The best new books to read in May

We all start out suspicious of mushrooms, right? They’re slimy. They sprout from dead things. Adults are always telling kids to eat around them.

Judging by the photos in the National Audubon Society’s stunning new Mushrooms of North America guidebook (Knopf, $39.95, out now), the ones that tainted the chopped steaks of my childhood were Agaricus bisporus, a.k.a. the button or baby bella — which is also known as portobello when it gets big enough. I eventually came around on mushrooms as food, especially this one, apparently ubiquitous kind.

Years ago, I lived in a perpetually damp Queen Village basement, the floor of which occasionally sprouted mushrooms when I wasn’t looking. Walking to my desk felt like Gargamel trampling through the Smurf village. I can’t find a photo in the Audubon book that exactly matches the ones in my memory. Shiitake? Is that possible? Probably not.

Of course, this book is aimed at hikers and naturalists, not chefs or foragers; only one of its 700-something pages is devoted to the edibleness of the specimens gorgeously photographed therein. Might one be tempted to taste these colorful little forest urchins, many of which seem to burst out of the soil in pleasant plumes of strawberry red, flan yellow, and creamsicle orange? Well don’t. “Many mushrooms look alike and are easy to misidentify,” says the intro. Eating ones you find in the woods (or on apartment floors) is “not recommended.”

Mushrooms have been popping up in pop culture recently. Fungi figure heavily in horror novels like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, and they’re the most dangerous things in the world (besides mankind!) on HBO’s The Last of Us. They’ve also made semi-innocuous cameos on Fleabag, Beef, Ted Lasso, and Party Down. Probably all over that new Mario movie too.

I’m starting to feel like this means something. I’m not saying a war with the mushrooms is coming, but. … But COVID was eerily preceded by a whole lot of pandemic novels and movies and TV shows. Mushrooms are looking suspect again — I’ll be hanging onto this book for a while.

And now more magic, sans mushrooms…

Is it too optimistic to say we live in a time when American history is — slowly, painstakingly, and against great resistance — becoming more inclusive and nuanced in its telling? Maybe it’s always been baby steps. Or maybe this illuminating and ambitious book will lead to a cultural shift, one that motivates America to reinsert American Indians into its consciousness, myths, textbooks, etc. Like Ibram X. Kendi’s powerful Stamped from the Beginning, Yale professor Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America is a thick, well-researched tome full of tragedy, injustice, and stories often left out of the official canon. It’s not always an easy read, but it’s rewarding and essential nonetheless. (Yale University Press, $35, out now)

Buy it now on bookshop.org

Simultaneously vivid and bleak, horrifying and electrifying, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s sure-to-be divisive new novel imagines a near future where prison lifers fight for their freedom in televised gladiatorial duels. As a death-match dystopia, Chain-Gang All-Stars enters a crowded arena (see also The Running Man, Battle Royale, Games both Hunger and Squid), but as a satire it stands apart for its righteous commentary on inequality and the for-profit prison system in the United States circa right now. (Pantheon, $27, out now)

Buy it now on bookshop.org | Borrow it from the Free Library

In her first novel since 2016′s runaway hit The Girls — about a teen who falls under the sway of a Manson-esque cult leader — Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation, this time at the hands of a young woman who charms her way into the lives of unsuspecting marks in an affluent beach town. The same things that make Alex a sketchy person also make her an infectious protagonist: She’s a schemer, a liar, a seducer, and a thief, always popping pills, burning bridges, and literally sticking her fingers where they don’t belong. But “hot mess” doesn’t quite do justice to her entrancing resourcefulness even as the walls are closing in. In fact, “sketchy” was too harsh. Alex is amazing, despite all the carnage she leaves in her wake. (Random House, $28, May 16)

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After delivering winners in the fantasy genre with The Poppy War trilogy and last year’s best-selling Babel, Chinese-American author R.F. Kuang makes her general fiction debut with a literary satire that’s on everybody’s list of the year’s most anticipated titles. Book people just love books about book people. This sharp, funny, nerve-wracking novel centers around a white writer who steals a promising unpublished manuscript from her successful and newly deceased Asian author friend, thus giving Kuang the opportunity to take swift, judicious swipes at the industry’s perennial problems from plagiarism to the increasingly muddy “who gets to tell this story?” conundrum — not to mention Goodreads, influencers, and the whole author-as-celebrity thing. (William Morrow, $30, May 16)

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In this gripping, relentless thriller, two women win early release from prison thanks to COVID, but their paths continue to cross on the outside (mainly because one of them is an unhinged psychopath, though the other’s no angel either). Where S.A. Cosby runs cool and methodical, Ivy Pochoda crafts crime fiction on the psychological edge, putting her characters through an emotional and physical gauntlet in the dark, empty streets of Los Angeles. Sing Her Down is brutal and chaotic and entertaining, but somewhere down deep there’s a tiny beating heart with a few wise things to say about guilt and growth. (MCD, $28, May 23)

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Also out this month:

Cronin (my writing professor at La Salle in the mid-’90s) follows up his literary horror series The Passage with a standalone door-stopper about a postapocalyptic utopia with a dark secret. (Ballantine Books, $30, out now)

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In this “domestic comedy of manners” unspooling over the course of a single day, a well-off suburban woman finds herself stuck between a husband and a best friend who just can’t stand each other. (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $26, May 16)

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A team of scientists is enlisted to investigate a gigantic mountain that suddenly appears out of nowhere in this tense, time-shifting sci-fi adventure. CW: Monsters. (Riverhead Books, $28, out now)

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The painfully honest Irby does poignant as well as she does gross (though not quite as often) in this collection of funny essays about her personal and professional life. She’ll be at the Parkway Central Library on Tuesday, May 16. (Vintage, $17, May 16)

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This alternate history by the author of Dark at the Crossing and Green on Blue is built around an intriguing and not-as-wacky-as-it-sounds premise: A group of scientists (with funding from President Al Gore) discovers a “cure” for death. (Knopf, $28, May 23)

Buy it now on bookshop.org | Borrow it from the Free Library