Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino

To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.

But Pacino was in his mid-thirties by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe.

Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions—the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.

Polostan by Neal Stephenson

Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn Rae Bjornberg is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.

Revisionaries: What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers by Kristopher Jansma

If you like to write—whether it’s a pastime, a passion, or a profession—you’ve probably found yourself reading something brilliant and thinking, “I could never do this! I might as well give up.” But if there’s one thing every great author has in common, it’s this: they’ve all written some hot garbage.

Revisionaries takes you on an engrossing tour through the discarded drafts, false starts, and abandoned projects of influential writers. In the process, it dismantles some of our most deeply held—and most suffocating—ideas about what it takes to produce great creative work.

American Rapture by CJ Leede

A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust.

Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin…

The end times are coming.

An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays by Lucy Ives

What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life―a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son―to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. She connects postmodern irony to eighteenth-century cults, Cold War musicals to a great uncle’s suicide to the settlement of the American West, museum period rooms to the origins of her last name to the Assyrian genocide, and the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem to the development of modern obstetrics. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.

Blood Test: A Comedy by Charles Baxter

Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock’s life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn’t be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.

Bull Moon Rising by Ruby Dixon

As a Holder’s daughter, Aspeth Honori knows the importance of magical artifacts . . . which is why it’s a disaster that her father has gambled all theirs away. Now that her family is in danger of losing their hold—and their heads—if anyone finds out the truth, Aspeth decides to do something about it. She’ll join the Royal Artifactual Guild and the adventurers who explore ancient underground ruins to retrieve the coveted arcane items.

It’s a great plan—with one big problem. The guild won’t let her train because she’s a woman. Aspeth needs a chaperone of some kind. The best way to get around this problem? Marry someone who will let her become an apprentice. Who better than a surly guild member who requires a favor of his own? He’s a minotaur (it’s fine) who is her teacher (also fine) . . . and he’s about to go into rut (which is where it gets tricky). He also has no idea she’s a noble (oops), and he’ll want nothing to do with her if he discovers her real identity.

Curdle Creek by Yvonne Battle-Felton

Welcome to Curdle Creek, a place just dying to make you feel at home. Osira, a forty-five-year-old widow, is an obedient follower of the strict conventions of Curdle Creek, an all-Black town in rural America stuck in the past and governed by a tradition of ominous rituals. Osira is considered blessed, but her luck changes when her children flee, she comes second to last in the Running of the Widows and her father flees when his name is called in the annual Moving On ceremony.

Forced into a test of allegiance, Osira finds herself transported back in time, then into another realm where she must answer for crimes committed by Curdle Creek. Exile forces her to jump realms again, landing Osira even farther away from home, in rural England. Safe as long as she sticks to the rules, she quickly learns there are consequences for every kindness. Each jump could lead Osira anywhere but back home.

Disturbing the Bones by Andrew Davis and Jeff Biggers

Chicago detective Randall Jenkins has not been back home to the historic Civil Rights hotspot of Cairo, Illinois since the disappearance of his mother, a well-known journalist, several decades ago.

That all changes the day Dr. Molly Moore, an ambitious young archaeologist in the national spotlight for her groundbreaking high-tech discoveries, uncovers a set of strange bones at a huge 12,000-year-old site at a highway construction project. With retired military general and contractor William Alexander breathing down her neck to cover up the dig, Molly and Randall soon find themselves in the middle of a wild military conspiracy.

The detective and archaeologist’s entwined family mysteries suddenly thrust them into the central position as the only people who can ensure the safety of the ongoing Chicago global peace summit. They must take on the rogue general who views any disarmament agreement as a clear and present danger to the United States. The fate of global peace and the lives of Molly and Randall hang in the balance.

Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot

Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence: On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband, home; but emotionally, psychologically, sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed.

Explorers: A New History by Matthew Lockwood

Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Familiar icons of exploration like Pocahontas, Columbus, Sacagawea, and Captain Cook find new company in the untold stories of people usually denied the title “explorers,” including immigrants, indigenous interpreters, local guides, and fugitive slaves. He highlights female voyagers like Gudrid Far-Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Viking women who sailed to North America in 1000 AD, and Mary Wortley Montagu, whose pioneering travels to Constantinople would lead to the development of the world’s first smallpox vaccine. Figures like Ghulam Rassul Galwan, a guide for European travelers in the Himalayas, reveal the hidden labor, expertise, and local enthusiasm behind many grand stories of discovery. Other characters, like David Dorr, a man born into slavery in New Orleans who embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe and Egypt, embody discovery and wonder as universal parts of the human condition.

Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth

Meet Libby Weeks, author of the mega-best-selling fantasy series, The Falling Children―written as “F.T. Goldhero” to maintain her privacy. When the last manuscript is already months overdue to her publisher and rabid fans around the world are growing impatient, Libby is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Already suffering from crippling anxiety, Libby’s symptoms quickly accelerate. After she forgets her dog at the park one day―then almost discloses her identity to the journalist who finds him―Libby has to admit it: she needs help finishing the last book.

Desperately, she turns to eleven-year-old superfan Peanut Bixton, who knows the books even better than she does but harbors her own dark secrets. Tensions mount as Libby’s dementia deepens―until both Peanut and Libby swirl into an inevitable but bone-shocking conclusion.

Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love by Julie Sedivy

A celebration of the beauty and mystery of language and how it shapes our lives, our loves, and our world.

If there is one feature that defines the human condition, it is language: written, spoken, signed, understood, and misunderstood, in all its infinite glory. In this ingenious, lyrical exploration, Julie Sedivy draws on years of experience in the lab and a lifetime of linguistic love to bring the discoveries of linguistics home, to the place language itself lives: within the yearnings of the human heart and amid the complex social bonds that it makes possible.

Sorcery and Small Magics by Maiga Doocy

Leovander Loveage is a master of small magics. He can summon butterflies with a song or turn someone’s hair pink by snapping his fingers. Though such minor charms don’t earn him much respect, anything more elaborate always blows up in his face, and so Leo vowed long ago never to use powerful magic again.

That is, until a mishap with a forbidden spell binds Leo to obey the commands of his longtime rival, Sebastian Grimm. Grimm is Leo’s complete opposite—respected, exceptionally talented, and absolutely insufferable. The only thing they can agree on is that revealing the curse between them would mean the end of their respective magical careers. They need a counterspell, and fast.

Chasing rumors of a powerful sorcerer with a knack for undoing curses, Leo and Grimm enter the Unquiet Wood, a forest infested with murderous monsters and dangerous outlaws alike. To break the curse, they will have to uncover the true depths of Leo’s magic, set aside their long-standing rivalry, and—much to their horror—work together.

The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit by Evan Rail

Thought to be hallucinogenic and banned globally for a century, absinthe is once again legal and popular. Yet it is still associated with bohemian lifestyles, just as when it was the favorite drink of avant-gardists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh and Baudelaire. And today, when vintage, pre-ban bottles are discovered, they can sell for exorbitant prices to private collectors. But such discoveries are increasingly rare.

Which is why the absinthe demimonde of rich collectors was electrified when a mysterious bon vivant claimed to be in possession of a collection of precious, pre-ban bottles.

Is his secret tranche of 100-year-old bottles real? And just who is the shadowy person selling them? And what about rumors of another secret cache, hidden away in an Italian palazzo?

Journalist Evan Rail sets out to discover the truth about the enigmatic dealer and the secret stashes. Along the way, he drinks with absintheurs frantically chasing down the pre-bans, visits modern distillers who have seen their status rise from criminal bootleggers to sought-after celebrities, and relates the legendary history of absinthe, from its birth in Switzerland through its coming of age in France, and on to its modern revival.

The Ancients by John Larison

A young boy and his older sisters find themselves suddenly and utterly alone, orphaned in an abandoned fishing village. Their food supplies dwindling, they set out across a breathtaking yet treacherous wilderness in search of the last of their people.

Down the coast, raiders deliver the children’s mother, along with the rest of their human cargo, to the last port city of a waning empire. Determined to reunite with her family, she plots her escape—while her fellow captives plan open revolt.

At the center of power in this crumbling city, a young scholar inherits his father’s business and position of privilege, along with the burden of his debts. As the empire’s elite prepare to flee to new utopia across the sea, he must decide where his allegiance lies.

The Man in Black: And Other Stories by Elly Griffiths

From the internationally bestselling author of the Ruth Galloway Mysteries, an eclectic, thrilling collection of short stories, featuring many characters that readers have come to know and love.

Elly Griffiths has always written short stories to experiment with different voices and genres as well as to explore what some of her fictional creations such as Ruth Galloway, Harbinder Kaur, and Max Mephisto might have done outside of the novels. The Man in Black gathers these bite-sized tales all together in one splendid volume.

The Specimen by Jaima Fixsen

1826. Isobel Tait finds herself, by chance, staring at a tiny human heart floating in a jar. It should be of little consequence; Dr. Burnett is renowned for his collection of oddities and medical specimens, and this, a juvenile heart with a damaged mitral valve, is not the strangest thing on display. Except that the condition is rare, and that Isobel’s young son, who has been missing for months, suffered from the ailment.

A phantom pulse beats in Isobel’s ears. She knows something here isn’t right.

Missing persons cases are all too common in Edinburgh, where people simply vanish like mist. But Burnett is obsessed with his specimens – how far would he go to acquire a new one? Determined to investigate, Isobel joins his staff as the keeper of his collection. What she’ll unearth, though, is far worse than any of her nightmares…

Based on true crimes, The Specimen is a mesmerizing story about one woman’s search for truth and vengeance in the darkest of places―where the deadliest secrets lie hidden in plain sight, on a freshly dusted shelf.

The Treasure Hunters Club: A Mystery by Tom Ryan

For nearly a century, people have ventured to the idyllic seaside town of Maple Bay in search of a legendary lost pirate treasure, but locals know there’s more than just gold buried in the sand. As the paths of three strangers converge in Maple Bay, the truth is about to be blown wide open. But not before the bodies start to pile up.

Peter Barnett is rapidly approaching 40 with little to show for it when a mysterious letter invites him to Maple Bay and the mansion his estranged family has called home for generations.

Seventeen-year-old Dandy Feltzen is isolated and adrift following the death of her beloved grandfather, until his final request and a tantalizing clue sets her on a mission to solve the mystery he spent his entire life chasing.

Cass Jones has given up on her dream of being a successful author when an unexpected opportunity lands in her lap: a housesitting gig in remote Maple Bay, where she stumbles on the perfect subject matter for her breakout book—and the handsome sailor who might be just the person to help her research it.

Peter, Dandy and Cass have never met, but they’re on a collision course with each other and the mystery that has defined Maple Bay for two centuries, and none of them are prepared for the shocking truths that may or may not still be buried there.

Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery

The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There’s Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there’s Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.

The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they’d better make the most of it while it lasts.

What I Ate in One Year: (and related thoughts) by Stanley Tucci

Food has always been an integral part of Stanley Tucci’s life: from stracciatella soup served in the shadow of the Pantheon, to marinara sauce cooked between scene rehearsals and costume fittings, to home-made pizza eaten with his children before bedtime.

Now, in What I Ate in One Year, Tucci records twelve months of eating—in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself.

Ranging from the mouth-wateringly memorable to the comfortingly domestic and to the infuriatingly inedible, the meals memorialised in this diary are a prism for him to reflect on the ways his life, and his family, are constantly evolving. Through food he marks—and mourns—the passing of time, the loss of loved ones, and steels himself for what is to come.

Whether it’s duck a l’orange eaten with fellow actors and cooked by singing Carmelite nuns, steaks barbequed at a gathering with friends, or meatballs made by his mother and son and shared at the table with three generations of his family, these meals give shape and add emotional richness to his days.