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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Gets the Book Treatment
A New Orleans police cruiser sinks beneath rising floodwater. A bouncy and ratchet-grooved R&B beat pummels like the noonday sun of Louisiana. And, looking resplendent in a striped red dress, Beyoncé reclines atop the squad car chanting, “I slay, I slay.” This unforgettable scene closes out the music video for “Formation,” the final track on the singer’s 2016 visual album Lemonade.
The choreographed riot also sets an opulent stage for a new, hard-to-classify work of music writing by Omise’eke Tinsley. In Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism, Tinsley charts how the luscious veneer of Lemonade conceals a subversive, empowering, and downright badass disruption of the cultural narratives that give shape to blackness, femininity, motherhood, southernness, and sexuality in America. Tinsley regards Beyoncé as a potential healing voice for many queer, femme, and trans* folk, who are often not given the space to speak their own stories. Part scholarly treatise and part family history, part lavish scrapbook and part justice-oriented advocacy—you’ve never read a book quite like this.
For this interview with The Millions, Tinsley talked about writing like a remixer, the startling wisdom found in autobiographies of famous female country singers, and Beyoncé stepping into the role of a paradigm-slaying hero.
The Millions: Your book is called Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism. How is your book a remix and why did you choose that form?
Omise’eke Tinsley: As I set out to write this book, one of my questions was, “How am I going to write about Beyoncé?” She has a lot of music. There is a lot that people have said about her. Initially, my editor imagined that I would tell a story that began with the first solo album and continued through Lemonade, or went track-by-track on Lemonade. But I didn’t feel like that would be a book I was particularly suited to write. Instead of writing a book the way that I was taught to write in graduate school, I wanted to have the form come from my subject matter as a matter of respect.
I tried in each chapter to bring in different elements—maybe a little bit of history, other current events—and to mix all of those together in the way that I would make a mixtape. My idea was to write the book like a song, given that I have no actual songwriting expertise, but to make a book-type song. Scholars like Angela Davis have talked about how black women’s songs have been a space in which we’ve told our stories, told what it means to be a black woman, and told how we imagine getting free. That has been a space that has been more accessible to black women, historically, than the academy ever has been. I was writing Beyoncé in Formation in the tradition of black feminism that’s always remixing the feminist texts that have come before.
TM: The Lemonade visual album is something of a mixtape too. It has traditional music video spots, voiceovers of poems by Warsan Shire, and home video footage from Beyoncé and Jay-Z. What do you think the big-picture project of Lemonade is and how the remix format fits into it?
OT: Like every other Beyoncé fan, I love the self-titled album. It came out around the time when Beyoncé stood up at the Video Music Awards in front of a brightly-lit sign, declared herself a feminist, and broke the Internet in a way that it desperately needed to be broken. However, one thing that was nagging at me in Beyoncé is that it’s so cosmopolitan. Parts of the self-titled visual album are shot in Brazil, parts of it are shot on the European continent. That’s great and that’s cute—it’s nice to be in chateaus. But it seemed to me that some of the specificity of Beyoncé as a black woman from the U.S. South was being washed out as part of her message of feminism.
When Lemonade dropped, it immediately had a special place in my heart. It imagines the U.S. South peopled almost entirely by black women. It’s a U.S. South in which the past, present, and future weave in and out of each other, in which black women both have a past that’s powerful and have a future that’s possible. Traditionally, it’s a site that people imagine as a space of impossibility and backwardness and disempowerment. For me, as someone living in Texas at that moment, to imagine the U.S. South as a space of possibility, as a space of historic strength, and as a space of possibility for the future was really important.
Thinking about black women’s creativity, our history, different cultural artifacts—how all of these can be in conversation to imagine a world in which black women simply get to be free is, to me, the premise of Lemonade. It’s imagining black women’s freedom and part of that freedom is not being beholden to anything.
TM: In the context of Lemonade, I’ve been thinking about how pop music has a trickster quality. There are bland, universal aspects but also a wink and a nod. There are also incredibly personal and autobiographical components in the language and the gestures of pop music. How do you think Beyoncé has incorporated autobiography in her music, and what changed for Lemonade?
OT: I don’t think Lemonade is the story of Beyoncé’s marriage. When it came out, there was a reaction like, “Oh my God, Beyoncé finally told us about her marriage. She finally laid herself bare and made herself vulnerable.” There was all this speculation: “Are they getting a divorce?”—and this and that and the other. I’ve had some people say to me, “I feel like Lemonade was about the black woman’s universal experience of being cheated on.” I did not get that at all. I’m not saying that’s not a valid reaction, but I think Beyoncé uses autobiographical elements to tell a story that’s about more than her individual story. If it was just her story, she wouldn’t need to create a world that’s populated by black women and a community that is there to witness her pain and her healing. She’s telling this story about healing in a marriage, but to me it’s about the bigger question, “What does a black woman need to heal?”
One thing about being a creative black woman or woman of color is the assumption always that we’re writing autobiography. I once taught Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat and a student of mine asked in class, “Is it safe to assume, because the author is fairly young, that this must be autobiography because she wouldn’t have anything else to write about?” And my answer was, “No! Of course not!” Black women have more to tell than just the story of our own lives. I think we all wish we were Beyoncé’s girlfriends and she would tell us about her marriage, but she’s not. She’s making a work of art, and she’s selling a product. That product is not access to Beyoncé’s home life. All artists use elements of the autobiographical to tell a story that’s larger than the story of their lives.
There are so many moments in Lemonade where that becomes abundantly clear. One of the moments is in “Hold Up” when she emerges on the courthouse steps dressed like Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of fresh water, beauty, and femininity. She’s putting her story in an African diaspora context. In the next song on the visual album, “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” she samples Malcolm X: “The most disrespected woman in America is the black woman.” At that moment, the film stops to make clear that if you think this is just about one black woman, you’re missing the point. The point is about how black women are disrespected in every aspect of our lives. Not just our marriages, not just our personal lives, not just by a man but by The Man. The point is also how we’re continually looking for the love, respect, and tenderness that we want and have a hard time accessing. I both applaud Beyoncé using autobiographical elements—the home videos and some stories from her past, whether real or fictional—to give us this idea that black women’s personal stories are worth telling. But she also takes that and builds on it, bringing in the work of other black women artists like Warsan Shire and Julie Dash, and thinks about the larger picture of how black women create beauty out of whatever it is we have available in our lives, how we take lemons and turn them into lemonade.
TM: Your book is like no other book that I’ve ever come across. I had to stretch to come up with a comparison, but the one that finally clicked for me was Joanna Demers’s Drone and Apocalypse. It’s about drone music; very different from Beyoncé, of course. The connection for me was that Demers answered another scholar’s call to write about her chosen genre in a new way that was more appropriate to its themes, aesthetics, and conventions. It took the form of a catalog for an art exhibit from the future, which makes a certain sort of sense when you read it. It seems to me that the remixed form of your book is shaped not only by the form of Lemonade, but also by the scholarly writing of Sydney Fonteyn Lewis and Juana Rodriguez, whom you call out in the introduction. Would you agree with that? And how would you say that Beyoncé in Formation responds to their work?
OT: I think my work has a similar spirit to those two, but is fairly different in some ways. Juana’s book Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings, which I love and adore, is scholarly in a different way than mine is. It’s playful and it’s attentive to pleasure. I also have that same opening to playfulness and pleasure, but in a different way. I think of my work in line with Juana’s partly because we both write specifically as femmes.
Lewis’s project was to look at a text, at popular culture, at people like Donna Summer, at black feminist novelists, and look for femme representation where we can’t find them. When I was a graduate student, I was struck that there was a dearth of people theorizing what it means to be a queer femme. Here we are, 20 years later almost, and it’s still the same thing. Why is it that femmes of color don’t feel like it’s important to write our gender into our queer texts?
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The two words that I wanted in the title of my book were “black” and “femme”— I won one battle and I lost the other. The publisher’s thought was that “femme” is too narrow, people aren’t going to know what it is. (Which is why I wanted it in the title!) I wanted to think about how femme-ness and black queer femme-ninity was in conversation with other black feminist representations. I was inspired by people who had come before me, but also hoping to hold space for the next generation of scholars to think about queer gender more expansively, particularly about femme-ninity.
TM: I’m really interested in that idea of holding space. You examine some of the femme and queer undertones and overtones of Lemonade, and readers never know what’s coming on the next page—from #blacktranslivesmatter activism to ratchet feminism to New Orleans bounce music. But by the end of the book, you pull back some of your autobiographical tendencies and put forward the voices of black trans* men and women. I was wondering if you could talk about “writing in” other voices, in terms of insertion into the text, and “writing in” other voices, in terms of imitation. How did you strike the right balance?
TO: I didn’t feel like, in a chapter about black trans* femme-ninity, my stories…they’re just not the stories that need to be told. I look forward to other trans* women of color in particular talking about their own relationship to Beyoncé and to popular culture. It’s important that Beyoncé is powerful to black trans* femmes—and it’s important to me that they tell that story and that I don’t. As I say in the book, I am disappointed that Big Freedia doesn’t show up in the “Formation” video. I’m disappointed that she doesn’t show up in Drake’s video as well. I hope that the inclusion of somebody like Big Freedia on these tracks can be a starting point for more representation of the diversity in which black femme-ninity robes itself. For example, black trans femme-ninity doesn’t all have to look like Janet Mock. (But it’s great if it does!) Black femme-ninity doesn’t have be assigned female at birth. It doesn’t have to be legible in the way we expect femme-ninity to be. I think there are going to be other texts coming out in which black trans* women get to be the autobiographical voice.
TM: You write about your new collection of autobiographies written by female country singers and mention that you “learned a lot about the ideal country mother” from them. Of course, Beyoncé is an idealized country mother in some ways. What did you learn by accumulating that small library? What are some things those books have you thinking about as a Texas-based mother yourself?
OT: I can’t say that I knew anything about country music growing up in Northern California. It was just not a part of my world. When I came to Texas, a lot of my black students from Houston had a connection to country music. It’s something that they heard in their houses. When Beyoncé had the nod to country music in Lemonade, that made sense to me.
My father’s mother, who died a few years before I was born, was born in Louisiana. I’ve always been really curious about her. My father has a hard time talking about her because for him she is the ideal country mother. She sacrificed everything for her six kids. My questions to him were, “What did she like? What did she enjoy?” She liked country music. She was a big Hank Williams fan. As a way of learning about my grandmother, it had been in the back of my mind to learn more about country music.
I got really interested in Loretta Lynn, and I read everything she’s ever written. Dolly Parton, some of these other women—I vaguely remember them from growing up, but I didn’t realize the way they were pushing back and challenging the ideals of country motherhood, which are that your family should be your life, if your man cheats you take him back, you put your faith in God, you don’t work outside the home except maybe once in a while to feed your family. These are the kinds of stories that I heard about my grandmother from my father. Some of my reading of these autobiographies, including Tammy Wynette’s Stand by Your Man, was to try and hear from these women about what the rewards and the challenges of being expected to live for your family are. What happens when you refuse to? Or you can’t? And what do you get out of it? What do you lose?
The strength and the complexity of their stories has really resonated with me. My poor husband has to listen to a lot more Loretta Lynn than he thought he was getting into when he married me.
TM: Are there things that you found in the autobiographies that conveyed something different than, for instance, the recorded albums of these songwriters? Are there any big themes that felt different in those books?
OT: I did not expect Dolly Parton to be the engaging writer that she is. I don’t know why—she is a songwriter. There is a joy and humor in Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business that I wasn’t expecting. There is a love of girliness that I really appreciate. I got to see where that was rooted in her life story.
Part of what was fascinating for me about Dolly Parton’s autobiography, though, was also reading her sister Stella’s autobiography, Tell It Sister, Tell It, and seeing the difference between the two of them. Particularly, the differences in the way that they remember their mother. Every good country singer has a story about their mother and how great their mother was. Stella wrote about the deep depression that their mother lived through, the difficulties of her life, and the difficulties and drudgeries of what it meant to be a country mother. That’s something that didn’t show up either in Dolly Parton’s autobiography or in her music. There seems to be a way that Dolly distances herself even from the memory of that in the autobiography. I found both of those stories really compelling. How do you beautify a story that wasn’t all that beautiful? What does it mean to think, I saw my mother constantly sick from being pregnant, either ill from pregnancy or post-partum depression and unable to get out of bed, and I had to do all of the work?, and to not sentimentalize that in the ways that it gets sentimentalized in some male country artists’ songs?
Loretta Lynn’s autobiographies—there’s Coal Miner’s Daughter and Still Woman Enough—it was fascinating to see her revise her story. To say, There are things that I told in that first story that were incomplete, there are moments where I came off as more the victim than I was, and there are moments where I underplayed the difficulty of my life is remarkable. Also, in the second autobiography, she’s writing because her twins want to know more about their father, who died when they were fairly young. She feels like at this point in her life it’s important not to sugarcoat things, and that she needs to talk about him being an alcoholic and abusive and her not just taking it. It was important to tell a less romantic story than what we saw in the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter or even in some of her songs. I really enjoyed all of those books.
I also should have mentioned earlier that Big Freedia’s autobiography, God Save the Queen Diva!, is one of my favorite books. The story that she tells is about growing up in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the complexity of gender and sexuality in her relationship to the black church. I love that book and people sometimes laugh at me and think I’m not serious. I’m like, “No, no, no, you have to read it!”
TM: Any last things that we should know about Beyoncé, feminism, femme-nism, or anything else?
OT: I’m really excited to see other women stepping into the space that Beyoncé has opened. Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer is a different kind of work imagining a world in which black women’s love matters. The work that Janet Mock has done on the television show Pose is great. I really look forward to continuing this conversation about the spaces that are opening and how we’re shaping them and claiming them. Lemonade has a life that’s beyond itself, and it should.
We Are 1: A Poem for Black Lives
To paraphrase the critic Georges Poulet: a poet of written poems does not necessarily aim only to write a poem; he or she aims to become, and for those who read his or her poems to become. Becoming is an activity that many young African Americans are engaged in today -- whether it be formal, revolutionary, or informal -- and it is an activity that requires undivided dynamism. If Kendrick Lamar’s chant “we gon’ be alright” -- four words that when repeated meld a fight song to a primordial moment in the foundation and the defense of a collective and its culture -- is now considered the foremost musical expression of this era’s black activism, Nate Marshall’s poem “repetition & repetition &”, the very first poem from his book Wild Hundreds, should be considered the foremost articulation of contemporary blackness’s dynamism in literature. It’s an engine of becoming.
Our is a long love song,
A push into open air,
A stare into the barrel
With those three lines, Marshall begins an epic comparable to Robert Hayden’s renowned “The Middle Passage” and other black epics; but this is an epic of guidance and instruction. It’s built on the thesis that black “works,” as painful as it may be to be black. The poem begins by posing the question What do I feel as a black person, its title “repetition & repetition &” having given us the context. The opening of the poem removes any ambiguity we might attribute to the poem’s message, plunging us into the poet’s project.
We are a pattern,
A percussive imperative,
A break beat
“repetition & repetition &” quickly comes to feature the collective “we” as fundamental to the poem. Marshall uses the word "we" as the black community loves for it to be used. If “I” is modernism, and postmodernism, Marshall pushes it aside for the beloved “we” -- the “we” of the hard road to salvation and joy. Sorry, he seems to be saying: despite claims that our sentiment is tribalism or that we are just Americans, the black community remains a place where a black “we” is a beautiful way of saying “me.” With “we” he expresses the blackness that has us all feeling, one that cannot be found in oh-so-many poems that center the lonely “I” or “me.”
“We” is brilliantly defined in the line “we are love.” We = love, in convivial crowds and effective political rallies.
Baby we are hundreds:
Wild until we are free.
Wild like Amnesia
This is an epic of identity. It proposes black identity (love, being wild) to its reader, as a written articulation of “black is beautiful”; it functions as a model of identity to adhere to and trust.
Identity is an old and persistent question in black life, to the point where passing, pretending that one is not black or not claiming one’s blackness, has been a theme of many black novels (see Nella Larsen’s Passing). Faith in blackness and in one’s own blackness is a feature in our age of contradictions: of a black president, of interracial marriages, of a growing middle class, of foreclosures of homes owned by blacks, of predatory and racist practices, of the killings of young black men and women, of Black Lives Matter. It’s an age of youthful comic modernities, where tragedy is not the sort of thing that co-workers of other races want to talk about. Should I be happy in public? Who am I in all of this? Marshall answers these questions and others with an epic that can guide, in terms of how to think about blackness or being black.
The black identity being proposed is not a simple one. As John Edgar Wideman wrote as a blurb for Mitchell Jackson’s novel The Residue Years, it embraces the English language as a means of expression, saying loud and clear, Despite my difference, I am culturally a descendent of the English language and of poetry in English. It is perhaps the most complex aspect of the poem -- the poet does not want to settle for blackness as some sort of noble savagery. His language tells us that a black person can read French theory and find solace in Modernist English poetry all the while feeling the pain and rage that comes from seeing a dead black child on a television; all of it combined being who “we” are or “I” am as a black person.
In the end, Marshall offers an engine for the pursuit of self that can only be the undercurrent of black production -- ranging from Beyoncé's Lemonade, or Greg Osby’s many great yet unknown albums of genius Jazz blackness, or a teacher’s persistence with children -- but also a vehicle for any non-black person to think about the blackness of co-citizens and friends. His poem is an epic of strength in love and in numbers, where in despite "a stare into the barrel," and "repetition," as he ends the poem, ‘we are 1’ and will remain it.
Another Southern Girl
Is it another Beyoncé/Lemonade thinkpiece? Yes. Is it also more than that and worth your time to read? Yes. Terryn Hall at The Rumpus on Beyoncé, Erykah Badu, and being a black woman in the South: "Although Beyoncé is not ‘literary’ in a traditional sense, she’s using her power to usher in new black poetic (Warsan Shire) musical (Ibeyi, Chloe and Halley Bailey) and modeling (Jourdan Dunn, Zendaya) talent in a manner similar to that of the literary patrons of yesteryear."
#LemonadeSyllabus
Beyoncé's visual album/phenomenon Lemonade has only been out for a few days and already it has spawned countless thinkpieces. One of the best and most inspiring things to come out of it has been the #LemonadeSyllabus hashtag, popularized by Rutgers University educator Candace Benbow. The series "encourages Black women to share curated reading lists of books, poems and other inspirational literature penned by Black female authors that celebrate every aspect of what it means to be a Black woman."
Lemonade and Poetry
If you’ve been on the Internet in the past week, you’ve probably heard about Beyoncé’s incredible new record, Lemonade. Noah Friedman at Wordshop 101 explains why Lemonade is great press for poets (particularly Warsan Shire, who is featured in the film). Andrew Kay writes on how reading poetry aloud connects us with the dead.
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