The good folks at KCUR invited me to talk about books on Steve Kraske’s Up-to-Date show this week. I hadn’t done it in a while, and I was happy to gather a wide of recent reading, some of which I’m sharing here. I was happy to meet the other participant, Cori Smith, who runs BLK + BRWN, a new Kansas City bookstore (on 39th Street in Midtown). I left out the boatload of material—poetry, criticism, and essays—I read almost every day while working on my book in progress, a biography of the poet William Stafford (much more on that later). So here goes…not all of the titles below got squeezed into the show’s airtime, but I’m leaving them here for entertainment value.

Nonfiction: Candice Millard: River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (Doubleday). Very popular and supremely accomplished local author with a global following. Her books transport us into far-flung corners of history by focusing on highly dramatic episodes in the lives of fascinating people. In this case we journey with her and British explorers into the wild and often catastrophic scientific expeditions in search of the source of the Nile River in Africa.

Nonfiction/Essays: Stanley Crouch: Victory Is Assured: Uncollected Writings (Liveright). Crouch, a prominent cultural critic who died in 2020, wrote voraciously and pugnaciously about jazz, politics, race, and the movies. The author of a significant biography of Charlie Parker, Crouch was a serious champion of Kansas City jazz, who once wrote, “A good number of our myths are as porous as Swiss cheese … but there is no more deservedly mythic city in the jazz story than Kansas City, Missouri.”

My column about Crouch’s book just posted at KC Studio magazine: https://kcstudio.org/kansas-city-jazz-had-a-devoted-champion-in-riff-artist-stanley-crouch/

Fiction: Michael Pronko: Azabu Getaway (Raked Gravel Press). Author is a Kansas Citian who has long lived and taught English and American literature in Tokyo. This is the fifth of his series of crime novels featuring Detective Hiroshi, who becomes embroiled in captivating and complex cases often involving corporate misdeeds and cultural collisions in modern-day Tokyo. This book actually publishes today, Sept. 10, so I’ve only just begun reading it, but I recently plowed through the audio version of the previous novel in his series, Tokyo Zangyo. Pronko does for Tokyo what Michael Connelly does for Los Angeles.

Fiction: Colson Whitehead: Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday). Not a conventional mystery novel per se, more a literary portrait of the Black cultural landscape of New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The novel’s central character owns a furniture store and gets involved in some risky business. Whitehead spoke last spring in Lawrence and read from a sequel that’s scheduled to come out next year.

Fiction: Torrey Peters: Detransition, Baby (Penguin Random House). Winner of this year’s PEN/Hemingway award for a first novel, the book takes us into the very contemporary world of gender fluidity. The story involves a transgender couple, a straight woman, and a pregnancy. Fascinating and achingly human.

Poetry: Gary Snyder: Collected Poems (Library of America). A great American poet and Zen teacher whose work stretches from his Beat associations of the early 1950s to today and is now available in a single volume. At a time when only now are many people becoming increasingly conscious of “climate change,” Snyder has provided an essential voice for the earth and wild nature for nearly seven decades.

Nonfiction/Memoir: Doug Peacock: Was It Worth It? (Patagonia). Another book that asks us to connect deeply with the planet and wildlife is this collection of essays and travel reports by a devoted chronicler of the natural world, especially the desert southwest, northern Mexico and Yellowstone, where Peacock has tracked grizzly bears for nearly a half century. After serving in the Vietnam War, Peacock became a great friend of the writer and desert sage Edward Abbey, who turned him into George Washington Hayduke, the eco-activist character at the heart of Abbey’s famous novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Nonfiction/Memoir: Ada Calhoun: Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press). Charming portrait of New York literati, the art world of 1960s and ‘70s, and Calhoun’s own dysfunctional family. Calhoun’s father, the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, once attempted to write a biography of poet Frank O’Hara. He was stopped in his tracks by a family roadblock. After a fire destroyed her parents’ apartment a few years ago, Calhoun found her father’s interview tapes and tried to pick up the biographer’s trail.

Nonfiction/Biography: Holly George-Warren: Janis: Her Life and Music (Simon & Schuster). Highly readable biography of the short and tragic life of rock superstar Janis Joplin.

Nonfiction/Essays: Richard Thomas: Why Bob Dylan Matters (Dey St./William Morrow). For me at least this has been something like the year of Bob Dylan. This is one of many recent books on the octogenarian pop superstar, but it carries some weight given the author’s status as a classics scholar at Harvard. Thomas gives us an approachable collection of essays about Dylan’s work, which serve to celebrate and justify Dylan’s Nobel Prize for literature. And coming soon, the Dylan world is eager to see Dylan’s own first book in about 20 years. Called The Philosophy of Modern Song and coming out in November, it’s a collection of essays about a surprising array of pop music of the last 70 or so years.

Nonfiction/Biography: Frances Wilson: Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This book happened to win the Plutarch Prize, or best of the year, from Biographers International Organization, whose board I happen to sit on. Lawrence, of course, was author of several notable and sometimes controversially racy novels, including Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (a new adaptation of which is soon to be a Netflix release in theaters and online). For literary readers it’s a fascinating account of Lawrence’s work and legacy. Forgive the commercial announcement, but Wilson will be featured in an online conversation, sponsored by BIO, at 1 p.m. Central, Sept. 17: https://biographersinternational.org/news/plutarch-winner-community-read-event-coming-this-fall/