Death, monsters, dictators and societal collapse: It’s Halloween, and this week we recommend a handful of books that might keep you up all night. (Reading or quietly freaking out, your choice.) There’s a philosopher’s fascinating inquiry into animal ideas of mortality, and a posthumous memoir by Russia’s most famous opposition leader, and a biography of the gadfly journalist who was among the first to wave a red flag about Hitler’s threat, along with a novelist’s memoir of life in exile and two fun works of wild speculative fiction by established masters of the form. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
BELIEVE NOTHING UNTIL IT IS OFFICIALLY DENIED:
Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism
Patrick Cockburn
Armed with plenty of charm and a weekly newsletter he founded in 1933, the British leftist Claud Cockburn became a crucial polemical voice of the 20th century; his greatest coup — as detailed in this deft and fond biography by his son — was to report, week after week, on the threat that Hitler posed to Europe long before the British government and media woke up to it.
PLAYING POSSUM:
Susana Monsó
What do animals know about death? Monsó, a philosopher, here explores the mysteries of grief and mourning in the animal world, from a chimpanzee carrying around the corpse of a bush baby to female giraffes wandering around the area where a calf had died.
PATRIOT:
Alexei Navalny
In a memoir that speaks from the grave, the Russian opposition leader — who died in an Arctic penal colony earlier this year — tells the story of his struggle to wrest his country back from President Vladimir Putin. Far from a righteous diatribe, the book paints a poignant portrait of Navalny’s indefatigable goodness.
ROMAN YEAR:
André Aciman
Aciman’s family was expelled from Alexandria in the 1960s for being Jewish, a story he told in his 1994 memoir, “Out of Egypt.” This book picks up where that one left off, recounting the time his family subsequently spent living in a former Italian brothel. At its heart, the memoir is about building a life from the limbo of dislocation.
THE GREAT WHEN
Alan Moore
The hero of Moore’s rollicking new novel is a miserable teenager who acquires a dangerous book that he must properly dispose of or be drawn into a parallel magical world. Moore himself can seem an emissary of that world, a sort of shadow Waugh or Wodehouse — he retains the witty narration but instead of a realistic novel about the marriageable upper classes, he offers a monster-filled fantasy about a virginal working-class sad sack.
ABSOLUTION
Jeff VanderMeer
In this surprise prequel to his Southern Reach series (which was published as a trilogy 10 years ago), VanderMeer returns to Area X, an unidentified coastal region surrounded by an invisible barrier and prone to uncanny phenomena. The book focuses on the previously peripheral character of Old Jim, who seemed to be a bar proprietor but is in fact a secret agent assigned to explore the mysterious region.
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