In LINDA HOGAN’s People of the Whale (Norton, August 11), a Native American community prepares to reenact the whale hunt that is central to its culture. But Thomas Just, who has recently returned from Vietnam, finds that he no longer feels at home. SANA KRASIKOV, who published her first story in The New Yorker, also profiles the displaced. In One More Year (Spiegel & Grau, August 12), she collects all her short fiction on the Russian immigrant experience.
For more short fiction, there’s JANE GARDAM’s The People on Privilege Hill and Other Stories (Europa, July 1), set in England and featuring a mix of codgers and brassy teens. Finally, JOE MENO, author of the celebrated Hairstyles of the Damned, isn’t content simply to offer 20 acute stories in Demons in the Spring (Akashic, August 28); each story is illustrated by a noted fine, graphic, or comic-book artist.
Nonfiction
For an America still at war in the Middle East, MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI poses a significant question: How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin Press, August 18). In Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (Penguin Press, June 23), Brookings Institution Fellow BENJAMIN WITTES also has a question, namely, why President Bush has never asked Congress to enact laws that would justify his actions since launching the War on Terror.
Defending Guantánamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift nervily challenged the legality of the military tribunals before the Supreme Court — and won. JONATHAN MAHLER details his victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: A Historic Challenge to the President (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 13). Former British warrant office JOHN GEDDES takes a different route in Highway to Hell: Dispatches from a Mercenary in Iraq (Broadway, August 12), giving what will likely be an uncomfortable picture of his life as a private military contractor.
If it’s not Iraq that has you worried, it’s the economy, stupid. For one perspective on our sliding fortunes, try PAT CHOATE’s Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America (Knopf, August 14), which looks at the integrated global market and sees unfortunate dependencies, security risks, and social drawbacks. MARK KURLANSKY’s The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town (Ballantine, June 3) brings it all back home with the portrait of a town caught between traditional livelihoods and modern commerce.
And now for some truth about fiction. Critic JAMES WOODS is just the person to clarify How Fiction Works (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, August 1), considering issues of story and style for both readers and writers. In Books: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, July 6), LARRY MCMURTRY explains how a boy raised with little to read grew up to love, sell, and, yes, write books.
Nobel Prize winner DORIS LESSING doesn’t address art but life in Alfred and Emily (HarperCollins, August 5), a portrait of her parents that does, however, use fictional techniques. HARUKI MURAKAMI draws his inspiration for What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir (Knopf, August 1) from Raymond Carver’s short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. His aim? To show how hoofing it out there on a daily basis has shaped his life.
