Ray Brown, by Jay Sweet (Equinox)
Musician and educator Jay Sweet’s biography of jazz bassist Ray Brown (1926-2002) is the culmination of more than a quarter-century of dedicated study, during which the author won the Benny Carter Jazz Research Award in 2001 for his research on Brown. Brown was born in the same year as two other jazz legends, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whose works are probably the best known among popular music fans with a casual interest in jazz.
Sweet’s narrative places Brown in a lineage of pioneering performers, starting with Jimmy Blanton in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, who pushed the bass role from a steady timekeeper to a melodic solo instrument. Oscar Pettiford, who also played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, “replicated the vocabulary and technicality of the top saxophone and trumpet soloists“. Scott LaFaro, who played in Bill Evans’ Trio, “developed a conversational style of improvisation, and expanded the higher range of the bass“.
Sweet further defines Brown as an elder statesman of jazz, building on Brown’s association with some of the most elegant and virtuosic performers in jazz history. Soon after relocating to New York City, Brown would score a place in an all-star band of bebop pioneers, including saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, and drummer Max Roach.
Sweet’s work is rigorously exhaustive in its detail of Brown’s discography, studiously reverent in its assessment of Brown’s talent, and matter-of-fact about Brown’s purist views regarding jazz-rock and the avant-garde. – Jeremy McDonagh
See also “Ray Brown Was an Elder Statesman of Jazz“, by Jeremy McDonagh.
Separation of Church and Hate, by John Fugelsang (Simon & Schuster)
As you may be aware, America’s right-wing, fundamentalist Christians continue to work to not just cross, but eliminate, the long-established, constitutional division between church and state. As Separation of Church and Hate makes clear, religion in politics is such a monumental threat to freedom and democracy that while there can be a tight focus on maintaining that division, another serious problem gets overlooked. That is, the religious right is not always adequately challenged on whether they are even accurately representing what Jesus said and stood for.
Fugelsang is a first-time author but a longtime actor and comedian, and, as host of the popular Sirius radio show Tell Me Everything, he addresses a variety of social and political matters. The author also has a fascinating background. His parents were a former nun and a former Franciscan friar who left their religious vocations to marry.
Fugelsang is a rather unique social commentator in that he is decidedly left-of-center on most significant issues, yet also possesses an encyclopedic understanding of and deep respect for the Bible. Fugelsang is remarkably respectful of those he debates, at a time when seemingly so few on social media are, and let alone while discussing religion. He organized The Separation of Church and Hate as a reference guide of sorts for any time a Biblical topic comes up, and one wants to have thoughtful discussions and debates with friends, family, or anyone else.
Indeed, this is the kind of book that can open a door for many and afford them some all-too-rare common ground: namely, that Jesus himself and his actual words and deeds were largely pretty fantastic. It is said that the truth will set you free, and this good book certainly moves the ball in that direction. – James A. Cosby
See also “‘Separation of Church and Hate’ Reclaims the Good Book“, by James A. Cosby.
Send in the Clowns!, by Seán Kennedy and James McNaughton (OR Books)
Send in the Clowns! is a study of Batman’s principal antagonist as he appears in Joker, Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story of Arthur Fleck. From its opening pages, Seán Kennedy and James McNaughton “grip read” Joker‘s visual semiotics such that they situate their implied reader in two worlds; the encompassing neoliberal policy shift in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s mapped onto New York circa 1981, and that inhabited by the 21st-century audience into which Joker has recently landed, with the implied observation that this is precisely what happened to the fictional society that continues to shape the contemporary audience.
The book’s outstanding achievement is how the authors read the economic, cultural, and political climate of late 20th-century neoliberalism in the realities of the present moment. Each historical observation they make, they fold, simultaneously, into contemporary reality and, in the process, reveal a playbook of ideological practices that continue to produce increasingly unfavourable monetary outcomes for the majority.
The authors read the past into the present and predict a chilling future that may be averted if policymakers adopt economic and cultural solutions, which the authors offer in the conclusion of their study. In mobilising their nuanced and compelling reading through the figure of an alienated clown, the authors provide a mirror to the reader’s contemporary individual circumstance. By consolidating analysis that makes political epiphany possible, their study opens the way for dramatic transformation. – Rodney Sharkey
The Stone Door, by Leonora Carrington [Reprint] (NYRB Classics)
Celebrated surrealist painter Leonora Carrington is best known for her cryptic, captivating work that revolutionized the genre with a strikingly feminist approach. While her book, The Stone Door, was written at the end of World War II, it was only this year that it was released in its original English. Yes, this novel is as deliciously beguiling as her paintings, and, like those artworks, contains labyrinthine layers: stories within stories, dreams within dreams, characters shape-shifting and melding into other characters.
Indeed, The Stone Door is one of Carrington’s vaunted visuals come to vivacious life on the page, replete with magical realism, alchemy, mythology, imagistic dream-logic, omens, incantations, you name it. Furthermore, The Stone Door’s defiantly non-linear plot and fantastical characterizations work in tandem to demolish patriarchal concepts of gender duality, among other bothersome binary ideals.
The Stone Door wholly bypasses rigidly rational ways of telling tales in favor of a more subliminal, mystical approach. You’ll have to dig deep into your subconscious for this one, but it’s well worth the wildly intuitive ride. – Alison Ross
Such Great Heights, by Chris DeVille (St. Martin’s)
Chris DeVille, Managing Editor at Stereogum, presents his labor of love, Such Great Heights, where he illustrates how indie music rose to prominence over the last quarter-century.
In line with his vocation, DeVille sprinkles bits of criticism throughout Such Great Heights, which makes for an enjoyable read, especially for an audience that mostly discovered new music through written reviews. These moments evoke specific works, but also ground the text in its historical context. DeVille consistently demonstrates his skill as a writer, concisely covering a lot of ground. He has done his homework and effectively integrates other voices into his work without taking away from his own ideas.
The term “explosion” perfectly captures the impact, as the sheer number of indie fans and musicians remains impossible to quantify. Sitting alongside Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001), Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom (2017), and various 33 1/3 entries, Such Great Heights is required reading for indie rock enthusiasts. – Patrick Gill
See also “‘Such Great Heights’ Views Indie Rock from a High Vantage Point“, by Patrick Gill,
Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
When I read Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow for the first time, I found the language to process my grief. This is a devastating book – not exactly a memoir, more like a diary of mourning – that documents the aftermath of her younger son’s suicide in 2024, seven years after the suicide of her eldest son.
With her only children dead, Li has written a book with a positionality that no one can reach or even attempt to do so. The Director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing also challenges all the nonsensical clichés that abound about death. Yet Things in Nature Merely Grow is not about death or loss; it is about who we become when we lose. Li doesn’t presume to know or understand how loss affects anyone but herself.
This is not a how-to manual. No one will be saved, no one should thank Li. Her abyss is not a place to be shared, but her act of writing this book has given me the courage to own my grief as mine —not something to be shared, compared, valorized, or understood. Like Li, I do not believe I will ever stop healing or truly find peace with the loss of my loved ones. That is okay. – Shyam K. Sriram
See also “‘Things in Nature Merely Grow’ Tackles Death Differently“, by Shyam K. Sriram.
Times and Seasons, by Robin Platts (HoZac)
The Zombies only had a couple of hit songs, yet Robin Platts shows their almost inhuman staying power to this day. Based mainly on the author’s interviews with the five original members, Times and Seasons relates their whole story in fascinating detail: from their overnight success with “She’s Not There” to the many “misses” that followed through to their initial break-up, their solo careers, and unexpected revival in the 21st Century, primarily built around touring their orchestral pop opus. It is also profusely illustrated with many timeless portraits, concert and record adverts, 45s and album sleeves, and intimate snapshots from the Zombies’ private collections.
Times and Seasons also tells the remarkable post-Zombie career of its late guitarist, Paul Atkinson. After first trying his hand at computer programming, he would experience massive success as an A&R executive at CBS and other labels. It was Atkinson who insisted that CBS sign a pop group from Sweden called ABBA (then known as “Atkinson’s Folly” before they hit big).
Platts’ book brings us up to the present. He provides extensive details on the band’s re-emergence as a successful touring and recording act, including the emotional Odessey and Oracle 40th Anniversary concert, the superb 1994 tribute album, The World of The Zombies, the Loser’s Lounge Tribute show in New York City, and much more. Here’s to hoping keyboardist and principal songwriter Rod Argent and the remaining members of the Zombies can live up to their name and rise from the grave to stride on stage again. – Sal Cataldi
See also, “The Zombies’ Inhuman Staying Power“, by Sal Cataldi.
Vanishing World, by Sayaka Murata (Grove Atlantic)
In Japanese literary sensation Sayaka Murata’s novel Vanishing World, sex between married couples (both for pleasure and for procreation) has all but vanished. Generally unconcerned with the precise machinations a total societal overhaul like this would entail, Murata’s work instead sets its gaze on the emotional reality of a complete reconfiguration of sexuality.
Unfettered by the conventional constraints of sci-fi worldbuilding and logic, Murata’s writing instead dissects the more profound, cerebral truths of confronting one’s sexuality in an uncompromising, almost alien world. Whereas much of Murata’s previous work, like the international best-selling novel Convenience Store Woman (2016), confronts the profound alienation asexuality can spawn, in Vanishing World, it is Amane’s very presence of sexuality that divorces her from much of the broader society.
Through the novel’s delightful frankness and almost startling emotional sincerity, Murata confronts the reader with our own stifled, inflexible understanding of love and life within the nuclear family. – Colin Scanlon
See also “Sayaka Murata’s Spectacularly Strange ‘Vanishing World’“, by Colin Scanlon.
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang (Hogarth Press)
Han Kang, the first Nobel Prize in Literature laureate from South Korea, possesses a rare ability to present tremendously complex narratives in a few words. A powerful political voice treading the liminal space between benevolence and atrocity, in her latest, We Do Not Part, Kang continues her tradition of charting Korea’s violent history through the eyes of ordinary people. Initially published in 2021, We Do Not Part was only translated into English in 2025, instantly ascending to the peak of Kang’s canon.
As with her previous works, in We Do Not Part, Kang confronts political violence and the many ways it etches itself in the lives of its victims, how it lingers in the corporal, the natural, and the conscious. The story follows a writer named Kyungha, who travels to Jeju Island to visit her old friend Inseon and experiences the legacy of the Jeju massacre. Masterfully building on her work in Human Acts (2014) and The White Book (2016), Kang again merges the dreamlike with the material through visions (in this case, of snow) and bodily remembrance of horror.
The Jeju Island massacre, orchestrated by the First Republic of Korea to drown out the residents’ uprising of 1948, remains among the stains indelibly imprinted on Korea’s contemporary history. Suppressed for decades and almost erased from the school curricula in 2022, it nevertheless lives on in the transgenerational trauma of Koreans and Kang’s exquisitely tender work. In its empathy, We Do Not Part emerges triumphant from catastrophe by reminding us, as only Kang can, that the endurance of memory is an act of defiance, not surrender. – Ana Yorke
What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan (Knopf)
What does it say about the very strange circumstances of not just daily life in 2025 but the onrushing future that one of the year’s best science fiction novels comes not from a cutting-edge genre practitioner like Ted Chiang or Jeff VanderMeer, but from prize-winning BritLit mainstay Ian McEwan?
Set in the year 2119, What We Can Know is an academic mystery about a pair of researchers studying a legendary 2014 dinner party at which a then-famous poet read a birthday poem to his wife, the text of which was lost but has since attained the nimbus of a lost classic, begging to be rediscovered. McEwan flips between the researcher’s time, vividly depicting an impoverished 22nd-century in which humanity is scraping together civilization after the environmental collapse and attendant wars, later called “The Derangement”, and the poet’s present, where ego and jealousies (romantic and professional) blot out larger concerns.
As ever, McEwan’s crystalline insights into human frailties course through the text, which moves rapidly towards a shocking denouement that is at once revelatory and an illustration of how little we can understand about our present, much less the past or future. – Chris Barsanti
For a staunchly conservative Englishman inspired by John Updike (I attended a lecture – it was insufferable) and elitism, Ian McEwan, perhaps surprisingly, remains among the most versatile and thematically phenomenal writers alive. His 18th novel, What We Can Know, is an entry in the increasingly popular genre of climate fiction, but with several metaphysical twists.
It is 2119, and the UK has been mostly submerged after (would you believe it) Russians accidentally set off a warhead in the middle of the ocean, triggering a cataclysm and destroying most of the planet. The protagonist, Tom Metcalfe, is a (would you believe it again) literature professor in pursuit of a long-lost poem, through which he recreates memories of the pre-apocalyptic 21st century.
Dystopian as the premise may be, you’d be wrong to compare What We Can Know with Ballard’s seminal The Drowned World or even Thomas Vinterberg’s recent TV show Families Like Ours. Tom’s story amounts to a far more intimate, near-philosophical rumination on the quotidian nature of our lives today, on the precipice of a great deluge. As McEwan said for The Independent, What We Can Know is ‘science fiction without the science’; by the same token, it is an ethnography without the (actual) memory, almost a narrative without the narrator. Uneven as it is in some respects, it’s a compelling, highly imaginative read. – Ana Yorke
What Did You Hear?, by Steven Rings (University of Chicago Press)
Steven Rings, an Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, has written a highly engaging and accessible book that neither compromises depth nor theory. Its main proposal is that Bob Dylan’s sonic imperfections are key to understanding his songs and their impact, offering a refreshing and new framework through which to view Dylan’s music.
The Carver-esque book title playfully asks, “What Did You Hear?” It seems simple. Obvious. Intrusive. Once you read What Did You Hear?, though, you realize that it is a question with a purpose: to investigate what we are hearing. With an adept ear and an in-depth understanding of music theory, Rings helps readers understand Dylan the performer, rather than the lyricist or songwriter. In other words, it isn’t about Dylan’s compositions but rather a breakdown of how he performs them, live or in the studio.
In the postscript, Rings interestingly states that Bob Dylan’s sounds approach a second-order perfection in their fidelity to imperfect life. This emotional truth is perhaps a kind of perfection. Indeed, What Did You Hear? carries a lot of emotional truth. Is it a perfect book? I‘ve never read one, and, like listening to Bob Dylan’s imperfect voice, I don’t expect that I ever will. – Jack Walters
See also “Bob Dylan Rings in His Ears“, by Jack Walters.
Will There Ever Be Another You? by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)
As one of the authors David Sedaris took with him as an opening act for his 2025 speaking tour, Patricia Lockwood does not seem at first glance to have much to do with his work, he being an essayist-slash-raconteur and she a novelist. Yet they both have a way of refracting experience through their skewed yet unerring perspectives, turning the everyday into something wholly unique and true, yet always gaspingly funny.
Will There Ever Be Another You? is purportedly a novel, but it does not fit the form we expect. The woman narrating is undergoing a mental and possible physical breakdown, seemingly brought about by an omnipresent COVID-like disease that generates reality-blurring anxieties that range from funny to horrifically funny. Lockwood weaves humor through the darkness, from awkward interactions (“’Three,’ she flirted” in response to a clerk’s query about how many “living cats” she had) to the symptoms of mania (“’What is love? Baby don’t hurt me’” was the “single song lyric” her mind allows her to hear), which illustrate the time’s messy anarchism almost too close for comfort. – Chris Barsanti