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AN HONEST LIVING

by Dwyer Murphy ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2022

More style than substance, but fans of noir fiction will feel right at home.

When a lawyer's investigation leads him into the New York rare book world, he finds himself embroiled in a drama of corruption and lies.

Hired by wealthy Anna Reddick to prove that her husband, whom she’s about to divorce, has been selling her rare books, the unnamed narrator infiltrates the Poquelin Society, “a scholarly society dedicated to the art, science and preservation of the book, whatever that meant,” in order to entrap him into a “controlled buy.” This seemingly easy job will lead the narrator to a second one that involves a probable suicide wrapped in a convoluted web of impersonation and misdirection and book auctions, and then leads him to a small-time crook who's suddenly hit it big with waterfront development in Brooklyn. The investigation also puts him in the path of an eccentric female novelist who seems to have stepped out of the pages of Hemingway or Chandler with an edgy charm and casual cruelty that only make her more fascinating. The novel is set in 2005, but the style and the narrative voice feel comfortably rooted in earlier decades. The self-conscious tone and the nostalgia—characters go see old movies and talk about old books—render the plot almost secondary to the setting. In the end, not that much happens, but the characters live and love and fight and die against a backdrop of New York City, its seasons and its landmarks, its underbelly and its flaws. The lawyer/detective ends his quest a little more jaded, a little sadder than he began. To quote a movie that is frequently invoked here, “Forget it…it’s Chinatown.” A bittersweet love letter to New York and times gone by.

Pub Date: July 26, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-59-348924-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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by Dwyer Murphy

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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by Kathy Reichs

EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE

by Benjamin Stevenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2023

This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.

In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.

In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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by Benjamin Stevenson

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Cosmopolitan Chaos: Dwyer Murphy on “An Honest Living”

By jonathan lee september 13, 2022.

An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

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‘An Honest Living’: A modern noir

Readers don’t need to go back in time to read about a corrupted and confusing world.

A National Book Award-winning novelist announces her intention to write something altogether different. Previously, she’s published “strange books that defied any attempt at coherent recollection or summary. Odd, staccato books full of people with contradictory motives and destructive wishes.” Now, she wants to kill off a character on the first page, “like a crime novel.” “There’s something to be said for that kind of efficiency,” she proclaims. “It’s decisive.” So long, literary longueurs; hello, streamlined suspense fiction.

This is one of many delightfully meta passages in Dwyer Murphy’s debut crime/literary novel, “ An Honest Living .” Murphy has earned this self-reflexivity. Editor in chief of the website “CrimeReads,” he knows not just where the bodies are buried but how readers want them to be discovered.

The novel opens in 2005 with a request from a woman to our narrator — a once-successful but now drifting NYC attorney who enjoys playing the role of “the eccentric washout” and might be named Dwyer Murphy. (His name is never given, though we’re told that Dwight Murphy is “only off by a few letters.”) The woman, named Anna Reddick, offers the narrator $10,000 in cash to catch her about-to-be-divorced husband, an antiquarian book collector, trying to sell rare pamphlets that belong to her family.

This is a shady proposal to begin with. After the “controlled buy” is done, things get shadier. It turns out that the woman isn’t in fact Anna Reddick, just someone pretending to be her. The real Anna Reddick, the aforementioned award-winning novelist who writes under the penname A.M. Byrne, claims no knowledge of the setup and threatens to sue the narrator. Anna’s husband, Newton Reddick, soon goes missing. Anna’s father, Liam Moore, is a vulgar, penny-ante real estate developer. He plays at being richer than he really is (sound familiar?) and is trying to get in on waterfront development in gentrifying Brooklyn.

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Somehow, this all fits together. Or maybe it doesn’t. In noir, that’s often the driving question: Are the patterns I see around me the workings of power and corruption or just the workings of my paranoid imagination? “An Honest Living” is filled with noir tropes: mistaken identities; forged manuscripts; fenced goods; coffee at diners and bodegas and train stations; a city whose “small, dying shops” and “ghostly vistas” are about to be rezoned and spun into staggering wealth, if only you can jam your snout into the trough.

At one point, the narrator goes to a screening of the 1958 film classic “Touch of Evil.” Afterward, our almost-contemporary Phillip Marlowe smokes a joint and considers “the way nothing that happened in [the movie] was done naturally and all the characters seemed to know they were in a movie only there was nothing they could do about it.” That’s how things tend to happen to noir characters: with the sense that they’re caught up in a plot beyond their control or ken. It isn’t long before the narrator realizes that his own life is beginning to resemble the plot of “Chinatown.” He checks the movie out of the library: “It was better than I remembered, quieter, lit in interesting ways, and not too much seemed to happen.”

Murphy’s sentences move quickly but his plot unfolds with great leisure. After the opening rush, not too much seems to happen here, either. Indeed, noirs are rarely ever about whodunnit. (Just try to reconstruct who did what to whom in Chandler’s “The Little Sister” or Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” I’ll wait.) Rather, they’re about creating a certain kind of atmosphere: an all-encompassing environment that is corrupted and bewildering, in which subjectivity bleeds into, and is shaped by, the world around it, where cynicism about the future is cut by sentimentality about the past.

Anna Reddick/A.M. Byrne gets it wrong when she declares that she’s leaving the literary behind for the decisive efficiency of the crime novel. As Murphy well knows, the crime novel is anything but efficient. I can rarely remember the ending of a good detective novel, but I can almost always remember its texture, the feeling it evoked and the atmosphere it placed me within. In other words, the crime novel lives by its literary effects. (Just as Murphy piles up the noir tropes, he includes elements familiar to readers of literary fiction, from a character who names himself after the protagonist of Roberto Bolaño’s “ The Savage Detectives” to a wonderfully weird cameo by fictionalized versions of the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg and her partner, the playwright Wallace Shawn.)

“An Honest Living” resolves some of its plot mysteries but not all of them. It introduces us to various worlds-within-worlds — the antiquarian book trade; big city law firms — but refuses to neatly tie them all together. The novel concludes, no spoiler here, with this sentence: “I closed my eyes and in the wind was a trace of salt.” This is the way a good noir ends: not with a plot but with a vibe.

AN HONEST LIVING

By Dwyer Murphy

Viking, 288 pages, $26

Anthony Domestico is chair of the literature department at Purchase College, SUNY, the books columnist for “Commonweal,” and the author of “ Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period .”

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• About the Book

A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it.

After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with $10,000 in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick --- a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy --- lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs and seedy real estate developers. 

Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling, AN HONEST LIVING is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

Audiobook available, read by Ari Fliakos

An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

• Publication Date: July 4, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Mystery , Noir
• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• ISBN-10: 0593489268
• ISBN-13: 9780593489260

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An Honest Living: A Novel

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters . . . Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly . ” —The New York Times Book Review

A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of  CrimeReads  in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the  real  Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers. Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling,  An Honest Living  is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

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An Honest Living

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It seemed at the time like the easiest money a person could make. The next day I typed a declaration and affidavit, attached Reddick’s handwritten, signed offer sheet as exhibit A, and emailed the documents to Shannon Rebholz at Rebholz and Kahn, Anna Reddick’s attorney for the divorce. Later that week, a courier showed up at my door with a sealed manila envelope. Inside was some fine stationery and another roll of hundred-­dollar bills, fifty of them. Together with the retainer, that made fifteen thousand dollars. Not a bad haul for a few hours of work. I put most of it under the mattress and promised myself I would look into the bond market straight away. With what was left, I treated Ulises Lima to a steak dinner at Peter Luger’s. I wanted to thank him for sending me such a brief, surprisingly lucrative case. He ordered the porterhouse with a baked potato and toward the end of the meal, after we’d both drunk a good deal, he was hell-­bent on making a toast. It started out as a toast about loyalty and friendship and ended with him talking about Jorge Luis Borges and his early poetry, how truly awful it was, so awful it must have been part of a long con the great man was playing on the Argentines. We spent the rest of the meal trying to figure out what the con could have been, whether it involved a fake encyclopedia like the Codex Seraphinianus or a pack of gauchos. It was one of those nights. We were happy and well fed. The work had come easily, without either of us having to search for it.

Ulises was probably my closest friend in the city at that point, but if you had asked me how we first met, I couldn’t have told you. He claimed it was in a bookshop on the Lower East Side, a place that sold paperback mysteries and anarchist literature, but he couldn’t remember the name. He had me confused with somebody else. New York was full of small, dying shops then and it could have just as easily been a record store or a luncheonette or a news kiosk. Ulises had a good, sharp mind that was always misremembering things. That was what made him a poet, he would tell you. If he had wanted to recall things in the order they occurred he would have become a detective or a lab assistant. Memories were speculative. That was his theory, anyway, and it all tied back to Borges’s poetry in a roundabout way and to some of the lesser-­read works of Roberto Bolaño, another writer Ulises admired. Bolaño died two years before, in Barcelona somewhere, supposedly of liver failure. Since then he had become fairly popular and you would sometimes see people on the subway trying to read one of his books in the original Spanish, especially 2666, the novel he wrote while waiting on a new liver that never arrived. It was all pretty inconvenient for Ulises, who had named himself after one of Bolaño’s characters. He had done it back when he first arrived in New York and had been counting on the reference remaining obscure for a long while, possibly forever. His real name was Juan Andres Henriquez Houry. Everyone called him Ulises. He had friends all over the city, a lot of unusual, interesting people.

After the steaks we went to Fortaleza Café and kept on talking about work. The regular crowd was there. Some of them Ulises knew and others were people I had done jobs for in the past, acquaintances and neighbors and the woman who ran the bakery on Graham Avenue, who the summer before had wanted to trademark a drawing of the blue stove her grandmother passed down to her, a simple case that only required a filing with the Patent and Trademark Office and earned me a lot of free muffins for a time. Warm, unruly muffins overflowing with berries. She was wearing a baggy sweater and dancing with another woman. I thought I recognized the other woman. Possibly she was a colleague from the bakery. The ends of her sleeves, around the wrists, were dusted with confectioners’ sugar. It was just after eleven and Fortaleza brought in music during the week. They didn’t charge anything at the door, they only passed around a hat. You could ignore the hat if you wanted, but Miss Daniela, who owned and managed the café and who may or may not have come from Fortaleza—I never checked—would be sitting at the bar, watching who contributed and who didn’t. Plenty didn’t, but I never saw them there again.

“You two are always working,” Miss Daniela said, when Ulises and I were sitting at the bar. She was three stools down, watching the band, which was a guitar, a drum, and a singer performing samba. Whenever a train passed overhead, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, the band would speed up the tempo and play louder as the rattling of the tracks and the bridge’s undergirding tried to drown them out but never managed to. It was all done very naturally. They played there every Thursday night, the same band, from around nine o’clock until midnight.

Miss Daniela changed stools to get a little closer. Closer to Ulises and to the band.

Ulises told her what we were discussing. The Newton Reddick case. Borges. Divorce. She hadn’t really thought we were working—it was all a joke. She liked to tease Ulises. They were neighbors, she used to say, her from Brazil and him from Venezuela, they shared a border, why not a bed now and again, for laughs, for fun, for exercise? She wore her hair in great, old-­fashioned hives wrapped with silk scarves. In the prior year she had been fined twice for violating the city’s cabaret laws. The cabaret laws in New York were like nowhere else in the country, maybe in the world. You could only dance in a few places around town, in clubs and in the old discos, several of which were still hanging on thanks to the dancing. The fines weren’t too exorbitant, but they added up for a small place like Fortaleza, which had only ten tables, the barstools, and a kitchen out back with four burners. The city used to send plainclothes officers around on weeknights looking for violators. The cabaret laws had been designed to keep Latin and Black neighborhoods under thumb. It was enough to make a businesswoman paranoid, especially one who brought in music, samba no less. But Miss Daniela couldn’t bear to have her place any other way. I told her the next time she was fined I would fight it out for her, pro bono. She asked if Ulises would come along for the fight, pro bono, and he said that he would try, he would be honored to do it, but you can’t fight city hall. That was something he had heard once.

“You know, I’ve divorced five men,” Miss Daniela said. “Two in Brazil, three here. Every one a class act. Didn’t take anything that was mine. Didn’t hire lawyers. Just signed the papers when I brought them by. If I saw them on Sundays at church, they all tipped their hats.”

“You chose good men to divorce,” I said.

“You have to. You have to think about how it’s going to end.”

“You should have been a litigator. That’s the same thing they teach us.”

“Lawyers don’t dance,” she said. “No music, no dancing. Just fines, tickets, divorces.”

She had us all figured out. Even still, she asked if I wanted to dance with her.

“What about the fines?” I asked.

“I got my lawyer right here,” she said. She was patting Ulises on the shoulder, flirting, though he wasn’t listening to us anymore. He was talking to the waitress, a woman he knew who was a few decades younger than Miss Daniela, but what did she know about starting a marriage or carrying through a divorce? We went down to the end of the bar, Miss Daniela and I, where there was just enough space to dance between the service area and where the band was set up. The J train passed overhead and the rhythm quickened and I had no hope of keeping pace, though I worked up a good sweat trying. Miss Daniela moved gracefully. In the air you could smell the cheese balls they were always cooking and pushing out to accompany the sugary drinks. Afterward I dropped a twenty in the hat. It was a lot more than I was used to tipping, but we were celebrating the end of a good case. That was my reasoning as I dropped the bill in and watched the hat disappear.

“Twenty bucks,” Miss Daniela said. “You think I’m getting fined tonight?”

I told her I didn’t know. Nobody could know a thing like that.

“We got any police here?” she asked. “What do you see?”

“No,” I said. “They’re all at the policeman’s ball.”

“What’s that?”

“The Benevolent Brothers’ Christmas Ball. They have it every December.”

“And none of them dancing? That’s some party.”

Maybe they did dance. I didn’t know anything about it. I hardly knew any police. Lawyers are meant to cultivate friends in the department but I could never quite bring myself to do it. I knew some FBI people, task-­force lawyers, but none of them danced, not that I ever saw. I was making up the policeman’s ball, inventing it, though it sounded like something they would do, carpooling in from Staten Island and Long Island with their wives, then driving home plastered, running into deer, and the next day, in the morning, seeing blood on their fenders or the edges of their windshields and wondering what they’d done, asking their wives, who didn’t know, calling their union reps to make sure it could be kept quiet and that nobody had reported any accidents. No, I had never seen the point of hanging around police stations trying to make a lot of friends.

“No more divorces for you,” Miss Daniela said. “You’re not cut out for that, okay?”

I agreed with her though probably we had different reasons for thinking so.

Ulises and I stayed until close and walked the waitress home, the woman he knew who was covering all ten tables by herself, working like mad, bringing around all the drinks and also the cheese balls, which were called pão de queijo. Her name was Gloria Almeida and she lived on North Eleventh, by the brewery, nearly half a mile out of the way but it didn’t matter, we wanted to see her home. There was snow in the forecast that night, but it hadn’t started falling

__________________________________

From An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy. Used with permission of the publisher, Viking. Copyright 2022 by Dwyer Murphy.

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Publisher's summary

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters . . . Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly . ”— The New York Times Book Review , Editors’ Choice

• A Best Book of the Year from The New Yorker , LitHub , CrimeReads , and more!

A sharp and stylish debut from the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads in which an unwitting private eye gets caught up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive literary superstar and her bookseller husband, paying homage to the noir genre just as smartly as it reinvents it

After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers.

Set against the backdrop of New York at the tail end of the analog era and immersed in the worlds of literature and bookselling, An Honest Living is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Critic reviews

“It is precisely style and atmosphere that give An Honest Living so much electricity and dimension. Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom bitten characters . . . Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly. For those who demand a straightforward mystery without any humor, romance and ambience, well, forget it, Jake, it’s literature. ” — The New York Times Book Review , Editors’ Choice

“Set amid New York’s rare-book trade, this slow-burning début crime novel is also an atmospheric homage to the film Chinatown .” — The New Yorker

“Murphy’s engrossing debut is a book made for summer reading. It’s a smart, leisurely read, richly layered with movie references and philosophical reflections.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

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In April 1945, The Nazis, reeling and near defeat, frantically work to hide the huge store of art treasures that Hitler has looted from Europe. Truck convoys loaded with the cultural wealth of the Western world pour in an unending stream into the compound of the vast Altaussee salt mine high in the Austrian Alps. But with the Allies closing in, the vaunted efficiency of the Nazis has broken down. At Altaussee, all is tumult and confusion.

Whiny protagonist & awful narration

• By teddy on 06-11-21

The Eighth Commandment

By: Lawrence Sanders

• Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel
• Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 44
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 44

When the Damaretion, the prized Greek coin from Archibald Havistock's collection, disappears and appraiser Mary Lou "Dunk" Bateson comes under suspicion, Bateson, a cop, and an insurance investigator set out to solve the crime.

It was a nice listen

• By John on 10-01-12

By: T. Jefferson Parker

• Narrated by: David Colacci
• Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 99

My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am 29 years old. I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector.

• By Robert E. Orlando on 01-01-14

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

By: Dinaw Mengestu

• Narrated by: Dion Graham
• Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 170
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 140
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 140

Ethiopian émigré Dinaw Mengestu is a skilled observer of people who offers a colorful debut work of fiction. Insightful and swiftly paced, this novel evokes past and present in the course of its compelling narrative. It's the `70s, and one D.C. neighborhood is undergoing big changes. In the mix is Ethiopian grocery owner Sepha Stephanos - a man with a complex past who fled his homeland after seeing his father brutalized by themilitary. He hopes for new prospects in D.C.'s gentrification process.

Great book, wonderful reader

• By Lisbeth on 11-22-11

Insomniac City

• New York, Oliver, and Me

By: Bill Hayes

• Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
• Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 177
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 164
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 162

Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at 48 years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.

Touching and Intimate Portrait

• By Amazon Customer on 01-18-19

Crewel World

By: Monica Ferris

• Narrated by: Susan Boyce
• Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 1,007
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 909
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 905

When Betsy Devonshire arrived in Excelsior, Minnesota, all she wanted was to visit her sister Margot and get her life in order. She never dreamed her sister would give her a place to stay and a job at her needlecraft shop. In fact, things had never looked so good - until Margot was murdered. In a town this friendly, it's hard to imagine who could have committed such a horrible act, but Betsy has a few ideas. There's an ex-employee who wants to start her own needlework store. And there's the landlord who wanted Margot out. Now Betsy's putting together a list of motives and suspects....

British style mystery set in America

• By Sara on 01-13-14

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

By: Sloan Wilson

• Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
• Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 107
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 89
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 90

Here is the story of Tom and Betsy Rath, a young couple with everything going for them: three healthy children, a nice home, a steady income. They have every reason to be happy, but for some reason they are not. Like so many young men of the day, Tom finds himself caught up in the corporate rat race - what he encounters there propels him on a voyage of self-discovery that will turn his world inside out.

great read/listen

• By BBJ on 09-26-16

The Book of Air and Shadows

By: Michael Gruber

• Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
• Length: 18 hrs and 52 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 523
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 186
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 186

Jake Mishkin's seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer (or killers) unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for 400 years.

Not your average story.

• By Nicholas Winn on 06-02-07

• 87th Precinct Series, Book 1

By: Ed McBain

• Narrated by: Dick Hill
• Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 467
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 414
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 411

When a sniper begins gunning down cops from the 87th Precinct in cold blood, it’s up to Detective Steve Carella to solve the case. With three cops already dead, Carella delves into the city’s underworld to search for the killer.

Dang, it's about time for the 87th Precinct

• By Eric J. Toll on 05-17-14

The Talented Mr. Ripley

By: Patricia Highsmith

• Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
• Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 3,631
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,206
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 3,209

In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal, but he grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante.

Patricia, Phil, and Pathology

• By Mel on 04-24-13

What listeners say about An Honest Living

• 3.5 out of 5 stars 3.7 out of 5.0
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.4 out of 5.0
• 3.5 out of 5 stars 3.4 out of 5.0

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Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

• Overall 3 out of 5 stars
• Performance 3 out of 5 stars
• Story 3 out of 5 stars

• Nicole Hurtado Docati

The beginning of the story was very engaging and the reading had a great tone and pace.

The story has a very anticlimactic ending, however the reading was very good. Would recommend this reader maybe not the author.

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• Performance 5 out of 5 stars

A noir homage. Or maybe pastiche. You decide.

I picked it up on a whim. I like noir. But this... it was something else. An homage. Or maybe a pastiche. To be honest, it was hard to say. I'm all for mystery, but it starts to get tedious. Maybe this was a book where nothing happens and people are just talking all the time going off into the woods. Is it Chinatown? Or maybe some Conrad story we're stuck in. Who knows? I wasn't sure I was following the story. Not sure I wanted to know. It was a long story that hung together pretty loosely. The man's confession was wrapped in his own skin. There was a great deal more to the story but I couldn't remember all the details. I needed a drink. Deserved one for finishing. Didn't we all?

• Overall 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 4 out of 5 stars

A True Noir

There’s a disaffected narrator, a damsel in distress who may or may not have a secret, a crime (or two), enough dry observations to make you reach for a cool drink, and even a fat man. Beautifully read.

1 person found this helpful

Promising start, failed to deliver

The narrator was the perfect choice for this novel. He did an excellent job. The story got off to a wonderful start, it was very well written with several interesting threads. The last third of the novel was a huge disappointment. All those threads were left dangling. Quite frankly, the ending baffled me. It made no sense, answered no questions, and generally insulted the listener who had hung in for the whole book. I feel cheated and that I wasted my time.

3 people found this helpful

• Story 2 out of 5 stars

writing style great, performance great, story overall flat and lacking...just kept thinking there had to be more

• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

A thoroughly enjoyable listen

Mr. Murphy’s prose is nicely balanced and sharply executed. I found his attention to detail about the gritty beauty of life in NYC and Brooklyn so gratifyingly rendered. The overall tone is slightly sardonic without being embittered or dark, and i found the protagonist to be relatable and likable. The author takes us into the world of his characters while letting the characters develop in the slow and subtle unfolding of an old-fashioned crime story— no overdramatized hyperbole, just a keen eye for both the facts and ambiguities of life and human nature, with a dash of mystery thrown in. The narration is excellent, nicely paced and moderated, with just the right combination of warmth and irony. This is a great first venture into crime noir for the author, and i hope there will be sequels to come.

• Katherine F.

Very enjoyable

Expertly read, well written. The book references and lightly mirrors Chinatown - I was eager to restart listening throughout. Not as tight as a standard whodunnit, but that somehow made it more likable, not less.

Great narrator no plot

If you like NYC you might like this gritty travelogue but that’s all it is. No big mystery or even plot

• Overall 1 out of 5 stars
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 1 out of 5 stars

• Amazon Customer

Disappointing

This story was lacking in any kind of finality as well as any real plot. Had I realized it was over when it was, I would have stopped listening, and gotten my money back. Read something else.

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An Honest Living: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Staff Reviews

This modern update on the pulpy detective story is as clever as it is enthralling. Following a lawyer who finds himself drawn into the shady underworld of antique book sales, along the way he encounters messy marriages, nefarious schemes, vast conspiracies, colorful characters, and twists and turns aplenty. Masterfully subverting many genre clichés, this title is sure to appease any and all mystery fans.

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• Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Private Investigators
• Fiction / Noir
• Fiction / Literary

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The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on May 6 in New York City. Read our reviews of this year's winning works of fiction, general nonfiction, history, biography, and memoir and autobiography.

Night Watch

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

King: A Life

Master Slave Husband Wife: An American Love Story

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice

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An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries 1st Edition

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An exiled professor’s journey from inside and beyond academe In the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that, too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career for an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus―a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, pro­fessional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school― An Honest Living describes the author’s decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern. Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs―Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut [AUB] ―ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought. Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was expelled: an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author’s decade of professional joys and travails.

• ISBN-10 1531506356
• ISBN-13 978-1531506353
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Fordham University Press
• Publication date March 5, 2024
• Language English
• Dimensions 6 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
• Print length 178 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fordham University Press; 1st edition (March 5, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 178 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1531506356
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1531506353
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
• #101 in Educator Biographies
• #6,567 in Memoirs (Books)
• #20,410 in Politics & Social Sciences (Books)

About the author

Steven salaita.

I'm currently the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut. My latest book is Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. I tweet here: @stevesalaita

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Soulful singer Michael McDonald looks back in his new memoir, ‘What a Fool Believes’

FILE - Michael McDonald, of the Doobie Brothers, poses for a portrait at Show Biz Studios in Los Angeles on Aug. 17, 2021. McDonald has a new memoir titled, “What a Fool Believes.” (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

This cover image released by Dey Street shows “What a Fool Believes” by Michael McDonald with Paul Reiser. (Dey Street via AP)

FILE - Tom Johnston, from left, Michael McDonald, John McFee and Pat Simmons of the Doobie Brothers appear with the ASCAP Voice of Music Award at the 32nd Annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards in Los Angeles on April 29, 2015. McDonald has a new memoir titled “What a Fool Believes.” (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Something stopped Michael McDonald from telling his story publicly — him. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer with multiple Grammys just didn’t think he had one.

McDonald, a member of both Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers who became a singular soul solo artist with such hits as “On My Own″ and “Sweet Freedom,” believed he was just a small player in the history of rock.

“I was afraid that, ‘Well, how much of a story is here, really?’ My experience is pretty much me living vicariously through other people’s accomplishments,” McDonald said in an interview.

Prodded by a friend — actor and comedian Paul Reiser — McDonald is finally owning his story this spring in the unvarnished and humble memoir “What a Fool Believes,” out May 21.

It’s the portrait of a remarkable singer-songwriter who had career highs and terrible lows, who battled alcoholism and self-doubt, endured popularity, mocking and then rejuvenation.

“I think we both discovered that this is really just a story about how random life really is — no matter how much we think we have a plan, and no matter how much we think we have a direction we want to go,” he said. “What we really have to do is be ready to let life change on a dime and go with the flow.”

Reiser said in a separate interview that the book grew from conversations the two had, mainly him asking lots of questions about McDonald’s life. “It’s entirely selfish. I just wanted to read it,” Reiser said.

“Everybody’s in awe of his voice. Everybody loves the music he’s done. But I don’t think anybody knows anything about him,” he added. “He just sort of floats on this frequency that doesn’t get a lot of attention.”

The book opens in 1971 with the author hungover in county jail. A 19-year-old McDonald has been arrested after falling asleep in a pancake house following a 48-hour cocaine- and Jack Daniels-binge. It is a foreshadowing.

It then goes chronologically, tracing the path McDonald took from humble roots in St. Louis, Missouri, to touring around the world with two classic rock outfits despite a “propensity for making poor choices.”

McDonald went from his first band at 12 playing picnics and civic events with a homemade guitar, to the local pro band Jerry Jay and the Sheratons and then the touring The Delrays. At 18, RCA Records gave him $3,000 and flew him to Los Angeles, but his debut album was scrapped and he was dropped from the label. “My quickly rising star came crashing down to earth,” he writes.

Tom Johnston, from left, Michael McDonald, John McFee and Pat Simmons of the Doobie Brothers on April 29, 2015. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)

He would return to California a few months later — by car this time — with a more secure offer of session work. “I was determined not to return to St Louis until I had something to show for my efforts,” he writes.

His career took an upswing when he was asked to sing backing vocals and play keys for Steely Dan. His distinctive, soulful voice graced memorable tracks on classic Steely Dan albums, including “Katy Lied,” “The Royal Scam,” “Aja” and “Gaucho.” (That’s him singing background on “Peg.”)

When Steely Dan stopped touring, McDonald jumped to another ‘70s icon, The Doobie Brothers. In 1975 — on the eve of the release of their fifth album — their original lead singer, Tom Johnston, was hospitalized and unable to tour. The band drafted McDonald into the line-up to replace him, giving him 48- hours to learn their entire set.

McDonald was asked to join the Doobies permanently — $1,500 a week plus a $100 per diem — and would become somewhat divisive for changing their direction from country rock and blues boogie to a smoother, more soulful sound.

“There was an undeniable atmosphere of internal strife building within our ranks. And I will be the first to claim my share of the blame in that department,” McDonald writes.

McDonald isn’t shy about showing life’s ugly parts — from having crabs as a young man to acid reflux as an older one. He admits to showing up drunk to a rehab support group two days in a row and once could be found in a bathrobe, a joint in his mouth and a salad bowl full of Lucky Charms on his chest.

“If you’re going to tell a story, tell the whole story,” he says in the interview. “We all get where we’re going in spite of ourselves, you know? And I think that’s what the story is kind of about.”

Musicians who read the book will get lessons in touring etiquette and songwriting, including hyper-specific details like chromatically descending II-V passing chord progressions.

Fans will also get stories about playing basketball with James Taylor and some good advice about opening for Cher: “Generally speaking, when you see some guy all made up in a Cher wig and gown standing on a chair giving you the finger, it’s time to go.”

McDonald poses for a portrait in Los Angeles on Aug. 17, 2021. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

In addition to his solo albums, McDonald sang on songs by Elton John, Luther Vandross, Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross (That’s McDonald singing “Such a long way to go” on Cross’ “Ride Like the Wind.”) He earned a Grammy nod for “Sweet Freedom” from the movie “Running Scared” and teamed up with James Ingram on “Yah Mo B There” and Patti LaBelle on “On My Own.”

Eventually, McDonald became a butt of jokes for his propensity to show up on other artists’ tracks. “No one wanted to hear another Michael McDonald background vocal — I had dipped into that well perhaps once too often, somewhere between 50 and a thousand times,” he writes.

Redemption occurred in the 2000s when McDonald began issuing well-received albums of Motown covers. He recorded with Solange Knowles and Grizzly Bear and showed up at the Coachella festival in 2017 with the jazz-funk bassist Thundercat.

McDonald, 72, says that writing the book gave him the chance to look back and let go of resentments to people he long perceived as standing in his way. “I probably owe those people more than I have a reason to hold a grudge,” he says.

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) charts his process — as a writer, reader and for living life

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And Then? And Then? What Else?

By Daniel Handler Liveright: 240 pages, $26.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission form Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

To begin, a confession: I’ve never read much Lemony Snicket, neither the 13-book sequence “A Series of Unfortunate Events” nor the four-volume follow-up, “All the Wrong Questions.” This is not a matter of aesthetics but pragmatics. When my kids were young, their tastes ran in other directions: Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, “Twilight.” Although we read “The Bad Beginning” and perhaps part of “The Reptile Room” — I can’t remember — they never warmed to the author’s gothic sensibilities or allusive style.

This, I fully accept, represents a parental failing on my part.

Let me admit, too, that I had a little difficulty at first with “And Then? And Then? What Else?” by Daniel Handler, the writer behind the Snicket franchise — “aka Lemony Snicket,” he identifies himself on the cover. This has to do with the nature of the writing, which can feel diffuse before it grows into one of the enduring charms of the book. The reason? “And Then? And Then? What Else?” is a bit of a grab bag, starting in the middle and ending in the middle, while telling a series of stories that both connect and overlap.

That something similar might be said of the Lemony Snicket novels is the whole idea. Handler is skilled and nuanced as a writer, with a developed voice and point of view. He has never fit the categories, so why would we expect him to start here?

As an example, there’s the question of form or genre. “And Then? And Then? What Else?” comes positioned as a memoir, but that’s not quite accurate. Neither is “craft book,” although there are a lot of notes on craft. More accurately, it’s what I want to label a process book, walking us through the author’s process as writer and reader. It is also a book that means to tell us how to make a life.

Handler gets at this from the outset: “What am I doing?” the book begins. It’s not a rhetorical question but a reflective one, and it opens a line of free association, of opinions and observations, that push back against our expectations. Yes, the author recognizes, we will have preconceptions; how, after all, could we not? Regardless of whether we’ve read the saga of the orphaned Baudelaire children, Handler’s reputation, the work he’s produced, carries its own cultural weight.

Lemony Snicket: ‘a strange writer in whom nobody took any interest’?

April 14, 2014

“I’m hunched over, headphoned,” he explains, describing himself writing on a legal pad in a cafe not far from his San Francisco home, “I look like a lunatic, which is likely the wrong word. It feels right, though.”

There it is, right from the get-go, a conditionality that might feel like a gimmick were it not also true to life. Likely the wrong word but it feels right? Here we get a glimpse of how Handler works. Throughout “And Then? And Then? What Else?” he highlights the tension between thought and feeling, the way we can infer something without fully knowing it. That’s a sensation familiar to every kid who reads “A Series of Unfortunate Events”: What adults are saying and what they’re doing are very different things.

For Handler, such suspicions didn’t disappear with childhood. Early in “And Then? And Then? What Else?” he recalls a party he attended where “real estate and traffic were the mandatory conversation topics,” all the boredom of the grown-up world. Eventually, he met a 6-year-old “and asked him what was up, in the hopes of a better conversation.” The child answered: “Last night I dreamed I was a horse.”

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David L. Ulin had the idea for his pitch-dark new L.A. noir novel, ‘Thirteen Question Method,’ decades ago. But to write it, he had to live it first

Dec. 14, 2023

It’s an instructive anecdote, Handler insists, because children “generally have a firmer grasp on what is interesting to say.” By way of elaboration, he continues: “If you had to sum up lasting literature in a single sentence, you could do worse than ‘I dreamed I was a horse’ — prophetic dreams and animal transformation appear much more frequently in the old epics than, say, which neighborhoods have the best schools.” A perception of the world, in other words, as magical, as inexplicable, as full of wonder, fear and awe. Isn’t this the reason so many of us started reading? Isn’t that what we look for most when we pick up a book?

In “And Then? And Then? What Else?” (the title, fittingly, comes from Baudelaire), Handler returns repeatedly to this notion, whether he’s discussing his books or the details of his life. He is frank without being overly revealing and always seeks out some larger integration, a place where thought and feeling might intersect. As an undergraduate, he suffered from recurring nightmares, populated by ghost-like figures, “naked, bald, painted or powdered white.” The resulting sleep deprivation led to seizures, as well as hallucinations in which these characters began to appear in the waking world.

Or perhaps, Handler conjectures, “hallucinations” is not the proper word. “Nabokov,” he writes, “famously said that reality was ‘one of the few words which means nothing without quotes,’ and this was an idea that kept visiting, bringing me comfort and bliss.”

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What he means is that we never know anything, not truly, and that what we think of as the real world is just another construct, built out of our desires and preconceptions (that word again), as subjective as the angle of our minds. That’s the craft lesson here, and the life lesson also: Be curious. Accept nothing at face value. Why couldn’t the figures from his dream exist — an acceptance that ultimately frees Handler from their influence — even if most of us don’t see them?

Of course, to believe that requires a creative leap. That disposition, that openness leads Handler to an especially acute critique of the pieties of cancel culture, with its distrust of work that some might suggest is “problematic” — a word, he explains, that “describes the entire human condition, which is to say it describes nothing.” Given the subjects and scenarios of his fiction, Handler has found himself in the cross-hairs of various self-appointed cultural guardians on more than one occasion, but while he shares some of those details, that is not what interests him. Rather, it is the question of human personality, human weirdness, which is, as it has ever been, the only source of art.

“The peculiarities of individual works,” he argues, “come from the peculiarities of the individuals who make them. All these peculiarities — all of them — are problematic to somebody or other. Luckily, your own choices about preferences, dictating what you decide to read, are problematic, too.”

If that’s the case, “And Then? And Then? What Else?” counsels, why not opt for joy? This, Handler wants us to understand, is the most important component of storytelling — of reading and writing — and of living too. I keep thinking of the conversation with the 6-year-old at that stultifying party, and the unalloyed pleasure of both the teller and the listener as they discover in the moment their own shared humanity.

“ Last night I dreamed I was a horse . You don’t say. Tell me more.” That is everything and all we need to know.

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.

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Are Plants Intelligent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Salad?

A new book, “The Light Eaters,” looks at how plants sense the world and the agency they have in their own lives.

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By Elizabeth A. Harris

Zoë Schlanger was a reporter covering climate change — a daily onslaught of floods, fires and other natural disasters — when she started wading into botany journals to relax.

There, she found something that surprised her: Researchers were debating whether plants might have an intelligence of their own.

Take corn, for example. It is one of several types of plants that can identify a caterpillar’s species by its saliva and send out plumes of chemical compounds into the air, summoning the insect’s predator. Alerted to the caterpillar’s presence by these compounds, a parasitic wasp arrives and destroys it, protecting the corn.

“One of the big debates is whether or not there’s any form of intention with plants and whether you need intention for something to have intelligence,” Schlanger said. “But one could argue that it doesn’t even matter if you can find intention in plants. What matters is watching what they actually do. And what they do is make decisions in real time and plan for the future.”

Schlanger spent the next several years exploring plant behavior for her book, “The Light Eaters,” which was published this month. On a recent walk through Central Park — past hydrangeas, hellebores, hyacinths and a Broadway softball league game between team “Hamilton” and team “The Lion King” — Schlanger described some of the astonishing things plants can do, and how learning more about them has informed her work reporting on climate change, which she now does for The Atlantic.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What are some surprising things plants can do?

I am most drawn to the ways that plants manipulate animals to their benefit.

Yellow monkey flowers are able to lie to bees about how much pollen they have in their flowers to dupe them into showing up. Bees have this screening process where they’re sampling the volatile chemicals coming off the flowers, and those chemicals will indicate how much pollen is there for them. The monkey flowers have come up with a way to not have to go through the very expensive, energetic work of making all this pollen, but just emitting the volatile chemicals. The bee shows up and there is nothing there for it, but the flower gets pollinated anyway.

Or there’s the whole world of sexually deceptive orchids, which I think is so cool. There are some that grow one really unusual petal: this long strand, with a little bulb at the end of it. Male wasps will arrive and cling to it because it’s exuding almost the exact same pheromone as a female wasp.

I like it when they summon a predator. That’s just crazy.

Back in the ‘90s, researchers realized that corn and tomatoes were able to sample the saliva of the caterpillar eating them, and then synthesize chemicals that summon the exact parasitic wasp that would come and inject the caterpillars with their larva. So the wasp comes, puts loads of larvae inside of the caterpillars. The larvae hatch and eat the caterpillars from the inside out and then glue their cocoons to the outside of the caterpillar. So then you just have these husks of caterpillars, covered in wasp cocoons.

Yeah, it’s a very creepy, bristly image. But the plant is trying to save itself. It’s eliminating a certain number of these caterpillars by summoning the exact predator to come destroy them. You can think of that as a plant using a tool. I mean, I don’t know about your feed, but mine is full of videos of things like crows using sticks as tools.

The algorithm has found you!

Absolutely. And obviously these crows are brilliant for doing that, but then what does it mean when plants are doing essentially the same thing, but to living organisms? They’re releasing chemicals that cause an animal to do something. Does that animal believe it’s doing this of its own free will? Is this a zombification of other animals, or is it more of a collaborative mutual exchange where the wasp gets something out of it? It’s hard to tell the difference between manipulation and collaboration in nature.

When scientists talk about “intelligence” in plants, what do they mean?

There are all of these calculations plants are constantly making by taking in every aspect of their environment and adjusting their lives accordingly, and it starts to look an awful lot like what we might consider intelligence — in a totally alien life form. That’s kind of how you have to treat it. Intelligence won’t show up in the way we expect ourselves to be intelligent. It’ll show up in ways that are evolutionarily appropriate for plants.

So no one is saying the plant is going to write a poem or do your math homework?

Not yet! Although researchers who study plant communication talk about syntax in plant communication and, in a way, sentence structure. But they’re talking about chemistry, chemical compounds floating in the air that have meaning.

What about the way plants sense the world? Do they interact with sound?

There’s some research happening now where scientists are playing tones for plants and realizing certain tones make plants produce more of certain compounds. There’s a tone that, if played for enough time, will make broccoli ramp up its antioxidants. In alfalfa sprouts, other tones will cause the plant to produce more vitamin C. One could see how — if they figured this out better — you could adjust the nutrition content of crops just by playing tones.

There’s also a whole world of playing tones to plants that causes them to produce more of their own pesticide, which is interesting when you think about how much pesticide we use to grow our food crops.

Have you changed your own behavior after spending so much time thinking about this? Do you have trouble eating salad now?

Obviously we’re animals that need to eat plants. There’s no way around that. But there is a way of imagining a future with agricultural practices and harvesting practices that are more tuned into the life style of the plant, the things it’s capable of and its proclivities.

This opens up the world of plant ethics. What does our world look like if we include plants in a moral imagination? There are lots of cultures that are already based on this. Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of “ Braiding Sweetgrass ”) writes a lot about this, how Indigenous science leaves a lot more room for questions about plants that are centered on respect and mutual interest.

What do you want people to take away from this book?

In thinking about plant intelligence, what we’re really thinking about is how much plants are active participants in their own life. They have some sense of agency, even if it doesn’t look anything like our own agency. I think that is really humbling. Everything wants to keep living. That has really helped me come back to climate reporting with more of a sense of what we stand to lose from climate change. Every single species is this ingenious biological feat that would be so foolish to extinguish.

  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

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