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This month’s featured titles include fiction from Thomas Pynchon ’59 and a look at two “unsung giants” of landscape architecture

For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups.

Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details!

And did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out!

The cover of "Shadow Ticket"

Shadow Ticket

Thomas Pynchon ’59

The hero of Pynchon’s latest novel—his first in more than a decade—is one Hicks McTaggart, a private eye searching for a missing cheese heiress in early 1930s Wisconsin.

“He’s another of Pynchon’s aw-shucks metaphysical detectives,” says a New York Times review, “‘a big ape with a light touch,’ as an admiring woman puts it.”

Naturally, in typical Pynchon fashion, the plot is secondary to an immersion into a singular world—one laden with digressions, odd acronyms, and hints of the surreal.

“There are droll and erudite disquisitions (and throwaway lines) on bomb-making and tacky lamps and how to bake bowling balls,” the Times observes. “Strange casseroles are served, Vernors ginger ale is celebrated, and Harley Davidson flatheads are driven to vivid effect. Hooch wagons are exploded, mickeys are slipped, a trans-Atlantic voyage is undertaken.”

The Washington Post calls Shadow Ticket “rollicking, genially silly, and ultimately sweet.”

As it notes: “To some extent … the challenge, even the annoyance, of reading Pynchon is the point, insofar as his frenetic narrative density mirrors the growing complexity of the histories he maps, the halogen-illuminated and fallout-addled stretch of the long 20th century, especially.”

Designing the American Century

Thomas Campanella, MLA ’91

In addition to being a professor of urban studies and city planning in AAP, Campanella is the historian-in-residence at NYC’s Department of Parks and Recreation.

His latest book spotlights two fellow Cornellians—Gilmore Clarke 1913 and Michael Rapuano 1927—whom he calls “unsung giants” of American landscape architecture.

The cover of "Designing the American Century"

“Their vast portfolio of public landscapes propelled the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux into the motor age, touching the lives of millions and changing the face of the nation,” states the publisher, Princeton University Press.

“With the patronage of public-works titan Robert Moses, Clarke and Rapuano transformed New York over a span of 50 years, revitalizing the city’s immense park system but also planning expressways, public housing, and urban renewal projects that laid waste to entire sections of the city.”

While history remembers the contributions of Olmsted and Vaux—not to mention the now-infamous Moses—in reimagining urban spaces, Campanella observes, Clarke and Rapuano have largely been forgotten. But their work includes iconic spots like the Central Park Zoo, Riverside Park, and Jones Beach, as well as the Palisades and Taconic State Parkways.

The cover of "One Size Fits None"

One Size Fits None

Alejandro Juárez Crawford ’95, BA ’96 & Miriam Plavin-Masterman ’93

The two alums co-host the podcast What if Instead?—which, per its description, is about “everyday people reimagining the way things work—and tackling the obstacles they face.” Now, they’ve parlayed the podcast into a book that explores its principles.

Subtitled Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution, it contemplates the challenges of our “unresponsive” economic system—one in which factors like politics, inequity, and a myopic drive for cost savings have combined to make many aspects of life and commerce frustrating and unproductive.

The canonical example they cite is the customer service rabbit hole, with its lack of human interaction and inability to address issues that fall outside narrow parameters.

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“Increasingly, we live and work in one-size-fits-none systems,” they write in the intro. “When you hear the phrase ‘your needs are very important to us,’ you know you are lost in one of these systems. It is magical thinking to believe they will suddenly become responsive—even to address the biggest crises of our time. Time for a new plan.”

Brightening Glance

Pat Sutton Lipsky ’63

The AAP alum and acclaimed painter reflects on her life and art in this memoir, published by University of Iowa Press.

“Through its SoHo grit and thrown punches, bad divorces and career reversals, Brightening Glance is set apart by the sensitivity of its observations,” says a review in the New Criterion. “A praised abstractionist on canvas, Lipsky on paper proves to be a keen portraitist, with illuminating depictions of [prominent art world figures] Tony Smith, Lee Krasner, Clement Greenberg, Andy Warhol, Robert Smithson, and Pierre Rosenberg, among others.”

The cover of "Brightening Glance"

The memoir follows Lipsky from her early career days in 1970s SoHo, where she was a single mother living and working in a loft on Wooster Street. She recalls early childhood influences, her time in Paris, and friendships, mentorships, and romances with noted members of the art world.

“There is a visit with [famed abstract expressionist] Lee Krasner at her home … and another at Lipsky’s Manhattan apartment; late-night, smoke-filled loft parties; and evenings at Max’s Kansas City, where Lou Reed and Nico sing in the background while rival groups of earthwork artists, pop artists, conceptual artists, and color field painters pretend to ignore each other at the bar,” says the publisher.

“Along the way, we experience Lipsky’s emergence at the forefront of her generation of painters.”

The cover of "Haunt Me"

Haunt Me

José Enrique Medina ’91

Medina won the prestigious 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize—out of some 3,000 entrants—which garnered him a monetary award and the publication of his debut collection of poetry.

“With dark humor and aching tenderness, Medina conjures Mexican family life, queer whispers, and sacred forgiveness,” says the publisher, the nonprofit Rattle Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting poetry. “This collection asks: what do we inherit from those who vanish? And what becomes of us when the ones we long for stay silent—while those we tried to forget come back, again and again, to remind us who we are?”

In the collection’s title poem, Medina invites the spirit of his departed mother:

“Against the greenhouse he built, the soul / of Tío Arturo leans, smelling faintly of brillantina. / Abuela drifts beneath cherry blooms, / thumbing her rosary, whispering prayers. / Mother, where are you? / Even the twins, who were never born, are here, / tossing big-headed mums, each one / a soft grenade of memory. / You died four years ago, / your silence unfolding like petals. / And still / you haven’t stepped into my garden / or caressed my amapola blossoms. / What are you waiting for? Haunt me.”

Beyond White Picket Fences

Catherine Simpson Bueker ’96

Bueker is a sociology professor at Boston’s Emmanuel College. Her nonfiction book—subtitled Evolution of an American Town—examines how the demographics of Wellesley, MA, have changed over the past century.

Although Wellesley “has long been considered the archetypal New England WASP community,” the publisher notes, influxes of Italian, Jewish, and Chinese residents have made it more diverse. While some newcomers opted to assimilate into existing social structures, others created their own. Either way, they changed and enriched the community—though they have sometimes faced racism, antisemitism, and discrimination.

The cover of "Beyond White Picket Fences"

As Bueker observes in the intro: 99% of Wellesley residents described themselves as white in 1970, but that figure has since dropped to about 73%. And although the town was once heavily Protestant, it now has other active Christian denominations and 10% of residents identify as Jewish.

“Those who consider these statistical changes in Wellesley’s demographics inconsequential are being too quick to dismiss the implications,” Bueker writes. “While few may notice these changes at first glance, the implications are playing out each and every day.”

To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, partner-published, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes.

Published December 5, 2025

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