Hystopia

SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Adam Hochschild. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.99.) Hochschild, the author of "King Leopold's Ghost," structures this account of the conflict as a collective biography of Americans who fought for the Republican side. He investigates the romantic appeal of the cause and the reasons for its failure. HYSTOPIA, by David Means. (Picador, $18.) In this novel within a novel - framed as a manuscript by a fictional Vietnam veteran, Eugene Allen, written shortly before he committed suicide - John F. Kennedy is entering his third term as president and has founded a program, the Psych Corps, to treat traumatized soldiers. Allen's story centers on two corps agents who have fallen in love and set off to recover a young woman who has been abducted. LOUISA: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, by Louisa Thomas. (Penguin, $18.) Born in London, the woman who married John Quincy Adams lived across Europe with her family, then her diplomat husband, before coming to the United States. These experiences helped set her apart, as did the trove of writing she left behind. Thomas draws on Louisa's memoirs, travelogues and extensive correspondence to offer a rich interior portrait. FOR A LITTLE WHILE: New and Selected Stories, by Rick Bass. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In this collection of tales, humans act on their animal natures, and the natural world is suffused with the holy; in one story, an ice storm and powerful arctic front leads a dog trainer and her client to an encounter with the sublime. As our reviewer, Smith Henderson, put it, Bass, "a master of the short form," writes not only "to save our wild places, but to save what's wild and humane and best within us." YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, by Tom Vanderbilt. (Vintage, $16.95.) Vanderbilt, a journalist, has written a guide to the invisible forces shaping personal preferences - and the companies trying desperately to understand, and profit from, taste. Taste is both contextual and categorical, he argues, leading to a baffling capriciousness in what people like and why. ELIGIBLE, by Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $17.) A retelling of "Pride and Prejudice" unfolds in the Cincinnati suburbs: Liz, a magazine writer in New York, comes home to find her family in disarray, and meets Darcy, now in the guise of a neurosurgeon from San Francisco who is profoundly underwhelmed by the Midwest. Sittenfeld's version seamlessly transplants Jane Austen's story to a modern American setting.

*Starred Review* Having established his literary standing with short stories, Means (The Spot, 2010) delivers his long-anticipated debut novel, a compelling, imaginative alternative-history tale about memory and distress. Now in his third presidential term, John F. Kennedy has survived multiple attempts on his life, flaunting his fearlessness in a series of national wave-by tours. Meanwhile, fresh off the battlefield, Vietnam War vet Eugene Allen pens a speculative tale in which the seemingly immortal Kennedy has founded Psych Corps, a government organization committed to preserving the mental state of soldiers and thus the country by expunging their traumatic memories with drugs and therapy, a process called enfolding. Psych Corps agents must track down veterans who have evaded the procedure, a band of whom are wreaking havoc around the Midwest. One such rebel is Rake, an impulsive murderer who leaves his bloody signature in his wake, dragging along his enfolded partner, Meg, who's not sure how she got into this mess. Another enfoldee, Psych Corps agent Singleton, plays by agency rules until he's off the clock, when his affair with a coworker threatens to reawaken his suppressed memories. By turns disturbing, hilarious, and absurd, Means' novel is also sharply penetrating in its depiction of an America all too willing to bury its past.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2016 Booklist

After four story collections, Means delivers his first novel, and it's a dazzling and singular trip. The novel within this novel is flanked by interviews, editorial clarifications, and multiple attempts at a suicide note by "author" Eugene Allen, a Vietnam vet who reconciles the death of his sister by writing the story of three wounded Vietnam vets and two wounded women connected by repressed-or "enfolded"-trauma. Returning vets have their traumas-and all other associated memories-erased by the Psych Corps, a federal agency created by J.F.K., who has survived six assassination attempts and three terms in office as the 1960s draw to a brutal close. Rake, on whom the enfolding treatment didn't work, frees Meg from Corps treatment and keeps her captive on a murderous rampage across Michigan. They take shelter with fellow vet Hank, who has partially reversed his enfolding treatment and quietly plots to save Meg from Rake. Meanwhile, drug-addled Corps agents Wendy and Singleton embark on a "mission gone haywire" in pursuit of Rake. The two narratives alternate between briefly disorienting perspective shifts but eventually converge. Means (The Spot) writes stunning prose and draws his characters with verve-Rake is a memorable psychopath. This tale reads like an acid flashback, complete with the paranoia, manic monologues, and violent visions, proving that some traumas never go away. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.