New books this week: A foodie memoir, a missing child, witches illustrated, and more

Merry daylight saving time, to all who celebrate! Between the later evenings, milder breezes and prodigious quantities of mud, the oncoming Ides of March often promises hope (for most, at least) and a literally brighter world — all of which just means more daylight for reading, duh.

It’s a good time, in other words, to neglect your ponderous backlog just a little longer and cast a longing gaze toward the hotly anticipated books publishing this week. They offer ecological catastrophe, witchcraft, gender-bending intrigue, high-stakes mystery — and of course, food. OK, so maybe not hope, exactly, but who needs hope when you’ve got a good book?

All the Other Mothers Hate Me, by Sarah Harman

When a boy goes missing, it is up to just one amateur detective to get to the bottom of the mystery. The trouble is that this would-be gumshoe — the mother of the classmate the missing boy used to bully — isn’t exactly what you’d call … competent. Or disinterested, or confidence-inspiring at all, really. She must figure it out anyway if she’s going to clear her own son’s name, in this smirking thriller that never threatens to take itself too seriously — and may well have its own TV adaptation on the way.

The Antidote, by Karen Russell

The short-story artisan’s first full-length novel since 2011’s critically lauded Swamplandia! swaps the bogs for the disastrously dry plains of Nebraska. It’s here, beneath the darkening skies of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, that Russell sets the cast of her historical epic. The storm’s ruinous onset supplies the book’s backdrop, but the characters entangled in its thrall may have more to fear from the troubled past that it threatens to disinter.

Care and Feeding, by Laurie Woolever

Woolever has spent decades immersed in the culinary world, at various times as a restaurant worker, food writer, assistant to Mario Batali and collaborator with the late Anthony Bourdain. Now, in her memoir, the thoughtful foodie draws on her motley experiences to paint the portrait of a woman in an industry that’s occasionally inhospitable, rarely boring and almost always messier than you’d expect.

Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters

Peters’ collection — three short stories and a novella that shares the book’s name— playfully wreaks havoc with the tenuous barriers established by gender conventions. These stories may not unfold how you expect, by design; it gives away little, and perhaps downright misleads, to say they feature lumberjacks, boarding school lovers and an apocalyptic pandemic. At any rate, they share a strain of dark humor and a gimlet-eyed interest in trans experiences.

The Story of Witches, by Willow Winsham

This one’s charms feel self-explanatory: Who isn’t at least a little fascinated by witchcraft? It’s this enduring fascination — the stories of witches, and all they say about those who tell them — that Winsham interrogates in her illustrated work of popular history. She draws on an eclectic range of sources to trace the many lives of this folkloric mainstay, across the world and the course of human civilization. Plus, she covers other crucial questions: like what’s the deal with those pointy hats?