Notable new releases
compiled by Sally Brewster
So Far Gone by Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia? With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend, Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.
The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears his family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible.
The Lost Masterpiece by B.A. Shapiro
In a gripping novel full of plot twists, B.A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late 19th-century Paris, centering on the anguished impressionist artist Berthe Morisot and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine. Tamara discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had the painting been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And most of all, why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life is thrown into turmoil. What wounds and resentments plagued Morisot, and to what lengths will her spirit go for revenge?
Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and
the New York Scene That Transformed Rock
by Jonathan Gould
One of the foundational bands of New York’s downtown 1970s music scene, Talking Heads have endured as a musical and cultural force for decades. Their unique brand of transcendent, experimental rock remains a lingering influence on popular music, despite their having disbanded over 30 years ago.
Now, New Yorker contributor Jonathan Gould offers an authoritative, deeply researched account of a band whose sound, fame and legacy forever connected rock music to the cultural avant-garde. From their art-school origins to the enigmatic charisma of David Byrne and the internal tensions that ultimately broke them apart, Gould tells the story of a group that emerged when rock music was still young and went on to redefine the prevailing expectations of how a band could sound, look and act.
More than just a biography of a band, Gould masterfully captures the singular time and place that incubated and nurtured this original music: downtown New York in the 1970s, that much romanticized, little understood milieu where art, music and commerce collided in the urban dystopia of Lower Manhattan. What emerges is an expansive portrait of a unique cultural moment and an iconoclastic band that shifted the paradigm of popular music by burning down the house of mainstream rock. SP
Sally Brewster is the proprietor of Park Road Books, 4139 Park Rd.
