6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week

Our critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote that Stille tells the story of the Sullivan Institute “with almost claustrophobic intimacy,” tracing it from its beginnings in the 1950s as a center for psychoanalysis that treated people like Jackson Pollock to its devolution into a repressive cult.

When Foster Dade, an insecure transfer student, arrives at the elite Kennedy Academy, he quickly becomes central to the school’s social life. Eighteen months later, he is expelled. This novel’s unnamed narrator, the inheritor of Dade’s old dorm room, attempts to piece together why. “The facts of this case remain disputed,” he says.

The star of movies like “Juno” and “Inception” recounts through flashbacks his journey through fame and queer identity, from hiding his first queer relationships to transitioning genders publicly. As he “slowly pieces together a clear sense of himself,” our reviewer wrote, “he brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria.”

Joanna and Esther, raised to protect a library of magical books that allow their keepers to do incredible things, become estranged after a book kills their father. This fantasy novel, one of our Notable Books of 2023, “accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion,” as our columnist Amal El-Mohtar put it.

In 1990s Mexico City, Montserrat works as a sound editor while caring for her sick sister and pining after her childhood best friend, an actor past his heyday. When the two are recruited to help finish a movie whose production was interrupted by a curse, an “inventive and carefully arranged supernatural mystery unravels,” as our reviewer said.

“Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances,” quips Wainaina, a Kenyan essayist and memoirist, in the 2005 satirical essay for which this posthumous compilation is named. The book also includes travel pieces, short stories and food writing.