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USA Today
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
New books to read: 15 March releases, from new 'Hunger Games' to shocking tell-alls
New books to read: 15 March releases, from new 'Hunger Games' to shocking tell-alls March was a big month in the publishing world. Between a new 'Hunger Games' book, a highly-anticipated nonfiction title from John Green and the third book in Tracy Deonn's BookTok sensation 'Legendborn' series, readers are booked and busy. And there are plenty of new celebrity memoirs and biographies to indulge your curiosity, including 'Yoko' by David Sheff, Graydon Carter's memoir and a new 'Bangles' deep dive. What are you in the mood to read next? We pulled together 15 of our favorites to keep your TBR well-stocked. New books: What to read next from March From sprawling family dramas and eerie dystopian novels to romance and new literary fiction, there's something for every reader on this list of March new releases. All of these books are out and available for you to buy at a bookstore near you. For a look at all the 2025 titles we're excited about, check out USA TODAY's most anticipated releases list. 'The Dream Hotel' by Laila Lalami This novel is in a dystopian near-future where artificial intelligence has an overreaching hand even in your sleep. Our protagonist, museum archivist Sara Hussein, is stopped by government agents from the Risk Assessment Administration after their algorithm analyzed her dreams and determined she's at risk of committing a crime in the future. Now, because of this dubious "crime prevention" program, she's being detained. 'The Dream Hotel' is reminiscent of '1984,' a masterful genre-bending commentary on bodily autonomy, government surveillance and the insidious side of technological innovation. 'Broken Country' by Clare Leslie Hall With an opening line of 'The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him,' 'Broken Country' doesn't waste any time getting you into this sweeping family drama. The story weaves back and forth in time, examining the consequences of love, pride and obligation. Beth and her husband Frank's willfully ignorant marital bliss is upended when Beth's brother-in-law shoots a dog that belongs to Gabriel, Beth's teenage love. He's returned to the village with his son, who reminds Beth of her own son who died in a tragic accident. 'Sunrise on the Reaping' by Suzanne Collins 'The Hunger Games' author returns with the series' fifth installment, a prequel about Haymitch's win in the 50th Hunger Games. In this 'Quarter Quell,' double the amount of tributes are reaped for the Games and Haymitch must leave his home, his beloved girlfriend and his family to fight in the Capitol arena. 'Sunrise on the Reaping' is teeming with 'Hunger Games' nostalgia, ringing true to the masterpiece of the original trilogy with its themes of propaganda and authority. Fans can expect a few loose-ends tied and the return of many favorite characters. 'Stop Me If You've Heard This One' by Kristen Arnett Big-hearted and knock-your-socks-off funny, 'Stop Me If You've Heard This One' follows Cherry Hendricks, a professional clown and part time aquarium store employee who is down on her luck. She's constantly hooking up with the wrong person's mom, her own is judgmental and Cherry's grief over her deceased brother is always popping up when she least expects it. And then she meets Margot the Magnificent, a much older lesbian magician whose success and charm manage to pull Cherry in swiftly. 'Careless People' by Sarah Wynn-Williams 'Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism' was kept a secret until less than a week before publication date, and understandably so – Meta quickly filed (and won) an emergency arbitration to stop promotion of the tell-all. In this unflinching memoir, now a bestseller, a former Facebook executive presents shocking allegations against the company's leadership influence, power and decision-making. 'Hot Air' by Marcy Dermansky 'Hot Air' is a hilariously unhinged romp through messy billionaire shenanigans, disappointing hook ups and wanting what you can't and shouldn't have. The story opens on a quickly souring first date (complicated by the fact that their children are on a playdate at the same time) as a hot air balloon, carrying a famous billionaire and his philanthropist wife, crashes into the backyard pool. When one half of the first date and one half of the billionaire couple realize they knew each other in a past life, all four embark on an entangled lost weekend into each other's lives. 'Story of My Life' by Lucy Score This small-town romance is 'Schitt's Creek' meets 'Gilmore Girls.' It follows a once-successful romance novelist whose breakup and writer's block drives her to impulsively flee to Pennsylvania in search of her next love story. There, she meets the swoony Bishop brothers, including grumpy contractor Campbell, who will renovate her newly purchased house. A fake date for 'research purposes' might be just what she needs to get her pen to paper. 'Stag Dance' by Torrey Peters You never knew you needed a short story collection that includes lonely lumberjacks exploring queerness and gender, but you do. The 'Detransition, Baby' author returns with a diverse collection that's as fun as it is serious. One short story follows a dystopian, plague-ravaged world where humans can no longer create their own hormones. Another follows a sexual awakening between two roommates at a Quaker boarding school. The titular novella follows restless loggers who plan a wintertime dance, on the condition that some of them attend as women. 'Oathbound' by Tracy Deonn The highly-anticipated third book in 'The Legendborn Cycle' is finally here. Bree Matthews has isolated herself from her friends, the Legendborn Order and her ancestral connections to keep her community safe, but it comes at a cost. Now, she must make an unbreakable bargain to bind herself to the shapeshifting Shadow King's as his new protege. But can Bree ever really outrun her past? 'Everything is Tuberculosis' by John Green Green's second nonfiction book is a well-researched and engaging dive into his obsession with one of the world's deadliest infection after befriending a young tuberculosis patient in Sierra Leone. Weaving history and solutions, Green explains modern-day tuberculosis as 'both a form and expression of injustice,' writing that 'there is nothing permanent or inalterable about health inequities.' 'The Unworthy' by Agustina Bazterrica From the author of the horror novel 'Tender is the Flesh' comes a similarly eerie tale that fans of 'I Who Have Never Known Men' and 'The Handmaid's Tale' will love. In an isolated convent, a woman writes her life story in secret – she's an 'unworthy,' low on the totem pole of the Sacred Sisterhood rankings and dreams of one day ascending to be an 'Enlightened.' At less than 200 pages, Bazterrica packs a lot into this story – female rage, abuse, sacrifice, hope and ideological extremism in a world ravaged by climate crises. 'O Sinners!' by Nicole Cuffy Quickly encapsulating, 'O Sinners!' follows a grieving Muslim journalist's deep-dive into a California cult known only as 'the nameless.' As Faruq embeds himself into the cult and its enigmatic leader, Odo, he finds himself forced to confront his own past. This literary fiction novel is told in three interwoven timelines – Faruq's investigation, one that examines Odo's service in the Vietnam War and another looking back on a clash between 'the nameless' and a fundamentalist church. 'Summer in the City' by Alex Aster Bestselling fantasy author Aster pens a contemporary romance in 'Summer in the City.' This lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers story follows a screenwriter returning to New York City after she nabs the gig of a lifetime. She then runs into her now-enemy 'Billionaire Bachelor' Parker, who she hooked up with two years ago. But when her hate-fueled writing about him helps her turn a corner with her screenplay and as he's scouting for a fake red carpet, the pair realize they might need each other more than they expected. 'The Antidote' by Karen Russell Several Nebraskans collide after a storm ravages their small town in this Dust Bowl epic. As the town of Uz crumbles from the Great Depression and the drought, its residents (including a 'Prairie Witch' and a Polish wheat farmer) must grapple with generational forgetting and reckon with a violent past and potential fate. A photographer's time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both. 'Raising Hare' by Chloe Dalton This moving memoir from a UK political advisor and speechwriter follows her unlikely bond with a newborn hare that she finds in her backyard after it had been chased by a dog. Though she's advised that the hare will likely die whether kept in captivity or released back out, she raises and bottle-feeds it for over two years. The hare becomes a companion, wandering the fields by day and returning to Dalton's home by night, imparting valuable lessons about slowing down and the beauty in the unexpected. 'We Need Diverse Books Day' is April 3: How to participate in inaugural celebration 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@
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
An Antiseptic Politics of Your Dreams
by Laila LalamiPantheon, 336 pp., $29 SARA HUSSEIN, 37, HISTORIAN, ARCHIVIST at the Getty, and married mother of twins, is returning to California from a conference in London when she is pulled aside by officers of the Risk Assessment Administration. Her risk score, checked by the AI at the gate, is too high; the algorithm has determined that she may be a risk to her husband. Sara's risk score is assembled by an algorithm from an agglomeration of data: social media posts, medical history, relationship status, legal background. But most importantly, thanks to the shiny new 'Dreamsaver' sleep aid device implanted in Sara's head, her risk score can be affected by the content of her dreams. She will need to come with them for a brief forensic observation; it shouldn't take more than twenty-one days, not so long as she follows the rules. That shouldn't be so hard, should it? Such is the conceit of Laila Lalami's fifth and latest novel, The Dream Hotel. As one might expect, Sara spends more than the promised twenty-one days in custody, held with at least fifty other women in a repurposed elementary school known as 'Madison.' Her retention is 'precaution, not punishment.' The attendants bristle when one of the women calls Madison a jail. This is a retention center, they say, it's not a prison or a jail. You haven't been convicted, you're not serving time. You're being retained only until your forensic observation is complete. . . . The attendants never call the women prisoners. They say retainers, residents, enrollees, and sometimes program participants. Sara spends her days fretting over the time she is missing with her children and husband, reading, working in the retention center's laundry or doing grunt work for an AI firm that has contracted with the retention center's corporate ownership, worrying about her legal case, and writing down her dreams. As her case drags out, and the conditions at Madison deteriorate, Sara comes to know her fellow 'retainees,' and begins to engage in acts of resistance. The early descriptions of Sara's arrest at the airport and arrival at the retention center are appropriately chilling and disorienting: At one point, Sara berates herself for getting snippy with the arresting officers, noting that 'She'd passed up so many chances to demonstrate her docility that she had only herself to blame for what happened.' The necessary worldbuilding is accomplished quickly and painlessly, largely via excerpts from press releases and newspaper articles. The dehumanizing Panopticon of the retention center is credibly drawn without the sort of prurient brutality that could easily have turned this novel about a prison full of women into a women-in-prison novel. Yet once the world is built, not much becomes of it. The table is beautifully set but the meal itself is bland and predictable; competent, but far from inspired. Support our growing coverage of books, the arts, culture, and ideas by signing up for a free or paid Bulwark subscription. This is not to say there's nothing to appreciate about The Dream Hotel; a few of the details of the surveillance in the retention center are vividly unpleasant, such as the quiet mention halfway through the book that pads or tampons are only provided to the inmates for free if they agree to have their periods tracked. One scene shows Sara sitting in the multi-faith worship space at the retention center, attended to by 'an old-generation NuSpirit . . . waiting to beam sermons in any faith or language that matches the face and file on record.' She begins to think about the role that prophetic dreams play in many religions: But surely, a voice inside her says, premonition has value only because it is so rare. Every night people dream multiple dreams, most of which have no meaning. They're little more than electrical activity in the brain, evidence that the sleeping self is alive, and at play. How many dreams did Joseph have apart from the one that predicted his rise to power in Egypt? Imagine if the sages had built religions around those, too. But in general, once The Dream Hotel has established how its systems work and roughly who its characters are, the rest of the novel unfolds without major surprises in either plot or characterization. The for-profit company that runs the retention center continues to try to extract as much profit as it can out of its residents, the sadistic guard continues to be sadistic, Sara continues to be certain she doesn't belong in the retention center, and the residents realize they will need to work together if they are going to improve their situation. The ultimate resolution to the plot is perfectly believable, but entirely too clean. There is little here that wasn't done already in Nineteen Eighty-Four, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Parable of the Sower, or The Minority Report. THE BOOK IS, IN FACT, SUFFUSED with a sort of antiseptic odor, as if anything that might have made anyone too uncomfortable has been carefully scrubbed away. (In one peculiar moment, as the book has not otherwise censored its swear words—'fuck' appears sixteen times—the narration undergoes an unexpected fit of Victorian propriety and describes Sara as 'cussing' another person with a mysterious 'word so nasty it instantly brings color to [another character's] cheeks.') It is this sterility that robs the central questions of The Dream Hotel of any lasting power. The book is, again, about a lightly dystopian future where if you dream wrong, you can go to jail for months on end, there to be exploited by greedy for-profit prison companies. The clear message of the book is that such a world, such a system, would be very bad. I think every American (with the possible exception of Peter Thiel) would agree that we should not create the Torment Nexus that is the dream-policing device. But The Dream Hotel opens as though it is going to take this proposal seriously: You're a good person; if you were in a position to stop disaster, you probably would. Whenever a woman's murder captures headlines, your first instinct is to ask why no one did anything about the cuts and bruises for which she sought treatment, the boyfriend's repeated violations of the court's restraining order, the alarming texts he sent, which laid out in detail what he planned to do. . . . Picture the women. . . . What if you could save them from these monsters? You don't even have to do anything; you've already agreed to the terms of service. The inciting incident that led to the passage of the Crime Prevention Act, we learn, was a mass shooting at a Super Bowl halftime show 'in which 86 people were shot dead on live television before the broadcast was pulled by CBS.' When the FBI investigated, they found a 'long trail of evidence,' including domestic violence complaints, ammunition purchases, and internet searches on how to bypass stadium security. By the time of the book's events, some 62 percent of the American public supports the Crime Prevention Act, and the head of the Risk Assessment Administration cites a 42.6 percent decrease in gun deaths and a 48 percent decrease in 'deaths by suicide.' The dream-policing device is far from the only tool used by the RAA; it's just yet another source of data available to the algorithm. Lalami thus, at the beginning of the book, appears to be setting up a slightly more nuanced debate than we actually get in the rest of the text. I would hardly expect her to have ever come down on the side of the dream-police (nor would I want her to), but a version of this book that more openly discusses why someone who is not a cartoon supervillain might be attracted to a Risk Assessment Administration would have been a more interesting work of art, even if (or perhaps because) it might have made readers a little more uncomfortable. The residents of Madison that we meet are uniformly not the sort of people who set off alarm bells in the reader's mind. Presumably, in the universe of the book, all of those folks are held somewhere else; certainly, there are many more facilities beyond just Madison, and references are made to at least one location filled with men who are under investigation for possible future gun crimes. Yet because we don't meet any of these other people, we can only view the central question of the book through the lens of people who do not appear to be any sort of physical threat to anybody, though admittedly they are only sketched: Emily is a firefighter who draws comic books about a pyrokinetic superhero; Victoria is a card shark and a flirt; Marcela plays the guitar. We do, however, spend a lot of time reading about Sara's dreams, which range from nightmares about starting a hearing without her attorney to the obligatory embarrassing sex dream to visions in which she, indeed, causes harm or death to her husband. Most of these dreams are oddly prosaic, lacking the peculiar, psychedelic logic that I find characterizes many of my dreams. (The one exception is a dream in which Sara flies around Los Angeles on a volant carrot, accompanied by Albert Finney.) It is presented as self-evident to any reader that these dreams are not indicative of some deep-seated desire to murder her husband. Yet one can imagine a version of this book in which at least some of Sara's dreams are far more disturbing and worrying to the average person. If Sara's dreams looked more like Saw movies, would the dream-police have a point? Contrast this antiseptic quality with Lalami's third novel, The Moor's Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. In The Moor's Account, Lalami described the adventures of Mustafa al-Zamori (called, by his captors, Estebanico), a real-life black Moroccan man enslaved by Spaniards and taken on the ill-fated Narvaez expedition, which went looking for gold in Florida in 1527 and ended in disaster for all but four of its members. In the real world, we know very little about this man beyond a few throwaway lines written by the man who enslaved him and later wrote a description of the expedition; in her book, Lalami allows Mustafa to write his own account. He journeys from Florida to modern-day Texas and Mexico, watching as the Spaniards do terrible things to the Native population, and as some of the Native Americans do terrible things in return to the Spaniards. It's a beautifully nuanced book, one that never loses sight of the fundamental horrors of slavery and conquest, but that does not feel the need to paint the victims of such crimes as sinless paragons. Mustafa is now a slave, but in his previous life as a wealthy merchant, he had once sold slaves himself; some of the Native American societies they meet are nearly utopian, but others are almost as violent and brutal as the Spaniards themselves. None of this excuses the dreadful crimes committed by the Spaniards against any of their victims; I would argue that this more honest picture of the world conveys more accurately how horrible these crimes were. A terrible thing is not terrible only because of the innocence of its victims; it is a terrible thing to enslave or conquer another human being, no matter who that human being is. Advocates for criminal justice reform in the real world will often focus on innocent people who have been put to death or otherwise punished, because those stories are much more obviously persuasive to undecided listeners. Yet a principled opposition to capital punishment, for instance, need not be based only on its error rate; one could, and many people do, oppose capital punishment categorically, regardless of whether or not the defendant committed the crime at issue. Is that the appropriate tack to take with the RAA and its dream-policing? Whatever its answer, a different, more interesting version of this book might have been able to ask that question in a more meaningful fashion. As it is, The Dream Hotel's political argument exists at about the level of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is a very enjoyable movie, but is not a very serious work of speculative fiction. Share this review with a lover of speculative fiction. Share
Associated Press
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Book Review: ‘The Dream Hotel' is a dystopian world in which people are detained for dreams
Anyone who spends time on the internet knows that our demographics, preferences and interests are assiduously tracked by Big Tech companies hoping to capture more of our dollars. They record our keystrokes, time spent on certain web pages, how long we hover over different subjects. What if those companies shared the information with a government intent on tracking our every move to determine not only if we had broken the law, but planned to commit crimes? That's the question that Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami explores in her new novel 'The Dream Hotel,' published this month. In this novel that recalls the societal oppression and alienation in the works of Margaret Atwood and Franz Kafka, protagonist Sara Hussein is detained at the airport as she returns to Los Angeles from a conference in London. Because a sleep device controlling her insomnia allows her dreams to be tracked without her knowledge, Sara has been deemed likely to commit a violent crime and taken to a 'retention center' for 21 days of observation. That period is repeatedly extended unilaterally by center employees for infractions such as using an unapproved hair style or loitering in a hallway. Sara is Moroccan American like Lalami, who has dug deep into her heritage for past novels including 'The Moor's Account,' which was a Pulitzer finalist in 2015. Lalami's bestselling 2019 novel 'The Other Americans,' is about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant in the U.S. The controls that Sara suddenly finds herself subject to stem from the Crime Prevention Act that Congress passed after 86 people were shot dead on live television during a Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. The broadcast watched by 118 million viewers was rapidly pulled off the air and another 32 people were killed off camera. Outraged citizens noted that the shooter's past was littered with red flags that could have prevented the killings – several cases of domestic violence, the recent purchase of bump stocks and ammunition on a personal credit card, his grievances against a team doctor. Backers of the act focused on the idea of using commercial data analysis as an investigative tool by law enforcement, and granting government broader access to private records, leading to the identification and detention of people deemed likely to commit violent crimes. A new Risk Assessment Administration began tracking many aspects of citizens' lives like a credit agency collects data on loan repayments and credit card usage. Getting evicted, fired, even suffering a mental health crisis could all be cause for suspicion that an individual was likely to commit violence. In Sara's case, additional tracking can be done through a device embedded in a patient seeking care for sleep issues that can read their dreams. The stated mission is to keep American communities safe using advanced data analytics tools to investigate suspicious individuals and identify public safety risks to prevent future crimes. At the retention center operated by the Safe-X company, Sara yearns for nearly a year to be reunited with her husband and their twin toddlers, a girl and boy. Sara doesn't even remember the dream that made her subject to retention — a nightmare about killing the spouse she loves. 'Police officers used to patrol neighborhoods they called 'rough,' stopping and searching people they thought were suspicious,' Lalami writes, 'now they sift through dreams.'
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What if Your Dreams Could Land You in Prison?
'The Dream Hotel,' the fifth novel by the acclaimed Moroccan American writer Laila Lalami, is set in a near-future reality only a notch or two on the dystopian dial away from our present. Its protagonist, Sara Hussein, is a museum archivist in her late 30s, living in Los Angeles with her husband, Elias, and their toddler twins. As a new mother suffering the rigors of insomnia, she finds relief in something called a Dreamsaver, an ingenious neuroprosthetic device that ensures high-quality sleep. Embedded in the device's terms of service, however, is a clause allowing the extraction and sale of its users' biometrical data, including the content of their dreams. Sara becomes aware of this only when she is detained at LAX on her return from a conference in London. It's a couple of decades in the future, and the state keeps tabs on its citizens by way of a risk score — somewhere between China's social credit system and a credit rating — which calculates the likelihood of their committing a crime. Among the data sources for such assessments are dreams, supplied wholesale by the makers of the Dreamsaver. And Sara has been having dreams about poisoning her husband, which the government's Risk Assessment Administration (R.A.A.) reads, with insistent literal-mindedness, as a direct expression of a desire. Lalami's dystopian premise here will be familiar to anyone who has read Philip K. Dick's novella 'The Minority Report' (or seen the 2002 Spielberg adaptation), set in a future where people are incarcerated for offenses they have yet to commit. 'The Dream Hotel' shares some of this dystopian DNA, but the forebear it nods most knowingly toward is Kafka. At one point, an incarcerated Sara recalls a trip to Prague, and a visit to the Castle; later she checks out 'The Metamorphosis' from the prison library. Sara spends most of the novel attempting to negotiate the nightmarishly dense bureaucracy of the R.A.A., and of the so-called retention system in which she is being held. Though the initial period of retention is only 21 days, the staff at Madison, the facility where she is kept, find continual cause for extension. 'Retainees' perform unpaid labor on behalf of the private corporation that runs the facility. They are constantly breaking rules they didn't know existed; once you're in the system, it quickly becomes clear, your detention, which is entirely at the pleasure of an unseen and 'holistic' algorithm, is essentially indefinite. Safe-X, the company that runs the retention facilities, makes most of its money 'from the postponements it generated through its complicated disciplinary system.' Despite the influence of Kafka and Dick, the novel's most obvious reference points are in the American present. One long and vivid sequence takes place against the backdrop of a Los Angeles consumed by wildfire. And anyone who has had the misfortune to find themselves snarled in the gears of Customs and Border Protection at a U.S. airport might read the extended account of Sara's initial detention with sweaty palms and a racing heart. Though not much is explicitly made of it, Sara shares with her creator a Moroccan background; the notion of people being punished for the perceived likelihood of committing a crime might seem less speculative to readers of Middle Eastern heritage. The book also clearly has its sights set on what Shoshana Zuboff terms 'surveillance capitalism,' as well as on the kind of algorithmic, predatory policing discussed in Jackie Wang's 'Carceral Capitalism.' Lalami's social critique has a righteous vigor, but as fiction 'The Dream Hotel' often feels inert: Once the novel has set out its nightmarish stall, not much happens beyond an insistent delineation of the boredom and sadness and absurdity of Sara's situation. It might seem odd to critique a book set almost entirely in a carceral facility on the grounds of its feeling airless and entrapping, but this has less to do with its narrative than its failure to break its provocative premise free of the walls around it. The third-person present-tense narration keeps us close to Sara's thoughts, but those thoughts too often reveal the presence of a heavy editorializing hand. And so we find her thinking, for instance, 'it's the parasitic logic of profit, which has wormed its way so deeply into the collective mind that to defy lucre is to mark oneself as a radical, or a criminal, or a lunatic.' Her train of thought is, elsewhere, pressed into service as a vehicle for plot exposition: 'OmniCloud continues to grow at an astonishing pace, Sara thinks, its only serious competition the Chinese conglomerate that a handful of senators want to outlaw.' Still, the novel's central vision — a world in which the most private aspects of people's inner lives are extracted and sold — retains an insidious power, and an uncomfortable relevance.
