These witty, expressive essays track a decades-long quest to capture the essence of painters, writers, critics, and artists of all description. In Forty-One False Starts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), acclaimed academic and writer Janet Malcolm investigates the subtle interactions among life, art, influence, and the art of biography itself. Reflective and informed, each piece muses on the role of the critic, the subjectivity of history and taste, and considers how these evolve over time. Malcolm tackles Edward Weston’s nudes, Edith Wharton’s fiction, Thomas Struth’s photography, Salinger’s prose, and many other artists and their work. In his introduction, Ian Frazier describes his New Yorker colleague’s writing as the “highest level of literature”; and, indeed, the essays are beautifully composed and reminiscent of fiction in their construction, their lyricism, and the thought-provoking weave of the tales.
This remarkable book, A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Life Lessons From an Unlikely Teacher (Riverhead, $26.95), by Sue Halpern, writer and editor at The New York Review of Books, tells the story of how Halpern and her six-year-old dog, Pransky, become a therapy team at a county-run facility for the elderly near their home in Vermont. The writer, whose previous books have explored the brain’s connections to aging and memory, among other topics, frames this story through her experiences of the seven life virtues while she and Pransky form extraordinary relationships with residents at the home. Pransky is the star of this deeply touching and humane book, and it is through the dog that the author offers a provocative and brilliant examination of what really matters in life and how we might find grace, happiness, and humor while dealing with the real challenges of growing older.
