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The vernal atmosphere of May is encouraging us all to gather newness around us and refresh our lives for the spring season. This month, readers have plenty of new books to choose from, including a touching immigration story, the memoir of a major voice in critical race theory and a psychedelic mystery set in South America.
‘Abundance’ by Hafeez Lakhani
Grief takes center stage in this debut about an Indian American family facing a medical crisis. Sakeena, the matriarch, is forced to consider all the choices that brought her from India to the panhandle, where she co-owned a Florida Dunkin franchise with her husband.
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When the treatment plan for her illness clashes with her religious beliefs, her family must reckon with how to support her wishes. The novel is an “epic, multigenerational family story, imbued with a strong sense of place and philosophically specific characters,” said Literary Hub. (out now, $28, Penguin Random House, Amazon)
‘Backtalker: An American Memoir’ by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
The mother of intersectionality and one of the foundational scholars of contemporary critical race theory, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, tells the story of how she got there by “starting to talk back,” said Literary Hub. The memoir “Backtalker” charts Crenshaw’s “extraordinary journey from precocious child to renowned public intellectual,” said The New York Times.
She coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to “urge us to consider the ways that bigotries rooted in gender, race and class overlap.” In addition to her scholarship on civil rights, race and feminist theory, Crenshaw is a law professor at both Columbia and UCLA. (out now, $30, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)
‘Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun’ by Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker
National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda’s “psychedelic novel” follows a pair of friends who travel to a “drug-soaked and pleasure-seeking techno-shamanistic festival in Ecuador, held at the foot of an active volcano,” said Literary Hub. While one friend fully indulges in the event, the other remains wary of the ominous energy that naggingly haunts her. It’s a novel of “friendship amid hidden pasts, uncertain futures and the supernatural from an exciting young writer.” (May 12, $20, Coffee House Press, Amazon)
‘On Witness and Respair’ by Jesmyn Ward
The two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward presents a decade’s worth of her nonfiction, including reflections on Black literary giants and personal essays on the death of her husband and on raising her son in a fractured America. Ward’s work is “bearing witness to injustice,” said Kirkus Reviews. In her writing, she aims to “assert my own humanity and the humanity of those I love,” Ward says in the book. (May 19, $29, Simon & Schuster, Amazon)
‘How to See Like a Machine: Art in the Age of AI’ by Trevor Paglen
Artist Trevor Paglen, in his “incisive” new book, “distills key insights” from his work to “make the case that mainstream understanding of images remains stuck in an outdated paradigm,” said Art News. He examines the origins of the current media landscape, in which images evolve in response to viewer feedback. His ideas “carve a clean, linear path through our messy neural era,” engaging in the “kind of big-picture sensemaking that books remain well-suited to do, even as AI encroaches on this terrain.” (May 19, $20, Verso Books, Amazon)
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