Many of the remarkable books featured in this week’s issue highlight the contributions of talented women. Miss May Does Not Exist by Carrie Courogen is “a long-overdue biography” of “comic genius” Elaine May; the novel Jackie by Dawn Tripp offers “cinematic scenes and thoughtful interior reflections” about the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America by Sara B. Franklin should delight “anyone enamored of publishing’s golden age.”
Plus, for younger readers, G.F. Miller’s “appealing, painfully funny second novel,” Not if You Break Up with Me First, tackles the “agonizing muddle” between liking someone and like-liking them; while Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell is an “intense and gripping YA thriller” about four Blackfeet teens contending with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis.
And for The Writer’s Life, memoirist and novelist Matt Young considers fractured narrative structures, time as a flat circle, the reverberations of trauma, and rediscovering the gentle side of being a man after serving in the Marine Corps.