Mentioned in:
The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview
It's been a painfully long winter here in New York City, but the glinting promise of spring—and spring books—has bolstered me through these cold, hard months. Here you’ll find just over 100 titles that we're looking forward to here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We’d hope you find your next great read among them.
We are, alas, still on hiatus, but are determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
*
April
Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (Wave)
Nelson’s genre-busting Bluets is a perpetual handselling favorite at many an indie bookstore and practically lyricism incarnate. Anything billed as “something of a companion piece” to it is worth a look. If anyone can make a diary of jaw pain sing, it’s Nelson. —John H. Maher
The Ephemera Collector by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson (Liveright)
Jackson's Afrofuturistic debut novel, which pays homage to Octavia Butler, follows an archivist at the Huntington Library who fights to protect her life's work—an impossible collection of ephemera from an undersea city that has yet to be founded—following the kidnapping of the Huntington's CEO. —Sophia M. Stewart
Surreal by Michèle Gerber Klein (Harper)
Mining a trove of newly uncovered material, Klein brings the extraordinary and enigmatic life of Gala Dalí—wife and muse of Salvador, as an art world mover and shaker who championed Surrealism—out of the shadows and into the much-deserved limelight. —SMS
Gloria by Andrés Felipe Solano, tr. Will Vanderhyden (Counterpoint)
Solano’s English-language debut traces the life of centers on a young Colombian immigrant as she navigates New York City and attends a fateful concert—the 1970 performance of Argentine singer Sandro at Madison Square Garden—which echoes into the life of her son five decades later. —SMS
Authority by Andrea Long Chu (FSG)
If Long Chu’s work for New York magazine is any indication, her newest collection of essays is sure to be equally riveting. Throughout, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic examines everything from The Phantom of the Opera to social media, weaving a compelling narrative about how criticism, now more than ever, presents a solution to our current crises. —EMB
I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang (Drawn & Quarterly)
Jenny, a "twenty-something-going-on-thirty hot mess," gropes her way toward adulthood while navigating work, romance, friendship, and the horrors of having a body in Ang’s debut collection. —SMS
Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado (Graywolf)
The Testo Junkie author's so-called "mutant text" blends essay, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction to explore dysphoria as an era-defining condition that captures our current cultural, political, and social moment. —SMS
Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom (Flatiron)
Carlstrom's debut novel centers on a mid-bender corporate burnout who sets off on a road trip to track down their conspiracy-theorist father—and in the process wrestles with everything from queerness to capitalism. —SMS
Searches by Vauhini Vara (Pantheon)
Building off of her brilliant 2021 essay for the Believer, Vara's essay collection—her nonfiction debut—elegantly grapples with questions around artificial intelligence, technological progress, and human connection. —SMS
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)
The much anticipated follow-up to 2021's Intimacies centers on a mysterious relationship between a well-known, middle-aged theater actress and a young man—are they friends, lovers, mother and son? Kitamura's bifurcated novel keeps you guessing. —SMS
My Documents by Kevin Nguyen (One World)
Nguyen’s sophomore novel follows four cousins in a United States whose government is rounding up Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Both America’s history and its present indicate how terrifyingly close to life that premise is. To quote Nguyen quoting The Legend of Zelda as the epigraph of New Waves, his debut novel: “It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.” —JHM
Big Chief by Jon Hickey (S&S)
Hickey's debut—hailed by David Heska Wanbli Weiden as the "great Native American political novel"—chronicles tribal politics, familial allegiances, and the quest for power on a Wisconsin reservation. —SMS
Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu, tr. Jacqueline Leung (Two Lines)
The Hong Kong writer's dystopian latest depicts a failing city where the government has incentivizes couples to surgically "conjoin"—and a struggling grad student who is forced to grapple with the new policy. —SMS
Going Around by Murray Kempton, ed. Andrew Holter (Seven Stories)
This collection, featuring a foreword by Darryl Pinckney, gathers the defining columns and essays from Kempton, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who "almost miraculously immersed himself in every region, profession, political movement, and social class," per Benjamin Moser. —SMS
Is Peace Possible? by Kathleen Lonsdale (Marginalian Editions)
First published at the height of the Cold War in 1957, this slender volume sees the pathbreaking Quaker scientist reckoning with nuclear warfare and the role of science in shaping the future of humanity. —SMS
What's Left by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown)
Historian-activist Harris follows up his barn-burner history of Palo Alto with a clear-eyed guide to what collective political action, if any, can stem the climate crisis. —SMS
The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley (Atlantic Monthly)
Admit it: we've all wondered what it's like to be one of the New Yorker magazine's famous fact checkers. This novel promises us some insights into the experience, as the reader embarks on a wild ride through New York City with one such guardian of truth and accuracy. —Claire Kirch
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove)
The latest novel from the author of the brilliantly weird Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings imagines an alternative Japan where married couples no longer have sex and all children are born by artificial insemination. —SMS
Now, the People! by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, tr. David Broder (Verso)
Mélenchon, a leader of the French radical left once described by the Washington Post as "France's Bernie Sanders," proposes a new kind of revolution against capitalism suited for our present moment—what he calls "a citizen's revolution." —SMS
In the Rhododendrons by Heather Christle (Algonquin)
I was an ardent fan of Christle's 2019 The Crying Book, and have a feeling her latest—a hybrid memoir that weaves personal narrative together with meditations on the life and work of Virginia Woolf—will bowl me over me yet again. —SMS
Fugitive Tilts by Ishion Hutchinson (FSG)
In his prose debut, poet Hutchinson offers an evocative meditation upon home, displacement, inheritance, and memory, chronicling everything from his trips to Senegal and his love of John Coltrane to the Jamaican music of his youth and paintings by Édouard Vuillard. —Eva M. Baron
The Power of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay (Princeton UP)
Holladay's comprehensive biography of the trailblazing lesbian-feminist writer, thinker, and activist draws on unpublished materials and rigorous research to paint the most expansive portrait of Rich to date. —SMS
Fish Tales by Nettie Jones (FSG)
Jones's debut novel—a portrait of a 1970s party girl whose life is tinged by drugs, sex, and violence—was first acquired by Toni Morrison at Random House and originally published in 1984, yet feels as fresh as ever. —SMS
Ordinary Time by Annie B. Jones (HarperOne)
The indie bookseller's debut book extolls the virtues of small, quiet, ordinary lives and the joy that comes with learning to love where you are, whether or not it's where you dreamed you'd be. —SMS
I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer by Mary Beth Norton (Princeton UP)
Norton's annotated collection of questions and answers from the world's first-ever advice column, which debuted in the 1690s, shows how eternal our preoccupations with love, sex, and romance are—and both how much and how little has changed in the last few centuries. —SMS
Gabriële by Anne Berest and Claire Berest, tr. Tina Kover (Europa)
There's no doubt that he author’s second foray into the English language—which follows the passionate love affair between a young French woman and a Spanish artist during the height of the Belle Époque and, later, World War I—should be just as engrossing as her hit English-language debut The Postcard. —EMB
The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza (Catapult)
This timely memoir from Palestinian American journalist Aziza explores bodies, borders, and death in all its forms as she traces three generations from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City. —SMS
Atavists by Lydia Millet (Norton)
Millet's 21st book is a collection of loosely linked stories set in Los Angeles, where a cast of recognizable characters navigates the tech-saturated, climate crisis–addled present, with varying degrees of success. —SMS
Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf)
Ethically, I have some reservations about posthumously publishing the journal in which Didion chronicled her therapy sessions, but as a forever fan and student of her work, I can't say I'm not looking forward to reading this new material. —SMS
When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy (Nightfire)
Cassidy’s title will be familiar to fans of the music of the Mountain Goats, whose songwriter, John Darnielle, has a talent for telling horror stories himself. In the case of the lyric evoked here, the terror is an abusive father coming home. Cassidy’s novel takes that fear to the extreme. —JHM
Dianaworld by Edward White (Norton)
Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris more than a quarter of a century ago and still, people the world over remain fascinated by her. White's ruminations on the life and times of Princess Diana examine her impact upon popular culture then and now, and I am so here for this. —CK
Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy (FSG)
One of the great chroniclers of how money works turns his mind to the system itself. If anyone can sum up the tumultuous and knotty history of the dominant economic system of our era in a brisk 600-and-change pages, it’s Cassidy. —JHM
Strangers in the Land by Michael Luo (Doubleday)
Luo's narrative history of Chinese immigrants in America documents a century-long struggle marked by exclusion, violence, and extraordinary resilience which proves essential to understanding the formation of American identity. —SMS
Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert (Penguin Press)
Gilbert is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, particularly on the subjects of gender and womanhood—and her debut book, which dissects three decades of pop culture through a feminist lens, is sure to be one of the standouts of the year. —SMS
*
May
Make Me Famous by Maud Ventura, tr. Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia)
As the stateside appetite for French literature grows, Ventura’s latest should provide ample satiation. The novel explores ambition and obsession via Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics whose relentless pursuit of fame within the music industry leads to shocking twists and revelations. —EMB
The Stolen Heart by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia)
Kurkov returns with a follow-up to The Silver Bone (one of PW's best books of 2024!), in which Samson Kolechko must rescue his kidnapped fiancée while investigating the illegal sale of meat in 1920s Kyiv. —EMB
Second Life by Amanda Hess (Doubleday)
The New York Times culture critic's debut is a candid chronicle of pregnancy, parenting, and paranoia in the page of social media, deriving humor and insights from her own internet-aggravated anxieties over her unborn child. —SMS
Melting Point by Rachel Rockerell (FSG)
Rockerell's genre-busting family memoir uses only primary sources—letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews—to tell the story of a group of Russian Jews whose search for a new homeland in the early 1900s brought them to, of all places, Galveston, Texas. —SMS
The Painted Room by Inger Christensen, tr. Denise Newman (New Directions)
A three-part literary novel of murder mystery, political intrigue, and Italian Renaissance frescoes—all with a dash of high fantasy? Sounds like the triptych of a lifetime. —JHM
Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal, tr. Robin Moger (Transit)
What does it mean to be a mother, and is there any way to convey those facts with fidelity? The latest entry in Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series is a meditation on identity, motherhood, and love, complete with archival photographs, journal entries, and writings that have informed Mersal’s practice and perspective. —EMB
Come Round Right by Alan Govenar (Deep Vellum)
Set in 1971, this hitchhiking journey follows 18-year-old Aaron Berg as he reckons with a sexual assault he and his new girlfriend survived in Canada five months earlier. The novel winds through Appalachia, charts America’s midcentury cultural upheavals, and plumbs the perennial allure of acceptance. —EMB
These Survivals by Lynne Huffer (Duke UP)
Wildly experimental and interdisciplinary, Huffer’s latest examines ethical living in the environmental ruin of the Anthropocene (a term that, she says, “sags from overuse”). Through collage, poetry, multimedia work, and memoir, Huffer balances a philosopher’s gravity—she is best known for her three-book treatment of Foucault’s ethics of eros—with a poet’s sense of play. —Jonathan Frey
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis (University of Texas)
Stratis's memoir-in-essays, the latest entry in UT Press's American Music Series, is a coming-of-age story from a distinctly working-class trans perspective which pays homage to the music that saved its author's life. —SMS
Everything Is Now by J. Hoberman (Verso)
Back in the 1960s, New York City was a haven for the avant-garde, whether it was in the shape of subcultural movements like fluxus and guerrilla theater or venues like coffeehouses, bars, and lofts. Hoberman’s cultural history is a thorough account of the New York underground, complete with rich, minute details about what the city once was. —EMB
A Toast to St Martirià by Albert Serra, tr. Matthew Tree (Coffee House)
Billed as the memoir of the acclaimed and adventurous Catalan filmmaker Serra that was composed of a wholly improvised speech at a film festival that seemingly doesn’t exist named for a saint that also appears nonexistent, what exactly this book is remains a mystery. But odds are that whatever that may be will be interesting. —JHM
Apocalypse by Lizzie Wade (Harper)
Covid. Trump. Climate change. Natural disasters. The hits keep coming—and it's not the first time. Wade's book traces various catastrophes that have befallen human beings stretching back thousands of years, proving that those who came before us survived apocalypses and we will survive what's being thrown at us too. —CK
The Living and the Rest by José Eduardo Agualusa, tr. Daniel Hahn (Archipelago)
What do you get when you mix a literary festival, an island off the coast of East Africa, and cyclone season? A storm of stories. —JHM
The Deserters by Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell (New Directions)
From the winner of the Prix Goncourt comes an ambitious novel that intertwines the stories of a soldier emerging from the Mediterranean wilderness during an unspecified war and a scientific conference taking place on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship. —EMB
The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus (Crown)
Dominus, a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, profiles cadres of high-achieving siblings (among them Lauren Groff!) in a quest to understand the familial conditions that lay the groundwork for success. —SMS
Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith (FSG)
Faith's debut novel follows a veterinary nurse named Sylvie whose ardent love for her therapist gives meaning to what she considers to be a small life—until that therapist starts to prepare Sylvie for the end of their time together. —SMS
This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson (Scribner)
In her debut memoir, Simpson reflects on her complicated relationship with her equally complicated mother, the daughter of sharecroppers who did what it took to survive and is now dying. —SMS
Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read (Crown)
Most of us are familiar with multilevel marketing schemes at this point, but Read’s debut offers an even more incisive and sprawling account of the MLM phenomenon. The New York journalist considers how brands like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife have devastated some of America’s most vulnerable populations, while also illuminating how MLMs strengthen the forces of capitalism. —EMB
Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead)
This dazzling novel examines what it means for parents to exist inside two families simultaneously—the one they’re born into, and the one that they create. When Margaret, a newly divorced young mother, returns to the home in which she was raised with her two daughters, she must reckon with her own childhood as well as its lingering secrets. —EMB
Proto by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury)
Ancient Greek and Latin can’t hold a candle to Proto-Indo-European as far as scope of influence is concerned. The latest from journalist Spinney aims to show just how great the impact of this little-remembered language still is. —JHM
The Einstein of Sex by Daniel Brook (Norton)
German-Jewish sexologist and queer rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, best known for his rejection of gender binaries and theory of "sexual relativity," finally gets his due in Brook's biography. —SMS
Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner)
Bechdel skewers her own commercial success—and her trouble adapting to it—in her latest, an autofictional graphic novel that finds her lightly fictionalized alter ego raging against capitalism but too distracted to do anything about it. —SMS
Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski (S&S)
Urbanski's short story collection surveys sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to explore the allure of portals and the infinite possibilities they represent. —SMS
Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel (Atria)
Michel’s work has long taken a calculated approach to probing the porosity of genre, and his sophomore novel is no exception. You’ve simply gotta hand it to someone whose story concept alone makes you wonder what a sci-fi epic collectively written by Joshua Cohen, Robert Heinlein, and Jonathan Lethem over Slack might look like. —JHM
So Many Stars ed. Caro de Robertis (Algonquin)
It's tough to be BIPOC, queer, trans, or nonbinary in the current political climate, but this oral history affirms that queer people of color have a long and proud history in the United States and beyond. —CK
State Champ by Hilary Plum (Bloomsbury)
When a "heartbeat law" criminalizes most abortions statewide, an abortion clinic receptionist stages a hunger-strike at her boarded-up workplace in protest—and unexpectedly mobilizes the people around her. —SMS
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)
Though originally a poet, Vuong’s 2019 prose debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, proved his immense command over fiction. His newest novel, which chronicles the budding friendship between a troubled young man and an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman, should be equally captivating, lyrical, and singular. —EMB
Shamanism by Manvir Singh (Knopf)
Singh traces the evolution of shamanism—which he sees as a natural human response to the uncertainty of the world, reflective of our desire for ritual and curiosity about the supernatural—from the Paleolithic era through the 20th century. —SMS
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (FSG)
Following her short story collection Wednesday’s Child, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, Li returns with a devastating memoir about the loss of her two teenage sons, James and Vincent, to suicide and her journey toward acceptance in the face of grief. —EMB
Aggregated Discontent by Harron Walker (Random House)
Walker is one of the sharpest writers around, and her debut essay collection about 21st century womanhood—its perils, indignities, and occasional joys—is sure to be a candid and keen-eyed dissection of the way women live today. —SMS
Marsha by Tourmaline (Tiny Reparations)
Legendary Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is considered to be the first person to have thrown a brick during the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. Her story needs to be told, especially when LGBTQ+ people are once again being targeted and marginalized. —CK
That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf)
Written as a sustained monologue, this ambitious and unusual novel follows 19-year-old Little Lea and her life in a rural town at the edge of the forest. Over a shared joint with a stranger, Little Lea spins a tale of loss, desire, and conspiracies, creating an idiosyncratic, voice-driven atmosphere that is sure to interest fans of Graywolf’s other translations. —EMB
The Cloud Intern by David Greenwood (Under the BQE)
One of two inaugural titles from the the new Brooklyn-based press Under the BQE, Greenwood's novel imagines a near-future where a tech company cofounder searches for connection in the alienating world he helped create. —SMS
Burning Down the House by Jonathan Gould (Mariner)
Music biographer Gould tells the definitive story of the Talking Heads and the gritty New York City scene that birthed them in this overdue account, out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the band's founding. —SMS
Freelance by Kevin Kearney (Rejection Letters)
I love Kearney's writing, and I'm so excited to read his latest novel, which centers on a young rideshare driver and asks big questions about labor, technology, and what we owe to our employers. —SMS
*
June
Sick and Dirty by Michael Koresky (Bloomsbury)
Koresky's history surveys how queerness still made its way onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the censorious Hays Code era, which lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s, examining the work of Lillian Hellman, Vincent Minnelli, Alfred Hitchcock, and more. —SMS
Nadja by André Breton, tr. Mark Polizzotti (NYRB)
This surrealist classic novel brings back memories. I read it in a college French literature course many years ago, and loved the romance between two rather absurd characters who could only have lived in Paris in the early 20th century. —CK
Be Gay, Do Crime ed. Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley (Dzanc)
In these "sixteen stories of queer chaos," authors Myriam Gurba, Alissa Nutting, and many more imagine queer characters who turn to crime as a means of survival, protest, retribution—or simply by accident. —SMS
The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram (Basic)
Design permeates nearly everything we do and everywhere we go. This fact is at the core of Gram’s cultural history, which explores design’s enduring appeal as both an economic and utopian tool throughout the 20th century. —EMB
What Is Wrong with Men by Jessa Crispin (Pantheon)
Feminist cultural critic Crispin turns to Michael Douglas movies to get to the root of the so-called crisis of masculinity and the anxieties around women, money, and power that are helping fuel it. —SMS
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader)
The acclaimed Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist adds a memoir to her body of work with this meditation on motherhood via surrogacy and the legacy of the displaced. —JHM
Flashlight by Susan Choi (FSG)
The National Book Award winner's latest novel follows a woman as she makes sense of a mysterious tragedy—the disappearance of her father—and the geopolitics of her family, whose ties to America, Korea, and Japan are impossible to untangle. —SMS
The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (S&S)
Boxing novels are having a moment right now, and this newest addition should also be a knockout. Schaefer’s debut follows two Texas teenagers, one of whom vanishes a decade later. In so doing, the author weaves an unflinching narrative about race, sex, and, of course, the fights that unfold inside the ring. —EMB
Lili Is Crying by Hélène Bessette, tr. Kate Briggs (New Directions)
Throughout her life, this midcentury French author published 13 novels, but none of them, until now, have been translated into English. Lili Is Crying, lauded upon its initial French publication in 1953, mines the fraught relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte, complete with tight, experimental prose that unearths the startling nuance of both characters. —EMB
Clam Down by Anelise Chen (One World)
Chen's genre-defying memoir turns her mother's innocent typo—an exhortation to "clam down"—into an investigation of her own "clam genealogy"—that is, the family history and forces that led her to retreat into her shell following a divorce—as well as what we can learn from those most cloistered of sea creatures. —SMS
How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast (Viking)
Jong-Fast's intimate memoir reflects on her unconventional upbringing and intense yet elusive relationship with her mother, the acclaimed author Erica Jong, in the face of Jong's dementia diagnosis. —EMB
The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward (Liveright)
The inaugural novel in Liveright's Well-Read Black Girls series follows estranged twin sisters who are stunned one day when they meet a version of their mother, who vanished when they were infants, that appears to have lived a full, childless life—and soon burrows her way into their lives as well. —SMS
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos (Knopf)
The master memoirist returns with an account of what she learned about sex, pleasure, and solitude from a year of celibacy. With Febos, you're always in good hands. —SMS
We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, tr. Robin Myers (New Directions)
I first encountered Cábezon Cámara by way of her International Booker Prize–shortlisted novel The Adventures of China Iron, and have been eager to read more of her ever since. Her latest, a "queer baroque satire" of the Basque nun and explorer Antonio de Erauso, sounds promising. —SMS
Endling by Maria Reva (Doubleday)
On the eve of Russian invasion and against the backdrop of Ukraine’s prosperous “Romance Tours,” in which Western bachelors visit in search of compliant wives, three women set off on a cross-country road trip in an effort to secure a last-ditch chance at procreation for Lefty: bachelor, snail, and last of his species. In this Saundersian tangle, it is unclear which is the metaphor and which is the ground, but there is a non-zero chance that this debut novel from the Ukrainian-born, Canadian-raised author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear might contain a key to navigating our incomprehensible present. —JF
Culture Creep by Alice Bolin (Mariner)
What do diet tracking apps, Animal Crossing, and Silicon Valley titans have in common? According to Alice Bolin, they’re all symptoms of the ongoing "pop apocalypse." Bolin’s newest collection mines the intersection of technology, culture, and feminism to make sense of the vicissitudes of modern existence. —EMB
Alpha and Omega by Jane Ellen Harrison (Marginalian)
The new imprint of McNally Editions led by cultural critic Maria Popova brings back an acclaimed early 20th century classicist and linguist’s 110-year-old collection of essays on consciousness, faith, love, reason, science—you know, the light stuff. —JHM
Exophony by Yoko Tawada, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)
Tawada's first book of essays to be translated into English fittingly centers on her lifelong fascination with the possibilities of "cross-hybridizing languages" as well as writing and existing outside one's mother tongue. —SMS
That's How They Get You ed. Damon Young (Pantheon)
A pioneering collection of Black humor, edited by the Thurber-winning Young and featuring an all-star roster of contributors including Hanif Abdurraqib, Wyatt Cenac, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, and Roy Wood Jr.—need I say more? —SMS
Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House)
Three giants stuck in a spaceship must keep speaking to keep the ship moving—and themselves from growing bigger than their confines. It sounds about as strange, and intriguing, a parabolic vessel for the exploration of imprisonment and power as they come. —JHM
Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Beacon)
Passion, especially when directed toward a creative pursuit, can be all-encompassing. In this book, Griest explores this timeless conundrum through queer, BIPOC, and women artists around the world, all of whom consider their own relationship to ambition, redemption, and creativity. —EMB
Grand Finales by Susan Gubar (Norton)
My most anticipated summer read looks at nine women artists—including George Eliot, Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, and Gwendolyn Brooks—who flourished creatively in the final chapters of their lives. —SMS
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (Summit)
This debut novel was one of the books being buzzed about at a recent booksellers conference, and I'm intrigued by the concept: a Black man from an elite family who spirals downward into New York City's underworld, where he's defined more by his race than class. —CK
Homework by Geoff Dyer (FSG)
Dyer has written countless works of fiction and nonfiction, but this memoir may be one of his most intimate. Charting his youth through the lens of schooling, exams, and, of course, the titular homework, this is a generous and deeply personal portrait of England in the 1960s and 70s. —EMB
Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt, tr. Peter Kuras (Granta)
The latest novel in the Granta Magazine Editions series traces the long-distance relationship of two millennials—a cult author and web designer—as they navigate life, love, and work (not to mention the encroachment of technology and climate change) in contemporary Germany. —SMS
Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams (Amistad)
What fascinates me most about Toni Morrison wasn't just a literary genius but an editorial one: during her tenure at Random House she shepherded the work of such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Lucille Clifton. Morrison herself asked that Dana A. Williams tell the story of this facet of her career—and even gave the book its unsurprisingly winning title. —SMS
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf)
Leave aside the title like the piercing gaze of truth itself. A multigenerational saga of Catalonia told by gossiping ghosts readying an otherworldly welcome party for a descendant on her deathbed? Now that’s a concept. —JHM
The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington (NYRB)
Carrington's long unavailable novel, written at the end of WWII and first published in 1977, has everything: love, adventure, the Zodiac, Mesopotamia, a mad Hungarian King, and, of course, the titular great stone door that leads to the unknown. —SMS
Porthole by Joanna Howard (McSweeney's)
Howard's latest novel traces the total meltdown of an art-house film director who may or may not be responsible for the on-set death of her leading man, muse, and lover. —SMS
These Heathens by Mia McKenzie (Random House)
The two-time Lambda Award winner's latest novel, set in 1960s Georgia, follows a pious small-town teenager as she travels to Atlanta to get an abortion only to discover the burgeoning civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black folks. —SMS
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (McNally)
Dunne's work often languishes in the shadow of his famous spouse, but this under-appreciated and long out of print memoir shows the writer—mordant, deadpan, and mid–nervous breakdown—at the height of his powers. —SMS
The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (FSG)
Lacey’s latest is as ambitious and genre-agnostic as anything she’s ever written, which is saying something. Part novel, part memoir, what might have become a mere separation narrative in another’s hands instead interrogates through its own form whether anything begins or ends in the first place. —JHM
The Scrapbook by Heather Clark (Pantheon)
The Sylvia Plath biographer makes her fiction debut with a story—inspired by Clark's own discovery of her grandfather's WWII scrapbook—about the illusions of first love and the burden of family history. —SMS
The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (FSG)
Originally written in English, a first for the author, Khemiri later rewrote this sweeping family saga in his native Swedish, which was published in 2023 and has since become a bestseller in Sweden. Now, the novel officially reappears in English, offering an indelible portrait of three Tunisian-Swedish sisters and the possible curse that follows them. —EMB
Among Friends by Hal Ebbott (Riverhead)
Ebbott's debut novel follows two wealthy couples who get together for a fateful weekend in the country—and how they navigate the harm, secrets, and life-shattering revelations that come from it. —SMS
Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois author makes her nonfiction debut with an essay collection that explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women's public lives—and her own private life. —SMS
[millions_email]
Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2025 Preview
It's cold, it's grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We'd love for you to find your next great read among them.
The Millions will be taking a hiatus for the next few months, but we hope to see you soon.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
January
The Legend of Kumai by Shirato Sanpei, tr. Richard Rubinger (Drawn & Quarterly)
The epic 10-volume series, a touchstone of longform storytelling in manga now published in English for the first time, follows outsider Kamui in 17th-century Japan as he fights his way up from peasantry to the prized role of ninja. —Michael J. Seidlinger
The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad)
In the years before her death in 1960, Hurston was at work on what she envisioned as a continuation of her 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. Incomplete, nearly lost to fire, and now published for the first time alongside scholarship from editor Deborah G. Plant, Hurston’s final manuscript reimagines Herod, villain of the New Testament Gospel accounts, as a magnanimous and beloved leader of First Century Judea. —Jonathan Frey
Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (Atria)
When you eagerly posted your Spotify Wrapped last year, did you notice how much of what you listened to tended to sound... the same? Have you seen all those links to Bandcamp pages your musician friends keep desperately posting in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, you might give them money for their art? If so, this book is for you. —John H. Maher
My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin (Verso)
African revolutionary Blouin recounts a radical life steeped in activism in this vital autobiography, from her beginnings in a colonial orphanage to her essential role in the continent's midcentury struggles for decolonization. —Sophia M. Stewart
The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut (Knopf)
Donald Trump repeatedly directs extraordinary animus towards Haiti and Haitians. This biography of Henry Christophe—the man who played a pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution—might help Americans understand why. —Claire Kirch
The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzzati, tr. Lawrence Venuti (NYRB)
This is the second story collection, and fifth book, by the absurdist-leaning midcentury Italian writer—whose primary preoccupation was war novels that blend the brutal with the fantastical—to get the NYRB treatment. May it not be the last. —JHM
Y2K by Colette Shade (Dey Street)
The recent Y2K revival mostly makes me feel old, but Shade's essay collection deftly illuminates how we got here, connecting the era's social and political upheavals to today. —SMS
Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Penguin)
In a vast dystopian reimagining of Nepal, Upadhyay braids narratives of resistance (political, personal) and identity (individual, societal) against a backdrop of natural disaster and state violence. The first book in nearly a decade from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, this is Upadhyay’s most ambitious yet. —JF
Metamorphosis by Ross Jeffery (Truborn)
From the author of I Died Too, But They Haven’t Buried Me Yet, a woman leads a double life as she loses her grip on reality by choice, wearing a mask that reflects her inner demons, as she descends into a hell designed to reveal the innermost depths of her grief-stricken psyche. —MJS
The Containment by Michelle Adams (FSG)
Legal scholar Adams charts the failure of desegregation in the American North through the story of the struggle to integrate suburban schools in Detroit, which remained almost completely segregated nearly two decades after Brown v. Board. —SMS
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow)
African Futurist Okorafor’s book-within-a-book offers interchangeable cover images, one for the story of a disabled, Black visionary in a near-present day and the other for the lead character’s speculative posthuman novel, Rusted Robots. Okorafor deftly keeps the alternating chapters and timelines in conversation with one another. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Open Socrates by Agnes Callard (Norton)
Practically everything Agnes Callard says or writes ushers in a capital-D Discourse. (Remember that profile?) If she can do the same with a study of the philosophical world’s original gadfly, culture will be better off for it. —JHM
Aflame by Pico Iyer (Riverhead)
Presumably he finds time to eat and sleep in there somewhere, but it certainly appears as if Iyer does nothing but travel and write. His latest, following 2023’s The Half Known Life, makes a case for the sublimity, and necessity, of silent reflection. —JHM
The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill (Avon)
A local bookstore becomes a literal portal to the past for a trans man who returns to his hometown in search of a fresh start in Underhill's tender debut. —SMS
Good Girl by Aria Aber (Hogarth)
Aber, an accomplished poet, turns to prose with a debut novel set in the electric excess of Berlin’s bohemian nightlife scene, where a young German-born Afghan woman finds herself enthralled by an expat American novelist as her country—and, soon, her community—is enflamed by xenophobia. —JHM
The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio)
Krilanovich’s 2010 cult classic, about a runaway teen with drug-fueled ESP who searches for her missing sister across surreal highways while being chased by a killer named Dactyl, gets a much-deserved reissue. —MJS
Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski (Liveright)
In the latest novel from the National Book Award finalist, a 50-something actress reevaluates her life and career when #MeToo allegations roil the off-off-Broadway Shakespearean company that has cast her in the role of Cleopatra. —SMS
Something Rotten by Andrew Lipstein (FSG)
A burnt-out couple leave New York City for what they hope will be a blissful summer in Denmark when their vacation derails after a close friend is diagnosed with a rare illness and their marriage is tested by toxic influences. —MJS
The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow by Kristen Martin (Bold Type)
Martin's debut is a cultural history of orphanhood in America, from the 1800s to today, interweaving personal narrative and archival research to upend the traditional "orphan narrative," from Oliver Twist to Annie. —SMS
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth)
Kang’s Nobel win last year surprised many, but the consistency of her talent certainly shouldn't now. The latest from the author of The Vegetarian—the haunting tale of a Korean woman who sets off to save her injured friend’s pet at her home in Jeju Island during a deadly snowstorm—will likely once again confront the horrors of history with clear eyes and clarion prose. —JHM
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard (Milkweed)
As the conversation around emerging technology skews increasingly to apocalyptic and utopian extremes, Béchard’s latest novel adopts the heterodox-to-everyone approach of embracing complexity. Here, a cadre of characters is isolated by a rogue but benevolent AI into controlled environments engineered to achieve their individual flourishing. The AI may have taken over, but it only wants to best for us. —JF
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case (Grand Central)
Singer-songwriter Case, a country- and folk-inflected indie rocker and sometime vocalist for the New Pornographers, takes her memoir’s title from her 2013 solo album. Followers of PNW music scene chronicles like Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and drummer Steve Moriarty’s Mia Zapata and the Gits will consider Case’s backstory a must-read. —NodB
The Loves of My Life by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
The 85-year-old White recounts six decades of love and sex in this candid and erotic memoir, crafting a landmark work of queer history in the process. Seminal indeed. —SMS
Blob by Maggie Su (Harper)
In Su’s hilarious debut, Vi Liu is a college dropout working a job she hates, nothing really working out in her life, when she stumbles across a sentient blob that she begins to transform as her ideal, perfect man that just might resemble actor Ryan Gosling. —MJS
Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids by Leyna Krow (Penguin)
Krow’s debut novel, Fire Season, traced the combustible destinies of three Northwest tricksters in the aftermath of an 1889 wildfire. In her second collection of short fiction, Krow amplifies surreal elements as she tells stories of ordinary lives. Her characters grapple with deadly viruses, climate change, and disasters of the Anthropocene’s wilderness. —NodB
Black in Blues by Imani Perry (Ecco)
The National Book Award winner—and one of today's most important thinkers—returns with a masterful meditation on the color blue and its role in Black history and culture. —SMS
Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (Avid)
The timely debut novel by Shamieh, a playwright, follows three generations of Palestinian American women as they navigate war, migration, motherhood, and creative ambition. —SMS
How to Talk About Love by Plato, tr. Armand D'Angour (Princeton UP)
With modern romance on its last legs, D'Angour revisits Plato's Symposium, mining the philosopher's masterwork for timeless, indispensable insights into love, sex, and attraction. —SMS
At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca (Blackstone)
After Ashley Lutin’s wife dies, he takes the grieving process in a peculiar way, posting online, “If you're reading this, you've likely thought that the world would be a better place without you,” and proceeds to offer a strange ritual for those that respond to the line, equally grieving and lost, in need of transcendence. —MJS
February
No One Knows by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy (New Directions)
A selection of stories translated in English for the first time, from across Dazai’s career, demonstrates his penchant for exploring conformity and society’s often impossible expectations of its members. —MJS
Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Bloomsbury)
This queer love story set in post–Gilded Age New York, from the author of Glassworks (and one of my favorite Millions essays to date), explores on sex, power, and capitalism through the lives of three queer misfits. —SMS
Pure, Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III (Random House)
This podcaster and pop culture critic spoke to indie booksellers at a fall trade show I attended, regaling us with key cultural moments in the 1990s that shaped his youth in Milwaukee and being Black and gay. If the book is as clever and witty as Madison is, it's going to be a winner. —CK
Gliff by Ali Smith (Pantheon)
The Scottish author has been on the scene since 1997 but is best known today for a seasonal quartet from the late twenty-teens that began in 2016 with Autumn and ended in 2020 with Summer. Here, she takes the genre turn, setting two children and a horse loose in an authoritarian near future. —JHM
Land of Mirrors by Maria Medem, tr. Aleshia Jensen and Daniela Ortiz (D&Q)
This hypnotic graphic novel from one of Spain's most celebrated illustrators follows Antonia, the sole inhabitant of a deserted town, on a color-drenched quest to preserve the dying flower that gives her purpose. —SMS
Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya (Random House)
As odes to the "lifesaving power of books" proliferate amid growing literary censorship, Chihaya—a brilliant critic and writer—complicates this platitude in her revelatory memoir about living through books and the power of reading to, in the words of blurber Namwali Serpell, "wreck and redeem our lives." —SMS
Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead)
Yuknavitch continues the personal story she began in her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. More than a decade after that book, and nearly undone by a history of trauma and the death of her daughter, Yuknavitch revisits the solace she finds in swimming (she was once an Olympic hopeful) and in her literary community. —NodB
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf)
A son reevaluates the life of his Egyptian mother after her death in Rakha's novel. Recounting her sprawling life story—from her youth in 1960s Cairo to her experience of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests—a vivid portrait of faith, feminism, and contemporary Egypt emerges. —SMS
Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa (Deep Vellum)
Deep Vellum has a particularly keen eye for fiction in translation that borders on the unclassifiable. This debut from a poet the press has published twice, billed as the story of “an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century,” seems right up that alley. —JHM
David Lynch's American Dreamscape by Mike Miley (Bloomsbury)
Miley puts David Lynch's films in conversation with literature and music, forging thrilling and unexpected connections—between Eraserhead and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Inland Empire and "mixtape aesthetics," Lynch and the work of Cormac McCarthy. Lynch devotees should run, not walk. —SMS
There's No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes, tr. Ann Goldstein (Washington Square)
Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house. —JHM
Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield (Norton)
Named for the humble beet plant and meaning, in a rough translation from the Latin, "vulgar second," Sarsfield’s surreal debut finds a seasonal harvest worker watching her boyfriend and other colleagues vanish amid “the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.” —JHM
People From Oetimu by Felix Nesi, tr. Lara Norgaard (Archipelago)
The center of Nesi’s wide-ranging debut novel is a police station on the border between East and West Timor, where a group of men have gathered to watch the final of the 1998 World Cup while a political insurgency stirs without. Nesi, in English translation here for the first time, circles this moment broadly, reaching back to the various colonialist projects that have shaped Timor and the lives of his characters. —JF
Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores (MCD)
This surreal tale, set in a 2038 dystopian Texas is a celebration of resistance to authoritarianism, a mash-up of Olivia Butler, Ray Bradbury, and John Steinbeck. —CK
Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez (Crown)
The High-Risk Homosexual author returns with a comic memoir-in-essays about fighting for survival in the Sunshine State, exploring his struggle with poverty through the lens of his queer, Latinx identity. —SMS
Theory & Practice by Michelle De Kretser (Catapult)
This lightly autofictional novel—De Krester's best yet, and one of my favorite books of this year—centers on a grad student's intellectual awakening, messy romantic entanglements, and fraught relationship with her mother as she minds the gap between studying feminist theory and living a feminist life. —SMS
The Lamb by Lucy Rose (Harper)
Rose’s cautionary and caustic folk tale is about a mother and daughter who live alone in the forest, quiet and tranquil except for the visitors the mother brings home, whom she calls “strays,” wining and dining them until they feast upon the bodies. —MJS
Disposable by Sarah Jones (Avid)
Jones, a senior writer for New York magazine, gives a voice to America's most vulnerable citizens, who were deeply and disproportionately harmed by the pandemic—a catastrophe that exposed the nation's disregard, if not outright contempt, for its underclass. —SMS
No Fault by Haley Mlotek (Viking)
Written in the aftermath of the author's divorce from the man she had been with for 12 years, this "Memoir of Romance and Divorce," per its subtitle, is a wise and distinctly modern accounting of the end of a marriage, and what it means on a personal, social, and literary level. —SMS
Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis (Haymarket)
Lewis, one of the most interesting and provocative scholars working today, looks at certain malignant strains of feminism that have done more harm than good in her latest book. In the process, she probes the complexities of gender equality and offers an alternative vision of a feminist future. —SMS
Lion by Sonya Walger (NYRB)
Walger—an successful actor perhaps best known for her turn as Penny Widmore on Lost—debuts with a remarkably deft autobiographical novel (published by NYRB no less!) about her relationship with her complicated, charismatic Argentinian father. —SMS
The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)
A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and cares for her sick father in Navarro's innovative, metafictional novel. —SMS
Autotheories ed. Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan (MIT)
Theory wonks will love this rigorous and surprisingly playful survey of the genre of autotheory—which straddles autobiography and critical theory—with contributions from Judith Butler, Jamieson Webster, and more.
Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein (Doubleday)
I enjoy retellings of classic novels by writers who turn the spotlight on interesting minor characters. This is an excursion into the world of Charles Dickens, told from the perspective iconic thief from Oliver Twist. —CK
Crush by Ada Calhoun (Viking)
Calhoun—the masterful memoirist behind the excellent Also A Poet—makes her first foray into fiction with a debut novel about marriage, sex, heartbreak, all-consuming desire. —SMS
Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
Sittenfeld's observations in her writing are always clever, and this second collection of short fiction includes a tale about the main character in Prep, who visits her boarding school decades later for an alumni reunion. —CK
Right-Wing Woman by Andrea Dworkin (Picador)
One in a trio of Dworkin titles being reissued by Picador, this 1983 meditation on women and American conservatism strikes a troublingly resonant chord in the shadow of the recent election, which saw 45% of women vote for Trump. —SMS
The Talent by Daniel D'Addario (Scout)
If your favorite season is awards, the debut novel from D'Addario, chief correspondent at Variety, weaves an awards-season yarn centering on five stars competing for the Best Actress statue at the Oscars. If you know who Paloma Diamond is, you'll love this. —SMS
Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker and Robin Myers (Hogarth)
The Pulitzer winner’s latest is about an eponymously named professor who discovers the body of a mutilated man with a bizarre poem left with the body, becoming entwined in the subsequent investigation as more bodies are found. —MJS
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House)
Jane goes missing after a sudden a debilitating and dreadful wave of symptoms that include hallucinations, amnesia, and premonitions, calling into question the foundations of her life and reality, motherhood and buried trauma. —MJS
Song So Wild and Blue by Paul Lisicky (HarperOne)
If it weren’t Joni Mitchell’s world with all of us just living in it, one might be tempted to say the octagenarian master songstress is having a moment: this memoir of falling for the blue beauty of Mitchell’s work follows two other inventive books about her life and legacy: Ann Powers's Traveling and Henry Alford's I Dream of Joni. —JHM
Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba, tr. Ginny Tapley (FSG)
A woman writer meditates on solitude, art, and independence alongside her beloved cat in Inaba's modern classic—a book so squarely up my alley I'm somehow embarrassed. —SMS
True Failure by Alex Higley (Coffee House)
When Ben loses his job, he decides to pretend to go to work while instead auditioning for Big Shot, a popular reality TV show that he believes might be a launchpad for his future successes. —MJS
March
Woodworking by Emily St. James (Crooked Reads)
Those of us who have been reading St. James since the A.V. Club days may be surprised to see this marvelous critic's first novel—in this case, about a trans high school teacher befriending one of her students, the only fellow trans woman she’s ever met—but all the more excited for it. —JHM
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf)
Told as a series of conversations, Sunder’s debut novel follows its recently graduated Indian protagonist in 2006 Cambridge, Mass., as she sees out her student visa teaching in a private high school and contriving to find her way between worlds that cannot seem to comprehend her. Quietly subversive, this is an immigration narrative to undermine the various reductionist immigration narratives of our moment. —JF
Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen (Norton)
Merle Oberon, one of Hollywood's first South Asian movie stars, gets her due in this engrossing biography, which masterfully explores Oberon's painful upbringing, complicated racial identity, and much more. —SMS
The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld (Princeton UP)
At a time when we are awash with options—indeed, drowning in them—Rosenfeld's analysis of how our modingn idea of "freedom" became bound up in the idea of personal choice feels especially timely, touching on everything from politics to romance. —SMS
Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul (St. Martin's)
One of the internet's funniest writers follows up One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter with a sharp and candid collection of essays that sees her life go into a tailspin during the pandemic, forcing her to reevaluate her beliefs about love, marriage, and what's really worth fighting for. —SMS
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria by José Donoso, tr. Megan McDowell (New Directions)
The ever-excellent McDowell translates yet another work by the influential Chilean author for New Directions, proving once again that Donoso had a knack for titles: this one follows up 2024’s behemoth The Obscene Bird of Night. —JHM
Remember This by Anthony Giardina (FSG)
On its face, it’s another book about a writer living in Brooklyn. A layer deeper, it’s a book about fathers and daughters, occupations and vocations, ethos and pathos, failure and success. —JHM
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (Deep Vellum)
In this metaphysical and lyrical tale, a captain known for sticking to protocol begins losing control not only of her crew and ship but also her own mind. —MJS
We Tell Ourselves Stories by Alissa Wilkinson (Liveright)
Amid a spate of new books about Joan Didion published since her death in 2021, this entry by Wilkinson (one of my favorite critics working today) stands out for its approach, which centers Hollywood—and its meaning-making apparatus—as an essential key to understanding Didion's life and work. —SMS
Seven Social Movements that Changed America by Linda Gordon (Norton)
This book—by a truly renowned historian—about the power that ordinary citizens can wield when they organize to make their community a better place for all could not come at a better time. —CK
Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson (Chronicle Prism)
Lipson reconsiders the narratives of womanhood that constrain our lives and imaginations, mining the canon for alternative visions of desire, motherhood, and more—from Kate Chopin and Gwendolyn Brooks to Philip Roth and Shakespeare—to forge a new story for her life. —SMS
Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin)
Doppelgängers have been done to death, but Sathian's examination of Millennial womanhood—part biting satire, part twisty thriller—breathes new life into the trope while probing the modern realities of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting. —SMS
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (Random House)
The author of Detransition, Baby offers four tales for the price of one: a novel and three stories that promise to put gender in the crosshairs with as sharp a style and swagger as Peters’ beloved latest. The novel even has crossdressing lumberjacks. —JHM
On Breathing by Jamieson Webster (Catapult)
Webster, a practicing psychoanalyst and a brilliant writer to boot, explores that most basic human function—breathing—to address questions of care and interdependence in an age of catastrophe. —SMS
Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories (Two Lines)
The stories of Unusual Fragments, including work by Yoshida Tomoko, Nobuko Takai, and other seldom translated writers from the same ranks as Abe and Dazai, comb through themes like alienation and loneliness, from a storm chaser entering the eye of a storm to a medical student observing a body as it is contorted into increasingly violent positions. —MJS
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Russell has quipped that this Dust Bowl story of uncanny happenings in Nebraska is the “drylandia” to her 2011 Florida novel, Swamplandia! In this suspenseful account, a woman working as a so-called prairie witch serves as a storage vault for her townspeople’s most troubled memories of migration and Indigenous genocide. With a murderer on the loose, a corrupt sheriff handling the investigation, and a Black New Deal photographer passing through to document Americana, the witch loses her memory and supernatural events parallel the area’s lethal dust storms. —NodB
On the Clock by Claire Baglin, tr. Jordan Stump (New Directions)
Baglin's bildungsroman, translated from the French, probes the indignities of poverty and service work from the vantage point of its 20-year-old narrator, who works at a fast-food joint and recalls memories of her working-class upbringing. —SMS
Motherdom by Alex Bollen (Verso)
Parenting is difficult enough without dealing with myths of what it means to be a good mother. I who often felt like a failure as a mother appreciate Bollen's focus on a more realistic approach to parenting. —CK
The Magic Books by Anne Lawrence-Mathers (Yale UP)
For that friend who wants to concoct the alchemical elixir of life, or the person who cannot quit Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Lawrence-Mathers collects 20 illuminated medieval manuscripts devoted to magical enterprise. Her compendium includes European volumes on astronomy, magical training, and the imagined intersection between science and the supernatural. —NodB
Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead)
The first novel by the Tanzanian-British Nobel laureate since his surprise win in 2021 is a story of class, seismic cultural change, and three young people in a small Tanzania town, caught up in both as their lives dramatically intertwine. —JHM
Twelve Stories by American Women, ed. Arielle Zibrak (Penguin Classics)
Zibrak, author of a delicious volume on guilty pleasures (and a great essay here at The Millions), curates a dozen short stories by women writers who have long been left out of American literary canon—most of them women of color—from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Zitkala-Ša. —SMS
I'll Love You Forever by Giaae Kwon (Holt)
K-pop’s sky-high place in the fandom landscape made a serious critical assessment inevitable. This one blends cultural criticism with memoir, using major artists and their careers as a lens through which to view the contemporary Korean sociocultural landscape writ large. —JHM
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga)
Jones, the acclaimed author of The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake Trilogy, offers a unique tale of historical horror, a revenge tale about a vampire descending upon the Blackfeet reservation and the manifold of carnage in their midst. —MJS
True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt (University of Arkansas Press)
Full disclosure: Lena is my friend. But part of why I wanted to be her friend in the first place is because she is a brilliant poet. Selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and blurbed by the great Heather Christle and Elisa Gabbert, this debut collection seeks to turn "mistakes" into sites of possibility. —SMS
Perfection by Vicenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes (NYRB)
Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin enjoying their freedom as digital nomads, cultivating their passion for capturing perfect images, but after both friends and time itself moves on, their own pocket of creative freedom turns boredom, their life trajectories cast in doubt. —MJS
Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus (Ecco)
Jemus's debut story collection paint a composite portrait of the people who call Guatemala home—and those who have left it behind—with a cast of characters that includes a medicine man, a custodian at an underfunded college, wannabe tattoo artists, four orphaned brothers, and many more.
Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal (MCD)
The Oakland, Calif.–based contributing writer for the Atlantic digs deep into the recent history of a city long under-appreciated and under-served that has undergone head-turning changes throughout the rise of Silicon Valley. —JHM
Barbara by Joni Murphy (Astra)
Described as "Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin," Murphy's character study follows the titular starlet as she navigates the twinned convulsions of Hollywood and history in the Atomic Age.
Sister Sinner by Claire Hoffman (FSG)
This biography of the fascinating Aimee Semple McPherson, America's most famous evangelist, takes religion, fame, and power as its subjects alongside McPherson, whose life was suffused with mystery and scandal. —SMS
Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood (Pantheon)
In this bold and layered memoir, Hood confronts three decades of sexual violence and searches for truth among the wreckage. Kate Zambreno calls Trauma Plot the work of "an American Annie Ernaux." —SMS
Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel (Clash)
Seibel’s debut story collection ranges widely from the down-and-out to the downright bizarre as he examines with heart and empathy the strife and struggle of his characters. —MJS
James Baldwin by Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Yale UP)
Zaborowska examines Baldwin's unpublished papers and his material legacy (e.g. his home in France) to probe about the great writer's life and work, as well as the emergence of the "Black queer humanism" that Baldwin espoused. —CK
Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Riverhead)
Arnett is always brilliant and this novel about the relationship between Cherry, a professional clown, and her magician mentor, "Margot the Magnificent," provides a fascinating glimpse of the unconventional lives of performance artists. —CK
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp (S&S)
The deal announcement describes the ever-punchy writer’s debut novel with an infinitely appealing appellation: “debauched picaresque.” If that’s not enough to draw you in, the truly unhinged cover should be. —JHM
[millions_email]
A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
A Year in Reading: R.O. Kwon
The other night, at a party, someone asked if I consider my writing to be political. I said no, but also yes, always, what else can it be, since I’m an immigrant, a woman, and a person of color, living in a time and place in which more or less every aspect of who I am has been politicized. Every day, to pull up the news is to see part, or parts, of myself attacked, threatened, and marginalized.
And it’s not just the news. Not long after the 2016 elections, my parents were in a minor car accident. A car drove into the parking space next to theirs; the stranger’s car scraped my mother’s open door—no big deal, you might think, except that the other driver, the one at fault, lost it. He yelled at my parents. He terrified my mother, one of the gentlest women I know. What did he yell? The tired obvious: “Go back to your country,” he shouted, standing in a parking lot, in my hometown, where my parents have lived the past 25 years. My father shouted back. “This is my country,” he said, sure of himself, defying the racist shit spitting in his face.
As I look back at my year in reading, I’m thinking of my parents. A word about methodology: since any list like this leaves out more than it can include, I’ll call out writers of Asian descent whose fictional worlds have been, for me, lifelines. Also, I prize and require short stories and essays and poems and memoirs, but my first love, my lifelong obsession is the novel, so I’ll limit myself to long-form fiction; finally, I’ll restrict this round-up to books by women because it’s 2017, and, my god, what a year it’s been for us. But dear Umma and Abba: fuck that guy in the parking lot. This is your country, and this write-up’s for you.
All hail Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, a tender, brilliant evocation of one woman’s experience of profound loss and gain. I loved, too, Katie Kitamura’s powerful A Separation, about a woman whose husband goes missing on a Greek island. I read it in one hypnotized go. I know you’ve probably already heard you should read Celeste Ng’s thrilling Little Fires Everywhere, but I can’t help adding to the chorus. In addition to its other signal merits, the book includes one of the best portrayals of artistic ambition I’ve read since I don’t know when.
Some of the writing I most crave, these days, is fiction that finds its way into what’s often called unimaginable. Along these lines, I admired A Good Country by Laleh Khadivi and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, novels that incisively, wisely imagine the lives of people drawn to religious extremism. Jimin Han’s impressive A Small Revolution brings to life a different kind of terrorist, one so much more prevalent in this gun-crazed country of ours: the angry man who goes on a shooting rampage.
I was riveted by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You and Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, both of which feature those most maligned of women, mothers who leave their sons. In the haunting Lucky Boy, Shanthi Sekaran spotlights a different kind of parent-child split, when an undocumented woman loses her child to foster care. Patrick Cottrell’s Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is centered upon a sister’s loss, and is by turns startling, harrowing, and compassionate.
Chemistry by Weike Wang is a funny and beguiling account of a graduate student uncertain if she wants to keep pursuing a life in chemistry. There’s also Dina Nayeri’s big-hearted Refuge, about the plight of a geographically divided family, as well as Arundhati Roy’s epic, vital The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness. Finally, especially in these hateful times, I want everyone to read Min Jin Lee’s much-lauded Pachinko, a novel chronicling some of the challenges endured by Korean immigrants in Japan.
More from A Year in Reading 2017
Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
[millions_ad]
A Year in Reading: Paul Yoon
This year I read too many wonderful books to name all of them here, but some highlights were: Katie Kitamura’s intoxicating A Separation, which is such a wild and yet disciplined exploration of the idea of the traveler and of grief. Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage came out last year, but it is a book I hold close to me these days, a miracle of a novel, one of the most humane, visceral, gut-wrenching and precise stories I have ever read. Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life exploded in my head and I’m still reeling from the effects of living that journey. I absolutely loved Jenny Erpenbeck’s new one, Go, Went, Gone. She is one of my favorites, one of those rare writers who, I think, can write a narrative where you feel layers, not only the layers of a character’s life, but literally the layers of sky, the earth, soil and history and the future. Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance will haunt me forever, a narrative that continues to astound me, and I think a near perfect portrayal of aloneness and solitude and deep longing. Finally, I just finished a book coming out next year, Happiness, by the great Aminatta Forna. It is a novel that carries a tremendous sense of the world, where I looked up upon finishing and sensed a shift in what I thought I knew, what I wanted to know. What a gift. It was what I needed. Readers are in for a treat.
More from A Year in Reading 2017
Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
[millions_ad]
The Millions Top Ten: August 2017
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.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
3.
Ill Will
5 months
2.
2.
American War
5 months
3.
4.
Men Without Women: Stories
4 months
4.
7.
Exit West
2 months
5.
10.
The Idiot
2 months
6.
8.
What We Lose
2 months
7.
-
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
1 month
8.
-
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
2 months
9.
-
Eileen
2 months
10.
-
The Changeling
1 month
Lots of action this month as our Hall of Fame absorbs three mainstays from the past six months: Lincoln in the Bardo, A Separation, and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. This marks George Saunders's third entry into the Hall of Fame. He'd previously reached those hallowed halls for Tenth of December and Fox 8.
Meanwhile, The Nix dropped from our list after two months of solid showings. If he's reading this (because who isn't?) then hopefully Nathan Hill can look to two other titles on this month's list for solace. Both The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake as well as Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen are examples of books that have graced our monthly Top Ten one month (June, in this case) only to drop out for another (July), and then reappear (August). If they can do it, so you can you, Nix fans!
The remaining two spots were filled by new novels from Laurent Binet and Victor LaValle.
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel, which was highlighted in both installments of our Great 2017 Book Preview, was expected to provide "highbrow hijinks." In her review for our site this month, Shivani Radhakrishnan confirms that it delivers in this respect. Calling Binet's novel "a madcap sharply irreverent French theory mash-up that’s part mystery and part satire," Radhakrishnan goes on to contextualize it among other works in detective fiction and theory, which, she writes, have a good deal in common and which, she writes, intertwine to great effect here:
The new book turns Roland Barthes’s accidental death in 1980 into a murder investigation set against French intellectual life. With a cast of characters that includes Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva with guest appearances by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Umberto Eco, and John Searle, it’s no surprise Binet’s book is way more dizzying than most detective stories. What is shocking, though, is how it manages to respect the theories and mock the theorists all at once.
The Changeling, too, was highlighted on this site in one of our monthly mini-previews. At the time, Lydia Kiesling implored readers to check out LaValle's second novel, which she described as "a book that somehow manages to be a fairy tale, an agonizing parenting story, a wrenching metaphor for America’s foundational racist ills, and a gripping page-turner to usher in the summer." If you're still not sold, you can check out an excerpt from the book, or read our interview with the author from last year.
Skulking just beyond our list – like some expectant, lovelorn dolphin admiring a human home-wrecker as he swims – is Alissa Nutting's Made for Love, which I reviewed a month ago, and which I encourage you all to buy and read so that this sentence makes sense.
This month's other near misses included: The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, Hillbilly Elegy, Made for Love, Enigma Variations, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: July 2017
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for July.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Lincoln in the Bardo
6 months
2.
2.
A Separation
6 months
3.
3.
Ill Will
4 months
4.
4.
Men Without Women: Stories
3 months
5.
5.
American War
4 months
6.
6.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
6 months
7.
-
Exit West
1 month
8.
-
What We Lose
1 month
9.
8.
The Nix
2 months
10.
-
The Idiot
1 month
Otessa Moshfegh learned Icarus's lesson this month. A few weeks ago, she boasted not one but two titles on our Top Ten list – a feat that had never before been accomplished. But come July? Nada. How quickly things change. One month, you're 1/5 of our list; the next month, one of your books has graduated to our Hall of Fame and another has dropped out of the running entirely.
Meanwhile, much of this month's list remains unchanged. The books in the first six positions didn't budge. Instead, three newcomers entered our ranks in the seventh, eighth, and tenth slots.
Mohsin Hamid's Exit West is one of those new books. "Tracing the fissures in human community and global space, and reflecting on the possibility of their transcendence," wrote Eli Jelly-Schapiro in his review for our site, the book "maps the divides that structure the current global order."
Next, in seventh position, we welcome What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. In our recently published Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview, our own Claire Cameron observed that "the buzz around this debut is more like a roar," and based on the book's immediate ascendance onto our list, that seems accurate.
Finally, Elif Batuman's The Idiot fills tenth position in this month's list. To that development, Millions staffers would likely say: about time. Having earned not one, but two full-length reviews for our site, The Idiot has been lauded for the way its "layered truths and fictions...compounded so that everything in the novel became true and real in a deep, shining way that cannot be achieved through essays." (It's also been examined in the context of sexual power dynamics.)
Next month, we can expect to see at least three openings on our Top Ten, and likely considerably more as the long tail of the Book Preview does its job.
This month's other near misses included: Hillbilly Elegy, The Night Ocean, Void Star, Dunkirk: The History Behind the Motion Picture, and Blind Spot. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: June 2017
We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for June.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
2.
Lincoln in the Bardo
5 months
2.
3.
A Separation
5 months
3.
4.
Ill Will
3 months
4.
8.
Men Without Women: Stories
2 months
5.
7.
American War
3 months
6.
5.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
5 months
7.
9.
Homesick for Another World
6 months
8.
-
The Nix
1 month
9.
-
Eileen
1 month
10.
-
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
1 month
One book dropped out, two ascended to our Hall of Fame, and that means three slots opened up for new titles on our June Top Ten. Before getting to the newcomers, congratulations are in order for The North Water author Ian McGuire, and especially for Derek B. Miller, whose Norwegian by Night dominated the Top Ten on the strength of Richard Russo's recommendation. Both authors are off to the Hall of Fame this month. At the same time, Zadie Smith's Swing Time has fallen off of the list after four months. Smith fans, fear not. In the past, authors have fallen off our list only to reappear later on, so it's possible for her to send her second book (after NW, which reached in 2013) to the Hall of Fame in due time.
Filling the new slots are three very different books following three very different trajectories.
The Nix by Nathan Hill finally joins the June Top Ten after hovering among the "Near Misses" since last December. At the time, our own Garth Risk Hallberg highlighted the book's "disparate concerns — video games, parental neglect, political anger" and praised the ways they're "bound together by the warmth, charm, and wit of the author’s voice." Nick Ripatrazone went further, invoking a lofty comparison in his teaser for our Great 2016 Book Preview:
Eccentricity, breadth, and length are three adjectives that often earn writers comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. Hill tackles politics more headlong than Pynchon in this well-timed release.
This is Hill's first time on one of our monthly lists.
Ottessa Moshfegh, meanwhile, is no stranger to them. Impressively, Eileen is the second Moshfegh book on this very month's Top Ten, after Homesick for Another World. It's Ottessa Moshfegh's world; we just live in it.
Finally, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake launched onto our list thanks to an insightful, moving, and comprehensive review from Mike Murphy. "Breece Pancake could see the future of America and it must have scared the hell out of him," Murphy writes of the late author, who took his own life in 1979, before this story collection was published posthumously.
This month's other near misses included: The Idiot, Exit West, Enigma Variations, Blind Spot, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: May 2017
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 May.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
6 months
2.
2.
Lincoln in the Bardo
4 months
3.
4.
A Separation
4 months
4.
7.
Ill Will
2 months
5.
5.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
4 months
6.
6.
The North Water
6 months
7.
8.
American War
2 months
8.
-
Men Without Women: Stories
1 month
9.
9.
Homesick for Another World
5 months
10.
10.
Swing Time
4 months
April showers bring May flowers, but a month of May book purchases launched Michael Chabon's Moonglow into our Hall of Fame. It's the author's second appearance there; Telegraph Avenue made the list four years back.
Chabon's success freed up an opening on this month's Top Ten. Filling his place in 8th position is another author who's no stranger to our Hall of Fame: Haruki Murakami. In our Great 2017 Book Preview, Murakami's latest story collection, Men Without Women, was said to "concern the lives of men who, for one reason or another, find themselves alone." Emily St. John Mandel continued:
In “Scheherazade,” a man living in isolation receives regular visits from a woman who claims to remember a past life as a lamprey; in “Yesterday,” a university student finds himself drawn into the life of a strange coworker who insists that the student go on a date with his girlfriend.
Could this book become Murakami's third to make our Hall of Fame? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile Derek B. Miller's Norwegian by Night continues its reign over our list, further demonstrating that if you want to sell books to Millions readers, you ought to get an endorsement from Richard Russo first.
Elsewhere on the list, a few movers moved and shakers shook, but overall things held steady. Next month, we'll likely graduate two titles to our Hall of Fame, which means we'll welcome two more newcomers. By then, we'll be in full swing with our Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview, which was a shocking thing to type. Can 2018 come soon enough?
This month's other near misses included: The Idiot, Eileen, The Nix, Exit West, and Enigma Variations. See Also: Last month's list.
The Summer Rooster Crows Soon
We are longtime fans (and participants) of The Morning News's Tournament of Books, and so were thrilled to learn they're starting up a summer book club with a ToB twist. Join them in reading Katie Kitamura's A Separation and The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge, starting in just a week and a half.
The Millions Top Ten: April 2017
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 April.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
5 months
2.
2.
Lincoln in the Bardo
3 months
3.
4.
Moonglow
6 months
4.
5.
A Separation
3 months
5.
7.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
3 months
6.
6.
The North Water
5 months
7.
-
Ill Will
1 month
8.
-
American War
1 month
9.
8.
Homesick for Another World
4 months
10.
10.
Swing Time
3 months
Spring has sprung but things are not what they seem. Here in Baltimore, watermen welcomed reports that the Chesapeake Bay crab population is the strongest its been in years, and yet simultaneously we got news that efforts to strengthen the Bay are on dire straits. Nationwide, things are not what they seem. Spring has sprung, and yet it snowed in Utah last weekend.
Appearances deceive. On our Top Ten list this month, Otessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World fell one spot -- perhaps because Brooks Sterritt disgusted y'all with his review for our site -- but at the same time, Moshfegh's earlier collection, Eileen, got a strong enough boost to make our list of near misses (at the bottom of this post). What is down is also up.
After six months of strong showings, we graduated two titles to The Millions's Hall of Fame: Tana French's The Trespasser and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth. Both have been there before: French six years ago for Faithful Place, and Patchett a year later for The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life.
Their spots on this month's list are filled by works from Dan Chaon and Omar El Akkad.
Chaon's novel, Ill Will, has been described by our own Edan Lepucki as being "about grief, about being unable to accept reality, and about the myriad ways we trick ourselves about our selves." In a wide-ranging conversation that ran on our site last month, the two discussed, among other things, Chaon's fascination with characters' names:
Names are weirdly important to me. ... I don’t know if it’s superstition or magic or what, but for me a name somehow breathes life into a puppet, gives shape to an abstraction. The characters often refuse to perform unless they have been properly christened.
Meanwhile El Akkad's debut, American War, "presents a highly plausible dystopia in the not so distant American future," according to Nicholas Cannariato:
El Akkad deploys a subtle critique of torture as not only immoral, but ineffective -- and a direct critique of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture and Donald Trump’s lurid flirtation with it.
Next month, we look forward to opening at least one new spot on the list. Which newcomer will come forth? Stay tuned to find out. (And enjoy the Spring as best you can!)
This month's other near misses included: Enigma Variations, Eileen, Here I Am, The Nix, and Version Control. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: March 2017
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 March.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
4 months
2.
3.
Lincoln in the Bardo
2 months
3.
2.
The Trespasser
6 months
4.
4.
Moonglow
5 months
5.
8.
A Separation
2 months
6.
5.
The North Water
4 months
7.
6.
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
2 months
8.
10.
Homesick for Another World
3 months
9.
7.
Commonwealth
6 months
10.
-
Swing Time
2 months
News broke recently that Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad will be adapted for the screen by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, and it's hard to say what Whitehead's going to celebrate more: that wonderful development, or the fact that his novel, after a six-month run on our Top Ten list, has at last graduated to our site's hallowed Hall of Fame. Regardless, it can be said that good news seldom comes alone.
Filling the open spot on our list is Zadie Smith, whose latest novel, Swing Time, returns to our list after a three-month absence. (It first cracked the rankings in December.) At this pace, look for Smith, who's previously reached our Hall of Fame four years ago with NW, to send her second work there in March 2018.
Elsewhere on the list, several titles swapped positions, and George Saunders's Lincoln In the Bardo overtook Tana French's The Trespasser to claim second place. On our site this week, Millions staffer Jacob Lambert penned a simultaneously hysterical and haunting "modern" adaptation of Saunders's first novel, featuring a lumbering, slovenly beast by now familiar to us all:
Even in the gloom, his skin held an unhealthy rusty glow; his hair, if one might call it that, had an aspect of spun sugar, though it did not appetize.
Meanwhile, Manjula Martin's Scratch anthology - which chronicles the ways writers do and do not make money from their craft -- held fast in the middle of our list. Millions editor Lydia Kiesling caught up with Martin last week to discuss the way the book came to be, the struggles of trying to make a living from writing, and how writers, editors, and publishers alike feel about the same:
On the one hand I’m like yeah, people who do work should be paid. On the other hand…there is a way in which artistic value cannot be quantified. These two things can be true at the same time. But I think where things become far less ambivalent is when it comes to writing for publications and companies that make a lot of money off your work while you’re not making money off your work.
Skulking just beyond our Top Ten ranks this month are two particularly notable titles: Ill Will by Dan Chaon, who was recently interviewed by Edan Lepucki; and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which made it to the Championship Round of the Tournament of Books. Will either break into the rankings of our list next time? Well, there's only one way to find out.
This month's other near misses included: Here I Am, Version Control, and The Nix. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: February 2017
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 February.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Norwegian by Night
3 months
2.
4.
The Trespasser
5 months
3.
-
Lincoln in the Bardo
1 month
4.
5.
Moonglow
4 months
5.
6.
The North Water
3 months
6.
-
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
1 month
7.
8.
Commonwealth
5 months
8.
-
A Separation
1 month
9.
4.
The Underground Railroad
6 months
10.
7.
Homesick for Another World
2 months
We sold so many copies of The Sellout over the past seven months that Paul Beatty's novel is now off to our Hall of Fame, and if current trends hold it looks like it'll soon by joined by Tana French's The Trespasser and Ann Patchett's Commonwealth. Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, too, has the Hall of Fame in its sights, although it'll need to hang on for one more month, and momentum is not on its side – it dropped five spots on our list this month.
Newcomers on this month's list include George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, Katie Kitamura's A Separation, and Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin. All three were previously featured on our Great 2017 Book Preview.
"Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is thus, itself, its own kind of bardo," wrote Louise McCune in her recent review for our site, which bound the novel – Saunders's first – to the Tibetan Buddhist concept of "something other than death."
It is an intermediate state. In Buddhist cosmology, it is most commonly understood as the period of transmigration, between death and new life, when the consciousness is waiting on the platform for the proverbial next train.
Scratch, meanwhile, concerns itself with something far more immediate: money, and the making of one's livelihood. The collection includes more than 30 essays, each focused on writers' precarious quests to earn income from their craft. Its appearance on our list was no doubt aided by "Ghost Stories," an excerpt from Sari Botton's contribution to the anthology, in which the author highlights some of her "most memorable deals from almost two decades in the [ghost writing] trenches."
For me, ghostwriting is a job — one I wouldn’t do if I didn’t need the money. Like any job, it has its pros and cons, its ups and downs — lots of freedom, the satisfaction of helping someone tell their story; but also, frequently, having to handle intense personalities with kid gloves.
Dropping out of this month's list were Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am, which was not exactly celebrated on our site (citation), as well as Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which most certainly was (citations 1, 2, 3, and 4). Until next month, I'll leave it to y'all to sort that out.
This month's near misses included: The Nix, Swing Time, and Hillbilly Elegy. See Also: Last month's list.
Tuesday New Release Day: Nguyen; McKay; Smith; Kitamura; Manguso; Omotoso; Lee; Darnielle
Out this week: The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen; Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay; Autumn by Ali Smith; A Separation by Katie Kitamura; 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso; The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso; Pachinko by Min Jin Lee; and Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)
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. For more February titles -- and there are a ton -- check out the Great First-Half 2017 Preview.
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: For Saunders fans, the prospect of a full-length novel from the short-story master has been something to speculate upon, if not actually expect. Yet Lincoln in the Bardo is a full 368-page blast of Saunders — dealing in the 1862 death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, the escalating Civil War, and, of course, Buddhist philosophy. Saunders has compared the process of writing longer fiction to “building custom yurts and then somebody commissioned a mansion” — and Saunders’s first novel is unlikely to resemble any other mansion on the block. (Jacob)
To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell: Millions staffer and author of Millions Original Epic Fail O’Connell brings his superb writing and signature wit and empathy to a nonfiction exploration of the transhumanist movement, complete with cryogenic freezing, robots, and an unlikely presidential bid from the first transhumanist candidate. O’Connell’s sensibility — his humanity, if you will — and his subject matter are a match made in heaven. It’s an absolutely wonderful book, but don’t take my non-impartial word for it: Nicholson Baker and Margaret Atwood have plugged it too. (Lydia)
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li: The Oakland-based Li delivers this memoir of chronic depression and a life lived with books. Weaving sharp literary criticism with a perceptive narrative about her life as an immigrant in America, Your Life isn’t as interested in exploring how literature helps us make sense of ourselves as it is in how literature situates us amongst others. (Ismail)
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Pulitzer Prize Winner Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees has already received starred pre-publication reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, among others. Nguyen’s brilliant new work of fiction offers vivid and intimate portrayals of characters and explores identity, war, and loss in stories collected over a period of two decades. (Zoë)
Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson: Well, it sounds like it's got it all: the Badlands, the Twin Towers, Elvis's resurrected twin brother, all put together to create what Jonathan Lethem called "a playlist for the dying American century." He told Granta this was the best novel he read all year. (Lydia)
Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay: A significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay is best-known for his novel Home to Harlem — which was criticized by W.E.B. Dubois for portraying black people (i.e. Harlem nightlife) as prurient — “after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” The novel went on to win the prestigious (if short-lived) Harmon Gold Medal and is widely praised for its sensual and brutal accuracy. In 2009, UPenn English professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier discovered the unpublished Amiable with Big Teeth in the papers of notorious, groundbreaking publisher Samuel Roth. A collaboration between Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards, a long-awaited, edited, scholarly edition of the novel will be released by Penguin in February. (Sonya)
The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: This sequel to the Nobel Prize-winning South African author’s 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus picks up shortly after Simón and Inés flee from authorities with their adopted son, David. Childhood was a sometimes thin-feeling allegory of immigration that found Coetzee meditating with some of his perennial concerns — cultural memory, language, naming, and state violence — at the expense of his characters. In Schooldays, the allegorical element recedes somewhat into the background as Coetzee tells the story of David’s enrollment in a dance school, his discovery of his passion for dancing, and his disturbing encounters with adult authority. This one was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. (Ismail)
A Separation by Katie Kitamura: A sere and unsettling portrait of a marriage come undone, critics are hailing Kitamura’s third book as “mesmerizing” and “magnificent.” The narrator, a translator, goes to a remote part of Greece in search of her serially unfaithful husband, only to be further unmoored from any sense that she (and in turn the reader) had of the contours of their shared life. Blurbed by no fewer than six literary heavyweights — Rivka Galchen, Jenny Offill, Leslie Jamison, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Karl Ove Knausgaard — A Separation looks poised to be the literary Gone Girl of 2017. (Kirstin B.)
The Weight of Him by Ethel Rohan: Set in rural Ireland, the accomplished short-story writer's debut novel takes on suicide, grief, overeating, and getting on. A novel that "that speaks to the essential core of our shared human experience," says Robert Olen Butler. (Lydia)
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: A debut about motherhood, art, and living across cultures focusing on a young Japanese woman who abandons her son. Alexander Chee says it is "the kind of novel our century deserves." (Lydia)
Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom: Academic and Twitter eminence McMillan Cottom tackles a subject that, given a recent spate of lawsuits, investigations, and closings, was front-page news for a good part of 2016. Drawing on interviews with students, activists, and executives at for-profit colleges and universities, Lower Ed aims to connect the rise of such institutions with ballooning levels of debt and larger trends of income inequality across the U.S. (Kirstin B.)
Most Anticipated: The Great 2017 Book Preview
Although 2016 has gotten a bad rap, there were, at the very least, a lot of excellent books published. But this year! Books from George Saunders, Roxane Gay, Hari Kunzru, J.M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, Jesmyn Ward? A lost manuscript by Claude McKay? A novel by Elif Batuman? Short stories by Penelope Lively? A memoir by Yiyun Li? Books from no fewer than four Millions staffers? It's a feast. We hope the following list of 80-something upcoming books peps you up for the (first half of the) new year. You'll notice that we've re-combined our fiction and nonfiction lists, emphasizing fiction as in the past. And, continuing a tradition we started this fall, we'll be doing mini previews at the beginning of each month -- let us know if there are other things we should be looking forward to. (If you are a big fan of our bi-annual Previews and find yourself referring to them year-round, please consider supporting our efforts by becoming a member!)
January
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay: Gay has had an enormously successful few years. In 2014, her novel, An Untamed State, and an essay collection, Bad Feminist, met with wide acclaim, and in the wake of unrest over anti-black police violence, hers was one of the clearest voices in the national conversation. While much of Gay’s writing since then has dealt in political thought and cultural criticism, she returns in 2017 with this short story collection exploring the various textures of American women’s experience. (Ismail)
Human Acts by Han Kang: Korean novelist Kang says all her books are variations on the theme of human violence. The Vegetarian, her first novel translated into English, arrested readers with the contempt showered upon an “unremarkable” wife who became a vegetarian after waking from a nightmare. Kang’s forthcoming Human Acts focuses on the 1980 Korean Gwangju Uprising, when Gwangju locals took up arms in retaliation for the massacre of university students who were protesting. Within Kang tries to unknot “two unsolvable riddles” -- the intermingling of two innately human yet disparate tendencies, the capacity for cruelty alongside that for selflessness and dignity. (Anne)
Transit by Rachel Cusk: Everyone who read and reveled in the nimble formal daring of Outline is giddy to read Transit, which follows the same protagonist, Faye, as she navigates life after separating from her husband. Both Transit and Outline are made up of stories other people tell Faye, and in her rave in The Guardian, Tessa Hadley remarks that Cusk's structure is "a striking gesture of relinquishment. Faye’s story contends for space against all these others, and the novel’s meaning is devolved out from its centre in her to a succession of characters. It’s a radically different way of imagining a self, too -- Faye’s self." (Edan)
4321 by Paul Auster: Multiple timelines are nothing new at this point, but it’s doubtful they’ve ever been used in quite the way they are in 4321, Auster’s first novel since his 2010 book Sunset Park. In his latest, four timelines branch off the moment the main character is born, introducing four separate Archibald Isaac Fergusons that grow more different as the plot wears on. They’re all, in their own ways, tied up with Amy Schneiderman, who appears throughout the book’s realities. (Thom)
Collected Stories by E.L. Doctorow: Doctorow is known for historical novels like Ragtime and The Book of Daniel, but he also wrote some terrific stories, and shortly before his death in 2015 he selected and revised 15 of his best. Fans who already own his 2011 collection All the Time in the World may want to give this new one a miss, since many of the selections overlap, but readers who only know Doctorow as a novelist may want to check out his classic early story “A Writer in the Family,” as well as others like “The Water Works” and “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate,” which are either precursors of or companion pieces to his novels. (Michael B.)
Enigma Variations by André Aciman: The CUNY Professor New York magazine called “the most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century” returns with a romantic/erotic bildungsroman following protagonist Paul from Italy to New York, from adolescence to adulthood. Kirkus called it an “eminently adult look at desire and attachment.” (Lydia)
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin: Martin ran the online magazine Scratch from 2013 to 2015 and in those two years published some terrific and refreshingly transparent interviews with writers about cash money and how it's helped and hindered their lives as artists. The magazine is no longer online, but this anthology includes many of those memorable conversations as well as some new ones. Aside from interviews with the likes of Cheryl Strayed and Jonathan Franzen, the anthology also includes honest and vulnerable essays about making art and making a career --and where those two meet -- from such writers as Meaghan O'Connell and Alexander Chee. It's a useful and inspiring read. (Edan)
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh: A long, dull day of jury duty in 2008 was redeemed by a lunchtime discovery of Unsaid magazine and its lead story “Help Yourself!” by Moshfegh, whose characters were alluring and honest and full of contempt. I made a point to remember her name at the time, but now Moshfegh’s stories appear regularly in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, and her novel Eileen was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize. Her debut collection of stories, Homesick for Another World, gathers many of these earlier stories, and is bound to show why she’s considered one of literature’s most striking new voices. (Anne)
Glaxo by Hernán Ronsino: Ronsino’s English-language debut (translated by Samuel Rutter) is only 100 pages but manages to host four narrators and cover 40 years. Set in a dusty, stagnating town in Argentina, the novel cautiously circles around a decades-old murder, a vanished wife, and past political crimes. Allusions to John Sturges’s Last Train From Gun Hill hint at the vengeance, or justice, to come in this sly Latin American Western. (Matt)
Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran: Set in Berkeley, Sekaran’s novel follows two women: Soli, an undocumented woman from Mexico raising a baby alone while cleaning houses, and an Indian-American woman struggling with infertility who becomes a foster parent to Soli’s son. Kirkus called it “superbly crafted and engrossing.” (Lydia)
A Mother’s Tale by Phillip Lopate: One day in the mid-'80s, Lopate sat down with his tape recorder to capture his mother’s life story, which included, at various times, a stint owning a candy store, a side gig as an actress and singer, and a job on the line at a weapons factory at the height of World War II. Although Lopate didn’t use the tapes for decades, he unearthed them recently and turned them into this book, which consists of a long conversation between himself, his mother, and the person he was in the '80s. (Thom)
The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen: Winner of Mexico’s Mauricio Achar Prize for Fiction, Xilonen’s novel (written when she was only 19, and here translated by Andrea Rosenberg) tells the story of a young boy who crosses the Rio Grande. Mixing Spanish and English, El Sur Mexico lauded the novel’s “vulgar idiom brilliantly transformed into art.” (Lydia)
Selection Day by Aravind Adiga: If Selection Day goes on to hit it big, we may remember it as our era’s definitive cricket novel. Adiga -- a Man Booker laureate who won the prize in 2008 for his epic The White Tiger -- follows the lives of Radha and Manju, two brothers whose father raised them to be master batsmen. In the way of The White Tiger, all the characters are deeply affected by changes in Indian society, most of which are transposed into changes in the country’s huge cricket scene. (Thom)
Huck Out West by Robert Coover: Coover, the CAVE-dwelling postmodern luminary, riffs on American’s great humorist in this sequel to Mark Twain’s classic set out West. From the opening pages, in which Tom, over Huck’s objections, sells Jim to slaveholding Cherokees, it is clear that Coover’s picaresque will be a tale of disillusionment. Unlike Tom, “who is always living in a story he’s read in a book so he knows what happens next,” Huck seems wearied and shaken by his continued adventures: “So many awful things had happened since then, so much outright meanness. It was almost like there was something wicked about growing up.” (Matt)
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa called Schweblin “one of the most promising voices in modern literature in Spanish.” The Argentinian novelist’s fifth book, about “obsession, identity and motherhood,” is her first to be translated into English (by Megan McDowell). It’s been described “deeply unsettling and disorientating” by the publisher and “a wonderful nightmare of a book” by novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez. (Elizabeth)
Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson. Wilson’s first novel, The Family Fang, was about the children of performance artists. His second is about a new mother who joins a sort of utopian community called the “Infinite Family Project,” living alongside other couples raising newborns, which goes well until eventually “the gentle equilibrium among the families is upset and it all starts to disintegrate.” He’s been described by novelist Owen King as the “unholy child of George Saunders and Carson McCullers.” (Elizabeth)
Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke: Clarke’s award-winning short story collection Foreign Soil is now being published in the U.S. and includes a new story “Aviation,” specifically written for this edition. These character-driven stories take place worldwide -- Australia, Africa, the West Indies, and the U.S. -- and explore loss, inequity, and otherness. Clarke is hailed as an essential writer whose collection challenges and transforms the reader. (Zoë)
American Berserk by Bill Morris: Five years ago, a Millions commenter read Morris’s crackling piece about his experience as a young reporter in Chambersburg, Penn., during the 1970s: “Really, I wish this essay would be a book.” Ask, and you shall receive. To refresh your memories, Morris encountered what one would expect in the pastoral serenity of Pennsylvania Dutch country: “Kidnapping, ostracism, the paranormal, rape, murder, insanity, arson, more murder, attempted suicide -- it added up to a collective nervous breakdown.” Morris has plenty to work with in these lurid tales, but the book is also about the pleasure of profiling those “interesting nobodies” whose stories never make it to the front page, no matter how small the paper. (Matt)
February
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: For Saunders fans, the prospect of a full-length novel from the short-story master has been something to speculate upon, if not actually expect. Yet Lincoln in the Bardo is a full 368-page blast of Saunders -- dealing in the 1862 death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, the escalating Civil War, and, of course, Buddhist philosophy. Saunders has compared the process of writing longer fiction to “building custom yurts and then somebody commissioned a mansion” -- and Saunders’s first novel is unlikely to resemble any other mansion on the block. (Jacob)
The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: This sequel to the Nobel Prize-winning South African author’s 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus picks up shortly after Simón and Inés flee from authorities with their adopted son, David. Childhood was a sometimes thin-feeling allegory of immigration that found Coetzee meditating with some of his perennial concerns -- cultural memory, language, naming, and state violence -- at the expense of his characters. In Schooldays, the allegorical element recedes somewhat into the background as Coetzee tells the story of David’s enrollment in a dance school, his discovery of his passion for dancing, and his disturbing encounters with adult authority. This one was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. (Ismail)
To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell: Millions staffer and author of Millions Original Epic Fail O’Connell brings his superb writing and signature wit and empathy to a nonfiction exploration of the transhumanist movement, complete with cryogenic freezing, robots, and an unlikely presidential bid from the first transhumanist candidate. O’Connell’s sensibility -- his humanity, if you will -- and his subject matter are a match made in heaven. It’s an absolutely wonderful book, but don’t take my non-impartial word for it: Nicholson Baker and Margaret Atwood have plugged it too. (Lydia)
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Pulitzer Prize Winner Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees has already received starred pre-publication reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, among others. Nguyen’s brilliant new work of fiction offers vivid and intimate portrayals of characters and explores identity, war, and loss in stories collected over a period of two decades. (Zoë)
Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay: A significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay is best-known for his novel Home to Harlem -- which was criticized by W.E.B. Dubois for portraying black people (i.e. Harlem nightlife) as prurient -- “after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” The novel went on to win the prestigious (if short-lived) Harmon Gold Medal and is widely praised for its sensual and brutal accuracy. In 2009, UPenn English professor Jean-Christophe Cloutier discovered the unpublished Amiable with Big Teeth in the papers of notorious, groundbreaking publisher Samuel Roth. A collaboration between Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards, a long-awaited, edited, scholarly edition of the novel will be released by Penguin in February. (Sonya)
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li: The Oakland-based Li delivers this memoir of chronic depression and a life lived with books. Weaving sharp literary criticism with a perceptive narrative about her life as an immigrant in America, Your Life isn’t as interested in exploring how literature helps us make sense of ourselves as it is in how literature situates us amongst others. (Ismail)
Autumn by Ali Smith: Her 2015 Baileys prize-winning How to Be Both was an experiment in how a reader experiences time. It has two parts, which can be read in any order. Now, Smith brings us Autumn, the first novel in what will be a Seasonal quartet -- four stand-alone books, each one named after one of the four seasons. Known for writing with experimental elegance, she turns to time in the post Brexit world, specifically Autumn 2016, “exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take.” (Claire)
A Separation by Katie Kitamura: A sere and unsettling portrait of a marriage come undone, critics are hailing Kitamura's third book as "mesmerizing" and "magnificent." The narrator, a translator, goes to a remote part of Greece in search of her serially unfaithful husband, only to be further unmoored from any sense that she (and in turn the reader) had of the contours of their shared life. Blurbed by no fewer than six literary heavyweights -- Rivka Galchen, Jenny Offill, Leslie Jamison, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Karl Ove Knausgaard -- A Separation looks poised to be the literary Gone Girl of 2017. (Kirstin B.)
Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez: This young Argentinian journalist and author has already drawn a lot of attention for her “chilling, compulsive” gothic short stories. One made a December 2016 issue of The New Yorker; many more will be published this spring as Things We Lost in the Fire, which has drawn advanced praise from Helen Oyeyemi and Dave Eggers. The stories themselves follow addicts, muggers, and narcos -- characters Oyeyemi calls “funny, brutal, bruised” -- as they encounter the terrors of everyday life. Fair warning: these stories really will scare you. (Kaulie)
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. Darnielle is best known for the The Mountain Goats, a band in which he has often been the only member. But his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, was nominated for a number of awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, set in Iowa in the 1990s, is about a video store clerk who discovers disturbing scenes on the store’s tapes. (Elizabeth)
300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso: It's as if, like the late David Markson, Manguso is on a gnomic trajectory toward some single, ultimate truth expressed in the fewest words possible -- or perhaps her poetic impulses have just grown even stronger over time. As its title suggests, this slim volume comprises a sequence of aphorisms ("Bad art is from no one to no one") that in aggregate construct a self-portrait of the memoirist at work. "This book is the good sentences from the novel I didn't write," its narrator writes. (Kirstin B.)
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso: Set in South Africa, Omotoso’s novel describes the bitter feud between two neighbors, both well-to-do, both widows, both elderly, one black, one white. Described by the TLS as one of the “Best Books by Women Every Man Should Read.” (Lydia)
Running by Cara Hoffman: The third novel from Hoffman, celebrated author of Be Safe I Love You, Running follows a group of three outsiders trying to make it the red light district of Athens in the 1980s. Bridey Sullivan, a wild teenager escaping childhood trauma in the States, falls in with a pair of young “runners” working to lure tourists to cheap Athenian hotels in return for bed and board. The narrative itself flashes between Athens, Sullivan’s youth, and her friend and runner Milo’s life in modern-day New York City. According to Kirkus, this allows the novel to be “crisp and immediate,” “beautiful and atmospheric,” and “original and deeply sad.” (Kaulie)
Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom: Academic and Twitter eminence McMillan Cottom tackles a subject that, given a recent spate of lawsuits, investigations, and closings, was front-page news for a good part of 2016. Drawing on interviews with students, activists, and executives at for-profit colleges and universities, Lower Ed aims to connect the rise of such institutions with ballooning levels of debt and larger trends of income inequality across the U.S. (Kirstin B.)
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. Febos’s gifts as a writer seemingly increase with the types of subjects and themes that typically falter in the hands of many memoirists: love (both distant and immediate), family, identity, and addiction. Her adoptive father, a sea captain, looms large in her work: “My captain did not give me religion but other treasures. A bloom of desert roses the size of my arm, a freckled ostrich egg, true pirate stories. My biological father, on the other hand, had given me nothing of use but life...and my native blood.” Febos transports, but her lyricism is always grounded in the now, in the sweet music of loss. (Nick R.)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: A sweeping look at four generations of a Korean family who immigrates to Japan after Japan's 1910 annexation of Korea, from the author of Free Food for Millionaires. Junot Díaz says “Pachinko confirms Lee's place among our finest novelists.” (Lydia)
Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin: Following in the literary tradition of Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf and Edgar Allan Poe, Elkin is fascinated by street wanderers and wanderings, but with a twist. The traditional flâneur was always male; Elkin sets out to follow the lives of the subversive flâneuses, those women who have always been “keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” In a review in The Guardian, Elkin is imagined as “an intrepid feminist graffiti artist,” writing the names of women across the city she loves; in her book, a combination of “cultural meander” and memoir, she follows the lives of flaneuses as varied as George Sand and Martha Gellhorn in order to consider “what is at stake when a certain kind of light-footed woman encounters the city.” (Kaulie)
March
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: In an unnamed city, two young people fall in love as a civil war breaks out. As the violence escalates, they begin to hear rumors of a curious new kind of door: at some risk, and for a price, it’s possible to step through a portal into an entirely different place -- Mykonos, for instance, or London. In a recent interview, Hamid said that the portals allowed him “to compress the next century or two of human migration on our planet into the space of a single year, and to explore what might happen after.” (Emily)
The Idiot by Elif Batuman: Between The Possessed -- her 2010 lit-crit/travelogue on a life in Russian letters and her snort-inducing Twitter feed, I am a confirmed Batuman superfan. This March, her debut novel samples Fyodor Dostoevsky in a Bildungsroman featuring the New Jersey-bred daughter of Turkish immigrants who discovers that Harvard is absurd, Europe disturbed, and love positively barking. Yet prose this fluid and humor this endearing are oddly unsettling, because behind the pleasant façade hides a thoughtful examination of the frenzy and confusion of finding your way in the world. (Il’ja R.)
White Tears by Hari Kunzru: A fascinating-sounding novel about musical gentrification, and two white men whose shared obsession with hard-to-find blues recordings leads them to perdition. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called White Tears "perhaps the ultimate literary treatment of the so-called hipster, tracing the roots of the urban bedroom deejay to the mythic blues troubadours of the antebellum South.” (Lydia)
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion: Excerpts from two of the legendary writer’s commonplace books from the 1970s: one from a road trip through the American south, and one from a Rolling Stone assignment to cover the Patty Hearst trial in California. Perhaps the origin of her observation in Where I Was From: “One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.” (Lydia)
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg: A novel about a 39-year-old woman taking stock of her life, from the best-selling author of The Middlesteins and St. Mazie. This one prompted Eileen Myles to ask “Is all life junk -- sparkly and seductive and devastating -- just waiting to be told correctly by someone who will hold our hand and walk with us a while confirming that what we’re living is true.” Evidently so. (Lydia)
Ill Will by Dan Chaon: Dustin Tillman was a child when his parents and aunt and uncle were murdered in his home, and it was his testimony that sent his older, adopted brother, Rusty, to jail for the crime. Forty years later, he learns that Rusty is getting out based on new DNA evidence. As that news sends tremors through Dustin’s life and the life of his family, he buddies up with an ex-cop who has a theory about some local murders. As often happens in Chaon’s book, you’ll be gripped by the story and the characters from the first page, and then all of a sudden you suspect that nothing is as it seems, and you’re sucked in even further. (Janet).
The Accusation by Bandi: For readers interested in a candid look at life in North Korea, The Accusation -- originally published in South Korea in 2014 -- will immerse you via the stories of common folk: a wife who struggles to make daily breakfast during a famine, a factory supervisor caught between denouncing a family friend and staying on the party's good side, a mother raising her child amidst chilling propaganda, a former Communist war hero who is disillusioned by the Party, a man denied a travel permit who sneaks onto a train so he can see his dying mother. Bandi is of course a pseudonym: according to the French edition, the author was born in 1950, lived in China, and is now an official writer for the North Korean government. The stories, written between 1989 and 1995, were smuggled out by a friend -- and will be available to us via Grove Press. (Sonya)
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti: This new novel by the editor of One Story magazine follows a career criminal who goes straight to give his daughter a chance at a normal life. But when his daughter, Loo, gets curious about the 12 mysterious scars on her father’s body, each marking a separate bullet wound, she uncovers a history much darker than she imagined. Twelve Lives is “is one part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation,” says Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth. (Michael B.)
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge: Fiction meets history in The Night Ocean's series of intricately nested narratives. A psychologist's husband, obsessed with a did-they-or-didn't-they affair between horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and a gay teenage admirer, disappears while attempting to solve the mystery. Set over a 100-year period and spanning latitudes from Ontario to Mexico City, this novel from New Yorker contributor La Farge promises to pull Lovecraft's suspense into the present day with flair. (Kirstin B.)
Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth: Unferth is an author about whom many overused litspeak cliches are true: she is incisive, bitingly funny, and -- here it comes--— whipsmart. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for her memoir, Revolution, her short stories have been published in Granta, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review, and are collected here for the first time. (Janet)
April
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout: “As I was writing My Name Is Lucy Barton,” said Strout, the New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, of her 2016 novel, “it came to me that all the characters Lucy and her mother talked about had their own stories.” Anything is Possible was written in tandem to Lucy Barton. For Strout’s many devoted readers, this novel promises to expand on and add depth to the story, while exploring themes for love, loss, and hope in a work that, “recalls Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity.” (Claire)
Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Set in post-colonial Kenya, this troubling allegory from the perennial Nobel candidate explores the evil that men do and the hope that serves as its only antidote. Written while in prison, the book’s proverbial structure and unapologetically political message -- think Karl Marx delivering liberation theology in East Africa -- follow a young Kenyan woman, Jacinta Wariinga, who, despite grave injustice, is determined to see neither her spirit nor her culture crushed. This is the original 1982 translation from the Gikuyu language, now being rereleased as part of the Penguin Classics African Writers Series. (Il’ja)
Marlena by Julie Buntin
I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Buntin's remarkable debut novel, about an intense friendship between two young women in rural Michigan, and I agree with Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter, who calls it "lacerating." Aside from a riveting story and nuanced characters, Buntin has also delivered an important story about addiction and poverty in middle America. In its starred review, Booklist called it "Ferrante-esque." (Edan)
American War by Omar El Akkad: El Akkad is an award-winning Canadian journalist, whose reporting has ranged from the war in Afghanistan to the protests in Ferguson, Mo. His brilliant and supremely disquieting debut novel opens in 2074, at the outbreak of the Second American Civil War, and follows a young Louisiana girl, Sarat Chestnut, as time and conflict gradually transform her from a child into a weapon. (Emily)
The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch: In a new kind of world, we need a new kind of hero and a reimagined Joan of Arc from Yuknavitch seems like just the thing. Following her widely lauded The Small Backs of Children, this novel takes place in the near future after world wars have turned the Earth into a war zone. Those surviving are sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures who write stories on their skin, but a group of rebels rally behind a cult leader named Jean de Men. Roxane Gay calls it, “a searing condemnation, and fiercely imaginative retelling.” (Claire)
The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron: Our own Cameron returns with a new novel about two women separated by, oh, only 40,000 years: Girl, the eldest daughter in the last family of Neanderthals, and present-day archeologist Rosamund Gale, who is excavating Neanderthal ruins while pregnant. How these two stories echo and resonate with one another will be just one of its delights. Such an ingenious premise could only come from the writer who brought us The Bear, which O, The Oprah Magazine deemed "a tender, terrifying, poignant ride" and which People gave 4 stars, saying "it could do for camping what Jaws did for swimming." (Edan)
Startup by Doree Shafrir: Probably you know Shafrir by her byline at Buzzfeed -- her culture writing always whipsmart, current, and grounded. Shafrir’s debut novel sounds like more of the same: three people working in the same Manhattan office building with colliding desires, ambitions, and relations, head for major conflict and reckoning as scandal sucks each of them into a media-and-money vortex. Hilarity, a mindfulness app, and an errant text message are also involved. Looking forward to this one. (Sonya)
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah: This debut collection of short stories, which takes its name from a story published in Catapult in 2015 to wide acclaim -- one that seamlessly blends magical realism and a kind of sci-fi, resulting in a one-of-a-kind dystopia -- announces the arrival of a brilliant new talent. Don’t take our word for it: one story, “Who Will Greet You at Home,” appeared in The New Yorker and was a National Magazine Award finalist, and others are already drawing high praise from across the publishing community. These stories explore the ties that bind us together, but in magical, even subversive forms. (Kaulie)
Void Star by Zachary Mason: In Mason’s second novel, three people living in wildly different circumstances in a dystopian near-future are drawn together by mysterious forces. The future that Mason imagines in Void Star is not particularly startling -- extreme climate change, ever-widening class divisions, and AIs who have evolved well beyond the understanding of the humans who created them -- but what sets Void Star apart is the stunning and hallucinatory beauty of Mason’s prose. Both a speculative thriller and a meditation on memory and mortality. (Emily)
Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke: I tell as many people as possible how cool I think Radtke is, so that when she blows up I’ll have proof that I was ahead of the curve. Besides having her own career as a writer and illustrator, she is the managing editor of Sarabande Books (where she not only published Thrown by Kerry Howley -- one of my favorite books of the last 5 years -- but designed its killer cover). Her first book is graphic memoir/travelogue about her life, family history, and a trip around the world in search of ruins. (Janet)
Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard: The author goes home in Gerard’s thorough, personal, and well-researched collection of essays on Florida, its inhabitants, and the ways they prey upon each another. As far as Floridian bona fides, it doesn’t get much more Sunshine State than growing up on the Gulf in an Amway family, and truly in the book’s eight essays, Gerard covers more of the state’s ground than Walkin’ Lawton Chiles. (Nick M.)
Kingdom of the Young by Edie Meidav: A new collection of the stories by novelist who brought us Lola, California, Crawl Space, and The Far Field. The stories have invited comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov, Clarice Lispector and Italo Calvino. (Lydia)
May
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami: The seven stories in Murakami’s new collection concern the lives of men who, for one reason or another, find themselves alone. In “Scheherazade,” a man living in isolation receives regular visits from a woman who claims to remember a past life as a lamprey; in “Yesterday,” a university student finds himself drawn into the life of a strange coworker who insists that the student go on a date with his girlfriend. (Emily)
The Purple Swamp Hen by Penelope Lively: Across her many wonderful books, Lively has ranged from low farce (How It All Began) to high feeling (Moon Tiger), from children’s literature to a memoir on old age. Now comes her fourth story collection, the first in 20 years. The title story draws on reliably entertaining source material: the meretricious lives of Roman rulers. Robert Graves turned to a stammering Claudius for his narrator, Lively to a less exalted personage: a purple swamp hen. Other stories involve trouble: a husband and wife working their way out of it, and a betrayed wife doing her best to cause some for her husband. (Matt)
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki: Our own Lepucki has always had keen insight into the psyches of women -- particularly so-called "difficult" protagonists. Her first novel, California, may have been about a family surviving the end of society, but it was really a post-apocalyptic domestic drama full of sharp wit and observations. Her sophomore effort is more grounded in reality but equally cutting. Lady is a writer struggling to raise her two kids and finish her memoir when she hires S. to help, but the artist becomes more than just a nanny for Lady’s eldest troubled son. (Tess M.)
Trajectory by Richard Russo: In this new collection, Russo, a 2016 Year in Reading contributor, takes a break from the blue-collar characters that readers have come to know from his bestselling novels Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls to spin tales of struggling novelists trying their hands at screenwriting and college professors vacationing in Venice. No matter. Readers can still count on Russo to deliver deeply human stories of heartbreak leavened by gently black humor. (Michael B.)
The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris: The book after Ferris’s Man Booker shortlisted To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a collection of short stories. The title story, first published by The New Yorker in 2008, is about a couple who invite a boring couple over to dinner (“even their goddam surprises are predictable,”) only to be surprised when the boring couple manage to surprise by not showing up. The collection pulls together stories that promise the, “deeply felt yearnings, heartbreaking absurdity, and redemptive humor of life,” for which Ferris is so well known. (Claire)
The Leavers by Lisa Ko. Ko’s debut novel has already won the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction, a prize created and selected by Barbara Kingsolver. The contest awards a novel “that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships,” and Ko’s book certainly fits that laudable description. The novel is the story of Deming Gao, the son of a Chinese-American immigrant mother who, one day, never returns home from work. Adopted by white college professors, Deming is renamed and remade in their image -- but his past haunts him. (Nick R.)
Isadora by Amelia Gray. The endlessly inventive Gray (whose story “Labyrinth” from The New Yorker is a gem) creates a fictional interpretation of Isadora Duncan, once described as the “woman who put the Modern into Modern Dance.” A dancer who mixed the classical, sacred, and sensual, Duncan is the perfect subject matter for Gray; if a writer can expertly resurrect the Theseus myth at a small-town fair, then she can do justice to a life as inspiring -- and troubled -- as Duncan’s. (Nick R.)
Chemistry by Weike Wang: In this debut novel, a graduate student in chemistry learns the meaning of explosive when the rigors of the hard sciences clash with the chronic instability of the heart. A traditional family, a can’t-miss fiancé, and a research project in meltdown provide sufficient catalyst to launch the protagonist off in search of that which cannot be cooked up in the lab. If the science bits ring true, in her diabolical hours, the author doubles as a real-life organic chemist. (Il’ja R.)
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal: Satyal’s novel takes place in a suburb near Cleveland and tells the story of Harit and Ranjana, who are both Indian immigrants that are experiencing loss. Harit’s sister has passed away and he’s caring for his mother; Ranjana’s son has left to college and she’s worrying her husband is having an affair. These two characters form a friendship amidst grief and self-discovery in a novel that is both heartfelt and funny. (Zoë)
Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley: The New Yorker stalwart (whose title story “Bad Dreams” appeared in the magazine in 2013) comes out with her third collection of short stories in the past decade. In one set in 1914, a schoolteacher grapples with the rising power of the women’s suffrage movement; in another, a young housesitter comes across a mysterious diary. In general, the stories let tiny events twirl out into moments of great consequence -- in the title story, a young child’s nightmare turns out to be the hinge of the plot. (Thom)
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul. Ah, the current frontrunner for Most Relatable Title of the Coming Year. The Canadian writer’s debut essay collection is “about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Western culture, addressing sexism, stereotypes, and the universal miseries of life.” Fans of her work online will be eager to see her on the printed page. Canadian journalist (and Koul’s former journalism professor) Kamal Al-Solaylee said of her writing, “To me, she possesses that rarest of gifts: a powerful, identifiable voice that can be heard and appreciated across platforms and word counts.” (Elizabeth)
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan: In her debut novel, Alyan tells the story of a Palestinian family that is uprooted by the Six-Day War of 1967 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This heartbreaking and important story examines displacement, belonging, and family in a lyrical style. (Zoë)
June
So Much Blue by Percival Everett: In Everett’s 30th book, an artist toils away in solitude, painting what may be his masterpiece. Alone in his workspace, secluded from his children, best friend, and wife, the artist recalls memories of past affairs, past adventures, and all he’s sacrificed for his craft. (Nick M.)
The Accomplished Guest by Ann Beattie: 1976 was a good year for Beattie: she published her first story collection, Distortions, as well as her debut novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter. Forty years and roughly 20 books later, Beattie has a new collection of stories, closely following last year’s The State We’re In, linked stories set in Maine. One defining trait of Beattie’s short fiction is her fondness for quirks: “However well you write, you can become your own worst enemy by shaping it so highly that the reader can relate to it only on its own terms. Whereas if you have some little oddities of everyday life that aren’t there to be cracked, it seems to me that people can identify with it.” (Nick R.)
Hunger by Roxane Gay: A few years ago, Gay wrote Tumblr posts on cooking and her complex relationship with food that were honest yet meditative. It was on the cusp of her breakthrough essay collection Bad Feminist. Now she may be a household name, but her second nonfiction book delves into the long-running topic of the role food plays in her family, societal, and personal outlook with the same candor and empathy. (Tess M.)
The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin: The Morning News cofounder and author of Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down returns with a murder mystery/romance/coming-of-age story set in New Hampshire. (Lydia)
Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim: Lim has long been publisher of the small, avant-garde Ellipsis Press, whose authors, including Joanna Ruocco, Evelyn Hampton, Jeremy M. Davies, and Lim himself, are remarkable for their unique voices, their attention to language and experimentation. Together they make a significant if lesser-known body of work. Dear Cyborg, Lim’s third novel, will be his first with a major press (FSG). Tobias Carroll has said, “Lim’s novels tread the line between the hypnotically familiar and the surreptitiously terrifying.” With comparisons to Tom McCarthy and Valeria Luiselli and praise from Gary Lutz and Renee Gladman, Lim’s work is worth seeking out. (Anne)
The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro: In this follow-up to Cutting Teeth, about a zeitgeisty group portrait of Brooklyn hipster moms, Fierro turns back the clock to the summer of 1992 when a plague of gypsy moths infests Avalon, an islet off the coast of Long Island, setting in motion a complex tale of interracial love, class conflict, and possible industrial poisoning at the local aircraft factory. Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, says Fierro, director of Brooklyn’s Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, has written “a novel to slowly savor, settling in with her characters as you would old friends.” (Michael B.)
The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton: A debut novel about the Egyptian revolution from filmmaker and activist Hamilton, who has written about the events of Tahrir square for The Guardian and elsewhere. (Lydia)
And Beyond
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward: The Odyssey has been repeatedly invoked by early reviewers of Sing, Unburied, Sing, which follows its protagonist on the journey from rural Mississippi to the state penitentiary and beyond. In the hands of a less talented writer, that parallel might seem over-the-top, but in the hands of one of America’s most talented, generous, and perceptive writers, it’s anything but. (Nick M.)
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy: What does Niels Bohr's take on quantum mechanics have to do with Johann Sebastian Bach and the suicide of a young New Orleans woman? Perhaps nothing. Or perhaps this, overheard at an advance reading -- from 2015 -- of Cormac McCarthy’s long-awaited new novel: "Intelligence is numbers; it's not words. Words are things we made up." That semi-colon haunts me. From Knopf: a “book one” and “book two” by McCarthy are set for a March 2017 release. A week later the story changes. Maybe July. Perhaps December. With McCarthy, the calculus remains inscrutable but the wait worth it. (Il’ja R.)
And So On by Kiese Laymon: We’ve learned virtually nothing new about this book since our last preview, but continue to expect it in 2017. As I said then, “Laymon is a Mississippi-born writer who has contributed to Esquire, ESPN, the Oxford American, Guernica, and writes a column for The Guardian. His first novel, Long Division, makes a lot of those 'best books you’ve never heard of' lists, so feel free to prove them wrong by reading it right now. What we know about his second novel is that he said it’s ‘going to shock folks hopefully. Playing with comedy, Afro-futurist shit and horror.’” (Janet)
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet: A madcap critical theory mystery by the author of HHhH. In the new novel, a police detective comes up against the likes of Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva. It sounds bonkers. (Lydia)
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang: Zhang’s got range: the poet/Rookie writer/essayist/ and now fiction writer has a voice that’s at once incisive and playful and emboldened. “If I fart next to a hulking white male and then walk away, have I done anything important?” she asks in her chapbook Hags, when wondering about ways to fight imperialism; she has written of encounters with white privilege as a Chinese American, of messiness and feelings and depression, of errata and text messages and Tracey Emin, and of resisting Donald Trump. Zhang’s sure to bring this force to her first collection of short stories, Sour Heart, which will be the first book published by Lena Dunham’s Lenny imprint. (Anne)
Made for Love by Alissa Nutting: Hazel ran out of her husband and moved into her father’s retirement community, a trailer park for senior citizens. She’s laying low for a while. Things are complicated, though. Her husband is the founder and CEO of Gogol Industries, a tech conglomerate bent on making its wares ubiquitous in everyday life, and he’s determined to use the company’s vast, high-tech resources to get her back. Meanwhile, did I mention Hazel’s father is obsessed with a realistic sex robot? (Nick M.)
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons: A debut novel from Apogee Journal cofounder and contributing editor at LitHub. Thandi loses her South African mother and navigates the process of grieving and growing up in Pennsylvania. (Lydia)
And Now We Have Everything by Meaghan O’Connell: Millions Year in Reading alum and New York magazine’s The Cut columnist O’Connell will bring her signature voice to a collection of essays about motherhood billed as “this generation’s Operating Instructions.” Readers who follow O’Connell’s writing for The Cut or her newsletter look forward to a full volume of her relatable, sometimes mordant, sometimes tender reflections on writing and family life. (Lydia)
This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins: Jerkins is way too accomplished for her age, but her range of skills and interests - 19th-century Russian lit, postwar Japanese lit, speaker of six languages, editor, assistant literary agent -- is so awesome I just can’t begrudge her. Jerkins writes reportage, personal essays, fiction, profiles, interviews, literary criticism, and sports and pop culture pieces. Now she has an essay collection coming out: This Will Be My Undoing. Some of her previously published essays include "The Psychic Toll of Reading the News While Black", "Why I Got a Labiaplasty in My 20s", and "How Therapy Doesn't Make Me a Bad Christian" -- all of which may or may not be collected in the new book; but you get a feel for the great stuff we can expect. (Sonya)
Sharp by Michelle Dean: Dean has made a name for herself as an astute feminist journalist and critic for the likes of The Guardian, the New Republic, and The Nation. Her work often focuses on the intersection of crime, culture, and literature. So it's fitting that her first book is nonfiction on other powerhouse female critics. (Tess M.)