5 buzzy books out this week that look inward

Who are you, anyway? It’s a simple question. Just complete a name tag at the welcome table and you’ll be fine, right? But behind that fig leaf there’s a freshet of complications, contradictions and still other questions of identity, not least of which is: Who gets to decide?

A handful of notable books coming out this week, each in its own way, offer stabs at an explanation — or, at least a deeper understanding of the questions involved. As different as their approaches may be — ranging from tribal politics to close-focus mystery, from measured criticism to one, um, intimate relationship with airplanes — these books all end up tangled in the knotty (occasionally naughty) conundrum of how we define ourselves.

Audition, by Katie Kitamura

Of all the books on this list, Kitamura’s novel probably comes closest to a literal interpretation of that question. Just who, exactly, are the two leads of this story? That’s not so easy to figure out, as what begins as a humdrum lunch between a veteran actress and an attractive young man soon gathers layer and layer of intrigue. It’s fair to say this tightly wound skein of a story has some surprises in store, for characters and reader alike, as it unspools.

Authority: Essays, by Andrea Long Chu

This collection pulls together many of the highlights published by the New York magazine essayist and Pulitzer Prize-winner for criticism. Books, TV, video games — the subjects under her microscope here can range widely, but the clear, cutting and provocative voice behind it all is unmistakably Chu. It is the critic’s first book since Females, a meditation on gender identity released in 2019.

Big Chief, by Jon Hickey

The narrator of Hickey’s first novel is a fixer for an Indigenous tribe based in Wisconsin, responsible, in his words, for carrying out “the decisions of a multimillion-dollar corporation that also happens to be a sovereign nation.” In other words, Mitch Caddo knows how to get things done. At least, he thought he did, before a few eventful days leading up to tribal presidential election put his life in a blender, in this taut tale of corruption and ethical question marks.

To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

This collection of essays began as a series of lectures that the Pulitzer Prize-winner delivered at Harvard University in 2023-24, and that are still available to watch in full online. Born in Vietnam, raised a refugee in the United States, Nguyen has always found himself caught in a contradiction: the split identity of an American privileged with protagonism on screen and page and a Vietnamese person usually relegated to the B plot, if mentioned at all. These six essays probe the idea that there are possibilities, as well as pain, for artists in occupying the position of “other.”

Sky Daddy, by Kate Folk

We have an early contender for book jacket blurb of the year: Linda, mild-mannered star of Folk’s debut novel, is constantly at the airport because she wants to get to know airplanes — in the biblical sense. Linda is sexually attracted to aircraft, you see. So. There’s plenty more to be said about this oddball, surprisingly earnest novel but, frankly, if that synopsis alone is not enough to pique your interest or scare you off, I don’t think there’s anything else I can say that will.