Up With the Sun by Thomas Mallon ’73 (Knopf)

In his eleventh novel, Mallon throws a spotlight on the faintly known show-biz world of Dick Kallman, a real-life, hustling Broadway and television actor, whose career seemed set to sparkle in the 1950s and 1960s—but by the time of his murder in 1980 he was selling antiques...

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dreamby Alissa Quart ’94 (Ecco)

Nobody actually pulls themselves up by the bootstraps. That’s the premise of Quart’s persuasively reported new book, one that works to unravel the myth of self-reliance woven into American culture for centuries. Quart (Squeezed) is a journalist, poet, and executive director of the Economic Hardship...

Drinking Games: A Memoirby Sarah Levy ’12 (St. Martin’s Press)

Her first blackout came at a house party near her home in New Jersey when she was 16. For years afterward, through Brown and a move to Brooklyn, the blackouts became more frequent and the drinking began to feel impossible to stop. Then a week after...

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress ’13 (Random House)

It’s 2011, the recession is hanging on, and both Occupy Wall Street and much intrigue are boiling at the fictional Wrynn College of Art, somewhere in New England. Louisa Arceneaux has just transferred from Louisiana on a scholarship and is drawn to her roommate Karina Piontek, the...

Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong ’10 (Catapult)

Reed, a 21-year-old Columbia student, is getting picked up at LAX by his irreverent mom before heading off to visit his Korean grandmother in the hospital. Reed is on academic probation and plans to drop out to become a Black Lives Matter activist. His painfully...

Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma by Harris Solomon ’07 AM, ’11 PhD (Duke Univ. Press)

Solomon, a professor of cultural anthropology and global health at Duke, spent time in one of Mumbai’s major public hospitals tracking the range of outcomes after someone was involved in a traumatic traffic or train accident. In part the book is an...

The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A Historyby Brian Jones ’95 (NYU Press)

On April 6, 1968, two days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., hundreds of Tuskegee Institute students briefly held the school’s Board of Trustees hostage, demanding changes that would turn Tuskegee into a “Black university.” The move brought 300 National...

Questions from Outer Spaceby Diane Thiel ’88, ’90 MFA (Red Hen Press)

Thiel’s third full-length poetry collection, and her twelfth book, arrives bristling with navigable strangeness and open-ended questions. The 67 sometimes otherworldly poems here weave through biology, parenting, the pandemic, world travel, life on Zoom, growing up in the South, the multiverse, and...

The Other Motherby Rachel M. Harper ’94 (Counterpoint)

It’s 2015, and on his first day at Brown Jenry Castillo stares up at the Carrie Tower, wondering if the long-stalled clock still worked when his mother Marisa was a student. A gifted pianist from Miami, Jenry is on a quest to learn about his father, Jasper Patterson,...