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This entertaining and essential account follows the high-stakes goings-on at leading AI companies as they attempt to build machines that think better and faster than humans. Rather than weighing the potential risks and benefits of a hypothetical technology, reporter Roose offers a front row seat to how humanity arrived at a pivotal inflection point.
A bemused investigation into a wealthy steel scion’s attempt to establish a harem in a castle in New England morphs into a rollicking inquiry into why some men, like sitcom writer Graham Linehan and actor Armie Hammer, have been driven into very public, career-ending spirals over issues of sex and gender identity. This gets at the heart of something both sinister and ridiculous about the present moment.
It’s been a banner year for New York City—Mamdani, the Knicks—and Whitehead meets the moment with one of the best novels of the city in recent memory. In this conclusion to his Harlem Trilogy, which traces the porous line between crime and straight life, Whitehead examines the city’s pull on newcomers and natives alike and the lengths people go to make it there.
What begins as a penetrating examination of the psychology of literary greats transforms into a gripping account of Montero’s pursuit of an imposter who posed as her for years when she was a journalist in Madrid. A unique exploration of the relationship between the impulse to write and insanity, this is nothing short of brilliant.
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There are more than a few ways to recommend this audacious novel: one could call out its devotion to late-20th-century queer literature; its sobering portrait of homophobia in Jamaica, where sodomy is illegal; or its deeply sensuous writing on sex, violence, and death. Most admirable, though, is James’s ability to sustain and develop a thought across 600 pages.
Those who toil in the culture industry will find special resonance in Riley’s gimlet-eyed view into a storied London literary magazine under clueless new ownership. The novel’s workplace drama and tight-knit tribe of writers are spot-on, and there’s equal depth to Riley’s sharp depictions of British class differences in barely affordable London and her portrayal of the narrator’s dysfunctional family.
To most, David Sawyer, the mysterious character at the center of filmmaker Schoenbrun’s ambitious, funny, and scary debut, is a mass-murdering cult leader. To some, he’s guiding the way to the truth about a portal to an alternate universe. What’s so good about this book, beyond the effortless mix of horror and trans coming-of-age story, is its irresistible voice.
Pulitzer winner Lepore warns in this urgent, sweeping treatise that AI governance is the final form of Hannah Arendt’s “totalitarian state.” But she notes that AI may also be sounding its own death knell, as the last gasp of a type of automated decision-making that has been on the rise for decades. The book’s title notes a “rise and fall” because, Lepore argues, the fall is nigh.
This kaleidoscopic retelling of the Lewis and Clark expedition surfaces the saga’s darker undercurrents—reframing the pregnant Sacajawea as a victim of rape, highlighting Clark’s refusal to free an enslaved man who made the journey, and spotlighting Lewis’s descent into addiction and Clark’s subsequent reign as superintendent of Indian Affairs, where he betrayed many who aided the expedition.
With its brisk pacing and tidy page count, Lerner’s finest novel offers readers a concentrated hit of fiction’s core pleasure: the sense, while reading, that one is recovering lost time. Though the story is contemporary, involving the anxiety and folly caused by a broken smartphone, it’s fueled by ageless concerns about technology’s effects on art, consciousness, and human relationships.
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