Giant Love, by Julie Gilbert (Pantheon). Fusing biography and Hollywood history, this book chronicles the creation of Edna Ferber’s novel “Giant” and its transformation into a film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. Ferber, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright (and the author’s great-aunt), spent nearly thirteen years “assembling the stones and bricks and mortar and metal” for her novel, which was set in Texas. As Gilbert recounts Ferber’s duodenal-ulcer-inducing work ethic and her impressions of the state as “bombastic; naïve, brash,” she also delves into the drama behind the 1956 film, directed by George Stevens, which heightened the novel’s focus on racial prejudice by, among other things, featuring a climactic diner fight not present in Ferber’s original text.
Anima, by Kapka Kassabova (Graywolf). This lyrical but unsentimental book is a eulogy for transhumance—the seasonal movement of livestock and the people who watch over them. For the final installment in a quartet of books about the Balkans, Kassabova travels to her native Bulgaria to live in the Pirin Mountains with some of Europe’s last modern pastoralists. What she finds is a world that appears at once out of time—bedeviled by wolf attacks and sheep theft—and entirely contemporary, with industrialization and the pull of consumerism threatening to finally consign the shepherds, and the rare animal breeds they cultivate, to extinction. As Kassabova deepens her relationships with her subjects, she is both confronted and enchanted by their lonely, often harshly beautiful existence.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
Playworld, by Adam Ross (Knopf). Griffin, the teen-age protagonist of this engrossing coming-of-age novel, set on the Upper West Side in the early nineteen-eighties, is living an unusual childhood: an actor in a hit TV show, with parents in the performing arts, he longs to do normal-person things, like fall in love with someone his own age. But Naomi, a thirtysomething friend of his parents’, has other ideas for him, as does his abusive high-school wrestling coach. Onscreen, Griffin plays a superhero; if he has a superpower in real life, it is detachment. Things come to a head one fateful summer as, amid personal and family tumult, the maturing Griffin begins to inhabit his most important role: himself.
Havoc, by Christopher Bollen (Harper). This abidingly wicked novel of suspense and one-upmanship is narrated by an eighty-one-year-old American widow permanently installed in a hotel on the Nile catering to moneyed vacationers. The widow is driven to “sow chaos” by what she calls her “compulsion.” “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck,” she claims. But her routine is disrupted when an eight-year-old American boy arrives at the hotel and becomes wise to her machinations. Their epic battle of wills comes to verge on black comedy, but the widow’s simultaneous battle with her own mortality gives the novel an unexpected poignancy. “Children aren’t the world’s inheritors,” she offers at one point, “they are its thieves, skating by on the hard work of generations that came before them.”
