The Compound, by Aisling Rawle (Random House). In this delightfully absorbing novel, an isolated house in the middle of a menacing desert landscape serves as the backdrop of a reality-TV competition. There, a cast of attractive young men and women are recorded with hidden cameras as they complete “tasks”—some innocuous, some sadistic—concocted by the show’s producers. They also pursue romances; if, at sunrise, they are not in bed with a member of the opposite sex, they are eliminated. The novel’s narrator, Lily, convinced that the outside world offers her only “drudgery, day after day,” resolves to win. As the show progresses, the book morphs into a potent examination of self-objectification, of the existential tedium of work, and of the disorientation produced by living in a world where what is genuine and what is performance are difficult to disentangle.
Never Flinch, by Stephen King (Scribner). This propulsive novel follows a police detective and a private eye—Holly Gibney, a character who appears in several other King novels—as they search for a killer who has announced that he will slay fourteen people to avenge the death of a man who was murdered in prison after having been framed. The investigators’ hunt occurs at the same time that an outspoken feminist activist discovers she is being pursued by a stalker while on a national book tour, for which she has employed Gibney as a bodyguard. As the stories begin to converge, King’s narrative can sometimes seem too tidy, but his pacing remains unmatched.
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Theater Kid, by Jeffrey Seller (Simon & Schuster). Seller, the producer of such lauded musicals as “Rent,” “In the Heights,” and “Hamilton,” chronicles his path from Michigan to Broadway in this graceful memoir. Seller, the adopted son of a mother who worked night shifts at a drugstore and a father whose jobs included circus clown, traces the arc of his life, from discovering his homosexuality at the onset of the AIDS epidemic to working at his own theatre agency. He is bracingly forthright about the harsh realities of the industry, as when he mentions a producer who was more upset about a star losing his voice than about a promoter who had just died by suicide.
The Invention of Design, by Maggie Gram (Basic). In this blend of history and polemic, Gram argues that the design industry has become a handmaiden of capitalism. In well-crafted profiles of notable designers, including the ceramicist Eva Zeisel and the New Deal-era techno-utopian Walter Teague, Gram shows how contemporary design, whose roots she places in the Industrial Revolution, has evolved beyond simple aesthetic considerations into a “megaconcept” combining notions of “beauty, function, problem solving, human-centeredness, experience, even thinking itself.” She celebrates the designers she profiles, but her message—that we can’t design our way out of structural problems, like the climate crisis—is bleak.
