Divorce stories are hot right now — Lyz Lenz’s “This American Ex-Wife” popped up on the best-seller list the same week as one of the books we recommend below, Leslie Jamison’s memoir “Splinters.” But the public’s appetite for such spectacles is nothing new, as another of this week’s recommendations makes clear: In “Strong Passions,” Barbara Weisberg tells the story of a scandalous high-society divorce that captivated New York City in 1864.
Also up this week, the story of a political divorce — Matt Dixon’s entertaining look at the Trump-DeSantis rivalry — and Joy-Ann Reid’s look at the strong, and consequential, marriage between Medgar and Myrlie Evers. We also recommend a book about New York’s rich linguistic heritage, a look at the roots of the immigration crisis and, in fiction, new novels from Tia williams, Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Megan Nolan. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
LANGUAGE CITY:
The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
Ross Perlin
In this history of New York, Perlin, a linguist, focuses on residents fighting to preserve their spoken heritages. The result is sweeping and intimate, simultaneously a call to arms and a tribute to a place that contains almost as many tongues as speakers.
Credit…“Less a lament for the deaths of endangered languages than an account of how, like their speakers, they have built new lives in a place where half the residents speak a language other than English at home.”
From Deirdre Mask’s review
Atlantic Monthly Press | $28
A LOVE SONG FOR RICKI WILDE
Tia Williams
Sparks fly when Ricki, who has opened a flower shop in Harlem in 2024, meets Ezra, who made a name for himself as a musician during the Harlem Renaissance a century earlier. This is not a time-slip story. Ezra has, through a curse, achieved a haunted immortality that keeps him trapped in the world but apart from it: People forget him entirely within a month if he doesn’t keep in contact.
