GAY BAR: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin. (Back Bay, 320 pp., $17.99.) According to our reviewer, Hugh Ryan, Atherton Lin “has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex.” He focuses on one gay bar per chapter in this lyrical memoir, jumping from San Francisco to London to Los Angeles, to tell a story about life “flensed down to just the bits that made it past the bouncer.”
DEAR SENTHURAN: A Black Spirit Memoir, by Akwaeke Emezi. (Riverhead, 240 pp., $16.) Emezi’s memoir, structured as a series of letters to friends, family and lovers, invokes Igbo cosmology as the author reflects on Western constructions of gender, Indigenous Black realities and more. Our reviewer, Kim Tran, called the book “an audacious sojourn” in the “relentless pursuit of self-actualization.”
A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, by Judith Flanders. (Basic, 368 pp., $17.99.) Flanders chronicles the rise of alphabetization in the several millenniums after the alphabet’s birth in Upper Egypt in what our reviewer, Deirdre Mask, called an “original and impressive book.” This account asks, along the way: What does the way we order knowledge reveal about how we see knowledge itself?
AFTERPARTIES: Stories, by Anthony Veasna So. (Ecco, 272 pp., $18.99.) This posthumous short story collection about Cambodian life in Stockton, Calif., lives on “as an ode to the Stockton of So’s youth,” our reviewer, Amil Niazi, commented, and to “the greasy doughnut stores and boisterous auto shops where pointed questions about identity, tragedy and belonging come to life.”
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE: America’s Rise in a World Transformed, by Andrew Bacevich. (Metropolitan, 224 pp., $17.99.) In this account, Bacevich, an outspoken voice against United States military intervention in the Middle East, rebukes the longstanding tradition of American exceptionalism and looks at the intangible challenges ahead, from climate change to the recent rise of cyberwarfare.
THE OTHER BLACK GIRL, by Zakiya Dalila Harris. (Atria, 368 pp., $17.) An ambitious, young Black editorial assistant at a Manhattan publishing house is thrilled when her company hires another Black woman, until she becomes increasingly distrustful and weary of her new co-worker. As our reviewer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, noted, Harris’s “Jordan Peele-esque” plot “takes on traits of the horror genre with a dash of magical realism.”
