Asking the Wrong Questions

I've been on holiday this last week (after getting on a plane! and traveling to a foreign country!) which has involved a lot of reading. I'll have more to say about the books I've read during this vacation in the coming weeks, but before I get to them, I wanted to clear the decks of reviews that have been sitting in my edit tab for quite some time, covering most the current year. Several of these books will be on my year's best list, and I'm glad I don't have to wait any longer to tell you about them. Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess - If you wanted to craft an elevator pitch for this novel, it might run something like " Exit West meets Station Eleven ". In Chess's debut novel, parallel universes exist, and three years ago, one of them suffered a catastrophic nuclear attack that left much of the US uninhabitable. Scientists at a New York research center were able to open a portal to our world, through which a hundred and fifty thousand refug...

This is a funny bunch of books: a few that I picked up on a whim; a few that I've been breathlessly waiting for since they were announced; and one that's been sitting on my shelves for years.  The result isn't as exciting--in good ways and bad--as the last roundup of books I published, but nevertheless there are some reads here that I can already tell are going to be highlights of this swiftly-concluding year. White Tears by Hari Kunzru - I freely admit that the main reason I picked up Kunzru's latest was its title, which made me laugh with its deliberate provocation.  The actual novel, however, starts out a lot less pugnacious than you might expect, sort of a cross between Donna Tartt and Stephen King, albeit with a much more sophisticated awareness of issues of race, class, and cultural appropriation.  Carter and Seth are music producers who specialize in an analogue, "authentic" sound that hearkens back to the early 20th century.  Carter, in particular...