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Los Angeles Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, March 30
1. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 2. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (S&S/Saga Press: $29) An historical horror novel about a vampire who haunts the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. 3. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf: $32) The story of four women and their loves, longings and desires. 4. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt & Co.: $29) An unexpected wedding guest gets surprise help. 5. The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf: $30) A Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraska town. 6. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon: $29) A woman fights for freedom in a near-future where even dreams are under surveillance. 7. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (Entangled: Red Tower Books: $30) The third installment of the bestselling dragon rider series. 8. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue (S&S/Summit Books: $27) A historical novel about an infamous 1895 train station disaster. 9. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $29) A woman upends her domestic life in this irreverent novel. 10. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead Books: $30) Worlds collide when a teenager vanishes from her Adirondacks summer camp. … 1. Everything Is Tuberculosis (Signed Edition) by John Green (Crash Course Books: $28). The deeply human story of the fight against the world's deadliest infectious disease. 2. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron Books: $33) An insider's account of working at Facebook. 3. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 4. Abundance by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A call to renew a politics of plenty and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. 5. The Tell by Amy Griffin (The Dial Press: $29) The investor's memoir explores how far we will go to protect ourselves. 6. Notorious by Maureen Dowd (Harper: $32.50) A collection of the New York Times columnist's celebrity profiles. 7. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 8. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Burgoyne (illustrator) (Scribner: $20) Gratitude, reciprocity and community, and the lessons to take from the natural world. 9. Who Is Government? ed. by Michael Lewis (Riverhead Books: $30) A civics lesson from a team of writers and storytellers. 10. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf: $28) A powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. … 1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 2. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Vintage, $18) 3. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $18) 4. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17) 5. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (Grand Central: $20) 6. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 7. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 8. Funny Story by Emily Henry (Berkley: $19) 9. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Penguin: $18) 10. Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (William Morrow Paperbacks, $18) … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 3. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $35) 4. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 5. Eve by Cat Bohannon (Vintage: $20) 6. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 7. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 8. Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (Picador: $18) 9. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli by Mark Seal (Gallery Books: $21) 10. All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster: $19)
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He's ‘the Worst Dream America Ever Had,' and He's Out for Revenge
Stephen Graham Jones's new novel would give Gen. Philip Sheridan fits. The Civil War officer is often cited as the source of one of the most infamous sayings in American history, 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian,' and there are dozens if not hundreds of dead Indians in 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.' There's also a very long-living or, more accurately, undead one who opines: 'What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had.' Take that, General! Good Stab is an Indigenous man from the Blackfeet tribe living in Montana around the time of the 1870 Marias Massacre, when U.S. Army troops killed nearly 200 unarmed women, children and elderly members of the Blackfeet Nation, a tragedy that figures in a multitude of ways throughout this gruesome joyride of a novel. One day, Good Stab is caught in a violent encounter with a wagon train of white settlers holding a supernatural being in a cage. The strange, humanish creature is bloodthirsty, death-defying, antagonistic, charismatic and chatty. He's called the Cat Man, and he's a centuries-old vampire. During an ensuing skirmish with the white settlers, the Cat Man is freed and his blood gets mixed into a wounded Good Stab, who then becomes a bloodsucker as well. Now released, the Cat Man preys on Good Stab's tribe, which enrages Good Stab, leading to decades of conflict between the two. All the while, each is on a near-perpetual quest for vengeance against white settlers and for survival in 19th-century Montana. None of this will be any surprise to readers of Jones's past fiction, which has confidently mashed up various horror genres with pointed explorations of Native American experience. But two features stand out with his latest: first, the particular terms of vampiric living. Rather than cloaked, castled mystery and wealthy Eurotrash vibes (familiar features of the vampire story, from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' in 1897 through to Robert Eggers's remake of 'Nosferatu' in 2024), the monsters in 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter' are High Plains eternal drifters who have to drain their victims completely to remain vital. Moreover, in a mordant deep joke on the saying that you are what you eat, Cat Man and Good Stab inevitably take on the attributes of their victims, whether humans or animals. Dante would be pleased with the situation Jones has created, though social justice-oriented readers looking for an easy-to-cheer-for BIPOC vigilante be warned: Good Stab can only defend his people and carry out vengeance on behalf of the Blackfeet by, as the novel's title suggests, killing and feeding on lots and lots of Native Americans himself. And his Blackfeet victims aren't just fellow warriors in the midst of battles, either. In one case, Good Stab gorges on a child after crawling into the lodge of a sleeping family. First he quietly bites into her throat. 'I didn't think she could scream anymore, but I didn't want her mother to have to see this,' he observes. But his remorse means little compared with his sudden insight: The younger the person he blood-sucks dry, the stronger he becomes. Cat Man already knows this, which leads to a wrenching climactic encounter with Good Stab that recalls the awful dilemma at the center of Ursula K. Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.' The consequences of this showdown stay with Good Stab forevermore. He unpacks his unquiet heart decades later, and his doing so plays out through the second distinctive feature of Jones's novel: its story-within-story-within-story structure. The novel opens with a discovery — in 2012, a book hidden in the wall of an old parsonage is found by an unnamed construction worker. It turns out to be a journal, written in 1912 and belonging to Arthur Beaucarne, the pastor of the local Lutheran congregation. Inside it contains the story of his strange encounters with Good Stab, who, after years of carnage, has seemingly come to him to confess. In the novel's 1912 sections, Jones adeptly plays into the expectations we have of horror tales. Good Stab appears and disappears in the church at will; people in town are being killed inexplicably; the sheriff doesn't believe Beaucarne when he tries to tell him his suspicions about Good Stab; and Beaucarne himself has a secret past, which makes his vow to listen to Good Stab's confession with 'a good heart' increasingly suspect. Jones creates and builds a strong sense of suspense and mystery in the 1912 sections, whereas the Good Stab passages are comparatively loose and repetitively graphic, to the point of tedium. This all comes to us through yet another frame narrative — at the beginning of the novel, Etsy Beaucarne, a flailing academic and descendant of Arthur, acquires the journal. Reading it, she's curious about what she learns of her ancestor and his undead companion. As the novel unfolds, Jones moves back and forth between Beaucarne's haunting in 1912 and Good Stab's hunting in the years before, reserving Etsy's discovery of her family connection to a strange and supernatural past for the opening and closing segments of the book. What is Jones doing here, with this trifold narrative structure? He has created a novel that invites us to reflect on how the stories we tell about ourselves can be at once confessions and concealments. At the same time, he's using this framework to set up some scary, big reveals. Do the vampire math, people: The story Etsy's reading from a hundred years ago isn't finished yet.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Spring Preview: A Few Books We're Excited For
Every season brings its share of books to look forward to, and this spring is no different. On this week's episode the host Gilbert Cruz and his colleague Joumana Khatib talk about a dozen or so titles that sound interesting in the months ahead. Books discussed on this episode: 'Dream Count,' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 'Sunrise on the Reaping,' by Suzanne Collins 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,' by Stephen Graham Jones 'Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools,' by Mary Annette Pember 'Great Big Beautiful Life,' by Emily Henry 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' by Ian Leslie 'Yoko: A Biography,' by David Sheff 'Searches,' by Vauhini Vara 'Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America,' by Michael Luo 'Rabbit Moon,' by Jennifer Haigh 'Mark Twain,' by Ron Chernow 'Authority,' by Andrea Long Chu 'Spent,' by Alison Bechdel 'Fish Tales,' by Nettie Jones We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
