Get ready for under-the-radar recommendations
The Thread's Must-Read
"Frankenstein in Baghdad"by Ahmed Saadawi
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2018 marks 200 years since Mary Shelley first published “Frankenstein.” (She was only 21 at the time, for the record — and just 19 when she came up with the idea.) Over two centuries, her unforgettable monster has been reinvented, reimagined — and endlessly spoofed — in countless forms.
The latest remarkable reincarnation comes alive in “Frankenstein in Baghdad.” The premise is simple and brutal. A junk collector in Baghdad in 2003 is unnerved by the high casualty count in the city. Bodies are piling up from suicide bombings and other violence. Or, more specifically, pieces of bodies are piling up.
So the junk collector begins to gather these pieces, in the hopes of stitching them into one recognizable corpse that officials will provide with a proper burial. But during a night of violence, the stitched-together corpse goes missing.
The disappearance coincides with a string of unusual murders around the city, which officials struggle to explain. Ahmed Saadawi brilliantly updates and translates Shelley’s work into a novel that asks unsettling questions about responsibility and criminality.
-Tracy Mumford
Librarian Nancy Pearl picks 7 books for summer reading Nancy Pearl's under-the-radar recommendations include a children's fantasy, a murder mystery set in 1919 Kolkata and an entire book dedicated to the events of 1947.
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Struggling for words, a boy and his grandfather are "Drawn Together" at last "Drawn Together" by Minh Lê
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Author Minh Lê had a loving relationship with his grandparents, but he also remembers a lot of "awkward silence." His new book explores barriers of language and culture between generations.
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What to do in the aftermath? "The Battle for Paradise" by Naomi Klein
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Bookseller Sam Faulkner recommends a topical read on the competing opinions over how to reshape the hurricane-damaged areas of Puerto Rico.
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Life rushes by, but sometimes there's beauty "Fight No More" by Lydia Millet
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Lydia Millet's latest is a novel about death, disguised as a short story collection about real estate, alternately wrenching and hilarious, and full of joys on every scale.
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This novel will draw you in, then take you somewhere unexpected "The Melody" by Jim Crace
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Jim Crace's superb new novel is a trickster — it seems to be a bittersweet tale of late-life love, but then it becomes a meditation on gentrification and the toll poverty can take on human beings.
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Listen: The big summer book show Looking for a way to spend those long summer hours? Check out this collection of adventurous summer reads, recommended by literary experts and listeners, too.
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A lucid dream of sci-fi perfection "Tell the Machine Goodnight" by Katie Williams
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Katie Williams' debut novel follows a woman who works for a company that can tell you infallibly how to become happy — and a drifting group of characters who aren't really looking for happiness.
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And you thought you knew cows... "The Secret Life of Cows" by Rosamund Young
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Farmer Rosamund Young's book will charm people who want to lap up more evidence that animals have personalities, but may not warm hearts of animal lovers who don't eat meat.
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Mapping the territory of fear "We are Where the Nightmares Go and Other Stories" by C. Robert Cargill
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C. Robert Cargill's new story collection covers the globe and genres of horror from classic to modern, with ghost stories, thrillers, gore and puzzles that would be right at home on premium cable.
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2 books find fuel in the American landscape Critic Maureen Corrigan recommends two books to expand your horizons: One is a cultural history of the great American road trip; the other an early 20th-century classic of Midwestern rural life.
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