Book Picks—November 2023

"Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone--from the city's first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples--could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned...

"In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not just a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon's findings, including everything...

"The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide. With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his...

In this genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms, the author, after the death of her father, grapples with her bipolar disorder and sets out to interrogate the very notion of recovery through the lens of figures from Japanese, Taiwanese and Okinawan legend.

"An irresistible murder mystery set at a genteel private club where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scene-a remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre and marks the arrival of a major new talent "The writer of murder, like all writers, must be a miser, conceding revelations bit by bit; for every novel is a puzzle, and every reader a sleuth." A remote, old-money hunting lodge. A raging storm. A locked...