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1 week ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
This week, don’t miss a transfixing chronicle of the nuclear age, a look back at Cambridge’s queer history, and a portrait of everyday life in war-torn Ukraine Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age by Frank Close The dawn of the nuclear age is not exactly an under-covered subject, even before Oppenheimer, the movie.
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2 weeks ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
READ Ellmann’s Joyce Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce came out in 1959, and it is still hailed as one of the finest biographies ever written. In fact, it’s so good that Zachary Leader wrote a book about the book. In an admirable feat of literary excavation, Leader goes behind the scenes and reveals not just how the biography came to be but what Ellmann himself was like, as both a family man and as a Northwestern University scholar.
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3 weeks ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
READ So Far Gone We here at Air Mail have long been fans of Jess Walter, partly because his range as a novelist is so inventive but mostly because he writes like a sly angel.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
This week, don’t miss a collection spotlighting Vietnamese voices, the story of a troubled American dynasty, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning funny guy’s new memoir The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora Edited by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan P. Duong, and Viet Thanh Nguyen It has been 50 years since the war ended in Vietnam, yet for decades afterward Vietnamese writers have rarely been published in the English language.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
READ Art Comes from Art Art Comes from Art—written by Timothy Anglin Burgard, Rachel Teagle, Eve Aschheim, and Lauren Palmor—pays homage to the painter Wayne Thiebaud. The artist, who lived most of his life in California (he died in 2021 at age 101), is revered for his luscious and layered paintings of commonplace objects (lipsticks, paint cans) and sweets (cake, ice cream, pies), though he also mastered landscapes and street scenes.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
This week, don’t miss a provocative history of World War II atrocities, an investigation into pyramid schemes, and a foray into the ruins of Pompeii Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II by Paul Thomas Chamberlin One sometimes wonders what publishers would do if World War II had never happened. Each year brings hundreds of new books about a conflict that ended 80 years ago, and there is only so many times you can read about the Battle of Midway.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
No one has been pursued by Donald Trump with more fervor than James Comey, who has been threatened with criminal investigations ever since Trump fired him as the head of the F.B.I., in 2017.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
The Complete Cambridge Jane Austen Eight-Volume Hardback Set Edited by Janet Todd This December marks the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, and celebrations are planned in the city of Bath and beyond. What better way to get a head start than by acquiring this eight-volume boxed set—as handsome as Mr. Darcy—which contains not only her six novels but her unpublished writings from both before and after she became famous.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
No one will ever describe Ron Chernow as a miniaturist. He has written brick-size biographies of John D. Rockefeller, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton (read the book, then see the hip-hop version!), plus histories of the Morgan and Warburg banking dynasties. Mark Twain is his latest subject, and the book is an absolute delight to read, written with flair (no surprise there) and keen psychological insight about a surprisingly complicated man prone to depression.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
Read Looking for a Story At the age of 94, the creative-nonfiction pioneer John McPhee is still writing. Good news indeed. Here is more good news: in Looking for a Story, Noel Rubinton has tracked down pretty much everything written by McPhee—college papers, teleplays, short fiction, and hundreds of unsigned stories he did at Time before he joined The New Yorker, in 1963. The excerpts illustrate how he turned Time magazine’s pithiness into prose that shines—and occasionally stings.
