By Jim Higgins | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Here’s a look at a few of the promising books and authors headed our way in January, February and March.
- Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges (Little, Brown), by Amy Cuddy. Harvard Business School and TED talk star Cuddy argues a case, based on her research, for “power posing,” or what some of us used to calling “faking it until you make it.” Her book was published December 22.
- A Hard and Heavy Thing (Tyrus Books), by Matthew J. Hefti. A University of Wisconsin-Madison law student, Hefti spent 12 years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician. His debut novel takes the form of a desperate letter from a guilt-stricken former sergeant to the friend whose life he saved.
- All the Birds in the Sky (Tor), by Charlie Jane Anders. Childhood friends, one now an engineering genius, the other a talented magician, reunite in San Francisco, possibly to save the world. Anders is the editor-in-chief of i09.com.
- Black Deutschland (FSG), by Darryl Pinckney. In Pinckney’s novel, a young, gay, black man flees his troubled past to Berlin, only to find “that petri dish of romantic radicalism” more complicated than he thought.
- Pax (Balzer + Bray), by Sara Pennypacker, illustrated by Jon Klassen. A boy and his fox are inseparable companions, until his father enlists in the military. Three hundred miles apart, each begins a dangerous search for the other. Suggested for readers 8 to 12 years old, but adults in the book-selling world are talking about this novel, too.
- The Yid (Picador), by Paul Goldberg. In this darkly comic novel, the unlikely troika of an old actor, a doctor and an African-American engineer resolve, amid arguments, to take down Stalin.
- Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man (Thomas Dunne Books), by William Shatner and David Fisher. Kirk pays tribute to Spock.
- What Happened, Miss Simone? (Crown Archetype), by Alan Light. Veteran music writer Light delivers a biography of singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone (1933-2003).
- At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others (Other Press), by Sarah Bakewell. Bakewell, whose previous book explored Montaigne’s thoughts, now digs into the world of being, nothingness, authenticity and good faith.
- The Making of the American Essay (Graywolf), edited and introduced by John D’Agata. The concluding volume of D’Agata’s massive trilogy of anthologies on the nonfiction form showcases a remarkable array of writers from Anne Bradstreet to Kathy Acker.