Three New Books for Your Commute

Girls in White Dresses
Here’s a strategy for fine-tuning your first novel: Get a job at the DC bookstore Politics and Prose and float the manuscript to your coworkers, prodigious readers all. Chicago transplant Jennifer Close did just that, and Girls in White Dresses—a lit-lite tale about a trio of female Manhattanites drinking and dating their way through their twenties—is the result.

Read a full review of Girls in White Dresses.

Into the Silence
Washington writer Wade Davis’s treatment of British attempts to reach the summit of Mount Everest in the 1920s—a harrowing series of expeditions organized by the Royal Geographical Society that ended in the disappearance of mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine—is, as it should be, enormous. Thanks to Davis’s lapidary prose, Into the Silence is also propulsive, a nearly 700-page book about the strivings of big-hearted men to conquer the world’s biggest mountain.

Read a full review of Into the Silence.

The Cut
“He had a cop’s knowledge of DC because he was out in it, street level, most of his working hours,” writes George Pelecanos of his new protagonist, Spero Lucas, in his 17th novel. The description could also apply to Pelecanos, whose encyclopedic knowledge of DC’s constabulary, criminals, and alleyways in which they clash, coupled with a Richard Price–like ear for authentic townie dialogue, has made him a local treasure, the lone Washington writer whose storytelling chops the airport-novel set and the literary crowd can agree on.

Read a full review of The Cut.

Drew Bratcher