Heiresses*, by Miranda Kaufmann (Pegasus)*. Nine British women—including a Cabinet minister’s wife and Jane Austen’s Barbados-born aunt—who derived their fortunes through Caribbean slavery are the subjects of this rich history. Kaufmann maps the global journeys these women undertook as they sought to solidify their social positions. Some moved to England in order to receive an education or marry into the aristocracy; others journeyed to India, Macau, or Rome. Kaufmann pays close attention to the business acumen that they and their families brought to enterprises like sugar plantations and the transatlantic slave trade. Such a lens shows that the mobility of these women depended on the labor of those who were unfree.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing*, by Hu Anyan, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves (Astra)*. This fascinating début memoir recounts its author’s career on the lower rungs of China’s consumer economy. Hu first worked during high school as a hotel waiter; later, he became a courier, a gas-station attendant, and a security guard, among fifteen other jobs. As Hu piled drudgery upon drudgery, he gathered a rich store of insight into the alienation and petty cruelties of working life. He also began to write. During the COVID pandemic, one of his essays, about his time on the night shift at a warehouse, took off online in China. His account reveals an author searching for his true self and finding it, amid unceasing toil, in the act of observation.

What We’re Reading

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls*, by Adam Morgan (Atria)*. At the heart of this lively history is the editor Margaret C. Anderson, a radical lesbian who is perhaps best known for publishing, in a literary magazine she edited, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in serial form. In 1921, Anderson was prosecuted by the U.S. government—the novel was thought “obscene”—and though Morgan focusses much of his attention on her trial, he also takes in her childhood, in Indianapolis; her years in Chicago, New York, and Paris; and her association with prominent figures of her time, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the anarchist Emma Goldman. What becomes clear in his study is that, in the end, Anderson’s will to forge a new path was matched only by her disappointment in where it led.

Estate*, by Cynthia Zarin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)*. The text of this slim, compressed novel is a letter written by Caroline—a New Yorker who will be familiar to readers of Zarin’s 2024 novel “Inverno”—to her paramour, a man who is also seeing two other women. A wry spin on an infatuated lover’s monologue, Caroline’s letter is a skein of free-associative thoughts—about her children, about the husband from whom she’s separated, about whatever springs to mind. It’s all in elliptical, finespun service to Caroline’s ambition: to understand “how I had become the person who might write such a letter, and behave in such a way, behavior of which I deeply disapproved.”