Dear Life: Stories

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The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview

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It's been a painfully long winter here in New York City, but the glinting promise of spring—and spring books—has bolstered me through these cold, hard months. Here you’ll find just over 100 titles that we're looking forward to here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We’d hope you find your next great read among them.  We are, alas, still on hiatus, but are determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim.  —Sophia Stewart, editor * April Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (Wave) Nelson’s genre-busting Bluets is a perpetual handselling favorite at many an indie bookstore and practically lyricism incarnate. Anything billed as “something of a companion piece” to it is worth a look. If anyone can make a diary of jaw pain sing, it’s Nelson. —John H. Maher The Ephemera Collector by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson (Liveright) Jackson's Afrofuturistic debut novel, which pays homage to Octavia Butler, follows an archivist at the Huntington Library who fights to protect her life's work—an impossible collection of ephemera from an undersea city that has yet to be founded—following the kidnapping of the Huntington's CEO. —Sophia M. Stewart Surreal by Michèle Gerber Klein (Harper) Mining a trove of newly uncovered material, Klein brings the extraordinary and enigmatic life of Gala Dalí—wife and muse of Salvador, as an art world mover and shaker who championed Surrealism—out of the shadows and into the much-deserved limelight. —SMS Gloria by Andrés Felipe Solano, tr. Will Vanderhyden (Counterpoint) Solano’s English-language debut traces the life of centers on a young Colombian immigrant as she navigates New York City and attends a fateful concert—the 1970 performance of Argentine singer Sandro at Madison Square Garden—which echoes into the life of her son five decades later. —SMS Authority by Andrea Long Chu (FSG) If Long Chu’s work for New York magazine is any indication, her newest collection of essays is sure to be equally riveting. Throughout, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic examines everything from The Phantom of the Opera to social media, weaving a compelling narrative about how criticism, now more than ever, presents a solution to our current crises. —EMB I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang (Drawn & Quarterly) Jenny, a "twenty-something-going-on-thirty hot mess," gropes her way toward adulthood while navigating work, romance, friendship, and the horrors of having a body in Ang’s debut collection. —SMS Dysphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado (Graywolf) The Testo Junkie author's so-called "mutant text" blends essay, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction to explore dysphoria as an era-defining condition that captures our current cultural, political, and social moment. —SMS Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom (Flatiron) Carlstrom's debut novel centers on a mid-bender corporate burnout who sets off on a road trip to track down their conspiracy-theorist father—and in the process wrestles with everything from queerness to capitalism. —SMS Searches by Vauhini Vara (Pantheon) Building off of her brilliant 2021 essay for the Believer, Vara's essay collection—her nonfiction debut—elegantly grapples with questions around artificial intelligence, technological progress, and human connection. —SMS Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead) The much anticipated follow-up to 2021's Intimacies centers on a mysterious relationship between a well-known, middle-aged theater actress and a young man—are they friends, lovers, mother and son? Kitamura's bifurcated novel keeps you guessing. —SMS My Documents by Kevin Nguyen (One World) Nguyen’s sophomore novel follows four cousins in a United States whose government is rounding up Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Both America’s history and its present indicate how terrifyingly close to life that premise is. To quote Nguyen quoting The Legend of Zelda as the epigraph of New Waves, his debut novel: “It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.” —JHM Big Chief by Jon Hickey (S&S) Hickey's debut—hailed by David Heska Wanbli Weiden as the "great Native American political novel"—chronicles tribal politics, familial allegiances, and the quest for power on a Wisconsin reservation. —SMS Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu, tr. Jacqueline Leung (Two Lines) The Hong Kong writer's dystopian latest depicts a failing city where the government has incentivizes couples to surgically "conjoin"—and a struggling grad student who is forced to grapple with the new policy. —SMS Going Around by Murray Kempton, ed. Andrew Holter (Seven Stories) This collection, featuring a foreword by Darryl Pinckney, gathers the defining columns and essays from Kempton, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who "almost miraculously immersed himself in every region, profession, political movement, and social class," per Benjamin Moser. —SMS Is Peace Possible? by Kathleen Lonsdale (Marginalian Editions) First published at the height of the Cold War in 1957, this slender volume sees the pathbreaking Quaker scientist reckoning with nuclear warfare and the role of science in shaping the future of humanity. —SMS What's Left by Malcolm Harris (Little, Brown) Historian-activist Harris follows up his barn-burner history of Palo Alto with a clear-eyed guide to what collective political action, if any, can stem the climate crisis. —SMS The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley (Atlantic Monthly) Admit it: we've all wondered what it's like to be one of the New Yorker magazine's famous fact checkers. This novel promises us some insights into the experience, as the reader embarks on a wild ride through New York City with one such guardian of truth and accuracy. —Claire Kirch Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove) The latest novel from the author of the brilliantly weird Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings imagines an alternative Japan where married couples no longer have sex and all children are born by artificial insemination. —SMS Now, the People! by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, tr. David Broder (Verso) Mélenchon, a leader of the French radical left once described by the Washington Post as "France's Bernie Sanders," proposes a new kind of revolution against capitalism suited for our present moment—what he calls "a citizen's revolution." —SMS In the Rhododendrons by Heather Christle (Algonquin) I was an ardent fan of Christle's 2019 The Crying Book, and have a feeling her latest—a hybrid memoir that weaves personal narrative together with meditations on the life and work of Virginia Woolf—will bowl me over me yet again. —SMS Fugitive Tilts by Ishion Hutchinson (FSG) In his prose debut, poet Hutchinson offers an evocative meditation upon home, displacement, inheritance, and memory, chronicling everything from his trips to Senegal and his love of John Coltrane to the Jamaican music of his youth and paintings by Édouard Vuillard. —Eva M. Baron The Power of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay (Princeton UP) Holladay's comprehensive biography of the trailblazing lesbian-feminist writer, thinker, and activist draws on unpublished materials and rigorous research to paint the most expansive portrait of Rich to date. —SMS Fish Tales by Nettie Jones (FSG) Jones's debut novel—a portrait of a 1970s party girl whose life is tinged by drugs, sex, and violence—was first acquired by Toni Morrison at Random House and originally published in 1984, yet feels as fresh as ever. —SMS Ordinary Time by Annie B. Jones (HarperOne) The indie bookseller's debut book extolls the virtues of small, quiet, ordinary lives and the joy that comes with learning to love where you are, whether or not it's where you dreamed you'd be. —SMS I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer by Mary Beth Norton (Princeton UP) Norton's annotated collection of questions and answers from the world's first-ever advice column, which debuted in the 1690s, shows how eternal our preoccupations with love, sex, and romance are—and both how much and how little has changed in the last few centuries. —SMS Gabriële by Anne Berest and Claire Berest, tr. Tina Kover (Europa) There's no doubt that he author’s second foray into the English language—which follows the passionate love affair between a young French woman and a Spanish artist during the height of the Belle Époque and, later, World War I—should be just as engrossing as her hit English-language debut The Postcard.  —EMB The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza (Catapult) This timely memoir from Palestinian American journalist Aziza explores bodies, borders, and death in all its forms as she traces three generations from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City. —SMS Atavists by Lydia Millet (Norton) Millet's 21st book is a collection of loosely linked stories set in Los Angeles, where a cast of recognizable characters navigates the tech-saturated, climate crisis–addled present, with varying degrees of success. —SMS Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf) Ethically, I have some reservations about posthumously publishing the journal in which Didion chronicled her therapy sessions, but as a forever fan and student of her work, I can't say I'm not looking forward to reading this new material. —SMS When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy (Nightfire) Cassidy’s title will be familiar to fans of the music of the Mountain Goats, whose songwriter, John Darnielle, has a talent for telling horror stories himself. In the case of the lyric evoked here, the terror is an abusive father coming home. Cassidy’s novel takes that fear to the extreme. —JHM Dianaworld by Edward White (Norton) Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris more than a quarter of a century ago and still, people the world over remain fascinated by her. White's ruminations on the life and times of Princess Diana examine her impact upon popular culture then and now, and I am so here for this. —CK Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy (FSG) One of the great chroniclers of how money works turns his mind to the system itself. If anyone can sum up the tumultuous and knotty history of the dominant economic system of our era in a brisk 600-and-change pages, it’s Cassidy. —JHM Strangers in the Land by Michael Luo (Doubleday) Luo's narrative history of Chinese immigrants in America documents a century-long struggle marked by exclusion, violence, and extraordinary resilience which proves essential to understanding the formation of American identity. —SMS Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert (Penguin Press) Gilbert is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, particularly on the subjects of gender and womanhood—and her debut book, which dissects three decades of pop culture through a feminist lens, is sure to be one of the standouts of the year. —SMS * May Make Me Famous by Maud Ventura, tr. Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia) As the stateside appetite for French literature grows, Ventura’s latest should provide ample satiation. The novel explores ambition and obsession via Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics whose relentless pursuit of fame within the music industry leads to shocking twists and revelations. —EMB The Stolen Heart by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk (HarperVia) Kurkov returns with a follow-up to The Silver Bone (one of PW's best books of 2024!), in which Samson Kolechko must rescue his kidnapped fiancée while investigating the illegal sale of meat in 1920s Kyiv. —EMB Second Life by Amanda Hess (Doubleday) The New York Times culture critic's debut is a candid chronicle of pregnancy, parenting, and paranoia in the page of social media, deriving humor and insights from her own internet-aggravated anxieties over her unborn child. —SMS Melting Point by Rachel Rockerell (FSG) Rockerell's genre-busting family memoir uses only primary sources—letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews—to tell the story of a group of Russian Jews whose search for a new homeland in the early 1900s brought them to, of all places, Galveston, Texas. —SMS The Painted Room by Inger Christensen, tr. Denise Newman (New Directions) A three-part literary novel of murder mystery, political intrigue, and Italian Renaissance frescoes—all with a dash of high fantasy? Sounds like the triptych of a lifetime. —JHM Motherhood and Its Ghosts by Iman Mersal, tr. Robin Moger (Transit) What does it mean to be a mother, and is there any way to convey those facts with fidelity? The latest entry in Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series is a meditation on identity, motherhood, and love, complete with archival photographs, journal entries, and writings that have informed Mersal’s practice and perspective. —EMB Come Round Right by Alan Govenar (Deep Vellum) Set in 1971, this hitchhiking journey follows 18-year-old Aaron Berg as he reckons with a sexual assault he and his new girlfriend survived in Canada five months earlier. The novel winds through Appalachia, charts America’s midcentury cultural upheavals, and plumbs the perennial allure of acceptance. —EMB These Survivals by Lynne Huffer (Duke UP) Wildly experimental and interdisciplinary, Huffer’s latest examines ethical living in the environmental ruin of the Anthropocene (a term that, she says, “sags from overuse”). Through collage, poetry, multimedia work, and memoir, Huffer balances a philosopher’s gravity—she is best known for her three-book treatment of Foucault’s ethics of eros—with a poet’s sense of play. —Jonathan Frey The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis (University of Texas) Stratis's memoir-in-essays, the latest entry in UT Press's American Music Series, is a coming-of-age story from a distinctly working-class trans perspective which pays homage to the music that saved its author's life. —SMS Everything Is Now by J. Hoberman (Verso) Back in the 1960s, New York City was a haven for the avant-garde, whether it was in the shape of subcultural movements like fluxus and guerrilla theater or venues like coffeehouses, bars, and lofts. Hoberman’s cultural history is a thorough account of the New York underground, complete with rich, minute details about what the city once was. —EMB A Toast to St Martirià by Albert Serra, tr. Matthew Tree (Coffee House) Billed as the memoir of the acclaimed and adventurous Catalan filmmaker Serra that was composed of a wholly improvised speech at a film festival that seemingly doesn’t exist named for a saint that also appears nonexistent, what exactly this book is remains a mystery. But odds are that whatever that may be will be interesting. —JHM Apocalypse by Lizzie Wade (Harper) Covid. Trump. Climate change. Natural disasters. The hits keep coming—and it's not the first time. Wade's book traces various catastrophes that have befallen human beings stretching back thousands of years, proving that those who came before us survived apocalypses and we will survive what's being thrown at us too. —CK The Living and the Rest by José Eduardo Agualusa, tr. Daniel Hahn (Archipelago) What do you get when you mix a literary festival, an island off the coast of East Africa, and cyclone season? A storm of stories. —JHM The Deserters by Mathias Énard, tr. Charlotte Mandell (New Directions) From the winner of the Prix Goncourt comes an ambitious novel that intertwines the stories of a soldier emerging from the Mediterranean wilderness during an unspecified war and a scientific conference taking place on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship. —EMB The Family Dynamic by Susan Dominus (Crown) Dominus, a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, profiles cadres of high-achieving siblings (among them Lauren Groff!) in a quest to understand the familial conditions that lay the groundwork for success. —SMS Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith (FSG) Faith's debut novel follows a veterinary nurse named Sylvie whose ardent love for her therapist gives meaning to what she considers to be a small life—until that therapist starts to prepare Sylvie for the end of their time together. —SMS This Is Your Mother by Erika J. Simpson (Scribner) In her debut memoir, Simpson reflects on her complicated relationship with her equally complicated mother, the daughter of sharecroppers who did what it took to survive and is now dying. —SMS Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read (Crown) Most of us are familiar with multilevel marketing schemes at this point, but Read’s debut offers an even more incisive and sprawling account of the MLM phenomenon. The New York journalist considers how brands like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife have devastated some of America’s most vulnerable populations, while also illuminating how MLMs strengthen the forces of capitalism. —EMB Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead) This dazzling novel examines what it means for parents to exist inside two families simultaneously—the one they’re born into, and the one that they create. When Margaret, a newly divorced young mother, returns to the home in which she was raised with her two daughters, she must reckon with her own childhood as well as its lingering secrets. —EMB Proto by Laura Spinney (Bloomsbury) Ancient Greek and Latin can’t hold a candle to Proto-Indo-European as far as scope of influence is concerned. The latest from journalist Spinney aims to show just how great the impact of this little-remembered language still is. —JHM The Einstein of Sex by Daniel Brook (Norton) German-Jewish sexologist and queer rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld, best known for his rejection of gender binaries and theory of "sexual relativity," finally gets his due in Brook's biography. —SMS Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner) Bechdel skewers her own commercial success—and her trouble adapting to it—in her latest, an autofictional graphic novel that finds her lightly fictionalized alter ego raging against capitalism but too distracted to do anything about it. —SMS Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski (S&S) Urbanski's short story collection surveys sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to explore the allure of portals and the infinite possibilities they represent. —SMS Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel (Atria) Michel’s work has long taken a calculated approach to probing the porosity of genre, and his sophomore novel is no exception. You’ve simply gotta hand it to someone whose story concept alone makes you wonder what a sci-fi epic collectively written by Joshua Cohen, Robert Heinlein, and Jonathan Lethem over Slack might look like. —JHM So Many Stars ed. Caro de Robertis (Algonquin) It's tough to be BIPOC, queer, trans, or nonbinary in the current political climate, but this oral history affirms that queer people of color have a long and proud history in the United States and beyond. —CK State Champ by Hilary Plum (Bloomsbury) When a "heartbeat law" criminalizes most abortions statewide, an abortion clinic receptionist stages a hunger-strike at her boarded-up workplace in protest—and unexpectedly mobilizes the people around her. —SMS The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press) Though originally a poet, Vuong’s 2019 prose debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, proved his immense command over fiction. His newest novel, which chronicles the budding friendship between a troubled young man and an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman, should be equally captivating, lyrical, and singular. —EMB Shamanism by Manvir Singh (Knopf) Singh traces the evolution of shamanism—which he sees as a natural human response to the uncertainty of the world, reflective of our desire for ritual and curiosity about the supernatural—from the Paleolithic era through the 20th century. —SMS Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (FSG) Following her short story collection Wednesday’s Child, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year, Li returns with a devastating memoir about the loss of her two teenage sons, James and Vincent, to suicide and her journey toward acceptance in the face of grief. —EMB Aggregated Discontent by Harron Walker (Random House) Walker is one of the sharpest writers around, and her debut essay collection about 21st century womanhood—its perils, indignities, and occasional joys—is sure to be a candid and keen-eyed dissection of the way women live today. —SMS Marsha by Tourmaline (Tiny Reparations) Legendary Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is considered to be the first person to have thrown a brick during the Stonewall Uprising in 1969. Her story needs to be told, especially when LGBTQ+ people are once again being targeted and marginalized. —CK That’s All I Know by Elisa Levi, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf) Written as a sustained monologue, this ambitious and unusual novel follows 19-year-old Little Lea and her life in a rural town at the edge of the forest. Over a shared joint with a stranger, Little Lea spins a tale of loss, desire, and conspiracies, creating an idiosyncratic, voice-driven atmosphere that is sure to interest fans of Graywolf’s other translations. —EMB The Cloud Intern by David Greenwood (Under the BQE) One of two inaugural titles from the the new Brooklyn-based press Under the BQE, Greenwood's novel imagines a near-future where a tech company cofounder searches for connection in the alienating world he helped create. —SMS Burning Down the House  by Jonathan Gould (Mariner) Music biographer Gould tells the definitive story of the Talking Heads and the gritty New York City scene that birthed them in this overdue account, out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the band's founding. —SMS Freelance by Kevin Kearney (Rejection Letters) I love Kearney's writing, and I'm so excited to read his latest novel, which centers on a young rideshare driver and asks big questions about labor, technology, and what we owe to our employers. —SMS * June Sick and Dirty by Michael Koresky (Bloomsbury) Koresky's history surveys how queerness still made its way onscreen, behind the camera, and between the lines during the censorious Hays Code era, which lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s, examining the work of Lillian Hellman, Vincent Minnelli, Alfred Hitchcock, and more. —SMS Nadja by André Breton, tr. Mark Polizzotti (NYRB) This surrealist classic novel brings back memories. I read it in a college French literature course many years ago, and loved the romance between two rather absurd characters who could only have lived in Paris in the early 20th century. —CK Be Gay, Do Crime ed. Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley (Dzanc) In these "sixteen stories of queer chaos," authors Myriam Gurba, Alissa Nutting, and many more imagine queer characters who turn to crime as a means of survival, protest, retribution—or simply by accident. —SMS The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram (Basic) Design permeates nearly everything we do and everywhere we go. This fact is at the core of Gram’s cultural history, which explores design’s enduring appeal as both an economic and utopian tool throughout the 20th century. —EMB What Is Wrong with Men by Jessa Crispin (Pantheon) Feminist cultural critic Crispin turns to Michael Douglas movies to get to the root of the so-called crisis of masculinity and the anxieties around women, money, and power that are helping fuel it. —SMS I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader) The acclaimed Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist adds a memoir to her body of work with this meditation on motherhood via surrogacy and the legacy of the displaced. —JHM Flashlight by Susan Choi (FSG) The National Book Award winner's latest novel follows a woman as she makes sense of a mysterious tragedy—the disappearance of her father—and the geopolitics of her family, whose ties to America, Korea, and Japan are impossible to untangle. —SMS The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (S&S) Boxing novels are having a moment right now, and this newest addition should also be a knockout. Schaefer’s debut follows two Texas teenagers, one of whom vanishes a decade later. In so doing, the author weaves an unflinching narrative about race, sex, and, of course, the fights that unfold inside the ring. —EMB Lili Is Crying by Hélène Bessette, tr. Kate Briggs (New Directions) Throughout her life, this midcentury French author published 13 novels, but none of them, until now, have been translated into English. Lili Is Crying, lauded upon its initial French publication in 1953, mines the fraught relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte, complete with tight, experimental prose that unearths the startling nuance of both characters. —EMB Clam Down by Anelise Chen (One World) Chen's genre-defying memoir turns her mother's innocent typo—an exhortation to "clam down"—into an investigation of her own "clam genealogy"—that is, the family history and forces that led her to retreat into her shell following a divorce—as well as what we can learn from those most cloistered of sea creatures. —SMS How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast (Viking) Jong-Fast's intimate memoir reflects on her unconventional upbringing and intense yet elusive relationship with her mother, the acclaimed author Erica Jong, in the face of Jong's dementia diagnosis. —EMB The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward (Liveright) The inaugural novel in Liveright's Well-Read Black Girls series follows estranged twin sisters who are stunned one day when they meet a version of their mother, who vanished when they were infants, that appears to have lived a full, childless life—and soon burrows her way into their lives as well. —SMS The Dry Season by Melissa Febos (Knopf) The master memoirist returns with an account of what she learned about sex, pleasure, and solitude from a year of celibacy. With Febos, you're always in good hands. —SMS We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, tr. Robin Myers (New Directions) I first encountered Cábezon Cámara by way of her International Booker Prize–shortlisted novel The Adventures of China Iron, and have been eager to read more of her ever since. Her latest, a "queer baroque satire" of the Basque nun and explorer Antonio de Erauso, sounds promising. —SMS Endling by Maria Reva (Doubleday) On the eve of Russian invasion and against the backdrop of Ukraine’s prosperous “Romance Tours,” in which Western bachelors visit in search of compliant wives, three women set off on a cross-country road trip in an effort to secure a last-ditch chance at procreation for Lefty: bachelor, snail, and last of his species. In this Saundersian tangle, it is unclear which is the metaphor and which is the ground, but there is a non-zero chance that this debut novel from the Ukrainian-born, Canadian-raised author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear might contain a key to navigating our incomprehensible present. —JF Culture Creep by Alice Bolin (Mariner) What do diet tracking apps, Animal Crossing, and Silicon Valley titans have in common? According to Alice Bolin, they’re all symptoms of the ongoing "pop apocalypse." Bolin’s newest collection mines the intersection of technology, culture, and feminism to make sense of the vicissitudes of modern existence. —EMB Alpha and Omega by Jane Ellen Harrison (Marginalian) The new imprint of McNally Editions led by cultural critic Maria Popova brings back an acclaimed early 20th century classicist and linguist’s 110-year-old collection of essays on consciousness, faith, love, reason, science—you know, the light stuff. —JHM Exophony by Yoko Tawada, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions) Tawada's first book of essays to be translated into English fittingly centers on her lifelong fascination with the possibilities of "cross-hybridizing languages" as well as writing and existing outside one's mother tongue. —SMS That's How They Get You ed. Damon Young (Pantheon) A pioneering collection of Black humor, edited by the Thurber-winning Young and featuring an all-star roster of contributors including Hanif Abdurraqib, Wyatt Cenac, Kiese Laymon, Deesha Philyaw, and Roy Wood Jr.—need I say more? —SMS Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House) Three giants stuck in a spaceship must keep speaking to keep the ship moving—and themselves from growing bigger than their confines. It sounds about as strange, and intriguing, a parabolic vessel for the exploration of imprisonment and power as they come. —JHM Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest (Beacon) Passion, especially when directed toward a creative pursuit, can be all-encompassing. In this book, Griest explores this timeless conundrum through queer, BIPOC, and women artists around the world, all of whom consider their own relationship to ambition, redemption, and creativity. —EMB Grand Finales by Susan Gubar (Norton) My most anticipated summer read looks at nine women artists—including George Eliot, Georgia O'Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, and Gwendolyn Brooks—who flourished creatively in the final chapters of their lives. —SMS Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (Summit) This debut novel was one of the books being buzzed about at a recent booksellers conference, and I'm intrigued by the concept: a Black man from an elite family who spirals downward into New York City's underworld, where he's defined more by his race than class. —CK Homework by Geoff Dyer (FSG) Dyer has written countless works of fiction and nonfiction, but this memoir may be one of his most intimate. Charting his youth through the lens of schooling, exams, and, of course, the titular homework, this is a generous and deeply personal portrait of England in the 1960s and 70s. —EMB Allegro Pastel by Leif Randt, tr. Peter Kuras (Granta) The latest novel in the Granta Magazine Editions series traces the long-distance relationship of two millennials—a cult author and web designer—as they navigate life, love, and work (not to mention the encroachment of technology and climate change) in contemporary Germany. —SMS Toni at Random by Dana A. Williams (Amistad) What fascinates me most about Toni Morrison wasn't just a literary genius but an editorial one: during her tenure at Random House she shepherded the work of such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Lucille Clifton. Morrison herself asked that Dana A. Williams tell the story of this facet of her career—and even gave the book its unsurprisingly winning title. —SMS I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf) Leave aside the title like the piercing gaze of truth itself. A multigenerational saga of Catalonia told by gossiping ghosts readying an otherworldly welcome party for a descendant on her deathbed? Now that’s a concept. —JHM The Stone Door by Leonora Carrington (NYRB) Carrington's long unavailable novel, written at the end of WWII and first published in 1977, has everything: love, adventure, the Zodiac, Mesopotamia, a mad Hungarian King, and, of course, the titular great stone door that leads to the unknown. —SMS Porthole by Joanna Howard (McSweeney's) Howard's latest novel traces the total meltdown of an art-house film director who may or may not be responsible for the on-set death of her leading man, muse, and lover. —SMS These Heathens by Mia McKenzie (Random House) The two-time Lambda Award winner's latest novel, set in 1960s Georgia, follows a pious small-town teenager as she travels to Atlanta to get an abortion only to discover the burgeoning civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black folks. —SMS Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (McNally) Dunne's work often languishes in the shadow of his famous spouse, but this under-appreciated and long out of print memoir shows the writer—mordant, deadpan, and mid–nervous breakdown—at the height of his powers. —SMS The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (FSG) Lacey’s latest is as ambitious and genre-agnostic as anything she’s ever written, which is saying something. Part novel, part memoir, what might have become a mere separation narrative in another’s hands instead interrogates through its own form whether anything begins or ends in the first place. —JHM The Scrapbook by Heather Clark (Pantheon) The Sylvia Plath biographer makes her fiction debut with a story—inspired by Clark's own discovery of her grandfather's WWII scrapbook—about the illusions of first love and the burden of family history. —SMS The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (FSG) Originally written in English, a first for the author, Khemiri later rewrote this sweeping family saga in his native Swedish, which was published in 2023 and has since become a bestseller in Sweden. Now, the novel officially reappears in English, offering an indelible portrait of three Tunisian-Swedish sisters and the possible curse that follows them. —EMB Among Friends by Hal Ebbott (Riverhead) Ebbott's debut novel follows two wealthy couples who get together for a fateful weekend in the country—and how they navigate the harm, secrets, and life-shattering revelations that come from it. —SMS Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper) The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois author makes her nonfiction debut with an essay collection that explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women's public lives—and her own private life. —SMS [millions_email]

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2025 Preview

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It's cold, it's grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that we’re excited to cozy up with this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We'd love for you to find your next great read among them.  The Millions will be taking a hiatus for the next few months, but we hope to see you soon.  —Sophia Stewart, editor January The Legend of Kumai by Shirato Sanpei, tr. Richard Rubinger (Drawn & Quarterly) The epic 10-volume series, a touchstone of longform storytelling in manga now published in English for the first time, follows outsider Kamui in 17th-century Japan as he fights his way up from peasantry to the prized role of ninja. —Michael J. Seidlinger The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston (Amistad) In the years before her death in 1960, Hurston was at work on what she envisioned as a continuation of her 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. Incomplete, nearly lost to fire, and now published for the first time alongside scholarship from editor Deborah G. Plant, Hurston’s final manuscript reimagines Herod, villain of the New Testament Gospel accounts, as a magnanimous and beloved leader of First Century Judea. —Jonathan Frey Mood Machine by Liz Pelly (Atria) When you eagerly posted your Spotify Wrapped last year, did you notice how much of what you listened to tended to sound... the same? Have you seen all those links to Bandcamp pages your musician friends keep desperately posting in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, you might give them money for their art? If so, this book is for you. —John H. Maher My Country, Africa by Andrée Blouin (Verso) African revolutionary Blouin recounts a radical life steeped in activism in this vital autobiography, from her beginnings in a colonial orphanage to her essential role in the continent's midcentury struggles for decolonization. —Sophia M. Stewart The First and Last King of Haiti by Marlene L. Daut (Knopf) Donald Trump repeatedly directs extraordinary animus towards Haiti and Haitians. This biography of Henry Christophe—the man who played a pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution—might help Americans understand why. —Claire Kirch The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzzati, tr. Lawrence Venuti (NYRB) This is the second story collection, and fifth book, by the absurdist-leaning midcentury Italian writer—whose primary preoccupation was war novels that blend the brutal with the fantastical—to get the NYRB treatment. May it not be the last. —JHM Y2K by Colette Shade (Dey Street) The recent Y2K revival mostly makes me feel old, but Shade's essay collection deftly illuminates how we got here, connecting the era's social and political upheavals to today. —SMS Darkmotherland by Samrat Upadhyay (Penguin) In a vast dystopian reimagining of Nepal, Upadhyay braids narratives of resistance (political, personal) and identity (individual, societal) against a backdrop of natural disaster and state violence. The first book in nearly a decade from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, this is Upadhyay’s most ambitious yet. —JF Metamorphosis by Ross Jeffery (Truborn) From the author of I Died Too, But They Haven’t Buried Me Yet, a woman leads a double life as she loses her grip on reality by choice, wearing a mask that reflects her inner demons, as she descends into a hell designed to reveal the innermost depths of her grief-stricken psyche. —MJS The Containment by Michelle Adams (FSG) Legal scholar Adams charts the failure of desegregation in the American North through the story of the struggle to integrate suburban schools in Detroit, which remained almost completely segregated nearly two decades after Brown v. Board. —SMS Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow) African Futurist Okorafor’s book-within-a-book offers interchangeable cover images, one for the story of a disabled, Black visionary in a near-present day and the other for the lead character’s speculative posthuman novel, Rusted Robots. Okorafor deftly keeps the alternating chapters and timelines in conversation with one another. —Nathalie op de Beeck Open Socrates by Agnes Callard (Norton) Practically everything Agnes Callard says or writes ushers in a capital-D Discourse. (Remember that profile?) If she can do the same with a study of the philosophical world’s original gadfly, culture will be better off for it. —JHM Aflame by Pico Iyer (Riverhead) Presumably he finds time to eat and sleep in there somewhere, but it certainly appears as if Iyer does nothing but travel and write. His latest, following 2023’s The Half Known Life, makes a case for the sublimity, and necessity, of silent reflection. —JHM The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill (Avon) A local bookstore becomes a literal portal to the past for a trans man who returns to his hometown in search of a fresh start in Underhill's tender debut. —SMS Good Girl by Aria Aber (Hogarth) Aber, an accomplished poet, turns to prose with a debut novel set in the electric excess of Berlin’s bohemian nightlife scene, where a young German-born Afghan woman finds herself enthralled by an expat American novelist as her country—and, soon, her community—is enflamed by xenophobia. —JHM The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio) Krilanovich’s 2010 cult classic, about a runaway teen with drug-fueled ESP who searches for her missing sister across surreal highways while being chased by a killer named Dactyl, gets a much-deserved reissue. —MJS Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski (Liveright) In the latest novel from the National Book Award finalist, a 50-something actress reevaluates her life and career when #MeToo allegations roil the off-off-Broadway Shakespearean company that has cast her in the role of Cleopatra. —SMS Something Rotten by Andrew Lipstein (FSG) A burnt-out couple leave New York City for what they hope will be a blissful summer in Denmark when their vacation derails after a close friend is diagnosed with a rare illness and their marriage is tested by toxic influences. —MJS The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow by Kristen Martin (Bold Type) Martin's debut is a cultural history of orphanhood in America, from the 1800s to today, interweaving personal narrative and archival research to upend the traditional "orphan narrative," from Oliver Twist to Annie. —SMS We Do Not Part by Han Kang, tr. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hogarth) Kang’s Nobel win last year surprised many, but the consistency of her talent certainly shouldn't now. The latest from the author of The Vegetarian—the haunting tale of a Korean woman who sets off to save her injured friend’s pet at her home in Jeju Island during a deadly snowstorm—will likely once again confront the horrors of history with clear eyes and clarion prose. —JHM We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard (Milkweed) As the conversation around emerging technology skews increasingly to apocalyptic and utopian extremes, Béchard’s latest novel adopts the heterodox-to-everyone approach of embracing complexity. Here, a cadre of characters is isolated by a rogue but benevolent AI into controlled environments engineered to achieve their individual flourishing. The AI may have taken over, but it only wants to best for us. —JF The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case (Grand Central) Singer-songwriter Case, a country- and folk-inflected indie rocker and sometime vocalist for the New Pornographers, takes her memoir’s title from her 2013 solo album. Followers of PNW music scene chronicles like Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and drummer Steve Moriarty’s Mia Zapata and the Gits will consider Case’s backstory a must-read. —NodB The Loves of My Life by Edmund White (Bloomsbury) The 85-year-old White recounts six decades of love and sex in this candid and erotic memoir, crafting a landmark work of queer history in the process. Seminal indeed. —SMS Blob by Maggie Su (Harper) In Su’s hilarious debut, Vi Liu is a college dropout working a job she hates, nothing really working out in her life, when she stumbles across a sentient blob that she begins to transform as her ideal, perfect man that just might resemble actor Ryan Gosling. —MJS Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids by Leyna Krow (Penguin) Krow’s debut novel, Fire Season, traced the combustible destinies of three Northwest tricksters in the aftermath of an 1889 wildfire. In her second collection of short fiction, Krow amplifies surreal elements as she tells stories of ordinary lives. Her characters grapple with deadly viruses, climate change, and disasters of the Anthropocene’s wilderness. —NodB Black in Blues by Imani Perry (Ecco) The National Book Award winner—and one of today's most important thinkers—returns with a masterful meditation on the color blue and its role in Black history and culture. —SMS Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (Avid) The timely debut novel by Shamieh, a playwright, follows three generations of Palestinian American women as they navigate war, migration, motherhood, and creative ambition. —SMS How to Talk About Love by Plato, tr. Armand D'Angour (Princeton UP) With modern romance on its last legs, D'Angour revisits Plato's Symposium, mining the philosopher's masterwork for timeless, indispensable insights into love, sex, and attraction. —SMS At Dark, I Become Loathsome by Eric LaRocca (Blackstone) After Ashley Lutin’s wife dies, he takes the grieving process in a peculiar way, posting online, “If you're reading this, you've likely thought that the world would be a better place without you,” and proceeds to offer a strange ritual for those that respond to the line, equally grieving and lost, in need of transcendence. —MJS February No One Knows by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy (New Directions) A selection of stories translated in English for the first time, from across Dazai’s career, demonstrates his penchant for exploring conformity and society’s often impossible expectations of its members. —MJS Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (Bloomsbury) This queer love story set in post–Gilded Age New York, from the author of Glassworks (and one of my favorite Millions essays to date), explores on sex, power, and capitalism through the lives of three queer misfits. —SMS Pure, Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III (Random House) This podcaster and pop culture critic spoke to indie booksellers at a fall trade show I attended, regaling us with key cultural moments in the 1990s that shaped his youth in Milwaukee and being Black and gay. If the book is as clever and witty as Madison is, it's going to be a winner. —CK Gliff by Ali Smith (Pantheon) The Scottish author has been on the scene since 1997 but is best known today for a seasonal quartet from the late twenty-teens that began in 2016 with Autumn and ended in 2020 with Summer. Here, she takes the genre turn, setting two children and a horse loose in an authoritarian near future. —JHM Land of Mirrors by Maria Medem, tr. Aleshia Jensen and Daniela Ortiz (D&Q) This hypnotic graphic novel from one of Spain's most celebrated illustrators follows Antonia, the sole inhabitant of a deserted town, on a color-drenched quest to preserve the dying flower that gives her purpose. —SMS Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya (Random House) As odes to the "lifesaving power of books" proliferate amid growing literary censorship, Chihaya—a brilliant critic and writer—complicates this platitude in her revelatory memoir about living through books and the power of reading to, in the words of blurber Namwali Serpell, "wreck and redeem our lives." —SMS Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead) Yuknavitch continues the personal story she began in her 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water. More than a decade after that book, and nearly undone by a history of trauma and the death of her daughter, Yuknavitch revisits the solace she finds in swimming (she was once an Olympic hopeful) and in her literary community. —NodB The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha (Graywolf) A son reevaluates the life of his Egyptian mother after her death in Rakha's novel. Recounting her sprawling life story—from her youth in 1960s Cairo to her experience of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests—a vivid portrait of faith, feminism, and contemporary Egypt emerges. —SMS Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa (Deep Vellum) Deep Vellum has a particularly keen eye for fiction in translation that borders on the unclassifiable. This debut from a poet the press has published twice, billed as the story of “an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century,” seems right up that alley. —JHM David Lynch's American Dreamscape by Mike Miley (Bloomsbury) Miley puts David Lynch's films in conversation with literature and music, forging thrilling and  unexpected connections—between Eraserhead and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Inland Empire and "mixtape aesthetics," Lynch and the work of Cormac McCarthy. Lynch devotees should run, not walk. —SMS There's No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes, tr. Ann Goldstein (Washington Square) Goldstein is an indomitable translator. Without her, how would you read Ferrante? Here, she takes her pen to a work by the great Cuban-Italian writer de Céspedes, banned in the fascist Italy of the 1930s, that follows a group of female literature students living together in a Roman boarding house. —JHM Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield (Norton) Named for the humble beet plant and meaning, in a rough translation from the Latin, "vulgar second," Sarsfield’s surreal debut finds a seasonal harvest worker watching her boyfriend and other colleagues vanish amid “the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.” —JHM People From Oetimu by Felix Nesi, tr. Lara Norgaard (Archipelago) The center of Nesi’s wide-ranging debut novel is a police station on the border between East and West Timor, where a group of men have gathered to watch the final of the 1998 World Cup while a political insurgency stirs without. Nesi, in English translation here for the first time, circles this moment broadly, reaching back to the various colonialist projects that have shaped Timor and the lives of his characters. —JF Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores (MCD) This surreal tale, set in a 2038 dystopian Texas is a celebration of resistance to authoritarianism, a mash-up of Olivia Butler, Ray Bradbury, and John Steinbeck. —CK Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez (Crown) The High-Risk Homosexual author returns with a comic memoir-in-essays about fighting for survival in the Sunshine State, exploring his struggle with poverty through the lens of his queer, Latinx identity. —SMS Theory & Practice by Michelle De Kretser (Catapult) This lightly autofictional novel—De Krester's best yet, and one of my favorite books of this year—centers on a grad student's intellectual awakening, messy romantic entanglements, and fraught relationship with her mother as she minds the gap between studying feminist theory and living a feminist life. —SMS The Lamb by Lucy Rose (Harper) Rose’s cautionary and caustic folk tale is about a mother and daughter who live alone in the forest, quiet and tranquil except for the visitors the mother brings home, whom she calls “strays,” wining and dining them until they feast upon the bodies. —MJS Disposable by Sarah Jones (Avid) Jones, a senior writer for New York magazine, gives a voice to America's most vulnerable citizens, who were deeply and disproportionately harmed by the pandemic—a catastrophe that exposed the nation's disregard, if not outright contempt, for its underclass. —SMS No Fault by Haley Mlotek (Viking) Written in the aftermath of the author's divorce from the man she had been with for 12 years, this "Memoir of Romance and Divorce," per its subtitle, is a wise and distinctly modern accounting of the end of a marriage, and what it means on a personal, social, and literary level. —SMS Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis (Haymarket) Lewis, one of the most interesting and provocative scholars working today, looks at certain malignant strains of feminism that have done more harm than good in her latest book. In the process, she probes the complexities of gender equality and offers an alternative vision of a feminist future. —SMS Lion by Sonya Walger (NYRB) Walger—an successful actor perhaps best known for her turn as Penny Widmore on Lost—debuts with a remarkably deft autobiographical novel (published by NYRB no less!) about her relationship with her complicated, charismatic Argentinian father. —SMS The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines) A Spanish writer and philosophy scholar grieves her mother and cares for her sick father in Navarro's innovative, metafictional novel. —SMS Autotheories ed. Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan (MIT) Theory wonks will love this rigorous and surprisingly playful survey of the genre of autotheory—which straddles autobiography and critical theory—with contributions from Judith Butler, Jamieson Webster, and more. Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein (Doubleday) I enjoy retellings of classic novels by writers who turn the spotlight on interesting minor characters. This is an excursion into the world of Charles Dickens, told from the perspective iconic thief from Oliver Twist. —CK Crush by Ada Calhoun (Viking) Calhoun—the masterful memoirist behind the excellent Also A Poet—makes her first foray into fiction with a debut novel about marriage, sex, heartbreak, all-consuming desire. —SMS Show Don't Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House) Sittenfeld's observations in her writing are always clever, and this second collection of short fiction includes a tale about the main character in Prep, who visits her boarding school decades later for an alumni reunion. —CK Right-Wing Woman by Andrea Dworkin (Picador) One in a trio of Dworkin titles being reissued by Picador, this 1983 meditation on women and American conservatism strikes a troublingly resonant chord in the shadow of the recent election, which saw 45% of women vote for Trump. —SMS The Talent by Daniel D'Addario (Scout) If your favorite season is awards, the debut novel from D'Addario, chief correspondent at Variety, weaves an awards-season yarn centering on five stars competing for the Best Actress statue at the Oscars. If you know who Paloma Diamond is, you'll love this. —SMS Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker and Robin Myers (Hogarth) The Pulitzer winner’s latest is about an eponymously named professor who discovers the body of a mutilated man with a bizarre poem left with the body, becoming entwined in the subsequent investigation as more bodies are found. —MJS The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker (Random House) Jane goes missing after a sudden a debilitating and dreadful wave of symptoms that include hallucinations, amnesia, and premonitions, calling into question the foundations of her life and reality, motherhood and buried trauma. —MJS Song So Wild and Blue by Paul Lisicky (HarperOne) If it weren’t Joni Mitchell’s world with all of us just living in it, one might be tempted to say the octagenarian master songstress is having a moment: this memoir of falling for the blue beauty of Mitchell’s work follows two other inventive books about her life and legacy: Ann Powers's Traveling and Henry Alford's I Dream of Joni. —JHM Mornings Without Mii by Mayumi Inaba, tr. Ginny Tapley (FSG) A woman writer meditates on solitude, art, and independence alongside her beloved cat in Inaba's modern classic—a book so squarely up my alley I'm somehow embarrassed. —SMS True Failure by Alex Higley (Coffee House) When Ben loses his job, he decides to pretend to go to work while instead auditioning for Big Shot, a popular reality TV show that he believes might be a launchpad for his future successes. —MJS March Woodworking by Emily St. James (Crooked Reads) Those of us who have been reading St. James since the A.V. Club days may be surprised to see this marvelous critic's first novel—in this case, about a trans high school teacher befriending one of her students, the only fellow trans woman she’s ever met—but all the more excited for it. —JHM Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf) Told as a series of conversations, Sunder’s debut novel follows its recently graduated Indian protagonist in 2006 Cambridge, Mass., as she sees out her student visa teaching in a private high school and contriving to find her way between worlds that cannot seem to comprehend her. Quietly subversive, this is an immigration narrative to undermine the various reductionist immigration narratives of our moment. —JF Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen (Norton) Merle Oberon, one of Hollywood's first South Asian movie stars, gets her due in this engrossing biography, which masterfully explores Oberon's painful upbringing, complicated racial identity, and much more. —SMS The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld (Princeton UP) At a time when we are awash with options—indeed, drowning in them—Rosenfeld's analysis of how our modingn idea of "freedom" became bound up in the idea of personal choice feels especially timely, touching on everything from politics to romance. —SMS Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul (St. Martin's) One of the internet's funniest writers follows up One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter with a sharp and candid collection of essays that sees her life go into a tailspin during the pandemic, forcing her to reevaluate her beliefs about love, marriage, and what's really worth fighting for. —SMS The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria by José Donoso, tr. Megan McDowell (New Directions) The ever-excellent McDowell translates yet another work by the influential Chilean author for New Directions, proving once again that Donoso had a knack for titles: this one follows up 2024’s behemoth The Obscene Bird of Night. —JHM Remember This by Anthony Giardina (FSG) On its face, it’s another book about a writer living in Brooklyn. A layer deeper, it’s a book about fathers and daughters, occupations and vocations, ethos and pathos, failure and success. —JHM Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (Deep Vellum)  In this metaphysical and lyrical tale, a captain known for sticking to protocol begins losing control not only of her crew and ship but also her own mind. —MJS We Tell Ourselves Stories by Alissa Wilkinson (Liveright) Amid a spate of new books about Joan Didion published since her death in 2021, this entry by Wilkinson (one of my favorite critics working today) stands out for its approach, which centers Hollywood—and its meaning-making apparatus—as an essential key to understanding Didion's life and work. —SMS Seven Social Movements that Changed America by Linda Gordon (Norton) This book—by a truly renowned historian—about the power that ordinary citizens can wield when they organize to make their community a better place for all could not come at a better time. —CK Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson (Chronicle Prism) Lipson reconsiders the narratives of womanhood that constrain our lives and imaginations, mining the canon for alternative visions of desire, motherhood, and more—from Kate Chopin and Gwendolyn Brooks to Philip Roth and Shakespeare—to forge a new story for her life. —SMS Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin) Doppelgängers have been done to death, but Sathian's examination of Millennial womanhood—part biting satire, part twisty thriller—breathes new life into the trope while probing the modern realities of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting. —SMS Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (Random House) The author of Detransition, Baby offers four tales for the price of one: a novel and three stories that promise to put gender in the crosshairs with as sharp a style and swagger as Peters’ beloved latest. The novel even has crossdressing lumberjacks. —JHM On Breathing by Jamieson Webster (Catapult) Webster, a practicing psychoanalyst and a brilliant writer to boot, explores that most basic human function—breathing—to address questions of care and interdependence in an age of catastrophe. —SMS Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories (Two Lines) The stories of Unusual Fragments, including work by Yoshida Tomoko, Nobuko Takai, and other seldom translated writers from the same ranks as Abe and Dazai, comb through themes like alienation and loneliness, from a storm chaser entering the eye of a storm to a medical student observing a body as it is contorted into increasingly violent positions. —MJS The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf) Russell has quipped that this Dust Bowl story of uncanny happenings in Nebraska is the “drylandia” to her 2011 Florida novel, Swamplandia! In this suspenseful account, a woman working as a so-called prairie witch serves as a storage vault for her townspeople’s most troubled memories of migration and Indigenous genocide. With a murderer on the loose, a corrupt sheriff handling the investigation, and a Black New Deal photographer passing through to document Americana, the witch loses her memory and supernatural events parallel the area’s lethal dust storms. —NodB On the Clock by Claire Baglin, tr. Jordan Stump (New Directions) Baglin's bildungsroman, translated from the French, probes the indignities of poverty and service work from the vantage point of its 20-year-old narrator, who works at a fast-food joint and recalls memories of her working-class upbringing. —SMS Motherdom by Alex Bollen (Verso) Parenting is difficult enough without dealing with myths of what it means to be a good mother. I who often felt like a failure as a mother appreciate Bollen's focus on a more realistic approach to parenting. —CK The Magic Books by Anne Lawrence-Mathers (Yale UP) For that friend who wants to concoct the alchemical elixir of life, or the person who cannot quit Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Lawrence-Mathers collects 20 illuminated medieval manuscripts devoted to magical enterprise. Her compendium includes European volumes on astronomy, magical training, and the imagined intersection between science and the supernatural. —NodB Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Riverhead) The first novel by the Tanzanian-British Nobel laureate since his surprise win in 2021 is a story of class, seismic cultural change, and three young people in a small Tanzania town, caught up in both as their lives dramatically intertwine. —JHM Twelve Stories by American Women, ed. Arielle Zibrak (Penguin Classics) Zibrak, author of a delicious volume on guilty pleasures (and a great essay here at The Millions), curates a dozen short stories by women writers who have long been left out of American literary canon—most of them women of color—from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Zitkala-Ša. —SMS I'll Love You Forever by Giaae Kwon (Holt) K-pop’s sky-high place in the fandom landscape made a serious critical assessment inevitable. This one blends cultural criticism with memoir, using major artists and their careers as a lens through which to view the contemporary Korean sociocultural landscape writ large. —JHM The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga) Jones, the acclaimed author of The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake Trilogy, offers a unique tale of historical horror, a revenge tale about a vampire descending upon the Blackfeet reservation and the manifold of carnage in their midst. —MJS True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt (University of Arkansas Press) Full disclosure: Lena is my friend. But part of why I wanted to be her friend in the first place is because she is a brilliant poet. Selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and blurbed by the great Heather Christle and Elisa Gabbert, this debut collection seeks to turn "mistakes" into sites of possibility. —SMS Perfection by Vicenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes (NYRB) Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin enjoying their freedom as digital nomads, cultivating their passion for capturing perfect images, but after both friends and time itself moves on, their own pocket of creative freedom turns boredom, their life trajectories cast in doubt. —MJS Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus (Ecco) Jemus's debut story collection paint a composite portrait of the people who call Guatemala home—and those who have left it behind—with a cast of characters that includes a medicine man, a custodian at an underfunded college, wannabe tattoo artists, four orphaned brothers, and many more. Pacific Circuit by Alexis Madrigal (MCD) The Oakland, Calif.–based contributing writer for the Atlantic digs deep into the recent history of a city long under-appreciated and under-served that has undergone head-turning changes throughout the rise of Silicon Valley. —JHM Barbara by Joni Murphy (Astra) Described as "Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin," Murphy's character study follows the titular starlet as she navigates the twinned convulsions of Hollywood and history in the Atomic Age. Sister Sinner by Claire Hoffman (FSG) This biography of the fascinating Aimee Semple McPherson, America's most famous evangelist, takes religion, fame, and power as its subjects alongside McPherson, whose life was suffused with mystery and scandal. —SMS Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood (Pantheon) In this bold and layered memoir, Hood confronts three decades of sexual violence and searches for truth among the wreckage. Kate Zambreno calls Trauma Plot the work of "an American Annie Ernaux." —SMS Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel (Clash) Seibel’s debut story collection ranges widely from the down-and-out to the downright bizarre as he examines with heart and empathy the strife and struggle of his characters. —MJS James Baldwin by Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Yale UP) Zaborowska examines Baldwin's unpublished papers and his material legacy (e.g. his home in France) to probe about the great writer's life and work, as well as the emergence of the "Black queer humanism" that Baldwin espoused. —CK Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett (Riverhead) Arnett is always brilliant and this novel about the relationship between Cherry, a professional clown, and her magician mentor, "Margot the Magnificent," provides a fascinating glimpse of the unconventional lives of performance artists. —CK Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp (S&S) The deal announcement describes the ever-punchy writer’s debut novel with an infinitely appealing appellation: “debauched picaresque.” If that’s not enough to draw you in, the truly unhinged cover should be. —JHM [millions_email]

A Year in Reading: 2024

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Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose. In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it. Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.) The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger. Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday. —Sophia Stewart, editor Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists Zachary Issenberg, writer Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves Nicholas Russell, writer and critic Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz Deborah Ghim, editor Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 202120202019201820172016201520142013,  2011201020092008200720062005

That’s A Wrap, Says Alice Munro

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Alice Munro announced her retirement from writing this week. “Perhaps, when you’re my age,” she told a National Post reporter, “you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be.” Previously the Canadian author announced her retirement in 2006, but that didn’t stop her from publishing two more books – including her latest story collection, Dear Life (Millions review). The uninitiated can get a primer on her entire oeuvre by checking out our comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro. See also: “Can Writers Retire? Let Us Count the Ways

The Millions Top Ten: April 2013

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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. Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever 4 months 2. 2. Tenth of December 4 months 3. 3. An Arrangement of Light 5 months 4. 4. The Middlesteins 2 month 5. 7. Stand on Zanzibar 2 months 6. 5. Building Stories 4 months 7. 8. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk 2 months 8. 9. Arcadia 4 months 9. 10. Both Flesh and Not 5 months 10. - Vampires in the Lemon Grove 1 month   In September 2012, we interviewed Sadie Stein, one of the Paris Review editors behind Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, a book that seems tailor-made to appeal to Millions readers. In it, a handful of accomplished short story writers -- Ann Beattie, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joy Williams, and so on -- were asked to pick a favorite story from the journal’s archive, then write a brief introduction explaining how the story spoke to them. After a six-month run, the book has now graduated to our Hall of Fame. Otherwise, our list doesn't see a whole lot of movement, with the top four positions unchanged, including Millions ebook Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever at number one. Karen Russell's Vampires in the Lemon Grove is our one debut this month. We've interviewed Russell twice, in 2011 and again early this year. Vampires was also featured in our big 2013 book preview. Near Misses: The Round House, The Orphan Master's Son, Fox 8, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, and Dear Life. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: March 2013

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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 March. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 1. Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever 3 months 2. 3. Tenth of December 3 months 3. 4. An Arrangement of Light 4 months 4. - The Middlesteins 1 month 5. 5. Building Stories 3 months 6. 6. Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story 6 months 7. - Stand on Zanzibar 1 month 8. - Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk 1 month 9. 8. Arcadia 3 months 10. 7. Both Flesh and Not 4 months   Last fall saw the arrival of three hotly anticpated titles from a trio of the most popular literary writers working today. Now those three titles are ending their run in our Top Ten by graduating to our Hall of Fame: This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, NW by Zadie Smith, and Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. Those graduations made room for three debuts. Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins pops up at number four. Attenberg made an appearance in our Year in Reading in December. The most popular piece on The Millions last month, by a wide margin, was Ted Gioia's unearthing of John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and the remarkably prescient predictions contained within. The essay sent readers running to check out the book. Finally, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain completed its long, stead ascent onto our list. Fountain also appeared in our Year in Reading, and Edan Lepucki interviewed him in these pages last June. Our first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by staff writer Mark O'Connell, stayed atop our list and continues to win praise from readers and critics. An exerpt is available here and you can learn more about the book here. Near Misses: The Round House, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Dear Life, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, and Sweet Tooth. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: February 2013

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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 February. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 1. Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever 2 months 2. 2. This Is How You Lose Her 6 months 3. 3. Tenth of December 2 months 4. 4. An Arrangement of Light 3 months 5. 5. Building Stories 2 months 6. 8. Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story 5 months 7. 9. NW 6 months 8. - Arcadia 2 months 9. 10. Telegraph Avenue 6 months 10. 7. Both Flesh and Not 3 months   With our top five remaining unchanged, the big action in February was the graduation of a pair of books to our Hall of Fame. Gillian Flynn's juggernaut Gone Girl won over Millions readers with help from Edan Lepucki and Janet Potter's entertaining tag-team reading of the book in September, though copies were already flying off the shelves in the months prior. Meanwhile, D.T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace was hotly anticipated by Millions readers from the moment the book was announced. We ran an excerpt and interviewed Max. Those graduations made room for the return of Lauren Groff's Arcadia (recently interviewed in our pages) and, appropriately enough, David Foster Wallace's Both Flesh and Not. Our first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by staff writer Mark O'Connell, stayed atop our list and continues to win praise from readers and critics. An exerpt is available here and you can learn more about the book here. Near Misses: Dear Life, Sweet Tooth, The Round House, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. See Also: Last month's list.

Judging Books by Their Covers 2013: U.S. Vs. U.K.

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As we've done for several years now, we thought it might be fun to compare the U.S. and U.K. book cover designs of this year's Morning News Tournament of Books contenders. Book cover art is an interesting element of the literary world -- sometimes fixated upon, sometimes ignored -- but, as readers, we are undoubtedly swayed by the little billboard that is the cover of every book we read. And, while many of us no longer do most of our reading on physical books with physical covers, those same cover images now beckon us from their grids in the various online bookstores. From my days as a bookseller, when import titles would sometimes find their way into our store, I've always found it especially interesting that the U.K. and U.S. covers often differ from one another. This would seem to suggest that certain layouts and imagery will better appeal to readers on one side of the Atlantic rather than the other. These differences are especially striking when we look at the covers side by side. The American covers are on the left, and the UK are on the right. Your equally inexpert analysis is encouraged in the comments. I much prefer the U.K. version here. The woodblock art is sublime, and the red and black are nice and bold.    

Can Writers Retire? Let Us Count the Ways

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While living in Durham, N.C., back in the 1980s, I met a guy who was studying creative writing at Duke University. I have come to think of him as the doomed acolyte. One day he told me that his teacher, venerable Reynolds Price, rolled into the classroom in his wheelchair and gave the class a curious assignment. Price told the students they were not to touch the short stories they were working on for the next week. Don't change a single word. Don't add or delete a comma. Don't even look at your stories. When the class reconvened the following week, Price asked how many had fulfilled the assignment.  About half of the students, including the doomed acolyte, raised a hand. Price then stunned the room by advising those who were able to follow his instructions that they should consider dropping out of the course. His reasoning was brutal and simple: Anyone who is able to stop writing for an entire week -- even for a single day -- does not have the right stuff to become a writer.  True writers, Price was saying, are in the grip of a compulsion. They have to write, and they are powerless to stop doing it. It is why they are alive and it is what keeps them alive. That story came back to me -- and it came into question -- when I heard the news that Philip Roth has quit writing fiction. "To his friends," Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times, "the notion of Mr. Roth not writing is like Mr. Roth not breathing." I'm sure Reynolds Price's friends felt the same way about him. Roth, author of more than 30 works of fiction over the past half century, has stuck a Post-it note to his computer that reads: "The struggle with writing is over." Roth said he looks at that little sticker every morning and it gives him "such strength." I've been writing every day for the past 40 years or so, sometimes getting paid to do it and sometimes not, and through all those years I've assumed I will keep doing it until my wits leave me or I die. In other words, I'm a long-time disciple of the gospel according to Reynolds Price, a believer that writers are people who are both blessed and cursed by the compulsion to distill their experience of the world into words on a page. But Roth's startling announcement caused me to begin rethinking this assumption. Why shouldn't writers be free to stop writing when they they've lost their appetite for the grind, or when they feel they've lost their edge, or when they've said everything they care to say? Isn't it liberating to think that writers are not slaves, after all, but are actually free to walk away from their desks and never look back?  And even though many writers remain productive into their eighties and beyond-- James Salter, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Elmore Leonard come immediately to mind -- isn't it preferable for some (most?) writers to quit rather than keep going through the familiar motions? Of course Philip Roth was not the first writer to retire. Writers have been putting down their pens for many years. Here is a selective and thoroughly incomplete list of the ways half a dozen writers have retired -- or tried to -- with wildly varying degrees of success: 1.  Retiring Prematurely: Arthur Rimbaud Before reaching his 21st birthday, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), fueled by a diet of hashish, absinthe, and bad behavior, produced dazzling works of poetry and prose that became pillars of modernism. Then he quit writing. He spent the rest of his short life demeaning his literary output while wandering from Indonesia to Africa, working as a soldier, a foreman in a stone quarry, a merchant of coffee and guns. No one has ever solved the great mystery -- why did this brilliant wild child quit writing? -- though in Bruce Duffy's novel about Rimbaud, Disaster Was My God, the poet's lover Paul Verlaine may have come close. "Well," Duffy's fictional Verlaine says, "one big reason, perhaps obvious, is he grew up...the child in him died."  2.  Retiring Selectively: E.M. Forster After publishing four novels in a six-year blaze, E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was silent for more than a dozen years before producing his most famous book, A Passage to India, in 1924.  Then -- no more novels. But Forster did not stop writing. He continued to produce essays, plays, film scripts, criticism, biography, and travel writing, even worked as a broadcaster and collaborated on the libretto for an opera. One theory has it that Forster, who was gay, stopped writing novels because he did not feel free to write about the theme that interested him most: homosexual love. In 1971, the year after his death, Forster's novel Maurice was published. Begun in 1913 and revised several times, it tells the story of two men who are in love with each other, and happy. Lionel Trilling wrote that his personal feeling about Forster's abandonment of novel writing "fluctuates between disapproval of a dereliction from duty and a sense of relief that a fine artist has not seen art as a grim imperative." That notion of writing as a "grim imperative" opened my eyes wider to the possibility that my original thoughts on compulsion were far too narrow. Trilling was relieved that Forster had overcome such a view. Maybe I -- maybe all writers -- should overcome it too. 3.  Retiring Aggressively: J.D. Salinger No American writer became more famous for being silent than the reclusive J.D. Salinger (1919-2010). After producing an indelible novel and a book of short stories, he retired from the literary world -- indeed from the world -- in 1953, moving from New York to a 90-acre hillside compound in Cornish, N.H. He produced two more books of stories, in 1961 and 1963, then published his final work, the long story "Hapworth 16, 1924," in The New Yorker in 1965. He never published another word, though in a rare interview in 1974 he revealed that while he had retired from publishing, he had not stopped writing. "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," Salinger said. "It's peaceful. Still. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." 3.  Retiring Half-Heartedly: Alice Munro Alice Munro, one of the undisputed living masters of the short story, published a collection called Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in 2001, when she was 70 years old. Ben Dolnick, a hard-core Munro fan, wrote here last year that Munro then entered what he considered the "cruising phase" of her career. When Munro announced in 2006 that she was retiring, Dolnick found himself, curiously, remembering the one time he saw Michael Jordan play basketball, then thinking of Jordan's unpretty habit of over-staying his welcome after his best years were behind him. "When (Munro) announced her retirement in 2006," Dolnick wrote, "I confess to feeling a certain relief; she was too proud and too self-aware to leave us remembering her like Jordan on the (Washington) Wizards." Munro's retirement didn't last. But unlike Jordan's, her return to the game was not unpretty. Her 2009 collection, Too Much Happiness, was a critical success. Even Dolnick was delighted when Dear Life followed it late last year. He wrote, "Much of the material here will be familiar to anyone who has ever read her -- the train trips and heartsick letters and unpaved roads -- but the voice is newly sharpened, as if she were freshly aware of only having so many words remaining in her allotment." Surely a writer's desire to use up her allotment of words is justification for coming out of retirement. In an interview in 2010, the year after Too Much Happiness appeared, Munro was asked what advice she would give to young writers. She replied, "If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't be able to quit." Munro is now 81, and still writing. 4.  Retiring Ambiguously: Imre Kertesz The Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, who survived the camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002, announced his retirement last November. Or did he? In an interview with a German magazine, Kertesz, who is 83 and suffering from Parkinson's disease, said, "I don't want to write anymore. I consider my oeuvre, so closely related to the Holocaust, as closed, whether I succeeded or not." Sounds like a retirement announcement to me. It did to the French journal ActuaLitte, too, which picked up the news. The Millions followed suit. As these reports spread, however, Kertesz's American publisher, Dennis Johnson, posted a recollection of visiting Kertesz and his wife in Berlin last March. "The only really somber moment occurred when Imre spoke of his fear of not being able to finish the new book he was working on," Johnson wrote. "Still, he was making progress, he insisted, and was determined to get it done." When the reports of his retirement began circulating several months after that meeting in Berlin, Kertesz wrote to Johnson that the rumors were "a bit too hasty." He added, "Naturally, I will try to write as long as I can." Ah, ambiguity. 5.  Retiring Richly: LaVyrle Spencer It's always refreshing to meet writers who admit they're in it for the money, and it's important to remember that they're not always hacks. As Flannery O'Connor once noted, no writer was hotter after the dollar than Henry James. The Master gets some competition from LaVyrle Spencer, who wrote her first romance novel when she was in her 30s and working as a junior high school teacher's aide in Minnesota. She went on to produce 23 novels, including a dozen New York Times best sellers, and was inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. Then, at the age of 54, she retired from writing. Why did she quit cold when she was selling millions of books and making millions of dollars? It's downright...un-American. "I want to feel free!" she told Publishers Weekly. She added that she had set a financial goal when she was starting writing novels, and once she reached it she promised herself she would retire. Unlike so many others, she kept her vow. She told PW she planned to enjoy her two young grandchildren and travel with her husband. No grim imperative for LaVyrle Spencer. 6.  Retiring Gradually: Roberto Bolaño You can't get any more retired than dead, yet writers of a certain stature have a tendency to keep publishing from the grave. Recent examples have included Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, David Foster Wallace, and James M. Cain. (Many fans are hopeful that J.D. Salinger did indeed keep writing during his long silence in New Hampshire, and that eventually he will join the club.) But no dead writer has out-produced the Chilean novelist, poet, and short story writer Roberto Bolaño, whose estate has put out a torrent of titles since he died of liver failure in 2003 at age 50. The posthumous output peaked with 2666, a novel of breathtaking sweep built around the disappearance of hundreds of women near the Texas-Mexico border. The torrent is finally subsiding, but scholars, critics and biographers are sure to keep picking over Bolaño's life and work for years to come. Which brings us to the paradoxical answer to the question posed in this essay's title: It turns out that, yes, it's possible for any writer to retire, but the good ones live on long after they die, and the great ones are never allowed to die. William Faulkner wanted the epitaph on his tombstone to read, "He wrote the books, and he died." More fitting would have been: "He wrote the books, and he died, but the books were so good that people kept reading them for years and years after he was gone to dust." Images courtesy of the author.

The Millions Top Ten: January 2013

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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 January. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. - Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever 1 month 2. 1. This Is How You Lose Her 5 months 3. - Tenth of December 1 month 4. 5. An Arrangement of Light 2 months 5. - Building Stories 1 month 6. 4. Gone Girl 6 months 7. 2. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 6 months 8. 3. Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story 4 months 9. 6. NW 5 months 10. 7. Telegraph Avenue 5 months   To kick off a new year of our Top Ten lists at The Millions, we made a slight adjustment to our calculations. The change has to do with how we account for lower-priced, shorter-form ebook originals that have become popular with our readers and effectively gives a modest penalty to the cheaper ebooks and recognizes that a purchase of a $1.99 ebook is different from buying a hardcover costing $20 or more. Despite this change, thanks to the overwhelmingly positive response from our readers, our first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by staff writer Mark O'Connell, lands atop our list. So far, the feedback from readers has been great, and we hope more will be inspired to pick it up. An exerpt is available here and you can learn more about the book here. Also debuting is Tenth of December by George Saunders, one of our Most Anticipated books and a title that has gotten a ton of positive press. Finally, also debuting is Chris Ware's Building Stories, reviewed in these pages by none other than Mark O'Connell. Ware also participated in our Year in Reading in December. Dropping from the list were David Foster Wallace's Both Flesh and Not, Lauren Groff's Arcadia and Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan Other Near Misses: Dear Life and The Round House. See Also: Last month's list.

The Millions Top Ten: December 2012

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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 December. This Month Last Month Title On List 1. 2. This Is How You Lose Her 4 months 2. 3. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 5 months 3. 4. Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story 3 months 4. 8. Gone Girl 5 months 5. - An Arrangement of Light 1 month 6. 5. NW 4 months 7. 6. Telegraph Avenue 4 months 8. 7. Both Flesh and Not 2 months 9. - Arcadia 1 month 10. - Sweet Tooth 1 month   After an impressive run, A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava graduates to our Hall of Fame (check out Garth Hallberg's profile of De La Pava that introduced many of our readers to this unusual book). This makes room for Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her (our review) to be crowned our new number one. Also joining our Hall of Fame is The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn (see our review of the last book in the series). Debuting on our list is Nicole Krauss's An Arrangement of Light, a bite-sized ebook original. And Krauss is joined on our list by Lauren Groff's Arcadia (selected by Alexander CheeEmily St. John Mandel, and Janet Potter in our recent Year in Reading series; Groff was also a participant) and Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (which we recently reviewed). Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King slipped off the list. Other Near Misses: Dear Life, Building Stories, The Round House, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. See Also: Last month's list.

Only So Many Words Remain: On Alice Munro’s Dear Life

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While reading Alice Munro’s new book, Dear Life, I kept finding myself thinking of something that had nothing to do with books, or with Canada, or with any of the dozen other things you might expect. What I thought of was a professional basketball game I went to 15 or so years ago. The Bulls were visiting the lowly Wizards (who were then still called the Bullets), and my friends and I had lucked our way into decent seats. It was the first and only time I’d seen Michael Jordan in person, and it was the strangest thing. You could feel a collective awareness in the building, like the smoke lingering after a fireworks show: he will outlive every one of us. Jordan’s name would appear the next day beside Calbert Cheaney and Bill Wennington’s in the box score, but years from now, when their names evoked nothing, his would be unfaded. He inhabited the court like a time traveler, visiting from a future in which he continued to exist while the rest of us -- chewing our $7 hot dogs, taking his picture every time he touched the ball -- did not. Which is to say: contemporary greatness is a strange thing. Alice Munro’s books are reviewed right there beside Ann Patchett and Richard Russo’s; they’re set on the New Releases table between the latest from Jane Smiley and Dave Eggers. But they’re of a different order, they’re made of different stuff. The Mona Simpson quote that appears on many of Munro’s paperbacks (“The living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years,”) seems truer than ever, and it gives an air of preemptive nostalgia to the act of reading her. Soon enough it will seem very strange, almost miraculous, that we could go to the store to buy a new book by Alice Munro. But for now, anyway, we can; the daily highlight reels must still be assembled. And so how does this latest collection of stories, her 14th, stack up? It is, I’m pleased to report, wonderful -- even surprisingly so. Since 2001’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, published when she was 70, she had seemed to me to be in the cruising phase of her career. The three collections since then were full of good, solid, Munro-grade stuff, but with a couple of exceptions, there were no stories that I imagined would make it into her best-of collections. Her writing had simplified considerably, and she seemed, with her plots, to be retracing old ground. When she announced her retirement in 2006, I confess to feeling a certain relief; she was too proud and too self-aware to leave us remembering her like Jordan on the Wizards. Well, she didn’t retire, and it’s a good thing she didn’t. Her writing continues in its understated mode, but the simplicity seems now to reflect an increased urgency, rather than a diminished capacity. There’s a kind of cut-the-crap quality to this latest batch of stories -- material that might have once have taken up 20 pages she now deals with in a couple of sentences, unsentimentally, almost in passing. In “Gravel,” the news that the narrator’s sister has drowned arrives by implication, like the passings of the seasons. In “Train,” a man walks away from his life with as little fanfare as if he were walking out of a movie theater. Here is how, in one of the collection’s best stories, “Leaving Maverley,” Munro describes a man whose wife has died after years of insentient dwindling in the hospital: He’d thought that it had happened long before with Isabel, but it hadn’t. Not until now. She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever. And people hurried around, as if this outrageous fact could be overcome by making sensible arrangements. He, too, obeyed the custom, signing where he was told to sign, arranging -- as they said -- for the remains. “Not at all, as if not ever,” -- these seven short, simple words give as clear an account of grief, of the infantilizing incomprehensibility of a loved one’s death, as anything I’ve ever read. The book is full of formulations like that -- births and deaths, marriages and infidelities, rendered in unimprovable calligraphic strokes. Much of the material here will be familiar to anyone who has ever read her -- the train trips and heartsick letters and unpaved roads -- but the voice is newly sharpened, as if she were freshly aware of only having so many words remaining in her allotment. And, in fact, such an awareness becomes explicit in places; growing old has, like a trip through a difficult country, endowed Munro with all manner of new information, and she has here begun to file her dispatches. “In Sight of the Lake,” about a woman’s increasingly baffled search for her doctor’s office, is as harrowing an account of old age as I’ve ever read. And “Dolly” makes the case, with worrisome authority, that jealousy and heartache are not occupations from which we may retire. A surprise, then, is that the book ends with a sequence of stories that Munro could almost have written decades ago. “The final works in this book are not quite stories,” she writes in an author’s note (under the disconcerting heading “Finale”). “I believe they are the first and last -- and the closest -- things I have to say about my own life.” A certain prurient ear-pricking is natural, when an author promises to share the actual goods about herself, but what she has to say turns out to be not so different from what she’s said about her childhood in her earlier books. We get the failing fox farm, the humble father, the ambitious and ailing mother. We get the house set uneasily between town and country, the rickety bridges, the trees known by name. The difference, if there is one, is the frankness with which she sets aside the possibility of artifice. It’s as if, after decades of plot trickery and composite characters, she longs to remove all the filters from her light, to show us the bare bulb. Here, finally, is the intelligence itself, the compassionate but merciless awareness that she has shone through all her hundreds of stories. At the end of one of those stories, a dozen or so books ago, there’s a sentence that may be the best single thing she ever wrote, and it offers something like a key to her entire career: “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable -- deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” In Dear Life, Munro, equipped with a head-lamp the likes of which we may never see again, continues to explore.

Tuesday New Release Day; McEwan, Munro, Bolaño, Tóibín, Solomon, Bookshelf, Jefferson, Glück, Peach, Rain, Hansen

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Some heavy hitters out this week: Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan; Dear Life, Alice Munro's latest collection; Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolaño; The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín; and Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon's massive follow-up to The Noonday Demon. Also out are My Ideal Bookshelf, in which figures from Judd Apatow to Jennifer Egan share about which books shaped them; Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson; 40 years of poems by Louise Glück; a new issue of McSweeney's food mag Lucky Peach; debut The Heat of the Sun by David Rain, and She Loves Me Not, a new collection of stories by Ron Hansen.

A Beginner’s Guide to Alice Munro

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This November, Knopf recently announced, Alice Munro will publish Dear Life: Stories, her 13th book of shorts and second since her announced “retirement” in 2006. For Alice Munro fanatics -- a group in which I proudly include myself -- this is, of course, wonderful news. It’s also an excuse, as if we needed one, to revisit her previous work, and to push her books on the world’s non-Munroviacs. Considering which of Alice Munro’s stories to read can feel something like considering what to eat from an enormous box of chocolates. There are an overwhelming number of choices, many of which have disconcertingly similar appearances -- and, while you’re very likely to choose something delicious, there is the slight but real possibility of finding yourself stuck with, say, raspberry ganache. Herewith, a partial guide: The Munro book to read if you’re only willing to read one: Selected Stories The Munro book to read if you’re only willing to read one but don’t like the idea of reading a literary greatest hits album: The Beggar Maid. Published in 1977, The Beggar Maid is as close as Munro has ever come to writing a novel, but it actually does a better job than just about any novel I know of getting an entire, living human being onto the page. The book follows a woman named Rose all the way from her early childhood to her middle age, and never feels stretched. It’s an extraordinarily high-grade steak that just happens to be served in slices. Best story, in the category of autobiographical-seeming stories about love: “Bardon Bus,” which contains some of the most convincingly rendered emotional agony I’ve ever read. Best story, in the category of historical drama: “A Wilderness Station,” which should, with its many voices and bizarre, dramatic happenings, put to rest any notion of Munro as a predictable dispenser of affair/epiphany-type fiction. Best story, all categories: “The Beggar Maid,” which showcases, among other things, her remarkable deftness in telling stories that leap around in time. Story featuring most implausible twist: “Tricks.” A woman falls in love with a man, meets him again and is puzzled by his coldness. Turns out, the cold one was an identical twin. She acknowledges the silliness within the story, but still. Stories featuring drownings or near-drownings: “Miles City, Montana,” “Changes and Ceremonies,” “Gravel,” “Walking on Water,” “Love of a Good Woman,” “Pictures of the Ice,” “Child’s Play.” Stories featuring murders or near-murders: “Open Secrets,” “Fits,” “Dimension,” “Free Radicals.” Story whose plot, after three or four readings, I’m still not sure I understand: “Open Secrets.” Most depressing story that will somehow leave you uplifted: “Dulse,” in which a woman spends a few days thinking gloomy thoughts in New Brunswick in the wake of a devastating breakup. The brilliant little breakfast scene with the Willa-Cather-obsessed man is a joy. Most uplifting story that will somehow leave you depressed: “The Turkey Season,” in which the narrator cheerfully remembers the winter she spent working in a turkey barn. A sense of never-quite-resolved unease hovers over this story like a snowstorm. Authors to read once you’ve finally gotten your fill of Munro: William Maxwell (who’s Munro’s favorite writer), Eudora Welty (whose story, “A Worn Path,” Munro has called the most perfect story ever written), and George Saunders (whose stories, despite very much not being set in rural Canada, are as moving and smart and humane as Munro’s). Appendix: Lives of Girls and Women: “Changes and Ceremonies” Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: “Walking on Water” The Progress of Love: “Miles City, Montana,” “Fits” Friend of My Youth: “Pictures of the Ice” Open Secrets: “A Wilderness Station,” “Open Secrets” Love of a Good Woman: “Love of a Good Woman” The Moons of Jupiter: “Turkey Season,” “Bardon Bus” Runaway: “Tricks” Too Much Happiness: “Free Radicals,” “Dimension,” “Child’s Play”