Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead). For more than three decades, Iyer, an essayist and a novelist, has spent several weeks a year at a silent retreat in a monastery in Big Sur, California. In this spare, delicately woven memoir, he combines portraits of the people he has encountered during his stays with crystalline descriptions of the natural setting and philosophical ruminations on the purposes of retreat. If Iyer’s ultimate goal is to illuminate a certain state of feeling—the incendiary sense of being alive hinted at in the title—his focus radiates outward: “It’s writing about the external world that feels most interior,” he tells a fellow silence-seeker. The result is a powerful work of observation in which deep truths seem to arise almost by accident.
Only in America, by Richard Bernstein (Knopf). This capacious biography of the Lithuanian-born entertainer Al Jolson also traces the evolution of American Jewry on stage and screen, casting Jolson as an exemplar of immigrant success. Bernstein analyzes Jolson’s role in “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first feature-length talkie, and explores how the film reflects tensions between embracing assimilation and honoring Jewish traditions. Bernstein also reckons with Jolson’s use of blackface, engaging with contemporaneous Black newspapers and later critical scholarship and taking the issue as an opportunity to consider the potential spiritual and “tragic” links between Jewish and Black music-making.
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Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from the Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf). Presented as a translation of an out-of-print Japanese text, this National Book Award-winning metafictional novel takes place in colonial-era Taiwan, and follows a Japanese writer on a trip during which she falls in love with her local translator. Yáng details their sumptuous meals, teasing out the differences between Japanese and Taiwanese foodways—and between what is imposed and what is native. As tensions around the imbalance that characterizes colonial relations threaten their intimacy, the novel’s framing device, with its many footnotes, underscores the barriers to mutual understanding the two face. “I complained about the Empire’s treatment of its colonies,” the Japanese writer notes, “yet I was but another citizen of this world with all its earthly flaws.”
Tasmania, by Paolo Giordano (Other Press). Paolo, the protagonist of this searching novel, is, like its author, an Italian writer with a physics degree. When his wife ends their efforts to conceive a child, he takes up a wandering life, sleeping on couches and in hotels while teaching, writing newspaper columns, and researching a book on the atomic bomb. He finds distraction in the lives of others, including a friend embroiled in a custody battle, a charismatic climate scientist, and a priest carrying on an affair. As Paolo struggles to make sense of relationships characterized by both intimacy and distance, Giordano explores the challenge of finding safety in a world where disasters—from bombings to rising sea levels—proliferate.
