True Books

The American perception of the Iranian Revolution started, for many, with the seizing of the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. That's where this book ends. The apparently sudden collapse of... (Tom)

On one hand, this is, like many memoirs, the story of a curious, ambitious child and a flawed, fascinating parent. The son of a white American mother and a father—a brilliant, larger-than-life, and of... (Tom)

I read this twice in two weeks. As soon as I finished the audiobook version, I knew I had to get my hands on a physical copy. The second reading demanded that I underline sentences, paragraphs, and so... (Anika)

Local newspapers, retail chains like Toys R Us, rural hospitals, affordable housing: all things that are being driven from our landscape by impersonal but inevitable market forces, right? The winds ma... (Tom)

Thank goodness for strange, little books. This one, almost 25 years old already (!) [Ed.: now almost 35], may not be for everyone, but if you have the smallest bit of fascination with how one writer t... (Tom)

“Even if a book is about everything else, it is never not about the life the writer lived.” Memoir meets biography meets literary criticism in this heartfelt bibliomemoir (and yes, I was delighted to... (Anika)

In the wake of the fame granted by her bestselling, Booker-winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, Roy has mostly turned her writing to political reporting and activism. But the death of her mot... (Tom)

Although she worked alongside civil rights legends like Bob Moses and Medgar Evers, you won't find Moody's name in the indexes of the big histories of the movement, and her memoir doesn't follow the a... (Tom)

There's something about the particular eloquence of Sally Mann's photographs—their locality, their intimacy, and the sense you get of her as not merely a silent, reserved observer but a real participa... (Tom)

The short and eventful life of Christopher Marlowe—at least what we know of it—would have provided enough drama for one of his own tumultuous plays, or one by his one-time collaborator William Shakesp... (Tom)

This hefty, beautiful, and mysterious book tempted me from across the store for months, and when I finally had the time to sit down with it, it turned out to be all of those things: hefty, beautiful,... (Tom)

Some writers, faced with the prospect of an early death, respond, at least on the page, with a kind of grace, a generous, expansive clarity, colored, even purified, by the urgency of their awareness o... (Tom)

D. Esperanza's story is a perfect example of how the personal is political. Thirteen-year-old Esperanza could not have anticipated that his first journal would become this memoir, just as he could not... (Anika)

Among the many high points of John Huston's film career, from The Maltese Falcon through Prizzi's Honor, his 1951 adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage would hardly rate a footnote if not for this, o... (Tom)

If rivers can die—we've all seen that they can—shouldn't that also mean that rivers are alive? Macfarlane's newest book is his most pointedly provocative, adding an activist's urgency to his usual, mi... (Tom)

Some of you might recall an earlier Phinney by Post pick, A Simple Story, by Leila Guerriero, about a dance contest in Argentina. Though it's a story about another dance contest in South America (duri... (Tom)

"When you listen to music, your heart changes rhythm. Can you hear it?" asks And There Was Music. This picture book is bursting with many types of song, including a brass band in New Orleans, Irish fo... (Tom)

Despite (or because of) Meta's clumsy efforts to suppress this Facebook insider's expose, it has received a flurry of coverage, focused, unsurprisingly, on its more sleazily scandalous tales. If that'... (Tom)

To say that this book began as a tweet—a single sentence posted in late October 2023, a little longer than what became its title but the same in spirit—is not to belittle it, but to capture the power... (Tom)

"There was a time when I knew nothing about hares and gave them little thought," Chloe Dalton writes in Raising Hare. That changes when Dalton rescues a baby hare (called a leveret) near her English c... (Haley)

When I finally picked up this book from 1955 about the 1930s, I can't deny I had current events in mind. We look for echoes in history, to see how a society—or part of a society—could embrace authorit... (Tom)

"What makes you think you're so important that someone should listen to you?" It's the question Neko Case has been asked—and even worse, asked herself—her whole life, born into a spectacularly neglect... (Tom)

This short book took a long time to come together. Kennedy, a star of the zine movement in her twenties, had become a design columnist at the NYT, writing about everyday inventions, when one invention... (Tom)

Only when Stanley Crawford died a year ago, at age 86, did I realize that the same person was the author of two very different books that had long intrigued me: the notoriously weird experimental nove... (Tom)

Two mixed-race immigrant kids, who spoke Dutch until they moved to California when they were nine and seven, where they won citywide competitions in classical piano. That may not be your image of the... (Tom)

One of the first books I reviewed for this newsletter was Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which soon after won the Booker Prize and remains one of the best books I've read... (Tom)

Mary Colby and George Oppen met in a college poetry class in Corvallis in 1926; they spent a night together, for which Mary was expelled, but by then they had chosen to leave their pasts behind to sha... (Tom)

Unless you have your own test kitchen, reviewing a new, 600-page cookbook can only be a partial exercise, but after using Big Vegan Flavor for the last two months as a part-time, non-expert cook in a... (Tom)

Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley, has made the one-third netherworld of sleep his life's work, and when you're a reader in his hands, it's hard not to be convinced there'... (Tom)

When Mersal, a young Egyptian literary scholar, encountered the novel Love and Silence by chance at a Cairo bookshop, she was drawn to the book's beauty and strangeness, but also to the author, the ne... (Tom)

What began as a book about the craft and politics of writing—addressed to his Howard University students, as his bestseller Between the World and Me was written to his son—became something else as Coa... (Tom)

For a number of reasons, it's rare I choose a history book for Phinney by Post, our backlist subscription, but Morton's 1979 microhistory made for a nice fit, both for its slim size and especially for... (Tom)

For anyone who wants to be a trans ally—or who doesn't understand more than the male-female binary—I urge you to read this memoir. The author's young daughter transitioned at age 6 in a conservative t... (Doree)

Agnès Varda made her first film in her twenties, before the French New Wave, with which she was long associated, began to crest; she made her last in her nineties, when she had lived long enough to wi... (Tom)

The tenth and last flight of Space Shuttle Challenger lasted only 73 seconds; to tell the full history of those terrible moments, Adam Higginbotham requires, justifiably, over five hundred pages and m... (Tom)

I don’t often read memoirs but this reissue of two volumes by British writer Storm Jameson falls smack dab in the middle of my current literary sweet spot. Born in the small coastal town of Whitby, Ja... (Liz)

This is a joyful book. Much of the joy comes from the wild turkeys Joe Hutto raises from a clutch of eggs, as they investigate and appreciate their portion of north Florida woodland, but Hutto is full... (Tom)

In the decade since Fedarko's first book, The Emerald Mile, came out, that tale of someone else's record-setting whitewater ride through the Grand Canyon has become a modern classic of outdoor adventu... (Tom)

The story of migration from Central America to the United States over the past few decades—especially in the last decade—is almost unutterably complex, and the misery driving it, and the misery furthe... (Tom)

About three years ago, Sante, a writer in her mid-60s known until then as Luc, sent to a few dozen close friends a piece of writing titled "Lucy," a tender, exact, joyful, and terrified confession and... (Tom)

In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, told her husband, who had spent the last few years living off the land on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, that she wanted to join him. And so s... (Tom)

I love this (kind of) memoir for satisfying the inappropriate curiosity I so often feel when the relationships of people I actually know end. Pittard spills all of the tea about the demise of her marr... (Anika)

New Books of the Week The Young Man by Annie Ernaux The Pole by J.M. Coetzee Sometimes books you read make themselves into pairs, but rarely as neatly as these two did for me: two very slim books, the... (Tom)

I was already predisposed to liking Scottish comedian Fern Brady's memoir on account of enjoying the hell out of her presence on Taskmasker (a British comedy panel game show) and her stand-up comedy s... (Anika)

Kent doesn't explain why he set out in a sailboat for Greenland in the summer of 1929, with two much younger men he didn’t know. He leapt at the idea, and even when they steered into catastrophe he ne... (Tom)

Raban's final book is the story of two journeys: his father's, as a British officer, through the World War II battlefields of Dunkirk, North Africa, and Anzio, and his own, as he recovers from, and ad... (Tom)

I've been waiting for years to make Athill's 1963 memoir a Phinney by Post selection, so as soon as NYRB Classics brought it back into print, I pounced. Athill was a prominent British book editor, and... (Tom)

If, like me, you loved Murphy's first book, the truck-driving memoir The Long Haul, you might have wondered what he's been doing since he retired from the road. The answer: trying to cash in on the su... (Tom)

Jane Wong grew up in her family's Chinese restaurant in New Jersey (until her father's gambling obsession drove it into failure); now she's a poet and professor at Western Washington in Bellingham. Bu... (Tom)

I confess: I am mostly untroubled by art crimes, whether thefts or forgeries. I even find them a little charming, mostly victimless, and a kind of art in themselves. And that's surely how Stéphane Bre... (Tom)