Thought Process
BOOKSHELF
Recent Releases MonkTime Leon Lee Dorsey ’81 JAZZ AVENUE 1 RECORDS
Bassist Leon Lee Dorsey returns to recording after a two-decade hiatus with a new trio—the DSC Band—and an album of eight Thelonious Monk compositions. Dorsey, also an educator (Berklee College of Music in
There is No Other Rhiannon Giddens ’00
Last Day Domenica Ruta ’01
NONESUCH RECORDS
SPIEGEL & GRAU
Boston) and an accomplished composer and arranger, took an unusual approach to the Monk tunes on MonkTime. “I felt from the start that with the chemistry of this band—there’s no horn and no piano,
The Hundreds Lauren Berlant ’79 and Kathleen Stewart
the two instruments that defined Monk’s sound—we could go to the magical music level,” he says. Midwestrecord.com says MonkTime is “Killer stuff for those just want it from deep in the pocket by real pros.”
How to Two David Soman ’91 P’23
Evvie Drake Starts Over Linda Holmes ’93
PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP
BALLANTINE BOOKS
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Though Rhiannon Giddens is constantly branching out—she had a role on the TV show Nashville (which also featured Will Chase ’92) and can be heard on the soundtrack to the videogame Red Dead Redemption II and her own opera-minded podcast Aria Code —she always returns to her roots. The MacArthur Fellow and 11-time Grammy winner continues with her startlingly prolific output with the album There is No Other, a collaboration with jazz composer Francesco Turrisi. The album, wrote Pitchfork, “doesn’t shine a light on old music; it blocks out the sun entirely, scavenging the darkness for deeper understanding.”
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Domenica Ruta has motherhood on her mind. She is among the editors and contributors to the anthology We Got This (She Writes Press, released in September), which explores the stories of 75 single moms. And her novel, Last Day, was written “in a postpartum fugue state as a new solo mom.” The annual Last Day is the holiday of potential apocalypse, when humanity gathers to anticipate, contemplate, and maybe celebrate, the end of the world. Ruta, whose previous work includes the memoir With or Without You, about being brought up by a drug-addicted, unpredictable mother, must know the feeling. Kirkus called it “a beautiful portrait of humanity in the shadow of a dying Earth.”
The Hundreds is a collection of writing exercises of 100 words— or a multiple of 100 words—with each entry “following out the impact of things.” “The result,” writes Hua Hsu in the New Yorker, “is a strange and captivating book.” Taken together, the entries form a general illustration of affect theory, with which Berlant, a literary scholar at the University of Chicago, has long been associated. Or maybe it just feels that way.
From veteran children’s book author and illustrator Soman, who created the Ladybug Girl series with his wife, Jacky Davis P’23, comes a book about inclusion hidden in a book about counting. Though the book stops at 10, the sweet, playful illustrations show that the number of friends, and the rewards of friendship, are limitless.
The debut novel from NPR pop culture correspondent and the host of the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, Evvie Drake Starts Over tells the tale of a fresh widow (who feels a little bad that she hasn’t lost her step over her husband’s death) and a pitcher for the Yankees (who’s lost his step and wants it back). They find themselves in Evvie’s house in Maine, first as strangers (and thus ideal co-confessors), and then something more. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a satisfying crowd-pleaser.”