We hope you have some free time this week, as several of the year’s most anticipated books are arriving at the library today! Literary favorites like Joyce Carol Oates, Neal Stephenson, Stuart Woods, and Jane Green all have new books, along with several others you might be less familiar with across a range of genres, from epic fantasy to celebrity memoir. Of particular note are Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest, City of Girls, and the debut novel from poet Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, both of which were listed on scores of best upcoming books lists and are debuting to near-universal acclaim.
FICTION
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
Description from Goodreads.
“With his radical approach to form and his daring mix of personal reflection, historical recollection and sexual exploration, Vuong is surely a literary descendant of [Walt Whitman]. Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, he has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal… [The] narrative flows — rushing from one anecdote to another, swirling past and present, constantly swelling with poignancy… Vuong ties the private terrors of supposedly inconsequential people to the larger forces pulsing through America… At times, the tension between Little Dog’s passion and his concern seems to explode the very structure of traditional narrative, and the pages break apart into the lines of an evocative prose poem — not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” – Washington Post
“A bildungsroman that vacillates between moments of piercing tenderness and savage brutality, set against quixotic hopes of the American Dream and the devastation of the opioid crisis. Vuong’s deeply felt work might just be the first great fiction of this modern, homegrown travesty, but it’s also a story that is enriched by both the beautiful and the ugly currents of American history.” – Vogue
“[A] raw, fearless debut… In prose as radiant and assured as his poetry, Vuong explores the ability of stories to heal generational wounds, and asks how we can rescue and transform one another in the wake of unimaginable loss.” – Esquire
“An epistolary masterpiece… Fearless, revelatory, extraordinary.” – Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
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Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok
It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother—and then vanishes.
Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn’t rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love.
But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it’s Amy’s turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister’s movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets… secrets that will reveal more about Amy’s complicated family—and herself—than she ever could have imagined.
A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone—especially those we love.
Description from Goodreads.
“I was only about two-thirds of the way through Jean Kwok’s Searching For Sylvie Lee when I began telling everyone I know: ‘I’ve found this book, you need to read it.’… This is a story like no other.” – Marie Claire
“This powerful novel is a must-read.” – Women.com
“Kwok tells this story of an immigrant family with lucidity and compassion… a profoundly moving portrayal of the complicated identities that exist even within a single family… a graceful portrait of the sacrifices we make for love.” – Nylon
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Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey
Ivy Gamble has never wanted to be magic. She is perfectly happy with her life—she has an almost-sustainable career as a private investigator, an empty apartment, and a slight drinking problem. It’s a great life and she doesn’t wish she was like her estranged sister, the magically gifted professor Tabitha.
But when Ivy is hired to investigate the gruesome murder of a faculty member at Tabitha’s private academy, the stalwart detective starts to lose herself in the case, the life she could have had, and the answer to the mystery that seems just out of her reach.
Description from Goodreads.
“There’s something for almost all readers here… Gailey shows us that humans are humans, even when they are magic, and they are still flawed, damaged, and oh-so-interesting.” – Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“Clever and fast-paced… a wonderfully quirky mystery filled with inviting characters and gripping surprise twists.” – Publishers Weekly
“A poignant and bittersweet family tragedy disguised as a mystery but with a magic all its own.” – Kirkus Reviews
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My Life as a Rat by Joyce Carol Oates
Which should prevail: loyalty to family or loyalty to the truth? Is telling the truth ever a mistake and is lying for one’s family ever justified? Can one do the right thing, but bitterly regret it?
My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African-American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement.
Arresting and poignant, My Life as a Rat traces a life of banishment from a family—banishment from parents, siblings, and the Church—that forces Violet to discover her own identity, to break the powerful spell of family, and to emerge from her long exile as a “rat” into a transformed life.
Description from Goodreads.
“Oates’s novel adroitly touches on race, loyalty, misogyny, and class inequality while also telling a moving story with a winning narrator. This book should please her fans and win her new ones.” – Publishers Weekly
“Violet’s fraught relationship with her family moves to an explosive climax, but there are signs of redemption as well, for her at least. Oates explores the long echoes of violence born of sexism and racism in one young woman’s life in this deft psychological thriller.” – Kirkus Reviews
“…Oates has added another unforgettably strong woman character to her canon, another variation on a seemingly endless theme of possibilities. If happiness usually proves duplicitous, and melancholy a dependable constant, then the journey of an epic Joyce Carol Oates novel is always going to be a trip worth experiencing.” – Pop Matters
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The Friends We Keep by Jane Green
Evvie, Maggie, and Topher have known each other since university. Their friendship was something they swore would last forever. Now years have passed, the friends have drifted apart, and none of them ever found the lives they wanted – the lives they dreamed of when they were young and everything seemed possible.
Evvie starved herself to become a supermodel but derailed her career by sleeping with a married man.
Maggie married Ben, the boy she fell in love with at university, never imagining the heartbreak his drinking would cause.
Topher became a successful actor but the shame of a childhood secret shut him off from real intimacy.
By their thirtieth reunion, these old friends have lost touch with each other and with the people they dreamed of becoming. Together again, they have a second chance at happiness… until a dark secret is revealed that changes everything.
The Friends We Keep is about how despite disappointments we’ve had or mistakes we’ve made, it’s never too late to find a place to call home.
Description from Goodreads.
“Love, grief, and forgiveness illuminate this compelling summer read.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Green writes with a clear, unfettered voice, filling this page-turner with plot twists and hinting at the power of forgiveness.” – Publishers Weekly
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MYSTERY
Skin Game by Stuart Woods & Parnell Hall
When Teddy Fay receives a freelance assignment from a gentleman he can’t refuse, he jets off to Paris on the hunt for a treasonous criminal. But as Teddy unearths more information that just doesn’t seem to connect, his straightforward mission becomes far bigger–and stranger–than he could imagine. The trail of bread crumbs leads to secrets hidden within secrets, evildoers trading in money and power, and a global threat on an unprecedented scale. Under the beautiful veneer of the City of Lights, true villainy lurks in the shadows… and Teddy Fay alone can prevent the impending disaster.
Description from Goodreads.
“The pure voyeuristic joy of this series lies in Fay’s remarkable skills and the abundance of gadgets and resources at his fingertips… A galloping good read.” – Booklist
“The ingenious ways in which Teddy outwits his adversaries is a large part of this entry’s appeal. Series fans will hope he has a long career.” – Publishers Weekly
“Ingenious.” – Kirkus Reviews
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HISTORICAL FICTION
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
Life is both fleeting and dangerous, and there is no point in denying yourself pleasure, or being anything other than what you are.
Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love.
In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves-and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest.
Now ninety-five years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life – and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it. At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time, she muses. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is. Written with a powerful wisdom about human desire and connection, City of Girls is a love story like no other.
Description from Goodreads.
“Perfect… a page-turner with heart complete with a potent message of fulfillment and happiness.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“City of Girls is the beautiful, poignant story of what it takes to live the life you truly want.” – Bookbub
“Reading City of Girls is pure bliss, thanks to its spirited characters, crackling dialogue, rollicking yet affecting story lines, genuinely erotic scenes, and sexual intelligence, suspense, and incisive truths.” – Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
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The Spies of Shilling Lane by Jennifer Ryan
Mrs. Braithwaite, self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed following her husband’s selfish divorce petition. Never deterred, the threat of a family secret being revealed sets her hot-foot to London to find the only person she has left—her clever daughter Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war.
But when she arrives, Betty’s landlord, the timid Mr. Norris, informs her that Betty hasn’t been home in days–with the chaos of the bombs, there’s no telling what might have befallen her. Aghast, Mrs. Braithwaite sets her bullish determination to the task of finding her only daughter.
Storming into the London Blitz, Mrs. Braithwaite drags the reluctant Mr. Norris along as an unwitting sidekick as they piece together Betty’s unexpectedly chaotic life. As she is thrown into the midst of danger and death, Mrs. Braithwaite is forced to rethink her old-fashioned notions of status, class, and reputation, and to reconsider the question that’s been puzzling her since her world overturned: How do you measure the success of your life?
Readers will be charmed by the unforgettable Mrs. Braithwaite and her plucky, ruthless optimism, and find in The Spies of Shilling Lane a novel with surprising twists and turns, quiet humor, and a poignant examination of mothers and daughters and the secrets we keep.
Description from Goodreads.
“…exciting… With its eccentric, believable characters and plot of home front intrigue, this delightful drama will appeal to fans of Martha Hall Kelly.” – Publishers Weekly
“A cozy, entertaining historical spy story.” – Kirkus Reviews
“…a rollicking adventure, full of can-do spirit as well as intrigue and double-crossing. Mrs. Braithwaite is an absolute delight as a main character.” – Bookshelf Fantasies
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In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
Azalea “Knot” Centre is determined to live life as she pleases. Let the people of West Mills say what they will; the neighbors’ gossip won’t keep Knot from what she loves best: cheap moonshine, nineteenth-century literature, and the company of men. And yet, Knot is starting to learn that her freedom comes at a high price. Alone in her one-room shack, ostracized from her relatives and cut off from her hometown, Knot turns to her neighbor, Otis Lee Loving, in search of some semblance of family and home.
Otis Lee is eager to help. A lifelong fixer, Otis Lee is determined to steer his friends and family away from decisions that will cause them heartache and ridicule. After his failed attempt as a teenager to help his older sister, Otis Lee discovers a possible path to redemption in the chaos Knot brings to his doorstep. But while he’s busy trying to fix Knot’s life, Otis Lee finds himself powerless to repair the many troubles within his own family, as the long-buried secrets of his troubled past begin to come to light.
Set in an African American community in rural North Carolina from 1941 to 1987, In West Mills is a magnificent, big-hearted small-town story about family, friendship, storytelling, and the redemptive power of love.
Description from Goodreads.
“This tender, exuberant, and impressively crafted debut novel spans decades of family upheaval and painful secrets in telling the story of a freethinking black woman in a tightly knit Carolina community… in the brave, hard-bitten, but deeply vulnerable Knot, Winslow has created a character as memorable and colorful as any created by Knot’s favorite writer, Charles Dickens.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“Beginning in the 1940s and spanning 40 years, Winslow’s debut novel shares themes of acceptance and the importance of community through the eyes of a fierce, memorable anti-heroine… Winslow is a natural storyteller whose writing is like a mash-up of Zora Neale Hurston and Edward Kelsey Moore, and his characters spark to life, especially Knot, who Winslow magically makes both enraging and endearing. . . its humor and heart will win over many readers.” – Booklist
“In West Mills exemplifies the timeless adage that it takes a village to raise one another. This is a historical fiction triumph.” ―BookPage, STARRED REVIEW
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The Electric Hotel by Dominic Smith
Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey—America’s first movie town—and on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.
For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.
Description from Goodreads.
“Fascinating information about the making of silent films is balanced by poignant, emotional portrayals of individuals attempting to define their lives offscreen even as they made history on it. Smith winningly delves into Hollywood’s past.” – Publishers Weekly
“Wondrous… [Smith] writes with an old-world elegance; you get lost in these pages like you do in a great movie, not wanting the lights to come up.” – The Seattle Times
“A glorious ode to the luminous art that ushered in Hollywood’s film era.” – BBC
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SCI-FI & FANTASY
Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson
In his youth, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast founded Corporation 9592, a gaming company that made him a multibillionaire. Now in his middle years, Dodge appreciates his comfortable, unencumbered life, managing his myriad business interests, and spending time with his beloved niece Zula and her young daughter, Sophia.
One beautiful autumn day, while he undergoes a routine medical procedure, something goes irrevocably wrong. Dodge is pronounced brain dead and put on life support, leaving his stunned family and close friends with difficult decisions. Long ago, when a much younger Dodge drew up his will, he directed that his body be given to a cryonics company now owned by enigmatic tech entrepreneur Elmo Shepherd. Legally bound to follow the directive despite their misgivings, Dodge’s family has his brain scanned and its data structures uploaded and stored in the cloud, until it can eventually be revived.
In the coming years, technology allows Dodge’s brain to be turned back on. It is an achievement that is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. An eternal afterlife—the Bitworld—is created, in which humans continue to exist as digital souls.
But this brave new immortal world is not the Utopia it might first seem…
Fall, or Dodge in Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.
Description from Goodreads.
“Fall is at once science fiction and fantasy, with quantum computing enabling what amounts to magic, and while Stephenson spins out a pleasingly plausible vision of our near future, he carves out his most comfortable position in the uncertain nexus where that future becomes past and we rewrite our own apocrypha. Vintage Stephenson, which is to say it’s like nothing he’s ever written.” – Wired
“Those ready for an endlessly inventive and absorbing story are in for an adventure they won’t soon forget. An audacious epic with more than enough heart to fill its many, many pages.” – Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
“Stephenson devotees with a taste for Tolkienesque fantasy will revel in the author’s imaginative world building… Still, there are enough futuristic, envelope-pushing ideas here, especially related to AI and digital consciousness, to keep even nonfans and science buffs intrigued.” – Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
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Spine of the Dragon by Kevin J. Anderson
Two continents at war, the Three Kingdoms and Ishara, are divided by past bloodshed. When an outside threat arises—the reawakening of a powerful ancient race that wants to remake the world—the two warring nations must somehow set aside generational hatreds and form an alliance to fight their true enemy.
Description from Goodreads.
“This epic fantasy takes readers on a sometimes brutal, often enthralling journey.” – Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“The pages turn almost by themselves, because you absolutely, categorically have to find out what happens next.” – Kirkus Reviews
“A hell of a kick-off to a new series.” – The NerdBlitz
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NONFICTION
Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters
No one knows more about everything—especially everything rude, clever, and offensively compelling—than John Waters. The man in the pencil-thin mustache, auteur of the transgressive movie classics Pink Flamingos, Polyester, the original Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame, is one of the world’s great sophisticates, and in Mr. Know-It-All he serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly and trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: “Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all.”
Studded with cameos of Waters’s stars, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst, and Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from Waters’s personal collection, Mr. Know-It-All is Waters’s most hypnotically readable, upsetting, revelatory book—another instant Waters classic.
Description from Goodreads.
“[Waters is] an indefatigable coiner of droll one-liners… Whether he likes it or not, [Waters] is a Great American Institution. Or maybe he belongs in an institution. Either way, we wouldn’t want to be without him.” – The Seattle Times
“On a line-by-line basis, [Mr. Know-It-All] always sparkles.” – The A.V. Club
“Nothing can squelch [John Waters’] outrageous imagination… If you don’t laugh loud and often, check your pulse, then your breath on a mirror.” – Booklist
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Naturally Tan by Tan France
In this heartfelt, funny, touching memoir, Tan France, star of Netflix’s smash-hit Queer Eye, tells his origin story for the first time. With his trademark wit, humor, and radical compassion, Tan reveals what it was like to grow up gay in a traditional Muslim family, as one of the few people of color in Doncaster, England. He illuminates his winding journey of coming of age, finding his voice (and style!), and how he finally came out to his family at the age of 34, revealing that he was happily married to the love of his life–a Mormon cowboy from Salt Lake City.
In Tan’s own words, “The book is meant to spread joy, personal acceptance, and most of all understanding. Each of us is living our own private journey, and the more we know about each other, the healthier and happier the world will be.”
Description from Goodreads.
“Feisty and affecting. France’s charming anecdotes and candid opinions exhibit no shortage of humor, and fans of the TV personality will revel in the peek into his colorful history.” – Publishers Weekly
“France shares style tips and behind-the-scene stories in his recognizable-on-the-page voice with lots of humor and well-formed opinions.” – Booklist
“…delightful… this pairing of fashion with compassion has never been a better match.” – Amazon Book Review
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The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will
For more than four decades, George F. Will has attempted to discern the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to America’s civic life. Today, the stakes could hardly be higher. Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events in America.
The Founders’ vision, articulated first in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution, gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government, religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of American prosperity. Now, as Will shows, conservatism is under threat–both from progressives and elements inside the Republican Party. America has become an administrative state, just as destructive trends have overtaken family life and higher education. Semi-autonomous executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power. Congress has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers. And the executive branch has slipped the Constitution’s leash.
In the intellectual battle between the vision of Founding Fathers like James Madison, who advanced the notion of natural rights that pre-exist government, and the progressivism first advanced by Woodrow Wilson, the Founders have been losing. It’s time to reverse America’s political fortunes.
Expansive, intellectually thrilling, and written with the erudite wit that has made Will beloved by millions of readers, The Conservative Sensibility is an extraordinary new book from one of America’s most celebrated political writers.
Description from Goodreads.
“The most considerable conservative book since Kirk’s [The Conservative Mind]… The richness and depth of Will’s study is astonishing… Everyone interested in American politics and liberal democracy will find it enthralling.” – Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“Most Americans would agree, I think, that America is exceptional, but nailing down exactly why can be a matter of contention. With his typical pellucid prose, George Will provides an exceptionally elegant explanation in… The Conservative Sensibility.” – National Review
“It’s time to return to the wisdom of the founding fathers, argues this sweeping political manifesto… Will centers the book on a rich, wide-ranging discussion of political philosophy written in graceful, aphoristic prose… Will offers a formidable, thought-provoking riposte to conventional dogmas.” – Publishers Weekly