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The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: July 2018

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We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for July. Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 2. Less 3 months 2. 1. The Immortalists 6 months 3. 7. Lost Empress 3 months 4. 6. The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath 4 months 5. 4. Frankenstein in Baghdad 4 months 6. - The Ensemble 1 month 7. 10. The Overstory 2 months 8. 8. My Favorite Thing is Monsters 6 months 9. - There There 1 month 10. - Warlight 1 month   Reflecting on the Great 2018 Book Preview - the first of the year, not the more recent Second-Half preview - it's interesting to note that of the first six titles we highlighted, four of them have made appearances in our Top Ten. For six months, Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon and Denis Johnson's The Largesse of the Sea Maiden hung around our list; this month they graduate to the Hall of Fame. On their heels, Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad holds fifth position this month, and in two months' time will likely join Quatro and Johnson in our Hall. Also, among the "near misses" listed at the bottom of this post, you'll find Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny, a French story which "tells of good help gone bad," as our own Matt Seidel put it months ago. From a certain perspective, it's wild that 66% of the first half dozen books we flagged last January have resonated so much with our audience. In fact, of the 10 titles on this month's list, 70% of them appeared on that first Book Preview. Put simply: Millions readers, we're here for y'all. Trust us. (For the record, the three titles currently on our Top Ten which did not appear in our Book Preview last January: Less, The Overstory and My Favorite Thing is Monsters.) Three new titles joined our list after Quatro and Johnson's books moved on to our Hall of Fame and Tayari Jones's An American Marriage dropped out. The newcomers are Aja Gabel's The Ensemble, Tommy Orange's There There, and Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which hold the sixth, ninth and tenth positions this month, respectively. In a preview for our site, Millions editor Lydia Kiesling recommended readers get "a taste of Gabel’s prose [by] read[ing] her Best American Essays-notable piece on grief and eating ortolans in France," and noted that "Orange’s novel has been called a 'new kind of American epic' by the New York Times." Meanwhile staffer Claire Cameron, while writing about Michael Ondaatje's latest, mused, "If only Anthony Minghella were still with us to make the movie." Overall it's clear that the Book Preview foretells Top Ten placements. Next month at least two spots should open up for new titles. Will those new books come from our latest Second-Half Preview? Based on the numbers, it looks likely. This month’s near misses included: Circe, Some Trick, The Mars Room, and The Perfect Nanny. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: July 2018

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Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in July. A Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires A book worthy of pondering—“how to find myself / when a self is so small”—Spires offers so many questions and considerations, yet they all return to our fleeting existences. “If my heart were scoured, / if my soul were remade / into a new and shining garment, / then would I have to die? // Lord, if perfection is death, / let me stay here / a little while longer, / spotted and stained.” In “The Road”: “A life: pared to the bone / Think of a room with no / chair, no bed.” Spires puts us in these monastic spaces where, like her narrator, we “sit on a black square / in a patch of light. / In my mind, I sit there.” When we sit inside ourselves, soon we sit everywhere, including out on the road. Spires’s narrator sees where “a few souls, gray as time, / stand in a patch of shade, / their arms held out.” There’s a need for poetry that is intensely, perhaps even messily, invested in the present moment as it unfolds; there’s also a need for poetry that feels transcendent, inward. There’s health in that for the reader, for the writer. “As one grows older, / there should be fewer / and fewer words to say,” Spires writes. This is a book of listening and contemplation. It does not ignore the outside world, but it gives readers a way to survive it. Poems like “Small as a Seed”—an appropriately Franciscan structured work from a poet raised Catholic—are welcome salves: “In everything, its opposite. / In terror, calm. / In joy, attendant sorrow. / In the sun’s ascendancy, its downfall. / In darkness, light not yet apprehended. // At night in bed, I fear the falling off. / Though falling, I will rise. / I fear. Fall arriving now. / In any word so small, the world. / In the world I walk in, a wild wood.” New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich In her introduction to this important volume, Erdrich quotes Dean Rader’s observation that “a comprehensive anthology of Indigenous American poetry has not been published since 1988.” Erdrich reminds us that in addition to this critical absence, there has also been erasure—“Native American-themed poetry by non-Natives” has “overwritten our identities in ways that confuse young people who are already at risk and struggling to forge an identity.” A small sampling of the excellent work here: Tacey M. Atsitty’s “Hole Through the Rock”: “But within my whorl, you are winged: doubled and pure, / like the coupling of pebbles in storm water. These enduring // glances from wind on pane say you can see plainly the part / of me you miss.” Selections from Layli Long Soldier’s moving collection, WHEREAS. From Tommy Pico’s IRL: “I / don’t have the option / of keeping my God / alive by keeping her name / secret b/c the word for her / is gone.” Craig Santos Perez’s masterful ruptures of language in “(First Trimester),” where the narrator’s partner feels their child’s first kick, that “embryo / of hope.” They think about fragments and pieces, organic and otherwise: “they say plastic is the perfect creation / because it never dies.” He thinks: “i wish my daughter was made // of plastic so that she will survive [our] wasteful / hands.” And then there’s Natalie Diaz, who will stop you, sit you right up: “Native Americans make up less than / one percent of the population of America. / 0.8 percent of 100 percent. / O, mine efficient country.” [millions_ad] Smudgy and Lossy by John Myers This debut by Myers unfolds as if it is in a Samuel Palmer painting: a moonlit field, blurry and dizzy at the right moments. Smudgy and Lossy, the two main characters in the book, are friends and lovers. They sometimes seem to have bodies; elsewhere, they drift through the book as referents. There’s a mystical, wondrous touch to Myers’s verse: “In the house I grew up in I always drew / where the windows were in the walls // because I didn’t trust that I would be / otherwise held.” In this pastoral world, dreams and reality share borders and sometimes overlap. “A butterfly found cold, its wings caked into the dirt” and “Lossy’s never bored watching mail carriers, their feet in the rain”—such lines are offered to the reader like passing thoughts. He often returns to the relationship between Smudgy and Lossy: “Sound requires a medium. / I put my back to you to / resonate and I can’t tell, does / this apply? You are hardly / affected no matter where / we share a tether.” His poems surprise us: They capture a world we’ve seen yet slightly transformed: “The light on the curve of one’s wrist like a nest of velvet ants.” The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik (translated by Patricio Ferrari and Forrest Gander) These are the first English translations of Pizarnik’s French poems, written from 1960-1964 and from 1970-1971. The collection includes images of her draft pages, now held at Princeton. Enrique Vila-Matas has written of how Pizarnik “liked illusory or artful nights,” and those incantatory rhythms particularly fuel these poems. “All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me. All night you abandon me slowly.” In the night, “Silence is temptation and promise.” The narrator is plagued by her longing; “I check the wind for you. You’re not a cry. But I check the wind for you.” To read Pizarnik is to inhabit her melancholic world, a world of recursive, enabling lines, where “my language is the priestess.” Trickster Feminism by Anne Waldman “I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.” Waldman has always been interested in the poetry of performance, but never purely in artifice: “There’s a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide...How, as a poet, do you take that on? How can the outrage really penetrate you into a state of compassion?” Trickster Feminism answers that question through a series of prose poems, litanies, and meditations; “what does the trickster say / kinetic or / clown / or / hiding so as in retreat”—for Waldman, the trickster is among us, sometimes within us. “Resistance. Had to resist. Ward off. Deflect. Exorcise. Defy. Apotropaic experiments to shift tone & anger.” This book is a call: “Take back founding myth of Americas: evil of the Feminine.” “This is a whisper,” Waldman writes, “enough of whisper to / rise up rise up and wiser, streets of the world.” Purgatorio translated by W.S. Merwin “I am invisible I am untouchable / and empty / nomad live with me / be my eyes / my tongue and my hands / my sleep and my rising / out of chaos / come and be given.” Those lines from The Essential W.S. Merwin arose while reading his translation of Dante’s masterwork. “The poem that survives the receding particulars of a given age and place soon becomes a shifting kaleidoscope of perceptions, each of them in turn provisional and subject to time and change,” Merwin writes in the foreword. He is in awe of Dante, and humbled by this assignment—a worthy caretaker. Merwin reminds us that out of Dante’s three sections, “only Purgatory happens on the earth, as our lives do, with our feet on the ground, crossing a beach, climbing a mountain.” It is also the realm of hope “as it is experienced nowhere else in the poem, for there is none in Hell, and Paradise is fulfillment itself.” The tactile, raw nature of our visceral world, and the longing for something more: a poetic duality that Merwin captures in each canto. “When we had come to a place where the dew / fends off the sun, there where it dries / hardly at all because of the sea breeze // my master spread out both his hands and laid them / gently upon the grass, and I who / understood what he intended to do // leaned toward him my cheeks with their tear stains / and he made visible once again / all that color of mind which Hell had hidden.” In Merwin’s Purgatorio, the mire of Hell is never far away—but neither is the salvation of Paradise.
Prizes

2018’s Literary Geniuses

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This year’s “Genius grant” winners have been announced. The MacArthur grant awards $625,000 “no strings attached” to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Alongside scientists, artists and scholars are some newly minted geniuses with a literary focus. This year’s literary geniuses are: Natalie Diaz is a poet who connects her experiences as a Mojave American and Latina woman to cultural and mythological systems of belief and Indigenous love in America. Her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), focuses on her brother's drug addiction and her childhood on the reservation. Manuel Gonzalez described the collection as "stellar" in his Year in Reading 2016, and Nick Ripatrazone, in his Must-Read Poetry 2018, said this about her poem, included in the New Poets of Native Nations (ed. Heid E. Erdrich): "And then there’s Natalie Diaz, who will stop you, sit you right up: “Native Americans make up less than / one percent of the population of America. / 0.8 percent of 100 percent. / O, mine efficient country.” John Keene  is a translator and writer of fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism whose work includes Annotations (1995), a semi-autobiographical novel and essay collection about coming of age as a black, queer, middle-class child in 1970s and '80s-era St. Louis, and Counternarratives (2015), a book of stories and novellas that Katrina Dodson described in her Year in Reading 2015 as a collection of "hypnotic, quasi-historical tales" jumping between various hubs of the New World in their examination of the legacies of slavery and colonialism.  Kelly Link, short story writer, is described by the MacArthur Foundation as "pushing the boundaries of literary fiction in works that draw on genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror while also engaging fully with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life." Her work includes Stranger Things Happen (2001), which Arthur Phillips described as "funny and bookish, charming and ghoulish, original even when she’s referential," and Get in Trouble (2015), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (You can read her conversation about it with Keith Lee Morris here.) In our interview with Link, she discussed the weirdness of the Florida landscape and the ways that writers' particular strengths are the result of the way in which they see the world: "the things they notice, the kinds of rhythms or structures that they are drawn toward." She runs Small Beer Press with her husband, Gavin Grant. Dominique Morisseau is a playwright who has examined the complicated realities of urban black communities, most recently in her trilogy, The Detroit Project, inspired by August Wilson's Century Cycle. The trilogy is composed of Detroit '67 (2013), Paradise Blue (2015), and Skeleton Crew (2016), the last of which is set in an automotive stamping plant during the 2008 recession. In an interview with The Millions, Morisseau discussed her intention to "contribute a different Detroit narrative," one in which its inhabitants appear as "more than sound bites." Bill Morris described the ways in which "calamity is always hovering in Morisseau’s Detroit," where the question "is how her Detroiters will retain their dignity and their humanity in the face of forces that yearn to crush them."
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: August 2018

- | 1 book mentioned
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for August. Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 1. Less 4 months 2. 3. Lost Empress 4 months 3. 6. The Ensemble 2 months 4. 5. Frankenstein in Baghdad 5 months 5. 7. The Overstory 3 months 6. 4. The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath 5 months 7. - The Incendiaries 1 month 8. 9. There There 2 months 9. 10. Warlight 2 months 10. - The Mars Room 1 month   “I have to watch I don’t get arrogant,” said Andrew Sean Greer after a Guardian reporter asked him how he’s changed since winning the Pulitzer for his latest novel, Less. Will he be able to stave off arrogance now that he's held first position in our Top Ten for two months, though? Bet smart. So, we bid farewell to two titles ascending to our Hall of Fame this month – The Immortalists and My Favorite Thing is Monsters – and we welcome two newcomers in their place – The Incendiaries and The Mars Room. Much praise has been heaped upon The Incendiaries, not least of all Celeste Ng's compliment on R.O. Kwon's "dazzlingly acrobatic prose." That admiration might be topped only by Michael Lindgren's review of The Mars Room in which he called Rachel Kushner "the most vital and interesting American novelist working today." The point is obvious. Golden rules are hard to find these days, but maybe it's enough to say that Millions readers always have good taste. State of California native Tommy Orange's There There earned a place on the 7-title shortlist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize this month, and the debut also moved up a spot from ninth to eight on our list. Will that momentum carry it up again next month? Be sure to check back and find out in October. On and on we go. Next to Orange's novel on our list in ninth position is Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which earned Man Booker longlist recognition last July. Month's end is when we'll see if it makes the next round of cuts. List long or short, Ondaatje's no stranger to any kind. This month’s near misses included: Severance, Circe, What We Were Promised, An American Marriage, and Some Trick. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Book Previews

Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview

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Putting together our semi-annual Previews is a blessing and a curse. A blessing to be able to look six months into the future and see the avalanche of vital creative work coming our way; a curse because no one list can hope to be comprehensive, and no one person can hope to read all these damn books. We tried valiantly to keep it under 100, and this year, we just...couldn't. But it's a privilege to fail with such a good list: We've got new novels by Kate Atkinson, Dale Peck, Pat Barker, Haruki Murakami, Bernice McFadden, and Barbara Kingsolver. We've got a stunning array of debut novels, including one by our very own editor, Lydia Kiesling—not to mention R.O. Kwon, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Crystal Hana Kim, Lucy Tan, Vanessa Hua, Wayétu Moore, and Olivia Laing. We've got long-awaited memoirs by Kiese Laymon and Nicole Chung. Works of nonfiction by Michiko Kakutani and Jonathan Franzen. The year has been bad, but the books will be good. (And if you don't see a title here, look out for our monthly Previews.) As always, you can help ensure that these previews, and all our great books coverage, continue for years to come by lending your support to the site as a member. (As a thank you for their generosity, our members now get a monthly email newsletter brimming with book recommendations from our illustrious staffers.) The Millions has been running for nearly 15 years on a wing and a prayer, and we’re incredibly grateful for the love of our recurring readers and current members who help us sustain the work that we do. JULY The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon: In her debut novel, Kwon investigates faith and identity as well as love and loss. Celeste Ng writes, “The Incendiaries probes the seductive and dangerous places to which we drift when loss unmoors us. In dazzlingly acrobatic prose, R.O. Kwon explores the lines between faith and fanaticism, passion and violence, the rational and the unknowable.” The Incendiaries is an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce pick, and The New York Times recently profiled Kwon as a summer writer to watch. (Zoë) My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh: Booker finalist Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest book is (as fans of hers can probably guess) both funny and deeply tender, a testament to the author’s keen eye for the sad and the weird. In it, a young woman starts a regiment of “narcotic hibernation,” prescribed to her by a psychiatrist as demented as psychiatrists come. Eventually, her drug use leads to a spate of bad side effects, which kick off a spiral of increasingly dysfunctional behavior. (Thom) Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Against the backdrop of political disarray and vicious violence driven by Pablo Escobar’s drug empire, sisters Chula and Cassandra live safely in a gated Bogotá community. But when a woman from the city’s working-class slums named Petrona becomes their live-in maid, the city’s chaos penetrates the family’s comfort. Soon, Chula and Petrona’s lives are hopelessly entangled amidst devastating violence. Bay Area author Ingrid Rojas Contreras brings us this excellent and timely debut novel about the particular pressures that war exerts on the women caught up in its wake. (Ismail) A Carnival of Losses by Donald Hall: Hall, a former United States poet laureate, earnestly began writing prose while teaching at the University of Michigan during the 1950s. Failed stories and novels during his teenage years had soured him on the genre, but then he longed to write “reminiscent, descriptive” nonfiction “by trying and failing and trying again.” Hall’s been prolific ever since, and Carnival of Losses will publish a month after his passing. Gems here include an elegy written nearly 22 years after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. “In the months and years after her death, Jane’s voice and mine rose as one, spiraling together the images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the singular absence of flesh.” For a skilled essayist, the past is always present. This book is a fitting final gift. (Nick R.) What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan: Set in China’s metropolis Shanghai, the story is about a new rich Chinese family returning to their native land after fulfilling the American Dream. Their previous city and country have transformed as much as themselves, as have their counterparts in China. For those who want to take a look at the many contrasts and complexities in contemporary China, Tan’s work provides a valuable perspective. (Jianan) An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim: In Lim’s debut novel, the world has been devastated by a flu pandemic and time travel is possible. Frank and Polly, a young couple, are learning to live in their new world—until Frank gets sick. In order to save his life, Polly travels to the future for TimeRaiser—a company set on rebuilding the world—with a plan to meet Frank there. When something in their plan goes wrong, the two try to find each other across decades. From a starred Publishers Weekly review: “Lim’s enthralling novel succeeds on every level: as a love story, an imaginative thriller, and a dystopian narrative.” (Carolyn) How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs: Last year, Alexia Arthurs won the Plimpton Prize for her story “Bad Behavior,” which appeared in The Paris Review’s summer issue in 2016. How to Love a Jamaican, her first book, includes that story along with several others, two of which were published originally in Vice and Granta. Readers looking for a recommendation can take one from Zadie Smith, who praised the collection as “sharp and kind, bitter and sweet.” (Thom) Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott: Megan Abbott is blowing up. EW just asked if she was Hollywood’s next big novelist, due to the number of adaptations of her work currently in production, but she’s been steadily writing award-winning books for a decade. Her genre might be described as the female friendship thriller, and her latest is about two high school friends who later become rivals in the scientific academic community. Rivalries never end well in Abbott’s world. (Janet) The Seas by Samantha Hunt: Sailors, seas, love, hauntings—in The Seas, soon to be reissued by Tin House, Samantha Hunt's fiction sees the world through a scrim of wonder and curiosity, whether it's investigating mothering (as in “A Love Story”), reimagining the late days of doddering Nikolai Tesla at the New Yorker Hotel (“The Invention of Everything Else”), or in an ill-fated love story between a young girl and a 30-something Iraq War Veteran. Dave Eggers has called The Seas "One of the most distinctive and unforgettable voices I've read in years. The book will linger…in your head for a good long time.” (Anne) The Occasional Virgin by Hanan al-Shaykh: Novelist and playwright Hanan al-Shaykh's latest novel concerns two 30-something friends, Huda and Yvonne, who grew up together in Lebanon (the former Muslim, the latter Christian) and who now, according to the jacket copy, "find themselves torn between the traditional worlds they were born into and the successful professional identities they’ve created." Alberto Manguel calls it "A modern Jane Austen comedy, wise, witty and unexpectedly profound." I'm seduced by the title alone. (Edan) The Marvellous Equations of the Dread by Marcia Douglas: In this massively creative work of musical magical realism, Bob Marley has been reincarnated as Fall-down and haunts a clocktower built on the site of a hanging tree in Kingston. Recognized only by a former lover, he visits with King Edward VII, Marcus Garvey, and Haile Selassie. Time isn’t quite what it usually is, either—years fly by every time Fall-down returns to his tower, and his story follows 300 years of violence and myth. But the true innovation here is in the musicality of the prose: Subtitled “A Novel in Bass Riddim,” Marvellous Equations of the Dread draws from—and continues—a long Caribbean musical tradition. (Kaulie) The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani: Kakutani is best-known as the long-reigning—and frequently eviscerating—chief book critic at The New York Times, a job she left last year in order to write this book. In The Death of Truth, she considers our troubling era of alternative facts and traces the trends that have brought us to this horrific moment where the very concept of “objective reality” provokes a certain nostalgia. “Trump did not spring out of nowhere,” she told Vanity Fair in a recent interview, “and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.” (Emily) Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar: Kumar, author of multiple works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, returns with a novel about Kailash, a young immigrant from India, coming of age and searching for love in the United States. Publishers Weekly notes (in a starred review) that “this coming-of-age-in-the-city story is bolstered by the author’s captivating prose, which keeps it consistently surprising and hilarious.” (Emily) Brother by David Chariandy: A tightly constructed and powerful novel that tells the story of two brothers in a housing complex in a Toronto suburb during the simmering summer of 1991. Michael and Francis balance hope against the danger of having it as they struggle against prejudice and low expectations. This is set against the tense events of a fateful night. When the novel came out in Canada last year, it won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was declared one of the best of the year by many. Marlon James calls Brother "a brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one.” (Claire) A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen: Familial devotion, academic glory, and the need for some space to think have combined to send Andrei back to Moscow some 20 years after his family had emigrated to America. The trip should stir up some academic fodder for his ailing career, and besides, his aging baba Seva could really use the help. For her part, baba Seva never wavers in her assessment of Andrei’s attempt to make a go of it in 200-aughtish Russia: “This is a terrible country,” she tells him. Repeatedly. Perhaps he should have listened. This faux memoir is journalist and historian Keith Gessen’s second novel and an essential addition to the “Before You Go to Russia, Read…” list. (Il’ja) The Lost Country by William Gay: After Little Sister Death, Gay’s 2015 novel that slipped just over the border from Southern gothic into horror, longtime fans of his dark realism (where the real is ever imbued with the fantastic) will be grateful to indie publisher Dzanc Books for one more posthumous novel from the author. Protagonist Billy Edgewater returns to eastern Tennessee after two years in the Navy to see his dying father. Per Kirkus, the picaresque journey takes us through “italicized flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness interludes, infidelities, prison breaks, murderous revenge, biblical language, and a deep kinship between the land and its inhabitants,” and of course, there’s also a one-armed con man named Roosterfish, who brings humor into Gay’s bleak (drunken, violent) and yet still mystical world of mid-1950s rural Tennessee. (Sonya) Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (translated by Heather Cleary): A fin de siècle Beunos Aires doctor probes a little too closely when examining the threshold between life and death. A 21st-century artist discovers the ultimate in transcendence and turns himself into an objet d'art. In this dark, dense, surprisingly short debut novel by the Argentinian author, we’re confronted with enough grotesqueries to fill a couple Terry Gilliam films and, more importantly, with the idea that the only real monsters are those that are formed out of our own ambition. (Il’ja) Now My Heart Is Full by Laura June: "It was my mother I thought of as I looked down at my new daughter," writes Laura June in her debut memoir about how motherhood has forced her to face, reconcile, and even reassess her relationship with her late mother, who was an alcoholic. Roxane Gay calls it “warm and moving,” and Alana Massey writes, “Laura June triumphs by resisting the inertia of inherited suffering and surrendering to the possibility of a boundless, unbreakable love.” Fans of Laura June's parenting essays on The Cut will definitely want to check this one out. (Edan)  OK, Mr. Field by Katherine Kilalea: In this debut novel, a concert pianist (the eponymous Mr. Field) spends his payout from a train accident on a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. And then his wife vanishes. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called the book “a striking, singular debut” and “a disorienting and enthralling descent into one man’s peculiar malaise.” You can whet your appetite with this excerpt in The Paris Review. Kilalea, who is from South Africa and now lives in London, is also the author of the poetry collection One Eye’d Leigh. (Edan) Nevada Days by Bernardo Atxaga (translated by Margaret Jull Costa): Though it’s difficult to write a truly new European travelogue, the Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga seems to have found a way. After spurning Harvard—who tried to recruit him to be an author in residence—Atxaga took an offer to spend nine months at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, which led to this book about his tenure in the Silver State during the run-up to Obama's election. Though it’s largely a fictionalized account, the book contains passages and stories the author overheard. (Thom) Interior by Thomas Clerc (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman): Give it to Thomas Clerc: The French writer isn’t misleading his readers with the title of this book. At heart, Interior is a tour of the author’s apartment, animated with a comic level of detail and consideration. Every object and appliance gets a history, and the author gives opinions on things like bathroom reading material. Like Samuel Beckett’s fiction, Interior comes alive through its narrator, whose quirkiness helps shepherd the reader through a landscape of tedium. (Thom) Eden by Andrea Kleine: Hope and her sister, Eden, were abducted as children, lured into a van by a man they thought was their father’s friend; 20 years later, Hope’s life as a New York playwright is crumbling when she hears their abductor is up for parole. Eden’s story could keep him locked away, but nobody knows where she is, so Hope takes off to look for her, charting a cross-country path in a run-down RV. The author of Calf, Kleine is no stranger to violence, and Eden is a hard, sometimes frightening look at the way trauma follows us. (Kaulie) Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting: The latest collection from one of America’s most audaciously interesting writers follows her last two novels, in which she inverted the Lolita story and satirized Silicon Valley, respectively. Somewhere in between, she also wrote about her love of hot dogs. Oh, and this collection’s title is clearly a nod to Lucia Berlin. Let’s be real for a minute: If you need more than that to buy this book, you’re not my friend, you’ve got bad taste, and you should keep scrolling. (Nick M.) Suicide Club by Rachel Heng: What if we could live forever? Or: When is life no longer, you know, life? Heng’s debut novel, set in a futuristic New York where the healthy have a shot at immortality, probes those questions artfully but directly. Lea Kirino trades organs on the New York Stock Exchange and might never die, but when she runs into her long-disappeared father and meets the other members of his Suicide Club, she begins to wonder what life will cost her. Part critique of the American cult of wellness, part glittering future with a nightmare undercurrent, Suicide Club is nothing if not deeply imaginative and timely. (Kaulie) The Samurai by Shusaku Endo (translated by Van C. Gessel): In early 17th-century Japan, four low-ranking samurai and a Jesuit priest set off for la Nueva España (Mexico) on a trade mission. What could go wrong? The question of whether there can ever be substantive interplay between the core traditions of the West and the Far East—or whether the dynamic is somehow doomed, organically, to the superficial—is a recurring motif in Endo’s work much as it was in his life. Endo’s Catholic faith lent a peculiar depth to his writing that’s neither parochial nor proselytizing but typically, as in this New Directions reprint, thick with adventure. (Il’ja) If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi by Neel Patel: The characters in these 11 stories, nearly all of whom are first-generation Indian immigrants, are gay and straight, highly successful and totally lost, meekly traditional and boldly transgressive, but as they navigate a familiar contemporary landscape of suburban malls and social media stalking, they come off as deeply—and compellingly—American. (Michael)   Homeplace by John Lingan: Maybe it’s true that a dive bar shouldn’t have a website, but probably that notion gets thrown out the window when the bar's longtime owner gave Patsy Cline her first break. In the same way, throw out your notions of what a hyper-localized examination of a small-town bar can be. In Lingan’s hands, the Troubadour explodes like a shattered glass, shards shot beyond Virginia, revealing something about ourselves—all of us—if we can catch the right glints in the pieces. (Nick M.) Early Work by Andrew Martin: In this debut, a writer named Peter Cunningham slowly becomes aware that he’s not the novelist he wants to be. He walks his dog, writes every day, and teaches at a woman’s prison, but he still feels directionless, especially in comparison to his medical student girlfriend. When he meets a woman who’s separated from her fiance, he starts to learn that inspiration is always complex. (Thom) AUGUST A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua: A factory worker named Scarlett Chen is having an affair with Yeung—her boss—when her life is suddenly turned upside down. After she becomes pregnant with Yeung’s son, Scarlett is sent to a secret maternity home in Los Angeles so that the child will be born with the privileges of American citizenship. Distressed at her isolation, Scarlett flees to San Francisco’s Chinatown with a teenage stowaway named Daisy. Together, they disappear into a community of immigrants that remains hidden to most Americans. While they strive for their version of the American dream, Yeung will do anything to secure his son’s future. In a time when immigration policy has returned to the center of our national politics, Bay Area author Vanessa Hua delivers a book that explores the motivations, fears, and aspirations that drive people to migrate. (Ismail) Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft): The 116 vignettes that make up this collection have been called digressive, discursive, and speculative. My adjectives: disarming and wonderfully encouraging. Whether telling the story of the trip that brought Chopin’s heart back to Warsaw or of a euthanasia pact between two sweethearts, Croft’s translation from Polish is light as a feather yet captures well the economy and depth of Tokarczuk’s deceptively simple style. A welcome reminder of how love drives out fear and also a worthy Man Booker International winner for 2018. (Il’ja) If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim: Kim, a Columbia MFA graduate and contributing editor of Apogee Journal, is drawing rave advance praise for her debut novel. If You Leave Me is a family saga and romance set during the Korean War and its aftermath. Though a historical drama, its concerns—including mental illness and refugee life—could not be more timely. (Adam)   Praise Song for the Butterflies by Bernice McFadden: On the heels of her American Book Award- and NAACP Image Award-winning novel The Book of Harlan, McFadden’s 10th novel, Praise Song for the Butterflies, gives us the story of Abeo, a privileged 9-year-old girl in West Africa who is sacrificed by her family into a brutal life of ritual servitude to atone for the father’s sins. Fifteen years later, Abeo is freed and must learn how to heal and live again. A difficult story that, according to Kirkus, McFadden takes on with “riveting prose” that “keeps the reader turning pages.” (Sonya) The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg: When Clare arrives in Havana, she is surprised to find her husband, Richard, standing in a white linen suit outside a museum (surprised, because she thought Richard was dead). The search for answers sends Clare on a surreal journey; the distinctions between reality and fantasy blur. Her role in Richard's death and reappearance comes to light in the streets of Havana, her memories of her marriage, and her childhood in Florida. Lauren Groff praises the novel as “artfully fractured, slim and singular.” (Claire) Severance by Ling Ma: In this funny, frightening, and touching debut, office drone Candace is one of only a few New Yorkers to survive a plague that’s leveled the city. She joins a group, led by IT guru Bob, in search of the Facility, where they can start society anew. Ling Ma manages the impressive trick of delivering a bildungsroman, a survival tale, and satire of late capitalist millennial angst in one book, and Severance announces its author as a supremely talented writer to watch. (Adam) Night Soil by Dale Peck: Author and critic Dale Peck has made a career out of telling stories about growing up queer; with Night Soil, he might have finally hit upon his most interesting and well-executed iteration of that story since his 1993 debut. The novel follows Judas Stammers, an eloquently foul-mouthed and compulsively horny heir to a Southern mining fortune, and his mother Dixie, a reclusive artist famous for making technically perfect pots. Living in the shadow of the Academy that their ancestor Marcus Stammers founded in order to educate—and exploit—his former slaves, Judas and Dixie must confront the history of their family’s complicity in slavery and environmental degradation. This is a hilarious, thought-provoking, and lush novel about art’s entanglement with America’s original sin. (Ismail) Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard: After the success of his six-part autofiction project My Struggle, Norwegian author Karl Knausgaard embarked on a new project: a quartet of memoiristic reflections on the seasons. Knausgaard wraps up the quartet with Summer, an intensely observed meditation on the Swedish countryside that the author has made a home in with his family. (Ismail)   Ohio by Stephen Markley: Ohio is an ambitious novel composed of the stories of four residents of New Canaan, Ohio, narratively unified by the death of their mutual friend in Iraq. Markley writes movingly about his characters, about the wastelands of the industrial Midwest, about small towns with economic and cultural vacuums filled by opioids, Donald Trump, and anti-immigrant hatred. This is the kind of book people rarely attempt to write any more, a Big American Novel that seeks to tell us where we live now. (Adam) French Exit by Patrick deWitt: In this new novel by Patrick deWitt, bestselling author of The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor, a widow and her son try to escape their problems (scandal, financial ruin, etc.) by fleeing to Paris. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a bright, original yarn with a surprising twist,” and Maria Semple says it's her favorite deWitt novel yet, its dialogue "dizzyingly good." According to Andrew Sean Greer the novel is "brilliant, addictive, funny and wise." (Edan) Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus: If you’ve read Marcus before, you know what you’re in for: a set of bizarre stories that are simultaneously terrifying and hysterical, fantastical and discomfortingly realistic. For example, in “The Grow-Light Blues,” which appeared in The New Yorker a few years back, a corporate employee tests a new nutrition supplement—the light from his computer screen. The results are not pleasant. With plots that seem like those of Black Mirror, Marcus presents dystopian futures that are all the more frightening because they seem possible. (Ismail) The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor: In the follow-up to his Costa Award-winning novel Reservoir 13, McGregor’s newest book focuses on the crime at the center of its predecessor: the disappearance of 13-year-old Becky Shaw. After Becky goes missing, an interviewer comes to town to collect stories from the villagers. Over the course of the book, the community reveals what happened (or what may have happened) in the days and weeks before the incident. In its starred review, Kirkus called the novel a “noteworthy event” that, when put in conversation with Reservoir 13, is “nothing short of a remarkable experiment in storytelling.” (Carolyn) Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey: Called “a dark star of a book, glittering with mordant humor and astonishing, seductive strangeness and grace” by Lauren Groff, this is the story of Pony Darlene Fontaine. She lives in “the territory,” a sinister town run on a scarce economic resource. One night, Pony’s mother, Billie Jean, bolts barefoot into cold of the wider world—a place where the townspeople have never been. Told from the perspectives of Pony, a dog, and a teenage boy, this book shows the magic of Dey’s imagination. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling it a "word-for-word triumph." (Claire) Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah: Every news event, policy decision, and cultural moment now draws parallels to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “It’s Gilead, we’re in Gilead,” Twitter tells us, “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” But Shah’s novel is both explicitly connected to Atwood’s marvel and working to expand it by imagining what a secular, Middle Eastern Gilead might look like. In a near future, war and disease have wiped out the women of what is currently Pakistan and Iran, and those who survived are now the forced breeders of a dystopian society. But there’s resistance, secrets, and risk; the result, Kirkus writes, is a kind of spy-genre-cum-soap-opera update on a modern classic. (Kaulie) Boom Town by Sam Anderson: The decorated journalist Sam Anderson, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, has set out to fill a yawning gap in the American popular imagination: our tendency to ignore the nation’s 27th-largest metropolis, Oklahoma City. Anderson’s rollicking narrative is woven from two threads—the vicissitudes of the city’s NBA team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the city’s boom-and-bust history of colorful characters, vicious weather, boosterism, and bloodshed, including, of course, the 1995 terrorist bombing of the federal building that left 168 dead. Everything about Anderson’s OK City is outsize, including the self-delusions. Its Will Rogers World Airport, for instance, doesn’t have any international flights. Anderson runs wild with this material. (Bill)  Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes (translated by Emma Ramadan): French feminist author and filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory used her experience of rape, prostitution, and work in the porn industry to explode myths of sex, gender, and beauty, and it subsequently gained a cult following among English-language readers when first published in 2010. She's since broken through to a wider audience with Volume 1 of her Vernon Subutex trilogy, just shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. While we’re waiting on the second volume of Subutex in the States, Feminist Press brings us Despentes' Pretty Things, "a mean little book, wickedly funny, totally lascivious, often pornographic,” according to Kirkus, and just one of the many reasons Lauren Elkin has called Despentes "a feminist Zola for the twenty-first century.” (Anne) Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction by Joshua Cohen: Book of Numbers, Cohen’s tome about a tech titan leading us out of the pre-internet wilderness with his search engine, contains aphoristic observations on technology: “Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination but becoming imagination, and so bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.” Now comes a nonfiction book about life in the digital age. The wide-ranging collection has political profiles, book reviews, and idiosyncratic journal entries: “Hat Lessons Gleaned from Attending a Film Noir Marathon with a Nonagenarian Ex-Milliner Who Never Stops Talking.” (Matt) Open Me by Lisa Locascio: If you’re looking for a sexy and smart summer read, look no further. In this erotic coming-of-age story, Lisa Locascio explores the female body, politics, and desire. Aimee Bender writes that this debut novel is “a kind of love letter to the female body and all its power and visceral complexity. This is a story of many important layers, but one of the many reasons it remains distinct in my mind is because of its honesty about our complicated, yearning physical selves.” (Zoë) Housegirl by Michael Donkor: In this debut novel, Donkor follows three Ghanaian girls: Belinda, the obedient; Mary, the irrepressible; and Amma, the rebel. For her part, Amma has had about enough of the tight-laced life in London that her parents want for her and begins to balk at the strictures of British life. But when she is brought to London to provide a proper in-house example for willful Amma, sensible Belinda begins to experience a cultural dissociation that threatens her sense of self as nothing before ever had. (Il’ja) SEPTEMBER Transcription by Kate Atkinson: As a fangirl of both the virtuosic Life After Life and of her Jackson Brody detective novels, I barely need to see a review to get excited about a new Atkinson novel—especially a period novel about a female spy, recruited by MI5 at age 18 to monitor fascist sympathizers. Nonetheless, here’s some love from Booklist (starred review): “This is a wonderful novel about making choices, failing to make them, and living, with some degree of grace, the lives our choices determine for us.” (Sonya) The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling: File The Golden State under "most most-anticipated" as it’s the first novel of The Millions’ own brilliant and beloved Lydia Kiesling, who has has been wielding her pen and editorial prowess on this site for many a year. Two months pre-pub, The Golden State is already off to the races with a nomination for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, stating, "Kiesling depicts parenting in the digital age with humor and brutal honesty and offers insights into language, academics, and even the United Nations." Kiesling herself has written that "great writing is bracing, and makes you feel like making something of your own, either another piece of writing, or a joyful noise unto the Lord.” The Golden State promises just that. (Anne) She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore: It’s the early years of Liberia, and three strangers with nothing in common help smooth the way for the nation. Gbessa is a West African exile who survives certain death; June Dey is running from a Virginia plantation; Norman Aragon, the son of a colonizer and a slave, can disappear at will. Their story stands at the meeting point of the diaspora, history, and magical realism, and Edwidge Danticat calls the novel “beautiful and magical.” (Kaulie) The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker: Barker is best known for her fantastic World War I Regeneration trilogy, including The Ghost Road, winner of the 1995 Booker Prize. The Silence of the Girls sees Barker casting her historical imagination back further, to Ancient Greece and the Trojan War. Captured by Achilles, Briseis goes from queen to concubine, from ruler to subject—in this retelling of The Iliad, Barker reclaims Briseis as a protagonist, giving authorial voice to her and the other women who have long existed only as powerless subjects in a male epic. (Adam) The Wildlands by Abby Geni: Geni’s last novel, The Lightkeepers, was a thriller set on an isolated island that was also somehow a meditation on appreciating nature, and it blew me away. Her new novel similarly combines the natural world with manmade terror. It follows four young siblings who are orphaned by an Oklahoma tornado and the ensuing national media attention that pushes their relationships to the edge. (Janet) Washington Black by Esi Edugyan: Edugyan’s last novel, Half-Blood Blues, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker. Attica Locke calls this one “nothing short of a masterpiece.” When Wash, an 11-year-old enslaved in Barbados, is chosen as a manservant, he is terrified. The chooser, Christopher Wilde, however, turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, and abolitionist. But soon Wash and Christopher find themselves having to escape to save their lives. Their run takes them from the frozen North to London and Morocco. It’s all based on a famous 19th-century criminal case. (Claire) Crudo by Olivia Laing: Olivia Laing, known for her chronicles of urban loneliness and writers' attraction to drink as well as critical writing on art and literature, jumps genres with her first novel, Crudo. It's a spitfire of a story with a fervent narrator and a twist: The book is written in the voice of punk feminist author Kathy Acker performed in mash-up with Laing's own, as she considers marriage (with equivocation) and the absurdity of current events circa 2017. Suzanne Moore at The Guardian says, "Here [Laing] asks how we might not disappear…She reaches out for something extraordinary. Crudo is a hot, hot book.” (Anne) Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart: Set during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Shteyngart’s novel begins with a bloodied, hungover, Fitzgerald-loving hedge fund manager—his company is called “This Side of Capital”—waiting for a bus in Manhattan’s Port Authority. A disastrous dinner party the night before has pushed him over the edge, leading to his impulsive decision to flee the city, his business woes, and his wife and autistic toddler to track down an old girlfriend. Like Salman Rushdie in The Golden House, Shteyngart turns his satiric eye on a gilded family in disarray. (Matt) The Shape of Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (translated by Anne McLean): In this, his sixth novel in English translation, Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez plays mischief with history, a string of murders, and the conspiracy theories that commonly arise alongside. Add a storyline carried by a duet of narrators—one with a healthy dollop of paranoia, the other with a fixation for real crime so engrossing he’s turned his home into a kind of museum of crime noir—and you’ve got a gripping read and a solid reflection on the appeal of conspiracy. (Il’ja) The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina: Edie finds her mother Marianne in the living room only just surviving a suicide attempt, while her sister Mae is upstairs in a trance. Marianne is committed to a mental hospital, and the sisters are sent to live with their father, far from their native Louisiana. But as they spend more time with their father, the girls grow further apart, torn by their deep loyalty to opposite parents and their own grief and confusion. Apekina’s debut novel plays with tricky family relationships and the way fact and fantasy, loyalty and obsession, can be so difficult to tease apart. (Kaulie) After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel (translated by Rosalind Harvey): A story about love and consciousness that takes place in Havana, Paris, and New York, by the Mexican author who Katie Kitamura called "a brilliant anatomist of love and perversity...each new book is a revelation." (Lydia)   Ordinary People by Diana Evans: The third novel from Evans, the inaugural winner of the Orange Prize for New Writers, Ordinary People follows two troubled couples as they make their way through life in London. The backdrop: Obama’s 2008 election. The trouble: Living your 30s is hard, parenthood is harder, and relationships to people and places change, often more than we’d like them to. But Evans is as sharply funny—in clear-eyed, exacting fashion—as she is sad, and Ordinary People cuts close to the quick of, well, ordinary people. (Kaulie) Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke by Sarah Smarsh: An uncomfortable reality of contemporary American society, one of many, is that where social mobility is concerned, the so-called American Dream is best achieved in Denmark. If you’re born into poverty here, in other words, hard work won’t necessarily pull you out. In Heartland, Smarsh blends memoir—she comes from a long line of teen mothers and was raised primarily by her grandmother on a farm near Wichita—with analysis and social commentary to offer a nuanced exploration of the impact of generational poverty and a look at the lives of poor and working-class Americans. (Emily) The Caregiver by Samuel Park: Park’s third novel takes place in Rio de Janeiro and California. Mara is an immigrant whose beloved mother Ana, a voice-over actress, was involved with a civilian rebel group in Rio. In California as an adult now, Mara works as a caregiver to a young woman with stomach cancer and grapples with her mother’s complicated, enigmatic past. Shortly after finishing the novel in 2017, Park himself died of stomach cancer at age 41. (Sonya) The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard: Winning France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt doesn’t guarantee an English translation, but as Garth Risk Hallberg showed in a piece about international prize winners, it helps. Recent translated winners include Mathias Énard’s Compass and Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and the latest is Eric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day, a historical novel about the rise of Nazism, corporate complicity, and Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Discussing his fictionalized account, Vuillard, who also wrote a novel about Buffalo Bill Cody, told The New York Times that “there is no such thing as neutral history.” (Matt) Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg: This new collection is the famed short story writer’s first book since 2006, and advance word says it lives up to the best of her work. Over the course of six lengthy, morally complicated stories, the author showcases her trademark wit and sensitivity, exploring such matters as books that expose one’s own past and the trials of finding yourself infatuated with a human rights worker. (Thom)  Ponti by Sharlene Teo: Set in Singapore in the 1990s, Teo's debut, which won the inaugural Deborah Rogers award in the U.K. and was subsequently the subject of a bidding war, describes a twisted friendship between two teenage girls. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it "relatable yet unsettling." (Lydia)   Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman: Eden Malcom, a deeply wounded soldier coming back from the Iraq war, lies unconscious in a bed. The story is narrated by a ghost, Eden’s friend and fellow soldier whom he has lost in the foreign land. Through numerous shattering moments in the book, Ackerman pushes the readers to explore eternal human problems such as the meaning of life, marriage, love and betrayal. (Jianan)   Boomer1 by Daniel Torday: Daniel Torday follows his acclaimed debut, The Last Flight of Poxl West, with a second novel that carries a menacing subtitle: Retire or We’ll Retire You. It’s apt because this is the story of a millennial loser named Mark Brumfeld, a bluegrass musician, former journalist, and current grad student whose punk bassist girlfriend rejects his marriage proposal, driving him out of New York and back to his parents’ basement in suburban Baltimore. There, under the titular handle of Boomer1, he starts posting online critiques of baby boomers that go viral. Intergenerational warfare—what a smart lens for looking at the way we live today. (Bill) River by Esther Kinsky (translated by Iain Galbraith): One of the unsung attractions of London is the transitional areas at the edges, where city meets country meets industry meets waterfowl meets isolated immigrant laborer. A book in which scarcely anything ever happens, River is, however, filled with life. Resolute in her take on the terrain as the outsider looking in, Kinsky skillfully chronicles the importance in our lives of the homely, the unobserved and the irrepressibly present. A book for those who would gladly reread W.G. Sebald but wish he had written about people more often. (Il’ja) The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman: Sarah Weinman uncovers that Sally Horner, an 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped in 1948, was the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Through her thorough research, Weinman learns that Nabokov knew much about Horner’s case and made efforts to disguise this fact. Megan Abbott writes that The Real Lolita “offers both nuanced and compassionate true-crime reportage and revelatory cultural and literary history. It will, quite simply, change the way you think about Lolita and ‘Lolitas’ forever.” (Zoë) The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre: The Myers-Briggs personality test is the most popular test of its kind in the world, and affects life in ways large and small--from the hiring and career development practices of Fortune 500 companies, to time-wasting Facebook tests to, amazingly, people's Twitter bios. (I'm allegedly an ENFP, incidentally.) As it happens, the test was contrived by a team of mother-daughter novelists with a Jung obsession. Scholar and trenchant literary critic Emre uses archival research to tell this story, revealing the fictions woven into a supposedly "scientific" instrument. (Lydia) [millions_ad] OCTOBER Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen): Like many before me, I once fell into Murakami’s fictional world only to emerge six months later wondering what on earth happened. So any anticipation for his new books is tempered by caution. His new novel is about a freshly divorced painter who moves to the mountains, where he finds an eerie and powerful painting called “Killing Commendatore.” Mysteries proliferate, and you will keep reading—not because you are expecting resolution but because it’s Murakami, and you’re under his spell. (Hannah) All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung: This book—the first by the former editor of the much-missed site The Toast—is garnering high praise from lots of great people, among them Alexander Chee, who wrote, “I've been waiting for this writer, and this book—and everything else she'll write.” Born prematurely to Korean parents who had immigrated to America, the author was adopted by a white couple who raised her in rural Oregon, where she encountered bigotry her family couldn’t see. Eventually, Chung grew curious about her past, which led her to seek out the truth of her origins and identity. (Thom) Heavy by Kiese Laymon: Finally! This memoir has been mentioned as “forthcoming” at the end of every Kiese Laymon interview or magazine article for a few years, and I’ve been excited about it the entire time. Laymon has written one novel and one essay collection about America and race. This memoir focuses on Laymon’s own body—in the personal sense of how he treats it and lives in it, and in the larger sense of the heavy burden of a black body in America. (Janet) Almost Everything by Anne Lamott: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author of Bird by Bird has some fascinating thoughts about hope and its role in our lives. In Almost Everything, Anne Lamott recounts her own struggles with despair, admitting that at her lowest she “stockpiled antibiotics for the Apocalypse.” From that point on, she discovered her own strength, and her journey forms the basis of this thoughtful and innovative work. (Thom) Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver: The beloved novelist’s latest tells the story of Willa Knox, whose middle-class life has crumbled: The magazine she built her career around has folded, and the college where her husband had tenure has shut down. All she has is a very old house in need of serious repair. Out of desperation, she begins looking into her house’s history, hoping that she might be able to get some funding from the historical society. Through her research, she finds a kindred spirit in Thatcher Greenwood, who occupied the premises in 1871 and was an advocate of the work of Charles Darwin. Though they are separated by more than a century, Knox and Greenwood both know what it’s like to live through cultural upheaval. (Hannah) Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: In his debut short story collection, Adjei-Brenyah writes about the injustice black people face every day in America. Tackling issues like criminal justice, consumerism, and racism, these timely stories are searching for humanity in a brutal world. The collection is both heartbreaking and hopeful, and George Saunders called it “an excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny.” (Carolyn) Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan: This debut collection of short fiction is the most recent collaboration between Coffee House Press and Emily Books. The 11 short stories argue that relationships between two people often contain a third presence, whether that means another person or a past or future self. Tan’s sensibility has been compared to that of Joy Williams, David Lynch, and Carmen Maria Machado. (Hannah) Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III: Whether in his fiction (House of Sand and Fog) or his nonfiction (Townie), Dubus tells blistering stories about broken lives. In his new novel, Daniel Ahern “hasn’t seen his daughter in forty years, and there is so much to tell her, but why would she listen?” Susan, his daughter, has good reason to hate Daniel—his horrific act of violence ruined their family and poisoned her life. Dubus has the preternatural power to make every storyline feel mythic, and Gone So Long rides an inevitable charge of guilt, fear, and stubborn hope. “Even after we’re gone, what we’ve left behind lives on in some way,” Dubus writes—including who we’ve left behind. (Nick R.) Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border by Octavio Solis: A memoir about growing up a mile from the Rio Grande, told in vignettes, or retablos, showing the small and large moments that take place along the U.S. border. Julia Alvarez says of the book, "Unpretentiously and with an unerring accuracy of tone and rhythm, Solis slowly builds what amounts to a storybook cathedral. We inhabit a border world rich in characters, lush with details, playful and poignant, a border that refutes the stereotypes and divisions smaller minds create. Solis reminds us that sometimes the most profound truths are best told with crafted fictions—and he is a master at it." (Lydia) Family Trust by Kathy Wang: Acclaimed by Cristina Alger as “a brilliant mashup of The Nest and Crazy Rich Asians,” the book deals with many hidden family tensions ignited by the approaching of the death of Stanley Huang, the father of the family. Family Trust brings the readers to rethink the ambitions behind the bloom of Silicon Valley and what families really mean. (Jianan)   Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson (translated by Damion Searls): At 1,800 pages, the two-volume set of Uwe Johnson’s 1968 classic—and first complete publication of the book in English—isn’t going to do your TBR pile any favors. The NYRB release follows, in detail, the New York lives of German emigres Gesine Cresspahl and her daughter Marie as they come to terms with the heritage of the Germany they escaped and with an American existence that, in 1968, begins to resonate with challenges not dissimilar to those they left behind. A Searls translation portends a rewarding reading experience despite the volumes’ length. (Il’ja) White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar: Drawing comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, and Sandra Cisneros, Bhuvaneswar’s debut collection pulls together stories of diverse women of color as they face violence, whether it be sexual, racial, or self-inflicted. The Buddha also makes an appearance, as do Hindu myths, incurable diseases, and an android. No wonder Jeff VanderMeer calls White Dancing Elephants “often provocative” as well as bold, honest, and fresh. (Kaulie) Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips: You know meritocratic capitalism is a lie because everyone who wrote during Holly Anderson’s tenure as editor of MTV News is not presently wealthy beyond imagination, but that’s beside the point. Better yet, let’s pour one out for Grantland. Better still, let’s focus on one truth. Brian Phillips’s essays are out of this world: big-hearted, exhaustive, unrelentingly curious, and goddamned fun. It’s about time he graced us with this collection. (Nick M.) The Souls of Yellow Folk by Wesley Yang: For the title of his debut collection of essays on race, gender, and American society, Wesley Yang invokes W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic study of race in America. These 13 essays, some of which appeared previously in New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and n+1, explore the ways in which the American dream shapes and distorts an assortment of people: chefs, strivers, pickup artists, and school shooters. Included here is “Paper Tigers,” Yang’s personal, National Magazine Award-winning look at Asian-American overachievers. As Yang’s avid followers already know, his laser scrutiny spares no one—not even Yang himself. (Bill) The Witch Elm by Tana French: For six novels now, French has taken readers inside the squabbling, backstabbing world of the (fictional) Dublin Murder Squad, with each successive book following a different detective working frantically to close a case. Now, in a twist, French has—temporarily, we hope—set aside the Murder Squad for a stand-alone book that follows the victim of a crime, a tall, handsome, faintly clueless public relations man named Toby who is nearly beaten to death when he surprises two burglars in his home. Early reviews online attest that French’s trademark immersive prose and incisive understanding of human psychology remain intact, but readers do seem to miss the Murder Squad. (Michael) There Will Be No Miracles Here by Casey Gerald: Casey Gerald fulfilled the American dream and is here to call bullshit. He grew up in Dallas with a sometimes absent mother and was recruited to play football for Yale. As he came to inhabit the rarefied air of Yale, Harvard, and Wall Street, he recognized the false myths that hold up those institutions and how their perpetuation affects those striving to get in. (Janet)   Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker: Camille Acker spins her debut story collection around a pair of linked premises: that respectability does not equal freedom and that the acclaim of others is a tinny substitute for one’s own sense of self. Set mostly in Washington, D.C., these stories give us a millennial who fights gentrification—until she learns that she’s part of the problem; a schoolteacher who dreams of a better city and winds up taking out her frustrations on her students; and a young piano player who wins a competition—and discovers that the prize is worthless. A timely, welcome book. (Bill) The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana): Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, Juan Rulfo—comparisons to each have been made with regard to Cristina Rivera Garza's novels, which are uncanny and unique, often exploring and crossing and investigating borders, including but not limited to "geopolitical borders and conceptual borders, borders of gender and genre, borders between life and death." Rivera Garza has spent her life crossing borders, too. Born in Mexico, she lived between San Diego and Tijuana for a long while, and she now directs the first bilingual creative writing Ph.D. program at the University of Houston. The Taiga Syndrome is Rivera Garza's second novel to be translated to English, a book which Daniel Borzutzky likens to "Apocalypse Now fused with the worlds of Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges." Yowza. (Anne) Well-Read Black Girl ed. Glory Edim: Glory Edim founded Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and an online space that highlights black literature and sisterhood, and last year she produced the inaugural Well-Read Black Girl Festival. Most recently, Edim curated the Well-Read Black Girl anthology, and contributors include Morgan Jerkins, Tayari Jones, Lynn Nottage, Gabourey Sidibe, Rebecca Walker, Jesmyn Ward, Jacqueline Woodson, and Barbara Smith. The collection of essays celebrates the power of representation, visibility, and storytelling. (Zoë)  Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return by Martin Riker: Martin Riker has exquisite taste in books. He’s proven this again and again as publisher of Dorothy and former editor for Dalkey Archive, and as a critic and champion of literature in translation, innovative writing, and authors who take risks—which is why the debut of Riker’s first novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, is so thrilling for us bookish types. The titular Samuel Johnson is not that Samuel Johnson but a Samuel Johnson who comes of age in mid-20th-century America who is killed and whose consciousness then migrates from body to body to inevitably inhabit many lives in what Joshua Cohen calls “a masterpiece of metempsychosis.” (Anne) NOVEMBER All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy: This is Roy’s latest offering after a powerful showing in Sleeping on Jupiter, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2015. This novel centers around Myshkin, a boy whose life is changed when his mother elopes—no, vanishes—with a German man who appears naked at a river near their house one day and insists he has come for her after first meeting her in Bali. The novel follows the anamnesis of what happened, and his ruminations on its effect on his life. Already published in Britain, the novel has been called “elegiac,” compelling, and powerful, among other things. Conceived during a time Roy spent in Bali—at a festival where I had the pleasure of meeting her in 2015—this is an affecting novel. Readers should look for a conversation between Roy and me on this site around publication date. (Chigozie) Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin: Can you remember a better short story collection in recent years than Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women? I can’t. Maybe once a week I think about that dentist, ripping his own teeth out in front of his granddaughter. Now, Berlin’s estate is back with even more stories, this time all previously uncompiled. In the case of a less talented writer, I’d be worried about publishers scraping the barrel. But with Berlin, there are surely unplucked molars. (Nick M.)  The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen: Today Franzen is best known as a novelist—even the “Great American Novelist”—but it’s worth noting that he first appeared on many readers’ radar with his 1996 Harper’s essay “Perchance to Dream” about the difficulties of writing fiction in an age of images. Franzen’s essays, like his novels, can be a mixed bag, but he is a man perennially interested in interesting things that others overlook, such as, in this book, the global devastation of seabirds by predators and climate change. (Michael) Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard (translated by Charlotte Mandell): From the author of the brilliant, Prix Goncourt-winning Compass, a work of historical fiction that follows Michelangelo to the Ottoman Empire, where he is considering a commission from the Sultan to build a bridge across the Golden Horn. The novel promises to continue Énard’s deep, humanistic explorations of the historical and ongoing connections between Europe and Asia, Islamdom and Christendom. (Lydia) My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite: As the title makes clear, the Nigerian writer Oyinkan Braithwaite’s first novel is a dark comedy of sibling rivalry. The beautiful Ayoola leads a charmed life, and thanks to the cleanup efforts of her older sister, Korede, she suffers no repercussions from killing a string of boyfriends. Korede’s loyalty is tested, however, when a man close to her heart asks out her sister. Film producers are already getting in on the fun, as Working Title has optioned what the publisher calls a “hand grenade of a novel.” (Matt) Those Who Knew by Idra Novey: Following up her debut novel, Ways to Disappear, Novey's latest tells the story of a woman who suspects a senator's hand in the death of a young woman on an unnamed island. The great Rebecca Traister says the book "speaks with uncommon prescience to the swirl around us. Novey writes, with acuity and depth, about questions of silence, power, and complicity. The universe she has created is imagined, and all too real." (Lydia) The April 3rd Incident by Yu Hua (translated by Allan H. Barr): A collection of his best early stories from a pioneer in China’s 1980 avant-garde literary movement, renowned for approaching realist subject matters through unconventional techniques. In his writings, reality is punctured and estranged, leading up to a new look at things familiar. Yu Hua is one of the best acclaimed contemporary Chinese authors. His previous works include China in Ten Words, Brothers, and the stunning To Live. (Jianan) The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem: Charles Heist lives in a trailer in the desert outside L.A. and keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer. Phoebe Siegler is a sarcastic motormouth looking for a friend’s missing daughter. Together, they explore California’s sun-blasted Inland Empire, searching for the girl among warring encampments of hippies and vagabonds living off the grid. In other words, we’re in Lethemland, where characters have implausible last names, genre tropes are turned inside out, and no detective is complete without a pet opossum. Insurrecto by Gina Apostol: A story that takes across time and place in the Philippines, from the American occupation to the Duterte era, by the winner of the PEN Open Book Award for Gun Dealer's Daughter. (Don't miss Apostol's astute essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Francine Prose and textual appropriation.) (Lydia)   Hardly Children by Laura Adamcyzk: Chicago-based author Laura Adamcyzk's bold and observant debut story collection, Hardly Children, teems with wry wit as it explores memory and family and uncovers the unexpected in the everyday. Her stories often involve family, interrelations within, and their disintegration, such as in "Girls,” which won the Dzanc Books/Disquiet Prize. Other stories are pithy and razor sharp, such as "Gun Control," which invents many permutations of Chekhov's Gun (i.e., a gun in act one must go off by act three), and in doing so reflects the degree to which Adamcyzk considers the architecture of her stories, which often shift in striking ways. (Anne) The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (translated by Asa Yoneda): This is the English-language debut from a Japanese writer whose work has already been translated worldwide. The short stories in this collection are a mix of the fantastical and the painfully real. The title story is about a woman who makes radical changes to her appearance through bodybuilding, yet her husband doesn’t even notice. Other mysterious premises include a saleswoman whose client won’t come out of a dressing room, a newlywed couple who begin to resemble each other, and umbrellas that have magical properties. (Hannah) The Patch by John McPhee: McPhee’s seventh collection of essays is finely curated, as expected for an essayist who lives and breathes structure. Essays on the sporting life fill the first part; the second includes shorter, previously uncollected pieces. The collection’s titular essay is an elegiac classic, which begins with the pursuit of chain pickerel in New Hampshire but soon becomes an essay about his dying father. McPhee flawlessly moves from gravity to levity, as in his writing about the Hershey chocolate factory. Such pieces are tastes of his willingness to let the world around him just be and to marvel at mysteries of all variety: “Pools and pools and pools of chocolate—fifty-thousand-pound, ninety-thousand-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate—in the conching rooms...Slip a little spatula in there and see how it tastes. Waxy? Claggy? Gritty? Mild? Taste it soft. That is the way to get the flavor.” One wishes John McPhee would write about everything, his words an introduction to all of life’s flavors. (Nick R.) The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco: A gender-bending historical detective story involving the opium trade and the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the Pacific Northwest. (Lydia)     Useful Phrases for Immigrants by May-lee Chai: Winner of the Doris Bakwin Award selected by Tayari Jones, Chai's collection comprises eight stories detailing life in a globalized world. Edward P. Jones called Useful Phrases "a splendid gem of a story collection...Complementing the vivid characters, the reader has the gift of language―‘a wind so treacherous it had its own name,' 'summer days stretched taffy slow'....Chai's work is a grand event." (Lydia) DECEMBER North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah: Farah has been writing about the world’s greatest catastrophes for years, and his novels, especially Hiding in Plain Sight, have been about the tragedy that accompanies the loss of one’s original country. That strong theme is the centrifugal force of this novel about a calm home engulfed when a son leaves quiet and peaceful Oslo to die back in Somalia. His widow and children return to Norway to live with his parents, and in bringing their devoted religiosity with them, threaten to explode the family once again. Farah is a master of shifts and turns, so this novel promises to be among the year’s most exciting publications. (Chigozie) Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra (translated by Achy Obejas): Translated for the first time into English, internationally bestselling novelist Guerra's book follows a writer from Cuba to Spain, where her expat compatriots assume she is a spy for Castro. Back home in Cuba, she is treated with equal suspicion by her government. (Lydia)
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: June 2018

- | 1 book mentioned
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for June. Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 3. The Immortalists 5 months 2. 4. Less 2 months 3. 5. Fire Sermon 6 months 4. 7. Frankenstein in Baghdad 3 months 5. 8. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden 6 months 6. 9. The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath 3 months 7. 10. Lost Empress 2 months 8. - My Favorite Thing is Monsters 5 months 9. - An American Marriage 1 month 10. - The Overstory 1 month   Three books are off to our Hall of Fame this month, but one of them is completely blank, which I believe is a first for our site. Back in November 2017, in Hannah Gersen's Gift Guide for Readers and Writers, she noted the benefits of the 5-Year Diary's design: The design is unique in that every page represents one day and is divided into five parts, with each part representing one year. So, when you write your entry for Feb 1, you can look back at Feb 1 of the previous year to see what you were doing/writing/reading/thinking/weathering. I think it’s especially useful for writers because if you use the space to track writing and reading projects (as I often do), it’s a great way to gauge your long-term progress. Accompanying the Diary are two works from Carmen Maria Machado and Jesmyn Ward. Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties was the darling of our most recent Year in Reading series, picked by seven participants – Jamel Brinkley, Morgan Jerkins, Rakesh Satyal, Julie Buntin, Lidia Yuknavitch, Louise Erdrich and Jeff VanderMeer – who together sang a chorus of Buy this Book, Buy this Book, Buy this Book. Over the chorus came Nathan Goldman, who wrote in his review for our site that "for all its darkness, Her Body and Other Parties is also a beautiful evocation of women’s—especially queer women’s—lives, in all their fullness, vitality, and complex joy. Formally daring, achingly moving, wildly weird, and startling in its visceral and aesthetic impact, Machado’s work is unlike any other." Evidently, Millions readers dug the tune. Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing was also well-received, drawing praise from four of the seven Year in Reading participants linked above, as well as from Kima Jones and Sarah Smarsh. In her review for our site, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim observed that "Ward’s fiction is about inherited trauma in a deeply divided society, where the oppressor and the oppressed share a legacy" and she also pointed to the other works invoked within the text. "By invoking [Toni] Morrison and [William] Faulkner for new readers," Ibrahim wrote, "Ward excavates not only the suffering of her characters, but also the long tradition of fiction about slavery, fiction that grapples with racial injustice that extends into the present." Elsewhere on our list this month, My Favorite Thing is Monsters returns after a monthlong hiatus, and newcomers An American Marriage and The Overstory fill our ninth and tenth spots, respectively. In the weeks ahead, we'll publish our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and surely several of those upcoming titles will be reflected on our July list. Get ready. This month’s near misses included: The Mars Room, Pachinko, Warlight, The Odyssey, and The World Goes On. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Lists

Seven Great Reads for the 2018 FIFA World Cup

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One hot night in the summer of 2002, I hosted a weird sleepover party in Brooklyn Heights. A dozen men and a wife with a saint’s patience and my alert newborn son crammed into our apartment to watch the nimble men of Brazil play a strong English side led by David Beckham in an elimination match in the soccer World Cup in South Korea. The game’s 3 or 4 a.m. start time required creative sleeping measures. But we didn’t mind. Like thousands of New Yorkers and billions—yes, billions—of people around the world, we were nuts about soccer’s World Cup, a quadrennial playoff of 32 national soccer teams that play with an intensity that makes the Olympics feel quaint. From June 14 to July 15, many eyes and sleeping patterns will be focused on the 2018 edition, which will be held across Russia. Organized since 1930 and relaunched with fanfare after World War II, passion for World Cup football has driven many countries around the planet mad, mostly with the agony of defeat. Only a handful of countries have won the trophies. The cup of their self-esteem runneth over. And many writers have tried to come to terms with soccer passion. In this selection of the best books about soccer, authors stand in awe and terror of what soccer does to them, their communities, and entire continents. There are zany grand treatises, and there are miniature portraits of lonely, raging fandom or, you could say, manhood. From Cameroon to England to sprawling Brazil and tiny Uruguay, soccer often manages to play an operatic role in how countries and boys and girls, not to mention women and men, see themselves. To put global football passion in perspective, I lived outside of the U.S. for nearly 15 years in the middle of sports-mad Europe. I could never convince more than one neighbor to come over to watch my beloved New York Giants play in the Super Bowl—even though kickoff was at the relatively reasonable midnight hour. Soccer in Sun and Shadow (2013) by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried Behind the seeming tedium of a scoreless soccer game lurks tragedies. In Galeano’s magisterial survey of murderous soccer passions, we learn of Abdón Porte of the Uruguayan club Nacional who was found dead in the middle of the stadium; the gun in his hand was the only remedy he could find to a string of bad news. Andres Escobar, a defender on the Colombian national team, scored against his own team in a common accidental play—but it was in a World Cup game in 1994, so he was subsequently murdered on the streets of Medellin. In 1942, the occupying Nazis warned Dynamo Kiev against playing well against a team of Germans. Dynamo crushed them. All their players were summarily executed before leaving the stadium or even changing out of their uniforms! As Galeano shows from examples grand and small, soccer is many things—but not really a game. Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power (2006) by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper Simon Kuper is one of the finest writers in the world about most grave global issues. But over his long career, he has traveled far and wide to talk to soccer coaches and the irrational fans who employ them and reported the hair-raising consequences of their unholy union in games that can decide the fate of nations. The title of this book is a little overblown, but politics and soccer have indeed meshed in ways that should make us wary of the way Donald Trump busts the NFL’s chops over player protests against police brutality. The Cameroonian novel Loin de Douala (2018) by Max Lobe (in French) In this tender new novel that is still criminally only available in French, Lobe, a Cameroonian living in Switzerland, explores how the siren call of global soccer stardom disrupts a family in Douala after an older brother alights for Europe and his worshipful kid brother tries to track him down before getting lost in the hands of a trafficker network that siphons players from Africa to Europe in a trail that gives new meaning to term “black market.” [millions_ad] The Game of Their Lives (1996) by Geoffrey Douglas The apex of American soccer in the World Cup happened all the way back in 1950 when team USA defeated the supposedly mighty England in the opening game of the first postwar World Cup in Brazil. To show that history is no precursor to destiny, in 2018, American soccer is enjoying a historical nadir, since it failed to qualify for the World Cup by losing to Trinidad when it only needed a draw. This slender account of that heroic 1950 team showcases the esprit de corps and immigrant-driven diversity that could someday lead the U.S. to the World Cup’s rarefied climes. Fever Pitch (1998) by British novelist/screenwriter Nick Hornby The most popular book about soccer passion in English history is almost winsome in its study of one young man’s agonies in work, love, and Arsenal fandom. Hornby’s lyrical paean to soccer fan frustrations was incredibly true in the '90s, remains true today, and likely will be as long as the game is played. The Hope That Kills Us: An Anthology of Scottish Football Fiction (2002), edited by Adrian Searle This excellent short story collection, featuring some of the best stories about soccer written by women, has a Scottish soccer theme and is worth the price of admission for a gem of story about a woman who feels frozen out of her boyfriend’s soccer fandom on the eve of a big game. Soccer love is difficult. Being in love with a soccer fan can be hell—a quirky, funny, and heartbreaking place. Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (2002) by journalist Alex Bellos Brazil is the poorest country to be excellent at soccer. In fact, it has five World Cup titles, and being the only country to participate in all 21 editions of the World Cup since it began in 1930 makes Brazil’s soccer the equivalent of blue chip brands like Germany’s Mercedes, France’s Louis Vuitton, or American Express. Bellos traces the odd, violent, and overwhelming coexistence of this consistent string of excellence, led often by black players like Pélé at that, with Brazil’s poverty and historically lousy governments and continent-sized passion, humor, and flair for delivering men and women, girls and boys, who can do magical things with a ball at their feet on the international stage.
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: January 2018

- | 1 book mentioned
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for January. Looking for additional book recommendations? One of the benefits of subscribing to The Millions is access to our exclusive monthly newsletter in which our venerable staffers let you know what they’re reading right now. Learn more here. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 1. 5 Year Diary 2 months 2. 2. Manhattan Beach 4 months 3. 3. Her Body and Other Parties 2 months 4. 8. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process 3 months 5. - Fire Sermon 1 month 6. 6. The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel 6 months 7. 4. Sing, Unburied, Sing 2 months 8. 5. Little Fires Everywhere 4 months 9. 9. The Changeling 6 months 10. - The Largesse of the Sea Maiden 1 month   Exit West exits our list this month, following a parabolic stint on our Top Ten: it debuted in 7th position on in July, and later rose to the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd spots in subsequent months before winding up once more in 7th position to close. As Mohsin Hamid's novel buoyed up our list and down again, it earned praise from no fewer than five of our Year in Reading participants: Jamel Brinkley, Michael David Lukas, Heather Scott Partington, Shanthi Sekaran, and Jeff VanderMeer. (That last author also gave a shout out to Belladonna, which is among this month's "near misses.") It also received critical examination from Eli Jelly-Schapiro, who remarked for our site about its author's attempts at "tracing the fissures in human community and global space, and reflecting on the possibility of their transcendence." Jelly-Schapiro continued: Orbiting earth, Hamid’s novel maps the divides that structure the current global order. But it also charts one necessary future, the advent of what Aimé Césaire called a “humanism made to the measure of the world.” Now, Hamid's novel is off to our Hall of Fame. Elsewhere on our list, it seems little has changed. Our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd spots belong to the books which held those spots in December. So, too, do our 6th and 9th spots. Still, some surprises can be found if one looks carefully. Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing somehow dropped three spots a scant two months after it won the National Book Award, which seems odd. Denis Johnson's new collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, finished not long before the author passed away, appeared at the bottom of our list. Meanwhile, Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon pops up in 5th position, following callouts in not only our Great 2018 Book Preview, but also in four Year in Reading pieces. Our own Hannah Gersen invoked a heavyweight in her praise: I feel bad for the new fiction I read this year, because I was always comparing it to Proust, and nothing could really stand up to that epic reading experience. However, there was one novel that swept me up with its passion, intelligence, and spiritual reach: Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon, which will be published in January 2018. I look forward to reading it again next year. This month’s other near misses included: The Odyssey, Don't Save Anything, My Absolute Darling, and Belladonna. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Book Previews

Most Anticipated: The Great 2018 Book Preview

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Settle in, folks, because this is one the longest first-half previews we've run in a long while. Putting this together is a labor of love, and while a huge crop of great spring books increases the labor, it also means there is more here for readers to love. We'd never claim to be comprehensive—we know there are far more excellent books on the horizon than one list can hold, which is why we've started doing monthly previews in addition to the semi-annual lists (and look out for the January Poetry Preview, which drops tomorrow). But we feel confident we've put together a fantastic selection of (almost 100!) works of fiction, memoir, and essay to enliven your January through June 2018. What's in here? New fiction by giants like Michael Ondaatje, Helen DeWitt, Lynne Tillman, and John Edgar Wideman. Essays from Zadie Smith, Marilynne Robinson, and Leslie Jamison. Exciting debuts from Nafkote Tamirat, Tommy Orange, and Lillian Li. Thrilling translated work from Leïla Slimani and Clarice Lispector. A new Rachel Kushner. A new Rachel Cusk. The last Denis Johnson. The last William Trevor. The long-awaited Vikram Seth. As Millions founder and publisher C. Max Magee wrote recently, you can help ensure that these previews, and all our great books coverage, continue for years to come by lending your support to the site as a member. The Millions has been running for nearly 15 years on a wing and a prayer, and we're incredibly grateful for the love of our recurring readers and current members who help us sustain the work that we do. So don your specs, clear off your TBR surfaces, and prepare for a year that, if nothing else, will be full of good books. JANUARY The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani (translated by Sam Taylor): In her Goncourt Prize-winning novel, Slimani gets the bad news out of the way early—on the first page to be exact: “The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds. The doctor said he didn’t suffer. The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a gray bag, which they zipped up.” Translated from the French by Sam Taylor as The Perfect Nanny—the original title was Chanson Douce, or Lullaby—this taut story about an upper-class couple and the woman they hire to watch their child tells of good help gone bad.  (Matt) Halsey Street by Naima Coster: Coster’s debut novel is set in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a rapidly gentrifying corner of Brooklyn. When Penelope Grand leaves a failed art career in Pittsburgh and comes home to Brooklyn to look after her father, she finds her old neighborhood changed beyond recognition. The narrative shifts between Penelope and her mother, Mirella, who abandoned the family to move to the Dominican Republic and longs for reconciliation. A meditation on family, love, gentrification, and home. (Emily) Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro: Five years after her story collection, I Want to Show You More, drew raves from The New Yorker’s James Wood and Dwight Garner at The New York Times, Quatro delivers her debut novel, which follows a married woman’s struggle to reconcile a passionate affair with her fierce attachment to her husband and two children. “It’s among the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about longing—for beauty, for sex, for God, for a coherent life,” says Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You. (Michael) The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson: Johnson’s writing has always had an antiphonal quality to it—the call and response of a man and his conscience, perhaps. In these stories, a dependably motley crew of Johnson protagonists find themselves forced to take stock as mortality comes calling.  The writing has a more plangent tone than Angels and Jesus’ Son, yet is every bit as edgy. Never afraid to look into the abyss, and never cute about it, Johnson will be missed. Gratefully, sentences like the following, his sentences, will never go away: “How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation?” R.I.P. (Il’ja) A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare (translated by John Hodgson): Kadare structures the novel like a psychological detective yarn, but one with some serious existential heft. The story is set physically in Communist Albania in the darkest hours of totalitarian rule, but the action takes place entirely in the head and life of a typically awful Kadare protagonist—Rudian Stefa, a writer. When a young woman from a remote province ends up dead with a provocatively signed copy of Stefa’s latest book in her possession, it’s time for State Security to get involved.  A strong study of the ease and banality of human duplicity. (Il’ja) Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (translated by Jonathan Wright): The long-awaited English translation of the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 gives American readers the opportunity to read Saadawi’s haunting, bleak, and darkly comic take on Iraqi life in 2008. Or, as Saadawi himself put it in interview for Arab Lit, he set out to write “the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone.” (Check out Saadawi's Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.) This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins: Wünderkind Jerkins has a background in 19th-century Russian lit and postwar Japanese lit, speaks six languages, works/has worked as editor and assistant literary agent; she writes across many genres—reportage, personal essays, fiction, profiles, interviews, literary criticism, and sports and pop culture pieces; and now we’ll be seeing her first book, an essay collection.  From the publisher: “This is a book about black women, but it’s necessary reading for all Americans.” The collected essays will cover topics ranging from “Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t ‘see color’; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of ‘the fast-tailed girl’ and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the ‘Black Girl Magic’ movement.”  (Sonya) Mouths Don’t Speak by Katia D. Ulysse: In Drifting, Ulysse’s 2014 story collection, Haitian immigrants struggle through New York City after the 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of their county. In her debut novel, Ulysse revisits that disaster with a clearer and sharper focus. Jacqueline Florestant is mourning her parents, presumed dead after the earthquake, while her ex-Marine husband cares for their young daughter. But the expected losses aren’t the most serious, and a trip to freshly-wounded Haiti exposes the way tragedy follows class lines as well as family ones. (Kaulie)  The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith: Smith’s The Sky Is Yours, is a blockbuster of major label debuts. The dystopic inventiveness of this genre hybrid sci-fi thriller/coming of age tale/adventure novel has garnered comparisons to Gary Shteyngart, David Mitchell and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. And did I mention? It has dragons, too, circling the crumbling Empire Island, and with them a fire problem (of course), and features a reality TV star from a show called Late Capitalism's Royalty. Victor LaValle calls The Sky Is Yours "a raucous, inventive gem of a debut." Don't just take our word for it, listen to an audio excerpt.  (Anne) Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee: Spanning cultures and continents, Lee’s assured debut novel tells the story of two sisters who are bound together and driven apart by the inescapable bonds of family. Miranda is the sensible one, thrust into the role of protector of Lucia, seven years younger, head-strong, and headed for trouble. Their mother emigrated from China to the U.S. after the death of their father, and as the novel unfurls in clear, accessible prose, we follow the sisters on journeys that cover thousands of miles and take us into the deepest recesses of the human heart. Despite its sunny title, this novel never flinches from big and dark issues, including interracial love, mental illness and its treatment, and the dislocations of immigrant life. (Bill) The Infinite Future by Tim Wirkus: I read this brilliant puzzle-of-a-book last March and I still think about it regularly! The Infinite Future follows a struggling writer, a librarian, and a Mormon historian excommunicated from the church on their search for a reclusive Brazilian science fiction writer. In a starred review, Book Page compares Wirkus to Jonathan Lethem and Ron Currie Jr., and says the book “announces Wirkus as one of the most exciting novelists of his generation.” I agree.  (Edan)  The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette: With Winnette’s fourth novel he proves he’s adept at re-appropriating genre conventions in intriguing ways. His previous book, Haint’s Stay, is a Western tale jimmyrigged for its own purposes and is at turns both surreal and humorous. Winnette's latest, The Job of the Wasp, takes on the Gothic ghost novel and is set in the potentially creepiest of places—an isolated boarding school for orphaned boys, in the vein of Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The Old Child, or even Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. “Witty and grisly” according to Kelly Link, strange and creepy, Job of the Wasp reveals Winnette's "natural talent" says Patrick deWitt. (Anne)  Brass by Xhenet Aliu:  In what Publishers Weekly calls a "striking first novel," a daughter searches for answers about the relationship between her parents, a diner waitress from Waterbury, Conn. and a line cook who emigrated from Albania. Aliu writes a story of love, family, and the search for an origin story, set against the decaying backdrop of a post-industrial town. In a starred review, Kirkus writes "Aliu’s riveting, sensitive work shines with warmth, clarity, and a generosity of spirit." (Lydia) The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin: Four adolescent sibling in 1960s New York City sneak out to see a psychic, who tells each of them the exact date they will die. They take this information with a grain of salt, and keep it from each other, but Benjamin’s novel follows them through the succeeding decades, as their lives alternately intertwine and drift apart, examining how the possible knowledge of their impending death affects how they live. I’m going to break my no-novels-about-New-Yorkers rule for this one. (Janet) King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich: This historical thriller features an ax-wielding psychopath wreaking havoc in the city of Sazeracs. It’s been eight years since Rich moved to New Orleans, and in that time, he’s been a keen observer, filing pieces on the city’s storied history and changing identity for various publications, not least of all The New York Review of Books. He’s certainly paid his dues, which is vitally important since the Big Easy is an historically difficult city for outsiders to nail without resorting to distracting tokenism (a pelican ate my beignet in the Ninth Ward). Fortunately, Rich is better than that. (Nick M.) The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers: Eggers returns to his person-centered reportage with an account of a Yemeni-American man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali's efforts to revive the Yemeni tradition of coffee production just when war is brewing. A starred Kirkus review calls Eggers's latest "a most improbable and uplifting success story." (Lydia)   In Every Moment We Are Still Alive by Tom Malmquist (translated by Henning Koch): A hit novel by a Swedish poet brought to English-reading audiences by Melville House. This autobiographical novel tells the story of a poet whose girlfriend leaves the world just as their daughter is coming into it--succumbing suddenly to undiagnosed leukemia at 33 weeks. A work of autofiction about grief and survival that Publisher's Weekly calls a "beautiful, raw meditation on earth-shattering personal loss." (Lydia) Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett: The award-winning British historian (The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War) makes her fiction debut. Narrated by multiple characters, the historical novel spans three centuries and explores the very timely theme of immigration. Walls are erected and cause unforeseen consequences for both the present and futurey. In its starred review, Kirkus said the novel was "stunning for both its historical sweep and its elegant prose." (Carolyn) Neon in Daylight by Hermione Hoby: A novel about art, loneliness, sex, and restless city life set against the backdrop of Hurricane Sandy-era New York, Neon in Daylight follows a young, adrift English catsitter as she explores the galleries of New York and develops an infatuation with a successful writer and his daughter, a barista and sex-worker. The great Ann Patchett called Hoby "a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty." (Lydia) This Could Hurt by Jillian Medoff: Medoff works a double shift: when she isn’t writing novels, she’s working as a management consultant, which means, as her official bio explains, “that she uses phrases like ‘driving behavior’ and ‘increasing ROI’ without irony.” In her fourth novel, she turns her attention to a milieu she knows very well, the strange and singular world of corporate America: five colleagues in a corporate HR department struggle to find their footing amidst the upheaval and uncertainty of the 2008-2009 economic collapse. (Emily) The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce: Pierce’s first novel is a fascinating and beautifully rendered meditation on ghosts, technology, marriage, and the afterlife. In a near-future world where holograms are beginning to proliferate in every aspect of daily life, a man dies—for a few minutes, from a heart attack, before he’s revived—returns with no memory of his time away, and becomes obsessed with mortality and the afterlife. In a world increasingly populated by holograms, what does it mean to “see a ghost?” What if there’s no afterlife? On the other hand, what if there is an afterlife, and what if the afterlife has an afterlife? (Emily) Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates: The follow-up novel by the author of Black Chalk, an NPR Best of the Year selection.  Yates's latest "Rashomon-style" literary thriller follows a group of friends up the Hudson, where they are involved in a terrible crime. "I Know What You Did Last Summer"-style, they reconvene years later, with dire consequences. The novel receives the coveted Tana French endorsement: she calls it "darkly, intricately layered, full of pitfalls and switchbacks, smart and funny and moving and merciless." (Lydia) FEBRUARY The Friend by Sigrid Nunez: In her latest novel, Nunez (a Year in Reading alum) ruminates on loss, art, and the unlikely—but necessary—bonds between man and dog. After the suicide of her best friend and mentor, an unnamed, middle-aged writing professor is left Apollo, his beloved, aging Great Dane. Publishers Weekly says the “elegant novel” reflects “the way that, especially in grief, the past is often more vibrant than the present.” (Carolyn) Feel Free by Zadie Smith: In her forthcoming essay collection, Smith provides a critical look at contemporary topics, including art, film, politics, and pop-culture. Feel Free includes many essays previously published in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and it is divided into five sections: In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free. Andrew Solomon described the collection as “a tonic that will help the reader reengage with life.” (Zoë) What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson: One of my favorite literary discoveries of 2017 was that there are two camps of Robinson fans. Are you more Housekeeping or Gilead? To be clear, all of us Housekeeping people claim to have loved ​her ​work before the Pulitzer committee agreed. But this new book is a collection of essays​ where Robinson explores the modern political climate and the mysteries of faith, including​,​ "theological, political, and contemporary themes​."​ ​Given that ​the essays come​​ from Robinson's incisive mind​, I think there will be more than enough to keep both camps happy.​ (Claire)​ An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: In our greatest tragedies, there is the feeling of no escape—and when the storytelling is just right, we feel consumed by the heartbreak. In Jones’s powerful new novel, Celestial and Roy are a married couple with optimism for their future. Early in the book, Jones offers a revelation about Roy’s family, but that secret is nothing compared to what happens next: Roy is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and sentenced to over a decade in prison. An American Marriage arrives in the pained, authentic voices of Celestial, Roy, and Andre—Celestial’s longtime friend who moves into the space left by Roy’s absence. Life, and love, must go on. When the couple writes “I am innocent” to each other in consecutive letters, we weep for their world—but Jones makes sure that we can’t look away. (Nick R.)  The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer: Nothing is what it seems in VanderMeer’s fiction: bears fly, lab-generated protoplasm shapeshifts, and magic undoes science. In this expansion of his acclaimed novel Borne, which largely focused on terrestrial creatures scavenging a post-collapse wasteland, VanderMeer turns his attention upward. Up in the sky, things look a bit different. (Check out his prodigious Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.) House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara: First made famous in the documentary Paris Is Burning, New York City’s House of Xtravaganza is now getting a literary treatment in Cassara’s debut novel—one that’s already drawing comparisons to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The story follows teenage Angel, a young drag queen just coming into her own, as she falls in love, founds her own house and becomes the center of a vibrant—and troubled—community. Critics call it “fierce, tender, and heartbreaking.” (Kaulie) Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi: A surreal, metaphysical debut novel dealing with myth, mental health, and fractured selves centering around Ada, a woman from southern Nigeria "born with one foot on the other side." She attends college in the U.S., where several internal voices emerge to pull her this way and that. Library Journal calls this "a gorgeous, unsettling look into the human psyche." (Lydia)   Red Clocks by Leni Zumas: The latest novel from the author of The Listeners follows five women of different station in a small town in Oregon in a U.S. where abortion and IVF have been banned and embryos have been endowed with all the rights of people. A glimpse at the world some of our current lawmakers would like to usher in, one that Maggie Nelson calls "mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring--not to mention a way forward for fiction now." (Lydia) Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot: In her debut memoir, Mailhot—raised on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in southwestern Canada, presently a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue—grapples with a dual diagnosis of PTSD and Bipolar II disorder, and with the complicated legacy of a dysfunctional family. Sherman Alexie has hailed this book as “an epic take—an Iliad for the indigenous.” (Emily)   Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday: 2017 Whiting Award winner Halliday has written a novel interweaving the lives of a young American editor and a Kurdistan-bound Iraqi-American man stuck in an immigration holding room in Heathrow airport. Louise Erdrich calls this "a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy." (Lydia)   Back Talk by Danielle Lazarin: long live the short story, as long as writers like Lazarin are here to keep the form fresh. The collection begins with “Appetite,” narrated by nearly 16-year-old Claudia, whose mother died of lung cancer. She might seem all grown up, but “I am still afraid of pain—for myself, for all of us.” Lazarin brings us back to a time when story collections were adventures in radical empathy: discrete panels of pained lives, of which we are offered chiseled glimpses. Even in swift tales like “Window Guards,” Lazarin has a finely-tuned sense of pacing and presence: “The first time Owen shows me the photograph of the ghost dog, I don’t believe it.” Short stories are like sideways glances or overheard whispers that become more, and Lazarin makes us believe there’s worth in stories that we can steal moments to experience. (Nick R.)  The Château by Paul Goldberg: In Goldberg’s debut novel, The Yid, the irrepressible members of a Yiddish acting troupe stage manages a plot to assassinate Joseph Stalin in hopes of averting a deadly Jewish pogrom. In his second novel, the stakes are somewhat lower: a heated election for control of a Florida condo board. Kirkus writes that Goldberg’s latest “confirms his status as one of Jewish fiction's liveliest new voices, walking in the shoes of such deadpan provocateurs as Mordecai Richler and Stanley Elkin.” (Matt) The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú: A memoir by a Whiting Award-winner who served as a U.S. border patrol agent. Descended from Mexican immigrants, Cantú spends four years in the border patrol before leaving for civilian life. His book documents his work at the border, and his subsequent quest to discover what happened to a vanished immigrant friend. (Lydia)   Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: If the driving force of Van der Vliet Oloomi's first novel, Fra Keeler,  was "pushing narrative to its limits" through unbuilding and decomposition, her second novel, Call Me Zebra, promises to do the same through a madcap and darkly humorous journey of retracing the past to build anew. Bibi Abbas Abbas Hossein is last in a line of autodidacts, anarchists, and atheists, whose family left Iran by way of Spain when she was a child. The book follows Bibi in present day as she returns to Barcelona from the U.S., renames herself Zebra and falls in love. Van der Vliet Oloomi pays homage to a quixotic mix of influences—including Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kathy Acker—in Call Me Zebra, which Kirkus calls "a brilliant, demented, and bizarro book that demands and rewards all the attention a reader might dare to give it." (Anne) Some Hell by Patrick Nathan: A man commits suicide, leaving his wife, daughter, and two sons reckoning with their loss. Focused on the twinned narratives of Colin, a middle schooler coming to terms with his sexuality, as well as Diane, his mother who’s trying to mend her fractured family, Nathan’s debut novel explores the various ways we cope with maturity, parenting, and heartbreak. (Read Nathan's Year in Reading here.) (Nick M.) The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory: If 2017 was any indication, events in 2018 will try the soul. Some readers like to find escape from uncertain times with dour dystopian prognostications or strained family stories (and there are plenty). But what about something fun? Something with sex (and maybe, eventually, love). Something Roxane Gay called a "charming, warm, sexy gem of a novel....One of the best books I've read in a while." Something so fun and sexy it earned its author a two-book deal (look out for the next book, The Proposal, this fall). Wouldn't it feel good to feel good again? (Lydia) MARCH The Census by Jesse Ball: Novelist Ball's nimble writing embodies the lightness and quickness that Calvino prized (quite literally, too: he pens his novels in a mad dash of days to weeks). And he is prolific, too. Since his previous novel, How to Start a Fire and Why, he has has written about the practice of lucid dreaming and his unique form of pedagogy, as well as a delightfully morbid compendium of Henry King’s deaths, with Brian Evenson. Ball's seventh novel, The Census, tells the story of a dying doctor and his concern regarding who will care for his son with Down Syndrome, as they set off together on a cross-country journey. (Anne) Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman: News of a new Tillman novel is worthy of raising a glass. Men and Apparitions is the follow-up novel to Tillman's brilliant, ambitious American Genius: A Comedy. Men and Apparitions looks closely at our obsession with the image through the perspective of cultural anthropologist Ezekiel "Zeke" Hooper Stark. Norman Rush says, "this book is compelling and bracing and you read many sentences twice to get all the juice there is in them.”  Sarah Manguso has said she is "grateful" for Tillman's "authentically weird and often indescribable books." I second that. (Anne) Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith: Police officer Eamon Michael Royce is killed in the line of duty. His pregnant wife, Evi, narrates Eamon’s passing with elegiac words: “I think of him making the drive, the gentle peachy July morning light illuminating his last moments, his last heartbeat, his last breath.” Months later and wracked with grief, Evi falls for her brother-in-law Dalton: “Backyard-wandering, full-moon pregnant in my turquoise maternity dress and tobacco-colored cowboy boots. I’d lose my way. Dalton would find me. He was always finding me.” The sentences in Cross-Smith’s moving debut are lifted by a sense of awe and mystery—a style attuned to the graces of this world. Whiskey & Ribbons turns backward and forward in time: we hear Eamon’s anxieties about fatherhood, and Dalton’s continuous search for meaning in his life. “I am always hot, like I’m on fire,” Evi dreams later in the novel, still reliving her husband’s death, “burning and gasping for air.” In Cross-Smith’s novel, the past is never forgotten. (Nick R.) The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani): In a New Yorker essay on Tawada, author of Memoirs of a Polar Bear, Riva Galchen wrote that “often in [her] work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own.” Tawada’s latest disorienting mythology is set in a Japan ravaged by a catastrophe. If children are the future, what does it presage that, post-disaster, they are emerging from the womb as frail, aged creatures blessed with an uncanny wisdom? (Read her Year in Reading here.) (Matt) The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst: Hollinghurst’s sixth novel has already received glowing reviews in the U.K. As the title suggests, the plot hinges on a love affair, and follows two generations of the Sparsholt family, opening in 1940 at Oxford, just before WWII. The Guardian called it “an unashamedly readable novel...indeed it feels occasionally like Hollinghurst is trying to house all the successful elements of his previous books under the roof of one novel.” To those of us who adore his books, this sounds heavenly.  (Hannah) The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector (translated by Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser): Since Katrina Dodson published a translation of Lispector’s complete stories in 2015, the Brazilian master's popularity has enjoyed a resurgence. Magdalena Edwards and Benjamin Moser’s new translation of Lispector’s second novel promises to extend interest in the deceased writer’s work. It tells the story of Virginia, a sculptor who crafts intricate pieces in marked isolation. This translation marks the first time The Chandelier has ever appeared in English (Ismail). The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat: It's very easy to love this novel but difficult to describe it. A disarming narrator begins her account from a community with strange rules and obscure ideology located on an unnamed island. While she and her father uneasily bide their time in this not-quite-utopia, she reflects on her upbringing in Boston, and a friendship--with the self-styled leader of the city's community of Ethiopian immigrants--that begins to feel sinister. As the story unfolds, what initially looked like a growing-up story in a semi-comic key becomes a troubling allegory of self-determination and sacrifice. (Lydia) Let's No One Get Hurt by Jon Pineda: A fifteen-year-old girl named Pearl lives in squalor in a southern swamp with her father and two other men, scavenging for food and getting by any way they can. She meets a rich neighbor boy and starts a relationship, eventually learning that his family holds Pearl's fate in their hands. Publisher's Weekly called it "an evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South." (Lydia) The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg: Fairy tales get a feminist spin in this short story collection inspired by Ortberg's most popular Toast column, "Children's Stories Made Horrific." This is not your childhood Cinderella, but one with psychological horror and Ortberg's signature snark. Carmen Maria Machado calls it a cross between, "Terry Pratchett’s satirical jocularity and Angela Carter’s sinister, shrewd storytelling, and the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart." Can't wait to ruin our favorite fables! (Tess) The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea: Urrea is one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen with my 35-year-old eyes, so it’s incredible that it’s not even the thing he’s best at. He’s the recipient of an American Book Award and a Pulitzer nominee for The Devil’s Highway. His new novel is about the daily life of a multi-generational Mexican-American family in California. Or as he puts it, “an American family—one that happens to speak Spanish and admire the Virgin of Guadalupe.” (Janet) Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala: Nearly 15 years after his critically-acclaimed debut novel, Beasts of No Nation, was published, Iweala is back with a story as deeply troubling. Teenagers Niru and Meredith are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When Niru’s secret is accidentally revealed (he’s queer), there is unimaginable and unspeakable consequences for both teens. Publishers Weekly’s starred review says the “staggering sophomore novel” is “notable both for the raw force of Iweala’s prose and the moving, powerful story.” (Carolyn) American Histories: Stories by John Edgar Wideman: Wideman’s new book is a nearly fantastical stretching and blurring of conventional literary forms—including history, fiction, philosophy, biography, and deeply felt personal vignettes. We get reimagined conversations between the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the doomed white crusader for racial equality John Brown. We get to crawl inside the mind of a man sitting on the Williamsburg Bridge, ready to jump. We get Wideman pondering deaths in his own family. We meet Jean Michel Basquiat and Nat Turner. What we get, in the end, is a book unlike any other, the work of an American master working at peak form late in a long and magnificent career. (Bill) Happiness by Aminatta Forna: A novel about what happens when an expert on the habits of foxes and an expert on the trauma of refugees meet in London, one that Paul Yoon raved about it in his Year in Reading: "It is a novel that carries a tremendous sense of the world, where I looked up upon finishing and sensed a shift in what I thought I knew, what I wanted to know. What a gift." In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly says "Forna's latest explores instinct, resilience, and the complexity of human coexistence, reaffirming her reputation for exceptional ability and perspective." (Lydia) The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa (translated by Edith Grossman): The Nobel Prize winner's latest arrives in translation from the extraordinary Edith Grossman. The Neighborhood is symphonic, a “thriller,” if you can call it that, about a detective whose wife gets roped into a debilitating situation. It is set in Llosa’s 1990s Peru, and you see this place with its paradox of grayness and color, juxtaposed with spots of blood. Two women married to very affluent men are having a lesbian affair, and one of their husbands, Enrique, is being blackmailed. When he fails to meet a photo magazine editor’s demands, he is slandered with photos of an erotic encounter on the front pages of the magazine. These two threads will converge at a point of explosion as is wont with Llosa’s novels. While this may not be his best work, it will keep readers reading all the way. (Chigozie) My Dead Parents by Anya Yurchyshyn: Sometimes truth is more fascinating than fiction. Such is the case with Yurchyshyn's My Dead Parents, which started as an anonymous Tumblr blog where the author posted photos and slivers of her parents' correspondences in an attempt to piece together the mystery of their lives. Yurchyshyn's father was a banker who died in Ukraine in a car "accident" that was possibly a hit when she was 16, and years later, though not many, her mother succumbed to alcoholism. Her parents made an enviously handsome couple, but they lived out Leo Tolstoy’s adage of each family being unhappy in its own way. Yurchyshyn's tale is one of curiosity and discovery; it's also an inquiry into grief and numbness. Her Buzzfeed essay, "How I Met My Dead Parents," provides an apt introduction. (Anne) The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas: Year in Reading alum and author of The Oracle of Stamboul explores the history of Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue (site of the famous Cairo Geniza document trove discovered in the nineteenth century) through the story of its generations of Muslim watchmen as gleaned by their modern-day, Berkeley-dwelling scion. Rabih Alameddine calls it "a beautiful, richly textured novel, ambitious and delicately crafted...a joy." (Lydia) Bury What We Cannot Take by Kirstin Chen: This is an atmospheric novel of betrayal and ardent allegiance to ideology and political choices. When young Ah Liam decides it’s virtuous to report the resistance of his grandmother to Maoist rule to the authorities, he unravels his family with his own hands. His decision leads to the family having to flee the country and for them to have to make a decision: leave a fraction of the family behind or face greater harm. With its striking title about the sacrifice (the “burying”) of those who are left behind, the novel succeeds in drawing a very striking portrait of this turbulent period of Chinese history. (Chigozie) Memento Park by Mark Sarvas: Many of us who have been with The Millions for some years surely remember Sarvas’s pioneer lit blog, The Elegant Variation—and look forward to his second novel, Memento Park, 10 years after his critically acclaimed Harry, Revised.  Memento Park is about art, history, Jewishness, fathers and sons: Joseph O’Neill writes pithily, “A thrilling, ceaselessly intelligent investigation into the crime known as history.”  So far, Kirkus praises Sarvas for “skillful prose and well-drawn characters.” (Sonya) Wrestling with the Devil by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Famously, Kenyan author Ngugi wrote his Gikuyu novel Devil on the Cross while serving out a prison sentence. (And he did it on toilet paper, no less.) Now, the writer whom Chimamanda Adichie calls “one of the greatest of our time” is releasing a memoir of his prison stay, begun a half-hour before he was finally released. Taking the form of an extended flashback, the memoir begins at the moment of the author’s arrest and ends, a year later, when he left prison with a novel draft. (Thom) Stray City by Chelsey Johnson: Twenty-something artist Andrea ran away from the Midwest to Portland to escape the expectation to be a mother and create a life for herself as a queer artist. Then, confused and hurt by a break-up, she hooked up with a man—and ended up having his child. Chelsey Johnson’s debut novel, which comes  after a successful run of short stories like the Ploughshares Solo “Escape and Reverse,” is a humorous and heartfelt exploration of sexual identity and unconventional families. (Ismail) APRIL The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer: Wolitzer is ​one of those rare​​ novelist​s​ who is able to capture the zeitgeist. Her follow up to The Interestings, The Female Persuasion centers around Greer Kadetsky, who is a freshman in college when she meets Faith Frank, an inspiring feminist icon who ignites Greer's passions. ​After graduation, Greer lands a job at Frank's foundation and things get real. Wolitzer is a master weaver of story lines and in this novel she brings four ​together as the characters search for purpose in life and love. As the starred review in Publisher's Weekly says, this novel explores, "what it is to both embrace womanhood and suffer because of it." Amen sister. (Claire) The Recovering by Leslie Jamison: The bestselling author of The Empathy Exams brings us The Recovering, which explores addiction and recovery in America, in particular the stories we tell ourselves about addiction. Jamison also examines the relationship many well-known writers and artists had with addiction, including Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and more. The Recovering has received advance praise from Stephen King, Vivian Gornick, and Anne Fadiman. Chris Kraus described the The Recovering  as “a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do.” (Zoë) Circe by Madeline Miller: It took Miller 10 years to write her Orange Prize-winning debut novel, The Song of Achilles. Happily, we only had to wait another five for Circe, even more impressive when one considers that the novel’s story covers millennia. Here Miller again invokes the classical world and a massive cast of gods, nymphs, and mortals, but it’s all seen through the knowing eyes of Circe, the sea-witch who captures Odysseus and turns men into monsters. (Kaulie) America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: As we enter year two of the Donald Trump presidency, Castillo’s first novel challenges readers to look beyond the headlines to grasp the human dimension of America’s lure to immigrants in this big-hearted family saga about three generations of Filipina women who struggle to reconcile the lives they left behind in the Philippines with the ones they are making for themselves in the American suburbs. (Michael)  You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld: Is Sittenfeld a serious literary novelist who dabbles in chick lit? Is she a writer of frothy beach reads who happens to have an MFA from Iowa? Do such distinctions still have any meaning in today’s fiction market? Readers can decide for themselves when Sittenfeld publishes her first story collection, after five novels that have ranged from her smash debut Prep to American Wife, her critically acclaimed “fictional biography” of former First Lady Laura Bush. (Michael) Varina by Charles Frazier: Returning to the setting of his NBA winning Cold Mountain, Frazier taps into the American Civil War, specifically the life of Varina Howell Davis, the teenage bride of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. In this personal tragedy set in an epic period of American history, Frazier examines how “being on the wrong side of history carries consequences” regardless of one’s personal degree of involvement in the offense.  Something to think about. (Il’ja) Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean: You’ve been reading Dean’s reviews and journalism for some time at The Nation, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, The New Yorker, Slate, Salon The New Republic, et alia.  Winner of the 2016 NBCC's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, Dean is debuting her first book with apt timing: Sharp features intertwining depictions of our most important 20th-century female essayists and cultural critics—Susan Sontag, Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, Rebecca West, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, and others.  A hybrid of biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp has been praised and starred by PW as “stunning and highly accessible introduction to a group of important writers.” (Sonya) How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee: In addition to receiving a starred review—and being named a Top 10 Essay Collection of Spring 2018—by Publishers Weekly, Chee’s essay collection explores a myriad of topics that include identity, the AIDS crisis, Trump, tarot, bookselling, art, activism, and more. Ocean Vuong described the book as “life's wisdom—its hurts, joys and redemptions—salvaged from a great fire.”  (Zoë) Disoriental by Négar Djavadi (translated by Tina Kover): From the waiting room of a French fertility clinic, a young woman revisits the stories of generations of her Iranian ancestors culminating in her parents, who brought her to France when she was 10. This French hit, published in English by Europa Editions, is called "a rich, irreverent, kaleidoscopic novel of real originality and power" by Alexander Maksik. (Lydia) Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires: A debut collection of stories exploring black identity and middle-class life in so-called "post-racial" America, with storylines ranging from gun violence and depression to lighter matters like a passive-aggressive fight between the mothers of school kids. George Saunders called these stories "vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive." (Lydia)   Black Swans by Eve Babitz: Until last year, Babitz was an obscure writer who chronicled hedonistic Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. And then Counterpoint and NYRB Classics began reissuing her memoirs and autofiction, and word of Babitz’s unique voice began to spread. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino wrote, “On the page, Babitz is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz.” Novelist Catie Disabato asserts that Babitz “isn’t the famous men she fucked or the photographs she posed in. She is the five books of memoir and fiction she left behind for young women, freshly moved to Los Angeles, to find.” Black Swans is the latest in these recent reissues. Published in 1993, these stories/essays cover everything from the AIDS crisis to learning to tango. And, of course, the Chateau Marmont. (Edan) Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley: Crosley, author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake, returns with a new collection of essays. Ten years removed from her debut, Crosley takes on issues ranging from the pressures of fertility, to swingers, to confronting her own fame. Look Alive promises to be a worthwhile follow-up to Crosley’s 2011 collection How Did You Get This Number?. (Ismail) The Only Story by Julian Barnes: Give this to Barnes: the Man Booker laureate’s not afraid of difficult premises. In his 13th novel, a college student named Paul spends a lazy summer at a tennis club, where he meets a middle-aged woman with two daughters around his age. Soon enough, the two are having an affair, and a flash-forward to a much-older Paul makes clear it upended their lives. (Thom)   Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre (translated by Sophie Lewis): In this torrential inner monologue out from Oakland publisher Transit Books, a woman reflects on music, politics and her affair with a musician, a pianist obsessed with the 1910 self-portrait painted by Arnold Schoenberg, a haunting, blue-tinted work in which the composer’s“expression promised nothing positive for the art of the future, conveyed an anxiety for the future, looked far beyond any definition of the work of art or of the future.” (Matt) How to Be Safe by Tom McCallister: This novel, by the author of The Young Widower’s Handbook, is billed as We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Dept. of Speculation—those are two of my favorite books! Also? Tom McCallister…is a man!  Although high school English teacher Anna Crawford is quickly exonerated after being named a suspect in a campus shooting, she nevertheless suffers intense scrutiny in the wake of the tragedy. As the jacket copy says, “Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she’s somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online.” Of the book, novelist Amber Sparks writes, “It’s so wonderful—so furious and so funny and urgent and needed in this mad ugly space we're sharing with each other.” Author Wiley Cash calls McCallister “an exceptionally talented novelist.” (Edan) MAY Warlight by Michael Ondaatje: From internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The English Patient​ and Divisidero among his other works,​ this new novel ​from Ondaatje ​is set in the decade after World War II. ​When their parents move to Singapore, ​​​14-year-old​ Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, ​are left in London under the watchful eye of a mysterious figure called The Moth. As they ​become immersed in his eccentric circle of friends, ​they are both protected and educated in confusing ways. The mystery deepens when ​​their mother returns months later without their father, but​ ​gives them no explanation. Years later, Nathaniel ​begins to uncover the story through​ a journey of​ facts, recollection, and ​​imagination. If only Anthony Minghella were still with us to make the movie. (Claire) The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner: In her third novel, two-time National Book Award-finalist Kushner writes about a woman named Romy Hall who is serving two consecutive life sentences (plus six years) in a prison in California’s Central Valley. The year is 2003, and the Mars Room in the title refers to a strip club in San Francisco where Romy used to dance; according to the jacket copy, Kushner details “the deadpan absurdities of institutional living…with humor and precision.” George Saunders calls Kushner “a young master” and Robert Stone wrote that she is “a novelist of the very first order.” Check out this short excerpt published by Entertainment Weekly. (Edan) Some Trick by Helen DeWitt: If you periodically spend afternoons sitting around wondering when you will get to read something new by DeWitt, this is your season. In May we get 13 stories from the brilliant writer who brought us The Last Samurai—one of the best books of this or any millennium—and the evilly good Lightning Rods. In this collection DeWitt will evidently apply her mordant virtuosity to territory ranging from statistics to publishing. (Lydia) Motherhood by Sheila Heti: Heti's previous two books have created and followed lines of inquiry—with Misha Glouberman she wrote a book of conversational philosophy, The Chairs Are Where People Go. Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? is an early work of autofiction that delves deep into art-making and friendship. Some called it a literary form of reality TV, making James Wood’s backhanded assessment of the book as both “unpretentious" and “narcissistic" quite the unintentional compliment. Heti's new novel Motherhood follows in a similar line of existential questioning—the narrator approaches the topic of motherhood, asking not when but if she should endeavor to become a mother at all.  (Anne) That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam: “Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s easy.” Priscilla Johnson says those words to Rebecca Stone early in Alam’s novel. Rebecca’s just given birth to her son Jacob, and the novel’s first scene feels both dizzying and precise—a visceral reminder of life’s complex surprises. Priscilla is the hospital staffer who most calms Rebecca’s anxieties, so much that she asks Priscilla to be Jacob’s nanny. A few years later, Priscilla’s own pregnancy ends in heartbreak. Rebecca’s decision to adopt Andrew is complex: she loves and misses Priscilla, and dearly loves this boy, but is she ready for the reality of raising a black son as a white mother? Alam’s sharp narrative asides—lines like “Some percentage of the things she did for the children were actually for her”—carry such weight and truth that we trust his route toward the bigger question of the book: are we ever ready for the pain and joy that life delivers us? (Nick R.) Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk: Four years since publishing his last novel, Palahniuk returns in the era of fake news, obvious government corruption, and widespread despair. (It’s as though the protagonists in his most famous novels were right from the start.) In Adjustment Day, these themes weave together in the form of a mysterious day of reckoning orchestrated by an out of touch, aging group of elected officials. (Nick M.) Last Stories by William Trevor: Prior to his death in November 2016, Trevor told a friend that the book he was working on would be called Last Stories.  That is this book—the last we will ever have from the Irish author. Six of the 10 stories included here have never been published before, and what preview would be sufficient? Perhaps just this: if the engine of accomplished fiction truly is empathy, then you will be hard pressed to uncover a finer practitioner of the core humanity that inspired and inspires this deliberate, and personal, epitaph.  RIP. (Il’ja) MEM by Bethany Morrow In this debut novel set in a speculative past, a Montreal-based scientist discovers a way to extract memories from people, resulting in physical beings, Mems, who are forced to experience the same memory over and over. Complications ensue when one of the Mems, Dolores Extract #1, begins to make and form her own memories. (Hannah)   And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell: O’Connell’s memoir—her first book—is here to remedy the “nobody tells you what it’s really like” refrain of new mothers. Giving birth to her son in her 20s, after an unplanned pregnancy, O’Connell chronicles the seismic changes that happened to her body, routine, social life, and existential purpose before she knew what was coming. All the cool moms of literary twitter (including Edan!) are raving. (Janet) The Ensemble by Aja Gabel: A novel about art and friendship and the fraught world of accomplished musicians—four young friends who comprise a string quartet. Mat Johnson said Gabel's novel "deserves a standing ovation." For a taste of Gabel's prose, read her Best American Essays-notable piece on grief and eating ortolans in France. (Lydia)   The Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava: De La Pava’s first novel, A Naked Singularity, was the rare self-published novel to receive critical acclaim, including the PEN/Bingham Prize. The Lost Empress is as ambitious as his first, a 672-page doorstopper that takes on both football and the criminal justice system. The novel has a large cast, but centers on two characters: Nina Gill, the daughter of the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and presumed heir to the franchise; and Nuno DeAngeles, “a brilliant criminal mastermind,” who gets himself thrown into prison in order to commit a crime. (Hannah) A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley: New York-bred writer Brinkley (and Year in Reading alum) delivers this anticipated debut story collection. Ranging from encounters on the New York subway to a young boy’s first encounter with the reality of racial hierarchy, these sensitive and probing stories promise to captivate. If you’ve read Brinkley’s title story “A Lucky Man” in A Public Space, then you know that he’s a talent to watch. (Ismail) Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel: Bullwinkel’s stories are fantastic and fabulist feats that (often) address our messy, cumbersome bodies in thrilling and imaginative ways. For example: in lieu of a bra, a man is hired to support a daughter's breasts; a woman whose plastic surgeon, when fixing her eyes, leaves her with a turkey neck (not literally but); twin brothers Gleb and Oleg, surgeon and sculptor, live in a prison infirmary and perform a thumb transplant. A compelling new voice, Bullwinkel has had stories in Tin House, Guernica, and Noon. Her first book, the story collection Belly Up, will be published by A Strange Object. (Anne) The Pisces by Melissa Broder: You may know Broder because of her incredible So Sad Today tweets. If you do, you won’t be surprised to hear about her novel, The Pisces, which follows a Ph.D student in love with a Californian merman. The student, Lucy, has a breakdown after nine years of grad school, which compels her Angeleno sister to invite her to dogsit at her place. On the beach, a merman appears, and Lucy embarks on a romance that seems impossible. (Thom) JUNE Kudos by Rachel Cusk: When I first encountered Cusk's writing in the mid-aughts I wrote her off as an author of potentially tedious domestic drama. I was woefully wrong. It's true Cusk is a chronicler of the domestic: she is as known for her memoirs of motherhood and divorce as she is for her novels, but her writing is innovative, observant, and bold. The New Yorker declared that with the trilogy that her latest novel Kudos completes, Cusk has "renovated" the novel, merging fiction with oral history, retooling its structure. Cusk has said: "I’ve never treated fiction as a veil or as a thing to hide behind, which perhaps was, not a mistake exactly, but a sort of risky way to live." (Anne) A Suitable Girl by Vikram Seth: Reportedly delayed by writer’s block brought on by a breakup, Seth has finally produced the much-anticipated sequel to his international smash of 1993, A Suitable Boy. That novel, a gargantuan epic set in post-independence India in the 1950s, was a multi-family saga built around the pursuit of a suitable husband in a world of arranged marriages. In the “jump sequel,” the original protagonist is now in her 80s and on the prowl for a worthy bride for her favorite grandson. Though best-known for A Suitable Boy, the versatile Seth has produced novels, poetry, opera, a verse novel, a travel book, and a memoir. (Bill) Florida by Lauren Groff: After collecting fans like Bara​c​k Obama with her bestselling novel Fates and Furies, ​Groff's next book is a collection of short stories that center around Florida, "the landscape, climate, history, and state of mind​." Included is ​"Dogs Go Wolf,​"​ the haunting story that appeared in The New Yorker earlier in the year. ​In a​ recent​ interview,​ Groff gave us the lay of the land:​ "The collection is a portrait of my own incredible ambivalence about the state where I've lived for twelve years.​..​I love the disappearing natural world, the sunshine, the extraordinary and astonishing beauty of the place as passionately as I hate the heat and moisture and backward politics and the million creatures whose only wish is to kill you.​"​ (Claire) There There by Tommy Orange: Set in Oakland, Orange's novel describes the disparate lives that come together for the Oakland Powwow and what happens to them when they get there. In an extraordinary endorsement,  Sherman Alexie writes that Orange's novel "is truly the first book to capture what it means to be an urban Indian—perhaps the first novel ever to celebrate and honor and elevate the joys and losses of urban Indians. You might think I'm exaggerating but this book is so revolutionary—evolutionary—that Native American literature will never be the same." (Lydia) Upstate by James Wood: It’s been 15 years since Wood’s first novel, The Book Against God, was published. What was Wood doing in the meantime? Oh, just influencing a generation of novelists from his perch at The New Yorker, where his dissecting reviews also functioned as miniature writing seminars. He also penned a writing manual, How Fiction Works. His sophomore effort concerns the Querry family, who reunite in upstate New York to help a family member cope with depression and to pose the kinds of questions fiction answers best: How do people get through difficulty? What does it mean to be happy? How should we live our lives? (Hannah) The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai: This third novel from the acclaimed author of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House interlaces the story of an art gallery director whose friends are succumbing to the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago with a mother struggling to find her estranged daughter 30 years later in contemporary Paris. “The Great Believers is by turns funny, harrowing, tender, devastating, and always hugely suspenseful,” says Margot Livesey, author of Mercury. (Michael)  Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill: Frequent New Yorker and Harper’s readers will know that O’Neill has been writing a lot of short fiction lately. With the new Good Trouble, the Netherland author now has a full collection, comprised of 11 off-kilter, unsettling stories. Their characters range from a would-be renter in New York who can’t get anyone to give him a reference to a poet who can’t decide whether or not to sign a petition. (Thom) Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li: A family chronicle, workplace drama, and love story rolled into one, Li's debut chronicles the universe of the Beijing Duck House restaurant of Rockville, Md., run by a family and long-time employees who intertwine in various ways when disaster strikes. Lorrie Moore raves, "her narratives are complex, mysterious, moving, and surprising." (Lydia)   SICK by Porochista Khakpour: In her much anticipated memoir SICK, Khakpour chronicles her arduous experience with illness, specifically late-stage Lyme disease. She  examines her efforts to receive a diagnosis and the psychological and physiological impact of being so sick for so long, including struggles with mental health and addiction. Khakpour’s memoir demonstrates the power of survival in the midst of pain and uncertainty. (Zoë)  Fight No More by Lydia Millet: Millet’s 2010 collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Eight years later she’s released another collection of stories arranged around a real estate broker and their family as they struggle to reconnect. Millet’s satire is well-known for it’s sharp brutality—and its compassionate humanity. Both sides are on full display here. (Kaulie)   Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson: Examining the intersection of social media and intimacy, the commercial and the corporeal, the theme of Hodson's essay collection is how we are pushed and pulled by our desire. The Catapult teacher's debut has been called "racingly good…refreshing and welcome" by Maggie Nelson. (Tess)   Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt: On the heels of her critically praised debut, The Daughters, Celt gives us a love-triangle story that, according to the publisher, is “inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core.”  The protagonist is a young Russian refugee named Zoya who becomes entangled with her boarding school’s visiting writer, Leo Orlov, and his imperious wife, Vera.  Our own Edan Lepucki praised the novel as “a sexy, brilliant, and gripping novel about the fine line between passion and obsession. I am in awe of Celt's mastery as a prose stylist and storyteller; I can't stop thinking about this amazing book.” (Sonya) [millions_ad]
Profiles

The Poetic Fiction of Gabriela Garcia

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"When I wrote this book,” Gabriela Garcia says of her debut novel, Of Women and Salt, “I had the ambitious idea of combining all these different threads I was obsessed with: Cuba, America, detention, deportation, addiction, privilege.” She also knew she wanted to write a book with all the voices being those of women—and so she has. The story begins with Maria Isabel, who in 1866 Cuba was the sole woman working in a male-dominated cigar factory. Moving back and forth in place and time, from Cuba to Miami to Mexico and from the 19th century to the present, Garcia spins tales of generations of Latinx women bound by blood and heritage and trauma: Carmen, a Cuban immigrant who becomes successful in the U.S.; Carmen’s daughter Jeanette, addicted to drugs and an abusive man; and Gloria, a Central American woman separated from her daughter when she’s taken into custody by ICE. Garcia, 35, is the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Cuba and grew up, she says, in “the overwhelming Latinx community in Miami.” She adds, “I was aware of the factions that existed—race and class, and what Latinx means in that community.” But while there are elements of her life in the book, her background is very different from that of the wealthy family in Of Women and Salt. Garcia tells me she had a variety of jobs in music, magazines, newspapers, and social justice organizations but did not take her creative writing seriously until “I realized it was all I wanted to do.” She went to Purdue University for a three-year MFA program, where she studied with Roxane Gay, whom she calls “a mentor and a great supporter who championed me.” When Gay tweeted about Garcia’s work (the book was her MFA thesis), agents took notice. PJ Mark, a partner at Janklow & Nesbit, and Marya Spence, an agent there, are co-representing Garcia. “It’s an unusual situation,” Spence says. “It started because there were different avenues of discovering her.” Spence saw Gay “wax poetic about Gabriela as a writer” and reached out. Meanwhile, Brian Leung, the director of the creative writing program at Purdue, put Mark in touch with Garcia. “He told me Gabriela was ‘the real deal’ and about to receive a major prize” Mark says. Leung wouldn’t reveal which prize (it was the 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award). So both agents, who first heard about Garcia in July 2018, were reading the manuscript at the same time. Both were loving it; both got in touch with her. “PJ and I work really well together,” Spence says, “so we decided to join forces in a complementary way.” Mark adds that he and Spence have worked together on many projects, but this is the first time they’ve collaborated as co-agents. “We have an intuitive shorthand, so this was our getting back together,” he says. He stresses how “fiercely Garcia brought these women’s lives to bear, emphasizing the theme of force reverberating through generations of women: force as revolution, force as reproduction.” Spence was immediately aware that Garcia is first and foremost a poet and of how that shows in her fiction. “Gabriela talks about women’s struggles, which are shown in poignant vignettes, yet there’s continuity,” she says. Garcia signed on as a client with Janklow & Nesbit in October 2018 and in March 2019, the manuscript was sent to publishers. Within a week, there were 10 interested editors, which led to a heated auction. Megan Lynch, then editorial director at Ecco, won North American rights. “I found Megan easy to talk to,” Garcia says. “I felt like she got my vision for the book.” And there was the “good advance”—close to seven figures, according to Mark. Of Women and Salt was Lynch’s last purchase before she went on maternity leave. “I was not taking on any books,” she says. “But I read the manuscript from two of my favorite agents and was so taken with the firepower and emotionally compelling characters, I had to have it. It engaged my brain and my emotions. I sent off my edits hours before my leave, which was perfect. Gabriela had three months to work on it.” Lynch was tapped to be the publisher of Flatiron Books last November, and in another unusual and, she notes, fortuitous situation, “the book followed me over.” Of Women and Salt was her first presentation at Flatiron. “It was exciting, and there could have been no better book to introduce me to the imprint,” she notes. She also says it’s been interesting to work on the book during the pandemic: “So many video chats, so much experimentation. We are learning that there are things we don’t need, but we need each other.” Flatiron will publish Of Women and Salt in April 2021, and it will be released simultaneously in the U.K. by Picador. Rights have already been sold in eight territories. Garcia says in writing the book she wanted to challenge herself—to look at how history shapes our lives in invisible ways and to explore the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. “My general life philosophy,” she admits, “is to expect the least, so it shocks me to have this much interest in the book.” Absolutely exciting, and fortuitous. [millions_email] This piece was produced in partnership with Publishers Weekly.
In Memoriam

Childlike Wonder, Adult Wisdom: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin, Donald Hall, and Aretha Franklin

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Never curse a slow elevator. Like a book or a song, it may offer lessons in grace or about growing older with truth and dignity. I was once on an aging contraption wheezing its way from floor one to two … to six, when the unobstructed honesty of a child under age 7 and a person over age 70 was revealed. Following long contemplation entirely void of self-consciousness, a young boy accompanied by his mother asked the elderly woman sharing our ride, “Why are you wearing a mask?” She, a ballet company director whose lined face grew even more wrinkled as she bent forward and smiled, answered with a gentleness that defied what I knew was her usual habit—of shouting maniacally at dancers whose failed pirouettes or bent arabesque legs she took as personal insults. “I am not wearing a mask,” she crooned. “I’m just very, very old.” The boy eyed his mother, perhaps wondering when her face, too, would turn into a map grooved by time, regret, smiles, the sun’s rays. He regarded the older woman, this time not staring, but actively, his eyes exploring each nook and cranny of her face. Accommodatingly, she remained nearly nose-to-nose. “It’s a very, very nice old,” he said at last. The woman straightened her spine, pleased a misconception had been shed and at the compliment. I, the observer, admired the straight-speaking pair and the care of their slow-paced exchange. Taking that lesson into the literary world, childlike wonder, adult wisdom, and good humor are never lost in the work of two wordsmiths: Ursula K. Le Guin and Donald Hall. These artists died in 2018. The only comforts are found in the works they leave behind. In addition to Le Guin’s poems, essays, book reviews, nonfiction, fantasy and award-winning science fiction novels (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Earthsea Cycle series and more), she, in her last years, wrote blog posts. A marvelous collection, No Time to Spare (December 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was inspired by Le Guin’s reading of The Notebook, Portuguese writer José Saramago’s blog-turned-book. No Time to Spare divides into four sections interrupted by blogs about Pard, her cat. “The Annals of Pard” serve at the most superficial level as respite—breathers from what are mild to heavy duty miniature essays on “Going Over Eighty,” The Lit Biz,” Trying to Make Sense of It,” and “Rewards.” Read deeply (to read Le Guin any other way is foolishness), the storytelling swings with signature humor and forthrightness from territorial battles with a feline to self-reflective wrestling or victories involving beliefs, curses, music and not writing “the great American novel.” Throughout, mortality (Le Guin’s eventual and that of a very dead mouse) rattles and moans or ironically, affirms Le Guin’s childlike vitality upon reaching eight decades of life. Among the essays, “The Diminished Thing” defines fortunate aging as retaining intellectual, practical and emotional vigor and gaining extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding. Aged intelligence, she writes, is recognizable and “if you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare and irreproducible presence.” Relatedly, “Catching Up, Ha Ha,” written on the eve of Le Guin’s 85th birthday, protests the idea “that anyone over seventy-five who isn’t continuously and conspicuously alive is liable to be considered dead.” Confronting PR people, tired teachers and lazy students who might wish for the author to identify if not produce “the great American novel,” Le Guin asks, “Who cares?” Art, she later states in “TGAN Again,” is not “a horse race” and literature is not an Olympic competition. If every essay does not hit with equal thrust, it’s impossible to overlook the craft behind the writing itself. The language on occasion is deliberately polemic, edgy and rhythmically irregular, but rarely preachy. Combining craft and profound content, there are “Belief in Belief” and a double-header on the music of Philip Glass and John Luther Adams. Le Guin constructs deep philosophical arguments over the misuse of one word in the former and captures the lyricism and rapture of a live performance in the latter’s few hundred words. It’s no easy task, but Le Guin makes it appear so. Going over 80 with Le Guin is wondrous. Reincarnation would be a fine belief to have, but short of that, thank goodness Le Guin’s books are immortal. [millions_ad] Hall died in June 2018 at age 89. Foreswearing poetry in 2010, he continued to write and live in his New Hampshire farm. A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety (July 2018, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) chronicles Hall’s exploits on the cusp of becoming a nonagenarian. Like his Essays After Eighty, the new collection offers the many pleasures of reading Hall: song-like phrasing, quick wit mixed with anger that rides a bitter border but never plunges into mean-spiritedness or hate. There’s raw emotion and vulnerability, especially discoverable in confessions related to loss, professional envy, and essays in which he engages in self-loathing or laughing-at-self over his aging physique. Hall’s protests are more subtle but equal to Le Guin’s. From the opening essay: “In your eighties you are invisible. Nearing ninety you hope nobody sees you.” And there are victorious proclamations: “As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. I tell short anecdotes, I hazard an opinion, speculate, assume, and remember.” From 1957 to 1975, Hall was an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan. In Ann Arbor, he met poet and student Jane Kenyon. Eventually, they married and in 1975 moved to Eagle Pond Farm. (A delight in Carnival is the 119-word essay “Dictaters,” which involves the farm’s name. Even the spell-check generation will appreciate the typo-angle and will not object to its short, internet-era length.) Hall often wrote about his life with Kenyon before and after her death in 1995 due to leukemia. Her work and death serve as an underlying touchpoint in essays on selected poets and absolutely in “Necropoetics,” a chapter about resuming his poetry after her death. “In the months and years after her death, Jane’s voice and mine rose as one, spiraling together the images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the unforgivable absence of flesh.” As always in the work of Hall, shadowy nostalgia, tender personal memories, and a deep love of things old and slow, like baseball, uplift. A reader who might otherwise become morose is therefore comforted by the stories’ underlying warmth. Hope steeped in truth arrives in the book’s final essays, “Way Way Down, Way Way Up” and “Tree Day.” As it is with Le Guin, Hall acknowledges that “emotional intricacy and urgency of human life expresses itself most fiercely through contradiction.” Messy human life and vulnerability exists in the fold: In the skin of a newborn or in old age wrinkles, in skewed or straightforward perspectives, in honest words plainly spoken. I was thinking about artists and aging when I learned the great Aretha Franklin had died all too early at age 76. Franklin, for many of us, changed the significance and meaning of the words “think” and “respect.” The song, “Think,” was written by Franklin and is both a protest and declaration on freedom. Her emphatic version of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, based on Otis Redding’s original song, erects seven letter-size monuments that add up to dignity. The power of Franklin's words changed and changes hearts and human behavior, as did and do Le Guin’s or Hall’s finely written phrases and sentences. So the next time you’re on a slow-moving elevator, don’t curse; take a moment to think. Speak to and respect the people riding along, regardless of age, gender, facial wrinkles, or other classifications. And on the chance that elevator gets stuck between floors, carry a book by Le Guin or Hall or hum a Franklin tune to pass the time. Image: Flickr/Gwydion M. Williams
The Millions Interview

Words, Ever Unreliable: The Millions Interviews Zoje Stage

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As Anne Elizabeth Moore states in her 2017 collection, Body Horror, chronic illness is more common in women than men, so it is no coincidence that these are the diseases society often ignores. This point is in direct conversation with Zoje Stage’s Baby Teeth (St. Martin's Press, July 2018), a delicious literary thriller that debuted last month. If you haven't discovered Baby Teeth, the novel is told from the perspective of two third-person narrators: Suzette, a stay-at-home mother recovering from surgery for Crohn’s disease; and Hanna, her nonverbal 7-year-old. Hanna is an angel when her father, Alex, is around, but left alone, she terrorizes her mother. Seeing her mother’s illness as a sign of weakness, she looks for ways to sabotage her, to damage her. Bottom line: Hanna loves Daddy and wants Mommy out of the way. Permanently. Despite all of this, I felt sympathy for Hanna. I could see where this little girl, though drastically misguided, was coming from, thanks in large part to Stage’s masterful use of language. I reached out to St. Martin’s Press, who graciously gave me a review copy of the novel and put me in touch with Stage for this interview.   The Millions: Zoje, thank you so much for agreeing to discuss your novel with me. I hate the word “unputdownable” because it feels like overused marketing copy, but in the case of Baby Teeth, it was true. I started reading around 7 o’clock one evening and only emerged from my couch five hours later—dazed, dehydrated, finished ARC in hand. Baby Teeth has been hyped as a new take on the “bad seed” genre, and while it excels as a summer thriller, it’s also gotten buzz from critical outlets like The New York Times Book Review. With that in mind, I want to explore your novel on the level of writing as craft. First, I have to say, I love your novel’s gray areas. Hanna isn’t 100 percent unsympathetic, and as the reader learns, Suzette isn’t a fully blameless victim either. Do you think this effect would have been possible without the two third-person points of view? Were the earliest drafts told in this alternating perspective? Zoje Stage: Before I started writing this novel I had to figure out how to tell it—and it was the decision to write it in dual POV that set me on my way. If I had told the story only from Suzette's perspective, not only would Hanna have seemed less sympathetic, but I think the one-sided aspect would have derailed some of the sympathy readers have for Suzette, too. In addition, a lot of the tension in the book comes from the dual perspective of seeing how these two characters interpret the same event differently, which makes people question if one of them is more right than the other. TM: So true. There’s something about such different takes on the same event that does it for me. Did the characters’ voices come to you fully formed or more gradually? I’m especially curious about Hanna, who, though mute, has a rich, almost-synesthetic inner life. When she tries to speak, alone in her room, the first chapter says, “bugs fell from her mouth, frighteningly alive, scampering over her skin and bedclothes.” The novel quickly cashes in on a side “benefit” of her mutism—“making Mommy crazy”—but is there a deeper reason Hanna won’t speak? In the opening chapter, Hanna opines that “Words, ever unreliable, were no one’s friend.” (This was the moment I, a commiserating writer, fell in love with your book.) ZS: Hanna's voice arrived fully formed, and I loved writing her chapters. Because she's not the biggest fan of words, I tried to think from the perspective of what things looked like to her. I think Hanna has many reasons for not speaking: an initial dislike of her own voice, a frustration with not being able to say things as "richly" as the images she sees in her head, and the awareness that it gets her a certain kind of attention. That attention goes back and forth between parental concern and annoyance, but it gives Hanna her own way to feel special. Her mutism became a sort of obsession where, after doing it for so long, she truly doesn't know how to stop. To a certain degree, Hanna knows she'll lose her identity if she begins speaking, and that frightens her. Who will she become? And thank you for singling out the "Words, ever unreliable, were no one's friend" line—it's one of my favorites in the book! It makes me laugh every time I read it, because of course I make my living with words. But Hanna experiences words as being inadequate, having found she could never articulate all of her feelings or thoughts. [millions_ad] TM: Let’s talk about setting for a moment. Though horrible things happen outside of the Jensen family’s home, I felt the greatest frisson of fear when Suzette was alone in the house with her daughter. This claustrophobic, oppressive feeling reminded me of the way each night in a horror film offers one more scare, one more piece of the puzzle. I was fascinated by the way the house Suzette and Alex designed together—a symbol of their love, much like their child—could grow into this warped and violent nightmare. Can you speak to any influences you had when developing this mood for your novel? ZS: Once upon a time, the concept behind this story existed as a screenplay I'd written and hoped to direct, and mood was the single most important aspect. I was very influenced by European cinema, which often has a "cool," detached feel, even while delving into realism. The mood in my book was inspired by elements from two particular films: Let the Right One In (a Swedish film from 2008) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (a 1975 Belgian film). I wanted to have this beautiful, pristine domestic environment that becomes a prison for the woman who's there all day. And the house, in my opinion, with its sophistication and cleanliness, is very "adult," as if neither Suzette nor Alex ever quite made room for a child. TM: I didn’t catch that at first, but you’re absolutely right. There aren’t many (or any) Hanna-friendly spaces in the house. With that in mind, it’s interesting to consider that Suzette sees Hanna as her rival for Alex’s affection and even fears that Alex will side with their daughter over her. I read this fear as not just emotional, but also a very real fear for her financial livelihood. Because of her husband’s career as an architect, Suzette has been able to take years off of work to face motherhood and life with Crohn’s disease. Even so, Suzette frequently worries about “proving her worth,” as though she will be tossed away if she is not beautiful or useful. Does her fear of being left financially alone factor into her more irrational fear of competing with a 7-year-old for her husband’s love? ZS: It is terribly unfortunate that Suzette feels about herself and her life that she would be nothing without Alex. And as her memories in the novel show, it doesn't help that she didn't experience unconditional love from her own mother. Suzette can easily envision a possibility where Alex loves Hanna unconditionally—because that's what good parents "should" do—while his love for her comes with conditions. Her health improved during the early years of their relationship, which undoubtedly was an ego boost for him, but she fears what will happen if her health spirals out of control. There are so many ways that it could impact Alex, from injuring his selfish pride to forcing him into a caregiver role to opening his eyes to how she sees herself: disgusting, on a physical level. And absolutely there is a financial concern. Perhaps of interest to readers is the fact that I've had Crohn's disease for 35 years. I'd hoped that by publishing novels I could improve my quality of life, as I was living on a [federal] disability payment of $627/month. So I'm personally familiar with this scary scenario of trying to keep your head above water while living with a chronic illness and not being well enough to work full-time. Suzette understands her limitations and knows that working full-time may never be in her future. Making things work with her husband is an imperative, and not just because she loves him. Since I like to pretend that my characters exist separately from me, I have to wonder if Hanna, very early in life, caught on to Suzette's imbalanced love: that Alex was the center of her universe, not her child. Is there a possibility that what Hanna once wanted was her mother's love? TM: Yes! I feel this so strongly. Multiple sclerosis, which my mother has lived with for three decades now, can be exhausting for its patients and can make emotional accessibility difficult. To use a common analogy, I now understand that my mother only has so many spoons per day, and some days there aren’t spoons enough for that connection. I wish I had understood this when I was Hanna’s age. Wow. Zoje, thanks so much for this interview. I hope that, if there isn’t a sequel, we can get a film version of Baby Teeth. To close, I have to ask: What is life like now, on the other side of your publication date? Are there any Zoje Stage projects in the works? ZS: The question I am most frequently asked—almost daily, via social media—is if I will write a sequel. I know I disappoint readers when I say no, but I consider the story set in its trajectory. One of the things that is most interesting to me is how each reader brings their own interpretation of that trajectory, and so often what I'm really being asked is "Will you write another book with evil Hanna?" Every once in a while a reader has a different sensibility and a different understanding of Hanna—where she is a troubled girl in a deeply dysfunctional family, but is not without hope. I love that readers are projecting these characters into the future on their own, but because I fall on the minority side—of believing that there is hope for Hanna and her family—it seems unlikely that I could write the satisfying sequel that many readers want. That said, I have a literary horror novel well in hand, with a publication date around winter 2019. And I have another book in progress, a bit more of a thriller. I'll keep it all vague, but rest assured I am a busy, busy writer.

Hall of Fame

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By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we use those numbers to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Once a book has been on the list for six months it graduates to our illustrious Hall of Fame. The books you see here are the all-time favorites of Millions readers (a very distinguished bunch). July 2009 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (at The Millions)The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (at The Millions) August 2009 Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences by Kitty Burns Florey (at The Millions)Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (at The Millions) September 2009 The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker by Matthew Diffee (at The Millions)Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (at The Millions)Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson (at The Millions)The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (at The Millions) January 2010 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (at The Millions)Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (at The Millions) March 2010 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (at The Millions) April 2010 Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (at The Millions) May 2010 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (at The Millions) June 2010 The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy (at The Millions)The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier (at The Millions)Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (at The Millions)The Interrogative Mood? by Padgett Powell (at The Millions) July 2010 Stoner by John Williams (at The Millions)Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (at The Millions) August 2010 Reality Hunger by David Shields (at The Millions) September 2010 The Big Short by Michael Lewis (at The Millions) November 2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding (at The Millions) December 2010 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (at The Millions)The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson (at The Millions) January 2011 The Passage by Justin Cronin (at The Millions)Faithful Place by Tana French (at The Millions) February 2011 Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (at The Millions)A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (at The Millions)Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (at The Millions, more at The Millions) March 2011 Room by Emma Donoghue (at The Millions) June 2011 Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (at The Millions)Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky (at The Millions) July 2011 The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (at The Millions)Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (at The Millions) August 2011 The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books edited by C. Max Magee and Jeff Martin (at The Millions) September 2011 The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (at The Millions)The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (at The Millions) October 2011 Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric by Ward Farnsworth (at The Millions) October 2011 The Enemy by Christopher HitchensThe Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (at The Millions) February 2012 The Bathtub Spy by Tom Rachman March 2012 The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life by Ann Patchett April 2012 1Q84 by Haruki MurakamiThe Marriage Plot by Jeffrey EugenidesThe Art of Fielding by Chad HarbachLightning Rods by Helen DeWitt June 2012 Pulphead by John Jeremiah SullivanThe Book of Disquiet by Fernando PessoaThe Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas CarrThe Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde August 2012 Train Dreams by Denis Johnson October 2012 How to Sharpen Pencils by David ReesThe Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt November 2012 Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel December 2012 A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La PavaThe Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn February 2013 Gone Girl by Gillian FlynnEvery Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max March 2013 This is How You Lose Her by Junot DíazNW by Zadie SmithTelegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon April 2013 Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story May 2013 An Arrangement of Light by Nicole Krauss July 2013 Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O'ConnellTenth of December by George SaundersBuilding Stories by Chris WareArcadia by Lauren Groff September 2013 Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben FountainStand on Zanzibar by John BrunnerThe Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg November 2013 The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson December 2013 Taipei by Tao Lin January 2014 The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin KakaesFox 8 by George Saunders March 2014 The Interestings by Meg WolitzerBleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon April 2014 The Goldfinch by Donna TarttSelected Stories by Alice MunroThe Flamethrowers by Rachel KushnerThe Luminaries by Eleanor CattonDraw It with Your Eyes Closed by Paper Monument and n+1The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri May 2014 The Circle by Dave Eggers June 2014 The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro September 2014 Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter November 2014 A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World by Rachel CantorWell-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines by Samantha Hahn January 2015 Reading Like a Writer by Francine ProseWe Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler March 2015 The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell April 2015 The Novel: A Biography by Michael SchmidtStation Eleven by Emily St. John MandelThe Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan May 2015 All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr June 2015 My Brilliant Friend by Elena FerranteDept. of Speculation by Jenny OffillThe Strange Library by Haruki Murakami July 2015 Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D’AmbrosioThe David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace September 2015 The Buried Giant by Kazuo IshiguroThe Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins October 2015 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo December 2015 Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen January 2016 Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi CoatesA Little Life by Hanya YanagiharaGo Set a Watchman by Harper Lee February 2016 Purity by Jonathan Franzen March 2016 Fates and Furies by Lauren GroffThe Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood April 2016 Slade House by David MitchellCity on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg May 2016 The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya June 2016 Fortune Smiles by Adam JohnsonA Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James July 2016 What Belongs to You by Garth GreenwellMy Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout August 2016 The Past by Tessa Hadley September 2016 Girl Through Glass by Sari WilsonThe Lost Time Accidents by John Wray October 2016 The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh NguyenMr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt November 2016 Zero K by Don DeLillo December 2016 Barkskins by Annie Proulx January 2017 Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams February 2017 The Sellout by Paul Beatty March 2017 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead April 2017 The Trespasser by Tana FrenchCommonwealth by Ann Patchett May 2017 Moonglow by Michael Chabon June 2017 Norwegian by Night by Derek B. MillerThe North Water by Ian McGuire July 2017 Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh August 2017 Lincoln in the Bardo by George SaundersA Separation by Katie KitamuraScratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin September 2017 Ill Will by Dan ChaonAmerican War by Omar El Akkad October 2017 Men Without Women: Stories by Haruki Murakami December 2017 Exit West by Mohsin Hamid February 2018 The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent BinetThe Changeling by Victor LaValle April 2018 Manhattan Beach by Jennifer EganLittle Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng May 2018 Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee June 2018 5-Year Diary by Tamara ShopsinHer Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria MachadoSing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward July 2018 Fire Sermon by Jamie QuatroThe Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson August 2018 The Immortalists by Chloe BenjaminMy Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris September 2018 Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed SaadawiThe Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison November 2018 Less by Andrew Sean GreerLost Empress by Sergio De La Pava December 2018 The Overstory by Richard Powers January 2019 There There by Tommy OrangeThe Ensemble by Aja Gabel February 2019 The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon March 2019 Washington Black by Esi Edugyan April 2019 Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami May 2019 Severance by Ling MaMy Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa MoshfeghTranscription by Kate Atkinson June 2019 The Friend by Sigrid NunezThe William H. Gass Reader by William H. Gass July 2019 Milkman by Anna BurnsDreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer August 2019 The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms edited by Kim AdrianEducated: A Memoir by Tara Westover November 2019 The Practicing Stoic by Ward FarnsworthThe New Me by Halle ButlerNormal People by Sally Rooney January 2020 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead February 2020 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga TokarczukThe Memory Police by Yoko OgawaInland by Téa Obreht March 2020 Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon April 2020 The Topeka School by Ben LernerDucks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann May 2020 The Hotel Neversink by Adam O'Fallon Price June 2020 Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino July 2020 Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry August 2020 The Resisters by Gish JenInterior Chinatown by Charles Yu September 2020 The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John MandelThe City We Became by N. K. Jemisin November 2020 Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller (ed.) December 2020 Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong WashburnDeath in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh January 2021 Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell February 2021 The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett March 2021 What You Are Going Through by Sigrid Nunez April 2021 The Silence by Don DeLillo May 2021 White Ivy by Susie YangDune by Frank HerbertCuyahoga by Pete Beatty June 2021 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George SaundersNo One is Talking About This by Patricia LockwoodDetransition, Baby by Torrey Peters July 2021 Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler September 2021 Klara and the Sun by Kazuo IshiguroThe Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen October 2021 Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon December 2021 The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee January 2022 The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell March 2022 The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki April 2022 Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony DoerrBeautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally RooneyMatrix by Lauren GroffBewilderment by Richard Powers May 2022 These Precious Days: Essays by Ann PatchettTractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein June 2022 The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård July 2022 Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition by James Joyce and Eduardo Arroyo (illustrator)The Penguin Modern Classics Book by Henry EliotWhen We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín LabatutCrossroads by Jonathan Franzen August 2022 The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook by Ward Farnsworth October 2022 How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia NagamatsuRefuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell November 2022 Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Essays

Want to Write Better Fiction? Become a Translator

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Around the world, it’s common for fiction writers to moonlight as translators. Even in places where there’s a robust network of governmental support for writers, translation work provides, at least in theory, a welcome injection of income. Since it’s difficult to make a living writing novels or stories, collecting an extra source of funding is important. What better way to do that than by plying the same medium—language, storytelling—as you do in your art? In Denmark, Pia Juul (The Murder of Halland; tr. Martin Aitken), Harald Voetmann (Sublunar, Awake; tr. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottesen), Olga Ravn (The Employees; tr. Martin Aitken), and Simon Fruelund, whose work I’ve translated, most recently The World and Varvara, have all translated books into Danish while also developing their craft as writers. Brazilian Paolo Henriques Britto (The Clean Shirt of It; tr. Idra Novey) and Argentine Federico Falco (A Perfect Cemetery, tr. Jenny Croft) have done the same. Jhumpa Lahiri was a prominent novelist and short story writer in English, of course, before she moved to Italy and began publishing in—and translating from—Italian. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Unlike many of their counterparts elsewhere, most American novelists don’t translate books. Here in the United States, with its constellation of MFA programs, many teach creative writing. Those who don’t teach work full- or part-time jobs, sometimes more than one; unless you’re independently wealthy, it’s nearly impossible to make art and provide a decent life for yourself and your family. Like freelance writers, independent (non-academic) translators are part of the gig economy—a perilous balancing act between employment and under-employment. For translators whose primary income is derived from translation, it’s a constant hustle. Even if you’re signed to translate two books, say, you’re always thinking about landing a third, because you can’t let the well run dry. You want to know you’ve got a reliable income stream ahead of you. And with many translators increasingly losing jobs to generative AI, the hustle is even more acute today. If you aspire to write fiction as well as translate it, as many translators do, then you have to steal time from some other part of your life. When I was translating my second book, Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Absent One, I would wake up at 4 a.m. to work on my own novel for one hour before shifting, between 5 to 7 a.m., to the translation. Then I’d have breakfast with my wife and son and head out to my full-time job as the communications director for a nonprofit. Though I cherished the one hour I got to spend on my novel—a book that took 10 years to write and would ultimately find no publisher despite my then agent’s best efforts—it came at the cost of extreme exhaustion. It was a crushing schedule I could not maintain. Though the novel I slowly pieced together in those wee morning hours was never published, nor were two of the manuscripts I wrote after that, the crucible of translation was a vitally important training ground that taught me how to read, and write, better—however much I lamented being pulled away from my own fiction and however many rejections I got. By immersing myself in novels at the most minute level, like a biologist studying spores in a Petri dish, I learned how to develop the backbone of stories, economize, and shape language. You might ask, isn’t that what all novelists do who regularly read and study fiction? To a degree, yes. But there’s a fundamental difference: reading fiction, even close reading, is not the same thing as recreating it via translation. Or, as Jenny Croft puts it, “Translation is the closest and most active form of reading.” The crucible of translation was a vitally important training ground that taught me how to read, and write, better. We’ve recently witnessed a flowering of new fiction by translators. In March of this year, Bloomsbury published The Extinction of Irena Rey by Croft, whose first book, Homesick, was originally written in Spanish as a novel but later published as a memoir in English. Last year, Penguin Random House published Take What You Need, the third novel by Idra Novey following Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. In July, HarperCollins will publish Korean translator Anton Hur’s debut novel Toward Eternity, while recent National Book Award for Translation winner Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours, also her debut, will be published by Grove Atlantic in October. That same month, SFWP will publish my own debut novel, The Book of Losman. This, too, is no exhaustive list. It’s hardly surprising that translators write fiction. The question is: How does each writer’s background as a translator impact their work as fiction writers? I asked Croft, Novey, and Dantas Lobato this question. [caption id="attachment_150758" align="alignleft" width="239"] Jenny Croft (Photo: Kelly Kurt Brown)[/caption] “I think the most important thing my translation work has done for my fiction has been to de-center standardized U.S. storytelling, which is difficult to do because U.S. storytelling is typically held so firmly in place by marketing, MFA programs, etc.,” Croft says. Croft, widely known as the translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights and The Books of Jacob and for her prominent role in the #namethetranslator movement, translates from Argentinian Spanish, Polish, and Ukrainian. She won the 2018 International Booker Prize for her work on Flights and teaches at the University of Tulsa. “My translation work makes me hyper-aware of the linguistic structures a writer might otherwise take for granted, such as syntax and etymologies,” she added.  “My years as a translator have taught me to judge all works on their own terms. And as a writer, to try and understand the terms of the work I’m embarking on.” This de-centering is clearly visible in The Extinction of Irena Rey, which Croft uses as a metafictional vehicle to explore, among other things, the act of translation as a creative endeavor. In it, a Spanish-speaking translator joins seven other translators at the home of a famous Polish novelist, the eponymous Irena Rey, to simultaneously translate Rey’s masterpiece into eight different languages. It is a novel—Decameron-like in its framing—that very deliberately, and playfully, employs elements linked to Croft’s work as a translator. Though this novel involves translation, she points out, her next will not. This is an obvious but important distinction to make: translators don’t have to write about translation. [caption id="attachment_150756" align="alignleft" width="238"] Idra Novey (Photo: Jesse Dittmar)[/caption] Like most translators, including the ones here, Idra Novey had literary aspirations from an early age. “I started writing poems and stories in elementary school and have never stopped,” she says. “Writing is my way of processing the world, and translation has become integral to my writing process. I was drawn to translate writers I admired and whose work I wanted to share with others, who couldn’t read it in the original.” For Novey, who teaches at Princeton and who as a translator is perhaps best known for her work on Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H, “the questions that guide my word choices when recreating the sensibility of another writer in English have become integral to the questions that guide my word choices for each character in [a] novel.” She doesn’t shy away from incorporating questions of translation in her fiction. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, is about an American translator who flies to Brazil to search for a famous novelist who has gone missing. Much like The Extinction of Irena Rey, Ways to Disappear reads like a novel conceived and developed outside the confines of an MFA workshop. Novey’s experience as a translator enriches her narratives at the most fundamental level of storytelling: language. “I think about how to convey the sensibility of a speaker through the syntax, how the character’s idiosyncrasies will manifest in the cadence and length of the sentences,” she says. “In Take What You Need, one protagonist speaks Spanish in the car with her family and I wrote their lines in Spanish first, then translated them into English. I did that for many scenes in Ways to Disappear as well, as almost the entirety of that novel takes place while the translator from the U.S. is in Brazil and I wanted the innuendos in the dialogue, and the humor, to evoke a sense of characters speaking to each other in Portuguese.” This kind of creativity, deeply embedded in culture and language, is paramount to the work of a translator. For translators who also write fiction, it offers another layer of possibility not available to writers who think and write solely in English. The best instruction for any writer—besides reading deeply and widely—is to become immersed, at the granular level, in another language. [caption id="attachment_150757" align="alignleft" width="239"] Bruna Dantas Lobato (Photo: Ashley Pieper)[/caption] Bruna Dantas Lobato, originally from Brazil, is perhaps best known for her translation of Sténio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, which won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. She has a slew of forthcoming translations in the pipeline, and will begin teaching at Grinnell College in the fall. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, follows the lives of two women who live 4,000 miles apart—one (a mother) in Brazil and one (her daughter) in Vermont, where she’s a student. Though it’s a relatively slim book, Blue Light Hours took her 10 years to write—and she started writing it, in English, before she began to translate. Ever since she moved to the United States as a student, she says, she has been drawn to writing in English. “It was like tapping into my subconscious, a dreamland,” she says. “Fiction happens to me in English, not Portuguese.” What brought Dantas Lobato to translation was a keen desire to return to her roots; she missed her native language. “My life was fragmented,” she recalls. “There was this one person I was before, and there was this one person I was. There was cognitive dissonance, and I wanted to bridge the gap. I brought a lot of what I knew about writing to my work as a translator.” The main thing translation has given her, she says, is “an expansive writer’s toolkit.” When she began putting stories to paper, she felt limited as a writer. As a translator, however, she was working with different voices and styles—from third person to first person—and this experience opened up new vistas in her fiction and boosted her confidence: “Because I’ve translated all these books, I don’t feel intimidated at all. I got my chance to try out different things. And I feel I can embody any voice I want.” [caption id="attachment_150759" align="alignright" width="238"] K.E. Semmel (Photo: Gerry Szymanski)[/caption] My own debut, The Book of Losman, is set in Copenhagen. Like Irena Rey and Ways to Disappear, questions of translation play a key role in the novel. The protagonist, Losman, is a literary translator with Tourette Syndrome who becomes involved in an experimental drug trial that allows him to relive childhood memories in a dubious attempt to find the cause of his condition. It incorporates elements pulled directly from my experience as an expat in Denmark and as a translator—the latter quite literally. The opening scene, for example, is a re-imagining of Simon Fruelund’s short story “Kramer” from his collection Milk & Other Stories, which I translated. I insert Losman directly in the story, and that allows him to interact with the characters Fruelund created. And there are other deliberate echoes from each of Simon’s books reverberating throughout the novel. Part of this is thematic, but another part is something deeper: When you spend months, even years, translating a writer’s books, you become immersed in that world and you want to explore it further. Although the book was written in English, I imagined my characters speaking Danish and that impacted the cadence of their voices. Like Dantas Lobato, who views her work—translation and fiction alike—as in dialogue with one another, The World and Varvara and The Book of Losman are thematically entwined. Over the years, my translation work often diverted attention from my writing, and that used to bother me. But I couldn’t have written The Book of Losman had I not first delved deeply, minutely, into Danish fiction and culture. The two elements are imprinted in the book’s pages like a colophon. Being able to translate is a privilege; it’s also an education that has made me a stronger writer. This, I am certain, is true for any writer-translator with a desire to tell stories. [millions_email]
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: James Frankie Thomas

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I started off the year reading The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran. I’d put it on my gift wish list for my family Secret Santa, and I was psyched to receive it. I spent those dark January evenings reading it in my local Starbucks and eavesdropping on men at other tables and feeling gorgeously melancholy about gay male loneliness. When I got to the end, I closed the book and stared into space fantasizing about becoming Andrew Holleran’s boyfriend. I would make sure that he (and his characters) would never feel lonely again. Later in January, while staving off gay male loneliness, I caught strep. For a week I was mostly bedridden and it hurt my eyes to look at a screen; I craved a gentle book with large print, and I realized it was the perfect time to read the oeuvre of my friend Kyle Lukoff, a children’s book author. First I read Too Bright to See, his Newbery-winning middle grade novel, and it instantly became my new favorite trans coming-out novel in any genre; I’m surprised it doesn’t get talked about more often in the context of trans lit, but people can be so snobby about children’s lit. Then I read his second middle grade novel, Different Kinds of Fruit, which is sunnier and satirical in tone. I loved that one too. In February I visited Philadelphia and got to tell Kyle in person how much I admired his work. In return, he took me to a used bookstore in Philly and insisted I buy two of his favorite lesser-known works of gay literature. One was Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, by Paul Monette: a devastating read. The other was Eighty-Sixed by David B. Feinberg, a novel published in 1989 and a fascinating artifact of gay life in New York City in the 80s. Since Kyle is a former children’s librarian, I asked him to recommend some board books for my friend Abigail’s baby. On his advice I went with Not a Box by Antoinette Portis and Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers (illustrated by Marla Frazee). I’m told the latter one was especially well received; apparently the baby loves to chew on it. Those board books were the least I could do, because Abigail consistently gives me the best book recommendations of anyone I know. In March I read Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, which Abigail rhapsodized about, although I didn’t get around to it until another friend told me they interpreted the narrator as a thwarted gay trans man. I devoured the novel in a state of blissed-out hypnosis, and it immediately became one of my all-time favorites; I think I’ve mentioned it in every interview I’ve done this year. In May, Abigail lent me her copy of X by Davey Davis (its cover in tatters because the baby had chewed on it), which is absolutely required reading for anyone into kink, noir, or queer lit. After I returned X, Abigail lent me Darryl by Jackie Ess, and now I’m so fanatically Darryl-pilled I’ve already taught it to students as an example of first person narration, the possibilities of summary, and how a really good writer can get away with breaking every writing rule. It’s the weirdest, funniest novel I’ve ever read and I’m obsessed with it. In June I read the wonderful, witty graphic novel Boys Weekend by the wonderful, witty Mattie Lubchansky. I also read Pageboy, even though I’ll never forgive Elliot Page for coming out as trans the day after I did and stealing my thunder. In July, Kyle Lukoff lent me his beloved copy of Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon. I read it while on vacation in Provincetown. At the time, I didn’t even know it was being adapted into a miniseries, which I’m now greatly enjoying. (I also didn’t know until just yesterday that Thomas Mallon was a lifelong Republican until Trump got elected, and now I want to reread the novel in light of this perplexing fact.) After I finished Fellow Travelers I read Mrs. S by K Patrick, and then Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis, and then We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. That was a great month of reading. In August I had dinner with my grad school friend Alexa Frank, who’s an editor at HarperVia, and she gave me a copy of People Collide by Isle McElroy. I was so obsessed from page one, I decided not to look at the author photo or bio because I wanted the reading experience to be untainted by any knowledge of the author. Then I had my own book launch, and a nice person came up to me in the book signing line and told me their name was Isle. Like an idiot, I actually thought to myself, “What a funny coincidence, that’s also the name of the author of that novel I’m loving,” and signed their book without realizing I was talking to the Isle McElroy. I haven’t stopped kicking myself since I figured it out. Alexa also gave me a Japanese novella called Idol, Burning by Rin Usami. It’s about fandom, so of course I loved it. I’m sorry it hasn’t received more attention; I think it fell through the cracks a little because it came out during the Harper strike. The same unfortunate timing befell Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois, a lovely, wry, bighearted novel about a friendship between two women, both named Emily, in New York City in the 1990s—it’s so lovable, and I wish more people had the chance to love it. I feel the same way about We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxana Asgarian. That one wasn’t affected by the strike, so it did get promoted, but no amount of promotion could be enough for this book, a heart-shattering work of reported nonfiction about the Hart family murder-suicide and the failures of the American child welfare system. It should be mandatory reading for everyone everywhere. In September my own book came out. One thing that happens when your book comes out is that people give you advance copies of forthcoming books, either for blurbing purposes or just as a perk, so that’s been my entire reading life over the last few months. So far, my favorite books of 2024 are Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife by Eric Schlich, Just Happy to Be Here by Naomi Kanakia, Here in Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton, and Come and Get It by Kiley Reid. I confess that I don’t log or track the books I read, so I’m going on pure memory here. If any of my author friends are reading this: I read your book too, I swear. And if Andrew Holleran is reading this: Hi. I’m still single. More from A Year in Reading 2023 A Year in Reading Archives: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005    [millions_email]
Book Previews

Most Anticipated: The Great 2023B Book Preview

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Hello beloved Millions readers! It feels like only yesterday we were mooning over the most exciting reads of 2023A. But time flies, and new books wait for no one. Before we get into it—and by "it" I mean forthcoming titles by Alexandra Chang, Annie Ernaux, Jon Fosse, Ross Gay, Werner Herzog, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Benjamin Labatut, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, John McPhee, Marie NDiaye, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sigrid Nunez, Joyce Carol Oates, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Gay Talese, Jesmyn Ward, Bryan Washington, Colson Whitehead, Diane Williams, Banana Yoshimoto, C Pam Zhang, Babs herself, and many, many more—a quick note. While we're highly selective about what makes it into our biannual previews, we know the sheer number of books here (171, to be exact) can be overwhelming, so for our 2023B list we've added tags for readers to more quickly distinguish fiction and nonfiction titles. In the future, we can also add more specific tags to distinguish, say, novels and story collections, memoirs and essay collections—if this would be helpful, do let us know! And though we do our best to strike a balance between being both curated and comprehensive, we're bound to miss a few books, not to mention the new titles that are being announced every day. We encourage you to check out our monthly previews for the most up-to-date lists of our most-anticipated fiction and nonfiction titles, and if you're looking for our most-anticipated poetry collections, be sure to check our our quarterly poetry roundups. Last but not least, if you like what we do, and want us to keep doing it sans paywall, consider making a one-time contribution or becoming a sustaining member today. By some miracle, The Millions has been around for 20 years—we'd like to be around for 20 more (or even just through the end of the year). Without further ado, it's my privilege and pleasure to present our Great 2023B Book Preview. —Sophia Stewart, editor July The Light Room by Kate Zambreno [NF] Zambreno—whose previous books include To Write as If Already Dead, Screen Tests, Drifts, and Heroines, all strange and mesmerizing and very good—chronicles her life as the mother of two young daughters amid the pandemic in her latest. As she teeters between exhaustion and transcendence, she finds inspiration in everything from her children's toys to the work of Natalia Ginzburg. Annie Ernaux counts herself as a big Zambreno stan—need I say more? —Sophia M. Stewart How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, edited by Jericho Brown and Darlene Taylor [NF] Edited by Pulitzer-winning poet Jericho Brown, this anthology features literary titans (and personal faves) Nikki Giovanni, Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, and Jamaica Kincaid, among many, many others, to offer a curated, comprehensive look at what it means to be a Black writer today and how Blackness can inform the craft and practice of writing. —SMS In the Act by Rachel Ingalls [F] In this witty, darkly comedic story, a housewife named Helen uncovers a secret her husband keeps locked in the attic. The reveal is too good to spoil, but let's just say deranged hilarity ensues. No one straddles the line between playful and macabre quite like Ingalls (perhaps best known for her 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban, about a lonely housewife who finds companionship in a sea monster named Larry), who always, in the words of critic Lidija Haas, “leaves readers to wonder, of her spouses and siblings, who might push whom off a cliff.” —SMS Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths [F] Griffiths, a decorated poet, debuts as a novelist with this tale of two Black sisters growing up in New England amid the Civil Rights movement. Blurbed by Jacqueline Woodson and Marlon James, who calls it a "magical, magnificent novel," Promise explores sisterhood, resistance, and everyday acts of heroism with a poetic sensibility. —Lauren Frank Zero-Sum by Joyce Carol Oates [F] The prolific author and goated tweeter is back with brutally dark story collection, centering on erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and the lure of self-destruction. The cast of characters include high school girls out for vengeance on sexual predators, a philosophy student bent on seducing her mentor, and a young woman morbidly fascinated by motherhood. Always one to wade into The Discourse, JCO pulls no punches here, touching every nerve she can manage. You can't help but respect it. —SMS All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky [F] Madievsky’s electric debut—pitched as Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch—follows an unnamed narrator who is torn between her obsession with her older sister Debbie and her desire to get clean. When Debbie vanishes, our narrator embarks on a kaleidoscopic journey of sex, power, and mysticism. All-Night Pharmacy counts among its fans Kristen Arnett, Isle McElroy, and Jean Kyoung Frazier, who calls the book "a black hole, a force so lively, unfiltered, and pure that you won’t mind being sucked in headfirst." —Liv Albright Thunderclap by Laura Cumming [NF] Art critic and historian Cumming zeroes in on a decisive moment in art history: a massive explosion at a Dutch gunpowder shop that killed the painter of The Goldfinch and almost killed Johannes Vermeer. Thunderclap blends memoir, biography, and history to explore one of art's most fertile periods and probe the intersections of art, memory, and desire. —LF Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson [F] Reissued by the extremely cool Dalkey Archive, Markson's 1988 novel—hailed by DFW himself as "a work of genius"—is a philosophical, experimental, and truly wild journey into the mind, narrated by a woman who is convinced that she is the last person on earth. One of the more daunting entries on this list, yes, but also one of the most fascinating. —SMS Tabula Rasa: Vol. 1 by John McPhee [NF] McPhee looks back on his seven-decade career by reflecting on all the people, places, and things he had planned to write about but never got around to. As with any retrospective by a literary icon, there's lots of quality tea in here, from a frosty encounter with Thorton Wilder to how he convinced The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. A curio cabinet of treasures. —SMS Sucker by Daniel Hornsby [F] This book was pitched to me as Succession meets Bad Blood meets vampires—a high-risk combination, narratively speaking, but undeniably tempting. Hornsby's sophomore effort, after the 2020 novel Via Negativa, is undeniably of the moment and sounds like just the sort of biting satire (I'm so sorry) that a lot of us could stand to sink our teeth into (seriously, like, so sorry) right now. —SMS Elsewhere: Stories by Yan Ge [F] Over two decades, Ge, a fiction writer who works in both Chinese and English, has written 13 books in Chinese, several of them translated into English. With Elsewhere, she makes her English-language debut. This will be Anglophone readers' first encounter with Ge as a short-story writer (a form she has lots of experience with; she published her first book—a short story collection—at 17), and if her novels are any indication, we're in for a treat. —LF My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan [F] A woman besotted with an apparently perfect man who does not return her affections—let's just say this one... resonates. The debut novel from France's Maud Ventura, this psychological thriller, a la Gillian Flynn, follows a wife whose passion for her husband, and tests of his love for her, threatens to tear her marriage apart. A delicious addition to the relationship-suspense genre. —SMS After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley [F] The latest collection from Hadley, a master at capturing the emotional gradations of domestic life, comprises 12 characteristically astute stories about the ties that bind. Colm Tóibín counts himself as a Hadley stan, and Lily King calls this, Hadley's twelfth book and fourth story collection, "pure magic." —LF Strip Tees by Kate Flannery [F] Flannery's memoir, set in mid-aughts Los Angeles, centers on the author's stint at American Apparel at the height of the indie sleaze. A record of a bygone era and a bildungsroman about work and sex, the cover alone has me yearning for the days of skater dresses and disco shorts—were we ever so young? —SMS Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson [F] In the follow-up to his hit debut novel Open Water, beloved by the likes of Katie Kitamura and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Nelson introduces three young Londoners on the cusp of adulthood and the major life changes it brings. Moving from London to Accra and back again, the novel's scale is both intimate and international, anchored by a timeless story of friendship and growing up. —LF How Can I Help You by Laura Sims [F] Wanting to escape her mysterious past, Margo Finch changes her name and accepts a library job, which she hopes will mask her penchant for violence. But her plan is upended when a dead body shows up in the library bathroom. Mona Awad calls this "a compulsive and unforgettable novel" that is "reminiscent of Shirley Jackson at her eerie best." —LA I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle [F] Doyle's debut story collection plumbs the inner lives of young women faced with the uncertainty, nostalgia, and romantic tribulations that are part and parcel of being alive in your twenties. This one is pitched for readers of Batuman, Moshfegh, and Lockwood—a holy trinity of sharp, searching female characters. Say no more. —SMS Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead [F] Whitehead continues his saga of late-20th-century Harlem (beginning with 2021's Harlem Shuffle) with a portrait of the seedy, exuberant world of 1970s New York. The novel takes us to the set of a Blaxploitation set, a standoff between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army, a bitter Bicentennial celebration—a rich imagining of an inimitable time and place, by one of New York's best. —SMS Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed [F] Ahmed's debut reimagines One Thousand and One Nights by placing its narrator, Scheherazade, at the center of the story. Crafted over 14 years of writing and research, offers a new take on 13th-century folktales, celebrating the richness of the medieval Islamic world while finding fresh and even feminist significance in Scheherazade's voice. Also, that cover—whew! —SMS Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland [NF] I'll cut to the chase—this the best book I've read this year and also one of the best books I've ever read in my life. No descriptor feels capacious enough: an intellectually rigorous memoir, a moving cultural history, an brilliant study of blindness, disability, and adaptation. My love and admiration for this book know no bounds, and I'm beyond excited for the new era in disability writing that its publication portends. Shoutout to one of my favorite living writers and thinkers Chloé Cooper Jones, whose blurb made me pick this book up and subsequently changed my life. —SMS Succession Scripts 1, 2, & 3 by Jesse Armstrong et al [F] My deep love for Succession stems mostly from its utterly brilliant dialogue—slippery and evasive, gestural and oblique, and a showcase for the most remarkable diction I've ever seen on TV. Nobody writes like Jesse Armstrong and his writer's room, and with the way the medium is headed I doubt anyone ever will again. This is mandatory reading for Succession fans, aspiring screenwriters, and anyone who loves good TV.  —SMS Gwen John by Alice Foster [NF] I first discovered John's work in Celia Paul's gorgeous memoir Letters to Gwen John, and she's been one of my favorite artists ever since. Foster's study of John's life and work—the first critical, illustrated biography of the early-twentieth-century painter—is a well-researched account and beautiful tribute to a brilliant and complicated woman artist who has long languished on the margins of art history. —SMS Contradiction Days by JoAnna Novak [NF] Creatively blocked and uneasy with her newly pregnant body, Novak becomes obsessed with painter Agnes Martin. In her debut memoir, she wrestles in real-time with Martin's remarkable body of work, which provides her with a new framework to engage with her changing body, creative impulses, and impending motherhood. Billed for readers of Rachel Cusk and Maggie Nelson, Contradiction Days explores the thorny intersections of art, obligation, and womanhood. —LA Someone Who Isn't Me by Geoff Rickly [F] Rickly's debut novel follows a man seeking psychedelic treatment for heroin addiction in Mexico, and is based on the author's own experience doing the same. Chelsea Hodson literally founded her own press just to publish this book, so it's gotta be bonkers good. Not to mention both Hanif Abdurraqib and Gerard Way are blurbers—the definition of an iconic duo. —SMS Pleasure of Thinking by Wang Xiaobo, translated by Yan Yan [NF] Collecting the essays of one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s, Pleasure of Thinking highlights Xiaobo's remarkable versatility as a critic and thinker. From essays on Calvino and Hemingway, to anecdotes about getting mugged and how shitty American food is, this yet-untranslated collection has it all. —LF August Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki [F] The latest from Lepucki (a Millions alum!) is a quintessentially California novel, spanning the dense forests of Santa Cruz and the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Centering on Ursa, who can (sort of) time travel and is drawn early on into an all-women cult (I'm listening), Time's Mouth wrestles with memory, inheritance, and whether we can ever be extricated from our past. —SMS Mobility by Lydia Kiesling [F] The sophomore novel by Kiesling (another Millions alum!) is a story of class, power, and climate change, as well as American complicity and inertia. Kiesling is one of the best writers working today, and the Namwali Serpell calls this latest book a "deeply engrossing and politically astute tale," so this one is especially hotly anticipated over at Millions HQ (by which I mean me). —SMS Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen [NF] This, by Nguyen, is a somewhat meta masterclass in memoir-writing: attuned to the inherent ethical dilemmas that come with writing creative nonfiction, the lapses in memory and changes in perspective, the subjective narration through which reality is filtered. I had the pleasure of speaking to Nguyen about the book a few months ago, and her command of her craft is undeniable—and on full display in her latest. —SMS Tom Lake by Ann Patchett [F] If anyone can pull off an actually-good pandemic novel, it's Patchett. Tom Lake centers on a mother and her three daughters, cooped up at home in early 2020, as the mother tells the story of a famous actor with whom she once shared the stage—and a bed. It's strange to think that our parents were people before we were born, and Patchett's latest covers that fertile narrative ground with aplomb. —LF Anansi's Gold by Yepoka Yeebo [NF] In her first book, Yeebo chases an infamous Ghanian conman, John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who pulled off one of the 20th century's longest-running frauds, living in luxury, fooling everyone, and making millions, all while evading the FBI for years. How long until this book becomes an HBO miniseries starring Isiah Whitlock Jr.? Only time will tell. —SMS Witness by Jamel Brinkley [F] Brinkley is one of the best writers of short fiction around right now, with Yiyun Li comparing him to "iconic short-story writers [like] Edward P. Jones and Mavis Gallant." His sophomore collection, following 2018's Lucky Man, comprises 10 stories about life, death, and city-dwelling. I'll read anything FSG publishes anyway, but Witness in particular looks like a real gem. —SMS The Plague by Jacqueline Rose [NF] Rose, also the author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women, refracts the experience of the pandemic through the work of Camus, Freud, and Simone Weil, using their politics and private griefs as windows into our present moment. A slim volume that, knowing Rose, will have some serious intellectual heft. —SMS Dark Days by Roger Reeves [NF] In his nonfiction debut, poet Roger Reeves combines memoir, theory, and criticism to study race, freedom, and literature. Cathy Park Hong praises Reeves's "dazzling intellect" whose insights "have truly changed my way of thinking"—I can't think of a more ringing endorsement from a more reputable endorser. —SMS Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo [F] Acevedo, who won the National Book Award for her YA novel-in-verse The Poet X, makes her adult debut with this novel of sisterhood, inheritance, and diaspora. The story centers on the women of one Dominican American family who discover secrets that bind them to one another. Kiese Laymon, one of our greatest living writers, calls this one "perfectly crafted and tightly drawn," adding: "This is how stories should be made." —SMS The Men Can't Be Saved by Ben Purkert [F] In his debut novel, Purkert asks: What do our jobs do to our souls? Ignoring how upsettingly close to home this question hits, this book sounds like a knockout, following a junior copywriter who is let go from his job but can't seem to let go of his job. Purket chips away at the ugly, entwined hearts of masculinity and capitalism in what Clint Smith called "a phenomenal debut novel by one of my favorite writers." —SMS Pulling the Chariot of the Sun by Shane McCrae [NF] McCrae, a decorated poet, recounts being kidnapped from his Black father by his white supremacist maternal grandparents. His heritage hidden, memories distorted, and life carefully controlled, McCrae's painful childhood allow allows him insights into the racial wounds and violence that permeate this country. A stirring, harrowing personal narrative and cultural indictment. —LF The Apology by Jimin Han [F] I've been curious about Han's multigenerational saga ever since Alexander Chee shouted it out in his 2022 Year in Reading entry. So I'll give Chee the floor: "Han’s novel, set in Korea and America, is about an ajumma who is determined to keep taking care of her family from beyond the grave, whether they want her to or not. It’s also a great novel to read if you ever wanted, say, more novels from Iris Murdoch (I am like this)." —SMS Hangman by Maya Binyam [F] Binyam, a contributing editor at The Paris Review, makes her debut with a strange and searching novel about exile, diaspora, and the quest for Black refuge in the U.S. and beyond. Tavi Gevinson and Maaza Mengiste gave this one lots of love, and Namwali Serpell hails Hangman as a "strikingly masterful debut" that is "clean, sharp, piercing." —LF Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang [F] Chang follows up her much-loved debut novel Days of Distraction with a story collection that spans the U.S. and Asia, chronicling the lives of immigrant families and expectant parents, housewives and grocery clerks, strangers and neighbors and more. Jason Mott and Raven Leilani both blurbed, but what takes the cake is the endorsement from George Saunders, who calls Chang "a riveting and exciting presence in our literature." —LF The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger [NF] De Beauvoir. Arendt. Weil. Rand. These four philosophers are the subjects of Eilenberger's ambitious group biography and intellectual history, rooted in these women's parallel ideas and intersecting lives, both of which were largely shaped by WWII. I've long been fascinated by each of these thinkers separately, and I can't wait to see how Eilenberger synthesizes their philosophies and probes the connections between them. —SMS How to Care for a Human Girl by Ashley Wurzbacher [F] Wurzbacher's debut novel follows two sisters who become unexpectedly pregnant—and simultaneously have to decide whether or not they will see those pregnancies through. Wurzbacher, also the author of the story collection Happy Like This, explores "the battle between the head, the heart, and the body" that all women experience, in the words of Michelle Hart, positing that "even in the grips of indecision women must get to decide their own lives.” —LA Liquid Snakes by Stephen Kearse [F] In his second novel, Kearse poses a timely question: What if toxic pollution traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? Mourning his stillborn daughter, killed by toxins planted in Black neighborhoods by the government, one man decides to take justice into his own hands. Hannah Gold calls this "a brilliant novel that manages to be, among other things, a pharmacological thriller and an incisive meditation on the poison-pen letter." —SMS I Hear You're Rich by Diane Williams [F] In her latest collection, Williams, the godmother of flash fiction, delivers 33 short stories that offer glimpses into the mundane and exhilarating beauty of everyday life. Lydia Davis and Merve Emre (who once called Williams “the writer who saved my life—or my soul, if one believes such a thing exists”) count themselves as megafans, and for good reason. —Daniella Fishman Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland [NF] Shapland's first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was stellar, and her latest, an essay collection on capitalism's creep into our bodies, minds, and land, looks great. Shapland is especially attuned to the porousness that characterizes modern life, having been diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity—literal thin skin. Alexander Chee calls this a "wrenching, loving, and trenchant examination" of everything from healthcare and nuclear weapons to queerness and feminism. —SMS August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan [NF] Not only is this the first authoritative biography of Wilson—its author actually knew the influential playwright, interviewing him many times before his death in 2005. Hartigan, an award-winning theater critic and art reporter, doesn't just recount Wilson's life but analyzes his work, studying his use of history, memory, and vernacular in such indelible plays as Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A much-needed record of Wilson's life and work that will help secure his legacy and introduce him to future generations. —LF The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush [NF] In this follow-up to the Pulitzer-nominated Rising, Rush watches the world melt. Chronicling a months-long journey to the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, she and a group of scientists study how climate change is changing our planet—and what this means for our future. But she's also thinking about her own future: she wants to become a mother. But is it ethical to bring a kid into the world right now? This, and many other salient questions, propel the book. —SMS The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle [NF] We all know Eliot as a genius novelist—but what about as a formidable philosophical mind? In a new study of the Middlemarch author, Carlisle tries to deliver a fuller portrait of Eliot as a woman and a thinker, for whom the question of marriage was particularly salient to her life and work. Carlisle, a brilliant philosophical mind herself, is perfectly matched to her subject here. The kind of book you savor page by page. —SMS Las Madres by Esmeralda Santiago [F] The author of the iconic 1993 autobiography When I Was Puerto Rican returns with a novel that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, centering on two generations of women: close-knit group who call themselves "las Madres," beginning in the 1970s, and their daughters, in present day. Santiago has made her name shining a light on Puerto Rican and Nuyorican life through both nonfiction and fiction, with this latest novel continuing that project. Bee Sting by Paul Murray [F] Perhaps best known for his 2010 tragicomic novel Skippy Dies, Murray returns with a story of family, fortune, and what it means—or whether it's even possible—to be a good person amid societal upheaval (or collapse, depending on how you look at it). As four members of a fairly ordinary family come up against twists of fate in various and sometimes life-changing ways, Murray chronicles their diverging trajectories in what Emily Temple calls "cool-water prose mixed with his trademark wry darkness." —SMS Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang [NF] As a lover of Old Hollywood, I practically lept out of my seat when mention of this biography began circulating among my fellow cinephiles. Huang dazzles with a modern reevaluation of the life and career of Hollywood’s first Chinese-American film star, Anna May Wong, detailing the all too common racism, sexism, and ageism that ran rampant through Hollywood (and still does, for that matter). Unsurprisingly, that story is brimming with juicy tidbits, like the fact that both Walter Benjamin and Marlene Detrich harbored massive crushes on Wong. —DF Surreal Spaces by Joanna Moorhead [NF] In this illustrated biography, the brilliant artist and writer Leonora Carrington—a Surrealist practitioner and vanguard among women painters—finally gets her due. Her fiction (beloved by everyone from Luis Buñel to Sheila Heti) has been resurrected thanks to the valiant efforts of the New York Review of Books and its Dorothy Project, and with this biography published by Princeton UP, her equally dramatic life story will have its moment in the sun too. —SMS Wifedom by Anna Funder [NF] The lives of literary wives have come under renewed scrutiny in reason years, and thank goodness for that. (See: Vera Nabokov, Nora Joyce, every woman in Carmela Ciuraru's Lives of the Wives.) So I'm thrilled to see Eileen O'Shaughnessy emerge from the shadows in Wifedom, which reveals the integral part she played in husband George Orwell's work, as well as her own merit as a writer. Funder asks: Are the roles of wife and writer forever at odds? —SMS Holler, Child by LaToya Watkins [F] Following up her debut novel Perish, Watkins delivers an 11-story collection that foregrounds the family and turns on loss, hope, reconciliation, and freedom. Per Deesha Philyaw, "Every story, every character, every line of LaToya Watkins's Holler, Child is a revelation." As is most of what Watkins writes—be sure to check out this stunning essay she wrote for us just last year. —LF Dialogue with a Somnambulist by Chloe Aridjis [NF/F] Come and take a lap with Aridjis, most recently the author of Sea Monsters, as she guides us through this murky daydream of a book. In this collection of stories and essays, Aridjis’s muses are both quotidian and uncanny: a plastic bag drifting through the wind (a la Katy Perry), a sea-monkey-eating grandma, astronauts in existential crisis. Interested yet? Well, try this on for size—the Deborah Levy calls the book an assortment of “sublime treasures from one of our boldest writers.” —DF Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto [F] Per Elizabeth McCracken, this one is "a knockout. 11 knockouts, one KO for every story." (Man, she's good at blurbing.) Indeed Kakimoto's debut collection tells 11 stories of contemporary Hawaiian identity, mythology, and womanhood. Unruly sexuality, generational memory, and the ghosts of colonization collide in what promises to be an auspicious short-fiction debut. —SMS Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter [F] Based on her award-winning story in Harper's Magazine, Leichter's second novel centers on a family who discovers a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet—and must contend with the repercussions of their discovery. In Terrace Story, blurbed and beloved by Jessamine Chan and Hernan Diaz, Leichter asks: How can we possibly nurture love with death always hanging overhead? —LF September My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell [F] I've been a fan of Ravn's since I read her bleak, brilliant sci-fi novella The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken. Her latest, My Work, explores childbirth and motherhood by mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, letters—with her signature experimental flair. I'm especially interested to read Ravn via Smith and Russell, who together have previously translated Tove Ditlevsen. —SMS The Fraud by Zadie Smith [F] Smith returns with her first novel since 2016's Swing Time. Her first work of historical fiction, The Fraud, is set against a real legal trial over the inheritance of a sizable estate that divided Victorian England and, in the story, captivates the Scottish housekeeper of a famous novelist. Smith probes questions of truth and self-deception, fraudulence and authenticity, and what it means for something to be "real." —LF Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li [F] Li's been the sort of fiction writer other writers talk about over a few rounds with not-so-hushed awe since her first story collection hit shelves in 2005 and The New Yorker figured out that pretty much any piece she turned in was worth printing. She's mostly known as a top-notch novelist now, but this return to short fiction—her first collection in 13 years!—should remind those not already passing copies of The Vagrants along to their friends like they're introductory leaflets to some secret society why they fell in love with Li in the first place. —Allen Charles I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel [F] Patel's debut is one of the first great social media novels (along, perhaps, with Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This). A bold, electric, and ruthless tale of sex, class, status, obsession, self-destruction, and the worst parts of being online, all told from the perspective of a beguiling unnamed narrator involved in a troubled romance, Rachel Yoder calls I'm a Fan "a scathing ode to the psychos and shitheads." —SMS End Credits by Patty Lin [NF] Lin, a former writer for Desperate Housewives, Breaking Bad, Freaks and Geeks, and Friends, recounts her tumultuous years in Hollywood as not only the sole woman in the writer's room, but the only Asian person as well. At a moment of reckoning for the entertainment industry (see: Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down), Lin's memoir of ambition, power, and sacrifice couldn't come at a better time. —SMS Creep by Myriam Gurba  [NF] Gurba first captivated the literary world with her scathing essay on American Dirt, which was among first of what would soon be a tsunami of takedowns. In her equally ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection, Gurba considers the idea of "creeps"—both the noun and the verb—as an illuminating instrument for her cultural criticism. The blurber roster is astonishing and includes Luis Alberto Urrea, Imani Perry, Morgan Jerkins, and Rachel Kushner, who writes, "I loved Creep and already consider it essential reading, a California classic." —SMS Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels [F] First off, can we hear a little commotion for the cover? I mean—stun-ning. But as for what's inside: Michaels's disturbingly topical novel follows an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI named Charlotte. I'm very much looking forward to this study of the intersections of art, labor, capital, and creativity—a book that I wish wasn't as timely and relevant as it is. —SMS Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas [F] I first encountered Thomas as a critic via his wry and razor-sharp review of the recent 1776 revival. So I'm excited to read his debut novel, the story of two estranged friends looking back on their formative years at a small Quaker high school in early-aughts lower Manhattan. Sarah Thankam Mathews and Kiley Reid both loved this one, and Pulitzer winner Paul Harding gave it a hearty "Bravo." —SMS Rouge by Mona Awad [F] The latest from Awad, the author of the hit 2020 novel Bunny, is pitched as Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut—a horror-tinted gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress store clerk whose mother's sudden death sends her in obsessive search of youth and beauty. Mary Karr herself says that she "couldn't put it down." —LF The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas, translated by Lizzie Davis [F] In this tale of a son’s peculiar homecoming, Cárdenas (author of the fantastic 2015 novella Ornamental) mystifies with the story of a crime like no other. After 15 years away from home, a biologist returns to his Colombian village only to find it strikingly different from when he last left it. Amid a tangled web of conspiracy, nothing is as it seems. What happens, Cárdenas asks, when you get stuck in the one place to which you swore you’d never return? —DF The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer [NF] In the Nobel winner's latest, Ernaux reflects on an affair she had with a man in his twenties when she was in her fifties. The romance foregrounds various contradictions: why can men have younger lovers, but not women? How is it that Ernaux feels both aware of her age and ageless in the presence of her paramour? It's a blessing, really, that there is still more Ernaux for Anglophone readers to discover and savor (even if the French did get to read this one a year ahead of us). —SMS Daughter by Claudia Dey [F] Dey's latest novel, after 2018's Heartbreaker, centers on a woman and her one-hit-wonder novelist father. Living in his shadow and caught in his orbit, she strives to make a life—and art—of her own. Raven Leilani and Miriam Toews are both fans, and Sheila Heti praises Dey for capturing "feelings and struggles I haven't encountered in other novels. I loved this beautiful book." —LF Glitter and Concrete by Elyssa Maxx Goodman [NF] From the Jazz Age to Drag Race, journalist and drag historian Goodman offers a timely Technicolor history of drag in New York City and the role it's played in both queer culture and urban life. Noted New Yorker (and excellent writer) Ada Calhoun calls this a "glamorous, giddy history" and "a love letter to New York City past and present." —SMS Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters by Lynnée Denise [NF] Thornton is one of the most important figures in the history of rock and roll, yet she's been largely excised from our cultural memory. Denise offers a desperately-needed corrective in this volume about the art, life, and legacy of Thornton, whose song "Hound Dog" (later recorded by Elvis) changed the course of American music. A standout installment in the University of Texas Press's always great Music Matters series. —SMS How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto [F] In Taranto's debut novel, a grad student follows her disgraced mentor—a star professor embroiled in a sex scandal—to a university that is a safe harbor for scholars of ill repute. A crisis that tests her commitment, marriage, and conscience ensues. Jonathan Lethem calls this one work by "a stunning new talent, announcing itself fully formed"—indeed, a premise like this takes both deftness and confidence to pull off. Sounds like Taranto pulls it off and then some. —SMS Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote [F] Foote's debut traces the entwined fates of two families during the Great Migration in a work of "biomythography," a term coined by Audre Lorde. Andrew Sean Greer calls this, the inaugural title published by Sarah Jessica Parker's imprint, a "masterpiece" and Jacqueline Woodson says, “Once in a while, a writer comes along with a brilliance that stops the breath—Kim Coleman Foote is that writer.” Glossy by Marisa Meltzer [NF] Cards on the table: I am, as the kids say, a Glossier girlie. But one need not be to pick up Glossy, a bombshell exposé and study of corporate feminism that reveals for the first time what exactly has gone down at Glossier under the leadership of Emily Weiss, who stepped down last year. If you don't believe me, take Tina Brown's word for it; she calls this a book "the portrait of a female CEO we've been sorely lacking." —SMS The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff [F] Groff follows up her 2021 novel Matrix with another work of historical fiction, trading her 12th-century monastery for a Jamestown-esque colonial settlement. When a servant girl escapes to the wilderness, she's forced to rethink the laws of civilization and colonialism that she's internalized. Part-adventure, part-fable, classic Groff. —LF Doppelganger by Naomi Klein [NF] The impetus for this book is actually kinda funny—Klein, upset that she keeps getting confused with the respected-feminist-writer-turned-ostracized-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf, looked into the nature of digital doppelgängers. But that led her down a far more fruitful and fascinating path toward questions of identity, psychology, democracy,  communication in the modern age, and, ultimately, this book. And it's Judith Butler-approved to boot! —SMS The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride [F] McBride appears incapable of writing a book that's not a massive success. Following Deacon King Kong (an Oprah's Book Club pick), The Good Lord Bird (a National Book Award winner), and The Color of Water (which has sold more than 2.1 million copies worldwide), one wonders if McBride was at all daunted by his own track record when he started work on The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a novel about the entwined destinies of people living on the margins of a small Pennsylvania town in 1972. Either way, he has yet to miss, so his latest will surely be another triumph. Sing a Black Girl's Song by Ntozake Shange, edited by Imani Perry [NF] This posthumous collection of unpublished work by the visionary Shange, edited by Imani Perry and with a foreword by Tarana Burke, introduces readers to never-before-seen essays, plays, and poems by the foundational writer behind the paradigm-shifting 1975 play for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow was enuf. Shange, who died in 2018, was an intellectual giant, in conversation with writers like Morrison and Walker, who never quite got her due in life. —SMS Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter by Rachel Shteir [NF] Friedan's legacy is complicated and sometimes contradictory, and in the first biography of Friedan in more than 20 years, Shteir tries to capture her subject in all her (often frustrating) complexity. A myopic and mercurial crusader, whose devotion was sincere and priorities warped, Friedan deserves a biography that can capture her fullness. And with her rigorous research, interviews, and archival dives, Shteir looks up to the task. —SMS Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva [F] Lozada-Oliva's follow-up to her wonderful novel-in-verse Dreaming of You was pitched to me as Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Needless to say, it got my attention. Cults, earthquakes, and a mysterious buffet inside a mall pepper the daunting journey that one woman must take to save her granddaughters and possibly the world. —SMS Wild Girls by Tiya Miles [NF] Miles, a brilliant historian and author of the National Book Award-winning All That She Carried, looks at trailblazing women throughout U.S. history, from Harriet Tubman to Louisa May Alcott to Dolores Huerta, to consider how their girlhood experiences outdoors shaped their lives and work. Miles is a wonderful writer, rigorous researcher, and visionary scholar, and here she takes a totally unique (and characteristically ingenious) perspective on how the natural world influenced many of our most consequential women thinkers and leaders. —SMS The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay [NF] Gay is back with a follow-up to his tender and uplifting 2019 book The Book of Delights. I'm admittedly curious to see what other delights he could possibly have in store—the first book was a perfect little gem that didn't exactly demand a sequel—but I trust Gay completely as both a charming prose stylist, a seasoned practitioner of noticing, and a keen observer of the quotidian joys that are all around us. —SMS Bartleby and Me by Gay Talese [NF] Sixty years ago, Talese wrote in Esquire that "New York is a city of things unnoticed." He spent the next six decades doing quite a bit of noticing, chronicling the people (and places and moments) that make the city what it is. In his latest, he remembers the "nobodies" that he's profiled over the course of his career, the cast of characters perhaps who are not as recognizable as, say, Sinatra or Ali, but nevertheless essential threads in our cultural fabric. —SMS The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright [F] Enright, best known for her 2007 Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering, follows three generations of women who contend with their inheritances from one man—a celebrated Irish poet—that continue to shape their lives. A women-centered family portrait punctuated with lyrical poems, Sally Rooney calls The Wren, The Wren "a magnificent novel." —LF The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken [F] Knausgaard returns with another dazzling tome on the human condition, narrated from the dual perspectives of long-lost siblings struggling with the timeless conundrum of responsibility vs. self-actualization. Here Knausgaard fashions his own theories of what it is to love, to lose, to live, and be part of a family. Patricia Lockwood says it best: "Just as we begin to wonder where he is taking us, whether he is capable, he gets us there.” —DF Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee [F] Admittedly, I hadn't heard of the Italian novelist Elsa Morante until I read Carmela Ciuraru's delicious group biography Lives of the Wives. I've been wanting to read Morante's sprawling, 800-page magnum opus Lies and Sorcery, now reissued by that most prodigious reissuer NYRB, ever since. Natalia Ginzburg once called Morante the writer of her generation that she admired most, and in Ginzburg we trust. —SMS Wandering Through Life by Donna Leon [NF] Leon's Commissario Brunetti books—a Venice-set mystery series with 31 installments (so far)—made her a literary legend. But she's largely stayed out of the spotlight—until now. In her eighties, Leon looks back on her own adventurous life, traveling the world, settling in Italy, and discovering her passion and aptitude for writing. I'll be honest, the cover alone sold me here—this is exactly what I want to look when I'm 80: sunglasses, bob, blazer, blindingly cool. You just know she's got some good stories in her bandoleer. —SMS 50 Years of Ms. edited by Katherine Spillar, foreword by Gloria Steinem [NF] When it launched in 1971, Ms. Magazine was one of the most radical publications on the market, broaching subjects that had long been kept out of popular discourse. With Steinem at its helm, the feminist magazine was essential reading for the era of women's liberation. This collection of mag's best writing includes work by Toni Morrison, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Allison Bechdel, and many more. Essential reading for anyone looking to understand the radical roots of mainstream feminism. —SMS Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre, translated by Heather Cleary [F] Translated by the great Heather Cleary, the debut novel by Fabre made waves in Mexico, earning him the prestigious Elena Poniatowska Prize. (By the way, if you haven't read Poniatowska, read Poniatowska.) Based on the true story of the theft of the body of Saint John of the Cross from a monastery in Ubeda. Part road-trip novel, part coming-of-age tale, part slapstick comedy, Recital of the Dark Verses is bound to make a splash with Anglophone readers. —SMS Love in a Time of Hate by Florian Illies, translated by Simon Pare [NF] Surely there's nothing like a book about a bevy of emotionally damaged creative geniuses staring down what must have seemed to them like the end of the world to rile up the sort of lit dork who's made it this far down this list. This one seems promising, cramming practically every pre-war fave, problematic or no—Sartre and de Beauvoir! Dietrich and Nabokov! Arendt and Benjamin! Dalí and Picasso!—into a history of artists caught between financial collapse and rising fascist violence. Anyway, sound familiar? —AC Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang [F] The followup to Zhang's debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold considers the ethics of seeking pleasure against the backdrop of a world in disarray. As environmental catastrophe looms, a chef escapes the city to take a job in an idyllic mountaintop colony, where nothing is as it seems. Among the novel's fans are Raven Leilani, Roxane Gay, and Gabrielle Zevin, who declares, "It's rare to read anything that feels this unique." —LF Jane Campion on Jane Campion by Michel Ciment [NF] I'll just let Harvey Keitel blurb this one: "Jane Campion is a goddess, and it's difficult for a mere mortal to talk about a goddess. I fear being struck by lightning bolts." —SMS People Collide by Isle McElroy [F] McElroy's sophomore novel, which comes on the heels of their debut The Atmospherians, chronicles a husband and wife who switch bodies, only for one of them to disappear without a trace. A fresh take on a classic trope, propelling this speculative story is the question of how this metamorphosis could transform their fraught union. Torrey Peters writes, "I predict Isle McElroy’s People Collide will inaugurate an entire genre." —LF This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara [F] Vara’s story collection, which follows her Pulitzer-nominated debut novel The Immortal King Rao, examines human relationships and our intrinsic yearning for connection. The book's all-star roster of blurbers includes Deesha Philyaw, Danielle Evans, Elizabeth McCracken, and Lauren Groff, and Pulitzer winner Andrew Sean Greer says This is Salvaged is "for readers who need clarity and hope–that is to say: everybody.” —LA The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell [NF] Since her death in late 2021, Didion has been iconized (i.e. flattened, simplified) even more than she was in life. She was, of course, cold and beautiful and utterly California—but there was much more to her than that. So it's reassuring to hear the brilliant Hua Hsu report that McDonnell's new volume on Didion "avoids simple platitudes, approaching the great writer with a fierce, probing intelligence." Didion deserves no less. —SMS Catland by Kathryn Hughes [NF] Against the backdrop of the twentieth-century cat craze, Hughes documents the life of artist Louis Wain, whose human-like illustrations of cats prompted an explosion of interest in feline houseguests across society. Despite his whimsical art, Wain's own life was steeped in adversity, and he was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, which may have played a role in his work. An accomplished academic, Hughes enlivens this history of the nation's first brush with catmania. —LA American Gun by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson [F] With mass shootings now endemic to American life, two veteran Wall Street Journal journalists look at one of the most common culprits—the AR-15—to figure out how we got here. Tracing the weapon's history and embrace by the gun industry, the duo reveals the various financial, political, and cultural interests at play in the horrific assent of a killing machine. Esteemed MLK biographer Jonathan Eig calls this "social history at its finest." —SMS Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches [F] In this work of autofiction, Weiner—a respected Peruvian journalist and writer—considers the legacy of imperialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizers. A study of the intersections of the personal and historical, violence and race, love and desire, I think/hope Undiscovered will be Weiner's breakthrough moment for Anglophone readers—the blurb from Valeria Luiselli is certainly a good sign. —SMS The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson [F] Wilson made waves in 2017 as the first woman to publish an English-language translation of The Odyssey, with its controversial opening line: "Tell me about a complicated man." She's been outspoken about the role her womanhood does and doesn't play in translating, telling the LA Review of Books, "The stylistic and hermeneutic choices I make as a translator aren’t predetermined by my gender identity." Still, there's something exciting about experiencing Homer via a woman's translation, which until now had not even been an option for Anglophone readers. I'm looking forward to Wilson's take on The Iliad. —SMS October The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser [F] Of all the incredible things she wrote, Lispector considered her 1961 novel The Apples in the Dark "the best one." This reissue, translated as always by Moser, concludes New Directions' ambitious—and wildly successful—mission to retranslate all her fiction and reintroduce the innovative, enigmatic, and enthrallingly glamorous Brazilian writer to an Anglophone audience. A fitting capstone to a remarkable publishing endeavor. —SMS How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair [NF] Tracing the arc of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, Sinclair—an accomplished poet—chronicles how she found her voice as a woman and a writer. Among the book's fans are such literary giants as Marlon James, Natasha Trethewey, and Imani Perry, who places Sinclair in "the pantheon of great writers of the Caribbean literary tradition," alongside Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid. —LF The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon [NF] Dixon's memoir-in-essays was acquired by Tin House editor-at-large Hanif Aburraqib, which is one of the best endorsements I can imagine. Chronicling the days of a child-free middle-aged woman living alone, The Loneliness Files considers how it feels to be a body behind a screen, and what it means to fall through the cracks of connective technology. The rare exploration of internet existence that sounds like it has something urgent to say. —SMS Company by Shannon Sanders [F] At the center of Sanders's debut is the Collins family, whose members and acquaintances are the recurring cast of this collection's 13 stories. In each story, a guest arrives at someone's home—sometimes invited, sometimes unexpected—and some conflict emerges. It's a great premise for a collection, as master short-fictioneer Deesha Philyaw can attest: "Shannon Sanders's stories simply blew me away." —LF The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda [F] An instant bestseller in Japan when it was first published in 1988, The Premonition follows a young woman from an apparently loving family who is nagged by the feeling that she's forgotten something important from her childhood. Yoshimoto is one of Japan's most celebrated writers, and it's thrilling to see her now dazzle Anglophone readers, including Ling Ma, who says, "Reading Banana Yoshimoto is like taking a bracing, cleansing bath." —LF The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut [F] Labatut is best known for his 2021 gripping book When We Cease to Understand the World and also this incredible interview with Public Books. His latest undertaking, The Maniac, centers on the life and legacy of Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, who invented game theory and the first programmable computer. Like When We Cease, The Maniac audaciously collides fact and fiction. —SMS Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward [F] A new Jesmyn Ward book is always an event. The two-time National Book Award winner returns with her fourth novel, the story of Annis, an enslaved girl sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her. We follow her on her miles-long march as she recalls the stories and memories that are her inheritance, and attunes herself to the natural world and spiritual realm that surrounds her. Pitched as Ward's "most magnificent novel yet," I can't wait to find out for myself. —LF Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz [NF] Do you ever find yourself using TikTok slang unironically, or referring to yourself (perhaps derogatorily) as “chronically online”? Well, Taylor Lorenz has the book for you! The acclaimed and oft-controversial WaPo reporter makes her literary debut with a comprehensive mapping of the internet’s history. From social to economic influences, Lorenz shows us the good, the bad, and the ugly of the World Wide Web and how it's evolved since its humble inception. A mammoth task to be sure—but if anyone is up to the challenge, it’s Lorenz. —DF Nefando by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker [F] The author-translator duo behind the much-loved and much-decorated National Book Award finalist Jawbone returns with a techno-horror story of six young artists in Barcelona, each of them somehow connected to Nefando, a controversial and mysterious video game that challenges their identities and their consciences. With characteristic daring, Ojeda explores the entangled physical and virtual spaces we all inhabit, whether we like it or not. —SMS A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen [NF] In his first memoir, the Pulitzer-winning novelist explores the themes that have always informed his writing—refugeehood and colonization, history and memory—through a newly personal lens. The book has gotten lots of love from Cathy Park Hong, Laila Lalami, and Gina Apostol, and Susan Straight raves that it "belongs with James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other writers whose memoirs take apart ‘the American Dream’ with laser precision." —LF The Beauty of Light by Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, translated by Ethen Mitchell [NF] In this slim volume of interviews, some of the last ones of Adnan's life, journalist Laure Adler talks with the poet and painter about her creative process, belief in beauty, and destiny as an artist. Adnan, who died in 2021, is an effervescent presence on the page and in conversation, doling out profound insights with ease, candor, and generosity. —SMS Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner [F] Gumbiner's sophomore effort has got Californian literary royalty from Claire Vaye Watkins to Tommy Orange to Dave Eggers heaping on the praise, with the latter even calling him "a sort of 21st century Steinbeck." Fire in the Canyon, about a grape grower and his family whose crops and lives are devastated by wildfire, does seem to take a leaf from the Steinbeck vine. —AC The Halt During the Chase by Rosemary Tonks [F] Praise be to New Directions for reissuing Tonks’s cult classic some 50 years after its publication. Set in high-society England, The Halt During the Chase evolves into a poignant criticism of love and marriage in the modern age, as well as what it means to fight for your individuality in the face of oppression on the level of both socioeconomics and intimate relationships. Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks. —DF Our Strangers by Lydia Davis [F] Davis returns with a story collection written with her characteristic wit and dazzling prose. In an extremely badass move against the corporate monopoly on bookselling, Davis will not be selling the book via Amazon, releasing it only in physical bookshops and select online outlets such as Bookshop.org. (This is also the first-ever title published by Bookshop.org.) Parul Sehgal once called Davis “our [modern] Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew”—it doesn’t get much better than that. —DF Is There God After Prince? by Peter Coviello [NF] Coviello navigates the current “Age of Lost Things,” a world obsessed with nostalgia for the past and the impending disaster of the future. Exploring our yearning for entertainment amid turmoil, Coviello examines how art’s meaning transforms alongside us. The Sopranos, Gladys Knight, Sally Rooney, The Shining, Joni Mitchell, Paula Fox, Steely Dan—no piece of culture evades his gaze. Through the lens of what Coviello calls “enstrickenness,” he wonders: Is there genuine hope to be found through sentimentality? —DF Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann [NF] With Cormac McCarthy now one with that Cimmerian empyrean through whose inky waters no helmsman has yet steered and returned, Herzog may be our greatest living witness of the beauty beside the bleak. If not, he's certainly the most widest-ranging—who else has made such compelling films about conquistadors, cave paintings, and equally murderous Renaissance composers and Alaskan bear populations, let alone made a convincing (sorta) cop of Nick Cage? Who knows what he'll say about all that in a memoir, but whatever it is, it's probably weird enough to be worth reading. —AC Bluebeard's Castle by Anna Biller [F] From the filmmaker behind the excellent 2016 cult film The Love Witch comes a subversive, feminist gothic spin on the classic fairytale. In this version, Bluebeard is a handsome and charming baron, whose love transforms Judith, a successful, if sensitive, novelist, into a new woman. But as you might have guessed, all is not what it seems. A perfect literary debut for a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. And that cover! —SMS Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz [F] I've long been fascinated by Lahiri's work as a bilingual author and translator, writing in both her native English and her adopted language, Italian. In this new story collection, she translates herself. In collaboration with fellow translator (and Knopf editor) Todd Pornowitz, Lahiri welcomes Anglophone readers into these nine stories, originally written in Italian and lovingly set in Rome. A feat of both self-translation and collaborative translation—and a monument to the art of translation itself. —SMS Family Meal by Bryan Washington [F] Washington can't seem to miss—his first two books, Lot and Memorial were both critical darlings, and his new novel, about two young men and former best friends whose lives collide once again after an unmooring death, doesn't look like it'll be any different, brimming as it is with Washington's signature motifs of food, love, and intimacy. "It takes a generous writer to show us the world in this way," says Rumaan Alam, "and Bryan Washington is one of our best.” —LF So Many People, Mariana by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa [F] Following her smart and scathing novel Empty Wardrobes, written in 1966 and published in translation by Two Lines in 2021, de Carvalho's story collection about ordinary women struggling to find their purpose is yet another gift to Anglophone readers. In stark, unsentimental prose, the late Portuguese literary powerhouse studies class, society, and gender with surgical precision. Per Joyce Carol Oates: “There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho’s vision and the originality and severity of her voice.” —SMS Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes, translated by Jill Foulston [F] The late Cuban-Italian astonished Anglophone readers earlier this year with the sardonic and subversive Forbidden Notebook, translated by none other than Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante (who counts de Céspedes as an inspiration). Now, Atra House has kindly blessed us with yet another de Céspedes novel, a tale of love and crime in fascist Italy, with an afterword by Ferrante herself. —SMS Down the Drain by Julia Fox [NF] When I heard that Fox was coming out with a memoir, I had hoped it would be a highlight reel of her best TikTok story-times—but the real thing promises to be much juicier. Fox, known for her out-of-the-box style and no-fucks-given attitude, finally gives us the lowdown on her mysterious come-up, from her breakout role in Uncut Gems to her ill-advised fling with Ye. Will we be getting an eyeliner tutorial? Will Simon & Schuster stage a baby Birkin giveaway to promote the book? Time will tell. —DF A Year and a Day by Phillip Lopate [NF] From one of the pioneers of the personal essay comes a new kind of experiment in creative nonfiction, for him at least: blogging. In 2016, Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about whatever he felt like, and A Year and a Day compiles 47 of the resulting essays. Naturally, the topics range widely, from death and desire to James Baldwin and Agnes Martin. There is something wonderful about watching a total pro try something new—and Lopate, unsurprisingly, rises to his own challenge. —SMS Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin [NF] It's about time somebody held Big Publishing as accountable for the decades-long insipidification of American literary culture as, say, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and Sinykin seems as game as any. The past half-century of publishing history has been all about corporate conglomerates that have shepherded readers and writers alike into a future where the book as product is of more importance than literature as sociocultural lodestar. Will Sinykin's analytical history make Dick Snyder shake in his grave? Doubtful, but here's hoping. —AC Mr. Texas by Lawrence Wright [F] Wright is one of our greatest (and one of my favorite) living nonfiction writers, combining in all his work masterful reportage with elegant prose. (See: The Looming Tower, Going Clear, The Plague Year, etc.) His latest novel (following his eerily prescient pandemic novel that came out... right before the pandemic) is a send-up of Texas politics, following a dark-horse candidate to risk it all for a seat in the Lone Star State's House of Representatives. —SMS Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore [NF] The founding member of Sonic Youth chronicles his creative life, from his small-town teen years to his arrival to the late-seventies East Village to his role at the center of the No Wave scene with the formation of one of the most consequential bands in rock history. Colson Whitehead's blurb is so delightful that I'll give it to you in full: "Downtown scientists rejoice! For Thurston Moore has unearthed the missing links, the sacred texts, the forgotten stories, and the secret maps of the lost golden age. This is history—scuffed, slightly bent, plenty noisy, and indispensable." —SMS The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts by Gregg Hecimovich [NF] In this groundbreaking study, Hecimovich solves the mystery of the identity of the first Black woman novelist whose book, The Bondwoman's Narrative, first made waves in 2002, at which point her identity was unknown. Hecimovich's account is at once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, shedding light not just on one trailblazing enslaved woman, but on the era that defined her life and erased her work. —LF Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee [F] McGhee's debut novel follows a self-proclaimed loser—the titular Jonathan—who lands his dream job but is soon faced with a crisis of morality (and reality). Critiquing the crushing weight of debt, the porousness of life and work, the disappointments of late-stage capitalism, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is pitched as "a debut novel for the modern working stiff." —LF Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth [F] Following her debut novel of feminist horror Motherthing, Hogarth's latest explores motherhood from yet another angle, considering how women's labor is (de)valued. When a new mother, once happy to stay at home, discovers an opportunity to do what looks like "meaningful" work, she jumps at it, only to become embroiled in a dangerous mystery. —LF They Flew by Carlos Eire [NF] The early modern era of European history is full of accounts of the impossible: people flying. Just as skepticism and empirical science had begun to supplant religious belief in the paranormal, tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft began to emerge, reflecting conflicting ideas about the natural world and the rocky transition into the secular age. My girl St. Teresa of Avila is just one case study in Eire's exquisite and relevant examination of reality and belief. —SMS The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell [F] The scope of Thirlwell's latest is sweeping, to put it mildly. It spans 1775 to this very moment, France and America and the Atlantic and the Pacific and also the moon. While we know the story centers on a young eighteenth-century French woman named Celine who finds herself slandered, the pitch for this one is admittedly vague. Not to worry—its star-studded lineup of blurbers includes Sheila Heti, Colm Tóibín, Salman Rushdie, and Edmund White, who calls the novel "so unthinkably original." —LF Tremor by Teju Cole [F] It's been a dozen years since Open City, Cole's his first novel to be published in the U.S., which he followed up with an essay collection and multiple volumes combining photography with criticism. He returns to the novel now with Tremor, about a West African man teaching photography at a celebrated New England school, which Katie Kitamura calls "an intimate novel about destabilization and catastrophe." —AC Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) by Sly Stone [NF] You couldn’t pick a more perfect inaugural title for Questlove’s new publishing imprint—a tell-all memoir by Sly Stone himself. For the first time ever, fans of Sly and the Family Stone can learn the band’s history straight from the source. With his trademark swagger and groove, Stone reflects on the allure of stardom and what happens when you get burned by the spotlight and traces his own evolution from enigmatic frontman to full-on pop-culture phenomenon. —DF One Woman Show by Christine Coulson [F] The conceit of Coulson's novel immediately got my attention: One Woman Show tells the story of a twentieth-century woman's self-realization entirely through museum wall labels. Coulson herself spent 25 years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which she dreamt of using the Met's strict label format to capture people as works of art. If that doesn't sell you, Maira Kalman herself is a fan of the book. "I read it in one fell swoop," Kalman says. "It is brilliant." —SMS The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie [NF] Linguist, lexicographer, technologist, and writer Ogilvie sheds light on the many far-flung volunteers who helped assemble the Oxford English Dictionary, which was the first of its kind. The identities of those volunteers may surprise you—they include three murderers, a noted pornography collector, and Karl Marx's daughter. Ogilvie uncovers the people and the work that went into defining the English language, word by word. —SMS Vengeance is Mine by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump [F] A new NDiaye novel is always an occasion. The French author—best known for 2009's Three Strong Women, which made her the first Black woman to ever win the prestigious Prix Goncourt—returns with a tale of a horrific triple homicide that exhumes mysterious memories from a lawyer's childhood. Tess Gunty reports being "hypnotized from the first word to the last"—as one is when reading NDiaye. —SMS The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin [NF] In this debut speculative memoir, Lin isn’t afraid of her demons. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, Lin struggled to manage her illness while caring for her cancer-stricken father. Unhappy with the rose-colored narratives about recovering from mental illness, she takes a different approach here, leaning into the darkness. Inspired by Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan ghost stories, Lin blends memoir and horror—plus stunning illustrations—to consider what it means to coexist with anguish. —LA Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang [F] Chang, the author of Gods of Want and Bestiary, weaves a novel full of ghosts and entrails, stray dogs and red string. When best friends Anita and Rainie encounter a lot of strays who can communicate with humans, the girls learn they are preceded by a generation of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs, and Anita convinces Rainie to become a dog with her; horror and beauty ensue. Now that's a premise! —LF Death Valley by Melissa Broder [F] Following up her hit novel Milk Fed, the ever-bold Broder takes readers along on one woman's journey into the California high desert in this darkly comedic exploration of grief, illness, and womanhood, catalyzed by a mysterious succulent. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah hails this as a "journey unlike any you've read before." —LF The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis [F] Best known for her 2013 novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Mathis returns with a multi-generational novel that follows a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. Set in the 1980s, and split between the racially and politically turbulent city of Philadelphia and the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama, The Unsettled is a meditation on inheritance, justice, and the meaning of family. Marilyn Robinson calls this "a fine, powerful book." —LF Madonna by Mary Gabriel [NF] Gabriel, the author of the stellar group biography Ninth Street Women, turns her gaze to an unexpected subject for her latest outing: Madge herself. Having previously written about Victoria Woodhull and Karl and Jenny Marx, I'm dying to see how Gabriel chronicles the life of one of the world's biggest pop stars. It clocks in at 880 pages, so I think it's safe to say Gabriel is nothing less than thorough. —SMS A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls [F] Fosse's Septology was one of the breakout novels of last year, thanks in part to a one-woman campaign spearheaded by Merve Emre, whose profound love and admiration for the book proved infectious on Twitter and beyond. So expectations are high for the next novel from one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, the details of which are still scarce. This will be the literary event of October (pending Emre's New Yorker review). —SMS The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore [F] In the follow-up to her beguiling debut novel The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore delivers yet another work of historical fiction, this time set amid the French Revolution. Inspired by the true story of Tarrare, a French showman and soldier noted for his rapacious appetite and unorthodox eating habits, seemingly at odds with the poverty that surrounds him. According to legend, he could devour cats whole—certainly a fascinating historical figure to build a novel around. —LA November Pandora's Box by Peter Biskind [NF] It's a dire moment for television. The medium is in peril thanks to corporate conglomeration and big (dumb) bets on streaming, and good TV is becoming increasingly hard to find. Enter Biskind, one of the wisest, weirdest cultural critics out there. Tackling the fall of network TV, rise of cable, and middling new era of streaming, this interview-packed volume might just have the answers to a question that keeps me up at night: How come TV sucks now? —SMS In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl by Merilee Grindle [NF] Grindle unearths the story of the pioneering anthropologist Zella Nuttall, whose study of Aztec culture and cosmology transformed our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico. She was the first to accurately decode the Aztec stone calendar, and also rediscovered countless pre-Columbian texts previously thought to have been lost—all the while juggling single motherhood with her career. This is the first biography of Nuttall—and one that sounds long overdue. —SMS Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney [F] Barrera reteams with translator MacSweeney on her debut novel, following her breakthrough 2020 essay collection Linea Nigra. Three childhood friends—Mila, Citali, and Dalia—now college-aged, embark on what they hope will be the trip of a lifetime to Europe, only to be faced with the signs they are each steadily changing and drifting from one another. Now, adult Mila reflects on that formative friendship and fateful trip when she learns that Citali has drowned. Barrera asks: What do we lose to adulthood? —SMS The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan [F] Already a massive bestseller across the pond, Dolan's latest novel is a sly study of modern love, centered on a couple barreling toward their wedding and three friends who might just tear them apart (and for pretty good reason). A wry and contemporary take on the marriage plot, The Happy Couple is well-loved by Colm Tóibín and Booker winner Douglas Stuart, who declares himself "fully in awe of Dolan's talent." —SMS Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox [NF] Fox is the smartest and funniest comedy critic working today. So there's no one I would rather read on the history, legacy, and inner workings of the form. From highbrow to lowbrow, stand-up specials to TikTok stars, Dave Chappelle to Ali Wong to Jerry Seinfeld to Jon Stewart, Fox offers a sweeping chronicle of one of our most potent cultural forces, as well as a look inside how humor actually works. —SMS The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez [F] Nunez turns her gaze to our contemporary moment and the trappings of modern life in her ninth novel, the plot details of which are admittedly scarce. We know that it has a solitary female narrator, and that there's also an adrift Gen Zer and a parrot named Eureka in the mix—that's about it. But what difference would it really make? It's Nunez! Just read it! —SMS How to Be Multiple by Helena de Bres, illustrated by Julia de Bres [NF] This study of twinhood sits at the intersection of the intellectual and the personal—philosopher Helena de Bres is a twin herself, attuned to the uncanniness of being a twin as both a scholar and a sister. Confronting questions of consciousness, free will, and selfhood, she mines art, myth, popular experience, and her own experience to get to the bottom of this fascinating reproductive quirk. Chloé Cooper Jones, a fave of mine, calls this one "a must-read," so I have no choice but to follow suit. —SMS My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand [NF] Babs wrote a tell-all memoir and it's 1,024 pages long. That's literally all you need to know. —SMS . . To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith [NF] To Free the Captives finds the Pulitzer-winning poet soul-searching and heartsick, grappling with our national identity amid endemic racist violence. In doing so, she attempted to assemble a new vocabulary of American life. At a moment where words seem to no longer have mutually-understood meanings—or, often, no meaning at all—Smith's linguistic mastery and poetic vision are sorely needed. —SMS The Sisterhood by Courtney Thorsson [NF] Starting in early 1977, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and other Black women writers would meet monthly at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to discuss their work over gumbo and champagne—I know! They called themselves "The Sisterhood," and this remarkable community (which came to include Audre Lorde and Margo Jefferson, among others) is the subject of Thorsson's book, which I quite literally pre-ordered the split-second she announced on Twitter. —SMS Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin [NF] I'll read Elkin's writing on just about anything, but the topic of "art monsters"—which originated in Jenny Offil's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation—is both a) extremely up my alley and b) a truly perfect fit for Elkin's literary sensibilities. Clocking in at 368 pages, this book has some real intellectual (and physical) heft to it and spans the work of Kara Walker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and many, many more. —SMS Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil [F] In her debut novel, McNeil considers a theme that's run through much of her work, including her first book Lurking: the intersections of life, labor, and technology. Wrong Way centers on Teresa, who gets a job at a fintech corporation that's launching a fleet of driverless cars. The lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is strong, but as she learns more about her new employer, she must reckon with the existential perils posed by artificial intelligence, unchecked capitalism, and the gig economy. —SMS Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra [F] Basra's debut novel follows a starry-eyed cinephile who leaves his rural village in Punjab to pursue his dreams of becoming an actor. (He fancies himself a Sami Frey type.) Of course, things don't work out as he plans, and nothing on his journey is quite what it seems. Happy is an indictment of the global migration crisis, a meditation on diaspora, and an argument for the right to a vivid inner life. —LF Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern by Jacqueline Taylor [NF] Taylor chronicles the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator who expanded our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Using Meredith as a lens to study the role architecture played in early twentieth-century Black middle-class identity, Taylor shows that Meredith, like so many other Black cultural producers, wasn't marginal to the modernist project but rather central to its definition. (Also, this book has my vote for Title of the Year.) —SMS The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump [F] Bump's sophomore novel follows a young Black Boston woman who constructs a separate society with her husband in search of a Black utopia. But as more interlopers want in, conflicts surface, food gets scarce, and the outside world intrudes, and the sustainability of utopia comes into question. A great premise to be sure, but what really sold me is this incredible blurb from the Percival Everett: "A Blithedale Romance for the 21st century, only less naive and more complex... This is funny, sad, sad-funny and funny-sad and just plain smart." —SMS The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman [F] I can't remember the last time a novel's premise amused me this much—a writer absconds to Hollywood after writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist and subsequently gets her sort of canceled, and in her hurt, is radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Yes, please! Esteemed fictioneers Zain Khalid and Joshua Cohen both blurbed, a great sign in itself, but the conceit alone is too tantalizing to pass up. —SMS Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park [F] Park, a founding editor of The Believer, imagines an alternate secret history of Korea—one where the Korean Provisional Government still exists today—in his second novel. Propelled by twists and mystery, Same Bed Different Dreams weaves together Korean history, American pop culture, and modern technology to explore utopia, reality, and our inevitable, undeniable interconnectedness. —LF Day by Michael Cunningham [F] The Virginia Woolf fanfictionalist-extraordinaire is writing about crumbling marriages again and yeah, OK, I'll bite. Everyone from Francine Prose to Ocean Vuong has blurbed the thing, with the Irish contingent particularly keen on it, pulling in a one-two punch from Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín: Cunningham, says the latter, "crafts a glorious sentence, and at the same time he tells an achingly compelling story," in what the former calls "writing about love and loss in tones that are both unsparing and tender." —AC Critical Hits, edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado [NF] If Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is the first "Great American Gamer Novel" (as per Nathan Hill), then this is certainly our first Great American Gamer Essay Collection. Writer-gamers like Alexander Chee, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Larissa Pham reflect on the video games and gaming experiences that shaped them, and what the medium can teach all of us about our culture and ourselves. —SMS Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright [F] Blakely-Cartwright's seductive debut adult novel (she's previously the author of the kid's book Red Riding Hood) of power and friendship got one of the best blurbs I've ever seen—a ringing "Obsessed!" from Chloë Sevigny. The novel tells the story of one woman's affair with her daughter's best friend, probing the inner lives of each of the three women caught up in this strange triangle. This one also got plenty of love from Yiyun Li and Hermione Hoby, a sure sign of greatness. —SMS Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno [NF] Samatar x Zambreno—an intellectual match made in heaven. Together, they tackle the most slippery aspect of literary theory: tone. How does it work? Can it be preserved in translation? What can it teach us? Per the inimitable Cristina Rivera Garza: "Just as the world laments the apparent lack of insightful literary criticism as well as the dwindling number of venues that support it, here comes the dazzling Committee to Investigate Atmosphere with a piece of criticism like no other." —SMS The Death of a Jaybird by Jodi M. Savage [NF] Pitched a The Year of Magical Thinking meets Somebody's Daughter, Savage's memoir-in-essays spans three generations. Savage honors and elegizes the complicated relationships she had with her mother and grandmother—the women who raised her—and explores how all Black women must navigate various (and sometimes contradictory) roles and identities in the world. —LF The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Haydn Trowell [F] In 1968, Kawabata became the first Japanese writer tow in the Nobel Prize for Literature, with novels like Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Sound of the Mountain enrapturing international readers. Now available in English for the very first time is The Rainbow, published in 1934, about three half-sisters living in Japan just a few years after the end of WWII, as they struggle to make sense of the postwar world in which they are coming of age. —LF December Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman [NF] Since his decade-long stint at the helm of Poetry Magazine, Wiman has kept himself busy putting out volumes of poetry and books on faith. The metaphysical poetic tradition isn't exactly at its most popular in the Year of Our Exhausted Skepticism 2023, but a good case could be made for Wiman as the heir to George Herbert—a case Protestant poet laureate (okay she's a novelist, but still) Marilynne Robinson might cosign, having argued that Wiman's "poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world." This volume is not just one but two twofers, blending poetry, criticism, theology, and memoir. —AC Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn [F] A queer love story set in Brooklyn—it's been done before, to put it mildly. But a queer love story set in Brooklyn in the year 2050, as the calamitous effects of climate change encroach on the city and the only people guaranteed survival are those accepted into an experimental weather-safe, city-sized facility overseen by a reclusive girlboss-billionaire? Now that's a novel I'm dying to read. —SMS Songs on Endless Repeat  by Anthony Veasna So [NF/F] Soon after Veasna So's essays and debut story collection Afterparties captured the attention of the literary world, we were forced to grieve his sudden death. This posthumous collection of stories and essays affirms his versatility, secures his legacy, and bittersweetly reminds us of what could have been. But let's focus on the sweet part, as well as the humor and joy to be found in this book—as the late So himself once wrote in this very publication, "I actually recommend everyone to stop taking books so seriously." —SMS The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy [F] Kennedy, who published her much-acclaimed debut novel Trespasses last year at the age of 55, returns with a collection of short stories that explore the lives of women living in various kinds of poverty—material, emotional, sexual—while still finding beauty and joy amid such lack. Says Emma Donoghue, "The only other writer I can think of who packs this much moving, terrible life into each story is Alice Munro." —LF Everywhere an Oink Oink by David Mamet [NF] Is Mamet an idiot-asshole who wrote a few pretty good plays a long time ago but otherwise sucks? Yes. Does he also probably have some deliciously juicy behind-the-scenes stories from his four decades in Hollywood? Also yes. —SMS The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? What part, if any, should it play in feminist thought and women's liberation? Flock searches for the thorny, unsettling answers in three parallel lives. —SMS The Complications by Emmett Rensin [NF] Rensin, a former editor at Vox, agitates for a total re-understanding of severe mental illness by offering his own account of living with schizoaffective disorder. Finding the usual calls for the rejection of "stigma" gravely inadequate, he confronts the many faults of current mental health narratives and the hierarchies they contain. Memoir, history, and cultural criticism collide to make an impassioned case for a new approach to severe mental illness in our conversations, our scholarship, our policies, and our hospitals. —LF [millions_email]
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Mairead Small Staid

- | 1 book mentioned
In January, every vein in my body expands, the amount of blood coursing through them increasing. Strange voluminous thing. I’m unable to read anything (too queasy each day, all day) but a book borrowed from the library in which an embryo is depicted at its actual size. I can cover it with my littlest finger, and do, a fact I write down in my notebook. In my notebook, I do not call it it. I call it you. In February, I read Anne Carson’s Short Talks and Lydia Davis’s Essays Two, on translation. I have spent the last couple years working on a book about translation, about marriage as a co-written text—but now it (you?) is on its way, this actuality we’ve authored. Funny, I never thought of myself as one for collaboration. Never thought of myself as willing to give anything, everything, up. In March, I read Teju Cole’s Black Paper and Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John. Paul’s son was raised by her mother so the artist could maintain her solitary life, her intense dedication to her work. I lust after Paul’s solitude: her bare apartment, her luminous paintings and lean sentences. I learn the word allogenic, meaning a thing foreign to the body but of the same species—it has something to do with why the immune system doesn’t reject the fetus as it might a transplant. Little parasite, I think, hands on the slight heave of my stomach. Little love. In April, I read Robert Kanigel’s Hearing Homer’s Song and poetry by Michael Bazzett, Matt Rasmussen, Claire Wahmanholm. I have to trim my fingernails every few days, they grow so fast. These little freakish bits of the body. The unexpected oddities—a stuffier nose, a panicked sleeplessness—alongside the expected, monstrous enlargement. I should not call it monstrous, someone will say, but what else is the fact of another brain firing behind my abdomen, limbs other than my own growing from the food I eat? I learn the word quickening, for the first fluttering movements of those limbs. Quickening, as the days hasten toward the conclusion of something, the beginning of something, I don’t know, can’t possibly know what. In May, we travel to London on a research trip for my husband’s work, and I walk too much, too quickly, growing lightheaded in the crowded halls of the National Gallery. I sit before Manet’s fragmented The Execution of Maximilian, written about so exquisitely in Hisham Matar’s The Return. Matar looked at this painting every day for weeks, for months. What I would give to have such artistry—the painter’s, the writer’s—and to make such use of my time. What I would give—not enough, apparently. At the Tate Britain, I find a self-portrait by Gwen John. “She is going to side with loss and solitude, like the saints,” Paul says of the painter. “She is going to be a great artist, even if it means complete deprivation.” Down the hall, the gallery lights have been dimmed to preserve Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals; he made great use of lithol red, which fades quickly if exposed. The creature inside me has kicked when I go to bed, when I lie down on the couch, when I put my feet up, beneath the kitchen table, on another chair, but now it kicks for the first time as I stand, as I walk from massive painting to massive painting, the swathes of black and crimson before me nearly as dark as the womb. In June, I read Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System and Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds. I learn that breastmilk is blood, converted, a Christlike transformation. I learn that babies cry, at first, without tears. I learn that my pupils will dilate in childbirth: hence the dimness of the room, as if the nurses were preserving not merely my comfort but some fugitive pigment, destined to disappear. Some undertaking huge as a wall. In July, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others, Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night, and Emily Hall’s The Longcut. My skin ripples like the surface of a lake disturbed. Things jut from my misshapen stomach: a hip, a heel, I can’t tell. My husband carries furniture to the basement and assembles other furniture in its place, turning the office into a nursery—too obvious a metaphor to belabor, though I do. The morning light lands on a rocking chair, now, where my desk used to be. I read Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book, in which she writes of the births of her children: “I just made three deaths. I just made six eyeballs. I will never lose this weight.” In August, I begin my maternity leave, the due date two weeks away, and read Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, and Camera Lucida. “What I can name cannot really prick me,” writes Barthes. “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” We have settled on names, though a disturbance remains: a static hum running under the long, leisurely days as we wait. We wait. The due date passes by a day, a week. I read The Total Library, a collection of Borges’s nonfiction. “To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god,” he writes. We have no idea, yet, how ardently we can worship a person. In August, in the dark hour just after midnight, we drive to the hospital. My body is connected to various machines, one of which monitors the fetal heartbeat, pumping the noisy drum of it into the room. For a few fitful hours, I sleep surrounded by the sound of the baby’s blood, as it has slept these many months surrounded by mine. The thump thump thump of surety, though I am still not sure, will never be sure, will come to discover that being sure is, in the end, unnecessary. Thump thump. Little parasite. Little love. Here she comes. In August, she is six days old and asleep in her father’s arms, so I read from Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music aloud to him—to them. “To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only the spectre of losing it,” Barry writes in “The Coast of Leitrim,” and I blame the hormones, the exhaustion, for the way my voice breaks at the story’s end. In August, the calendar stops, briefly, and swings open to swallow us whole. In September, I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s Three Rings and W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction. Why I think reading about bombed-out cities while nursing a newborn is a good idea, I don’t know. It must seem, in its way, only fair: I should be reminded of the world beyond our walls, its cruelty. I read Nathalie Léger’s triptych of The White Dress, Suite for Barbara Loden, and Exposition, in which I learn that the French word—exposition—can mean abandoning a newborn where it will be found. I abandon her every night, I think. Every night, I find her again. In October, I read Anna Badkhen’s Bright Unbearable Reality, Natalie Hodges’s Uncommon Measure, and Peter Orner’s Still No Word from You. “It isn’t as though at some point you start living your actual life,” Orner writes. “But there are times we might be forgiven for believing it.” In November, I type these words in the stolen minutes of several days, one-handed, while she sleeps in my arms. However gently I press the keys, the sound risks waking her. Her eyelids are violet, her cheeks slumped moons. I risk it; I risk it all. More from A Year in Reading 2022A Year in Reading Archives: 2021, 2020,  2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Jessamine Chan

- | 1 book mentioned
At this time last year, a little birdie (recent debut author) warned me that I might never read for pleasure again after my pub day. While this turned out to be kind of true, I tried to carve out time for pleasure reading throughout the year, even when that meant falling behind on blurb requests and event prep deadlines, which was of course very enjoyable reading too! Somehow, because of these efforts and deadlines and the great privilege of a life and career where a lot of my work is reading, I read 47 books, four times more than 2021. I wish I could mention every title here. My 2022 began in dramatic fashion with my debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, publishing on the first Tuesday in January. Since then, I’ve met more book people than I thought possible in one year: fellow writers, readers, booksellers, librarians, editors, journalists, festival organizers, students, book club members. After a lifetime of reading and making sense of my life through books, it’s been amazing (thrilling! surreal!) to be read. My favorite book of 2022 was the exquisite memoir Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones, which is about motherhood, love, disability, art, travel, ambition, the pursuit of beauty, new ways of seeing, and being alive, but really no description I could write would do this book justice. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Chloé and I met in fall 2021 during a virtual bookseller tour and since then, and especially since reading each other’s books, have both approached our new friendship with a “where have you been all my life?” intensity that’s brought me so much joy. Winter book press and tour events gave me the chance to read Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh, Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang, and Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho, among many other wonders. More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez stole my heart. While traveling in the spring, I treated myself to the female-gaze-celebrating Vladimir by Julia May Jonas and thought, I hope to write this well one day. I followed up Our Share of Night, the wild, terrifying, blood-soaked novel by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell, February 2023), with the elegantly sinister Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson. I was reading The Women Could Fly, the fantastic second novel by Megan Giddings, when the Alito draft opinion leaked, and Megan’s book gave me a way to understand my grief and rage, while also dreaming of a world where witches are real. During that brief window of time before Roe was overturned, when the world felt more hopeful, I read my friend Nellie Hermann’s gorgeous new novel, With Child, in manuscript form, as well as several great, varied books, including: Cost of Living by Emily Maloney, This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, and The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng (March 2023). In May, I received a gift from the gods: an artist residency at The Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, via a last-minute cancellation. I arrived at Ragdale in late June with 15 books, clearly overcompensating for my first residency since 2016. There, I escaped from social media. I turned off my phone. I learned how to quiet my brain and write fiction again. Key to this effort was reading the excellent How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, which was as insightful and perspective-shifting as friends promised. Though we residents were only at Ragdale for 18 days, the world changed dramatically during that time. At the end of the first week, Roe was overturned. That evening was our first night of collective mourning. Then, a few days before we left, there was a shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, which is the next town over. We spent that afternoon sheltering in place and that night, we mourned again, shaken and furious at the insanity of gun violence in America and our country’s cowardly lawmakers. We continued with our planned open studios for that evening and shared music and dance, trying to remember our purpose as artists. Books that fueled my creativity and helped me maintain hope in art-making during my residency included: I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins, Matrix by Lauren Groff, Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, and The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman), which I’ve been delaying finishing, because I don’t want it to ever end. I was most surprised by my devotion to Matrix, given that medieval nuns were not a subject that ever interested me before, but once I started reading, I couldn’t get enough. Such is the power of Groff’s prose. Before fall festival season began, I tried to fit in as much “just because” reading as possible and finished Animal by Lisa Taddeo, Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman, and Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change by Angela Garbes, which I’d love to give to every mother in my life, everyone who’s considering becoming a mother, everyone who cares about mothers, everyone in charge of designing public policy for mothers. Soon after, an invitation to read Kelly Link’s new collection White Cat, Black Dog (March 2023) arrived in my inbox and I had to wrap my head around the idea of writing a blurb for one of my writing heroes. What adjectives could even capture my love for her work? Reading her new stories, which are reimagined fairy tales, made me feel like I was discovering the magic of books for the first time. Adding to my surreal good fortune this year, in October I traveled to the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England at the behest of guest programmer Celeste Ng, whose brilliant and daring new novel Our Missing Hearts made me feel so seen. On the plane ride home from London, I read Happening by Annie Ernaux and wondered how I’d made it to age 44 without reading her work. Recently, I read Simple Passion, up next is A Girl’s Story, then Getting Lost. Like you, I’m now obsessed with her and want to drop everything to read the Ernaux canon. In the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of reading two wonderful forthcoming debut novels: A Quitter’s Paradise by Elysha Chang (June 2023) and The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar (March 2023). And for a perfect nonfiction pairing with my novel, I’ll forever be recommending Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by New York Times parenting columnist Jessica Grose (forthcoming on December 6). I’m now midway through Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling (April 2023) and Pure Colour by Sheila Heti, which I’m savoring in small bites. In December, I plan to read Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (April 2023), whose collection Friday Black is one of my favorites. This has been the most eventful year of my life, full of conversation and travel and discovery and new friends and old friends, as well as a lot of cake. The question I’ve been asked most often is what I’m working on next. I’m not sure yet, but I hope my reading will guide me. More from A Year in Reading 2022A Year in Reading Archives: 2021, 2020,  2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005