10 books you should read in November, including Steve Martin's Number One Is Walking and Bob Dylan's Philosophy Of Modern Song

This sly and sharp-edged collection by A.J. Bermudez doesn’t let you rest, insisting on your attention across 20 eclectic short stories. Anchoring the book is the exceptional “The Real India,” in which the assistant to a clueless wealthy artist must not only supply her boss with basic cultural guidance but also validate her iffy decision-making. Issues of class and status collide with questions of artistry and authenticity; “plastic outlives oak,” the assistant thinks, defeatedly. Motifs revolving around identity, privilege, and the power of words pop up in many of the stories. Bermudez deploys language with precision and panache (keep a dictionary handy) and is the kind of author whose work you want to devour. The collection won this year’s Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Anthony Marra declared it “absolutely brilliant”—high and well-earned praise.

With Weird Al Yankovic’s ongoing tour and upcoming , and now this follow-up to Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz’s 2020 , you have to wonder—have we hit peak Weird? One hopes not; the world wants the weird. Longtime drummer and band archivist Bermuda is back with a color counterpart to Black & White, having whittled down the thousands of 35mm images he took over 25 years to just the few hundred shared here. Chapters, organized chronologically by album and tour, open with short contextualizing intros peppered with behind-the-scenes memories (the one touring rule: “no number two” allowed on the bus!), followed by images of Al on tour, on set, on stage, backstage, and just generally hamming it up. The book, with a short foreword by Drew Carey and a micro-mini afterword by Weird Al himself, is forgivably light on captions and wonderfully heavy on outlandish short-sleeve fashion choices. As the pages turn, you see the band grow into a national sensation, the sets and costumes becoming more elaborate, the venues larger. Alas, the trip down memory lane ends in 2006, when Bermuda fully switched over to shooting digital. Perhaps that means a third volume, one of digital selections, is in fans’ future?Another musician’s photo book well worth checking out this month: ’s A Book of Days (November 15, Bloomsbury).

has written plenty—stand-up routines, screenplays, plays, novellas, essays, a novel, kids’ books, cartoons and even a memoir—but never a cartoon memoir, until now. The first 90 or so pages of Number One Is Walking covers the long arc of Martin’s film career, from his decision to transition out of stand-up and into movies to the point, more than 40 films later, when he decides to pull back and focus on other work. The short anecdotes and reminiscences, rendered beautifully in comics form by artist Harry Bliss (Martin’s cartoon-collection collaborator on 2020’s A Wealth of Pigeons), are warm, funny, and smart, heavy on celebrity encounters (Carl Reiner, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams, Paul McCartney, and , to name a few) and brief vignettes about writing or being on set of movies like The Three Amigos, Roxanne, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The longer, latter portion of the book switches focus off Martin as a subject and consists of Bliss-Martin cartoons, mostly single-panel fare, Pigeon style, that would be right at home in the New Yorker (where Bliss regularly contributes cover art and cartoons).

Have there ever been more upbeat accountants of awfulness than comedian and writer Lacey Lamar? In 2021 the sisters from Omaha, Nebraska, came out with You’ll Never Believe What Happened To Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism, detailing their ridiculous run-ins with racists. The World Record Book of Racist Stories widens the sources to also include the broader Ruffin family—mom, dad, brother and two other sisters—plus a state senator, friends, and even a few stories from white pals for wild contrast. Ruffin, accustomed to turning tough material into humorous packages in segments on her own show (“How Did We Get Here?”) and on Late Night With Seth Meyers (“Amber’s Minute of Fury,” “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell”), and Lamar, accustomed to existing while Black in Omaha, come to the project with skill sets that allow them to recount more than 200 pages of racist tales without ever sounding preachy or sanctimonious. In fact, they stay funny, dishing out awards like “Most Angry About My Hair” and “Most Frugal Racist” (actually a tie) and asking white readers to take the “Hands-Outta-Your-Hair-Oath,” a pledge to keep your dang hands to yourself no matter what. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hope that somehow there won’t be enough material for a third book.

Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa, winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, wears a bulletproof vest to work. A former CNN correspondent and the cofounder of Filipino news site Rappler, she tells truth to power—a dangerous proposition when doing so endangers your life and livelihood—and sounds the alarm early about the threat of disinformation via social networks. Having angered President Rodrigo Duterte and his administration through her site’s reporting, Ressa became the target of government harassment and multiple legal battles; eventually her case was taken on by human rights lawyer Amal Clooney (who also penned the memoir’s intro). How To Stand Up To A Dictator covers Ressa’s fascinating life, from her early childhood in the Philippines to moving to the States and then back to the Philippines, where her devotion to the pursuit of good journalism (not “balanced” journalism, she says—a blind commitment to objectivity can be the “coward’s way out”) matured. The book’s narrative ends in late spring of this year, but Ressa’s story continues, as she stubbornly fights for democracy and a free press.