New in Paperback: ‘Janis’ and ‘Grand Union’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/books/review/new-paperbacks.html

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JANIS: Her Life and Music, by Holly George-Warren. (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $18.) “We get the full Janis,” our reviewer, Sheila Weller, wrote of this “masterfully researched” biography of the pop icon. But while George-Warren had access to Joplin’s diaries and letters (the latter of which are peppered with the word “SIGH”), she “zeros in” on her skill in singing, particularly the blues.

MARY TOFT; OR, THE RABBIT QUEEN, by Dexter Palmer. (Vintage, 336 pp., $16.95.) By spinning a 1726 medical hoax, in which a British woman claimed to have given birth to 17 rabbits, into a “cracking” and “compassionate” novel about “the nature of belief,” Palmer pays Toft “the compliment of complexity.” Her story, “both happily and unhappily,” our reviewer, Katharine Grant, quipped, “is rather more than the sum of its rabbit parts.”

GRAND UNION: Stories, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, 256 pp., $17.) According to our reviewer, Rebecca Makkai, the best pieces in this first collection of Smith’s stories “achieve something less narrative” than her more traditional tales of disillusionment, “and closer to brilliance.” Among them “we find the surreal, the nonlinear, the essayistic, the pointillist” — some of Smith’s “most vibrant, original fiction, the kind of writing she’ll surely be known for.”

UNDERLAND: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane. (Norton, 496 pp., $17.95.) “You know a book has entered your bloodstream when the ground beneath your feet, once viewed as bedrock, suddenly becomes a roof to unknown worlds below,” our reviewer, Terry Tempest Williams, said about this “epic exploration” of caverns around the world.

PARISIAN LIVES: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir, by Deirdre Bair. (Anchor, 368 pp., $16.95.) “To our delight, we become voyeurs” in this “gripping account” of Bair’s “fraught journey” (as a fledgling biographer) toward “uncovering the lives” of Beckett and Beauvoir, our reviewer, Alan Riding, marveled. “Can this inexperienced young American tame these two monstres sacrés?”

THE SIBERIAN DILEMMA, by Martin Cruz Smith. (Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $17.) This Arkady Renko mystery takes the detective into Russia’s “untamed wilderness” in search of a journalist who went missing while covering a Putin opponent. “The case is of special importance” to Renko, our Crime columnist, Marilyn Stasio, wryly noted, “because the reporter, Tatiana Petrovna, is his lover.”