Now Read This: The Week’s Best New Books, March 6th Edition

Mount Terminus
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, $26)
By David Grand
Grand’s first novel in over a decade follows a boy and his father across the American West into the fledgling city of 19th century Los Angeles. The boy’s father installs the family of two by a desert spring, striving to isolate him and his son from Los Angeles society, until the discovery of a half-brother complicates his plans.
Out: March 4

I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50
(Blue Rider Press, hardcover, $26)
By Annabelle Gurwitch
Gurwitch, an actress and columnist, has faced the vicissitudes of midlife and responded with her latest collection of essays. After reading I See You Made An Effort, comedian Richard Lewis declared, “I think there is a middle-aged woman’s body trying to break out of me.”
Out: March 6

Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft, Science, and Counterculture in Modern California
(Sobersvoce Press, paperback, $20)
Edited by Robert Kett and Anna Kryczka
Learning by Doing at the Farm reflects on an open-air social experiment conducted by the University of California, Irvine, where craftspeople from Guatemala, Mexico, and Samoa rubbed elbows in California during the turbulent 1960s.
Out: March 1

Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival
(Ecco, hardcover, $28)
By Peter Stark
Less than a decade after Lewis and Clark embarked on the Corps of Discovery, a lesser known (yet far bloodier) expedition occurred: the attempt to found the settlement of Fort Astoria on the Columbia River. The plan was concocted by two hegemons of early American society, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson.
Out: March 4

Boy, Snow, Bird
(Riverhead Hardcover, hardcover, $28)
By Helen Oyeyemi
Boy Novak leaves New York for a small town in Massachusetts, where she soon marries a widower and becomes stepmother to his daughter, Snow. The birth of Boy and her husband’s dark-skin child reveals that she and her husband are light-skinned African Americans who have misled their community into believing they are white. This is the fifth novel for Oyeyemi, who has yet to reach 30.
Out: March 6