Samuel Clemens’ early resume is a scrap heap of hapless ambition. School, printing, riverboat piloting, soldiering, prospecting — for one reason or another, none of his motley pursuits ever seemed to last long or net much success for the restless Missourian. From one angle, it was a rather inauspicious start. From another, it’s the stuff of American legend.
Clemens, of course, became Mark Twain — who, in turn, has become the subject of the latest biography from the foremost profiler of American iconoclasts. Ron Chernow‘s biographies of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton, among others, have earned the historian a bevy of literary prizes and even a smash Broadway adaptation. Now, he’s training his gaze on Twain’s twisty path from elementary school dropout to Great American novelist and world-famous wit.
But Chernow’s tome isn’t alone on this week’s publishing calendar. Get on your tiptoes to look past it — seriously, it’s hefty — and you’ll find reflections on life and art, the latest from a couple of beloved novelists, and Dave Barry, who has made quite a living off his wit, as well.
‘Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up’ by Dave Barry
Barry is an institution. For decades the Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist has fired potshots at the inanities of modern life, from any number of vantage points: a syndicated column, dozens of books, even a rock band and short-lived TV adaptation.
But there’s a through-line to all of this, as the 77-year-old Barry explores in a new memoir that reaches all the way back to his earliest childhood: “In our house,” Barry explained to NPR’s Weekend Edition, “the rule was that you could make fun of everything, and in fact, you should. You should never take anything too seriously, and above all, you should never take yourself too seriously.”
‘The Devil Three Times: A Novel’ by Rickey Fayne
Fayne’s debut novel does not lack for ambition. Beginning with a Faustian bargain between a woman on a slave ship and the devil, Fayne traces the fallout of this deal across the generations of her descendants that follow. This family history contains magic and despair, migrations and hauntings — and echoes of the country’s complex, often painful racial history writ large.
‘The Emperor of Gladness’ by Ocean Vuong
At once a poet and a novelist, a leading light of American letters and a Vietnamese immigrant who didn’t learn English until he was 11, Vuong defies easy categorization. His books, whether they deploy line breaks or paragraphs, tend to root around among life’s mundane intimacies for the profound truths of human connection.
