
New Book of the Week
Man with a Seagull on His Head
by Harriet Paige
Ray Eccles is leading a modest, unassuming existence when he's abruptly struck on the head by a falling bird and finds his whole life changing course. Read Harriet Paige's new novel and you may find yourself similarly affected. The opening of Man with a Seagull on His Head tempts you with its brisk prose and summery seaside setting to pick it up as a momentary diversion, but it quickly establishes powerful links among its many characters, connecting hearts and minds across distance, time, and cultural barriers. By the end it takes them, and you, much further than you'd have ever expected. —James

Kids Book of the Week
The Lost Words
by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
We had heard about this book for a while—it was wildly popular and a "book of the year" in the UK, and Macfarlane, Britain's leading nature writer, is becoming beloved in the States too. But seeing it in person is something else entirely. Macfarlane and Morris have set about reclaiming basic words of nature ("acorn," "heron") that, they noticed, have been taken out of children's dictionaries in favor of tech terms like "broadband." But the book they made is not a dictionary—it's a thing of exquisite beauty, celebrating both these simple, evocative words (with poems of Macfarlane's) and the animals and plants they represent (with Morris's glorious paintings). It's a giant book, and one that both kids and grown-ups are likely to cherish. (Age 3 and up) —Tom

New Book of the Week
The Alehouse at the End of the World
by Stevan Allred
This is a tough one to describe, because as soon as I start I'm afraid I'll scare some of you off. Avian demigods? Fertility goddesses? An epic journey to the Isle of the Dead to recover a lost love? Sure, fantasy fans will hear me out, but the rest of you should, too. Drawing on European, Asian, and North American folk traditions, Stevan Allred plows the oldest narrative field there is, the open commons that existed before anyone thought of subdividing it with genre fences. Pure story, in other words, once-upon-a-time stuff that doesn't seem fringy at all. Turns out that a modern version of ancient myth involving love, death, and talking birds is exactly what we need in these trying times. —James

New Book of the Week
The Order of the Day
by Éric Vuillard
The Prix Goncourt is France's highest award for fiction, and the most recent recipient was Éric Vuillard for The Order of the Day. It's an interesting choice for at least three reasons. First, it's really good, like prize-winning good, written in crystalline sentences ably translated by Mark Polizzotti. Second, it's not a bog-standard war story about generals and infantrymen or even suffering civilians. Instead it focuses on the bureaucrats and businessmen who quietly and cravenly capitulated to a Fascist regime that in the 1930s didn't yet have a stranglehold on power. Over and over again in Vuillard's account, civility outweighs principle, as in the chilling scene where Chamberlain and Ribbentrop linger over a diplomatic dinner while Nazi forces drive unopposed across the German-Austrian border. Every detail marshaled here is devastatingly accurate, which brings us to a final point of interest: this isn't really fiction. Sure, there's creative description on every page, but at its heart, The Order of the Day is history as it was made. As fact-based as it is, it probably wouldn't be eligible for an American fiction prize, but the French don't worry about categories, just beautiful writing. In this case, I'm on their side. —James

New Book of the Week
Land of Smoke
by Sara Gallardo
I've been reading these stories for months, off and on in between other books. I'm not sure I could have read them any other way: they read easily, but take some digesting, in the best way. Gallardo wrote from the '50s through the '70s and was a well-known figure in Argentina, but this is her first book translated into English, and it landed (on me at least) like stone tablets from another world. She's described as a "magical realist," because she's South American and because there are fantastic elements in her stories, but she stands apart from her apparent peers, Garcia Marquez and Borges. Some of these many stories are only a page long, some are twenty. There are monsters, suicides, priests, exiles, and many, many animals. But more than anything there is her voice: spoken with utterly confident authority, able and willing to turn a story on a dime at any moment. —Tom

Old Book of the Week
Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History
by Glen Berger
At some point in the previous decade, news filtered back to me that Glen Berger, the most talented person I knew in college, was writing a Spider-Man musical with U2 and Julie Taymor. What a break for an unknown playwright! Well, you may have heard how that turned out: a notorious Broadway disaster that still managed to survive for over a thousand performances. If you want to hear more, Berger told all in this 2013 memoir, written amid the wreckage left by a typhoon of artistic overambition and technical catastrophe. If there were any bridges left standing after that debacle, he burns them here, but with a rueful earnestness that makes it clear he wishes he could build them all back again. My favorite Broadway book is Act One, Moss Hart's delightful tale of his charmed debut. Glen's story is, sadly, its opposite, but a fascinating page-turner that might be just as useful for a young artist to read. —Tom

Kids Book of the Week
All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah
by Emily Jenkins and Paul O. Zelinsky
When I first started to read on my own I couldn’t get enough of Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family chapter books, which I recently heard called the “Jewish Little House on the Prairie.” The series follows five sisters as they grow up in New York City during the first few decades of the 20th century, recording family dramas (low-key) and traditions. So I was thrilled to see that an award-winning children’s author and illustrator had teamed up to create a picture-book introduction to these not-all-that-well-known classics. Vibrant, page-filling pictures, which often give the delicious feeling of peeking into a dollhouse, are the backdrop for the story, starring 4-year-old Gertie, who is frustrated that she’s not old enough to help make the latkes, just before finding out that she is the perfect age to light the first candle on the menorah. Any young person who enjoys the book this year will most certainly be ready to start on the series by Hanukkah-time next year. (Ages 3 to 6) —Liz






