April 4, 2026
Three novels this week touch on fame: we have a slim yet potent book concerning a famous, aging writer; a group of midlife female boy-band fans aboard a cruise ship; and a modern pioneer woman with millions of followers who becomes dangerously complacent with her accomplishments. Also this week, a Booker Prize-winning Irish author imparts her wisdom in a series of crucial cultural essays, and we celebrate National Poetry Month with a trenchant new poetry collection from a multi-talented favorite.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Transcription
By BEN LERNER
Published by FSG
A writer arrives to interview his 90-year-old German mentor and inadvertently drops his recorder in a hotel sink. Embarrassed to tell him, he pretends it is recording. During the interview, the mentor conflates our narrator with his own son. This brief, slyly structured novel is about many things, including the nature of memory, fiction as reporting, and how technology affects our interactions. As usual, Lerner asks big questions that hide comfortably in what—at first—seems a simple story. It is what makes him such a fascinating writer.
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American Fantasy
By EMMA STRAUB
Published by RIVERHEAD
Straub’s latest is set on a cruise ship with several thousand hysterical women fans who have not gotten over their love for a certain ’90s boy band (think New Kids on the Block, NSYNC, etc.). Throw in a skeptical, newly divorced narrator who has just turned 50, and you have a wonderful mix of possibilities. Follow our protagonist’s emotional journey (fueled by silly drinks) aboard this floating world full of aging musicians, a jaded hardworking crew, and the women seeking to relive their youth. Straub has said she wanted to “explore what pleasure looks like and feels like in middle age,” and she nails it here. Fun, poignant, and wise.
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Attention
By ANNE ENRIGHT
Published by W.W. NORTON
Booker Prize-winner Enright arranges her timeless yet urgent essays into three categories: ‘Voices’ (writers discussed include Edna O’Brien, Helen Garner, and Toni Morrison); ‘Bodies’ (one about both consent and submission, another about Ireland’s abortion reform); and ‘Time’ (a wonderful piece, written just last fall, on revisiting her childhood home and its contents after her mother moved to a nursing home, “dying and not dying for many months”). Enright has assembled the best of her criticism, along with personal and political essays written over three decades, into one volume for the first time. As Arthur Miller once said in his classic play, Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid!”
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Yesteryear
By CARO CLAIRE BURKE
Published by KNOPF
“I wrote a story about what it looks like to fall back in time, in every sense of the word.” Burke’s debut is equal parts entertaining, wickedly funny, and timely. Natalie is a wildly successful social media influencer, famous for advocating a back-to-basics lifestyle on her Yesteryear ranch. However, behind the scenes of the Christian values and rusticity she espouses, she is nothing like the simple tradwife she presents to the world. Rather, she’s a pretty nasty piece of work, awful to her family and staff. She wakes one day to find herself living in the actual 1850s, complete with a farmer husband, unsure whether she is dreaming, trapped in a reality show, or unraveling entirely. The surprise ending is a bonus.
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Visitations
By JULIA ALVAREZ
Published by KNOPF
Alvarez’s beautiful novels about characters from her homeland of the Dominican Republic and their assimilation in Nueva York are as lyrical as poems. In her first poetry collection since 2011, she begins in ’50s D.R. under Trujillo’s dictatorship and continues to the present in Vermont, where she lives. These ‘visitations’ of the periods of her life are suffused with family memories, political upheavals, graceful aging, love, and loneliness. In the title poem, she speaks directly to her deceased mother as she gives a presentation at a senior center. Taken as a whole, this rich volume stands in for a memoir—which we are lucky to have, in case this is her sneaky way of writing one.
