Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart. Mixing hilarity with poignancy, Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story) delivers a tale for our times - a chaotic cross-country road trip set during the craziness of the 2016 presidential campaign.  

Narcissistic, self-deluded, and ultra-rich hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen is thrown into a midlife crisis, both by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son's diagnosis of autism. Forsaking his wealth and family, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of his old college sweetheart and a simpler, more romantic life that he imagines he'll find with her. He leaves behind his super-smart wife, Seema - a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth - with her own demons to face.  

 

Shteyngart's characters are flawed but worth rooting for, and the novel has attracted early praise, especially from fellow writers like Richard Ford, who wrote, "In Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly: its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity."   

 

 

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King. Those of you lucky enough to have seen the documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? already know what a cool guy Fred Rogers was. This first full-length biography of the TV icon draws on original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents to trace Rogers's personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work. And while nostalgia for simpler times, especially within the boomer generation, may explain some of his rediscovered appeal, King's book makes clear that Rogers was a legitimate trailblazer. He was adamant about making a show that engaged children, not pandered to them, and in later years, Neighborhood scripts were written in collaboration with experts on childhood development. Rogers wasn't a perfect person, but his commitment to and understanding of kids' emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being is unquestioned. I wish he were my neighbor.