11 New Books We Recommend This Week

It’s entirely a coincidence, I swear, that Rax King’s “Tacky” — an essay collection celebrating the lowbrow and garish products of American pop culture — appears on our recommended books list in the same week as “Liarmouth,” a debut novel by the acclaimed film director John Waters, who for decades has made a whole aesthetic out of his love for the lowbrow and garish. Sometimes, the planets just align. I’m glad they do in this case, though, since it gives me an excuse to quote a commenter who made this same connection after reading Dwight Garner’s review of the King book: “Like John Waters, she tackles bad taste from a place of amusement, but not judgment or irony. There is plenty in this world to take seriously right now, so why not find joy where you can?” Why not, indeed.

Other books on this week’s list that feature art or artists or the creative impulse include Liana Finck’s graphic novel “Let There Be Light” (a retelling of Genesis that casts God as a female artist) and Celia Paul’s “Letters to Gwen John,” an imagined dialogue between the author and a fellow painter she never had the chance to know. Farther afield, we also like Simon Heffer’s “High Minds,” a cultural history of 19th-century Britain, and Cathy O’Neil’s “The Shame Machine,” a cultural history that’s very much of the 21st century, along with a couple of memoirs: Delia Ephron’s “Left on Tenth,” about loss and late-life romance, and Erika Krouse’s “Tell Me Everything,” about her job as a private investigator. In fiction, we recommend new novels by Hernan Diaz, Susan Straight and Kelsey Ronan. Happy reading.

Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books

TACKY: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, by Rax King. (Vintage, paper, $15.95.) King’s ebullient book is a well-calibrated celebration of “bad” taste: Creed, frosted lip gloss, “The Jersey Shore,” the Cheesecake Factory, the “Josie and the Pussycats” movie and Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist. She tucks pieces of memoir inside her cultural criticism. She’s opposed to distance and irony; you end up taking her seriously because she’s so opposed to the project of being taken seriously. Our critic Dwight Garner writes: “So winsome is the writing in ‘Tacky’ that, most of the time, there’s no other word for it but classy.”

LIARMOUTH: A Feel-Bad Romance, by John Waters. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) The film director, essayist and artist John Waters’s first novel is about three generations of women in the Sprinkle family: Adora Sprinkle is an unlicensed plastic surgeon who performs cosmetic tweaks on pets. Her estranged daughter, Marsha, is a thief who is fond of lying and hates snitches, patriotism, children and food. Completing the lineage is Marsha’s daughter, Poppy, who runs a trampoline park somewhere outside Baltimore. “The novel unfurls as a tangled ribbon of manic events untouched by the logic of cause and effect,” our critic Molly Young writes. “When you read a book like this, you’re wandering into a maze of anarchy that is fully legible only to its creator.”

TRUST, by Hernan Diaz. (Riverhead, $28.) Diaz uncovers the secrets of an American fortune in the early 20th century, detailing the unchecked rise of a financier and the enigmatic talents of his wife. This exhilarating novel subverts readers’ expectations with each of its four parts while paying tribute to literary titans from Henry James to Jorge Luis Borges. “Some writers capture their characters’ thoughts through what creative writing teachers call a close third person,” Michael Gorra writes in his review. “Diaz relies in contrast on a far one, and his sentences are at once cool, deliberate and dispassionate. … Much of the novel’s pleasure derives from its unpredictability, from its section-by-section series of formal surprises.”

LET THERE BE LIGHT: The Story of Her Creation, by Liana Finck. (Random House, $28.99.) The cartoonist’s smart and smarting new graphic novel recasts the story of Genesis with a female God plagued by self-doubt, who turns out to be a neurotic artist a lot like Finck herself. “She’s very prone to feeling bad about herself,” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes in her review. “No act of creation goes unpunished. The words ‘And God saw that it was good’ never once appear. Instead, she feels disappointment, despair, an increasingly urgent desire to hide away.” Yet the book is charming precisely because of its neuroses, Goldstein adds: “It’s a wonderful cartoonist who, with all the sad-funny playfulness of her art, imagines that it is on earth as it is in heaven.”

MECCA, by Susan Straight. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Straight’s new novel is a love song for a place and its people. The story follows the intertwining lives of three characters in Southern California: a highway patrol officer, a single mother and an undocumented immigrant. Straight showcases the intimate, often unseen recesses of the state and explores the histories buried there. “Susan Straight is an essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West, and ‘Mecca’ is a meaningful addition to this canon,” Carribean Fragoza writes in her review. “She heralds important ways of storytelling that shift how we see the land and one another.”

LEFT ON TENTH: A Second Chance at Life, by Delia Ephron. (Little, Brown, $29.) When her husband of 33 years died, Ephron — a writer of screenplays, essays and novels — had a new subject to write about: loss. Her breadth of subject matter expanded when she was diagnosed with cancer and found love again. This is her memoir of those extraordinary events, stitched together with quotidian moments that offer their own heft. The book “is less the story of a woman losing a husband than it is that of a woman falling in love again at age 72,” Joyce Maynard writes in her review. “Ephron presents a moving and heartfelt portrait of romance — also of passion. … If there’s such a thing as a feel-good memoir, this is it.”

HIGH MINDS: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain, by Simon Heffer. (Pegasus, $39.95.) Heffer’s history of Britain in the middle decades of the 19th century is a story of a society transformed as the nation moved ever closer to a humane and civilized social order. Heffer “identifies ideas and sentiment as the driving force of this transformation,” Benjamin Schwarz writes in his review. “Intellectuals, politicians and largely upper and upper-middle-class activists, he argues, moved by ‘a sense of earnest, disinterested moral purpose,’ sought ‘to improve the condition of the whole of society.’ This high-minded effort was made manifest in ‘the measures enlightened government took,’ measures that unfolded in a series of landmark parliamentary acts and administrative innovations in the 40-odd years Heffer scrutinizes.”

TELL ME EVERYTHING: The Story of a Private Investigation, by Erika Krouse. (Flatiron, $28.99.) This lyrical, jarring, propulsive memoir of Krouse’s time as a private investigator is literary nonfiction at a high level — the author manages the tricky high-wire act of balancing the story of a case with a more personal dive into her past. In addition, according to our reviewer Patrick Hoffman (a P.I. himself), “she certainly conveys the emotional realities of the job: the narcotic thrill of a good interview, the exhilaration of grimy situations, the constant niggling feeling of being a bully, a manipulator, a liar.”

LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN, by Celia Paul. (New York Review Books, $29.95.) Paul’s haunting memoir takes the form of correspondence with a fellow painter she never knew: Gwen John, who died in 1939. Drawn to the parallels in their lives, Paul meditates on aging, personhood, loneliness, art. “The clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly contemporary,” Drusilla Modjeska writes in her review. “Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than power and vulnerability do.”

CHEVY IN THE HOLE, by Kelsey Ronan. (Holt, $26.99.) This moving debut novel set in Flint, Mich., asks one central question, by way of a budding romance between a young cook recovering from opioid addiction and an activist trying to save a city in crisis: Does relentless commitment always yield positive results? “They form a relationship based on something subtly beautiful, an unspoken but profound understanding of a particular kind of loneliness they both share,” Dean Bakopoulos writes in his review. “The main propulsive engine of the novel becomes a question that often applies to relationships as much as it applies to stories about America’s forgotten and marginalized landscapes: Can we save them with love, or will they simply collapse?”

THE SHAME MACHINE: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation, by Cathy O’Neil with Stephen Baker. (Crown, $27.) In her timely study of what she terms the “shame-industrial complex,” a data analyst examines how shame has been commodified by our culture — and who stands to profit. (Hint: It’s the usual suspects.) While O’Neil points to instances of “healthy shaming” that yield positive results, Alissa Bennett concludes in her review that “the basic ‘us’ versus ‘you’ dichotomy that foregrounds even the most benign of shaming always stands in the shadow of the hierarchical tower. It’s a lonely world. We should all admit that sometimes it secretly feels good to disappear into a heckling crowd.”