American War: A novel

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

A Year in Reading: Scaachi Koul

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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.” [millions_ad] 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

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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. [millions_ad] 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

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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. [millions_ad] 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

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for 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 ProcessThe 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

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for 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 StoryThe Night Ocean, Little Fires EverywhereHillbilly Elegy, and In Praise of Shadows. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: August 2017

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for August. 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 StoryHillbilly Elegy, Made for Love, Enigma Variations, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: July 2017

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for July. 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

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for 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 WestEnigma Variations, Blind Spot, and The Night Ocean. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: May 2017

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for 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 IdiotEileenThe Nix, Exit West, and Enigma Variations. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: April 2017

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  We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use those stats to find out what books have been most popular with our readers in recent months. Below you’ll find our Millions Top Ten list for 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, EileenHere I AmThe Nix, and Version Control. See Also: Last month's list.

Rising Waters: On Omar El Akkad’s ‘American War’

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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.

April Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

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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

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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

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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

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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 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 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005