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Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, July 20
1. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine Books: $30) A story of friendship, love and adversity during the 1980s Space Shuttle program. 2. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House: $28) A tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart. 3. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 9 4. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 5. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 6. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab (Tor Books: $30) A vampiric tale follows three women across the centuries. 7. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau: $30) A suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence. 8. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 9. The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley (Ace: $30) A romantasy following an assassin and a healer forced to work together to cure a fatal disease. 10. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt & Co.: $29) An unexpected wedding guest gets surprise help on her journey to starting anew. … 1. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 2. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A study of the barriers to progress in the U.S. 3. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 122 4. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books: $28) The true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a partnership stretched to its limits. 5. Lessons From Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds (Grand Central Publishing: $13) A guide to channeling feline wisdom in the face of authoritarian nonsense. 6. 2024 by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, Isaac Arnsdorf (Penguin Press: $32) The inside story of a tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign. 7. Super Agers by Eric Topol (Simon & Schuster: $33) A detailed guide to a revolution transforming human longevity. 8. The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad (Random House: $30) A guide to the art of journaling and a meditation on the central questions of life. 9. We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle (The Dial Press: $34) The guidebook for being alive. 10. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Burgoyne (illustrator) (Scribner: $20) On gratitude, reciprocity and community, and the lessons to take from the natural world. … 1. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 2. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine: $20) 3. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 4. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 5. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 6. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 7. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner: $20) 8. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19) 9. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 10. Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley, $20) … 1. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne (Penguin: $21) 2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 3. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Vintage: $19) 4. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 5. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13) 6. Sociopath by Patric Gagne, Ph.D. (Simon & Schuster: $20) 7. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 8. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 9. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 10. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (Penguin: $19)


Los Angeles Times
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Gary Shteyngart's ‘Vera, or Faith' is a witty (and anxious) child-led tale about status in the Trump era
Vera, the heroine of Gary Shteyngart's sixth novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' is a whip-smart 10-year-old Manhattanite, but she's not quite smart enough to figure out her parents' intentions. Why is dad so concerned about 'status'? Why does her stepmom call some meals 'WASP lunches'? How come every time they visit somebody's house she's assigned to see if they have a copy of 'The Power Broker' on their shelves? She's all but doomed to be bourgeois and neurotic, as if a juvenile court has sentenced her to live in a New Yorker cartoon. Since his 2002 debut, 'The Russian Debutante's Handbook,' Shteyngart has proved adept at finding humor in the intersection of immigrant life, wealth and relationships, and 'Vera' largely sticks to that mix. But the cynicism that has always thrummed underneath his high-concept comedies — the dehumanizing algorithms, the rapacious finance system — is more prominent in this slim, potent novel. Vera is witnessing both the slow erosion of her parents' marriage along with the rapid decline of democracy in near-future America. Her precocity gives the novel its wit, but Shteyngart is also alert to the fact that a child, however bright, is fundamentally helpless. Not to mention desperate for her parents' affection, which is in short supply for Vera. Her father, the editor of a liberal intellectual magazine, seems constantly distracted by his efforts to court a billionaire to purchase it, while her stepmom is more focused on her son's ADHD and the family's rapidly dwindling bank account. Things are no better outside in the world, where a constitutional convention seems ready to pass an amendment awarding five-thirds voting rights for 'exceptional Americans.' (Read: white people.) Vera, the daughter of a Russian father and Korean mother, may be banished to second-class citizenry. Even worse, her school has assigned her to take the side of the 'five-thirders' in an upcoming classroom debate. So it's become urgent for her to understand the world just as it's become inexplicable. Shteyngart is stellar at showing just how alienated she's become: 'She knew kids were supposed to have more posters on their walls to show off their inner life, but she liked her inner life to stay inside her.' And she seems to be handling the crisis with more maturity than her father, who's drunk and clumsy in their home: 'If anyone needed to see Mrs. S., the school counselor with the master's in social work degree, it was Daddy.' It's a challenge to write from the perspective of a child without being arch or cutesy — stories about kids learning about the real world can degrade to plainspoken YA or cheap melodrama. Shteyngart is striving for something more supple, using Vera's point of view to clarify how adults become victims of their own emotional shutoffs, the way they use language to at once appear smart while covering up their feelings. 'Our country's a supermarket where some people just get to carry out whatever they want. You and I sadly are not those people,' Dad tells her, forcing her to unpack a metaphor stuffed full of ideology, economics, self-loathing and more. Every chapter in the book starts with the phrase 'She had to,' explaining Vera's various missions amid this dysfunction: 'hold the family together,' 'fall asleep,' 'be cool,' 'win the debate.' Kids like her have to be action-oriented; they don't have the privilege of adults' deflections. Small wonder, then, that her most reliable companion is an AI-powered chessboard, which offers direct answers to her most pressing questions. (One of Shteyngart's most potent running jokes is that adults aren't more clever than computers they command.) Once she falls into a mission to discover the truth about her birth mother, she becomes more alert to the world's brutal simplicity: 'The world was a razor cut … It would cut and cut and cut.' Shteyngart's grown-up kids' story has two obvious inspirations: One, as the title suggests, is Vladimir Nabokov's 1969 novel 'Ada, or Ardor,' the other Henry James' 1897 novel 'What Maisie Knew.' Both are concerned with childhood traumas, and if Shteyngart isn't explicitly borrowing their plots he borrows some of their gravitas, the sense that preteendom is a crucible for experiencing life's various crises. In its final chapters, the novel takes a turn that is designed to speak to our current moment, spotlighting the way that Trump-era nativist policies have brought needless harm to Americans. A country can abandon its principles, he means to say, just as a parent can abandon a child. But if 'Vera' suggests a particular vision of our particular dystopian moment, it also suggests a more enduring predicament for children, who live with the consequences of others' decisions but don't get a vote in them. 'There were a lot of 'statuses' in the world and each year she was becoming aware of more of them,' Vera observes. Children will have to learn them faster now. Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of 'The New Midwest.'


Boston Globe
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In Gary Shteyngart's latest, a wise child trying to survive a near-future New York
'Vera, or Faith' is told from the perspective of 10-year-old Vera, who lives in an anonymous incarnation of New York City with her Russian immigrant father Igor Shmulkin and her Boston Brahmin stepmother Anne Bancroft, whom she calls Anne Mom. The child believes her Korean biological mother left because she was a 'tough baby,' and, like many kids of divorce, feels responsible for keeping her current parents happily together. Vera suffers 'intense anxiety,' partly because of her demanding Upper East Side elementary school and partly because her overbearing parents micromanage her every emotion and interaction, trying to ensure her likability by hammering into her juvenile head the importance of 'knowing your audience.' Absorbing these pressures without possessing the ability to process them, the girl is laser-focused on pleasing her parents by becoming a 'woman in STEM' who attends Swarthmore College. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Vera's parents do love her and her younger half-brother, but don't necessarily love parenting. Anne Mom acts perpetually put-upon by the demands of childrearing and is additionally frustrated by Vera's unconditional adoration of her often absent father, someone who is, even when present, absentminded, at best good for an encouraging bromide thrown out while staring into his phone. Bloomberg News once considered Daddy someone who 'might need to [be taken] seriously,' but these days, the controversial lefty intellectual is focused on trying to resurrect an 'old magazine people had completely forgotten about,' even if it means selling — or selling out — to a Rhodesian billionaire. Related : Advertisement Aside from the challenges of home life, Vera is growing up in a world where 'Cycle Through' states stop women and girls to monitor their menstrual cycles and city streets routinely resound with the rage of MOTHs, or Marches of the Hated, put on by aggrieved, working-class white people who feel they've been left behind. This downtrodden majority bemoans their cruel fate despite a proposed constitutional amendment, known as Five-Three, that would give weighted votes to the 'new marginalized class,' defined as anyone who can trace their ancestry to 'those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.' (Shteyngart's inversion of the Constitution's original Three-Fifths clause is a deplorable but creatively inspired invention.) Anticipating the upcoming constitutional conventions, Vera's school schedules a mock debate on Five-Three, with Vera and her classmate Yumi, the daughter of Japanese diplomats, assigned to argue the amendment's merits. While always eager to excel academically, Vera is more thrilled at the opportunity to befriend someone besides Kaspie, her Korean-made chess computer. (The novel's technological prognostications, which feel less imminent than its political changes, include AI devices that provide genuine — if still godforsaken — friendship and autonomous cars that navigate urban grids and cross-country trips.) Related : Advertisement As should be clear, Vera is preternaturally precocious, fueled by logging unfamiliar words and facts into her 'Things I Still Need to Know' diary, an ingenious plot device that allows Shteyngart to write a novel for adults from the point of view of a child by putting in quotes anything Vera is parroting from grown-ups, be it individual words, esoteric concepts, euphemisms, or curse words. He also brilliantly apes the agile, almost hyperactive, sponge brain of a child, peppering Vera's thoughts with continual callbacks and recapitulations. Anybody familiar with Shteyngart's writing, or even his social media or Substack, knows that he has a clever wit, which is on full display here, despite operating within a world that feels drawn from the sweaty fantasies of those who authored 'Project 2025.' Along with winking allusions to cultural titans like Mike Nichols and Vladimir Nabokov, whose indispensable wife Vera gets a shoutout as 'a genius herself,' there are innumerable nods to New York City esoterica, my favorite of which is the fact that Daddy pays Vera to inspect copies of 'The Power Broker' in other people's homes to see if the tome has a cracked spine or is just for show. Vera, like too many children with comparatively much less privileged lives in our real world, is forced to grow up much too quickly, but what Shteyngart does by the end of the novel, and perhaps does better than any other current American author, is pinpoint a glimmer of hopefulness in the seemingly impenetrable gloom. His canny fiction doesn't make me any happier to be living through the times he is memorializing, but it does provide commiseration and amusement, maybe even a bit of faith in the possibility of something better on some distant horizon. Advertisement VERA, OR FAITH By Gary Shteyngart Random House, 256 pages, $28 Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.