Generally it seems preferable not to read too much about a book before reading it, but Jesmyn Ward’s Vanity Fair profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the occasion of the publication of his first novel, The Water Dancer, is an exception. The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World) Yet somehow she herself waxes mighty funny over 373 pages of marital bust-up. As Brodesser-Akner herself has tweeted, the big D makes for uneasy art-the writer has said she couldn’t “fucking take” Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. The “all is not as it seems!” debunking of Don Lemon, the curtain-pullback on the aforementioned Goop, the “get a load of this guy” of Franzen. Like a signature “Taffy” profile, Fleishman shifts between observation and reflection-it’s an amalgam of all the things that make her profiles the rich experiences they are. Now poor old Toby Fleishman gets his turn as he navigates estrangement from his wife, Rachel, and enters his freaky-jeaky post-mature bachelorhood as an unlikely sex object. You likely are familiar with Brodesser-Akner’s writing: Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bradley Cooper, and Jonathan Franzen have all been on the other side of her velvety pen. One of Twitter’s (and the New York Times’s and Time magazine’s and Goop’s and of course now Vanity Fair’s) favorite books of 2019 is Fleishman Is in Trouble, by the grandmaster of the meta-profile, Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Block out time for this one, and for the rest of her oeuvre, if you're lucky enough to be new to it.įleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House) I felt like I was at a reunion-a reunion where people may or may not be running sex-trafficking rings out of Yorkshire, but still! Kate Atkinson is an international treasure: She creates characters with the ease of Agatha Christie, makes narratives out of mysteries and mystery out of narrative (see Life After Life), and has written some of the most memorable scenes and dialogue I've encountered in the past decade. This year brought a new temptation by way of the fifth Brodie novel, Big Sky, which features our favorite ex-policeman, his now teenage son, and an appearance by the winning young sleuth of Good News, Reggie Chase, now working as a detective.

I have to keep Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series on a very high shelf, because if I so much as pick up my copy of When Will There Be Good News? I will ignore work, family, everything until I've reread it (again).

The vanity fair book