March 7, 2026
The five books this week remind us how, despite life’s obstacles, we carry on. Whether through a memoir composed of staccato short pieces revealing life both banal and profound; a collection of memorable quotes from one of our most talented humorists, gone too soon; a stylish novel about underground life in Berlin; short fiction from an astonishingly gifted Australian writer whose reputation has grown in the U.S.; or a surprising post-9/11 story set on the ocean among a floating array of humanity, these writers capture the dogged spirit of survival.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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All the World Can Hold
By JUNG YUN
Published by S&S/37 INK
Yun told Publishers Weekly, “I didn’t want to write about 9/11—I wanted to write about people whose lives came into focus as a result of that event.” The claustrophobic setting of a luxury cruise ship bound for Bermuda provides a perfect opportunity to observe behavior after life-changing trauma. (Think White Lotus.) The cruise, formerly a Love Boat-style experience, hosts, among others, a bad actor from the previous incarnation; a Korean mother-daughter duo attempting to enjoy a prepaid holiday; and an MIT graduate avoiding her future. Using elements of farce, Yun identifies the challenges of moving forward in the wake of tragedy.
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Someday This Will Be a Funny Story
By NORA EPHRON
Published by KNOPF
What better source for advice than the brilliant mind of Nora Ephron? Throughout her screenplays and novels, she was a famous quipster, spreading wisdom and fun wherever she went. Some of her work was ‘borrowed’ from friends and family—thus the famous quote “everything is copy” (actually, this came from her mother, Phoebe). Even if you’ve never bought a self-help book, consider this your first—it is inspiring and hilarious. Packaged in a perfect size to sit at your bedside table—or on the counter of any and all bookstores—you’ll find yourself dipping in again and again to find her guidance on love, death, religion, and fashion (“Everything matches black, especially black.”), even as she faced her own mortality.
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Lean Cat, Savage Cat
By LAUREN J. JOSEPH
Published by CATAPULT
Welcome to the underbelly of Berlin with all its seductive darkness, sexual freedom, and glamour. Told with a satirical wit, the novel’s style has been compared to the film, Saltburn. Joseph’s protagonist Charli is obsessed with David Bowie and is meant to be writing her dissertation about his lover, when she meets a musician in London who is returning to Berlin. On a whim, she follows him and sets in motion swirling scenes of decadence. The author’s prose sparkles as we watch Charli make choices she is destined to regret. The novel manages to be both enervating and invigorating. Joseph, a trans performance artist working all around the world, is a keen observer of culture.
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Stories
By HELEN GARNER
Published by PANTHEON
It has been a treat for American readers to discover (or rediscover) Garner—a perennial bestselling ‘Staff Pick’ from Jory, our Australian-born Bookstore Manager—from the republication of much of her work in the last couple years. In both her fiction and nonfiction, her characters (doctors, surfers, young girls), are molded through a gimlet eye that is the hallmark of her prose. As stated in the foreword, they “seem to be in a perpetual state of arrival.” Their desires and disappointments are laid out in specific detail making each story affecting, textured, and full of humor, evident from titles like, “The Psychological Effect of Wearing Stripes” and “All Those Bloody Young Catholics.”
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The Irish Goodbye
By BETH ANN FENNELLY
Published by W. W. NORTON
These ‘micro-memoirs’ get right to the heart of nonfiction. Some are two lines; one, “The Stories We Tell About the Stories We Tell” is 17 pages. But all the precisely observed moments accrue to reveal the bigger picture. Fennelly uses humor and insight—about herself, her neuroses, her marriage, her competitive yoga, her sister’s untimely death, how both her mother and her mother-in-law have dementia, how she started to garden in the pandemic only to have slugs attack her plants. It is a whole life laid out with all the attendant joy and despair. This is intimacy unveiled. Though an ‘Irish goodbye’ usually refers to slipping away unnoticed, this memoir disproves the rule.
