María Balogh, Cumbia Soul (Cool Way Press): This isn’t a first book for Balogh, who teaches Spanish, South American literature, and creative writing at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. That was 2013’s Bailar Caribeño, written in Spanish, her mother tongue. Cumbia Soul is her first book in English, which she wields far more gorgeously than many of us native speakers. It packs an impossible amount of adventure and music into just 85 pages, including vivid, juicy poems; a selection of flash fiction; and a cheeky mini-essay titled “Dos and Don’t For Growing Up in Macholand.”
John Van Atta, A Wolf by the Ears: The Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 (Johns Hopkins University Press): A sequel of sorts to Van Atta’s Securing the West, which took a long, cold look at manifest destiny, Wolf picks up where that book left off—with the Missouri Compromise. As Van Etta argues in this dense but very readable account of that historical event, the fight over Missouri’s statehood not only set the stage for the Civil War, but revealed just how deeply the U.S. had bound itself to the terrible institution of slavery early on, using it as its preferred method of nation-building.
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John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: A Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton): It’s been pronounced a masterpiece…and the definitive biography of Williams. In its pages, you get detailed accounts of the playwright’s drug binges, mental breakdowns, and icky co-dependent relationships with barnacles like failed actress Lady Maria St. Just. At the same time, Lahr, a drama critic for The New Yorker, links these episodes with Williams’ creative output, and argues for his genius. The book took home the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography, and now it’s newly in paperback—making this 784-page tour de force much more portable.
