Patrick Radden Keefe: Say Nothing. A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
Nathalie Olah: Steal As Much As You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity.
Anna Wiener: Uncanny Valley. A Memoir.
Fiction:
Annalee Newitz: The Future of Another Timeline.
Rebecca Barrow: This Is What It Feels Like.
Charlie Jane Anders: The City in the Middle of the Night.
Chana Porter: The Seep.
N.K. Jemisin: The City We Became.
William Gibson: Agency.
Tiffany Tsao: The Majesties.
Holly Throsby: Goodwood.
Claire O'Dell: The Hound of Justice.
Emily St. John Mandel: The Glass Hotel.
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I find it difficult to describe Chana Porter's The Seep - a novel that explores humanity utterly altered by an alien life form that provides endless potentialities, and yet does not provide an answer for what any of it means. It's a rare, imaginative feat - the idea of endless possibilities for life without end and limits appears to create boundaries and to break connections, if anything, as much as it pretends to create a better version of humanity. Sometimes it's VanderMeerian biohorror, sometimes it's just the captivating protagonist Trina, navigating a now-unfamiliar world and the grief of a lost life-long relationship and trying to find a way to still help.
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And in Claire O'Dell's The Hound of Justice (the second entry after A Study in Honor into this alternate universe Sherlock Holmes cover), Dr. Janet Watson and the mysterious agent of some agency Sara Holmes go deep into the dangerous South of this civil war torn alternate history United States to chase war profiteer and villain Nadine Adler, whose pharmaceutical empire has tested on and killed soldiers on both sides of the line. Janet Watson still struggles with her new prosthesis, her war trauma, and trying to become a surgeon again, and Sara Holmes remains distant and unknowable, as I suppose she should be as per the original material.
LitHub: Jenny Odell and Wendy Liu on Liberating Ourselves From Usefulness, April 13, 2020
Undark: Marking Grim Milestones, the World Takes Stock of a New Normal, April 4, 2020
LARB: COVID and Community, March 30, 2020.
The Atlantic: How the Pandemic Will End, March 25, 2020.
Vox: Deciem fueled the skin care boom. Then it almost went bust., March 18, 2020
The Oxford American: An Intersection at the End of America, March 17, 2020
n+1: And Then the Brenner Was Closed, March 17, 2020
The Atlantic: The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors, March 11, 2020
The Atlantic: Cancel Everything, March 10, 2020
The Sun: We Will Be Seen; Tressie McMillan Cottom On Confronting Racism, Sexism, And Classism, February 2020
The Atlantic: You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus, February 24, 2020
Ruby Tandoh on Medium: Empire of Seeds. The Life and Dreams of Esiah Levy, February 19, 2020
n+1: A Very Brexit Party, February 10, 2020
The Saturday Paper: Christmas Island and the rise of mandatory detention, February 8, 2020
Buzzfeed: How Margot Robbie Changed Her Hollywood Destiny, February 7, 2020
Vanity Fair: Daniel M. Lavery Comes Unstuck, February 7, 2020
The New York Times: Inside the Race to Contain America’s First Coronavirus Case, February 5, 2020
The Cut: 100 Women vs. Harvey Weinstein, January 2020
The New Yorker: N.K. Jemisin's Dream Worlds, January 27, 2020
Ars Technica: Deadly fungus became resistant to all existing drugs in 3 unlinked US patients, January 10, 2020
Slate: Australia Was Warned, January 9, 2020
The New Yorker: The Killing of Qassem Suleimani Is Tantamount to an Act of War, January 3, 2020