Controversy — political, sexual, and otherwise — always sells books, and Mike Stanton’s The Prince of Providence: The True Story of America’s Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds (Random House; June) is going to be controversial. Stanton, who won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his Providence Journal reporting on corruption in the Rhode Island Supreme Court, moves the Buddy Cianci story from the headlines to the bookstores. Political intrigue and scandal are also the main topics in La Cazzaria: The Book of the Prick, by Antonio Vignali, edited and translated by Ian Frederick Moulton (Routledge; April). A cross between Machiavelli’s The Prince and the most scandalous pornography of its time, this 16th-century " erotic dialogue " — translated for the first time — redefines the possibilities of sexual politics. And though we don’t think of women’s fashions as political or scandalous now, they certainly were for the Victorians. Whistler, Women and Fashion, by Margaret F. McDonald, Susan Grace Galassi, and Aileen Ribeiro with Patricia De Monfort (Yale; May), accompanies the new Whistler exhibit at the Frick, and it’s a gorgeous and generously illustrated look at how women’s clothes and fashions make the artist.
Of course, dress and fashion are often the prelude to sex, and Jane Juska’s sexual adventures, which began with an ad in the New York Review of Books that read, " Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like, " are recounted in her A Round Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance (Villard; May). Sex and romance are also at the center of Kavita Daswani’s debut novel, For Matrimonial Purposes (G.P. Putnam’s Sons; June), in which a young single woman flees her marriage-obsessed family in Bombay to find a career (and continue husband hunting) in Manhattan: it promises to be My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets Sex and the City with a curry twist. Love gone wrong — after lots of sex — is the theme of Erica Jong’s newest, Sappho’s Leap (Norton; May), a historical novel of ancient Greece that details the amorous and artistic life of the woman who invented the love lyric. Reimagining history is also at the core of Jon Boorstin’s novel The Newsboys’ Lodging-House: or The Confessions of William James (Viking; April), in which the author envisions what happens to the 30-year-old philosopher in 1870 when, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he moves to New York and, in Boorstin’s telling, becomes involved in the gritty and dangerous lives of street boys.
The lure of urban life — often racialized — is at the heart of much American culture, and Arthur Kempton’s Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music (Pantheon; May) takes a hard look at how African-American art not only informed but transfigured US popular culture. White America’s fascination with blackness is also at the heart of Into Africa: The Epic Adventure of Stanley & Livingstone, by Martin Duggard (Doubleday; April), which examines the world-famous 1866 expedition into " darkest Africa. " The horrors of history are also present in Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor, by Joshua Greene (Broadway Books; April), which tells the until-now-hidden story of William Denson, the US Army lawyer who oversaw the prosecution as war criminals of individuals who worked in concentration camps only to see their sentences overturned because of Cold War politics.
Politics are likewise at the heart of Christina Garcia’s new novel Monkey Hunting (Knopf; May), which like her National Book Award–nominated Dreaming in Cuban examines the workings of ethnicity and family. Here she traces the life of a Chinese immigrant who leaves his home in 1896 to go to Cuba and lives to see his grandchildren grapple with the horrors of Mao’s China and the US war against Vietnam. Even though much of it is not even set on Earth (or an Earth we easily recognize), Samuel R. Delany’s Aye, and Gomorrah (Vintage; April) grapples with the profound human questions of home, identity, and being. This is the complete collection of all of the short fantasy and science fiction of this multi-award-winning writer and a boon to his present and future fans. Gail Godwin’s 11th novel, Evenings at Five (Ballantine; April), examines the relationship of a long-married couple months after one of them dies. And just to show that even the old can be new, Modern Library is issuing the long-awaited translation of Nikolai Gogol’s Russian epic novel of family, betrayal, and politics, Taras Bulba (Random House; April), which Ernest Hemingway praised as " one of the ten greatest books of all time, " so it’s probably pretty good, and even better now in Peter Constantine’s new translation.
And in Appetites: Why Women Want (Counterpoint; May), former Phoenix writer and editor Caroline Knapp, who died last June of cancer at 42, follows up her previously acclaimed memoirs Drinking: A Love Story and Pack of Two with a meditation on her own anorexia that leads to an investigation of some of the negative repercussions of the women’s movement.
