Here's a half-dozen new paperbacks, just waiting for a rainy spring afternoon ...
"Transcription" by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown, $16.99). Atkinson follows up the brilliant pairing of "Life After Life" and "A God in Ruins" with another wartime novel; this time a stand-alone. It follows a young woman who becomes a transcriptionist for MI5, eavesdropping on suspected fascist sympathizers. In reviewing it last year, I wrote that "Like a transcription read aloud with differing inflections, you can find new angles to this book each time you read it ... she's both telling us a story and pulling back the curtain just a bit, showing us how she tells the story, how she builds this delicate house of cards. It's mesmerizing, from every angle."
"Varina" by Charles Frazier (HarperCollins, $16.99). Frazier returned to the Civil War setting of his National Book Award-winning "Cold Mountain" for his latest novel, named for the wife of the only president of the Confederate States of America. Mary Doria Russell, in a Washington Post review, called it "a finely wrought novel that will reward rereading. Elegiac without being exculpatory, it is an indictment of complicity without ignoring the historic complexity of the great evil at the core of American history."
"Noir" by Christopher Moore (HarperCollins, $16.99). Moore describes his book, in an afterword, as "closer to Damon Runyon meets Bugs Bunny than Raymond Chandler meets Jim Thompson"; set in 1947 San Francisco, it involves a sad-sack bartender whose world is rocked by a daffy waitress with a past. Seattle Times reviewer Jeff Baker wrote that "Moore's all about the zany and the zinger ... Sometimes this House of Silly collapses on itself and sometimes it's as solid as Alcatraz during an earthquake."
"Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations" (Melville House, $16.99). For those wanting to remember the late musician with his own words, this collection includes interviews published in sources as disparate as Rolling Stone, Vegetarian Times and Prince's high-school newspaper. The 10 pieces, wrote Washington Post reviewer Chris Richards, "uphold Prince's reputation for being tight-lipped with his interrogators _ not always down to play ball, but occasionally playful." The volume includes an introduction by the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib.
"Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing," edited by Stephanie Stokes Oliver (Simon & Schuster, $16). "A passion for books pervades every page of this anthology of black writers' reflections on reading and writing," wrote Publishers Weekly about this slender but rich volume. Oliver, a Seattleite, traces more than 250 years of black literature in America, from Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup to Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
"Tin Man" by Sarah Winman (Penguin, $14). Winman's novel, which has at its center an artist who no longer makes art, is brief _ barely 200 pages _ but a New York Times reviewer calls it "a small miracle," noting that so much is contained in it that it seems "impossible that it all fits, yet the slow build of emotion and the cascade of quiet, well-earned tears are testament to how rich this meditation on love, art, loss and redemption truly is."
