The Trouble with Reality, by Brooke Gladstone (Workman). This brisk piece of media criticism, by the host of WNYC’s “On the Media,” draws on philosophy and literature to show the extent to which the American press has been ill-equipped to deal with a major political figure—Donald Trump—who creates a parallel reality rather than working within the realm of consensus. The book’s main concern isn’t dishing out platitudes but providing a battle plan for individuals anxiously “watching the edifice of reality collapse.” Instead of “spiking your cortisol levels” by dwelling on President Trump’s tweets or on the Administration’s “ceaseless cascade of lies,” Gladstone recommends protest and “preserving your outrage,” because, ultimately, “facts are real and will reassert themselves eventually.”
Slight Exaggeration, by Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In this book-length sequence of fragments and miniature essays, the renowned Polish poet combines stories from his life with reflections on music, literature, and twentieth-century Europe’s “black hole of war.” Displaced at an early age by shifting borders (he was born in 1945, in Lwów, which became part of the Soviet Union in 1946), Zagajewski wrestles with the burden of history borne by the writer, who must “experience rapture and recollect horror simultaneously.” Neither naïve nor cynical, Zagajewski concludes, convincingly, that writing is “completely impossible”—and yet it must emerge “from reality, from a dimension that seldom reveals itself.”
The Impossible Fairy Tale, by Han Yujoo, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (Graywolf). This début novel sketches the barbaric politics of elementary school with terrifying clarity: loyalties won and dissolved over hair ties, the instinctive violence of small humans barely cognizant of consequence or remorse. In the novel’s second half, a girl, known only as The Child, whose mother adds to the schoolyard cruelties by beating her and leaving her unfed, begins to pay menacing visits to Yujoo’s writerly alter ego, demanding to know why she was forced to inhabit such a macabre story. “It was your plan to have me atone for the sins I didn’t even commit,” The Child accuses. The narrative turn is both exuberantly postmodern and in dead earnest, questioning the use of suffering as an aesthetic device.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, by Morgan Parker (Tin House). This singular poetry collection is a dynamic meditation on the experience of, and societal narratives surrounding, contemporary black womanhood: “I do whatever I want because I could die any minute. / I don’t mean YOLO I mean they are hunting me.” The book, Parker’s second, responds to the work and the lives of women like Carrie Mae Weems, the Hottentot Venus, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Her language is by turns worshipful and profane, her tone colloquial and confessional. Ranging from orderly couplets to an itemized list titled after Jay Z’s “99 Problems” to lines interrupted by gaping white space, these exquisite poems defy categorization.