Shakespeare is ThirtyRory Loughnane (Princeton). Who was Shakespeare before he became the Shakespeare of “Hamlet” and “King Lear”? Loughnane considers the inevitability of the most famous British writer by focusing on the Bard’s early life, when he was still a “relative nobody.” Alongside a nuanced picture of the poet-playwright’s upbringing, marriage, and professional beginnings, a simultaneous portrait of Elizabethan England emerges: a place of recurring plague, political instability, bitter literary squabbles, and a nascent theater culture. Loughnane emphasizes the practice of collaborative playwriting, a common technique from which Shakespeare moved away as his art developed.
Almost AnimalBy Amy Irvine (Spiegel and Grau). This memoir begins in Salt Lake City, the night the author, whose family has lived in Utah for six generations, went into labor. Up to that point, Irvine writes, he had spent “his entire life trying to take off or escape.” Being a mother limits this tendency; This also leads to postpartum depression, according to Irvine. When she moves to a Colorado plain with her husband and daughter, she encounters the unruly ways of the wilderness, invasive creatures (a bear, black widows) and strange diseases that afflict her young child. She wonders whether her increasingly isolated female Mormon ancestors similarly felt “an unshakable sense that they were an exotic species imported from a very different habitat.”