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1 week 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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2 weeks 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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2 weeks 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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3 weeks 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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3 weeks 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 Darcy—which contains not only her six novels but her unpublished writings from both before and after she became famous.
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4 weeks 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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4 weeks 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.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
READ Trouble Is My Business Credit Arvind Ethan David, Ilias Kyriazis, and Cris Peter with the inspired idea to turn Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business into a graphic novel. After all, Chandler is as much about atmosphere and description as he is about plot, and these gentlemen bring his words to vivid life. There is a slight tinkering with the opener, but that only deepens the story.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
READ Theater Kid It’s hard to beat Moss Hart’s Act One for best Broadway memoir, but Jeffrey Seller’s Theater Kid is very much in the running. Yes, reading about the man who has produced three Tony Award–winning shows (Rent, Avenue Q, and Hamilton) is interesting enough. But what makes Seller’s story sing is his vivid recollection of a deprived childhood with demanding parents, his first job as a booking agent, and his coming out during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
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1 month ago | 
airmail.news | Jim Kelly
Read The Golden Hour There are countless memoirs about Hollywood, but what makes The Golden Hour special is that the bittersweet tale is told by Matthew Specktor, whose father, despite being in his early 90s, still works as a top talent agent. A word to the wise: Do not become an agent if you do not want your heart broken by a longtime client who defects (Good-bye, Danny DeVito) or if you are not larcenous enough to steal a client (Hello, Robert De Niro).
