UNTIL JUSTICE BE DONE: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, by Kate Masur. (Norton, 496 pp., $20.) In this “cleareyed” and “revelatory” book, as the Times critic Jennifer Szalai called it, Masur traces a struggle for racial equality going back to the early days of the republic and recounts the victories that led to achievements such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.
FILTHY ANIMALS, by Brandon Taylor. (Riverhead, 288 pp., $16.) In this story collection, a young graduate student navigates a turbulent love triangle with two dancers, a babysitter is driven to the brink and two childhood friends come to terms with their mutual desires. As our reviewer, John Paul Brammer, remarked, Taylor presents “sumptuous, melancholic portraits of characters overwhelmed.”
WAKE: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall. Illustrated by Hugo Martínez. (Simon & Schuster, 224 pp., $19.99.) In this memoir-meets-graphic novel, Hall sifts through centuries of archival documents for evidence of female slave rebellions and imagines their stories, which are rendered in Hugo Martínez’s “evocative and poetic” black and white drawings, as our reviewer, Hillary Chute, noted.
BREATHE, by Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco, 384 pp., $19.99.) According to our reviewer, Joshua Henkin, Oates’s “fever dream” is “a moving meditation on grief time, where there is no beginning, no end.” In this novel, a 37-year-old writer faces the harrowing prospect of widowhood as her husband of 12 years, an esteemed academic, is stricken by a mysterious and life-threatening illness.
AMERICAN REPUBLICS: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor. (Norton, 544 pp., $20.) This stimulating history challenges the narrative of early America as a nation confidently marching to its manifest destiny. “Many histories of this important interregnum period have been written,” our reviewer, David S. Reynolds, noted, “but none emphasizes the fragility of the American experiment as strongly as Taylor’s book does.”
ON ANIMALS, by Susan Orlean. (Avid Reader Press, 256 pp., $17.99.) The subjects of Orlean’s essays, written over more than 25 years, range from household pets and racing pigeons to Moroccan donkeys and endangered whales. The collection received a full-throated endorsement from our reviewer, Margaret Renkl, who proclaimed: “Every essay in the book is magnificent.”
