Life and Death of the American Worker, by Alice Driver (One Signal). This intimately reported chronicle focusses on the migrant workers who staff Tyson Foods chicken plants in Arkansas. Their jobs, Driver reports, come with significant physical risks: they suffer from carpal-tunnel syndrome, chemical poisoning, and U.T.I.s (thanks to limited bathroom breaks). Because many workers process more than a hundred birds per minute, accidents are common: an average of twenty-seven workers a day are hospitalized, and some undergo amputations. According to Driver, Tyson intimidates workers who speak up, and the conditions at their plants devolved further during the pandemic. (Tyson representatives denied many of the claims in the book.)
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out, by Katherine Bucknell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A masterly biography of the author of “Goodbye to Berlin” and “A Single Man,” this book captures the intricacies of a fascinating, often contradictory character. Isherwood was an upper-class Englishman (he gained American citizenship in his forties) who genuinely loved people from all walks of life; a libertine turned Vedanta monk; a gay literary icon who didn’t come out publicly until his sixties. But, above all, as Bucknell shows, he was a tireless observer and recorder of people, places, and historical moments. When Isherwood died, in 1986, he left behind a vast personal archive—material that Bucknell uses to gently tease out themes that connect the author’s life to his art. Isherwood, she writes, “imagined a world in which he might be able to live differently”; through his work, he helped usher that world into being.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
Mina’s Matchbox, by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen B. Snyder (Pantheon). This beguiling coming-of-age novel, set in 1972, follows a twelve-year-old girl who goes to live for a year with her eccentric half-German uncle. The head of a beverage company, he resides with his family in coastal Japan, in a large house with grounds that once contained a zoo. The youngster bonds with her cousin, Mina, a beautiful but frail asthmatic girl who collects matchboxes and rides to school on her pet pygmy hippopotamus. The book is suffused with the transplant’s growing awareness of the ephemerality of her own innocence: “Even if you were born in a wonderful house like this,” she thinks, “you couldn’t just stay there, warm and cozy, for the rest of your life.”
The Sons of El Rey, by Alex Espinoza (Simon & Schuster). Encompassing three generations and two countries, this novel traces the lives of the men of the Vega family. As the patriarch, a former professional-wrestling star from Mexico, lies in hospice, the ghosts of his wife and his lucha libre persona force him to untangle his life’s defining relationships and failures. His son struggles to keep the Vegas’ gym, in Los Angeles, afloat amid the pandemic; his grandson, who is gay, totters between academic ambition and self-exploitation. The result is an affecting exploration of masculinity, familial and cultural inheritance, and the ways that love can be hidden and revealed.
