Simone de Beauvoir has a new book out, 35 years after her death: The novel “Inseparable” closely follows the true-life story of Beauvoir’s early childhood friendship with the iconoclastic and doomed Élisabeth Lacoin, a.k.a. “Zaza,” who died at the age of 21. It’s a short book that offers a key to some of Beauvoir’s own political engagement and philosophical development, and it’s one of the books we recommend this week. We also like a couple of memoirs, by Kat Chow and the playwright Sarah Ruhl, along with a close look at the murder trial of the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and new fiction from Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Anthony Doerr (his first novel since the Pulitzer-winning “All the Light We Cannot See”). And a couple of books that might have appealed to Beauvoir herself if she were still on the scene: Randall Kennedy’s essay collection “Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture” and Amia Srinivasan’s “The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century.”
Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles
THE RIGHT TO SEX: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In this quietly dazzling essay collection, Srinivasan wants us to think more fully about sex, as a personal experience with social implications. She writes about pornography and the internet, misogyny and violence, capitalism and incarceration. She also makes space for ambivalence, for idiosyncrasy, for autonomy and choice. “This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order. She doesn’t deliver lessons from on high but encourages us to think alongside her — even (or especially) when it feels uncomfortable.”
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND,by Anthony Doerr. (Scribner, $30.) Weaving narratives from three eras across most of a millennium, from Constantinople in the 15th century to a space pilgrimage in the 22nd, Doerr’s first novel since “All the Light We Cannot See” offers a paean to the consolations of storytelling, and to the people who pass down ancient texts. “It’s a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences,” Marcel Theroux writes in his review. “‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading.”
THE ONES WHO DON’T SAY THEY LOVE YOU: Stories, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. (One World, $26.) The stories in Ruffin’s debut collection (following a 2019 novel, “We Cast a Shadow”) present 21st-century New Orleans as a lost old world, at risk of displacement from gentrification, racial strife and the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina. “Ruffin writes with the clipped motion of the best comic books, and the unsparing tenderness of a poet,” Jeremy Gordon writes in his review. “Readers enamored with the relentless lyricism of his novel may be surprised to find a gentler voice guiding these stories, without judgment. This softness is exactly what binds these patchwork chronicles into a vibrant and true mosaic of a place.”
INSEPARABLE, by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Sandra Smith. (Ecco, $26.99.) Written in 1954 but never before published, this brief novel by the great French feminist was inspired by her friendship with a brilliant classmate, who died at 21 of a viral illness. Chronicled with sensitivity and passion, that relationship, Beauvoir’s book suggests, was the formative one of her youth; no wonder Sartre, who read the manuscript, didn’t care for it. “One is reminded of the death of Beth March in ‘Little Women’ (a book Beauvoir read and loved),” Leslie Camhi writes in her review, “or of the saintly orphan Helen Burns in ‘Jane Eyre,’ who accepts her fate with quiet dignity, eyes on the prize of the world to come. Beauvoir’s furious determination to create her own rules for living and loving was forged in this cauldron of loss.”
SAY IT LOUD! On Race, Law, History, and Culture, by Randall Kennedy. (Pantheon, $30.) This collection of essays about racial politics and culture in America offers a full portrait of Kennedy’s thinking as a law professor and public intellectual, demonstrating his commitment to reflection over partisanship, thinking over feeling. Kennedy “doesn’t expect a ‘racial promised land’ in his lifetime,” John McWhorter writes in his review. “He assumes progress will be gradual and, one senses, relatively undramatic. And in this, as in almost everything about his views on race in America, Kennedy is both resolutely temperate and probably right.”
ALPHA: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs, by David Philipps. (Crown, $28.99.) Philipps tells the story of a Navy SEAL who was credibly accused of murdering an Iraqi prisoner of war but won acquittal as well as the widely publicized support of President Donald Trump. Eliot A. Cohen, in his review, calls it a “meticulously assembled and brilliantly written account” that “reveals that the killing was only the culmination of years of indiscipline, recklessness, tactical incompetence and bragging. … But the most interesting part of this remarkable and engrossing book examines the SEALs as an institution and as a subculture within the military.”
SEEING GHOSTS: A Memoir, by Kat Chow. (Grand Central, $28.) Nearly two decades after her mother’s death, when Chow was just 13, her family is still in deep mourning, an experience she documents with wit, poignancy and fresh insight and imagery. “The passage of so much time hasn’t dulled the ache,” Gaiutra Bahadur writes in her review. “A certain kind of sorrow lingers because a part of us wants it and wills it to persist, and Chow artfully and intelligently maps which kind of grief this is.”
SMILE: The Story of a Face, by Sarah Ruhl. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) Soon after the birth of her twins, the award-winning playwright was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, which robs her of something she had taken for granted: her smile. “This is the story of my asking it to come back,” Ruhl writes in this miracle-free but affecting memoir. Mary Pols reviews the book alongside two other memoirs of recovery, and notes that Ruhl “takes detours into theology and her life in the theater, including confronting a sense that the Bell’s palsy marked a dividing line between her early success and later work. … But there’s something pleasing about the memoir’s deliberately slow pace, mimicking Ruhl’s recovery over 10 years. A partial recovery, she realizes, is very much like life itself.”
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