Gregory Cowles Senior Editor, Books Twitter: CANDY HOUSE, by Jennifer Egan. In fiction, we like Jennifer Egan’s “The Candy House” (a sequel of sorts to her magnificent novel “A Visit From the Goon Squad”), along with Eloghosa Osunde’s “Vagabonds!” and “Rebellion,” a reissued 1924 novel by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. Peters, a look at the recent history of the Republican Party. Jane Pek offers an unconventional detective story in her debut novel, “The Verifiers.” And in “Scoundrel,” the Book Review’s crime columnist, Sarah Weinman, tells the true story of a convicted killer freed from prison in the 1960s after he became a cause célèbre on the right.Īlso recommended this week: Ruth Brandon’s biography of the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and his romantic entanglements, Natalie Hodges’ classical music memoir, Silvia Ferrara’s history of written language and a couple of politically minded books - Mónica Guzmán’s guide to bridging the partisan divide and, from the Times reporter Jeremy W. (Apr.Crimes and mysteries anchor a number of our recommended titles this week, from the murder case at the heart of Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel, “The Return of Faraz Ali,” to the search for a missing student in Sara Novic’s novel “True Biz,” set at a school for the deaf. Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes. It casts its spell on Bennie, whose punk rock days with the Flaming Dildos are long past: “Tongue-in-cheek nostalgia is merely the portal, the candy house, if you will, through which we hope to lure in a new generation and bewitch them,” he writes in an email.

Appearances from music producer Bennie Salazar, his mentor Lou Kline, and their lovers and children provide sharp pleasures for Goon Squad fans, and Egan cleverly echoes the ambitious, savvy marketing schemes of real-world tech barons with Own Your Unconscious. Not everyone sees this as panacea, and a countermovement called Mondrian arises. “Counters” seek to ferret out “proxies” that help hide “eluders” who resist merging their “gray grabs” to the collective in order to leave their online personae behind. In the near future, a platform called Own Your Unconscious allows memories to be uploaded to the cloud and accessed by anyone. I’ll see your PowerPoint chapter, Egan seems to say, and raise you a chapter in tweets, and another in emails and texts. Egan returns to the fertile territory and characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad with an electrifying and shape-shifting story that one-ups its Pulitzer-winning predecessor.

Reviews the candy house