What to Read This Month: Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl, and More – Vanity Fair

Photograph by Tim Hout.

With her fifth novel, The Burning Girl (Norton), Claire Messud forgoes clever satire for elegant sympathy. Slim but impactful, her narrative follows the diverging paths of a pair of teenage girls in a small town, torn apart by men, drugs, and, most polarizing of all, fantasy. If you have to imagine, asks the troubled Cassie, why imagine something bad? The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page.

V.F. writer Tom Sanctons juicy The Bettencourt Affair (Dutton) is the very picture of un grand scandale about the worlds richest woman. First novels as rich and enchanting as Augustus Roses The Readymade Thief (Viking) dont come around too often, and when they do, they rarely combine secret societies, teenage runaways, and Marcel Duchamp. Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsies Home Fire (Riverhead) is a blaze of identity, family, nationalism, and Sophocles Antigone. V.F. contributing editor Kurt Andersens erudite Fantasyland (Random House) is a study of magical thinking and mania throughout American history. Meanwhile, fantasy becomes reality in NBC reporter Katy Turs Trump-trailing Unbelievable (Dey Street).

Back in a flash: Sam Stephenson takes a wide-angle view of a celebrated photo-essayist in Gene Smiths Sink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Only connect with Bill Goldstein as he peers through a literary lens at The World Broke in Two (Henry Holt). And whats black and white and flashy all over? Famed photographer Jean-Pierre Laffonts New York City Up and Down (Glitterati).

Its all cafeteria trays and dormitory IDs until it isnt. Vanity Fairs Schools for Scandal (Simon & Schuster), edited by Graydon Carter, offers not just an inside peek but a multifaceted examination of the dramas that unfold on Americas most elite campuses. From the unraveling of allegations at big-name institutions (Duke University, University of Virginia) to art thefts at Transylvania University, Schools for Scandal presents a syllabuss worth of riveting journalism. As V.F. editor-at-large Cullen Murphy writes in the books introduction, schools are a point of intersection for just about every social phenomenon on the planet; come for the Trump University filleting, stay for John Kerry playing boodleball, a violent soccer-hockey hybrid, in Yales Skull and Bones Tomb.

George Giustis Kromekote: Salesmaker for the World of Music, from The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (Abrams), by Steven Heller and Greg DOnofrio.

Photographs from the George Giusti Collection/Cary Graphic Arts Collection/Rochester Institute Of Technology/permission of Robert Giusti (Kromekote).

Judith Newman reveals the tender side of tech in To Siri with Love (Harper). Literary biographer James Atlas is a writers writers writer in The Shadow in the Garden (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie signs a magical lease on The Golden House (Random House). Yve-Alain Bois and Ben Easthams Ed Ruscha (Rizzoli) puts us in a typographical trance. Jonathan Dees The Locals (Random House) shrinks class warfare down to size. Kristen Iskandrian explores maternal bonds in Motherest (Twelve). Adorn your life with all things Alice Temperley (Rizzoli). Mumble a prayer for Stephen Colbert in Stephen Colberts Midnight Confessions (Simon & Schuster). Absorb Danielle Allens account of an abbreviated life, just Cuz (Liveright). Gabriel Tallents My Absolute Darling (Riverhead) captures a compelling young heroine. Three eccentric socialites buttress Judith Mackrells The Unfinished Palazzo (Thames & Hudson). The Red-Haired Woman (Knopf) takes us outside Istanbul and inside the mind of Orhan Pamuk. Culinary icon Alice Waters goes farm-to-bookshelf with Coming to My Senses (Clarkson Potter). Its racial Utopia for two but not forever in Danzy Sennas New People (Riverhead). Heather Harpham finds Happiness (Henry Holt) when her life is rocked. Emily Culliton dazzles in The Misfortune of Marion Palm (Knopf). William Taubman leaves his mark on Gorbachev (Norton). Mike Perry manufactures a hipster maze in The Broad City Coloring Book (Laurence King). Russell Westbrook (Rizzoli) dares us not to sweat his style. Daniel Handler deftly details All the Dirty Parts (Bloomsbury). Loudon Wainwright IIIs Liner Notes (Blue Rider) delves into death, decay, and other delights.

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What to Read This Month: Katy Tur's Unbelievable, Claire Messud's The Burning Girl, and More - Vanity Fair