You probably miss Jenny Diski even if you’ve never heard of her. The beloved British author chronicled her terminal illness for the London Review of Books, and now The Vanishing Princess (Ecco), a collection of her caustically funny and ebullient stories, is being released. Here are narratives that play with perception, turning fairy tales on their sides, if not their heads; stories about women attempting to construct ideal bathtubs, contentedly existing in towers, and dipping in and out of mental institutions. Diski’s is the kind of voice of which we need more, of which we now have one fewer. But she has paved a subversive path through the forest for others to follow.
“Is an ax-man at large in New Orleans?” So asks a 1918 Times-Picayune article in Nathaniel Rich’s sprawling but speedy third novel, King Zeno (MCD). Set against the backdrop of the birth of jazz and the Spanish flu, King Zeno tells the story of an army veteran, a jazz cornetist, and a Mafia widow, whose trajectories are twisted by a musically motivated ax murderer. It’s a rich, contemporary canonization of the Crescent City at the turn of the century.
In the hierarchy of traumatic memoir, Maude Julien has something to write home about. She just has nowhere to address it. The Only Girl in the World (Little, Brown) is the haunting story of a girl whose survivalist parents locked her away and subjected her to “training” starting at the age of three. But it is also proof that love is in our nature regardless of our nurture.
Order up: Eggs get no benediction in Brendan Francis Newnam and Rico Gagliano’s Brunch Is Hell (Little, Brown), an ode to dinner parties, and Galt Niederhoffer laces a lover with Poison (St. Martin’s).
IN SHORT
Quantum lit: Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine (Bloomsbury) unpacks the power of our atomic arsenal. David N. Schwartz fissions nuclear pioneer Enrico Fermi, The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Basic Books). V.R. meets I.R.L. in Jaron Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything (Henry Holt). If the suit fits, read it in Jon Robin Baitz’s play Vicuña (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Neel Mukherjee invents his own India in A State of Freedom (Norton). Jan Morris brings Japan’s Battleship Yamato (Liveright) to the surface. Literature gets the J. M. Coetzee treatment in Late Essays (Viking). Benjamin Taylor collects Susan Sontag’s stories in Debriefing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Fiona Mozley’s forest is foreboding in Elmet (Algonquin). V.F. editor-at-large Cullen Murphy journeys to Cartoon County (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). George Wayne asks ‘em all in Anyone Who’s Anyone (Harper). Karen Duffy straightens her Backbone (Arcade). Mark K. Updegrove’s The Last Republicans (Harper) explores the two president Bushes. Liz Josefsberg scales back with Target 100 (BenBella). New York magazine celebrates 50 years with Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable (Simon & Schuster).
