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The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: October 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 October. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 1. Less 6 months 2. 2. The Overstory 5 months 3. 3. Lost Empress 6 months 4. 5. The Incendiaries 3 months 5. 4. There There 4 months 6. 7. The Ensemble 4 months 7. 9. Washington Black 2 months 8. 10. Transcription 2 months 9. - Warlight 3 months 10. - Killing Commendatore 1 month   Only the lightest, feather soft jostling on the top half of our list this month, as R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries trades places with Tommy Orange's There There. From there, things get more interesting. First, two books graduated to our Hall of Fame: Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad and Leslie Jamison's The Recovering. It's the first time either author has had the honor, and this move freed up two new spaces on the list. One of those spaces was filled by Michael Ondaatje's Warlight, which rejoins our rankings in ninth position after taking a one-month hiatus. The other space was filled by Haruki Murakami's Killing Commendatore, which our own Hannah Gersen described as a "new novel ... about a freshly divorced painter who moves to the mountains, where he finds an eerie and powerful painting called 'Killing Commendatore.'" Of course, when it comes to Murakami, simple descriptions belie subtle unsettlement. "Mysteries proliferate," Gersen continues, "and you will keep reading—not because you are expecting resolution but because it’s Murakami, and you’re under his spell." Of the five "near misses" this month, four appeared in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview. The Practicing Stoic, which did not, is Ward Farnsworth's "idiosyncratic, strange, yet convincing and useful volume," according to Ed Simon, offering a novel corrective to the popular understanding of Stoicism. "The Practicing Stoic is one of many philosophical self-help books, contending with the primordial question: 'How am I to live?'" Simon continues as he situates it within the context of several others in the canon. Additionally, Stoicism itself proves valuable in how it "help[s] us cope with the ever-mounting anxieties of postmodernity, the daily thrum of Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds, the queasy push notifications and the indignities of being a cog in the shaky edifice of late capitalism (or whatever)." Next month two more spots should open on our list for two newcomers, and there's only one way to find out which. This month’s near misses included: Severance, The Golden State, Lake Success, The Practicing Stoic, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: October 2018

- | 1 book mentioned
Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in October. The Lumberjack’s Dove by GennaRose Nethercott All praise to book-length poems. Nethercott’s yarn begins with a lumberjack who chops off his own hand. “The hand becomes a dove” and tries to fly away, but the lumberjack strings it to his belt. He “walks out of the forest, the airborne hand fluttering along behind.” The narrator tells us: “You know this story.” It’s part whisper, part command, all curiosity. How do we know this story? We know stories like it—folklore borne of the forest—and we know that our lives and souls are stories. It begins to add up. Nethercott’s narrator is gentle, quirky, playful, endearing: this is a book to read in circles around fires, under blankets, in dark and quiet room corners. Befuddled, the lumberjack wanders and wonders. He “clutches the absent space at the end of his arm.” His dove—his hand, his self—“looks back at him, already forgetting it was ever anything but sovereign.” Nethercott’s book is inventive, unique, and a welcome source of escape—or maybe inscape. The narrator frequently steps in and clears the white space of the page; these addresses are not interruptions, but soft reminders that stories are brought to us by mouths and hands. “Living creatures believe they own something as soon as they love it”: Nethercott’s book feels true as wind, a discovery worth embracing. The Arrangements by Kate Colby These are sharp elegies—not quite of the dead, but of the failures of language and connection all around us—delivered with smiles and smirks. To read “Wistless” is to miss summer, to enter the shape of mourning: “In-your-face blooms / now brown, drooped // into black / eyes of dying Susans.” In this space between seasons, we sigh: “Screen door squeaks, / buffeting whump of // unfast ceiling fan.” Colby’s columnar lines feel threaded, a lattice of letters that never feels choppy. The Arrangements carries us to someplace a little dark, a little comfortable. In “The Plunge,” we see: “Black evergreens / pre-dawn, it’s all / there before you.” In that place of “felt darkness,” there is love, picked “like splinters / of light from the light.” Colby is fresh and stirring—“Day doesn’t so much / progress as condense– // rain fills red Solo bowls / for feral cats in the yard”—yet her controlled language is fairly hypnotic, peacefully familiar: “There’s a first time / for everything and // now we’re in for it.” Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez Martinez has written of growing up Catholic in Greeley, Colorado, where the stained glass iterations of the Holy Mother blurred into the glass candles in a curandera’s room: Mariology as reflection, refraction. Language as litany, proving ground for poetry. Martinez’s poems are dynamic personal doxologies of Mexican-American tradition and inheritance. In “Family Photo—Mi Bisabuela Con Mi Abuela”: “Maria Beltran would peel the oranges / & all things on the earth’s surface / became navel & hearth.” His poems open and turn; his theme of family feels like a reclamation. In a later photo poem, the woman’s “wedding dress spills // lilies & lilies of sugar mornings”— those ls lifting the image out of memory. His second sequence in the book—a meditation on execution, bodies hung, bodies “unnailed in cross”—is masterful. Based on a postcard set by Walter H. Horne from Mexico, the images are striking: “the second / leans forward into crucifixion // arms upstretched as wingbones / wrought of tar.” Later: “Lined as background stick figures, / a crowd of children gathers dust // & shade beside the spectacle.” He gathers rhythm and reason toward the poem’s end: “if there are tears, there are no homilies; / if there is color, they are bronze; // if there is life, it is public domain; / if he had a name, it is now transnational // confusion / postmarked in relief.” Ambitious and historical, Martinez’s book earns praise. Things as It Is by Chase Twichell Twichell’s new collection brings us into the world of her poems through invitation, not interrogation. It is a calm, measured entrance. In “The Missing Weekly Readers,” the narrator and her cousins are at their grandmother’s house during the first big snowstorm: “We sat around the table / in an igloo: the dining room // darkened and hushed, / windows a swollen glow.” After lunch, they brave the storm to loot the next week’s magazines from a mailbox. Years later, still coated with guilt, she tells us: “If you someday find them / in a surprising place, with a note / from some kids admitting to the theft, // please keep it to yourself.” Such union—or communion—with the reader is an offering worth savoring. Yet Twichell’s work is neither innocent nor gentle. In one stanza she describes riding her bike through the ash piles of burned leaves; in the next, she writes of a dangerous man who “liked little girls.” She repeats little, and the horror becomes pungent. Poetic turns like that require real skill, and the awareness that beauty and terror often share the same air. In “Soft Leather Reins,” the narrator and her friend had to release horses tangled in barbed wire. They ride home together at dusk, and “There my knowledge ends.” Twichell lets her poems unfurl into the world, and it is a quiet joy to watch them evaporate. With the Dogstar as My Witness by John Fry Fry’s debut begins in the most appropriate way possible for the book that follows: “like a preacher’s son returned to God / —but never the church.” This book is a search for a soul, undertaken by one who has “looked for that angel unawares, / prodigal or pilgrim, saint or sinner, to ask” questions without answers, unless we look to the imperfections of faith. With the Dogstar as My Witness is a document of terrible longing that we are born for, so many hearts “promised benediction, our goodbyes / blackened our altars.” In poems spread across the page—syntactic breaks in breath and hope—Fry suggests that we are never truly content with divine absence. He looks not for substitute, but salves. He travels the wilderness, the desert of desire. He accepts the recognition that “even novenas / can’t coat a stomach already gone.” Fry quotes Fanny Howe in one section of the book, and she is an appropriate patron saint for poetic hearts straining, inevitably, toward God. “say I am:” the narrator writes, “otherwise agnostic, a believer / only when in unison / words are sung-said / beside another, stranger or / familiar, not alone.” Hey, Marfa by Jeffrey Yang Marfa is lucky to earn such a quicksilver ode from Yang, whose poems are flexible, expansive, sonorously clever. From “Substation”: “Gray day faraway water-tower potentiometer // enclosed by a series of right-angle triangles, guy- / line hypotenuse cables lengthening to anchor / pole.” Among these manufactured moods, “A small town thrives in the desert.” Yang is so precise in his rendering of myths: “Sunrise over a dirt road / by a low-wire fence, birdsong, / a rooster crows, then distant church bells / pealing arpeggios in the thin air.” Peppered with paintings and drawings by Rackstraw Downes, Yang’s book is equal parts historical (diary and interview anecdotes from residents), folkloric (“They told us a story about the devil, / mala cosa, small in stature with a beard / whose face they could never see clearly”), and comfortable in contemporary wonder. In one poem, the narrator and friends “sought out the Lights / off an empty highway, not a soul but us four.” On the distant horizon, they see the magic: “hovering / eerily for a moment, chills at being chosen, / growing / brighter than disappearing.” The marvel ends when a police officer’s lights bring their gaze down to earth. His flashlight scans their faces, and he asks them: “You all’re Americans aren’t you?” Their response: “we lied and said ‘Yes.”—a reminder that even though you can capture a place in words doesn’t mean your language and self are understood there.
Book Previews

October Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

- | 1 book mentioned
We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month. Let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments!Want to know about the books you might have missed? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then sign up to be a member today. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam: “Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind,” reads the Airbnb posting for the charming Hamptons house rented by a Brooklyn family for a one-week vacation. The world has other ideas. Shortly into their stay, the East Coast power grid goes down, New York City is plunged into darkness, warplanes roar across the sky—the sonic boom “a rend in heaven right above their little house”—and, worse, the rental home’s owners appear at the front door. An exquisitely tense novel of manners in the midst of a catastrophe from which there is no safe haven, however well-furnished. (Matt) Memorial by Bryan Washington: In the follow-up to his 2019 story collection, Lot, Washington introduces us to Mike and Benson. They’re a couple, and though they haven’t been together forever, their relationship has lasted long enough for them to both become vaguely dissatisfied. Their rather boring comfort gets shaken up by the arrival of Mike’s mother, Mitsuko, from Japan: she reveals that his father is dying, and while Mike travels to Osaka to, Mitsuko stays behind with Benson. The result is not only an exploration of a kaleidoscopically diverse America—Mike is a Japanese American man who works at a Mexican restaurant and dates a Black man—but a moving portrait of two young men who are figuring out exactly who they are in this world. Anyone who enjoyed Washington’s dreamlike yet textured meditations on life in Houston in Lot will be enchanted with Memorial. (Ismail) The Silence by Don DeLillo: The prerelease literature for DeLillo’s The Silence takes pains to note that DeLillo completed his new novel mere weeks before the advent of Covid-19. One understands why when one reads the plot summary: Five people on Super Bowl Sunday in the near future, trapped together in a Manhattan apartment in the midst of an ongoing catastrophe. In The Silence, DeLillo trains his postmodern meditative powers on what happens when our connection to technology is severed, and asks what ultimately makes us human. As Joshua Ferris writes in The New York Times Book Review: “DeLillo offers consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world.” (Adam Price) The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada (translated by David Boyd): Fans of Oyamada’s The Factory— a curious and delightfully eccentric novel that follows four workers through their jobs at a Kafkaesque labyrinthine factory—will be delighted to know that New Directions is publishing the English translation of Oyamada’s follow-up novel, The Hole. Work figures into this book too: when a couple relocates to a rural area for the husband’s job, the wife is left with an abundance of time. She explores the countryside, finding various unlikely creatures, and particularly a hole that seems to be made just for her, in this novel that is “by turns reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, David Lynch, and My Neighbor Totoro.” (Anne) Bright and Dangerous Objects by Anneliese Mackintosh: A beautiful novel about an undersea welder who juggles her desire to join a mission to Mars with the reality of her pregnancy. This is a lovely and fascinating book about the kind of work that is usually invisible, and a kind of maternal ambivalence that reaches for the literal stars, told from the perspective of a singular, well-drawn protagonist. (Lydia) The Searcher by Tana French: French, who made her name writing six bestselling mysteries starring detectives from the fictional Dublin Murder Squad, has branched out into stand-alone books. In this one, a retired Chicago cop buys a house in a rural town in Ireland’s Lonesome West, hoping to put police work behind him. But of course trouble finds him in the form of a local boy from a dysfunctional family who needs help finding his missing brother. If you are a French obsessive, you don’t need to know the rest. Just pre-order and call in sick for a couple days after Oct. 6 when the book comes out. (Michael) Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París (translated by Christina MacSweeney): A young man works through the aftermath of his mother’s abandonment when he was a young child, from the author of the critically acclaimed Among Strange Victims. (Lydia) Just Like You by Nick Hornby: The much-loved author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and other hits is out with another unlikely romance—this one between Lucy, a nearly divorced 41-year-old schoolteacher with two sons, and Joseph, a part-time butcher half her age who’s still living at home with his mom. When they meet, Lucy’s looking for a babysitter but winds up with something more. In this age of lockdowns and social distancing, the novel asks timely questions about how people manage to connect when confronted with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Sometimes, this brutally funny novel suggests, the perfect match might be the person who’s utterly unlike you. (Bill) Missionaries by Phil Klay: Despite soul-sapping fatigue, a soldier-medic adept at patching up the war wounded and a journalist equally adept at covering American war find the chance to enter yet another conflict zone irresistible. A calling of sorts. But whence the call? From its appeal to ego—the belief that one is among the favored few tasked with making things right in the world? As acolytes to violence, if not by preference then by necessity? With Missionaries, Klay, winner of the National Book Award in 2014, has dropped a novel on us of a muscular veracity as terrifying and important as it is rare in contemporary writing. (Il’ja) Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty: Debut novel Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty ‘defies all modest description” according to Brian Phillips. The novel’s a mix of tragedy and farce that evokes the kitchen sink of classics (high and low): the Greek classics and the Bible alongside nods to Looney Tunes, Charles Portis, and Flannery O’Connor. Set in 1837 Ohio, Medium Son narrates the tale of Big Son, who looks for a steady wage and in doing so stumbles into a series of misadventures that involve (but are not limited to) elderly terrorists, infrastructure collapse, steamboat races, wild pigs, and multiple ruined weddings. A boisterous adventure, Cuyahoga at its essence, per Phillips, is “a ramshackle joy from start to finish.” (Anne) The Lost Shtetl by Max Gross: In Gross's debut novel, a disintegrating marriage inadvertently reveals a larger secret: the existence of a tiny Jewish village in Poland called Kreskol. Isolated (in equal measure) from the horrors, advancements, and culture of the 20th century, its residents must come to terms with their new reality—and long-hidden origin story. A starred review from Publishers Weekly says: "Gross’s entertaining, sometimes disquieting tale delivers laugh-out-loud moments and deep insight on human foolishness, resilience, and faith." (Carolyn) White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad: Born out of her viral Guardian article from 2018 ( "How White Women Use Strategic Tears to Silence Women of Color"), Hamad's first book explores the ways white feminism has been used to uphold white supremacy and oppress Black and Indigenous women, and women of color. Blending history, research, and cultural criticism, Zeba Talkhani calls the book "an essential guide for those who want to be truly intersectional in their feminism." (Carolyn) Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth: Danforth's debut adult novel weaves together stories (and stories within stories) centered around Brookhants School for Girls, a shuttered and haunted New England boarding school. Deeply metafictional, mysterious, and queer, the novel explores the ways the past and the present converge in horrifying and spectacular ways. "Brimming from start to finish with sly humor and gothic mischief, Plain Bad Heroines is a brilliant piece of exuberant storytelling by a terrifically talented author," says Sarah Waters. (Carolyn) Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori): In a follow-up to her wildly successful English-language debut, Convenience Store Woman, Murata's newest novel follows Natsuki, a girl who believes she's an alien. Ignored, abused, and painfully lonely, she grows up but never fits into society; she dreams of escaping the "factory" (modern Japanese society) for her true home: space. Elif Bautman calls the novel "A radical, hilarious, heartbreaking look at the crap we have all internalized in order to fit in and survive." (Carolyn) [millions_email] A Woman, A Plan, An Outline of a Man by Sarah Kasbeer: Winner of Zone 3 Press's 2019 Creative Nonfiction Award, Kasbeer's debut essay collection explores girlhood, sexuality, trauma, shame, and hope. “An astonishing collection not for the faint of heart," says Chloe Caldwell. "Kasbeer speaks the unspoken and dares to be vulnerable in a world of facades.” (Carolyn) Tiny Nightmares edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto: In their second "tiny" anthology, editors Michel and Nieto gather 40 established and emerging writers— including Samantha Hunt, Jac Jemc, and Hilary Leichter—to spin small tales of terror. About the little horrors, Carmen Maria Machado says: "I could gorge myself all day and night on these macabre, hellish little literary bonbons...Tiny Nightmares is an absolute treat." (Carolyn)
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: November 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 November. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 2. The Overstory 6 months 2. 7. Washington Black 3 months 3. 5. There There 5 months 4. 4. The Incendiaries 4 months 5. 6. The Ensemble 5 months 6. - The William H. Gass Reader 1 month 7. 8. Transcription 3 months 8. 10. Killing Commendatore 2 months 9. - Severance 1 month 10. - The Golden State 1 month   The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction has reached our site's Hall of Fame each year that the site has operated, and this month the trend continues with the ascension of Andrew Sean Greer's Less. Joining it on that voyage is Sergio De La Pava's Lost Empress, marking the second time De La Pava's earned the honor since Garth Risk Hallberg profiled him back in 2012. We ran another long interview with the author earlier this year. Meanwhile Michael Ondaatje's Warlight has once again dropped out of our Top Ten. In the past four months it's been on, off, on and off, flickering like a candle that can't quite stay lit. With three fresh spots, we welcome three newcomers to the list. All 928 pages of The William H. Gass Reader hold sixth position, and the book enters our ranks at an appropriate time. When better than the winter, asked our own Nick Ripatrazone, to appreciate the author of "a wild, wacky horror story about snow that deserves to be rediscovered, appreciated — and, instead of Joyce — tweeted, as the snow falls upon all the living and the dead"? Nick went on to enumerate his thoughts on Gass's work, and its transformative effects. In the ninth spot, we find Severance, Ling Ma's "funny, frightening, and touching debut," which our own Adam O'Fallon Price called "a bildungsroman, a survival tale, and satire of late capitalist millennial angst in one book" in his teaser for our Great 2018 Book Preview. Ma has since contributed to our ongoing Year in Reading series, recommending a newly reprinted novella first published in 1982. To find out which, you'll have to read the entry for yourself. Finally, Millions editor Lydia Kiesling's novel The Golden State makes its first appearance on our Top Ten. As of this writing, four Year in Reading participants have included the book in their lists: Angela Garbes, Edan Lepucki, Lauren Wilkinson, and Crystal Hana Kim. (They won't be the last.) "It was one of several books I read that also complicate the conventional ways we view and talk about motherhood," Garbes wrote. "The novel’s anxiety-laced vulnerability, its at once mundane and urgent first person narration, was a revelation," Lepucki added. Next month's list should be shaken up quite a bit by the rest of the Year in Reading series, which reliably bloats everyone's "to read" piles just in time for the New Year. This month’s near misses included: The Practicing Stoic, Lake Success, The Friend, and What We Were Promised. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Prizes

2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Announced

- | 1 book mentioned
Tommy Orange's There There wins the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize! Awarded to the best debut novel published between January 1 and December 31 of the award year, the winner is given $10,000. This year's judges were Jeffery Renard Allen, Julie Lekstrom Himes, Katie Kitamura, Rachel Kushner, and Dana Spiotta. There There was featured in our 2018 Great Book Preview, snagged a spot in The Millions Top Ten, and made an appearance in multiple Year in Reading entries. About the novel, YiR alum Ada Limón wrote: Tommy Orange’s There There had me deeply disturbed and enthralled, not only for the characters and cultural veracity, but because I think he’s an incredible master of time. Here are the authors that made this year’s short and long lists.
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: September 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 September. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 1. Less 5 months 2. 5. The Overstory 4 months 3. 2. Lost Empress 5 months 4. 8. There There 3 months 5. 7. The Incendiaries 2 months 6. 4. Frankenstein in Baghdad 6 months 7. 3. The Ensemble 3 months 8. 6. The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath 6 months 9. - Washington Black 1 month 10. - Transcription 1 month   Pulitzer-winner Andrew Sean Greer holds this month's top spot with his latest novel, Less. Two more months of strong sales and he'll ascend to our Hall of Fame, just as Leslie Jamison (The Recovering) and Ahmed Saadawi (Frankenstein in Baghdad) seem poised to do in October. One of two newcomers this month is Esi Edugyan, whose Booker-shortlisted novel Washington Black is based on a famous 19th-century criminal case and tells the story of an 11-year-old slave's incredible journey from the cane fields of the Caribbean to the Arctic, London, and Morocco. "In its rich details and finely tuned ear for language," wrote Martha Anne Toll for our site last week, "the book creates a virtual world, immersing the reader in antebellum America and Canada as well as in Victorian England." Edugyan is joined on our list by Kate Atkinson, whose new period novel Transcription focuses on a female spy, recruited by MI5 at age 18 to monitor fascist sympathizers. "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," wrote Sonya Chung in our Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview, and evidently her feelings are shared by many Millions readers alike. Spots for both books were opened when Warlight and The Mars Room dropped from our ranks. Elsewhere on the list, shuffling abounds. The Overstory rose to second position after being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and There There rose as well after being longlisted for the National Book Award. Meanwhile, if you'll turn your attention to this month's "near misses" below, you'll see The Golden State, the debut novel from Lydia Kiesling, our intrepid editor. Longtime readers of this site are no doubt familiar with Lydia's brand of antic, incisive writing – she's one of the few authors who've made me laugh and tear up in the same piece – but prepared as I was, I'll admit this book floored me in the best way. Not only is it an engrossing depiction of a very particular parent's mind, but it's also an exploration of what it means to connect with others, raise them, be influenced and repulsed by them, as well as overwhelmed by them alike. As a bonus, there's also an absolutely ruthless and necessary skewering of modern university administrative work, and the entire story vibrates with an extreme sense of place. I cannot wait to read what Lydia writes next and in the meantime I encourage you all to check this one out. This month’s near misses included: Severance, The Practicing Stoic, and The Golden State. See Also: Last month's list. [millions_ad]
Book Previews

October Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

- | 1 book mentioned
We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month. Find more October titles at our Great Second-Half Preview, and let us know what you’re looking forward to in the comments! 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. 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) Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister: What it says in the title, by one of the foremost contemporary chroniclers of the role(s) of women in American society. It feels as though the timing of this release could not be better (that is to say, worse). Read an interview with Traister here. (Lydia)     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, that garnered him the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honor, 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.) Little by Edward Carey: Set in a Revolutionary Paris, a tiny, strange-looking girl named Marie is born—and then orphaned. Carey blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and art and reality, in his fictionalized tale of the little girl who grew up to become Madame Tussaud. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly writes the novel's "sumptuous turns of phrase, fashions a fantastical world that churns with vitality." (Carolyn)   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.) Scribe by Alyson Hagy: In a world devastated by a civil war and fevers, an unnamed protagonist uses her gift of writing to protect herself and her family's old Appalachian farmhouse. When Hendricks, a mysterious man with a dark past, asks for a letter, the pair set off an unforeseen chain of events. Steeped in folklore and the supernatural, Kirkus's starred review called it "a deft novel about the consequences and resilience of storytelling." (Carolyn) 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) Hungry Ghost Theater by Sarah Stone: Siblings Robert and Julia Zamarin want to reveal the dangers of the world with their small political theater company while their neuroscientist sister Eva attempts to find the biological roots of empathy. While contending with fraught family dynamics, the novel touches on themes like art, free will, addiction, desire, and loss. Joan Silber writes she "found this an unforgettable book, astute, vivid, and stubbornly ambitious in its scope." (Carolyn)   Love is Blind by William Boyd: In Boyd's 15th novel, Brodie Moncur—a piano tuner with perfect pitch—flees his oppressive family in Scotland and travels across Europe. In the shadow of a (seemingly) doomed affair, the novel ruminates on the devastating power of passion, secrets, and deception. (Carolyn)   Famous Adopted People by Alice Stephens: Stephens' debut novel follows Lisa, a 27-year-old adoptee, as she travels to South Korea to find her birth mother. Equally tense, tragic, and comedic, Publishers Weekly describes the novel as a "fun-house depiction of the absurdities and horrors of the surveillance state."  (Carolyn)   Girls Write Now by Girls Write Now: Containing more than one hundred essays from young women in the Girls Write Now program, a writing and mentorship program in New York City. The anthology contains stories rife with angst, uncertainty, grief, hope, honesty, and joy, and advice on writing and life from powerhouses like Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Zadie Smith. Kirkus calls the anthology  "an inspiring example of honest writing."  (Carolyn)   A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande: A former undocumented Mexican immigrant, Grande's memoir explores to her journey from poverty to successful author—and the first of her family to graduate from college. Candid and heartfelt in exploring the difficulties of immigration and assimilation, Publishers Weekly's starred review called the book  an "uplifting story of fortitude and resilience." (Carolyn)   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) What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky: Havrilesky's, the acclaimed memoirist and columnist for The Cut's "Ask Polly" advice column, newest collection addresses our culture's obsession with self-improvement. Publishers Weekly's starred review writes "it’s a message she relates with insight, wit, and terrific prose." Tackling subjects like materialism, romance, and social media, she asks readers—who are constantly inundated with messages about productivity and betterment—to ask less of themselves, to realize that they (and their lives) are enough. (Carolyn)   [millions_ad]
Prizes

2018 Man Booker Shortlist Announced

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The 2018 Man Booker Shortlist has been revealed! In its 50th year, the Man Booker Prize continues to uphold its mission to "promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written in English and published in the United Kingdom." Wittled down from the 13-title longlist, the 6-book shortlist includes writers from the UK, US, and Canada—three, two, and one, respectively. With her debut novel, Johnson is the youngest writer to be shortlisted for the Man Booker at 27, and Edugyan is the only nominee this year to have been shortlisted before (Half-Blood Blues in 2011). Here's the 2018 Man Booker shortlist (which features many titles from our 2018 Great Book Preview) and applicable bonus links: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Read our review) Everything Under by Daisy Johnson Washington Black by Esi Edugyan The Long Take by Robin Robertson The Overstory by Richard Powers Milkman by Anna Burns The Man Booker Prize will be awarded on October 16.
Prizes

2018 National Book Awards Longlists Announced

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And just like that book award season is back! The National Book Foundation announced the National Book Award longlist this week on the New Yorker's Page Turner section. Each containing ten books, the five longlists are fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young people's literature, and, the newly minted, translated literature. The five-title shortlists will be announced on October 10th and the awards will be revealed in New York City (and streamed online) on November 14. Some fun facts about these nominees: The Fiction list only contains one previous nominee (Lauren Groff). All of the Nonfiction nominees are first-time contenders for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The Poetry list include one previous winner (Terrance Hayes), one previous finalist (Rae Armantrout), and eight first-time nominees—three of which are for debut collections (Diana Khoi Nguyen, Justin Phillip Reed, and Jenny Xie). 2018 is the first year of the Translated Literature category so all nominees are first-time contenders for this award. Here’s a list of the finalists in all five categories with bonus links where available: Fiction: A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Our interview with Brinkley; Brinkley's 2017 Year in Reading) Gun Love by Jennifer Clement Florida by Lauren Groff (Our review; The Millions interview with Groff) The Boatbuilder by Daniel Gumbiner Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (Featured in our February Book Preview) An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (Jones's 2017 Year in Reading) The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Our interview with Makkai) The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Nunez's 2010 Year in Reading) There There by Tommy Orange (Featured in our June Book Preview) Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Featured in our April Book Preview) Nonfiction: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation by Colin G. Calloway Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh (Smarsh's 2017 Year in Reading) Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler Poetry:  Wobble by Rae Armantrout feeld by Jos Charles (ft. in our August Must-Read Poetry preview) Be With by Forrest Gander American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Our review) Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed lo terciario / the tertiary by Raquel Salas Rivera Monument: Poems New and Selected by Natasha Trethewey Eye Level by Jenny Xie (ft. in our April Must-Read Poetry preview) Translated Literature: Disoriental by Négar Djavadi; translated by Tina Kover (Featured in our 2018 Great Book Preview) Comemadre by Roque Larraquy; translated by Heather Cleary (Featured in our Second-Half 2018 Great Book Preview) The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail; translated by Max Weiss and Dunya Mikhail One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan; translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan Love by Hanne Ørstavik;  translated by Martin Aitken Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life by Gunnhild Øyehaug; translated by Kari Dickson Trick by Domenico Starnone; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (An essay on learning new languages) The Emissary by Yoko Tawada; translated by Margaret Mitsutani (Tawada's 2017 Year in Reading) Flights by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Jennifer Croft (Our review; 2018 Man Booker International Prize) Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya; translated by Anya Migdal Young People's Literature: The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin (Our three-part conversation from 2009 with Anderson) We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor The Journey of Little Charlie by Christopher Paul Curtis Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam by Elizabeth Partridge What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper
The Millions Top 10

The Millions Top Ten: August 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 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)
Book Previews

Must-Read Poetry: January 2018

- | 1 book mentioned
Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in January. Wild Is the Wind by Carl Phillips Listen to Nina Simone’s stirring classic that inspired Phillips’s title, and then settle into this masterful collection. Phillips has found the sweet union between pacing and structure, and each poem in this book, like Simone’s recording, fully inhabits its space. The wideness and wisdom of his first person steps out in the middle of poems, as in “Brothers in Arms”: “I’ve always thought / gratitude’s the one correct response to having been made, / however painfully, to see this life more up close.” And “The happiest / people I know are those whose main strategy has / always been detachment.” This sense of control permeates the book, exemplified in poems like “Stray”: “Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed / to fail—that the body is—keeps me almost steady, if / steadiness is what a gift for a while brings—feathers, burst- / at-last pods of milkweed, October—before it all fades away.” To fade is to drift, disappear, and to lose ourselves—a notion, much like love, that requires some strange confidence and fear. A pleasure to have a poet armed with the architecture of history speaking to us, telling us: “to know utterly what you’ll never be, to understand in doing so / what you are, and say no to it, not to who you are, to say no to despair.” He does so by reminding us how to see, even something as simple and necessary as leaves: “Now they look suspended, like heroes / inside the myth heroes seem bent on making / from the myth of themselves; or like sunlight, in fog.” Indictus by Natalie Eilbert The first poem of Indictus is a preface and schema for the book: “I envision a world where the men are gone who pulled language out of my mouth to push themselves in.” The narrator explains “If I jump around in my details, it is because I have willfully refused details in writing,” and the warning makes sense: “Even in the highest form of truth, to access memory is to blunder its event.” Eilbert’s narrators respond to trauma with fever and force, and we’re plunged into these dark moments in stanzas that stray across the page, little blinks of memory that have pushed their way out. The narrative style here is often mythic—Eilbert’s recursive songs turn words like “hole” into struggles—making Indictus feel like some discovered, aged text of permanence. There often is a freeing sense of vulnerability here; on one page, after a pointed childhood memory, the narrator skips a line like taking a breath, and writes: “What do I want to tell you?” What is told: “A poem is a hole in how it is dug up,” she writes, “the soil purged, the soiled purge—movement likened / to a net uncatching.” Indictus is, among other things, a paean to poetic power: “My obsession with words is a kind of envy, / that they affect meaning as their former usage / is erased, retooled.” Eilbert’s book is an act of reclaiming, revising, transcending—while never forgetting. Luxury by Philip Schultz “As I get older more seems to be needed.” Luxury begins with the anxiety that accompanies awareness. The narrators of the first poems in the collection are frozen, watching the world. An aging man in his home, “worrying about a future my sons / will help make.” A man sitting “next to the toilet” on packed transit, “thinking about Pythagoras, / who believed our souls ended up inside / the bodies of animals selected as rewards / and punishments.” A narrator witness to small-town bickering in line at the grocery store. These are poems of dizzying suburban silence: “I like to stand at my window, / looking for a TV’s futile flickering, / always surprised to see / instead, / the quaint, porous face / of my reflection, / immersed in darkness, / its one abundance.” “Luxury,” the long title poem that encompasses the final quarter of that book, looks deeper into that darkness. It ventures forward and backward—in the bounding way that grief does—and the narrator considers how “the first / and only life I ever managed to save / was my own.” Melancholic without ever become maudlin, Schultz’s new book is a snapshot of our malaise “one luminous, lost imagination at a time.” Take Me with You by Andrea Gibson Gibson’s pithy love poems are a nice match for the book’s pocket size, and Sarah J. Coleman’s line drawings help the eye linger on the page. The final two sections of the book, “On the World” and “On Becoming,” are idealistic calls for unity—that we might compromise enough to listen to each other, but that we don’t have to compromise our souls. The untitled poems make the pages bleed into each other; one page is an affirmation to “write the poem” in the midst of grief, and the opposing page feels right: “I am so desperate to learn / how people reach / each other, / I can’t stop running / around cursing this city / for the day they started / burying the telephone wires / underground.” “You should never trust a ship / that won’t let you get off”—Gibson’s wisdom sails in lines that take curious routes. They might court cliché in some of their love poems, but that makes their later dances with words all the more surprising and powerful “I know a thousand / things louder than / a soldier’s gun. // I know the / heartbeat of his / mother.” A former college basketball player (they played for St. Joseph College’s Lady Monks), they first came out at 20 to their roommate: “I gotta tell you something. I / finally understand God.” [millions_ad] Hymn to the Reckless by Erin Fornoff At a gas station: “slicks of oil tie-dye the puddles / in the concrete.” They “reflect the sun, / turn it wild, hold it in the cracked dips of the ground.” In the forest: “Look at a beech long enough, you want / to run your hands up its trunk like a lover.” Making moonshine: “We wait for a sunny day and begin early, / haul deep pots and propane up the hill / back where the rain-rubbed mountains meet.” Fornoff looks at the world—animate and inanimate—as pulsing, peculiar, worthy of attention. “I manufactured a kinship with the sea,” she writes in one poem: “It flirted. It tweaked my ankles.” Later, when "I fell over the rocks" into the sea, the water “pulled / into the moaning boil, it ignored me, / pounded my sinuses, churned.” Her vision is tempered by realism. “Politeness as identity is taxing.” Hymn to the Reckless moves between the poet’s native North Carolina and her home in Ireland, where she says “the light is different here.” It is from that distance that she looks at her home and wonders, with the weight of elegy, “If the future’s something we have to brace / ourselves against, can we find a space in the dark, / and life courage from the mess?” The Cataracts by Raymond McDaniel Often McDaniel’s narratives unfold from a word’s definition. Decimate, light, haven: “Is the name for the place of safety or refuge. // Though refuge from what is unclear, unspecified, // it matters in that the nature of a haven depends // on what you are fleeing from.” And on his lines go, spinning definition out into discovery. This is a book of blurred vision, a theme imbued into the spaces between the lines, into the memories of the narrator—memories that feel like a game: “Do you know where you are, / if you know that wherever you are, / you are lost?” There are many mirrors in this book, light refracted, vision strained. In one long poem, the narrator speaks of his father’s cataracts: “because we were all broken by the cost of his having been broken.” His pain is a weight upon them, and years later, after his death, the narrator dreams of his father: “he said if you want to stare at the sun // and not go blind you look not at its light // but what it illuminates the world the moon // never the thing itself and always its reflection.” There’s a heavy sadness to this book—a strangely calming one—with a hint of resignation: “I want nothing, / not even to be free of desire."
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.
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Athena Dixon

- | 1 book mentioned
2023 was a whirlwind of a year. While I waited and worried for my book, The Loneliness Files, to make its debut I had a lot of nerves to calm. Writing about your own internal and external loneliness and then handing it over to the world is kind of a big leap to take. It was easy to slip a little bit deeper into those feelings of isolation and disconnection as a remedy of sorts for those fears. Between my day job, the book, and all of the other moving parts of my life there were lots of shadows to hide in. Lots of silence, too. So, I made a decision to lean into the two places I’ve found the most comfort—music and books. I wanted to recapture the feelings I had when I used to wander the stacks of Rodman Public Library in my hometown and the giddy feeling of disappearing into a world with no expectation of analysis or weight. I decided to make my year of reading much more focused on the fun, escapism, and curiosity I’d been missing in prior years. I turned my attention to books that spoke to genres I’d been neglecting or ignored—horror, celebrity memoir, urban fiction, and Black romance—and combined them with my reading bread and butter of essay collections and poetry. Nonfiction, Essays, and Memoir My year has been bookended by nonfiction audiobooks. I started 2023 with Black Women Writers at Work edited by Claudia Tate and Finding Me by Viola Davis. The former was a treasure trove of ideas I plucked out to turn over as I tried to find my footing and define what I wanted my own writing legacy to be. These ideas, relevant decades after the book’s 1984 debut, still had something valuable to give me and helped me see my own place in the literary landscape a bit differently. Just as the first book spoke to my very intellectual fears, Viola Davis’s autobiography helped calm some of my heart-based worries. For me, the focus was not the absolute struggles she overcame, but was more about her creative path. It helped assuage the fears that I was moving a little too slowly along my own creative journey and that each step forward was placing me right where I needed to be. As the year is coming to a close, I’m capping it off with the audiobook of The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. This book was something I came to by pure internet influence. I hadn’t planned on reading it, but after coming across so many glowing reviews of the narration I had to give it a listen. I’m glad I did. I wasn’t interested in gawking at her life experiences, rather I found myself more interested in how a person’s passion can pull them into everything they’d ever wanted and away from it at the same time. As 2023 moved along, I also started mulling over the next manuscript I wanted to write and finally settled on the general theme—pleasure. Hurts So Good: The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart caught me in the first five pages when she wrote, “human: the deliberate act of choosing to feel bad to then feel better.” Perfectly on theme. This book’s exploration of pain and the human condition was fascinating and eye-opening because it expanded upon parts of my own experiences and memories that I’d never really thought had deeper meaning or origins. It was a perfect jumping off point for the new ideas I’ve begun puzzling through. The later half of 2023 also brought me some of my favorite nonfiction books of the year. I came across Jiordan Castle’s Disappearing Act after hearing her read in New York in November. The book, written in beautifully rich verse, built a bridge between my love of poetry and memoir. The vessel of the story is like floating above the surface of memory and then being plunged down into something heartbreaking and beautiful. Another writer I had the pleasure of reading with this year was Sean Enfield. His book, Holy American Burnout, is worthy of the good buzz for its December release. Enfield’s writing is probing and electric. It doesn’t shy away from its subject matter and its stylistic approach, really a multi-media type experience, is a worthy framework for the collection. A Calendar is a Snakeskin by Kristine Langley Mahler is a small but mighty thing. Clocking in at just over 100 pages, it’s a beautiful meditation on paying attention to the world around you and where it is leading you. In the same vein, Irregulars by Kerry Trautman is tiny too at just 66 pages, but it is packed full of prose that slips between the POVs of waitresses at a diner and the diner’s patrons. The format worked well and I felt as if I was in the rush of a shift sitting in a booth listening to the din of the crowd around me. Fiction and Short Stories When summer rolled around, I made another decision. I was going to spend the remainder of 2023 reading Black Romance and Urban Fiction almost exclusively. I got heavily into BookTok and filled up my eReader with the recommendations I found there. Some standouts in Black Romance were Only for the Week by Natasha Bishop, Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan, and Revive Me and Restore Me by JL Seegers. Rome, the main male character in Bishop’s book, is my book boyfriend of the year and I spent a feverish few hours devouring the book and falling in love with him. The book was a perfect escape. A tropical setting. Spicy sex scenes. Drama and family tension. Lots of romance. Ryan’s book, now in development at Peacock, is a second-chance romance full of much of the same, but features a middle-aged, estranged couple co-parenting their children while being pulled back into each other’s orbits. Most of the romance novels I read this year featured younger characters, so Yasmen and Josiah being so close to my age group was a breath of fresh air. The book is a testament that love, romance, and sensuality don't have an age. Seeger’s books exist in the same universe among the same group of friends and offer the kinds of second chance romance and enemies to lovers tropes, but the books spread the slow burn over many years. It was lovely to get to see the worlds of the characters unfurl and to escape into it with them. I spent lots of day reading nearly the entire catalogs of Grey Huffington (in particular The Eisenberg Effect series and its expanded universe), Asia Monique (her Sinful series about Black Mafia families), and Christina C. Jones’s Alexandria House series. Each of these books were pure escapism and fun to read and brought a bit of joy back to the year. Reading Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele in a bustling train station and then a long train ride in October was like looking over my shoulder waiting for something about the world to be a little off kilter. I’m not the biggest fan of horror, but this collection stuck with me. It felt as if I wasn't being told to be afraid of what was in the pages, but rather the stories let my mind do all the work—looking between the lines and overanalyzing and worrying myself silly. Poetry I didn’t read too much poetry in 2023, but Year of the Unicorn Kids by Jason B. Crawford, Slack Tongue City by Mackenzie Berry, and In Stories We Thunder by V. Ruiz were all early year pickups that lingered throughout the remainder of the months. All three collections were published by Sundress Publications and I loved that each of them leaned into rhythm and culture and bright language. 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]
Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Kristen R. Ghodsee

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I spent a lot of this year ruminating on time: what it is, how we measure it, and why we’re so loathe to waste it. Calendars are not just neutral containers for our weeks, months, and years, but unique cultural artifacts that shape our temporal relations with nature and each other. Because I teach, study, and write about revolutionary and utopian movements throughout history, I’m fascinated that so many past social dreamers have attempted to reorder time as part of their plans to reimagine the world. The Julian calendar came into effect in 45 BC, and served as the primary calendar of the Roman Empire and of medieval Europe for about 1600 years. Outdated astronomical calculations caused the Julian Calendar to add an extra day every 128 years, so after over a millennium and a half of use, Pope Gregory XIII corrected the Julian Calendar in 1582. His papal bull established what we now call the Gregorian calendar, which has become the hegemonic calendar of global capitalism. Eastern Orthodox Christians never accepted this papal reform and continued to use the Julian system. Tsarist Russia also rejected the Gregorian calendar, which is why the thing we often refer to as the "October Revolution" actually happened on November 7, 1917 by the Gregorian calendar (October 25 by the Julian calendar). When the new Bolshevik government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, they wiped thirteen days out of existence by administrative decree: February 1 became February 14—tough luck if you had a birthday or an anniversary in those two lost weeks. The French Revolutionary Calendar rejected the temporal imperialism of the Pope and was in use for about twelve years between 1793 and 1805, reappearing briefly during the Paris Commune in 1871. The year started in autumn and proceeded through twelve equal months of thirty days each named after seasonal phenomena. I find the French attempt to secularize time both poetic and radical. Why not obey the rhythms of the weather around Paris rather than some arbitrary ecclesiastical authority in Rome? In honor of those radical utopians who challenged the tyranny of other people’s horology, I’ve organized my Year in Reading using the French revolutionary names for the relevant months on the Gregorian calendar. Nivôse I shared the longest nights of the year with Oliver Burkeman’s amazing book, 4000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which knocked me off my chair and made me rethink my entire approach to productivity. I measure my days in items crossed off to-do lists, and Burkeman’s slim volume provided the wakeup call I desperately needed. Good time management doesn’t mean squeezing more things into our already crowded schedules, but rather being ruthlessly deliberate about how we use our precious 4000 weeks. I started the new (Gregorian) year with a commitment to say “no” more often so I could dedicate more hours to reading. Pluviôse Angela Saini is a British science journalist and her brilliant book, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, got me through the dark, cold, bleariness of the month of Valentine’s Day. Saini and I research and write about similar things (and we are both big Star Trek fans), so reading this one was like vibing with an intellectual sister. She shows how patriarchal forms of power are not “natural” or inevitable, but that part of the secret to their longevity is making themselves appear so. Ventôse I finally listened to the audiobook of Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story as the days started to get longer and warmer. I’ve been a U2 fan since the early 1980s and this was one book that had to be heard rather than read because of all the musical interludes. For several weeks, I felt like I was having a personal conversation with, and enjoying a private concert from, this iconic rock & roll front man. Germinal I needed a little anarchism in my life to match the remarkable self-organization of the Pennsylvania spring. David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, Or the Real Libertalia, is a provocative exploration of the history of pirate settlements in Madagascar where Graeber conducted ethnographic fieldwork for his doctoral research. By examining the largely forgotten history of the radical self-government practiced by former mutineers, Graeber challenged me to reconsider the origins of the European Enlightenment once again, providing a refreshing reminder that there have always been pockets of human societies which have thrived in the absence of coercive authority. Floréal I was so grateful to do a launch event for my own most recent book at the Philadelphia Free Library with the incomparable Arwa Mahdawi, a columnist for The Guardian U.S. In preparation for our discussion, I dove into her Strong Female Lead: Lessons from Women in Power, which cleverly dissects the way that leadership has been conflated with masculinity. Crisply written and well argued, Mahdawi’s book forced me to confront the ugly persistence of stereotypes about competence and authority that still disadvantage those who don’t identify as men. Prairial  Publishers sent me several advanced readers’ copies this year, and by far the most entertaining was It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and Move On by Malaika Jabali. This short, spunky, and insightful volume is lushly designed and illustrated by Kayla E. For someone curious to learn more about socialism for the first time, this book provides the perfect introductory primer to why the free-market sucks. Messidor My adult daughter had been pestering me for a at least a year to read The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I spent the first month of summer traveling, so I packed the paperback in my carry-on. To be honest, it took me a while to get into this one, but once I realized that the disorientation and scatteredness of the first fifty pages reflected the disorientation and scatteredness of what it’s like to be a first-year student at an elite university like Harvard, I fell in love with it. It definitely made me more empathetic to those eighteen-year-olds who show up on campus every fall at Penn. Thermidor Among my guiltiest pleasures are comic books, graphic novels, and manga. As the heat spiked, I devoured Volumes I and II of the omnibus collections of Saint Young Men. I only recently discovered this quirky manga about Jesus and the Buddha taking a gap year from heaven to live in contemporary Tokyo. As they try to hide their divinity and behave as ordinary young adults living in the material world, the two spiritual leaders face the challenges of modern life, a literal manifestation of the theory of immanence. Their amusing adventures provide an interesting (and sometimes hilarious) perspective on Christianity and Buddhism. Fructidor The beginning of my semester found me reading a piece of utopian climate fiction (cli-fi) by the debut Maine author, Nick Fuller Googins. The Great Transition follows the story of a young woman named Emi living in the post-capitalist utopia of Nuuk, Greenland. Emi’s parents are heroes of the Climate Corps, who helped the world finally achieve net zero emissions. The family is drawn into a complex web of intrigue as they travel to a ruined New York City. A page-turner chock full of optimistic ideas for how we can co-create our collective future, The Great Transition is a necessary antidote to climate doom and nihilism. Vendémiaire Since Vendémiaire is the official start of the new year for the French Revolutionary calendar, I returned to the theme of time. Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock is a profound and eye-opening history of our contemporary relationship with temporality and the ways in which industrialization and global capitalism have warped our ability to think of hours as anything other than fixed units to be bartered, bought, sold, or “wasted.” Odell excavates all sorts of wonderful examples of efficiency manuals, productivity secrets, and life hacks aimed at making us all more obedient to our chronometers. Brumaire For the penultimate month of the year, I’m reading two different books, Cat Bohannan’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution and an advanced reader copy of The Other Significant Others: Reimaginng Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen. Bohannan’s book is a sweeping work of evolutionary anthropology that has managed to suck me into an entire universe of contemporary scientific debates about, for example, the species-defining importance of female reproductive choice, about why human (and orca) menopause is among “the biggest mysteries in modern biology,” and why old-fashion sexism is no longer doing the job it was “evolved to do.” The Other Significant Others boldly explores a topic that is near and dear to my heart: how to share our lives more capaciously outside of the confines of our romantic relationships and our blood-related kin. Frimaire The book I plan to read for the final month of 2023 is an advanced reader copy of the latest novel by Sarah Braunstein: Bad Animals. As an ardent fan of Braunstein’s New Yorker short stories, I’m eager to dive into this tale of a small-town librarian drawn into a complex plot for literary appropriation, hopefully curled up in a heated blanket with a steaming cup of herbal tea. If I only have 4000 weeks in my life, then I want to spend as many of them as possible buried in my books! 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: Vanessa A. Bee

- | 1 book mentioned
I tend to read the least when I am writing the most. This bad habit completely baffles me, given the number of times exposure to great literature has either delivered me out of creative ruts or elevated the quality of my work through some ambient mechanism that borders on metaphysical. But it’s more than that. Like most readers of The Millions, I love books. I love holding them and smelling them and hearing them. I love the feeling being swept into another mind or another world. The feeling of counting down the hours until I can reenter an engrossing narrative. Of finding the perfect literary match for a friend. While 2021 was an exceedingly productive year writing-wise, I missed being connected to others through literature. But I had sold the proposal for my memoir, Home Bound, during the previous fall. As a result, much of the following year was consumed by drafting the final chapters, then rushing to incorporate my editor’s notes before my due date. By the time the baby arrived in December 2021—happy, healthy, and two weeks early—I had read fewer than 10 books from cover to cover. Dismayed by this performance, I made reading more books my top resolution this year. I was surprised to find that committing verbally helped me stick to my goal. Or maybe goal is too strong a word. With an infant, a day job, and a book coming out in October 2022, I thought it wiser to not hold myself to a firm number. Still, I have done better than I expected. As I draft this essay in late November, I have finished 28 books and hope to squeeze in a few more before the year ends. Most are literary fiction, my favorite genre, but a few nonfiction titles made it onto the list. Here are my simple and honest thoughts on these reads. WINTER I started out with Hervé Le Tellier’s L’Anomalie, a French blockbuster with a sci-fi edge. I wanted to see what the buzz was about, and whether I could still get through an adult novel in my native French. (I can.) The premise was interesting though I must confess that the book’s reception still does not entirely make sense to me. I found it just all right. But things looked up with Gary Shteyngart’s witty pandemic novel, Our Country Friends, and Jessamine Chan’s heart-wrenching The School for Good Mothers, another sci-fi adjacent novel that resonated that much more with a newborn sleeping on my chest. I flew through Andrew Sean Greer’s charming Less and trudged through Otessa Moshfesh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I found nihilistic, apathetic, and actively unfunny, despite multiple reviews and my very own husband promising humor. Simultaneously intrigued by author Brandon Taylor’s rave in the New York Times and skeptical about my odds of enjoying Karl Ove Knausgaard, I borrowed my husband’s copy of The Morning Star. From the first page I felt drawn into an eerie Norway on the eve of spiritual darkness. I finished the winter with Weike Wang’s Joan Is Okay, the unsentimental—which I do not mean pejoratively—story of a doctor grieving the death of her father in her own way. SPRING Having loved Olive Kitteridge, I inhaled Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William! (sweet and deceptively simple in prose), followed by Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon (cerebral, funny, relatable, and now a National Book Award finalist). In the market for a couple of quick novels, I moved on to Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (a fascinating idea, again, but maybe sci-fi is just not for me) and Sheila Heti’s philosophical Pure Colour. The latter stumped me at times but I found helpful context in this review by Nora Caplan-Bricker in Jewish Currents. Spring ended with a break from the front list, as I read James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. I must say, rarely has a book made me laugh this much. SUMMER My progress slowed while I recovered from Covid and readjusted to the workplace after a wonderful six months of parental leave. A podcast interview with the writer NoViolet Bulawayo put me onto Glory, her cutting satire with a cast of animals for main characters. While the novel is intended to skewer Zimbabwean politics, its points very much hit home with this Cameroonian-born reader. This is also the summer that I also finally got around to Hernan Diaz, whose reputation as a writer precedes him. I started with Trust, then looped back to his debut, In the Distance. Neither disappointed but Trust stands out to me as particularly ambitious in its prose and structure. With book tour fast approaching and internal stress levels accordingly, I switched to audio and listed to a few novels: Ling Ma’s Severance (prescient if a little too aloof in tone for me); the first Harry Potter in French audio (just so that the baby could hear the language on the way to and from daycare; I promise to update him on all the problematic aspects in a few years); and Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You (sharp, funny, and definitely my favorite short-story collection of the year). FALL After reading the synopsis for Jeanna Kadlec’s Heretic, I messaged her to say how excited I was about her memoir about American evangelicalism. Having since devoured it and heard Jeanna discuss it at a joint book event, I recommend it wholeheartedly, especially to defectors from strict religious households. While attempting to pick up jogging yet again, I listened to Sayaka Murata’s short-story collection Life Ceremony (a hit-or-miss for me, with several stories that felt underdeveloped). We also got through the second book in the Harry Potter series (less good than the first in my opinion; baby is agnostic/non-verbal). I adored Kayla Maiuri’s Mother in The Dark, which is this beautifully written, simmering portrait of an Italian-American family on the brink of failure. I was proud to finish Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs—being a mega fan of her previous novel, A Children’s Bible—and Claire Keegan’s Foster while on my own book tour. I celebrated being back home for the foreseeable future by treating myself to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, an engrossing novel about platonic friendship, creativity, and work, with unforced commentary on disability and gender. It completely absorbed me. Next, I listened to When McKinsey Comes to Town by NYT veterans Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe. The book was sometimes dry, in the way all pure reporting can be, but overall this is an essential expose on the (often invisible) power that the consulting titan wields in every major sector of industry. A must-listen. After my last tour stop, I pivoted back to fiction with Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, a compulsively readable story that explores themes of race and class with deft and  humor. Last but not least, I listened to Pulitzer-winning The Netanayahus, read by its author Joshua Cohen. Biting, intelligent, and hilarious—including a perfectly executed poop joke and almost cinematic climax—this is by far my favorite novel of this year. An absolute treasure. 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