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The Millions’ Great Summer 2025 Book Preview
Any book can be a beach read with the right attitude. On offer this summer are a bevy of books to take seaside, or poolside, or to the park, patio, or outdoor setting of your choosing. Here you’ll find just over 100 titles out this summer that we’re excited about 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 hope you find your next great read among them.
The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we're determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if, at times, a bit belatedly).
—Sophia Stewart, editor
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July
I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman (Ecco)
Kreizman's writing captures that distinctly millennial brand of malaise with refreshing wit and vigor, and her always-correct book world takes are informed by a deep love of literature. I'm looking forward to seeing these chops and more on display in her debut essay collection. —Sophia M. Stewart
Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn (Catapult)
Nguyen's debut is a subversive satire and romantic romp rolled into one, following two Asian American trans women's scheme to join a men's pro indoor volleyball league. —SMS
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
Shteyngart returns with the story of a precocious little girl as she searches for her birth mother, navigates her imploding family, and strives toward unending love. —Eva M. Baron
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloombsury)
Savas's followup to her brilliant novel The Anthropologists is a collection of stories that deconstruct contemporary life through the lenses of desire, loss, and intimacy. —SMS
A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart by Nishant Batsha (Ecco)
The sophomore novel from Batsha, inspired by the real-life romance of 20th-century radicals M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, tells the love story of an Indian revolutionary and Stanford grad student who fall for one another in 1917. —SMS
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie (Doubleday)
A ruthless theater critic meets his match in a struggling actress, who sets off the unraveling of his reputation after a one-night stand in Runcie’s clever tale, which also offers a piercing critique of power games and misogyny. —Sam L. Spratford
Putafeminista by Monique Prada, tr. Amanda De Lisio (Feminist Press)
Brazilian sex worker and activist Prada calls for a working class women's movement that rejects "whorephobia" and critiques current feminist discourse around sex work in this bracing manifesto. —SMS
Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House)
Howarth's queer coming-of-age novel set in small-town Ireland in the early 1990s mines the intensity of first love (and first heartbreak) as well as the pain of being queer in a small, conservative community. —SMS
Fools for Love by Helen Schulman (Knopf)
Following her 2023 novel Lucky Dogs, Schulman offers up a smart short story collection complete with a cast of characters including an East Village playwright, a precocious baby, and an American mother and French Orthodox rabbi who become lovers. —EMB
The Feather Detective by Chris Sweeney (Avid Reader)
In the 1960s, Roxie Laybourne pioneered the field of forensic ornithology, which is exactly what it sounds like—using feathers to solve bird-related mysteries and crimes, from plane crashes to a racist tarring-and-feathering. Sweeney's biography must be read to be believed. —SMS
A Return to Self by Aatish Taseer (Catapult)
Part travelogue, part memoir, A Return to Self was spurred by the revocation of Taseer's Indian citizenship in 2019, exiling him from his home of 30 years. Traveling across cities in Turkey and Mexico, he considers questions of identity, home, and why certain sites become historical epicenters. —SMS
The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Machida, tr. Bruno Navasky (Putnam)
Centered on a small-town Japanese mini-mart aptly called Tenderness, Machida’s international bestseller is a heartfelt ode to community and the unassuming delights that help us all endure. —SLS
Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems by Vernon Duke, tr. Boris Dralyuk (Paul Dry Books)
I've been reading Dralyuk's translations of and writing about Vernon Duke for a couple years now, courtesy of his wonderful blog, and could not be more excited to see Duke's Los Angeles poems paired with his 1995 memoir—both rendered in Dralyuk's always-brilliant translation from the Russian. —SMS
A Flower Traveled in My Blood by Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader)
Gilliland's sweeping, rigorous narrative history tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the fearless Argentine grandmothers whose pregnant daughters were disappeared and whose grandchildren were kidnapped by the government—and have much to teach us now. —SMS
Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore (Tin House)
The 11 stories in Moore's debut collection explore the lives of Black men and women in the American South—from North Carolina to Florida to Texas—who seek a sense of belonging in the oppressive shadow of history. —SMS
Information Age by Cora Lewis (Joyland)
Lewis’s novella of a journalist covering technology in the late 2010s looks back on the not-so-distant early days of our dizzying digital news cycle, through the ears of one woman whose reporting and personal life meld into one noisy milieu. —SLS
Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo, tr. Chi-Young Kim (Astra House)
A successful sculptor contemplates killing herself by eating a fatal serving of blowfish—just as her grandmother did before her—in Jo's haunting novel. —SMS
Nothing More of This Land by Joseph Lee (One Signal)
Growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, Lee found that his Wampanoag identity didn’t match what he learned about U.S. history at school. Now a journalist, he thinks about the meaning of Indigenous identity today and how one might move beyond colonial legacies. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde (Riverhead)
Following their acclaimed debut Vagabonds!, Osunde’s sophomore novel conjures up more than two dozen multi-generational characters navigating queer life in Nigeria, who grapple with everything from the risks of authenticity to questions of death and God. —SLS
Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit)
Yee weaves tragedy into comedy in her debut novel, which follows an unnamed Chinese American woman as she navigates the one-two punch of discovering her husband's infidelity and being diagnosed with breast cancer. —SMS
Pan by Michael Clune (Penguin)
A precocious teenager tries to get to the roots of his anxiety after he starts suffering from panic attacks, reading and writing his way toward an explanation—including that the Greek god Pan, from which the word panic, comes, might be trapped inside his body. —SMS
Sloppy by Rax King (Vintage)
King follows up her cheeky debut Tacky with an essay collection about bad behavior—from shoplifting to drug use and abuse to mental illness—written with her characteristic wit, cheek, and sense of gallows humor. —SMS
Black Genius by Tre Johnson (Dutton)
Johnson’s subversive and entertaining essays weave family and U.S. history to illuminate Black ingenuity and the "brilliance of the everyday," from 90s airbrush graffiti tees to unassuming family traditions. —SLS
The Trembling Hand by Mathelinda Nabugodi (Knopf)
Nabugodi's new history of Romantic literature illuminates the ever-looming presence of the Atlantic slave trade in the lives and work of Shelley, Keats, and others, exemplifying the difficulty—and necessity—of facing the violent contradictions that undergird the stories we love to read and tell. —SLS
An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park (Random House)
Park’s story collection perfects the tongue-in-cheek accounting of modern life that characterized his two novels, delivering a memorable cast of characters whose fates coincide at the border between mundane and strange. —SLS
Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos, tr. Peter Bush (NYRB)
This new translation restores the most unsavory truths about Franco’s dictatorship to Martín-Santos's darkly funny 1962 novel, which follows a Nobel-aspiring scientist through the shadows of a society that has hit rock bottom. —SLS
The Dance and the Fire by Daniel Saldaña París, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Catapult)
Described as "spellbinding" by PW, Saldaña’s latest is a smoldering tale of three friends whose erotic and artistic dynamics rouse a Mexican city from its collective slumber. —SLS
Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky (Pantheon)
From the editor of the satirical comics publication the Nib comes an imaginative and terrifying story of monsters both natural and supernatural, set in 2081 between a dystopian New York City and a cult in the Catskills. —SLS
My Clavicle and Other Massive Misalignments by Marta Sanz, tr. Katie King (Unnamed)
Sanz's autofictional English-language debut is a poetic meditation on illness, mortality, and writing sure to please memoir readers and mystery enthusiasts alike. —SLS
Love Forms by Claire Adam (Hogarth)
In a sprawling and emotional tale of an aging woman in search of the daughter she gave up for adoption at 16, Adam probes the many ways love can shape our lives in her latest novel since her prize-winning debut Golden Child. — SLS
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown)
The art world is infamously cutthroat—and an endless source of inspiration for novelists. Wambugu’s debut fits squarely into this tradition, conjuring New York’s art scene in the early 1990s through the intense, competitive, and richly imagined friendship of two ambitious women. —EMB
August
Solitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz, tr. Benjamin Brooks (Astra House)
In Cruz’s propulsive liberation novel, a mother and a daughter work as live-in maids in the Golden Plate, the most expensive building in an unnamed Brazilian city. While there, the duo must reckon not only with their own invisibility and dissatisfaction, but with Brazil’s legacies of colonial violence, wealth, and injustice. —EMB
He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid by Yoshiharu Tsuge, tr. Ryan Holmberg (D&Q)
Manga creator Yoshiharu Tsuge, now in his 80s, had a relatively short comics career from 1965–1987, rising to cult status but plagued by difficulties with his mental health. This collection of his work, spanning 1975–1981, showcases Yoshiharu’s characteristic blend of the personal and the nightmarish. —NodB
People Like Us by Jason Mott (Dutton)
Mott follows up his 2021 National Book Award–winning novel Hell of a Book with a surreal and intimate story about two Black writers contending with loss, longing, and gun violence. —EMB
Blessings and Disasters by Alexis Okeowo (Holt)
Perhaps even more than the New Yorker writer's journalistic chops, Okeowo's ability to navigate, with nuance and empathy, seemingly hopeless racial divides is what makes this ground-level depiction of her home state of Alabama exceptional. —SLS
The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson (Pegasus)
Watson's debut biography deconstructs the Jayne Eyre author's swift ascent to literary fame and the dueling narratives that continue to shape her legacy. —SMS
The Book of Homes by Andrea Bajani, tr. Elizabeth Harris (Deep Vellum)
Bajani’s episodic, nonlinear narrative traces one man’s memories and rites of passage through a series of northern Italian homes, from infancy in 1976 to 21st-century adulthood. —NodB
Moderation by Elaine Castillo (Viking)
As our world becomes more virtual, so too does romance. That shift grounds Castillo’s intriguing latest, where one of the world’s best content moderators must contend with falling in love during a digital—and increasingly isolated—era. —EMB
Putting Myself Together by Jamaica Kincaid (FSG)
Intimate in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this collection gathers Kincaid's early pieces from such publications as the New Yorker, Village Voice, and Ms., exemplifying her stylistic confidence—and evolution—across time. —EMB
Friends with Words by Martha Barnette (Abrams)
A Way with Words is the only podcast I listen to, and the fact is that I would die for Martha Barnette, so I can't wait to read her chronicle of her lifelong love of language. —SMS
God and Sex by Jon Raymond (S&S)
Climate disaster, New Age writing, carnality, and meditations on God may seem an unlikely melange, but Raymond brilliantly merges each of these strands into this rigorous and probing novel about an author whose brush with a forest fire pushes him to seek a higher power. —EMB
The Dilemmas of Working Women by Fumio Yamamoto, tr. Brian Bergstrom (HarperVia)
Each of the five stories in Yamamoto's collection centers on a different woman navigating life in contemporary Japan, where the alienation of wage labor compounds with the pressure to be agreeable, maternal, and non-confrontational—patriarchal norms to which these "spiky" women cannot bend. —SLS
Loved One by Aisha Muharrar (Viking)
Muharrar—a TV writer with credits on Hacks, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and more—makes her literary debut with this story of love and loss, about a young woman who goes on an intercontinental journey to recover the belongings of her old friend and first love, who dies unexpectedly at 29. —SMS
Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel (FSG)
Perhaps out of necessity, our ongoing housing crisis offers perfect fodder for fiction—or at least that’s the case for Kivel’s aptly-titled, surrealist debut. Part fairy tale, part social commentary, this innovative and wry story follows a young woman’s quest for a home when, in a world-ending twist, every renter is evicted en masse. —EMB
Little World by Josephine Rowe (Transit)
Rowe's story about various lives touched by a child saint's corpse over space and time is lyrical, varied, and only slightly less strange than it sounds. —SLS
Positive Obsession by Susana M. Morris (Amistad)
Octavia Butler was a literary trailblazer as the first Black woman to consistently write and publish science fiction. This sweeping biography probes Butler’s legacy with both sensitivity and rigor, considering the cultural, political, and social contexts that shaped her life and writing. —EMB
Black Moses by Caleb Gayle (Riverhead)
It's a rare and satisfying experience to find a nonfiction book that balances the scope of its content with narrative coherence, without sacrificing either. Gayle's latest carves a historical epic out of a forgotten episode in the Black separatist movement, enthralling as both a character study and a novel look at America's racial history. —SLS
Stories of the True by Jeyamohan, tr. Priyamvada Ramkumar (FSG)
With evocative, refreshing, and at times volatile prose, Jeyamohan reveals the intricacies of life in contemporary India through stories about bureaucrats, elephants, gurus, and doctors. —EMB
The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips (Melville House)
In this highly original thriller, Gus, a Black university professor, plans a burglary to "liberate" a priceless Benin mask from a London museum. The result is a timely meditation on what art institutions owe us and the cultures they plunder. —EMB
The Right of the People by Osita Nwanevu (Random House)
Taking up some of the most monumental political questions of our day, including the viability of America's founding institutions, this treatise from Nwanevu, an editor at the New Republic, is essential reading for anyone who feels their hopes for democratic reform floundering. —SLS
The New Lesbian Pulp ed. Sarah Fonseca and Octavia Saenz (Feminist Press)
Who doesn't love pulp fiction, the more melodramatic the better? This collection is a heady mix of 1950s-era lesbian pulp and newer material that turns up a notch or two the classic tropes of romantic peril, unbridled passion, and revenge. —Claire Kirch
Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, tr. Jeremy Tiang (Riverhead)
In this propulsive translation, a nanny witnesses a wealthy Chinese family’s fall from grace—all while knowing their darkest secrets and caring for their only son. —EMB
The El by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (Vintage)
Van Alst Jr.'s semi-autobiographical novel, inspired by Sol Yurick's The Warriors, follows a group of teenage gang members in Chicago who trek across the city to attend a high-profile gathering of gangs. —SMS
Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press)
In Chou's clever collection, which includes short stories and a novella, features a cast of characters who invariably find themselves in extraordinary situations that shake up their sense of self and make them reconsider their place in the world. —CK
The New Negro ed. Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Princeton UP)
This anthology, coedited by the great Skip Gates, spanning 1887-1937 chronicles how generations of Black thinkers from W.E.B Du Bois to Oscar Micheaux to Zora Neale Hurston conceptualized and debated the idea of the "New Negro." —SMS
The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus (Hogarth)
Antrobus's memoir untangles his knotty relationship to his own deafness, exploring the "missing sounds" that shaped his life and the sense of in-betweenness that long defined both his aural ability and racial identity. —SMS
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (FSG)
The debut novel from the inaugural FSG Writer's Fellow is a Black Southern family drama that wrestles with sin, silence, and patriarchy in a small Mississippi town. —SMS
Mounted by Bitter Kalli (HarperOne)
As Beyoncé and others push us to reconsider the legacy of the cowboy, Kalli explores how intertwined Blackness, nationhood, and horses have been throughout history. —EMB
Patchwork by Tom Comitta (Coffee House)
For fans of Burroughs's cut-up tradition, Comitta's latest is a fresh experiment in the limits of literary collage. Using illustrations and passages from classic literature, the Nature Book author fashions a playful story about the search for a missing snuff box, full of sensory surprises and curiosities of craft. —SLS
Archipelago by Natalie Bakopoulos (Tin House)
This atmospherically rich book, which follows an unnamed translator at an artists' residency on a Croatian island, is also chock-full of thought-provoking commentary on authorship and creative identity. —SLS
Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs (FSG)
Boggs's door-stopper of a biography—the first of Baldwin in three decades—examines how the visionary author's intimate and artistic relationships with four men shaped his life and work. —SMS
Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers (Hub City)
Wohlers's debut novel follows a young woman who arrives at her late grandfather's apple orchard with the intention of giving up her painting career and social life in order to become one with the trees—until the appearance of an old friend upends her plans. —SMS
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)
Marking the first time in two decades that Toews has written about her own life in nonfiction, this memoir is a poignant meditation upon her sister’s suicide, the urge to write, and the limits of memory. —EMB
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles (Picador)
Bowles's 1943 novel—her only one, now with a new introduction from Sheila Heti—is a modernist tale about two upper-class women who eschew convention and embrace debauchery. —SMS
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (HarperCollins)
Fans of Babel will not be disappointed by Kuang's latest dark-academia epic, which follows an honors graduate student in "Analytical Magick" and her rival as they embark on a Dantesque journey to rescue her advisor from the underworld. —SLS
Such Great Heights by Chris DeVille (St. Martin's)
This cultural history of the indie rock explosion—from Neutral Milk Hotel and Death Cab to Sufjan and the National—would have blown my teenage self's mind. It is total catnip to adult-me as well. —SMS
September
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)
In electrifying, intimate prose, Roy's first memoir traces the her complex relationship with her mother, Mary and how it shaped the person—and writer—she ultimately became. —EMB
The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, tr. Polly Barton (Europa)
Following her last collection Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda's latest stays focused on the absurdities and traumas of sexism in Japan, presenting 52 fresh, subversive stories that call to mind Shirley Jackson's short works. —SLS
Trip by Amie Barrodale (FSG)
Barrodale's debut novel follows Sandra, who dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal and must set off on a quest in the afterlife to help her son, who is both literally and metaphorically lost at sea. —SMS
Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (Astra House)
Magic, humor, and faith ground Lozada-Oliva’s story collection, which features beheaded bodies, bizarre video games, sentient tails, and haunted punk houses. —EMB
Miss Ruki by Fumiko Takano, tr. Alexa Frank (NYRC)
Frank's translation brings this lighthearted manga into English for the first time. Originally published in Japan in the 1980s, the eponymous protagonist is an offbeat young woman who rejects the rat race for a slower, more intentional life. —SLS
The Improbable Victoria Woodhull by Eden Collinsworth (Doubleday)
At once celebrated and maligned, the 19th-century businesswoman and activist at the center of Collinsworth's biography dipped her toe in everything from mysticism to free love to an unprecedented presidential campaign. —EMB
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken (ND)
An unlikely narrator guides this visceral horror story: a wax doll created by an unmarried noblewoman accused of witchcraft. Through the eyes of this doll, we witness—with startling clarity—the brutality and fear that ruled 17th-century Denmark. —EMB
Grace Period by Maria Judite de Carvalho, tr. Margaret Jull Costa (Two Lines)
When de Carvalho's protagonist sets out to sell his childhood home to fund a trip for his dying girlfriend, he is forced to reckon with the 25 out-of-control years that separate him from his past, which is full of paralyzing love, pain, and apathy. —VMS
Reflections on Exile by Edward W. Said (Vintage)
This reissue of selected essays by the great scholar and critic Said, which features the particularly salient title essay on the fate of the Palestinian people, is just the book we need right now. —SMS
Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela (Viking)
As polyamory and open relationships gain cultural relevance, Varela's subversive and generous novel considers the sting of rejection and heartbreak from the perspective of its married narrator who has just been dumped by his younger boyfriend. —EMB
Tracker by Alexis Wright (ND)
Decorated novelist Wright returns to nonfiction with a portrait of an influential Aboriginal Australian leader conveyed through collective storytelling, providing a window into Aboriginal culture as it narrates a moment in 20th-century Australian politics. —SLS
The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym (NYRB)
Pym's shrewd and ahead-of-its-time 1978 novel about a women's attachment to a much younger man is back in a new edition from NYRB, featuring an intro from Loved and Missed author Susie Boyt. —SMS
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (Coffee House)
The country home around which Goodman's story coalesces is no ordinary haunted house. Through the eyes of a male protagonist, readers feel the titular spirit Helen at once as an intimately tangible presence and a harbinger of the existential stakes of starting one's life over again. —VMS
The Animal on the Rock by Daniela Tarazona, tr. Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn (Deep Vellum)
After the death of her mother, a woman named Irma holes up on a faraway beach to grieve and, the process, undergoes a supernatural metamorphosis in the Mexican author's latest. —SMS
A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)
Vanasco's memoir looks at how silence is wielded and weaponized through the lens of her own complicated relationship with her mother. —SMS
The Lack of Light by Nino Haratischwili, tr. Charlotte Collin and Ruth Martin (HarperVia)
This sprawling, densely populated saga charts the lead-up to and fallout from Georgia's independence from the Soviet Union through the lives of four childhood friends. —SMS
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)
The brilliant sophomore novel from the National Book Award finalist follows five Black women across two decades as they attempt to shape their lives on their own terms. —VMS
Surviving Paris by Robin Allison Davis (Amistad)
We've all dreamed of escaping to Paris and living "la vie en rose." Davis, a Black woman and journalist, has written a memoir of how she did just that, but things did not go exactly as she'd hoped: Davis was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to contend with it far away from her loved ones, all while trying to find her way amid a foreign culture. —CK
Bird School by Adam Nicolson (FSG)
It’s a slippery slope from looking up a little brown bird on Cornell’s Merlin app to becoming an all-season birder. For Nicolson, a recognition of nesting species led to setting up a shed to watch wildlife year round. The book's British setting covers only a narrow range of birds, but its sentiments are universal; the world might have greater peace and sounder environmental policies if everyone took up birding. —NodB
Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno (Transit)
Zambreno is one of our most inventive and formally daring writers, and their latest work of nonfiction—a meditation on mortality, alienation, boredom, surveillance, and the animal kingdom—sees them at the height of their powers. —SMS
Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (D&Q)
Pond crafts a graphic narrative biography of the six Mitford sisters, among them writers Jessica and Nancy. Raised in a deteriorating English country manse, the early 20th-century socialites were known for differences of opinion around Empire and fascism. Pond paints the upper crust scene in prim navy, cool periwinkle, and powder blue. —NodB
Kaplan's Plot by Jason Diamond (Flatiron)
Centered on a son who returns to Chicago to be with his dying mother, Diamond's debut novel is a stunning story of how families bend to accommodate the unspoken, and how, every once in a while, a tenacious individual might straighten things out. —VMS
Articulate by Rachel Kolb (Ecco)
The deaf writer's deft debut memoir probes the many meanings of language, voice, and communication through the lens of her own attempts to harness speech and be perceived as "articulate." —SMS
For the Sun After Long Nights by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy (Pantheon)
Iranian journalists Jamalpour and Tabrizy chronicle the 2022 women-led protests in Iran over the murder of Kurdish woman Mahsa Jîna Amini at the hands of police, catalyzing one of the country's largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. —SMS
The Waterbearers by Sasha Bonét (Knopf)
Bonét's profound ode to Black womanhood narrates the history of America through generations of Black mothers and daughters—including her own. —SMS
Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Vintage)
When Marisa goes on a company retreat with her unhinged coworkers, the lies she's built her whole successful, fine-art-appreciating persona around are threatened to be exposed. What ensues is like a car crash you can't look away from—if a car crash was as hilarious and well-crafted as Serrano's writing. —SLS
It's Me They Follow by Jeannine Cook (Amistad)
Cook, founder and owner of the beloved Harriett's Bookshop in Philly, debuts with a romance starring a bookseller who becomes a reluctant matchmaker. —SMS
Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead)
After a bout with Covid, a successful author reckons with a dissolving sense of self and struggles to maintain her public persona, in this fictive exploration of consciousness. The No One Is Talking About This author conveys her protagonist’s dissociation and memory loss, heightened when her husband becomes ill and requires her care. —NodB
Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp (Knopf)
The state of the world seems uniquely grim today—but haven't people always thought so? Kemp's sweeping survey charts the surprising history of societal collapse, bringing some (not always comforting) perspective to our own troubling reality. —SMS
We Love You Bunny by Mona Awad (S&S/Marysue Rucci)
Awad returns with another darkly comedic novel set in the "Bunny-verse," after her 2019 cult classic Bunny, about a lonely MFA student who gets seduced by a creepy clique. —SMS
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson (FSG)
The enigmatic Scottish writer Muriel Spark gets her due in Wilson's illuminating biography, which aims to demystify its stubbornly elusive but endlessly fascinating subject. —SMS
Beings by Ilana Masad (Bloomsbury)
Masad's second novel, after All My Mother's Lovers, weaves together three narratives—two set in the 1960s and one in the present—of love, loneliness, and supernatural encounters. —SMS
Cécé by Emmelie Prophète, tr. Aidan Rooney (Archipelago)
Immersed in the atmosphere and people of a Haitian cité, Prophète's titular protagonist attempts to claw a life for herself out of the hands of gangs, junkies, grandmothers, and preachers. With her morbid internet following on one side and the pressures of sex work on the other, Cécé is an imperfect and deeply human testament to female resiliency. —SLS
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin (Dorothy)
Taking inspiration from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Lin chronicles her partner Lan Thao's life and work in this genre-defying portrait. —SMS
To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage (Avid)
Ramage's ambitious and big-hearted debut novel follows one young woman across three decades and multiple continents on her quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut. —SMS
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 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
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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
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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
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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: Scaachi Koul
Oh my god, would you believe that we didn’t die this year? I know that, technically, many people did die this year, but you reading this and me writing this — we did not die. It’s an achievement. You really did your best in the hellfire of 2017. Treat yourself! Get a big juice.
I spent most of the year on a book tour talking about my own stupid thoughts and feelings and sensitivities, examining the very real things that were happening in my life. The result was that I did a lot of reading, largely to pull me out of my narrow little universe and into someone else’s. These are some of my favorites in books and Internet, things that made me forget for a brief moment, that I am dying, and you are dying, and everything hurts all the time. I know I’m supposed to have a joke to finish this paragraph off with, but just be grateful you made it to December without getting shingles, okay?
American War by Omar El Akkad
I hate books about war! People (MEN) get so mad at me when I say that but they activate a part of my brain too dark and too painful to deal with so I rarely read them. But Omar’s writing is so gentle, and he has such compassion for his (FEMALE) characters that his book ends up feeling like three perfectly fused stories: One about growing up, another about family, and a third about politics.
"My Family’s Slave" by Alex Tizon
“It would have blown up my family in an instant. Instead, my siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly."
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
At every book event I did this year, someone would ask me what they should read next, and I always suggested Sam’s book. I did this so often and with such enthusiasm, that in this passage I’m likely repeating myself 20 times over, but here goes anyway: This was the funniest, most charming, poopiest book I’ve read in recent memory. (It might be the poopiest ever but please don’t take me to court.) Nothing in this piss year gave me delight quite like this collection, so read it tomorrow, read it twice.
"The Land of the Large Adult Son" by Jia Tolentino
“It’s memes all the way down with this Administration: Trump, the father of the large adult son of the summer, is himself, clearly, a large adult son.”
The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang
Everyone should read this book, but if you have immigrant parents, do so in private so that a lady on the subway doesn’t put her hand on your shaking shoulder and ask that if you must cry, you do so without blocking the doors.
"The Myth of the Male Bumbler" by Lili Loofbourow
“Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler—the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth—is the best and hardest proof.”
The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall
I know that reading yet another thing about sexual assault or harassment can feel daunting, but I loved this book so much because it tackled it from so many different perspectives: A wife whose husband is accused of something nefarious, his daughter, her boyfriend, his family. The ending made me fucking nuts but only because it was so realistic and inevitable.
"The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
“To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”
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The Invaders by Karolina Waclawiak
Karolina is my boss at BuzzFeed which is definitely not the reason I put her book on my list. I love a book about the secrets suburban families are desperate to keep and The Invaders delivers in a big, creepy way. It’s a great book written by someone who is either completely nuts or a really great manager. Boss Of The Year! Please don’t fire me!!! I’ll be good!!!!!!!!!
"A Restaurant Ruined My Life" by Robert Maxwell
This article—wherein a man in Toronto opens a restaurant without a) any experience and b) without enough money and c) by cutting many necessary corners—is a tragicomedy about how easily men delude themselves into thinking they can do anything just because they want to. I have read this piece 100 times. Should I have any of my own, I will read this to my large adult sons as a warning.
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
A Year in (Canadian) Reading: Claire Cameron
I was on book tour for much of the year. And when I tour, I read. I'm not sure how many books I got through exactly, but I read about quantum gravity, a few different translations of Beowulf, microbiology, and cave art. I read Elon Musk’s biography, meaning I can now more accurately predict the size and shape the coming apocalypse. I read many, many novels.
In looking at my read pile, I decided I needed a focus and narrowed in on Canadian books. But I immediately ran into a problem. What makes a book Canadian?
Margaret Atwood published Survival in 1972, a thematic guide to Canadian literature that searched for ways to define our national literature. Back then, American and British novels tended to dominate our bookshelves. Bookstores often had a curious shelf labelled Canadiana, where the local authors were tucked away.
We spent the next few decades searching for reasons to see ourselves as distinct. We often did this by pointing out who we were. When I was growing up in the '80s, one of my favorite games was to name famous people who were actually Canadian and I still do this—Sandra Oh, Michael J. Fox, Drake, Pamela Anderson, and William Shatner. We hide so easily among others.
Since then, our ideas, our identities, and our writing have all expanded. Canadian literature, or CanLit, has its own hashtag (#canlit), but that’s about the only straightforward thing I can say about it. Now that it undoubtedly exists, we spend our time arguing about what it might be. The central question, as writer Russell Smith asked, "is it a literature that is made here, or set here, or addresses uniquely Canadian themes?" But for many, CanLit also stands for what needs to change. It's a shorthand for an out-dated colonial point of view, structural racism and sexisim, a lack of diversity and opportunity.
So after thinking it through, I've decided why the books on my list are Canadian: They have little or nothing in common. Each is different from the other. There are no similar themes that stand out. The authors have their own identities that are best defined by them. If you asked each author if they are Canadian, I think they would answer yes—but likely with some kind of qualification, caveat, or hyphen. They might include a second citizenship, language, culture, or country. And maybe two or three.
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I'm aware that this isn't exactly a clear definition. I don't need it to be. And similarly, I don't think CanLit is a particularly useful term anymore. We've grown beyond the need to agonize about what we are. But more, the act of defining artistic work involves creating a boundary. Who gets to draw that literary line? I hope that no person nor group would assume that they have the ability to define our books. I will be wary if they do.
So, here are a few of my favorite novels published this year, written by authors who, when asked if they are Canadian, would probably answer, "yeah, and...," and start telling a long and complicated and fascinating story about their identity:
The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill
When I interviewed O’Neill earlier in the year, I confessed to a certain kind of creative jealously. I’d like to say that I’ve since matured, however I’m a writer. Her prose sparkles, her way with the metaphor is unparalleled, and this, her third novel, has an intricate construction. You know when someone folds paper, cuts little holes in it, and—like magic—smooths out a perfect snowflake? Reading it feels like that, except add in some cigarettes, sex, and swearing. O'Neill often writes about Montreal, which in her words is, “totally funny, it’s wry, it’s dirty.” Also a perfect description of this book.
Brother by David Chariandy
A perfectly sculpted novel, each word is placed with a heart full of hip hop. It tells the story of an enduring love between two brothers, Michael and Francis, who live in the suburbs of Toronto (though the T-word is never mentioned). The book gives voice to black and brown men with beautiful and complex emotional lives. As said in The Walrus, the novel shows, “a very different picture than what CanLit usually peddles: comfortable and self-soothing narratives about our supposedly progressive cities.” Brother is already out in Canada. It just won one of our biggest awards, the Writers' Trust Roger Fiction Prize. It will be out in July.
American War by Omar El Akkad
A novel that follows the life of Sarat Chestnut, who is six years old, in 2074, when a second civil war breaks out. Set in what used to be the South, it is told from that perspective. I went to the same Canadian university as El Akkad and asked about this choice. He explained that his work as a reporter often took him to the South. He would find himself talking to a certain kind of person, "incredibly hospitable, would give you the shirt off their back. But also deeply tied to some very old traditions, some of them good, some of them terrible, and god help you if you challenge those traditions." He went on to explain that he was born in Egypt and grew up in the Middle East, "incredibly generous people who are also tied to some very old traditions, and god help you if you challenge those traditions." In my view, that insight lays the framework for this brilliant book.
The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall
This novel came out in Canada in 2016 and in the U.S. this fall, but in our post-Harvey Weinstein world it feels more timely and urgent than ever. A family saga set in Connecticut, a respected teacher at a prep school is accused of sexual assault. The story follows the people who are closest to him, family and close friends. Without ever getting preachy, it draws an elegant line between rape culture, patriarchy, and privilege. I compared it to The Ice Storm or Ordinary People, but it has more contemporary companions, too, in The Interestings or The Woman Upstairs.
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
A Year in Reading: Lidia Yuknavitch
This last year has left me so depleted and on the cusp of despair, because TRUMP of course, because death culture, because planet and existence ending policies. And yet I have been astonished. Up against the gloom and grind of current events voices have emerged, and with those voices body stories, singing up and through the horror. These are the books that left me breathless and alive, reminding me that we must endure, go on, spend every last bit of energy working against the grain of forces that might silence us.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward: A story that breaks down what we mean when we say family, father, mother, self, and reconstitutes it by illuminating the cracks and fissures that will either break us or lead us to light.
Hunger by Roxane Gay: This is a profound body story speaking back to a culture that would disappear that body. If we have hearts left at all, this book is heartspeak, an opportunity to remember how to love into the otherness rather than judge difference as if we have ever had that right. A triumph of a book and a body.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado: WHAT a genre busting burst of brilliance! Restored my faith not only in the short story, but also my delight in those writers (nearly always women, writers of color, or LGBTQ writers) willing to risk everything formally on the page. I am on the sidelines cheering with abandon.
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What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell: I read this book when it first emerged and I will keep reading it every year of my life. It is a secular desire bible. It is desire alive.
The Vegetarian and Human Acts, both by Han Kang: I devoured both of these books and then devoured them again. Both contain a raw and riveting helix made from the fantastic threaded through raw reality, with the body as a site of resistance.
American War by Omar El Akkad: A splicing and remixing of culture that dislocates "America" from her supposed moorings, themselves constructed fictions.
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer: Holy mother of dirt and animals—this book pitches us into a future that is technically already present, and restates our fears and desires inside giant floating bears and beings made from everything about us.
Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot: Stories that untell the dominant culture's cover story from the point of view of a First Nation Woman. Absolutely astonishing in its wrestling of hustle and heart.
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
The Millions Top Ten: October 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 October.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
-
Manhattan Beach
1 month
2.
3.
Exit West
4 months
3.
4.
Men Without Women: Stories
6 months
4.
6.
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
3 months
5.
8.
The Changeling
3 months
6.
5.
Forest Dark
2 months
7.
-
Autumn
1 month
8.
7.
My Absolute Darling
2 months
9.
-
Little Fires Everywhere
1 month
10.
9.
What We Lose
4 months
With Dan Chaon's Ill Will and Omar El Akkad's American War each off to our Hall of Fame, and Elif Batuman's The Idiot dropping off our list, there's room for three newcomers in our October standings - including a new #1.
Atop our list sits Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, her fifth novel and her first in six years. Its immediate ascension indicates that, evidently, Millions readers were champing at the bit for a follow-up to the author's 2011 Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. In our Great 2017 Book Preview, Michael Bourne called Manhattan Beach "a noirish historical novel," which like Goon Squad returns to New York City. Yet the similarities seem to end there:
At the Brooklyn Naval Yard, Anna Kerrigan becomes the nation’s first female diver, repairing ships that will help America win World War II. Through a chance encounter, she meets nightclub owner Dexter Styles, who she hopes can help her solve the riddle of her father’s disappearance years before.
Farther down in seventh position we find Ali Smith's Autumn, which Claire Cameron identified as "the first novel in what will be a Seasonal quartet — four stand-alone books, each one named after one of the four seasons." Smith, a Scottish writer, turns her attentions here 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.'"
Finally, we welcome Year in Reading alum Celeste Ng to our list. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, occupies the ninth spot. A few months back, our own Tess Malone remarked on how the book "tangles multiple families in a drama of class and race in a Cleveland suburb."
Next month, Haruki Murakami's Men Without Women: Stories will surely graduate to the Hall of Fame, meaning at least one new spot on our list will open. Which book will take its place? Will it be one of the "near misses" below? There's only one way to find out.
This month's other near misses included: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, and The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. See Also: Last month's list.
The Millions Top Ten: September 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 September.
This Month
Last Month
Title
On List
1.
1.
Ill Will
6 months
2.
2.
American War
6 months
3.
4.
Exit West
3 months
4.
3.
Men Without Women: Stories
5 months
5.
-
Forest Dark
1 month
6.
7.
The Seventh Function of Language: A Novel
2 months
7.
-
My Absolute Darling
1 month
8.
10.
The Changeling
2 months
9.
6.
What We Lose
3 months
10.
5.
The Idiot
3 months
Minimal shake-ups on this month's list, only two spots opened, and no ascendants to our Hall of Fame, so what on earth is there to talk about? Patterns? The top four books this month have the letter "W" in their titles. What does that mean? The works in fourth, fifth, and sixth position have yellow covers. Is that significant? The mind reels.
In all seriousness, this month marks the entrée of two newcomers, both of whom were spotlit in our Great 2017 Book Preview.
Debuting in the respectable fifth position this month is Nicole Krauss's fourth novel Forest Dark, which "follows the lives of two Americans in Israel in alternating chapters." In his preview for our site, Nick Ripatrazone added context:
Krauss’s novel A History of Love has been rightly praised, but this new book might send people back to her equally intriguing debut, Man Walks into a Room, another investigation of what happens when our lives are radically transformed.
The other newcomer this month is Gabriel Tallent, whose debut novel My Absolute Darling fills our lists seventh spot. In her blurb for our preview, Janet Potter invoked a heavy hitter to sing the book's praise:
The book industry trades in superlatives, but the buzz for this debut novel stands out. To read it is to become an evangelist for it, apparently, and Stephen King says he’ll remember it forever. It’s about 14-year-old Turtle Alveston and her “tortured but charismatic father,” from whom she’s gradually realized she needs to escape, with the help of her one and only friend and an arsenal of survival skills.
This month's other near misses included: The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, The Night Ocean, Little Fires Everywhere, Hillbilly Elegy, and In Praise of Shadows. See Also: Last month's list.
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 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.
Rising Waters: On Omar El Akkad’s ‘American War’
American War, the debut novel from Omar El Akkad, presents a highly plausible dystopia in the not so distant American future. The Second American Civil War erupts over a dispute about the nation’s energy future, with the North embracing green technology and renewables and the South clinging steadfastly to fossil fuels. El Akkad deftly places climate change as a primary force of national disintegration; the geography of this future post-coastal America has been permanently altered by climate change and geographic sectarianism, leaving the battle for American identity to be fought between the Midwest and the South. The new Northern (Blue) capital is Columbus, Ohio, and the capital of the Free Southern (Red) State is Atlanta. The landscape is dramatically different, but the tenor of the politics in the novel is eerily familiar. The newly dominant Bouazizi Empire of Middle Eastern and North African states united from the “Fifth Spring” Arab democratic revolutions is now seeking to manipulate a civil war in the once “soaring, roaring, and oblivious” America. Here, El Akkad not so subtly suggests the corruptibility of democratic states to imperial pursuits. He creates the theatre of conflict in which the novel’s protagonist stakes her claim.
Sarat Chestnut is a fascinating study of the border between justice and ruthlessness. Sarat grows up in a small river town in Louisiana just outside the Free Southern State until her father is killed in a “homicide bombing.” Early on, she doesn’t display inclinations that portend political consciousness, but, instead, an inwardness leading her to a crucial choice: resistance as an existential imperative or capitulation to the meaninglessness of war, death, and the transience of life.
Sarat spends her early childhood examining her surroundings, once pressing “her finger to the needles of a yucca plant,” and finding them “brown and rigid, immune to sun and storm.” It seems to her that nature is the constant, and it is meaningless. Consequently, she views sexuality as an ulterior concern, noticing the “dramatic concern for things that seemed inane and devoid of adventure: the color and style of skirts, the arrival of facial hair, the mysterious topology of flesh.” It’s an unusually extreme kind of seriousness for a kid her age; then again, this is an unusually extreme historical moment in which she finds herself. When her mother, Martina, moves the family to a refugee camp, the stage is set for Sarat’s radicalization.
At the ominously named Camp Patience, Sarat and her family subsist, waiting for the inevitable Northern incursion where they will be slaughtered. There, she is radicalized by a savvy ideologue named Albert Gaines. He hones her igneous intensity into a fixed bayonet of insurgent rage. Here, her naiveté is on full display. Betraying her provincial roots, she’s just not suspicious enough of the overly smooth Gaines. And the clues are not few. At one point even, Gaines, wearing an unwrinkled suit, jumps the shark by offering her caviar. Still, it is clear she is more taken by the persona of Gaines than by his ideas, which are little more than a melange of nativist and anti-imperialist tropes. She sees in him a cultured man, a man in the fray and above it, and it would be hard for any sensitive young person not to find that alluring. But the real radicalizing moment for Sarat is when Northern Blues storm Camp Patience and murder scores of helpless refugees.
El Akkad is excellent here in judiciously refraining from making clear whether it is Gaines’s ideology or the wanton carnage that radicalizes Sarat. When the Northern militias storm Camp Patience, she fights for her life, even relentlessly stabbing a foe until she can’t slash him anymore. Is this the inspiration Gaines imparted to her, or her desire to wreak vengeance on the marauding hordes from the North? After she draws her first blood, she cuts herself as a form of anesthetic as “the heat of life left the man, but she did not feel it.” She achieves the paradox of the revolutionary, of the insurgent, which is ruthlessness in the service of justice.
One weakness of the novel is the lack of development of Sarat's close childhood friend, Marcus Exum, who departs early for the safety of the North, where he eventually becomes a Union Blue officer. Later on, the two are reunited and Sarat feels genuine warmth toward him, even though he has chosen a life antithetical to everything she stands for. Nowhere does she show this same level of mercy or understanding for anyone else, and thus it falls flat. We all know the mere fact of being friends with someone in childhood is no guarantee of sentimental feeling later, especially in the context of the novel here, where Sarat’s entire identity if predicated on a fiercely sectarian orientation to the world.
And that fierce devotion to radical insurgency should be her most noble trait, but, as the novel progresses, it proves to be the most damning. After she’s given up and betrayed by Gaines to the Northern forces, she is tortured in the “Non-Compliance Area” of the dubiously named prison, “Sugarloaf,” clearly a futuristic version of Guantanamo Bay. She is waterboarded and confesses to all crimes she’s charged with: “complicity in all manner of insurrectionist violence, things she’d never heard of before.” El Akkad here deploys a subtle critique of torture as not only immoral, but ineffective, as captives will say literally anything to make the pain stop -- a direct critique of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture and Donald Trump’s lurid flirtation with it.
Roughly the final quarter the novel is narrated by Sarat’s nephew, Benjamin Chestnut. It’s the end of the war, and Benjamin is the voice of a postwar generation sorting through its cultural inheritance. He’s intrigued and ultimately disillusioned by his famous, war-grizzled aunt, living again with her brother (his father), Simon, and his wife, Karina, on the family property in Lincolnton, Ga., not far from Atlanta. Over time, he gets to know her. He feels affection for her, but, frustratingly, he never can get to the core of who she is. She remains inscrutable to him. Ultimately, in adulthood, Benjamin concludes that Sarat’s will to fight was an act of mourning, a profound unhappiness born of helplessness and protracted, pointless struggle.
He recalls one day from his childhood when he and Sarat went swimming in the river near their home. As they get out to dry themselves, he marvels at her body, that intricately austere record of the ravages of war, with its “strange rivulets of scarred skin that lined her upper arms and shoulders, dead-looking and paler than the rest of her.” When she was waterboarded, the sense of drowning overwhelmed her, and she couldn’t resist anymore. No one could. Drowning is universal. There are limits to resistance, even if there are no limits to one’s capacity to resist. Whether it be the metaphorical drowning of American cultural disintegration or the rising seas of a warming, carbon-clogged planet, Sarat’s lust for vengeance is a fight against rising waters sure to submerge us all.
Tuesday New Release Day: Buntin; El Akkad; Arimah; Meidav; Watts; Bausch
Out this week: Marlena by Julie Buntin; American War by Omar El Akkad; What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah; Kingdom of the Young by Edie Meidav; No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts; and Living in the Weather of the World by Richard Bausch. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
April 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 April titles, check out the Great First-Half 2017 Preview, and let us know what you're looking forward to in the comments.
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)
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 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)
No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts: A novel about a black family in North Carolina dealing with economic decline, outsourcing, and the legacy of Jim Crow. Watts's debut has been pitched as a contemporary retelling of The Great Gatsby, but Ron Charles writes in the The Washington Post that Watts hasn't done merely another reboot; she has written a "sonorous, complex novel that’s entirely her own." (Lydia)
A Little More Human by Fiona Maazel: A new novel from the author of Woke Up Lonely, Maazel's latest is a superhero story about a mild-mannered mind-reader slash nursing assistant from Staten Island dealing with personal and professional strife. It sounds as though Maazel has rifled deftly through genres to create something in a class entirely by itself. (Lydia)
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer: A much-awaited new offering from the author of the breakout hit Southern Reach trilogy (the first volume of which will be a movie later this year). The titular Borne is a small, living "green lump" adopted by a lonely young woman living in a post-apocalyptic city plagued by a roving bear and hazardous waste. Colson Whitehead calls Borne "a thorough marvel." (Lydia)
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 Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic by Nick Joaquin: The first U.S. appearance of one of the Philippines' most distinguished writers, pegged to the centenary of his birth. Joaquin, who died in 2004, wrote in English and set much of his work -- which included two novels and several collections of short stories in addition to essays, plays, and criticism -- in post-WWII Manila, exploring themes of colonialism and liberation, Catholicism and folklore. An exciting introduction for uninitiated American readers into Joaquin's oeuvre. (Lydia)
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)
Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba: The first offering from a new, Oakland-based, translation-focused nonprofit publisher Transit Press Books, this is the fourth of Spanish novelist Barba's books to appear in English. The novel relates the story of a new girl in an orphanage, and the sinister game she invents with her co-residents. The novel is translated by Lisa Dillman, with an afterword by Edmund White. In a starred review Kirkus warns, "Barba’s girls, and their game, will linger in the minds of his readers." (Lydia)
Some Necessary French Pessimism
Over the past few months, bookstores have seen a spike in the sale of dystopian novels. George Orwell’s 1984 reached the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in January, followed soon after by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Predictably, this news was fox chased by trend piece writers -- who then became the target of protesting think piece writers: “Forget Nineteen Eighty-Four. These five dystopias better reflect Trump’s US” shouted one; “Grave New World: Why "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is not the book we need in the Trump era,” claimed another.
Meanwhile, away from the mud and scrum, in the hothouse of independent publishing, French author Antoine Volodine’s eighth book in English translation, Radiant Terminus, was released by Open Letter. Deftly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, it’s the first major apocalyptic novel to come out in a year stacked with books in the genre, notably Omar El Akkad’s American War and David Williams’s When the English Fall.
As with most titles without big marketing budgets, Radiant Terminus may struggle to find its way into popular discourse. This is a shame. Not just because it’s the most stylistically courageous, entertaining dystopian novel in recent memory, but because of all possible scenarios leading to our cataclysmic end, the one imagined by Volodine might be among the timeliest. Rather than caused by the direct result of aggression, he envisions the world ruined by a bright idea.
Far in the future -- keep following, this shouldn’t take more than a minute -- engineers of the Second Soviet Union beat warheads into sizzling fuel rods, transforming their planet into a hive of energy self-sufficient cities, resource extraction centers, and prison camps, each powered by a nuclear reactor. But after generations of implied slack and harmony, the reactors fail, a cascade of nuclear meltdowns follow, and this “project of the century,” born of the purest egalitarian spirit, collapses society. Entire continents become uninhabitable. Dog-headed fascists lunge from their dens. Counter-revolutionary armies raze oblast after irradiated oblast.
It’s here that Radiant Termius begins. And where the fun begins.
Narrowly escaping the fall of the last fortified city, comrade-soldier Kronauer flees into the Siberian taiga. In scenes evoking visions of present-day Chernobyl -- birch roots wedging cracks in irradiated concrete, atomic heaps steaming under evergreen canopies -- he seeks help from a settlement believed to be across the steppe, within a dark wood.
As if stumbling into a folk tale dreamt by Strugatsky Brothers, the crippled kolkhoz that Kronauer enters is nuclear-powered yet primordial, existing in a fabulist realm between dreams and reality. This community of “Radiant Terminus,” whence the book gets its title, is led by the monstrous Solovyei, “a gigantic muzhik in his Sunday best, with a beard and a wreath of hair sticking out here and there as if run through by an electrical current.” Unfortunately for Kronauer and all those who meet him, Solovyei is a jealous giant, a twisted psychic tyrant. In the words of one victim:
Nobody was permitted to exist in the kolkhoz unless he’d gotten control over them in the heart of their dreams. No one was allowed to struggle in his or her own future unless he was part of it and directing it as he wished.
Rather than fell Kronauer with his axe, Solovyei makes him a prisoner of the communal farm. Expected to work on pain of being cast as a drain on socialist society, Kronauer meets Radiant Terminus’ residents: Solovyei’s three grown daughters, all prey to their father’s incestuous, oneiric violations; a handful of shambling proles; and Gramma Ugdul, the witchy keeper of a radioactive well, two kilometers deep, at the bottom of which lies a reactor in eternal meltdown. Together they join in the endless labor of gathering and “liquidating” irradiated items by hurling them down Ugdul’s abyss.
The book’s heroic narrative progresses with dreamlike logic, leading, as most would expect, to an almost unbearably tense confrontation between Kronauer and Solovyei. What results isn’t an end. Instead, it precipitates a pivot in the narrative -- or, better described: a concussive break of the central narrative, cracking the skull of the story, opening a consciousness unable to differentiate between nightmares and waking life, declamations and ramblings, physics and shamanism, she and they, he or I.
If this all seems odd, it is -- in the best sense. Part of the joy of the book is the playful seriousness with which Volodine goes about his world building; another is spotting his influences. Samuel Beckett is clearly one. So are the aforementioned Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, perhaps best known for their 1971 sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic, adapted into the feature film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. The nightmarish, irradiated atmosphere of that world -- a world in which the most terrifying perils lie unseen, often imperceptible -- is reflected in Volodine’s. So too are other fantastic elements, including Solovyei’s psychic projections.
In Radiant Terminus, what Volodine brings to the French -- and now, through Zuckerman, to the English -- is perspective on a genre that’s refreshingly distinct from the two or three upsetting novels America read in high school. Unlike 1984 or Brave New World, he evokes a post-urban dystopia -- a communal, agrarian dystopia, slowly receding into an apocalypse of open steppes and endless woodland. This may seem unprecedented, but not within the Russian tradition.
After witnessing the Terror Famine of 1932 and 1933, Andrey Platonov wrote The Foundation Pit, a brilliant short novel brought to English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson in 2009. Unpublished in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, it follows a team of rural workers tasked with excavating the foundation of an unimaginably brilliant edifice, a “future building for the proletariat.” With little prospect of seeing the project realized, they spade deeper into the clay, oblivious to the pit’s semblance to a mass grave. Meanwhile, in the village where the workers are barracked, an activist hurries along the process of total collectivization -- culminating with the gathering and liquidation of the region’s kulaks.
The satiric atmosphere of The Foundation Pit is so toxic with jargon and slogans that the prose itself mutates; description becomes sooty with language from official mouthpieces: “Most likely the rooks felt like departing ahead of time,” the narrator muses as a worker scans the sky, “in order to survive the organization collective-farm autumn in some sunny region and return later to a universal institutionalized calm.” In Radiant Terminus, Solovyei’s psychic intrusion into his subjects’ minds, his joy at “walking supreme throughout [their dreams]” seems only a fantastic reframing of what Platonov’s diggers experience when they return to their barracks, “furnished with a radio … so that during the time of rest each of them might acquire meaning of mass life”:
This oppressed despair of soul from the radio was sometimes more than Zhachev could endure, and, amid the noise of consciousness pouring from the loudspeaker, he would shout out: “Stop that sound! Let me reply to it!”
Adopting his graceful gait, Safronov would immediately advance forward.
“Comrade Zhachev, that’s more than enough…It’s time to subordinate yourself entirely to the directive work of the leadership.”
This same imperative hits Kronauer when he first steps into the boundary of Radiant Terminus, halting at the sound of a piercing whistle. Hands over his ears, he looks to his guide, one of Solovyei’s subordinated daughters.
Her eyes were obstinately focused on the tips of her boots, as if she didn’t want to watch what was happening.
—It’s nothing, she said finally. We’re in one of Solovyei’s dreams. He’s not happy that you’re here with me.
Kronauer walked up to Samiya Schmidt and looked at her, aghast. He kept his ears covered and he found it necessary to talk loudly to make himself heard.
Within the communities of both novels, truth is subservient to the barreling pace of activity: neither Solovyei nor the unseen spirit of Stalin would pause to consider the objection to a posited statement: in company, with frenetic movement and reprisals, they act as their will dictates; in seclusion, behind doors barred to dissent, they recuse themselves from question. Unlike the urban 1984 and Brave New World, where rigid control is needed to maintain the hard science fiction of the state, the rural setting of these two microcosmic dystopias can tolerate facts that counter its leaders. They’re simply ignored or dismissed, brushed away by hapless followers. Existing within a cycle of work and days, the power of these tyrants becomes as intemperate and natural to them as the weather -- even, to some, as entertaining.
All considered, it wouldn’t be wrong to view the kolkhoz of Radiant Terminus as reconstruction of the village of The Foundation Pit. Stolen from the Russian, charged with psychosis, radiation, and incest, Volodine rebuilt it slat by slat, hut by hut, within a darker world.
In his foreword to the novel, Brian Evanson reminds us that Radiant Terminus is just one book in a forty-nine volume set that, when complete, will form Volodine’s ambitious, interconnected “post-exoticist” project. “One of the key features of [his] work,” Evanson explains, “comes in the echoes that operate both within individual books and between books.” Certainly, within the book’s last quarter, these echoes rebound -- becoming as taxing on the reader as they are to Volodine’s characters:
—It’s just repetition, Noumak Ashariyev insisted. It’s hell.
—It’s not just hell, Matthias Boyol corrected. It’s more that we’re within a dream that we can’t understand the mechanisms of. We’re inside, and we don’t have any way of getting out.
Long after the point is taken, the book persists, nearly to the point of page-flipping exhaustion -- the same exhaustion that meets every reader of Bouvard and Pécuchet -- but it would be cruel to dismiss Radiant Terminus on this charge.
In truth, to be fair -- what other conclusion could we expect? “Death occurs,” John Berger wrote, “when life has no scrap to defend.”
At the end of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, as either implied by or explicitly stated in their respective appendices, future academics discover the texts or recordings that form the books’ core narratives. But in Radiant Terminus, in a future irreversibly collapsed from the start, there are no academics -- only snow, steppes, a shamble of survivors, “existences wasted and millennia gone for nothing.” Without the ability to rebuild civilization, the novel, its world, and its world’s inhabitants lose common language and temporality: overcast months become years, years become decades, decades become “one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six years or more.” As humanity atomizes and recedes, surrounded by Platonov’s “universal enduring existence,” its narrative deltas into a frozen sea.
As Ben Ehrenreich wrote in his exploration of Volodine’s “post-exoticist” project for The Nation, “this, you’ll remember, is literature of defeat”; Radiant Terminus offers nothing in the way of hope. But perhaps an injection of French pessimism is warranted -- overdue for those who still assume the spirit of humanism to be indomitable. Volodine reminds us of a truth we can easily forget, distracted, as we often are, by the luxuries of technology and moral outrage: namely, that the civilization we’ve inherited is an heirloom so terribly precious, at risk of shattering into one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six irreparable pieces, yet in constant motion -- passed and plundered from generation to generation, hand to shaking hand. At the height of the Cold War, in his speech to the Swedish Academy, Solzhenitsyn claimed that the massive upheaval of Western society is “approaching that point beyond which the system becomes metastable and must fall.” Over the decades that followed, most considered his prediction delusional. Today, to many, it seems less so.
Future scholars may agree or disagree, but only in the chance they exist. As Radiant Terminus demonstrates, Kafka’s axe -- the axe of a book that can split the frozen sea -- is useless without the knowledge to wield it as a tool. Present circumstances considered, the thought alone makes Orwell and Atwood seem cheery.
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.)
A Year in Reading: Emily St. John Mandel
I’m writing this in November, which is the month when I go through the notebook where I keep track of all the books I read, study the titles with a little star next to them, and try to remember which of these struck me the most. The three that remain most vividly in memory from this past year are a book about the shipping industry, a surrealist novel from a small press, and a work of speculative fiction about the Second American Civil War, the premise of which seemed horribly topical when I read it back in September and hasn't become less troubling since.
1. The Shipping Industry
The British journalist Rose George's Ninety Percent of Everything has one of those wildly unwieldy subtitles that haunt the non-fiction section -- Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, Food on Your Plate -- but unwieldy or not, the subtitle does sum up the situation fairly nearly, and it’s an elegantly written and deeply researched book. George goes to sea aboard a container ship, the Maersk Kendal, and in so doing steps into a world mostly closed to outsiders. Standing on the dock at Felixstowe in the U.K., looking up at the towering hull of the ship, she reflects on the oddly invisible nature of the industry relative to its importance:
These ships and boxes belong to a business that feeds, clothes, warms, and supplies us. They have fueled if not created globalization. They are the reason behind your cheap T-shirt and reasonably priced television. But who looks behind a television now and sees the ship that brought it? Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.
“Are you reading that for research?” a couple of people asked, when they saw me reading it.
“Yes,” I said, which wasn’t untrue, but also easier than explaining that I've always been interested in the shipping industry, which is probably not terribly uncommon among people who grew up by the ocean and hold childhood memories of grey horizons with container ships passing, floating citadels crossing unimaginable distances. I’ve spent a lot of time in hotel rooms over these past couple years, and the one I liked best was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, because the view was of the docks across the street, where another Maersk ship was being loaded when I went to bed. The ship was gone by morning.
2. A Surrealist Novel From a Small Press
The only thing I don’t like about Christopher Boucher's work is that it’s almost impossible to do it justice when I’m trying to explain it to people. (I praised his first novel, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, at some length back in 2011. It was about a man whose girlfriend gives birth to a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle.) His second novel, Golden Delicious, is in more or less the same surrealist vein and infused with the same strange brilliance, but this time it’s a kind of meta-novel, which is to say that the characters know they're in a novel. Their novel’s Reader is a character, with whom the protagonist goes on bicycle rides. The protagonist doesn't have a name, but he does have a pet sentence. If you ride your bike to the edge of town, you’ll reach the margins, which are sometimes a little sketchy.
The language in Boucher’s novel isn’t just alive; it gets into fights. (“Shortly after that, two clauses got in a fight in the margin across the street. This would happen every once in a while -- you’d hear the wild, high squeal and pitter-patter of language chasing language through trees.”) Sentences sometimes skitter away, as in: “Just then a small sentence scampered across the page. My Mom lunged at it, picked it up by the scruff of its vowel and tossed it into the margin.”
The whole thing’s a bit convoluted, peculiar, often very funny, and also deeply, improbably moving, because here, as in Boucher’s debut novel, the entire high-wire act is in service to a deadly serious story about belonging, and about the agonies and joys of being in a family.
3. A Novel That Isn’t Out Yet
It is arguably slightly obnoxious to recommend novels that aren’t out yet, but the book that I found the most haunting this year doesn't actually come out until April. Omar El Akkad is a Canadian journalist who’s covered topics ranging from terrorism to the gradual disappearance of Louisiana beneath the water. His debut novel, American War, opens with the outbreak of the Second American Civil War in 2074. Sarat Chestnut is six years old when the war begins, and El Akkad follows her through her years in a displaced persons camp and into the war's aftermath. The war’s ostensible trigger is the South’s refusal to stop using banned fossil fuels, but it seems clear that this is essentially a pretext; the problem was never really oil, the problem was that two incompatible cultures have emerged in one country and the Red and Blue states have found themselves on a collision course. (Seems improbable, I know, but stay with me here.) The premise is harrowing, the prose is stark and beautiful, the plotting is impeccable, and there's something utterly heartbreaking in El Akkad's subtle rendition of the ways in which war shapes the human soul.
More from A Year in Reading 2016
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