I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories, edited by Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines Press). Reviewed by Mariko Hewer. “Readers making their way through this collection, edited by Sarah Coolidge, will be delighted by the sheer variety of specters haunting its pages. From a doppelganger who’s always one step ahead of his twin to a midwife called upon to assist a jinni in childbirth, these tales offer a broad scope for considering what it means to be a ghost — and what it means to be left behind.”

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt and Co.). Reviewed by William Rice. “But as vital as those questions are to the maintenance of a democratic republic, they shrivel in significance beside the question of how to save the nation from a lawless autocrat and his eager henchmen. Siegel worries about Presidents Obama and Biden strong-arming social-media sites to suppress potentially dangerous misinformation about terrorism, covid, and the 2020 election; their successor has talk-show hosts taken off the air if he doesn’t like their jokes. The author is concerned that First Amendment rights are potentially imperiled by overbearing Democratic administrations, while Trump routinely violates a whole range of constitutional protections.”

Paradiso 17: A Novel by Hannah Lillith Assadi (Knopf). Reviewed by Mike Maggio. “In many ways, the novel, while telling the story of the author’s father, relates the broader story of the Palestinian diaspora: the displacement, the state of being dispossessed, the sense of alienation, the absence of roots. It’s as if the plight of the Palestinians has been condensed into a single individual whose life mirrors the suffering of all his compatriots. And, yet, Paradiso 17 is by no means an allegory, nor does it attempt to make a point. Rather, it follows a narrative construct that stands on its own with characters who are well developed and a plot that is keenly rendered.”

True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color — from Azure to Zinc Pink by Kory Stamper (Knopf). Reviewed by Michael Howard. “Some of the passages in True Color read like scenes out of a comic novel. Priest’s successor (Priest eventually quit in a huff), Isaac Hanh Godlove, is equally funny at times, though for different reasons.  Stamper’s sense of humor and flippant lightness of tone — on display throughout the book — belie the earnestness with which she approaches her subject. She doesn’t allow her passion for lexicography and dictionaries to blind her to the fact that most people don’t really care about such things. By creating a character-based narrative and exploiting its inherent comedy, Stamper lends appeal to what, in the hands of a grim-faced academic, would be a very dry book.”

The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Diane Kiesel. “To the cognoscenti, Bathory is a cult figure. She has been the subject of novels and poems. For her murderous deeds, she scored a mention in The Guinness Book of World Records. Her likeness has been plastered on T-shirts, and her former castles are macabre tourist traps. But given the paucity of documentation about her crimes and the proliferation of embellished accounts of her bloody behavior, it’s impossible to know whether she was a villain or a victim.”

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