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USA Today
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Need a new book? 10 new releases you can read right now from romance to thriller
Need a new book? 10 new releases you can read right now from romance to thriller What do a ghost-conjuring chef, a fast-food employee and a world-renowned dying artist have in common? They're the topics of some of our favorite new books from May, of course. Check out the titles we recommend this month, including new Stephen King, a swoony new romantasy bestseller and the book that Fredrik Backman said could be his last. Or, take a look at the titles we're most excited about this summer. Plus, there's still time to read for USA TODAY's Spring Book Challenge, where you could win a $100 gift card to just by filling out our bingo card. What should I read next? 10 new books from May Summer is just around the corner, and it's time to get your TBR ready for beach reading and vacations. From dystopian tales to steamy romance, here are the titles we think you should pick up at your local bookstore or library. 'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong 'The Emperor of Gladness' has all the poetic meditations and lyricism of Vuong's 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous,' but with a lovable cast of found family characters that practically leap off the page. In it, a young man about to commit suicide is stopped by an elderly woman with dementia. What results is an unlikely friendship, a fast-food job that reunites him with his cousin and a new supportive, quirky community. 'Aftertaste' by Daria Lavelle This dark comedy set in the culinary world follows a Ukrainian American chef who can conjure spirits of the dead by cooking their favorite foods. Haunted by the death of his father and yearning to use his powers for good, Kostya opens a restaurant where loved ones reunite over one last meal. With carefully crafted depictions of grief and mouth-watering culinary adventures, this is the perfect novel for the always hungry and for fans of 'The Bear.' 'My Friends' by Fredrik Backman Told in two timelines, Backman's heartwarming latest is about four childhood friends and one transformative summer. Their bond inspires a painting that eventually becomes, decades later, the most famous painting in the world. In the present, a teenager who cherishes that painting finds herself in unexpected ownership of the original. Her cross-country journey to learn how the artwork came to be connects surprising roads in her own life and the painting's subjects. 'Can't Get Enough' by Kennedy Ryan In 'Can't Get Enough,' ambitious, goal-oriented Hendrix Barry is thriving in most aspects of life, but caring for her aging parent means she doesn't have time for romance. But then she meets tech mogul Maverick Bell, and the one man she can't have seems to be the perfect match. 'Things in Nature Merely Grow' by Yiyun Li Writer and professor Li meditates on the loss of her two sons – both from suicide, seven years apart. Li searches for the words that might fill the loss of Vincent at age 16 in 2017 and James at age 19 in 2024. 'Things In Nature Merely Grow' is less of a book about grief and more a tribute to radical acceptance and the lasting power of memory. 'Immaculate Conception' by Ling Ling Huang Twisty dystopian horror 'Immaculate Conception' follows art students whose work and study are upended by artificial intelligence. Grappling with her artistic purpose and jealous of her friend Mathilde's global success, protagonist Enka comes across a new technology that would let her enter Mathilde's mind, inextricably linking the co-dependent friends. 'Never Flinch' by Stephen King King deviates from his terrifying horror to pen a detective novel in 'Never Flinch.' This mystery thriller puts beloved character Holly Gibney at the forefront, now working for a celebrity women's rights activist whose lecture tour is under threat by a violent mystery assailant. At the same time, Holly helps her police detective friend with a serial killer on a revenge mission. 'Along Came Amor' by Alexis Daria This steamy romance is the third and final installment of Daria's 'Primas of Power' series. When Ava Rodriguez's now ex-husband leaves her to chase dreams that don't include her, she tries to embrace her new singleness in a one-night stand with Roman Vázquez. Type-A Roman is laser-focused on building his empire, so he initially agrees to her no-strings-attached, no-feelings situationship. That comes crashing when the pair run into each other at Ava's family function. 'Shield of Sparrows' by Devney Perry This new romantasy series, billed for fans of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, sees a forgotten princess changing her fate. She's never meant to rule, only to obey her father. But after an encounter with a legendary monster hunter and a prince upends her life, she realizes she can make her own rules, becoming the warrior she was meant to be. 'How to Be Well' by Amy Larocca Everyone knows a 'well woman' – the spiritual, skincare aficionado who is just one cog in the machine of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry. Journalist Larocca touches on her own experience getting sucked into wellness culture before ripping back the curtain at the science behind it, as well as the standards of American womanhood driving the profits. Support AAPI authors all year: 10 new books by Asian authors to read Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
CBS News
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Oprah Winfrey unveils "The Emperor of Gladness" as her latest book club pick
Oprah Winfrey reveals new book club pick: "The Emperor of Gladness" by Ocean Vuong Oprah Winfrey unveiled her latest book club selection Tuesday on "CBS Mornings," choosing "The Emperor of Gladness" by acclaimed author and poet Ocean Vuong. During the exclusive announcement, Winfrey described the novel as containing "some of the most beautiful writing I've experienced in my lifetime," and praised Vuong's ability to "capture the essence of just ordinary people." "When I tell everybody, would you just read the first chapter. And if you read the first chapter, you're gonna be hooked," Winfrey said. The novel opens with the line, "The hardest thing in the world is to live only once," and follows 19-year-old Hai who develops a profound connection with Grazina, an elderly widow suffering from dementia. In the interview, Vuong shared that the story was inspired by personal experience, noting that suicide is "a very personal thing" following his uncle's death by suicide in 2012. Rather than focusing solely on the moment of crisis, Vuong said he wanted to explore what happens after. "Often in stories or news segments, we have the suicide at the edge of the bridge. And then when they come off that bridge, and God willing they do, we all clap. Everything's back to normal," Vuong said. "But I've always thought what's happened for that person on day two of that decision. Day three, day 20. Because their life still is in shambles." The author said the unlikely bond between his main characters, noting that "both the young people and the very old have been pushed on the margins" of society, creating "masses amount of loneliness on both sides of that age spectrum." There is also a personal connection between Winfrey and Vuong, who shared that his mother, a nail salon worker in Connecticut, regularly watched "The Oprah Show." Vuong said as a child, he watched women feel empowered through reading. When asked what his late mother would think of his book being selected for Oprah's Book Club, Vuong said it would be the only literary achievement she would have fully recognized, saying "This is the only thing that would be legible to her." "I hope she's proud of me. I hope she's seeing me somewhere," Vuong said. Vuong's previous work includes the bestselling novel "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" and the poetry collection "Time Is a Mother." "The Emperor of Gladness" is on sale now.
Telegraph
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Gen Z adore this novelist – but he has run out of road
The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong 's second novel, begins with an exhortation to observe. Look, it says: in the fictional town of East Gladness, in Connecticut, lawns are overrun, roadkill is abused, and veterans are miserably glued to their TVs. It's the kind of place through which Vuong is poised to explore the pivotal issues of late capitalism – class, labour, race – and from which the book's troubled protagonist Hai would like to escape forever. But as Hai prepares to jump to his death from a bridge, he's saved by an elderly Lithuanian woman, Grazina. The next morning, Grazina offers him a job as her carer, a ludicrously ill-advised decision that's only somewhat explained by her dementia. Hai, having lied to his mother that he's studying medicine in Boston, accepts. Thus the novel's stage is set for the life-changing and unlikely friendship that will follow. Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, featured an autobiographical narrator, Little Dog. Through letters, Vuong excavated a tragic family history that moved from wartime Vietnam to a nail salon in New England. The book enjoyed a rapturous commercial reception, particularly with younger readers, and was marked by an earnestness and sincerity also present in his two poetry collections. 'Vuong refuses to be embarrassed,' said Viet Thanh Nguyen, admiringly. Critics were more mixed, but the novel's success was enough to see Vuong catapulted to literary fame, and expectations have since been high for his sophomore outing. Fans of Vuong will be satisfied by The Emperor of Gladness, but it's unlikely to convert any sceptics. The novel's characters and structure are new – here, Vuong uses the third person – but core subjects remain, and the prose is similarly heartfelt. Like Little Dog, Hai (an aspiring writer) is the son of Vietnamese immigrants who moved to New England and soon found themselves battling grief and deprivation. Aside from Hai and Grazina, the book is populated by a cast of downtrodden characters, each with their own personal baggage. Everyone is short on cash; everyone has been ravaged by drugs and alcohol, particularly opioids, and the novel's concern with the systems that facilitate those addictions is one of its strengths. The citizens of East Gladness work numbing, exhausting gigs, propping up a system from which they cannot benefit. Vuong is skilled at invoking the spirit and geography of East Gladness, and the book is at its best when Hai is working at HomeMarket, shooting the breeze with his motley crew of coworkers. In these moments, there's a sense of ease that I wished had been sustained. Elsewhere, readers are asked to suspend their disbelief. Grazina's dementia forces her backwards into the shadow of her war-torn youth; Hai spends a good portion of the novel calling himself 'Sgt. Pepper' and acting out with Grazina the violent geopolitical conflicts of the Second World War. When Hai goes to rehab, he finds the same Mary Oliver quote – 'what will you do with your one wild and precious life' – pinned on every wall. There's an actual written rendition of 'The Parting Glass' towards the end, warbled tearfully by one of Hai's friends. Vuong is a skilled writer, but not a subtle one. In his work, it's as though the world can, and should, be constantly mined for sentiment. This can be exhausting. 'You tried to locate yourself inside an immeasurable universe,' Hai tells Grazina. 'And no one knows where you are and you feel, for a tiny second, that you have no parents, that they never existed at all, which is impossible and shameful to love, but I did.' This declaration is shortly followed by: 'the superpower of being young is that you're closest to being nothing – which is also the same as being very old.' Barely a paragraph later: 'Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive.' Each page contains some kind of epiphany that seems designed to have been underlined. Vuong allows for no breathing room between such breathless proclamations, and the reader is barely able to react emotionally before another is foisted upon them. Ultimately, the effect is claustrophobic. By the closing metaphor, I couldn't help wishing that Vuong had stepped back a little – and let the dingy, intriguing ecosystem of East Gladness speak for itself.
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ocean Vuong Was Ready to Kill. Then a Moment of Grace Changed His Life.
Seen in a soft light, Ocean Vuong's life looks like a modern American fairy tale. In 1990, he and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam. They landed in small-town Connecticut and began muddling their way through an existence limited by low-paying work and cultural and personal alienation. Vuong seemed destined to stay stuck on society's margins. Until, that is, he discovered literature and his own enormous gift for writing. Now Vuong is one of the country's most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. a 'genius grant') and a tenured professor in the creative-writing department at New York University. His bittersweet debut novel, 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous,' a marvel of emotional and narrative compression published in 2019, became a best seller and, over time, a bona fide millennial classic. All this, and he's only 36. But there's another side to Vuong's narrative, one that doesn't resolve so neatly. It's that side of his history that informs his new novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness,' which will be published on May 13. At 400-plus pages, with a large cast of characters and comedic set pieces and touching on fast-food jobs, elder care and the static nature of most American lives, 'Emperor' is a bigger book in every way than Vuong's first. It also provided the occasion for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews I've ever done. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App Your new novel is based in part on your experiences working at fast-food restaurants. Where did you work? I worked at a place called Boston Market and a place called Panera. I was living in HUD housing with my mother and my brother. It was this situation where if your family income surpassed [a certain minimum], then you can't live there anymore. In the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which was $9.50 cash, no Uncle Sam involved. You confront, as a teenager, this antithesis of American prosperity and upward mobility where it's like, 'Don't make too much money, or we'll be homeless.' So I went to Boston Market, which is a very eye-opening experience of American life. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Time Magazine
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The Best New Books to Read in May
The best new books to read in May include historian and best-selling author Ron Chernow 's biography of Mark Twain, United We Dream co-founder Cristina Jiménez 's debut memoir, and poet and novelist Ocean Vuong 's follow-up to his 2019 novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. There's something for everyone this month. Young adult author Christina Li makes her adult literary debut with a gothic ghost story for fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane 's latest is a personal and political look at the legal rights of nature. And New York Times critic at large Amanda Hess dissects what it's like to raise a child in the digital age. Below, the 13 books you should read in May. The Manor of Dreams, Christina Li (May 6) The Manor of Dreams begins with the death of a fictional starlet named Vivian Yin, who has left her crumbling mansion to an unlikely heir: the daughter of her long-deceased former housekeeper. Vivian's children now find themselves in a battle over their mother's broken-down estate against someone they suspect may have had a hand in her demise. In hopes of piecing together Vivian's final days, the warring families move into the dilapidated home together only to discover that it is being haunted by the ghosts of the late actor's complicated past. Jemimah Wei's debut, The Original Daughter, tells the story of an unlikely sisterhood. Genevieve Yang's life is completely upended when, at eight years old, she suddenly gains a de facto younger sister who is actually the daughter of an estranged in Singapore at the turn of the millennium, the unexpected siblings quickly bond over the societal pressure to be the perfect daughter only to have a bitter betrayal tear them apart later in life. When Genevieve's mother gets sick, the two must try and put their differences aside in this decades-spanning saga about ambition, resentment, and forgiveness. With her debut memoir, journalist Amanda Hess uses her own experience as a first-time mom to look at what it's like to have and raise a child in the social media age. But Second Life isn't the new What to Expect When You're Expecting. Hess isn't offering parenting tips to tech-savvy caretakers. Instead, she takes readers on an eye-opening adventure down the parenting internet rabbit hole where she explores, among many things, the personification of pregnancy tracking apps, the surreal network of prenatal genetic tests, and the origins of the growing ' freebirther ' movement. In this follow-up to writer and editor Michele Filgate's acclaimed 2019 anthology, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, authors, poets, and essayists including Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Kelly McMasters unspool their complicated relationships with their dads. Across 16 essays, What My Father and I Don't Talk About tackles difficult topics such as parental estrangement, toxic masculinity, and emotional availability in hopes of encouraging us to consider how we are shaped by our family. Ocean Vuong's second novel begins when an elderly Lithuanian woman with early-stage dementia saves Hai, a troubled 19-year-old, from taking his own life. Hai soon reciprocates this act of kindness by becoming her caregiver. The pair, both living on the fringes of society in their Connecticut town, form an unexpected friendship that leads the teen on a journey of self-discovery. Mark Twain, Ron Chernow (May 13) After tackling the lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Ulysses S. Grant with his previous biographies, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow returns with a definitive portrait of another American icon: Mark Twain. Across a whopping 1,200 pages, Chernow takes a comprehensive look at the life of the author born Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The book delves into Twain's early years working odd jobs—steamboat pilot, miner, journalist, just to name a few—before the release of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. From there, Chernow traces Twin's life and career up until his grief-stricken final days marked by undiagnosed madness. The latest novel from Kevin Wilson, the best-selling author of Nothing to See Here, starts with an unusual family reunion that leads to an even crazier family road trip. Twenty years after her father walks out on her and her mom, organic farmer Madeline 'Mad' Hill meets Reuben, a 40-something mystery writer who claims to be her older half-brother. With the help of a private detective, Reuben has tracked down their dad, who, it turns out, has fathered multiple children. Now, Reuben is hitting the road to gather up their siblings and confront their absentee dad, and he wants Mad to come with him. Looking for answers for her dad's disappearance, she agrees, embarking on an adventure to finally understand where she came from. Madeleine Thien's century-spanning fourth novel, The Book of Records, is set in a mysterious shape-shifting enclave for displaced people where the past, present, and future collide. After fleeing their home in southern China, Lina and her ailing father have taken up residence at 'the Sea.' There, they live alongside a diverse group of neighbors including a Jewish scholar from 17th century Amsterdam, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and a philosopher fleeing Nazi persecution in 1930s Germany. After her dad reveals his role in their family's tragic past, Lina looks to her time traveling community for advice on how to reckon with her devastation. With his twelfth book, best-selling British nature writer Robert Macfarlane argues thatrivers are not just flowing bodies of water, but living beings with legal rights. Inspired by the Rights of Nature movement, the global effort to legally protect nature, Macfarlane visits a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, the wounded creeks, lagoons, and estuaries of southern India, and a wild river in Quebec at risk of being dammed to show how activists, artists, and lawmakers are putting the concept of environmental personhood to the test. Shamanism, anthropologist Manvir Singh's debut, traces the evolution of the titular spiritual practice. To investigate the origins of the ancient religion, Singh travels to the Mentawai archipelago in Indonesia, a cave in southwest France, and the northwest Amazon. He studies with shamans, healers who are believed to have the power to commune with spirits, in hopes of understanding why their practices have become as popular with Burning Man festival goers as they are with Wall Street traders. Blending memoir, investigative journalism, and anthropological fieldwork, Shamanism is a deep dive into a religious tradition that is as mysterious as it is timeless. With her second memoir, novelist Yiyun Li examines the unbearable pain of losing both her sons to suicide. Things in Nature Merely Grow paints a loving portrait of each of her teenage children, who died nearly seven years apart, and details her own battles with depression and suicidal ideation. (The latter was the focus of her 2017 debut memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.) Throughout, Li does not shy away from the magnitude of these losses. Instead, she writes of radical acceptance, offering a profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children. When activist Cristina Jiménez was 13, she and her family moved from Ecuador to the United States. Her debut memoir, Dreaming of Home, tells the story of what it was like growing up undocumented in Queens, NY, and how her experience inspired her to become a prominent voice in the fight for immigration justice. Lush, Rochelle Dowden-Lord (May 27) In Rochelle Dowden-Lord's debut, Lush, four wine experts—a wunderkind sommelier, a food writer, a social media influencer, and the owner of a popular, but mediocre wine brand—are invited to a French vineyard for the weekend. While there, they'll get the chance to taste the rarest wine in the world. But in order to achieve this professional milestone, they'll have to confront their personal demons in this intoxicating look at the world of wine and those who love it.
