11 New Books We Recommend This Week – The New York Times

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MIGRATION LITERATURE: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns, edited by Dohra Ahmad. (Penguin, $17.) This collection of writings about migration includes excerpts from work by Phillis Wheatley, Edwidge Danticat (who also contributes the foreword), Salman Rushdie, Marjane Satrapi, Zadie Smith and others. The book seeks to refine and enlarge our definition of migrant literature, our critic Parul Sehgal writes. These stories and poems push back against the fallacies that migration is always elective; that migrants are always keen to leave their home countries; that migration is one-way, and necessarily leads to a better fate.

THE INSTITUTE, by Stephen King. (Scribner, $30.) In Kings most frightening books like this one, about the abduction of psychically gifted children the evil is perpetrated not by supernatural creatures, but by ordinary people like you and me. Our reviewer, Laura Miller, says the novel is as consummately honed and enthralling as the very best of his work. How do you maintain your dignity and your humanity in an environment designed to strip you of both? That theme, such an urgent one in literature from the 20th century onward, falls well within Kings usual purview.

WE, THE SURVIVORS, by Tash Aw. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) The protagonist of Aws latest novel, a Malaysian man of modest means, has committed murder and served jail time for it; as he unspools his story, it becomes a searching commentary on the desperate conditions of the largely invisible work force propelling the global economy. Aw is a precise stylist; with a few, lean images, he evokes a country on the cusp of change: a sofa still sheathed in plastic to protect it from everyday life, the rusting tin for Danish butter cookies now holding a mans life savings, writes our reviewer, Hannah Beech (The Timess Southeast Asia bureau chief in Bangkok). The laborers who built modern Malaysia, Aw reminds us, are destined for obscurity, each layer of cement and heavy load they carry crushing who they really are.

THE OUTLAW OCEAN: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier, by Ian Urbina. (Knopf, $30.) Urbinas riveting chronicle of crime and lawlessness on the high seas based on a series of deeply reported features for The New York Times ranges from Somalia to the Philippines to the Antarctic, profiling pirates, slavers, poachers and others. Urbina highlights how, in overlooking the seas, weve allowed that void to become a vacuum for corruption, violence and lawlessness, a stage for gruesome deaths and even more gruesome lives, Blair Braverman writes in her review. And then he brings us into intimate contact with those lives, forcing witness.

EVERYTHING INSIDE: Stories, by Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $25.95.) The unreliability of the human heart connects many of the stories in this beautiful book, throughout which Danticats birthplace, Haiti, emerges in almost mythic fashion as a land that exists both in the past and the present even as it remains largely invisible. Apart from the land and people of Haiti, Aminatta Forna writes in her review, the books defining qualities are Danticats precise yet emotionally charged prose and the way she has curated this slim volume, bringing its elements together to create a satisfying whole.

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11 New Books We Recommend This Week - The New York Times