“Brown Dog” (Grove Press), by Jim Harrison, out December 3rd. Brown Dog (or B.D.), a down-and-out, Upper Peninsula Michigan Indian prone to roaming in pursuit of his appetites, first appeared as the title character of a 1990 novella, in which he tries to recover the body of an old Indian preserved at the bottom of Lake Superior. Since then, B.D. has developed over the course of four more novellas, in which he does everything from searching L.A. for the man who stole his bearskin to caring for special-needs foster children while suffering from a chronic toothache. This volume brings all the Brown Dog stories together for the first time, along with a new, sixth novella, “He Dog,” in which we find B.D. on a road trip to Montana for a chance at love. Harrison’s writing is funny, generous, and bittersweet, with an
“Dangerous Women” (Tor Books), edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, out December 3rd. Among the twenty-one original stories in this cross-genre anthology (a companion to the 2010 collection “Warriors”), some are entirely new, and others are continuations of best-selling series—a novella by George R. R. Martin, for example, about a civil war in Westeros before the events of his beloved series “A Game of Thrones.” All are linked by a focus on anti-damsels in distress: “sword-wielding women warriors, intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen, deadly female serial killers, formidable female superheroes, sly and seductive femmes fatale, female wizards, hard-living Bad Girls…” Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, Sharon Kay Penman, and Lev Grossman are among the volume’s contributors. —R.A.
“In the Night of Time” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Edith Grossman, out December 3rd. Publishers Weekly called this expansive novel a “ ‘War and Peace’ for the Spanish Civil War.” A story of love, violence, and politics, the book is told from the perspective of a Spanish architect named Ignacio Abel who flees Madrid for New York in 1936, leaving behind a wife and children. His recollections of his rise from inauspicious beginnings to notable success wind through the true historical events of Spain in the thirties. The complex plot and dense descriptions echo Molina’s earlier works, including the much-praised “A Manuscript of Ashes.” “In the Night of Time” was received with prizes and enthusiastic reviews in Europe. It is the fifth of Molina’s books to be translated into English. —A.D.
“Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Sherill Tippins, out December 3rd. These days, the Chelsea Hotel is famous largely for the bohemian crowd that gathered there in the sixties and seventies. Tippins’s history of the building surveys all the expected anecdotes from those years—Bob Dylan writing “Blonde on Blonde,” Andy Warhol filming “Chelsea Girls,” Janis Joplin sleeping with Leonard Cohen, Sid Vicious apparently murdering Nancy Spungen—as well as providing a more thorough sense of the atmosphere where these events occurred. Tippins also goes further back in history, to the building’s founding, in 1884, as the home of an association dedicated to the communal-living ideas of the French utopian Charles Fourier. In those days, the neighborhood was on the edge of town, and the Chelsea was the largest residential building in New York. The neighbors feared that “Parisian-style apartment living might lead the residents to looser moral standards.” Maybe, in retrospect, they were right. —A.D.
“No Regrets: Three Discussions” (n+1 Foundation), edited by Dayna Tortorici, out December 9th. This pocket-size book—the fifth in n+1’s pamphlet series, and a follow-up to 2007’s “What We Should Have Known”—features engaging, often funny conversations with twelve female writers, editors, academics, activists, and artists about reading in their late teens and early twenties. What books do they wish they had read? What books made them want to write? What books do they avoid revisiting? Where did they get cues about what to read? (Elif Batuman: “I had the worst time ever trying to read Henry Miller in Samarkand. I had a serious crush on a guy who said that ‘Sexus,’ ‘Plexus,’ and ‘Nexus’ were the best books ever, so I went to a bookstore, and they were too expensive, so I just got ‘Sexus’ and ‘Plexus.’ ”) Tortorici, who moderates the discussions, describes “No Regrets” in her introduction as “a book of women talking about the processes of becoming themselves.” —R.A.
“Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe” (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Ray Jayawardhana, out December 10th. Neutrinos gained widespread attention in 2011, after a team of physicists in Europe discovered that the subatomic particles could travel faster than the speed of light, thus violating Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Those findings turned out to be erroneous—the result of faulty experimental equipment—but among physicists like Jayawardhana, neutrinos have been a subject of keen interest for decades. In “Neutrino Hunters,” Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto and an award-winning science writer, chronicles more than eighty years of neutrino research by some of the “most brilliant minds and colorful personalities in the history of physics,” from Wolfgang Pauli to scientists today, and explains the particles’ enormous implications for cosmic phenomena like stellar explosions, dark matter, and the early stages of the universe after the Big Bang. Neutrinos, he writes, are “by far the most elusive and the weirdest of all known denizens of the subatomic world”; but, for neutrino hunters, “the best is yet to come.” —R.A.
“Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt” (Basic Books), by Edward P. Kohn, out December 10th. Teddy Roosevelt has come down to us through history as the Rough Rider President, living strenuously and gleaning his political outlook by exploring the untamed American West. This new biography of Roosevelt argues that our understanding of him is upside down, that the Western adventurer was a persona that Roosevelt promoted to play to voters’ romanticized notion of the frontier, while his politics were, in fact, firmly rooted in his upbringing and political training in New York City. Kohn’s last book, “Hot Time in the Old Town,” explained how New York’s disastrous 1896 heat wave, which occurred while Roosevelt was the police commissioner, helped vault the young man onto the political stage. “Heir to the Empire City” expands this storyline, looking at Roosevelt’s biography and writings to demonstrate that Teddy was as much an urban sophisticate as he was a cowboy, and more of a New Yorker than a frontiersman. —A.D.
“The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987” (Harvard University Press), edited by Hans Bak, out December 16th. Boswell of the “lost generation,” literary editor of The New Republic, and champion of authors from Fitzgerald and Faulkner—whose career he resuscitated—to Kerouac and Kesey, Malcolm Cowley lived a long life and wrote a ton of letters debating, critiquing and defending the state of American literature. (Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken and Edmund Wilson were among his closest interlocutors.) The majority of the letters in this collection have never before been published; they are presented here in chronological order, with a foreword by Cowley’s son, Robert, and extensive biographical notes by Hans Bak, the book’s editor. Cowley was a “barometric chronicler of his literary times,” writes Bak in his introduction; his collected letters amount to a heady portrait of American literary and intellectual life in the twentieth century. —R.A.
“Dangerous Women” (Tor Books), edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, out December 3rd. Among the twenty-one original stories in this cross-genre anthology (a companion to the 2010 collection “Warriors”), some are entirely new, and others are continuations of best-selling series—a novella by George R. R. Martin, for example, about a civil war in Westeros before the events of his beloved series “A Game of Thrones.” All are linked by a focus on anti-damsels in distress: “sword-wielding women warriors, intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen, deadly female serial killers, formidable female superheroes, sly and seductive femmes fatale, female wizards, hard-living Bad Girls…” Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, Sharon Kay Penman, and Lev Grossman are among the volume’s contributors. —R.A.
“In the Night of Time” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Edith Grossman, out December 3rd. Publishers Weekly called this expansive novel a “ ‘War and Peace’ for the Spanish Civil War.” A story of love, violence, and politics, the book is told from the perspective of a Spanish architect named Ignacio Abel who flees Madrid for New York in 1936, leaving behind a wife and children. His recollections of his rise from inauspicious beginnings to notable success wind through the true historical events of Spain in the thirties. The complex plot and dense descriptions echo Molina’s earlier works, including the much-praised “A Manuscript of Ashes.” “In the Night of Time” was received with prizes and enthusiastic reviews in Europe. It is the fifth of Molina’s books to be translated into English. —A.D.
“Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Sherill Tippins, out December 3rd. These days, the Chelsea Hotel is famous largely for the bohemian crowd that gathered there in the sixties and seventies. Tippins’s history of the building surveys all the expected anecdotes from those years—Bob Dylan writing “Blonde on Blonde,” Andy Warhol filming “Chelsea Girls,” Janis Joplin sleeping with Leonard Cohen, Sid Vicious apparently murdering Nancy Spungen—as well as providing a more thorough sense of the atmosphere where these events occurred. Tippins also goes further back in history, to the building’s founding, in 1884, as the home of an association dedicated to the communal-living ideas of the French utopian Charles Fourier. In those days, the neighborhood was on the edge of town, and the Chelsea was the largest residential building in New York. The neighbors feared that “Parisian-style apartment living might lead the residents to looser moral standards.” Maybe, in retrospect, they were right. —A.D.
“No Regrets: Three Discussions” (n+1 Foundation), edited by Dayna Tortorici, out December 9th. This pocket-size book—the fifth in n+1’s pamphlet series, and a follow-up to 2007’s “What We Should Have Known”—features engaging, often funny conversations with twelve female writers, editors, academics, activists, and artists about reading in their late teens and early twenties. What books do they wish they had read? What books made them want to write? What books do they avoid revisiting? Where did they get cues about what to read? (Elif Batuman: “I had the worst time ever trying to read Henry Miller in Samarkand. I had a serious crush on a guy who said that ‘Sexus,’ ‘Plexus,’ and ‘Nexus’ were the best books ever, so I went to a bookstore, and they were too expensive, so I just got ‘Sexus’ and ‘Plexus.’ ”) Tortorici, who moderates the discussions, describes “No Regrets” in her introduction as “a book of women talking about the processes of becoming themselves.” —R.A.
“Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe” (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Ray Jayawardhana, out December 10th. Neutrinos gained widespread attention in 2011, after a team of physicists in Europe discovered that the subatomic particles could travel faster than the speed of light, thus violating Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Those findings turned out to be erroneous—the result of faulty experimental equipment—but among physicists like Jayawardhana, neutrinos have been a subject of keen interest for decades. In “Neutrino Hunters,” Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto and an award-winning science writer, chronicles more than eighty years of neutrino research by some of the “most brilliant minds and colorful personalities in the history of physics,” from Wolfgang Pauli to scientists today, and explains the particles’ enormous implications for cosmic phenomena like stellar explosions, dark matter, and the early stages of the universe after the Big Bang. Neutrinos, he writes, are “by far the most elusive and the weirdest of all known denizens of the subatomic world”; but, for neutrino hunters, “the best is yet to come.” —R.A.
“Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt” (Basic Books), by Edward P. Kohn, out December 10th. Teddy Roosevelt has come down to us through history as the Rough Rider President, living strenuously and gleaning his political outlook by exploring the untamed American West. This new biography of Roosevelt argues that our understanding of him is upside down, that the Western adventurer was a persona that Roosevelt promoted to play to voters’ romanticized notion of the frontier, while his politics were, in fact, firmly rooted in his upbringing and political training in New York City. Kohn’s last book, “Hot Time in the Old Town,” explained how New York’s disastrous 1896 heat wave, which occurred while Roosevelt was the police commissioner, helped vault the young man onto the political stage. “Heir to the Empire City” expands this storyline, looking at Roosevelt’s biography and writings to demonstrate that Teddy was as much an urban sophisticate as he was a cowboy, and more of a New Yorker than a frontiersman. —A.D.
“The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987” (Harvard University Press), edited by Hans Bak, out December 16th. Boswell of the “lost generation,” literary editor of The New Republic, and champion of authors from Fitzgerald and Faulkner—whose career he resuscitated—to Kerouac and Kesey, Malcolm Cowley lived a long life and wrote a ton of letters debating, critiquing and defending the state of American literature. (Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken and Edmund Wilson were among his closest interlocutors.) The majority of the letters in this collection have never before been published; they are presented here in chronological order, with a foreword by Cowley’s son, Robert, and extensive biographical notes by Hans Bak, the book’s editor. Cowley was a “barometric chronicler of his literary times,” writes Bak in his introduction; his collected letters amount to a heady portrait of American literary and intellectual life in the twentieth century. —R.A.
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