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Most Anticipated: The Great Summer 2024 Preview
Summer has arrived, and with it, a glut of great books. Here you'll find more than 80 books that we're excited about 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 hope you find your next summer read among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
July
Art Monster by Marin Kosut [NF]
Kosut's latest holds a mirror to New York City's oft-romanticized, rapidly gentrifying art scene and ponders the eternal struggles between creativity and capitalism, love and labor, and authenticity and commodification. Part cultural analysis, part cautionary tale, this account of an all-consuming subculture—now unrecognizable to the artists who first established it—is the perfect companion to Bianca Bosker's Get the Picture. —Daniella Fishman
Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams [F]
If you're reading this, you don't need to be told why you need to check out the next 99 strange, crystalline chunks of brilliance—described enticingly as "stories of Azrael"—from the great Joy Williams, do you? —John H. Maher
Misrecognition by Madison Newbound [F]
Newbound's debut novel, billed as being in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Patricia Lockwood, chronicles an aimless, brokenhearted woman's search for meaning in the infinite scroll of the internet. Vladimir author Julia May Jonas describes it as "a shockingly modern" novel that captures "isolation and longing in our age of screens." —Sophia M. Stewart
Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías, tr. Heather Cleary [F]
The Uruguayan author makes her U.S. debut with an elegiac work of eco-fiction centering on an unnamed woman in the near future as she navigates a city ravaged by plague, natural disaster, and corporate power (hardly an imaginative leap). —SMS
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel [F]
In Regel's debut novel, the listless Nicola is working in an archive devoted to women's art when she discovers—and grows obsessed with—a beguiling dozen-year correspondence between two women, going back to 1976. Paul author Daisy LaFarge calls this debut novel "caustic, elegant, elusive, and foreboding." —SMS
Reinventing Love by Mona Chollet, tr. Susan Emanuel [NF]
For the past year or so I've been on a bit of a kick reading books that I'd hoped might demystify—and offer an alternative vision of—the sociocultural institution that is heterosexuality. (Jane Ward's The Tragedy of Heterosexuality was a particularly enlightening read on that subject.) So I'm eager to dive into Chollet's latest, which explores the impossibility of an equitable heterosexuality under patriarchy. —SMS
The Body Alone by Nina Lohman [NF]
Blending memoir with scholarship, philosophy with medicine, and literature with science, Lohman explores the articulation of chronic pain in what Thin Places author Jordan Kisner calls "a stubborn, tender record of the unrecordable." —SMS
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner [F]
In this particular instance, "Long Island Compromise" refers to the long-anticipated follow-up to Fleishman Is In Trouble, not the technical term for getting on the Babylon line of the LIRR with a bunch of Bud-addled Mets fans after 1 a.m. —JHM
The Long Run by Stacey D'Erasmo [NF]
Plenty of artists burn brightly for a short (or viral) spell but can't sustain creative momentum. Others manage to keep creating over decades, weathering career ups and downs, remaining committed to their visions, and adapting to new media. Novelist Stacey D’Erasmo wanted to know how they do it, so she talked with eight artists, including author Samuel R. Delany and poet and visual artist Cecelia Vicuña, to learn the secrets to their longevity. —Claire Kirch
Devil's Contract by Ed Simon [NF]
Millions contributor Ed Simon probes the history of the Faustian bargain, from ancient times to modern day. Devil's Contract is, like all of Simon's writing, refreshingly rigorous, intellectually ambitious, and suffused with boundless curiosity. —SMS
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada, tr. Susan Bernofsky [F]
Tawada returns with this surrealist ode to the poet Paul Celan and human connection. Set in a hazy, post-lockdown Berlin, Tawada's trademark dream-like prose follows the story of Patrik, an agoraphobe rediscovering his zeal for life through an unlikely friendship built on a shared love of art. —DF
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş [F]
Savaş’s third novel is looking like her best yet. It's a lean, lithe, lyrical tale of two graduate students in love look for a home away from home, or “trying to make a life together when you have nothing that grounds you,” as the author herself puts it. —JHM
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher [F]
Zaher's debut novel, about a young Palestinian woman unraveling in New York City, is an essential, thrilling addition to the Women on the Verge subgenre. Don't just take it from me: the blurbs for this one are some of the most rhapsodic I've ever seen, and the book's ardent fans include Katie Kitamura, Hilary Leichter, and, yes, Slavoj Žižek, who calls it "a masterpiece." —SMS
Black Intellectuals and Black Society by Martin L. Kilson [NF]
In this posthumous essay collection, the late political scientist Martin L. Kilson reflects on the last century's foremost Black intellectuals, from W.E.B Dubois to Ishmael Reed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that Kilson "brilliantly explores the pivotal yet often obscured legacy of giants of the twentieth-century African American intelligentsia." —SMS
Toward Eternity by Anton Hur [F]
Hur, best known as the translator of such Korean authors as Bora Chung and Kyung-Sook Shin (not to mention BTS), makes his fiction debut with a speculative novel about the intersections of art, medicine, and technology. The Liberators author E.J. Koh writes that Hur delivers "a sprawling, crystalline, and deftly crafted vision of a yet unimaginable future." —SMS
Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne [NF]
I've always felt some connection to Sylvia Plath, and am excited to get my hands on Van Duyne’s debut, a reconstruction of the poet’s final years and legacy, which the author describes as "a reckoning with the broken past and the messy present" that takes into account both Plath’s "white privilege and [the] misogynistic violence" to which she was subjected. —CK
Bright Objects by Ruby Todd [F]
Nearing the arrival of a newly discovered comet, Sylvia Knight, still reeling from her husband's unsolved murder, finds herself drawn to the dark and mysterious corners of her seemingly quiet town. But as the comet draws closer, Sylvia becomes torn between reality and mysticism. This one is for astrology and true crime girlies. —DF
The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary [NF]
The debut memoir by Chowdhary, a survivor of one of the worst massacres in Indian history, weaves together histories both personal and political to paint a harrowing portrait of anti-Muslim violence in her home country of India. Alexander Chee calls this "a warning, thrown to the world," and Nicole Chung describes it as "an astonishing feat of storytelling." —SMS
Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler [F]
Butler grapples with approaching middle age in the modern era in her latest, which follows thirty-something Moddie Yance as she ditches city life and ends her longterm relationship to move back to her Midwestern hometown. Banal Nightmare has "the force of an episode of marijuana psychosis and the extreme detail of a hyperrealistic work of art," per Jia Tolentino. —SMS
A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit by Noliwe Rooks [NF]
In this slim volume on the life and legacy of the trailblazing civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune—the first Black woman to head a federal agency, to serve as a college president, and to be honored with a monument in the nation's capital—Rooks meditates on Bethune's place in Black political history, as well as in Rooks's own imagination. —SMS
Modern Fairies by Clare Pollard [F]
An unconventional work of historical fiction to say the least, this tale of the voluble, voracious royal court of Louis XIV of France makes for an often sidesplitting, and always bawdy, read. —JHM
The Quiet Damage by Jesselyn Cook [NF]
Cook, a journalist, reports on deepfake media, antivax opinions, and sex-trafficking conspiracies that undermine legitimate criminal investigations. Having previously written on children trying to deradicalize their QAnon-believing parents and social media influencers who blend banal content with frightening Q views, here Cook focuses on five families whose members went down QAnon rabbit holes, tragically eroding relationships and verifiable truths. —Nathalie Op de Beeck
In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran [F]
Inspired by West African folkore, Ogundiran (author of the superb short speculative fiction collection Jackal, Jackal) centers this fantasy novella, the first of duology, on a sort-of anti-chosen one: a young acolyte aspiring to priesthood, but unable to get the orishas to speak. So she endeavors to trap one of the spirits, but in the process gets embroiled in a cosmic war—just the kind of grand, anything-can-happen premise that makes Ogundiran’s stories so powerful. —Alan Scherstuhl
The Bluestockings by Susannah Gibson [NF]
This group biography of the Bluestockings, a group of protofeminist women intellectuals who established salons in 18th-century England, reminded me of Regan Penaluna's wonderful How to Think Like a Woman in all the best ways—scholarly but accessible, vividly rendered, and a font of inspiration for the modern woman thinker. —SMS
Liars by Sarah Manguso [F]
Manguso's latest is a standout addition to the ever-expanding canon of novels about the plight of the woman artist, and the artist-mother in particular, for whom creative life and domestic life are perpetually at odds. It's also a more scathing indictment of marriage than any of the recent divorce memoirs to hit shelves. Any fan of Manguso will love this novel—her best yet—and anyone who is not already a fan will be by the time they're done. —SMS
On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ [F]
Flashbacks to grad school gender studies coursework, and the thrilling sensation that another world is yet possible, will wash over a certain kind of reader upon learning that Feminist Press will republish Russ’s 1980 novel. Edited and with an introduction by Cornell University Ph.D. candidate Alec Pollak, this critical edition includes reminiscences on Russ by her longtime friend Samuel R. Delany, letters between Russ and poet Marilyn Hacker, and alternative endings to its lesbian coming-out story. —NodB
Only Big Bumbum Matters Tomorrow by Damilare Kuku [F]
The debut novel by Kuku, the author of the story collection Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, centers on a Nigerian family plunged into chaos when young Temi, a recent college grad, decides to get a Brazillian butt lift. Wahala author Nikki May writes that Kuku captures "how complicated it is to be a Nigerian woman." —SMS
The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn [NF]
A book about the girls, by the girls, for the girls. Dunn, a classicist, reconfigures antiquity to emphasize the influence and agency of women. From the apocryphal stories of Cleopatra and Agrippina to the lesser-known tales of Atossa and Olympias, Dunn retraces the steps of these ancient heroines and recovers countless important but oft-forgotten female figures from the margins of history. —DF
August
Villa E by Jane Alison [F]
Alison's taut novel of gender and power is inspired by the real-life collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and Swiss architect Le Corbusier—and the sordid act of vandalism by the latter that forever defined the legacy of the former. —SMS
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf [F]
Kraf's 1979 feminist cult classic, reissued as part of Modern Library's excellent Torchbearer series with an introduction by Melissa Broder, follows a young woman artist in New York City who experiences wondrous episodes of dissociation. Ripe author Sarah Rose Etter calls Kraf "one of literature's hidden gems." —SMS
All That Glitters by Orlando Whitfield [NF]
Whitfield traces the rise and fall of Inigo Philbrick, the charasmatic but troubled art dealer—and Whitfield's one-time friend—who was recently convicted of committing more than $86 million in fraud. The great Patrick Radden Keefe describes this as "an art world Great Gatsby." —SMS
The Bookshop by Evan Friss [NF]
Oh, so you support your local bookshop? Recount the entire history of bookselling. Friss's rigorously researched ode to bookstores underscores their role as guardians, gatekeepers, and proprietors of history, politics, and culture throughout American history. A must-read for any bibliophile, and an especially timely one in light of the growing number of attempts at literary censorship across the country. —DF
Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia [F]
Valencia's debut short story collection is giving supernatural Southwestern Americana. Subjects as distinct as social media influencers, ghost hunters, and slasher writers populate these stories which, per Kelly Link, contain a "deep well of human complexity, perversity, sincerity, and hope." —DF
Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi, tr. Jennifer Feeley
This 1989 semi-autobiographical novel is an account of the late Hong Kong author and poet Xi's mastectomy and subsequent recovery, heralded as one of the first Chinese-language books to write frankly about illness, and breast cancer in particular.—SMS
Village Voices by Odile Hellier [NF]
Hellier celebrates the history and legacy of the legendary Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, which he founded in 1982. A hub of anglophone literary culture for 30 years, Village Voice hosted everyone from Raymond Carver to Toni Morrison and is fondly remembered in these pages, which mine decades of archives. —SMS
Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party by Edward Dolnick [NF]
Within the past couple of years, three tweens found the fossilized remains of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex in North Dakota and an 11-year-old beachcomber came upon an ichthyosaur jaw in southwestern England, sparking scientific excitement. Dolnick’s book revisits similar discoveries from Darwin’s own century, when astonished amateurs couldn’t yet draw upon centuries of paleontology and drew their own conclusions about the fossils and footprints they unearthed. —NodB
All the Rage by Virginia Nicholson [NF]
Social historian Nicholson chronicles the history of beauty standards for women from 1860 to 1960, revealing the fickleness of fashion, the evergreen pressure put on women's self-presentation, and the toll the latter takes on women's bodies. —SMS
A Termination by Honor Moore [NF]
In her latest memoir, Moore—best known for 2008's The Bishop's Daughter—reflects on the abortion she had in 1969 at the age of 23 and its aftermath. The Vivian Gornick calls this one "a masterly account of what it meant, in the 1960s, to be a woman of spirit and intelligence plunged into the particular hell that is unwanted pregnancy." —SMS
Nat Turner, Black Prophet by Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs [NF]
Kaye and Downs's remarkable account of Nat Turner's rebellion boldly and persuasively argues for a reinterpretation of the uprising's causes, legacy, and divine influence, framing Turner not just as a preacher but a prophet. A paradigm-shifting work of narrative history. —SMS
An Honest Woman by Charlotte Shane [NF]
As a long-time reader, fan, and newsletter subscriber of Shane's, I nearly dropped to my knees at the altar of Simon & Schuster when her latest book was announced. This slim memoir intertwines her experience as a sex worker with reflections on various formative relationships in her life (with her sexuality, her father, and her long-time client, Roger), as well as reflections on the very nature of sex, gender, and labor. —DF
Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, tr. Stephen B. Snyder [F]
Mina's Matchbox is an incredible novel that affirms Ogawa's position as the great writer of fantastical literature today. This novel is much brighter in tone and detail than much of her other, often brutal and gloomy, work, but somehow the tension and terror of living is always at the periphery. Ogawa has produced a world near and tender, but tough and bittersweet, like recognizing a lost loved one in the story told by someone new. —Zachary Issenberg
Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Reuben Woolley [F]
The Grey Bees author's latest, longlisted for last year's International Booker Prize, is an ode to Lviv, western Ukraine's cultural capital, now transformed by war. A snapshot of the city as it was in the early aughts, the novel chronicles the antics of a cast of eccentrics across the city, with a dash of magical realism thrown in for good measure. —SMS
The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya [F]
I loved Hamya's 2021 debut novel Three Rooms, and her latest, a sharp critique of art and gender that centers on a young woman who pens a satirical play about her sort-of-canceled novelist father, promises to be just as satisfying. —SMS
A Complicated Passion by Carrie Rickey [NF]
This definitive biography of trailblazing French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda tells the engrossing story of a brilliant artist and fierce feminist who made movies and found success on her own terms. Film critic and essayist Phillip Lopate writes, "One could not ask for a smarter or more engaging take on the subject." —SMS
The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao [F]
This epistolary novel by Nao, an emerging queer Vietnamese American writer who Garielle Lutz once called "an unstoppable genius," sounds like an incredible read: an unnamed narrator in Las Vegas writes sensual stream-of-consciousness letters to their lover in Italy. Perfect leisure reading on a sultry summer’s afternoon while sipping a glass of prosecco. —CK
Survival Is a Promise by Alexis Pauline Gumbs [NF]
Gumbs's poetic, genre-bending biography of Audre Lorde offers a fresh, profound look at Lorde's life, work, and importance undergirded by an ecological, spiritual, and distinctly Black feminist sensibility. Eloquent Rage author Brittany Cooper calls Gumbs "a kindred keeper of [Lorde’s] lesbian-warrior-poet legacy." —SMS
Planes Flying Over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París, tr. Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman [NF]
Over 10 essays, the Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña Paris explores the cities he has lived in over the course of his life, using each as a springboard to ponder questions of authenticity, art, and narrative. Chloé Cooper Jones calls Saldaña Paris "simply one of our best living writers" and this collection "destined for canonical status." —SMS
The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones [F]
The latest novel from Jones, the Pulitzer finalist and mentee of Toni Morrison who first stunned the literary world with her 1975 novel Corregida, follows a Black soldier who returns home to the Jim Crow South after fighting in World War II. Imani Perry has called Jones "one of the most versatile and transformative writers of the 20th century." —SMS
Becoming Little Shell by Chris La Tray [NF]
When La Tray was growing up in western Montana, his family didn’t acknowledge his Indigenous heritage. He became curious about his Métis roots when he met Indigenous relatives at his grandfather’s funeral, and he searched in earnest after his father’s death two decades later. Now Montana’s poet laureate, La Tray has written a memoir about becoming an enrolled member of the Chippewa Little Shell Tribe, known as “landless Indians” because of their history of forced relocation. —NodB
Wife to Mr. Milton by Robert Graves (reissue) [F]
Grave's 1943 novel, reissued by the great Seven Stories Press, is based on the true story of the poet John Milton's tumultuous marriage to the much younger Mary Powell, which played out amid the backdrop of the English Civil War. E.M. Forster once called this one "a thumping good read." —SMS
Euphoria Days by Pilar Fraile, tr. Lizzie Davis [F]
Fraile's first novel to be translated into English follows the lives of five workers approaching middle age and searching for meaning—turning to algorithms, internet porn, drugs, and gurus along the way—in a slightly off-kilter Madrid of the near future. —SMS
September
Colored Television by Danzy Senna [F]
Senna's latest novel follows Jane, a writer living in L.A. and weighing the competing allures of ambition versus stability and making art versus selling out. The perfect read for fans of Lexi Freiman's Book of Ayn, Colored Television is, per Miranda July, "addictive, hilarious, and relatable" and "a very modern reckoning with the ambiguities triangulated by race, class, creativity and love."—SMS
We're Alone by Edwidge Danticat [NF]
I’ve long been a big fan of Danticat, and I'm looking forward to reading this essay collection, which ranges from personal narratives to reflections on the state of the world to tributes to her various mentors and literary influences, including James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. That the great Graywolf Press published this book is an added bonus. —CK
In Our Likeness by Bryan VanDyke [F]
Millions contributor Bryan VanDyke's eerily timely debut novel, set at a tech startup where an algorithm built to detect lies on the internet is in the works, probes both the wonders and horrors of AI. This is a Frankenstein-esque tale befitting the information (or, perhaps, post-information) age and wrought in VanDyke's typically sparkling prose. —SMS
Liontaming in America by Elizabeth Willis [NF]
Willis, a poet and professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, plumbed personal and national history for last year’s Spectral Evidence: The Witch Book, and does so again with this allusive hybrid work. This ambitious project promises a mind-bending engagement with polyamory and family, Mormonism and utopianism, prey exercising power over predators, and the shape-shifting American dream. —NodB
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner [F]
I adore Kushner’s wildly offbeat tales, and I also enjoy books and movies in which people really are not who they claim to be and deception is coming from all sides. This novel about an American woman who infiltrates a rural commune of French radicals and everyone has their private agenda sounds like the perfect page-turner. —CK
Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, tr. Asa Yoneda [F]
Kawakami, of Strange Weather in Tokyo and People in My Neighborhood fame, returns with a work of speculative fiction comprising 14 interconnected stories spanning eons. This book imagines an Earth where humans teeter on the brink of extinction—and counts the great Banana Yoshimoto as a fan. —SMS
Homeland by Richard Beck [NF]
Beck, an editor at n+1, examines the legacy of the war on terror, which spanned two decades following 9/11, and its irrevocable impact on every facet of American life, from consumer habits to the very notion of citizenship. —SMS
Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai, tr. Ottilie Muzlet [F]
Every novel by Krasznahorkai is immediately recognizable, while also becoming a modulation on that style only he could pull off. Herscht 07769 may be set in the contemporary world—a sort-of fable about the fascism fermenting in East Germany—but the velocity of the prose keeps it ruthilarious and dreamlike. That's what makes Krasznahorkai a master: the world has never sounded so unreal by an author, but all the anxieities of his characters, his readers, suddenly gain clarity, as if he simply turned on the light. —ZI
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker [F]
Catapult published Bieker’s 2020 debut, Godshot, about a teenager fleeing a religious cult in drought-stricken California, and her 2023 Heartbroke, a collection of stories that explored gender, threat, and mother-and-child relationships. Now, Bieker moves over to Little, Brown with this contemporary thriller, a novel in which an Oregon mom gets a letter from a women’s prison that reignites violent memories of a past she thought she’d left behind. —NodB
The World She Edited by Amy Reading [NF]
Some people like to curl up with a cozy mystery, while for others, the ultimate cozy involves midcentury literary Manhattan. Amy Reading—whose bona fides include service on the executive board of cooperative indie bookstore Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, N.Y.—profiles New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, who came on board at the magazine in 1925 and spent 36 years editing the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Janet Flanner, and Mary McCarthy. Put the kettle on—or better yet, pour a classic gin martini—in preparation for this one, which underscores the many women authors White championed. —NodB
If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, tr. Charlotte Barslund [F]
Hjorth, the Norwegian novelist behind 2022's Is Mother Dead, painstakingly chronicles a 30-year-old married woman's all-consuming and volatile romance with a married man, which blurs the lines between passion and love. Sheila Heti calls Hjorth "one of my favorite contemporary writers." —SMS
Fierce Desires by Rebecca L. Davis [NF]
Davis's sprawling account of sex and sexuality over the course of American history traverses the various behaviors, beliefs, debates, identities, and subcultures that have shaped the way we understand connection, desire, gender, and power. Comprehensive, rigorous, and unafraid to challenge readers, this history illuminates the present with brutal and startling clarity. —SMS
The Burning Plain by Juan Rulfo, tr. Douglas Weatherford [F]
Rulfo's Pedro Páramo is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels ever written, so it's no surprise that his 1953 story collection The Burning Plain—which depicts life in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and Cristero Revolt—is widely seen as Mexico's most significant (and, objectively, most translated) work of short fiction. —SMS
My Lesbian Novel and TOAF by Renee Gladman [F/NF]
The perpetually pitch perfect Dorothy, a Publishing Project is putting out two books by Renee Gladman, one of its finest regular authors, on the same day: a nigh uncategorizable novel about an artist and writer with her same name and oeuvre who discusses the process of writing a lesbian romance and a genre-smashing meditation on an abandoned writing project. What's not to love? —JHM
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes, tr. Frank Wynne [F]
I'm a big fan of Despentes's caustic, vigorous voice: King Kong Theory was one of my favorite reads of last year. (I was late, I know!) So I can't wait to dig into her latest novel—purported to be taking France by storm—which nods to #MeToo in its depiction of an unlikely friendship that brings up questions of sex, fame, and gendered power. —SMS
Capital by Karl Marx, tr. Paul Reitter [NF]
In a world that burns more quickly by the day—after centuries of industrial rapacity, and with ever-increasing flares of fascism—a new English translation of Marx, and the first to be based on his final revision of this foundational critique of capitalism, is just what the people ordered. —JHM
Fathers and Fugitives by S.J. Naudé, tr. Michiel Heyns [F]
Naudé, who writes in Afrikaans, has translated his previous books himself—until now. The first to be translated by Heyns, a brilliant writer himself and a friend of Naudé's, this novel follows a queer journalist living in London who travels home to South Africa to care for his dying father, only to learn of a perplexing clause in his will. —SMS
Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias, tr. Gerald Martin [F]
This Penguin Classics reissue of the Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan writer's epic novel, just in time for its 75th anniversary, throws into stark relief the continued timeliness of its themes: capitalist exploitation, environmental devastation, and the plight of Indigenous peoples. Héctor Tobar, who wrote the forward, calls this "Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses." —SMS
Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson [F]
It is practically impossible to do, after cracking open any collection of stories by the horror master Evenson, what the title of this latest collection asks of its readers. This book is already haunting you even before you've opened it. —JHM
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, tr. Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary [F]
De la Cerda's darkly humorous debut story collection follows 13 resilient, rebellious women navigating life in contemporary Mexico. Dogs of Summer author Andrea Abreu writes, "This book has the force of an ocean gully: it sucks you in, drags you through the mud, and then cleanses you." —SMS
Lost: Back to the Island by Emily St. James and Noel Murray [NF]
For years, Emily St. James was one of my favorite TV critics, and I'm so excited to see her go long on that most polarizing of shows (which she wrote brilliantly about for AV Club way back when) in tandem with Noel Murray, another great critic. The Lost resurgence—and much-deserved critical reevaluation—is imminent. —SMS
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin [F]
Who could tire of tales of Parisian affairs and despairs? This one, from critic and Art Monsters author Elkin, tells the story of 40 years, four lives, two couples, one apartment, and that singularly terrible, beautiful thing we call love. —JHM
Bringer of Dust by J.M. Miro [F]
The bold first entry in Miro’s sweeping Victorian-era fantasy was a novel to revel in. Ordinary Monsters combined cowboys, the undead, a Scottish magic school, action better than most blockbuster movies can manage, and refreshingly sharp prose astonishingly well as its batch of cast of desperate kids confused by their strange powers fought to make sense of the world around them—despite being stalked, and possibly manipulated, by sinister forces. That book’s climax upended all expectations, making Bringer of Dust something rare: a second volume in a fantasy where readers have no idea where things are heading. —AS
Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe [NF]
The latest book from Roxane Gay's eponymous imprint is Radclyffe's memoir of coming out as a trans man in his forties, rethinking his supposedly idyllic life with his husband and four children. Fans of the book include Sabrina Imbler, Sarah Schulman, and Edmund White, who praises Radclyffe as "a major writer." —SMS
Everything to Play For by Marijam Did [NF]
A video game industry insider, Did considers the politics of gaming in this critical overview—and asks how games, after decades of reshaping our private lives and popular culture, can help pave the way for a better world. —SMS
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte [F]
Tulathimutte's linked story collection plunges into the touchy topics of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet. Vauhini Vara, in describing the book, evokes both Nabokov and Roth, as well as "the worst (by which I mean best) Am I the Asshole post you’ve ever read on Reddit." —SMS
Elizabeth Catlett by Ed. Dalila Scruggs [NF]
This art book, which will accompany a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum organized by Scruggs, spotlight the work and legacy of the pioneering printmaker, sculptor, and activist Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), who centered the experiences of Black and Mexican women in all that she did and aspired "to put art to the service of the people." —SMS
The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball [F]
I often credit Jesse Ball's surrealist masterpiece A Cure for Suicide with reviving my love of reading, and his latest got me out of my reading slump once again. Much like ACFS, The Repeat Room is set in a totalitarian dystopia that slowly reveals itself. The story follows Abel, a lowly garbageman chosen to sit on a jury where advanced technology is used to forcibly enter the memories of "the accused." This novel forces tough moral questions on readers, and will make you wonder what it means to be a good person—and, ultimately, if it even matters. —DF
Defectors by Paola Ramos [NF]
Ramos, an Emmy Award–winning journalist, examines how Latino voters—often treated as a monolith—are increasingly gravitating to the far right, and what this shift means America's political future. Rachel Maddow calls Defectors "a deeply reported, surprisingly personal exploration of a phenomenon that is little understood in our politics." —SMS
Monet by Jackie Wullshläger [NF]
Already available in the U.K., this biography reveals a more tempestuous Claude Monet than the serene Water Lilies of his later years suggest. Wullschläger, the chief art critic of the Financial Times, mines the archives for youthful letters and secrets about Monet’s unsung lovers and famous friends of the Belle Époque. —NodB
Brooklynites by Prithi Kanakamedala [NF]
Kanakamedala celebrates the Black Brooklynites who shaped New York City's second-largest borough in the 19th century, leaving a powerful legacy of social justice organizing in their wake. Centering on four Black families, this work of narrative history carefully and passionately traces Brooklyn's activist lineage. —SMS
No Ship Sets Out to Be a Shipwreck by Joan Wickersham [NF]
In this slim nonfiction/poetry hybrid, Wickersham (author of National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index) meditates on a Swedish warship named Vasa, so freighted with cannons and fancy carvings in honor of the king that it sank only minutes after leaving the dock in 1682, taking 30 lives with it. After Wickersham saw the salvaged Vasa on display in Stockholm, she crafted her book around this monument to nation and hubris. —NodB
Health and Safety by Emily Witt [NF]
I loved Witt's sharply observed Future Sex and can't wait for her latest, a memoir about drugs, raves, and New York City nightlife which charts the New Yorker staff writer's immersion into the city's dance music underground on the cusp of the pandemic—and the double life she began to lead as a result. —SMS
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Shelve This in Memoir: Confessions of a Teenage Bookseller
1.
A few months after being hired as a bookseller at the second largest independent bookstore in Indiana, I received an unexpected promotion—to Easter Bunny.
I stared at the bunny suit and accompanying head crushed into the crate in the bookstore’s backroom. “So you want me to put that on?” I said, turning to my boss. My boss—a man in his late 20s—nodded.
“Why me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, grinning. “You look about the right size.”
It was the spring of 2001. I was 16, a sophomore, and, as it turned out, about the right size for the entire menagerie of Saturday morning story hour costumes. Following my stint as the Easter Bunny, I became Clifford the Big Red Dog, Angelina the Ballerina, Franklin the Turtle, Curious George, and Spot, amid a host of other children’s books characters. Since the clunky costumes didn’t allow much in the way of maneuverability, I relied on Sherry—the store’s story time specialist—to guide me by the furry hand from the backroom to the throne in the children’s section. No matter the costume, as soon as I turned the corner, the children greeted me with an enthusiasm generally reserved for Barney and Big Bird. While Sherry read the story, I summoned the miming skills of Marcel Marceau, dramatically reacting to every page. When the story ended, the children engaged in a little light rioting in their attempt to hop onto my lap for a photo.
“Sm-ile!” Sherry called, snapping the photos and allowing the images to unspool from the Polaroid camera. I sweated a river inside that suit until, at last, the line of children reached its end.
“Nice work,” my boss said, removing my head and peeling me out of the suit. “And thanks.”
“No problem,” I replied. I’d begged my way into this job in the hopes that it might lead me closer to a literary life. And it would. Eventually. One character costume at a time.
2.
Long before serving as the bookstore’s various mascots, I was its most loyal customer. I’d grown up in its overstuffed chairs, whittling away my elementary school years with stacks of chapter books piled high alongside me. Over time, the booksellers got to know me; I was the earnest young kid who always reshelved the books he didn’t buy. In some ways, I was a different store mascot then—no costume required.
To celebrate the end of my seventh-grade school year, my mother drove me to the bookstore and said, “You can pick out any book you want.” While my friends spent the first night of summer at the movies, I spent mine running my finger along the spines of books as if performing some divination.
Once, buried in the science fiction section I noticed an unassuming book by Ray Bradbury, whose short story, “The Fog Horn,” we’d read in English class earlier that year. I pulled Dandelion Wine from the shelf and read the back copy. “The summer of '28 was a vintage season for a growing boy,” it read. “A summer of green apple trees, mowed lawns, and new sneakers. Of half-burnt firecrackers, of gathering dandelions…”
I was sold, not only by the poetic flourishes of the subject but the timing, too. The book began on the first day of summer 1928—precisely 70 years from the moment in which I then lived. Surely it was a sign, a bit of bibliomancy to direct me to whatever came next. I made my way to the register that I would one day operate.
“Great choice,” the bookseller said, ringing me up and returning the book. “When you’re done, come back and tell me what you think.”
“I will,” I promised.
3.
In 2001, Americans were reading three books: Who Moved My Cheese, The Prayer of Jabez, and John Adams. I knew this because, when I wasn’t “in character,” it was my job to shelve them directly across from the registers. I’d face their covers out, giving customers a visual reminder of what they’d seen on the Today Show or in the pages of People magazine. Of course, readers got their recommendations from at least one other source, Oprah Winfrey, whose book selections catapulted more than a few titles—Icy Sparks, Cane River, Stolen Lives—to the top of the bestseller lists. I never read any of them, though many people did. Or at least many people bought them, paged through them, and lugged them to the book club and back. At which point Oprah would make her next selection and the cycle repeated.
I never begrudged this brand of book buyer. True, their literary preferences were decided by a talk show host, but at least that talk show host got them through the door. And without their willingness to plunk down $24.95 a dozen times a year, we’d have never survived the big box bookstores, whose daily encroachment threatened our survival. I didn’t much care if the books were any good; I just wondered what it must feel like to hold in your hands a book you’d written yourself. I wasn’t thinking like a reader, I was thinking like a writer.
For the remainder of my high school career, I began acting like a writer, too—penning failed story after failed story when I wasn’t at school or at the store. And for nearly three years, it seemed I was always at the store. I worked weekends, in addition to one or two weeknights. If my work schedule wreaked havoc on my social life, I can’t recall. What I do remember were the perks: getting paid slightly more than minimum wage to borrow books, chat up fellow readers, and brush shoulders with every author who stepped through our doors. Hardly a week passed when some author didn’t. In my first month, I worked events featuring Dave Pelzer and Bill Bryson, and marveled at their standing-room-only crowds. I set up the chairs and tore down the chairs and peddled their books as best I could. The process repeated itself for James Patterson, Jim Davis, David Almond, and so many others.
Most nights, I maintained some semblance of professionalism, but when I met John Updike, I was too starstruck to manage much beyond the idiotic ramblings of a 17-year-old. “I…I saw your cameo on The Simpsons,” I told him. Updike pondered this and then released his tight New England laugh.
“That’s right,” Updike said. “I did do that, didn’t I?”
Yes, I confirmed. He had.
4.
One night in 2001, the author Peter Jenkins, who’d famously walked across America, stuck around after closing to sign a few stacks of books. I’d been sequestered behind the register for most of his talk, though now that the doors were locked and the customers had gone home, I lingered in his field of vision, hopeful for a conversation. I’d just finished cleaning the bathrooms, my body reeking of lemon-scented disinfectant and toilet bowl cleaner. If he noticed, he offered no indication. Instead, he signed the last of his books, then turned toward me and introduced himself. For 15 minutes, we small-talked near the gas fireplace in the center of the store, surrounded by hundreds of travel books.
“Do you write?” Jenkins asked me.
“I try,” I said.
“Well, what do you write about?”
Nobody had ever asked me that, and whatever answer I managed lacked conviction. My boss was in the backroom counting the drawers, so I took it upon myself to walk the author to the front of the store and send him off. He waved, wished me the best with my writing, and then walked toward his car. I thought: The man now walking before me once walked across America. But even more impressive, he’d written a book about it.
5.
One night, as the rain drummed down upon the store’s skylight, I hid in the fiction section and read a collection of stories by a writer named Jhumpa Lahiri. I was so deeply immersed in the collection’s opening story that I didn’t hear my coworker buzz me over the intercom. Before that night, I’d never heard Lahiri’s name; I knew nothing of her work. But the story of Shoba and Shukamar—and their confessions to one another under cover of darkness—so moved me that I became numb to the world around me. I sunk to the floor alongside the other L- authors—Tim LaHaye, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman—and tried to understand how a writer could make me care so deeply about people I’d never met.
“Where on earth were you?” my co-worker asked upon my eventual return to the register.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere else.”
6.
Four years after purchasing Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, I received a letter from the author in the mail. I’d written an essay on Bradbury which, much to my astonishment, had won first prize in a national contest. I was working a late shift at the bookstore when my mother hand delivered it.
“This came for you,” she said, pointing to the return address.
Standing at the same register where I’d purchased my first Bradbury book, I opened the envelope. Ray Bradbury had read my essay, his letter informed me, and he thought it “one of the finest” essays he’d ever read. He promised to keep it in his desk drawer “as a permanent piece of literature for me to read from time to time.”
That night, I shelved the books twice as fast. Memoir, history, psychology, reference—the books found their place in record time. I directed customers to The Lovely Bones, The Da Vinci Code, The Corrections—whatever they wanted. It took every ounce of restraint I had to keep from pulling Bradbury’s letter from my pocket and sharing it with every customer. See this? I wanted to shout. Someone out there was listening! Next time somebody asked me what I was writing, I’d have an answer.
7.
When Lois Lowry was in town, the bookstore’s owner—who was aware of my literary ambitions—generously assigned me the task of assisting Lowry with her autographs. My job was simple: open each book to the proper page and let her do the work. At that point in my life, Lowry’s The Giver was one of the most consequential books. It was the first book that felt like it was taking me seriously as a reader. It refused merely to entertain.
Since the bookstore owner hadn’t explicitly prohibited me from doing anything dumb, I did something rather dumb. Upon learning that I was a writer, too, Lowry made the mistake of asking the same question Peter Jenkins had asked, only this time I was ready. What was I writing?
“Mostly this,” I said, pulling forth from my backpack my two-hundred-page manuscript. “You can have it if you want,” I said. “I’ve got other copies.”
A polite “thanks but no thanks” was in order. An impolite, “Leave me alone, kid,” would have been warranted, too. Instead, she summoned some wellspring of generosity, and said, “Thank you. I look forward to reading it on the plane.”
A few years back, after a young writer handed me a similarly sized unsolicited manuscript, I reached out to Lois Lowry to beg forgiveness for my faux pax. “I don’t know if you remember me,” I began in an email, “but back in 2002 or so, I handed you my novel….” She did not remember me. Thank God. “But I will tell you that I do treasure each individual encounter," she added. “And I’m glad you’ve treasured the memory of it as well.”
8.
Later, after publishing a few books of my own, I returned to my hometown to give a reading at the local library. Following the presentation, I glanced up to see the bookstore owner who, 15 years prior, had the bad sense to trust me not to pass off my manuscript to Lois Lowry. I didn’t know what to say to the man. How to thank the person who created the space for some high school kid to get a taste of the literary life?
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you,” I finally managed.
“Oh, it was nothing,” he replied.
“It was something,” I said. “Meeting all those authors and shelving all those books, it allowed me to be a part of things.”
Only a handful of people remember how the rain drummed atop the store’s skylight. And how when you looked up in the right light, you could see a hint of your reflection staring back. We shook hands, and I never saw him again. Moments later, I was approached by a teenaged student who informed me he was a writer, too. I took the risk; I asked the question.
“Oh yeah? And what do you write?”
9.
A few summers back, I founded an arts camp for 14-to-18-year-old artists in five disciplines. I did it not because I am a glutton for punishment, but because only now, in middle age, do I understand the impact seasoned artists have had on my life. Not just the aforementioned writers but also the local journalists, the English teachers, the librarians. Those people who helped me understand that there are plenty of paths to the literary life, and only sometimes does that path involve costumes.
When I watch young artists interact with their artist mentors at camp, it all seems far more casual. Either their artistic heroes are humbler, or today’s young artists are harder to impress. If they want to be starstruck, the young artists scroll TikTok. But if they want to learn about color, shape, and how to craft a line, they pocket their phones and turn to their mentors. They are direct, pragmatic, and unafraid. They are what I wish I’d been.
10.
On the night Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released, the bookstore stayed open late. Hundreds of people packed the store, many of them wearing cloaks and scarves, all of them wielding wands. Though I was fully aware of the Harry Potter phenomena, I’d underestimated the commitment of the series’s superfans. They trembled with anticipation, sheer joy flooding their faces as they dreamed up spells to speed up the hands on their watches.
Legally, we weren’t allowed to sell the books until midnight. And so, when the hour struck, I joined a parade of booksellers to wheel out the book carts. The superfans—children and adults alike—nearly tore my clothes as they threw their bodies toward those carts, snatching up copies before I even made it to the front of the store. It was the closest I ever came to being a rockstar.
Today, it seems impossible: that there was a time when hundreds of people would gather, stay up late, and squeal at the prospect of getting their hands on a long-anticipated book. It was a communal event, an occasion, something you marked on your calendar. Book buyers have since foregone such occasions in favor of convenience: a click, a swipe, and the book’s delivered straight to your door. At which point the solitary act of buying the book can be accompanied by the solitary act of reading. The bookseller is lost in the process. As is the budding writer.
11.
“Smi-ile,” my mother called.
It was May 2003, days before I received my high school diploma. I was at the bookstore, posing before a giant display of graduation books (Oh, The Places You’ll Go, The Healthy College Cookbook). Directly above me was a sign with my name on it, congratulating me on my impending graduation. By then, I’d been working at the bookstore for years, and the people there had become family. Not just my coworkers (one of whom would be a groomsman at my wedding) but also the customers (one of whom would attend that wedding).
By August, the bookstore would shutter its doors for good—the latest casualty of the big box bookstores. But even if our store hadn’t closed—even if we’d survived our brick-and-mortar competition—my time donning character costumes had ended. I’d move to Illinois in early September to study English and creative writing at a small liberal arts college. And while the next four years were vital to my writing development, they were not nearly as important as the three years that came before. Amid all those interactions with all those writers, I came to learn one essential truth: Writers were people just like me.
Too-cool-for-school senior that I was, I offered my mother and her camera no more than a two-second grin. Just long enough to snap a shot of me in my natural environment: an 18-year-old in cargo shorts and a Hollister shirt. Staring at the photo today, I notice something else: a pen dangling from my writing hand. It’s the only bookstore photo I’ve got when I’m not in costume. And it’s the photo that captures the most.
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