EDITORS’ CHOICE
9 New Books We Recommend This Week
June 13, 2019

“I have a lot of apps open in my brain right now,” Lin-Manuel Miranda once said. We know the feeling. That quote turns up late in David Epstein’s new book, “Range,” which reassures committed dilettantes that there’s merit in the generalist’s approach to life: When you’re “facing uncertain environments,” Epstein writes, “breadth of experience is invaluable.”

With that in mind, we offer a generalist’s buffet of books for your consideration this week. Start with Epstein’s own, then move on to an account of the ground beneath your feet (“Underland,” by the gifted nature writer Robert Macfarlane) or a novel based on the real-life saint of Sudan, as St. Josephine Bakhita is known (“Bakhita,” by Véronique Olmi). Read about pandemics, or the settlers of the Northwest Territory, or Neville Chamberlain’s ill-advised strategy of appeasing Hitler; read a biography of the con artist who gave rise to the loaded term “welfare queen,” or settle in with a satire about creative writing programs, or enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert’s new historical novel about the world of New York showgirls. Open some apps in your brain. No environment is more uncertain than today’s, after all, so you might as well put Epstein’s theory to the test and broaden your knowledge.

Gregory Cowles
Senior Editor, Books
Twitter: @GregoryCowles

LOUDERMILK: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, by Lucy Ives. (Soft Skull, paper, $16.95.) The title character of Ives’s clever attack on writing programs is a hunky bro who decides he can make it big as a poet if somebody else will just write the poems for him. “Ives scores some fine touches in her satire,” Caleb Crain writes in his review, but “in the end I found myself more interested in the novel’s half-hidden earnest side: its exhibition, with persuasive bitterness, of the damage that can be wreaked by the idea that literature is competition, especially when the idea is institutionalized in a classroom.”