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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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The Transformation and Legacy of Soho Press
At the Union Square offices of Soho Press, news has circulated that one of their recent titles, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See by Juliann Garey, has just been longlisted for The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Senior Publicity Director Meredith Barnes rushes to shoot emails to press, and Editor-in-Chief Bronwen Hruska delivers the news to the author. Everyone is proud; you can see it on the faces of the now many employees at Soho Press, but it wasn’t always this way. Today is a good day to talk to Bronwen Hruska about the Soho that once was, the Soho that almost wasn’t and the Soho that’s full of smiles today.
Since its inception, Soho Press has maintained its reputation as a reputable independent publishing house both in the realms of crime/mystery fiction and literary fiction. In recent years, readers have become acquainted with a new incarnation of Soho Press, one born out of loss, perseverance, and respect.
[caption id="attachment_66604" align="alignright" width="190"] Laura Chapman Hruska.[/caption]
Soho Press launched in 1986, the brainchild of Laura Chapman Hruska, Alan Hruska, Juris Jurjevics, and his wife, Laurie Colwin. It was a serendipitous grouping of friends -- all four had roots firmly planted in the publishing world in different ways. Jurjevics, at the time, was an established editor at Dial Press. Laurie Colwin was a novelist and contributor to The New Yorker and Playboy Magazine. Bronwen’s mother was a successful novelist who wrote under the name Laura Chapman, and her father, Alan Hruska, was a lawyer with a few successful forays into writing. One night over drinks (at a Soho bar, the only real connection between the press and the neighborhood), the group found themselves bemoaning the state of publishing. Chapman had seen success with several published novels at Doubleday, but she also had two historical fiction books for which she’d yet to find a home. The group consensus was that there was a serious plight of new and interesting fiction being overlooked. Between the four of them, they’d seen countless books deserving of a life that went unpublished. Soho Press was to be a solution to that problem.
Bronwen was already a sophomore in college when her parents started Soho. Although she always considered her parents “intimidatingly awesome,” working with them at Soho was never her goal. Bronwen had a successful career as a writer. She was a regular contributor to the LA Times and a staff writer for Entertainment Weekly, the experience of which is fictionalized in her debut novel, Accelerated.
Bronwen never wanted to take the helm at Soho Press. Who would blame her? She’d already done the hard work to establish an identity elsewhere. Indeed, there was a connection between that identity and the company that her parents built, but the idea of letting that company inform who she was made her anxious.
“It was always in the back of my head,” she says. “Should I do this? Should I not? I really didn’t want to do it. I was a writer. That’s what I was trained in. It’s what I was good at.”
She’d succeeded in a difficult industry and that solidified her identity as a writer. Publishing was a related but entirely separate world, a world in which Soho was becoming a recognized name.
The Inception
[caption id="attachment_66605" align="alignright" width="220"] Bronwen Hruska.[/caption]
Soho Press had an office in Union Square with a small staff and a strong set of standards and values for doing business. It was considered a constant at Soho that they would always accept unsolicited manuscripts. Not to consider unsolicited manuscripts would go against their original ethos -- to create a home for writers who’d been ignored or outcast by mainstream publishing. Another pillar of the Soho mission statement was to make sure that the books they published could be found by potential readers. From the beginning, they worked to make sure they had distribution that surpassed the limited reach of your average independent house, at first by handing it to FSG, until the publisher decided to stop handling client publishers. They then moved their distribution to Consortium. Bronwen feels that in part it was their list and the reputation of the team that helped them to be taken seriously as clients, rather than just some fledgling indie.
Too often, independent is associated with undiscerning, and Soho was determined to prove otherwise. Their standards were high, and their vetting was rigorous albeit not exclusive. According to Bronwen, Soho has always considered slush because it leads to at least one to two Soho literary titles per year.
“It's a hard time to find an agent,” she says. “It's a hard time to find a publisher even if you have an agent! So I know there are very talented writers out there who have great novels that deserve to be read by editors.”
However, how the press views slush has evolved. Bronwen stipulates that it’s rigorous, particularly because Soho only publishes 10 to 12 literary titles per year, and for the past couple years, they’ve had to stop considering unsolicited crime manuscripts.
The process first paid off with the discovery of a manuscript entitled Breath, Eyes, Memory by a Haitian-born author named Edwidge Danticat. The novel, a story of a young girl moving from Haiti to New York City, set the tone for Soho’s literary imprint, which would go on to publish many successful novels that dealt with culture clash. Soho would also succeed with early books by celebrities like Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. “There was a lot of discovering authors who would go on to have really big careers,” Bronwen says. Put simply, Soho represented the voices of authors who’d otherwise been ignored while maintaining a high standard. It was a refusal to believe that major houses had snatched up all the high-caliber fiction out there.
The catalogues of independent publishing houses also tend to reflect the tastes of the individual editors. Laura and Alan Hruska always had a special interest in books that focused on foreign cultures. Laura also had an enduring love of mystery and crime fiction. The Soho Crime imprint was launched in 1991 and took off so quickly that it almost usurped the identity of the Soho literary imprint. “Crime readers are rabid in the best possible way,” Bronwen says. It wasn’t something the press resented. Crime is what gave Soho the means to release and distribute all its literary titles, and it was one of Laura’s passions. At the same time, the company didn’t want to be known exclusively for the crime genre.
The Decision
Laura Hruska was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. For the first time, Bronwen considered joining the team, but only until her mother’s health improved. She came into the office here and there and helped out where she could, but her heart wasn’t in it. She struggled to find a place.
“One day I screwed up really bad,” she says.
Bronwen describes a galley she was working on. She forgot some small detail, like pressing “save.” As result, a bunch of galleys went out without copyediting changes. She felt terrible, guilty, and eventually she quit. Around that time, her mother went into remission. Bronwen went on to sell her first screenplay and begin a novel, and Soho continued to succeed as it had.
In 2006, Bronwen’s mother had a reoccurrence of breast cancer. She finally decided to ask Bronwen to consider coming to work for Soho with an eye for taking it over.
Bronwen knew she didn’t want to accept unless she really meant it. She’d learned from her time at Soho that publishing is hard -- especially for anyone who didn’t really feel compelled to do it. She also learned that she knew almost nothing about the publishing industry.
On other hand, Bronwen had found herself a little bit closer to the position her mother was in when she started Soho Press. She was nearly finished with her first novel after working on it for over a year in a small weekly writing workshop. She was surrounded by aspiring novelists there and saw the kind of sweat and pain that can go into writing a novel. She witnessed how a promising new voice could blossom when given a little encouragement but also understood the tragedy of a good novel unpublished.
“I'd been a writer for my entire career up to that point,” she says. “There were a lot of good -- really good -- books out there and fewer and fewer opportunities for those books to be published. I'll admit the romantic ideal of being able to help great books have a life -- the mandate that gave birth to Soho in the first place -- was very appealing to me.”
At lunch with a close friend, Bronwen discussed the truly life-altering decision at hand. She was still unsure. Her friend’s response was unequivocal.
“She said to me, ‘Are you crazy? Your dying mother asks you to take over her publishing company -- you say yes!’”
But it wasn’t that easy. She pauses, and her facial expression tightens as she explains that she knew she couldn’t take over Soho unless she was certain it was what she wanted to do. If she wasn’t, her mother would know and wouldn’t allow her to say “yes.” Bronwen laughs, but the weight of her statement lingers. It’s the idea of a parent not allowing her child to do what she herself most wants unless she's certain it will make her child happy. It’s something one who isn’t a parent probably cannot truly understand. Bronwen adds that up to that point she truly didn’t believe that she was going to accept the offer.
“Then, I decided that I needed to at least give it a serious chance,” she says.
With that decision, Bronwen went from being a grown woman and professional writer who made her own schedule to working nine to five in a small office side by side with her mother.
“I felt like I was 21.”
The Transition
At the time, only five people worked in the Soho Press office, which consisted of one wide-open room. Bronwen quickly found that her past frustrations with the job came from not understanding the logistics of the industry. The more that changed, the more her opinion of the job changed. As time passed, Bronwen became serious about becoming editor-in-chief of Soho Press.
Bronwen’s mother died in 2010. By then, Bronwen had grown to love the job, the publishing world, and Soho Press more than she ever thought she could. Bronwen took the reins at Soho and hoped to bring something new to the table. That was before she realized that keeping the business intact would become the first priority.
Unfortunately, there was a potentially ruinous obstacle at bay -- the publishing industry was falling apart. Major book retailers were closing their doors. Second-hand markets and Amazon were eating up a large chunk of publishers’ and retailers’ profits. And people still weren’t sure if there was a future in ebooks.
“I couldn’t believe how bad it was,” Bronwen says. “I wondered how we could possibly even have a business; it was dismal.”
Bronwen credits the company's survival in part to e-books and to Soho’s head of marketing at the time taking the burgeoning medium seriously when many throughout the industry did not. Soho made a concerted effort to publish and advertise the electronic versions of their titles during a time when most publishing houses weren’t. They also tightened their belts. Bronwen and her mother, when she was there, forwent their salaries until things turned around. With only five employees at the time, that meant only three of them were being paid.
Aside from keeping Soho Press alive, Bronwen’s goal as editor-in-chief was, in part, to breathe new life into the literary fiction division. Crime had been so successful since its launch that it overshadowed the rest of the company. When people thought about the house, Soho Crime was the first thing that came to mind, thanks in part to collections like Massie Dobbs -- a series about an English housemaid turned private investigator. The downturn in the publishing industry made things a bit more complicated. Now ramping up both imprints was integral for the company’s survival.
The Transformation
Author Alex Shakar wrote the book that represented a new era for Soho’s literary imprint. The story of Shakar’s pre-Soho career has become something of a cautionary tale in the literary world. Shakar’s second novel, Luminarium, not only meant a new chapter for Soho, but a happy ending for Shakar as well.
When Shakar’s first book was picked up for publication, it had all the indicators of success: a hotshot agent, big name blurbs, and a large advance from HarperCollins. The novel entitled The Savage Girl was a satire of consumer culture with subversive elements, all of which would generally make for a promising first outing -- if not for a pub date exactly one week after 9/11. Shakar found himself abandoned. His agent, Bill Clegg, was forced to take time off, a story recounted in Clegg’s memoir Portrait of the Addict As a Young Man, and The Savage Girl flopped. Of all the writers who had it rough during the publishing downturn, writers with a so-called “bad track record” may have had the worst. Shakar recounted the experience in his essay, “Year of Wonders.”
Clegg had just come off a long convalescence period when he had lunch with original Soho co-founder Juri Jujrevics. It was Jurjevics who helped convince Clegg to return, as it was his firm belief that Clegg was one of the brightest and promising agents in the business. As a result, Clegg had a soft spot for Jurjevics and Soho.
Shakar took his time writing his follow-up to The Savage Girl and stuck with Clegg as his agent. However, the Murphy’s Law chain of events surrounding The Savage Girl left Shakar in a tough spot. Fate and proximity put Shakar, Clegg, and Bronwen together at book party in Bronwen’s apartment where the three discussed the book.
“I had the good fortune of coming to Soho at an exciting time,” Shakar says. “The place was bubbling with energy and ambition. Having just stopped by couple weeks ago, I'm happy to say that it still is.”
Luminarium wasn’t just a compelling read -- it was a novel that made a statement. It sojourned into realms of fractured reality and of spirituality. It was heady and fresh yet unique. It was exactly the kind of book Soho’s new literary editor Mark Doten had been looking for to set the tone for the future.
Doten had gotten his MFA at Columbia and worked under the likes of Ben Marcus and Sam Lipsyte. According to a 2007 feature in New York Magazine, Doten had distinguished himself as a rising star in the hyper-competitive program. Doten’s debut novel is set to publish in February 2015 by Graywolf, a publisher whom Bronwen admittedly considers friendly competition. The interplay between Bronwen and Doten seems to account for what’s become the strongly realized identity of the new Soho Press. For Bronwen, the driving factor that moves her to want to publish a book is a plot that keeps a reader turning the pages -- a big part of what made her own 2013 novel Accelerated a success. Doten, on the other hand, is more focused on the importance of voice.
“I’m looking for a novel that couldn’t have possibly been told by anyone other than that particular storyteller,” he says.
The Restoration
The melding of those priorities is reflected throughout the notable books of Soho’s post-2011 literary catalogue. A few people interviewed for this piece referred to a “Soho feel” or “a quintessential Soho book.” Trying to piece to together what that meant wasn’t easy. It’s not something you’d find in the content or even the style. It would be wrong to use words like “dark” or “edgy,” though those qualities are often present.
Take Paula Bomer’s Soho debut. Nine Months is a dark and honest take on pregnancy that embraces the goriest of details while maintaining the emotional breadth of such a sacred life event. Bomer refers to her experience working with the team at Soho as both “fun” and “life changing.” Her follow-up, Inside Madeline, published this month.
“I think what Soho does is unique in that there really is a family feel. It’s always been a joy for me to do business with everyone, from the publishers to the assistants,” says Bomer, who dedicated her first novel to Doten. During these interviews, multiple authors echo the notion that the process of editing with Doten is responsible for elevating their manuscripts.
Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and The Woods is a recent Soho title that both Doten and Bronwen consider especially important to their timeline. The book was well reviewed in The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and more, and made The Believer’s top 20 list for fiction. The novel, on its surface, is about a couple who move into a secluded house and have trouble conceiving, but ask someone who’s read the book, and they’re most likely to talk about the giant squids or sentient bear or huge labyrinth underneath the house. As Doten puts it, “It’s a book where the way in which the physical world is presented is heavily influenced by the character’s psychology.” Both Bronwen and Doten consider Bell’s novel “a quintessential Soho Press book.” It’s hard to say what Breath, Eyes, Memory, Lumiarium, and In the House have in common -- but the same can be said for recently successful indies like Akashic or Two Dollar Radio; the qualities they look for are more or less intangible.
The Legacy
Fortunately for Bronwen, the publishing industry didn’t fall apart completely and neither did Soho Press. In fact, both Doten and Bronwen echo the sentiment that they’ve seen nothing but growth since coming on board. One of Bronwen’s biggest contributions to Soho is a heightened focus on the importance of marketing. What was once a one-person department now consists of five employees. What was once a company consisting of five employees is now 16. Soho has also recently handed their distribution over to Random House, making their titles especially accessible throughout the country. In doing so, Bronwen and company have realized the dream of their predecessors -- to build an indie house with the same reach as the majors. Aside from Doten's eye for quality work and keen editorial skills, Bronwen credits him for his knowledge of the literary community and for his ability to move confidently throughout it. Doten admits that though it was something he once lamented about the job, he’s gotten good at “going out and drinking with people.”
When she first joined Soho Press, Bronwen’s reservations concerned identity, losing her own, or somehow marring the one that her mother had built. Certainly the latter isn’t a concern. The Soho Crime division is as vibrant as ever, with crime editor Juliet Grames keeping the international flavor favored by the crime division of days past -- only now it also focuses on locales that are exotic in different ways. Recent Soho Crime releases include titles taking place in Mormon Utah or the Alaskan wilderness. Crime fans still know what to expect from the imprint. As for the literary division, Soho is as true to the hopes and aspirations of the four people in that downtown bar as they’ve ever been.
“They're smart and they're plugged in, and you can really feel when you walk in there that they love what they do,” Shakar says.
The prospect of letting a parent down is scary, perhaps as much for a four year old as it is for a forty year old. Once a parent has passed on, that prospect becomes something entirely different, something far beyond appeasement or resentment. For Bronwen, joining Soho has become a way to keep her mother closer than she ever thought she could. A book will come up that she remembers her mother reading or acquiring. She’ll stumble across books or a note with her mother’s handwriting. She’s surrounded by hundreds of thousands of pages of her mother’s work and passion. She didn’t just keep Soho Press afloat. By giving a voice to all those authors who wouldn’t have had one otherwise, she kept her mother’s voice spirit alive. The new Soho Press isn’t just a crime fiction or YA or even a literary fiction house, it’s a respected publishing house. It’s a home for writers who might not have had one otherwise.
Photos courtesy of Soho Press.
Goodbye to Oprah’s Golden Ticket
That sound you hear is a thousand book publicists wailing. Oprah Winfrey will announce today that her eponymous talk show will end in September 2011. That means that in less than two years, the ultimate book publicity coup will be off the table.
Oprah's Book Club isn't quite the powerhouse it once was. The club was started in 1996, a savvy move when neighborhood book clubs were in vogue with the Oprah demographic. The Book Club also was a way of distancing the show from its increasingly shock-oriented daytime peers (a format, we may forget, that Oprah once partook of.) In those early years of the Book Club, Oprah would often, though not always, chose a little-known, "mid-list" book that would become an overnight bestseller. In a literary world where writers are playing the lottery against the longest of odds, Oprah was the winning ticket.
The Club earned a reputation, perhaps unfair to the Club and perhaps unfair to the books that were a part of it, as a redoubt of "women's fiction," but the selections were more varied than that, ranging from melodrama like Anita Shreve's The Pilot's Wife and Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone to more nuanced fare like Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying and Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat. The Club went on like this for about five years, selecting 10 or 12 books a year, and, with a flick of this magic wand, turning each one into a bestseller.
And then Jonathan Franzen came along. You can argue whether Franzen should have accepted Oprah's selection as just another of many honors bestowed upon The Corrections or whether he had every right to exert some well-earned control over how his book was marketed, but one thing seems clear. Oprah had never contemplated the idea of someone turning her down.
After Franzen, the Book Club, as if trying to find its purpose again, meandered, initially with some fanfare, but increasing as an afterthought, through classics by Garcia Marquez, Tolstoy and others. The books still sold but she was only making a couple of selections a year, and some of the dazzle had leaked out of the enterprise. Then, to juice things up, Oprah announced that she would return to selecting living authors.
In all the furor that followed the uncovering of James Frey's confabulations in his memoir A Million Little Pieces, it's easy to forget that prior to selecting Frey's book, Oprah had actually announced that she was going to go back to picking books by living authors, and there was a good deal of discussion around this, as though "living author" was a genre you might find in the bookstore. But implicit in this announcement was a recognition that Oprah's Book Club just wasn't as exciting without the sub-plot of making an author an overnight millionaire and household name.
Or, to put it another way, What Oprah told the New York Times was, "I wanted to open the door and broaden the field... That allows me the opportunity to do what I like to do most, which is sit and talk to authors about their work. It's kind of hard to do that when they're dead." But that was before Frey turned the whole thing into a circus, culminating with Oprah's finger-wagging excoriation of Frey on her show.
Since the Franzen-Frey double-whammy, the Book Club hasn't been quite the touchstone it once was. There some moments of cultural relevance, like the cognitive dissonance of Oprah selecting Cormac McCarthy's The Road days before it won the Pulitzer, seeing an Oprah logo next to McCarthy's name on the book cover, and later, her visit to his ranch for her show. But the Book Club remains an afterthought, with new selections happening only rarely (Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them in September was the first of 2009) and, while the books she picks still sell and publicists still get excited, the Club isn't as much on the media radar, and no one wrings their hands about Oprah's impact on literary culture any more.
This isn't to say, however, that the Book Club was the only reason that Oprah was important to the publishing industry. Oprah had guests flogging books in categories outside of fiction and confessional memoir (and, yes, fictionalized confessional memoir) on the show all the time, and the big sales that followed for these celebrity memoirs, diet books, and self-help guides showed that, in publishing (and in every other business), landing Oprah was still the ultimate publicity coup. While gallons of ink were spilled on the Book Club's literary taste, Oprah's role was probably far more insidious with these other titles, most notably with her incessant flogging of the "power of positive thinking" pabulum found in The Secret. (Salon.com's 2007 takedown of The Secret, and Oprah for hyping it, is essential reading.)
So, with the Book Club wasting away and the end of Oprah now in sight, what's a publicist or mid-lister hoping for a miracle to do? The reality is that it's hard to imagine our culture supporting an enterprise like Oprah's Book Club again. In 1996, audiences were far less fragmented, and even a daytime show could command enough of the public's attention to achieve the desired critical mass. Oprah is set to extend her media empire in new ways, as she's launching her Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) early 2011, and while word is she'll do a daily show there, don't be surprised if she takes the shift as an opportunity to retire the Book Club concept. And even if she doesn't, OWN will be just another, and maybe smaller, piece of this already fragmented media landscape, and a new Book Club likely wouldn't be the winning lottery ticket it once was.
Who knows, maybe she'll get into publishing, instead. (I can almost hear the manuscripts flying her way.)
Bonus Link: The complete list of Oprah's Book Club titles
2009’s Literary Geniuses
We take a break from our countdown to salute this year's literary "Genius grant" winners (the full list of Geniuses). The MacArthur grant awards $500,000, “no strings attached” to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” This year’s literary geniuses are:
Millions favorite Deborah Eisenberg was a winner this year. The grant seems perfect for this incredibly talented but not very prolific short story writer. Many critics have been jumping on the Eisenberg bandwagon in recent years, and this honor seems sure to cement her in the pantheon of contemporary masters. Eisenberg's masterpiece (as yet) is Twilight of the Superheroes, and ten years before that saw the publication of All Around Atlantis and The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg, which combines her first two collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986) and Under the 82nd Airborne (1992). Garth wrote a long and essential consideration of Eisenberg nearly two years ago, and prior to that, Andrew wrote of seeing Eisenberg and longtime companion Wallace Shawn in Toronto.
Edwidge Danticat is another well-known name, at least in literary circles. The Hatian-American writer has written several books. She received a National Book Award nomination for her 1996 collection Krik? Krak!, and more recently her novel The Dew Breaker and memoir Brother, I'm Dying won praise. Danticat first rose to prominence when her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was selected for Oprah's book club.
Finally, MacArthur honored poet Heather McHugh, of whom the judges say, "Heather McHugh is a poet whose intricately patterned compositions explore various aspects of the human condition and inspire wonder in the unexpected associations that language can evoke." Her collection Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, published in 1994, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Eyeshot, published in 2003, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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