June 8th -14

THE SHORT book, long underestimated, has a lot going for it. To start with

the prosaic: if you want to get through more volumes, short is shrewd.

Slender books can be slipped into a bag or coat pocket and plucked out

again in an idle moment, so you’ll be more likely to finish them. For

adventurous readers the format allows for casual experimentation with new

styles, topics and authors. For indecisive ones it can make a bookshop’s

universe of possibilities feel less daunting: just scour the shelves for slim

spines. Most of all, there is a rare satisfaction in reaching the final pages of

a book while still holding the full sweep of its story in your mind. Tautprose is intense and immersive, like a distilled fragrance. These books offer

that, too. They must; they don’t have long to make their point. In an era of

many distractions, that is a great virtue.

These six non-fiction books include memoir, journalism, essays and

pictorial essays. They take you into the bedroom of a grieving husband in

imperial China; into the courtroom where a sensational murder trial split

New York’s Bukharan Jewish community in the late 2000s; and, classically,

into a room of one’s own. In short, they get plenty done in just 150 pages.

Six Records of a Floating Life. By Shen Fu. Translated by Leonard Pratt

and Chiang Su-Hui. Penguin Classics; 144 pages; $16 and £9.99

A meditation on extraordinary love and an ordinary life, this memoir was

written at the beginning of the 19th century in Qing-dynasty China by a

widowed scholar. Despite the lapse of time, Shen Fu’s joys and sorrows feel

comfortingly familiar. He was a civil servant who, though highly educated

for his time, did not manage to rise up the ranks. He quarrelled with his

parents, played drinking games and went on picnics. He also married the

love of his life (they had known each other since they were 13 years old)

and, as Shen’s memoir reveals, he treated Chen Yun like an equal, admiring

her practicality and sparring with her in ad lib poetry competitions. The

book has long been cherished in China as a true account of deep love. For

modern readers the records may hold some surprises, too. Shen loved

flower arranging. And although he and Yun adored each other, she matter�

of-factly sought out a concubine for him—with whom, the text implies, she

also had sex (lesbian relationships were not especially frowned upon at the

time). The translators’ judicious footnotes make the reading all the more

pleasurable.

Oranges. By John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 149 pages; $16.

Daunt; £9.99

Are there 150 sparkling pages to be written about the everyday orange?

John McPhee proves there are. “Oranges”, which evolved from an essay

published in the New Yorker in 1966, established a new form of journalism:

one that marries whimsy with forensic explanatory reporting. Mr McPhee

examines the rise of frozen orange-juice concentrate after the second worldwar—already then a $700m industry and “the boomiest boom since the

Brazilian rubber boom”. He interviews Florida’s orange barons, pickers,

packers and pomologists. His essay flows from the fantastic sex life of

oranges to the Sanskrit origins of the word (naranga) to oranges’ role in the

Norman invasion of Sicily. It is sweet to read about Botticelli and Degrees

Brix (the standard measure of sugar) in a single sitting. This is also

dissection at its sharpest, and eating an orange will never be the same again.

A Room of One’s Own. By Virginia Woolf. Mariner; 128 pages; $16.99.

Penguin Modern Classics; £5.99

Among the most influential essays of the 20th century, “A Room of One’s

Own” was based on a lecture that Virginia Woolf gave at Newnham College

and Girton College, the first two for women at Cambridge University.

Woolf lands her best-known line by the second page: “A woman must have

money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” That sends her

down new routes of inquiry. As she relays the train of thought she has while

walking around “Oxbridge” (a barely fictitious composite) and London, her

wry humour develops a fierceness that builds to anger. “Why are women

poor?” she asks. “What effect has poverty on fiction?” And “What

conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” She summons the

work of women over the centuries, from Aphra Behn to the Brontë sisters,

to find the answers. The lot of women in Britain has improved dramatically

in the century since Woolf wrote her essay. Yet it still feels like essential

reading, in particular as a manifesto on the right to form one’s own opinion

and express it.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial. By Janet

Malcolm. Yale University Press; 155 pages; $13.95 and £9.99

If the aim of journalistic inquiry is to provide answers, Janet Malcolm

shows, with devastating rigour, that observation can be enough. “Iphigenia

in Forest Hills” tells the story of a murder trial in New York in 2009.

Mazoltuv Borukhova, a 35-year-old doctor, is accused of paying an

acquaintance to kill her husband. Malcolm lays out the facts of the case,

then raises the question at the heart of most true-crime stories: “She

couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” Yet the title, a reference

to the Greek myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed daughter of Agamemnon, says itall. This too is a tragedy; its end certain. Malcolm does not offer suspense.

Instead, from many small procedural details at the Queens Supreme Court

she coaxes bigger, more unsettling questions. Such as, is bias inevitable?

“Borukhova’s otherness was her defining characteristic,” notes Malcolm.

Observe, her text urges, how decisive the opinion of an expert witness can

be. Notice the seduction of certainty—how courtrooms revel in it. See what

small tyrannies the judge permits himself. Unshowily, Malcolm makes her

point: a trial is perhaps nothing more than “a contest between competing

narratives”.

Ways of Seeing. By John Berger. Penguin Modern Classics; 155 pages;

$11 and £9.99

Adapted from a four-part BBC television series of the same name that aired

in 1972, John Berger’s book will probably change how you think about art.

Four essays consider the reproduction of art; the female form and the male

gaze; how ownership influences art; and publicity and the illusion of

authority. These are delightfully complemented by three wordless pictorial

essays, bold visual arguments for Berger’s incantatory opening—which

purposely appears right on the cover of this edition—that “seeing comes

before words”. He shows how the meaning of art is always influenced by

how and where it is viewed. Berger’s book is naturally a product of its time,

too: Marxist, radical and preoccupied with the ruling class. But it made

complex ideas about a closed world accessible and engaging. Its influence

is lasting: read the review we wrote for its 50th anniversary.

A Man’s Place. By Annie Ernaux. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven

Stories Press; 96 pages; $13.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £7.99

Annie Ernaux made her mark with autobiographical fiction in which, as we

wrote when she received the Nobel prize in literature in 2022, she remakes

“the private and the ordinary into something profound”. But to write a

radically short biography of her father the French author had to strip away

all pretence; she abandoned a first attempt at a novel with “feelings of

disgust”. “If I wish to tell the story of a life governed by necessity,” she

writes, “I have no right to adopt an artistic approach.” The result is a spare,

starkly beautiful memoir. Its studied restraint, almost ethnographic, is the

work of a daughter at pains to do justice to the life of a father whom she feltshe could no longer truly know: “Although it had something to do with

class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.” Like many others

of his era, he first laboured on a farm, then entered a factory and finally

worked for himself, as a shopkeeper in rural Normandy. Ms Ernaux strove,

she writes, to convey both his happiness and “the humiliating limitations”

of his class. It is the story of a generation, but also firmly her father’s own.

Try also

Ms Ernaux wrote a short biography of her mother, “A Woman’s Story”. It is

as accomplished as that about her father, and secured her reputation with

French readers. If you enjoyed Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills”,

try “Still Pictures”, a short book published posthumously that is also

perhaps her most personal. We reviewed it last year here. New to John

McPhee’s writing? He has written more than 30 books. After “Oranges”,

why not try his most recent, “Tabula Rasa”—it comes in at under 200

pages. We offered our appraisal here