The Road (Oprah's Book Club)

New Price: $7.15
Used Price: $1.00

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

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

Most Anticipated: The Great 2023B Book Preview

-
Hello beloved Millions readers! It feels like only yesterday we were mooning over the most exciting reads of 2023A. But time flies, and new books wait for no one. Before we get into it—and by "it" I mean forthcoming titles by Alexandra Chang, Annie Ernaux, Jon Fosse, Ross Gay, Werner Herzog, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Benjamin Labatut, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, John McPhee, Marie NDiaye, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sigrid Nunez, Joyce Carol Oates, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Gay Talese, Jesmyn Ward, Bryan Washington, Colson Whitehead, Diane Williams, Banana Yoshimoto, C Pam Zhang, Babs herself, and many, many more—a quick note. While we're highly selective about what makes it into our biannual previews, we know the sheer number of books here (171, to be exact) can be overwhelming, so for our 2023B list we've added tags for readers to more quickly distinguish fiction and nonfiction titles. In the future, we can also add more specific tags to distinguish, say, novels and story collections, memoirs and essay collections—if this would be helpful, do let us know! And though we do our best to strike a balance between being both curated and comprehensive, we're bound to miss a few books, not to mention the new titles that are being announced every day. We encourage you to check out our monthly previews for the most up-to-date lists of our most-anticipated fiction and nonfiction titles, and if you're looking for our most-anticipated poetry collections, be sure to check our our quarterly poetry roundups. Last but not least, if you like what we do, and want us to keep doing it sans paywall, consider making a one-time contribution or becoming a sustaining member today. By some miracle, The Millions has been around for 20 years—we'd like to be around for 20 more (or even just through the end of the year). Without further ado, it's my privilege and pleasure to present our Great 2023B Book Preview. —Sophia Stewart, editor July The Light Room by Kate Zambreno [NF] Zambreno—whose previous books include To Write as If Already Dead, Screen Tests, Drifts, and Heroines, all strange and mesmerizing and very good—chronicles her life as the mother of two young daughters amid the pandemic in her latest. As she teeters between exhaustion and transcendence, she finds inspiration in everything from her children's toys to the work of Natalia Ginzburg. Annie Ernaux counts herself as a big Zambreno stan—need I say more? —Sophia M. Stewart How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, edited by Jericho Brown and Darlene Taylor [NF] Edited by Pulitzer-winning poet Jericho Brown, this anthology features literary titans (and personal faves) Nikki Giovanni, Natasha Trethewey, Rita Dove, and Jamaica Kincaid, among many, many others, to offer a curated, comprehensive look at what it means to be a Black writer today and how Blackness can inform the craft and practice of writing. —SMS In the Act by Rachel Ingalls [F] In this witty, darkly comedic story, a housewife named Helen uncovers a secret her husband keeps locked in the attic. The reveal is too good to spoil, but let's just say deranged hilarity ensues. No one straddles the line between playful and macabre quite like Ingalls (perhaps best known for her 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban, about a lonely housewife who finds companionship in a sea monster named Larry), who always, in the words of critic Lidija Haas, “leaves readers to wonder, of her spouses and siblings, who might push whom off a cliff.” —SMS Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths [F] Griffiths, a decorated poet, debuts as a novelist with this tale of two Black sisters growing up in New England amid the Civil Rights movement. Blurbed by Jacqueline Woodson and Marlon James, who calls it a "magical, magnificent novel," Promise explores sisterhood, resistance, and everyday acts of heroism with a poetic sensibility. —Lauren Frank Zero-Sum by Joyce Carol Oates [F] The prolific author and goated tweeter is back with brutally dark story collection, centering on erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and the lure of self-destruction. The cast of characters include high school girls out for vengeance on sexual predators, a philosophy student bent on seducing her mentor, and a young woman morbidly fascinated by motherhood. Always one to wade into The Discourse, JCO pulls no punches here, touching every nerve she can manage. You can't help but respect it. —SMS All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky [F] Madievsky’s electric debut—pitched as Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch—follows an unnamed narrator who is torn between her obsession with her older sister Debbie and her desire to get clean. When Debbie vanishes, our narrator embarks on a kaleidoscopic journey of sex, power, and mysticism. All-Night Pharmacy counts among its fans Kristen Arnett, Isle McElroy, and Jean Kyoung Frazier, who calls the book "a black hole, a force so lively, unfiltered, and pure that you won’t mind being sucked in headfirst." —Liv Albright Thunderclap by Laura Cumming [NF] Art critic and historian Cumming zeroes in on a decisive moment in art history: a massive explosion at a Dutch gunpowder shop that killed the painter of The Goldfinch and almost killed Johannes Vermeer. Thunderclap blends memoir, biography, and history to explore one of art's most fertile periods and probe the intersections of art, memory, and desire. —LF Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson [F] Reissued by the extremely cool Dalkey Archive, Markson's 1988 novel—hailed by DFW himself as "a work of genius"—is a philosophical, experimental, and truly wild journey into the mind, narrated by a woman who is convinced that she is the last person on earth. One of the more daunting entries on this list, yes, but also one of the most fascinating. —SMS Tabula Rasa: Vol. 1 by John McPhee [NF] McPhee looks back on his seven-decade career by reflecting on all the people, places, and things he had planned to write about but never got around to. As with any retrospective by a literary icon, there's lots of quality tea in here, from a frosty encounter with Thorton Wilder to how he convinced The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. A curio cabinet of treasures. —SMS Sucker by Daniel Hornsby [F] This book was pitched to me as Succession meets Bad Blood meets vampires—a high-risk combination, narratively speaking, but undeniably tempting. Hornsby's sophomore effort, after the 2020 novel Via Negativa, is undeniably of the moment and sounds like just the sort of biting satire (I'm so sorry) that a lot of us could stand to sink our teeth into (seriously, like, so sorry) right now. —SMS Elsewhere: Stories by Yan Ge [F] Over two decades, Ge, a fiction writer who works in both Chinese and English, has written 13 books in Chinese, several of them translated into English. With Elsewhere, she makes her English-language debut. This will be Anglophone readers' first encounter with Ge as a short-story writer (a form she has lots of experience with; she published her first book—a short story collection—at 17), and if her novels are any indication, we're in for a treat. —LF My Husband by Maud Ventura, translated by Emma Ramadan [F] A woman besotted with an apparently perfect man who does not return her affections—let's just say this one... resonates. The debut novel from France's Maud Ventura, this psychological thriller, a la Gillian Flynn, follows a wife whose passion for her husband, and tests of his love for her, threatens to tear her marriage apart. A delicious addition to the relationship-suspense genre. —SMS After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley [F] The latest collection from Hadley, a master at capturing the emotional gradations of domestic life, comprises 12 characteristically astute stories about the ties that bind. Colm Tóibín counts himself as a Hadley stan, and Lily King calls this, Hadley's twelfth book and fourth story collection, "pure magic." —LF Strip Tees by Kate Flannery [F] Flannery's memoir, set in mid-aughts Los Angeles, centers on the author's stint at American Apparel at the height of the indie sleaze. A record of a bygone era and a bildungsroman about work and sex, the cover alone has me yearning for the days of skater dresses and disco shorts—were we ever so young? —SMS Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson [F] In the follow-up to his hit debut novel Open Water, beloved by the likes of Katie Kitamura and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Nelson introduces three young Londoners on the cusp of adulthood and the major life changes it brings. Moving from London to Accra and back again, the novel's scale is both intimate and international, anchored by a timeless story of friendship and growing up. —LF How Can I Help You by Laura Sims [F] Wanting to escape her mysterious past, Margo Finch changes her name and accepts a library job, which she hopes will mask her penchant for violence. But her plan is upended when a dead body shows up in the library bathroom. Mona Awad calls this "a compulsive and unforgettable novel" that is "reminiscent of Shirley Jackson at her eerie best." —LA I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle [F] Doyle's debut story collection plumbs the inner lives of young women faced with the uncertainty, nostalgia, and romantic tribulations that are part and parcel of being alive in your twenties. This one is pitched for readers of Batuman, Moshfegh, and Lockwood—a holy trinity of sharp, searching female characters. Say no more. —SMS Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead [F] Whitehead continues his saga of late-20th-century Harlem (beginning with 2021's Harlem Shuffle) with a portrait of the seedy, exuberant world of 1970s New York. The novel takes us to the set of a Blaxploitation set, a standoff between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army, a bitter Bicentennial celebration—a rich imagining of an inimitable time and place, by one of New York's best. —SMS Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed [F] Ahmed's debut reimagines One Thousand and One Nights by placing its narrator, Scheherazade, at the center of the story. Crafted over 14 years of writing and research, offers a new take on 13th-century folktales, celebrating the richness of the medieval Islamic world while finding fresh and even feminist significance in Scheherazade's voice. Also, that cover—whew! —SMS Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland [NF] I'll cut to the chase—this the best book I've read this year and also one of the best books I've ever read in my life. No descriptor feels capacious enough: an intellectually rigorous memoir, a moving cultural history, an brilliant study of blindness, disability, and adaptation. My love and admiration for this book know no bounds, and I'm beyond excited for the new era in disability writing that its publication portends. Shoutout to one of my favorite living writers and thinkers Chloé Cooper Jones, whose blurb made me pick this book up and subsequently changed my life. —SMS Succession Scripts 1, 2, & 3 by Jesse Armstrong et al [F] My deep love for Succession stems mostly from its utterly brilliant dialogue—slippery and evasive, gestural and oblique, and a showcase for the most remarkable diction I've ever seen on TV. Nobody writes like Jesse Armstrong and his writer's room, and with the way the medium is headed I doubt anyone ever will again. This is mandatory reading for Succession fans, aspiring screenwriters, and anyone who loves good TV.  —SMS Gwen John by Alice Foster [NF] I first discovered John's work in Celia Paul's gorgeous memoir Letters to Gwen John, and she's been one of my favorite artists ever since. Foster's study of John's life and work—the first critical, illustrated biography of the early-twentieth-century painter—is a well-researched account and beautiful tribute to a brilliant and complicated woman artist who has long languished on the margins of art history. —SMS Contradiction Days by JoAnna Novak [NF] Creatively blocked and uneasy with her newly pregnant body, Novak becomes obsessed with painter Agnes Martin. In her debut memoir, she wrestles in real-time with Martin's remarkable body of work, which provides her with a new framework to engage with her changing body, creative impulses, and impending motherhood. Billed for readers of Rachel Cusk and Maggie Nelson, Contradiction Days explores the thorny intersections of art, obligation, and womanhood. —LA Someone Who Isn't Me by Geoff Rickly [F] Rickly's debut novel follows a man seeking psychedelic treatment for heroin addiction in Mexico, and is based on the author's own experience doing the same. Chelsea Hodson literally founded her own press just to publish this book, so it's gotta be bonkers good. Not to mention both Hanif Abdurraqib and Gerard Way are blurbers—the definition of an iconic duo. —SMS Pleasure of Thinking by Wang Xiaobo, translated by Yan Yan [NF] Collecting the essays of one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s, Pleasure of Thinking highlights Xiaobo's remarkable versatility as a critic and thinker. From essays on Calvino and Hemingway, to anecdotes about getting mugged and how shitty American food is, this yet-untranslated collection has it all. —LF August Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki [F] The latest from Lepucki (a Millions alum!) is a quintessentially California novel, spanning the dense forests of Santa Cruz and the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Centering on Ursa, who can (sort of) time travel and is drawn early on into an all-women cult (I'm listening), Time's Mouth wrestles with memory, inheritance, and whether we can ever be extricated from our past. —SMS Mobility by Lydia Kiesling [F] The sophomore novel by Kiesling (another Millions alum!) is a story of class, power, and climate change, as well as American complicity and inertia. Kiesling is one of the best writers working today, and the Namwali Serpell calls this latest book a "deeply engrossing and politically astute tale," so this one is especially hotly anticipated over at Millions HQ (by which I mean me). —SMS Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen [NF] This, by Nguyen, is a somewhat meta masterclass in memoir-writing: attuned to the inherent ethical dilemmas that come with writing creative nonfiction, the lapses in memory and changes in perspective, the subjective narration through which reality is filtered. I had the pleasure of speaking to Nguyen about the book a few months ago, and her command of her craft is undeniable—and on full display in her latest. —SMS Tom Lake by Ann Patchett [F] If anyone can pull off an actually-good pandemic novel, it's Patchett. Tom Lake centers on a mother and her three daughters, cooped up at home in early 2020, as the mother tells the story of a famous actor with whom she once shared the stage—and a bed. It's strange to think that our parents were people before we were born, and Patchett's latest covers that fertile narrative ground with aplomb. —LF Anansi's Gold by Yepoka Yeebo [NF] In her first book, Yeebo chases an infamous Ghanian conman, John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who pulled off one of the 20th century's longest-running frauds, living in luxury, fooling everyone, and making millions, all while evading the FBI for years. How long until this book becomes an HBO miniseries starring Isiah Whitlock Jr.? Only time will tell. —SMS Witness by Jamel Brinkley [F] Brinkley is one of the best writers of short fiction around right now, with Yiyun Li comparing him to "iconic short-story writers [like] Edward P. Jones and Mavis Gallant." His sophomore collection, following 2018's Lucky Man, comprises 10 stories about life, death, and city-dwelling. I'll read anything FSG publishes anyway, but Witness in particular looks like a real gem. —SMS The Plague by Jacqueline Rose [NF] Rose, also the author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women, refracts the experience of the pandemic through the work of Camus, Freud, and Simone Weil, using their politics and private griefs as windows into our present moment. A slim volume that, knowing Rose, will have some serious intellectual heft. —SMS Dark Days by Roger Reeves [NF] In his nonfiction debut, poet Roger Reeves combines memoir, theory, and criticism to study race, freedom, and literature. Cathy Park Hong praises Reeves's "dazzling intellect" whose insights "have truly changed my way of thinking"—I can't think of a more ringing endorsement from a more reputable endorser. —SMS Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo [F] Acevedo, who won the National Book Award for her YA novel-in-verse The Poet X, makes her adult debut with this novel of sisterhood, inheritance, and diaspora. The story centers on the women of one Dominican American family who discover secrets that bind them to one another. Kiese Laymon, one of our greatest living writers, calls this one "perfectly crafted and tightly drawn," adding: "This is how stories should be made." —SMS The Men Can't Be Saved by Ben Purkert [F] In his debut novel, Purkert asks: What do our jobs do to our souls? Ignoring how upsettingly close to home this question hits, this book sounds like a knockout, following a junior copywriter who is let go from his job but can't seem to let go of his job. Purket chips away at the ugly, entwined hearts of masculinity and capitalism in what Clint Smith called "a phenomenal debut novel by one of my favorite writers." —SMS Pulling the Chariot of the Sun by Shane McCrae [NF] McCrae, a decorated poet, recounts being kidnapped from his Black father by his white supremacist maternal grandparents. His heritage hidden, memories distorted, and life carefully controlled, McCrae's painful childhood allow allows him insights into the racial wounds and violence that permeate this country. A stirring, harrowing personal narrative and cultural indictment. —LF The Apology by Jimin Han [F] I've been curious about Han's multigenerational saga ever since Alexander Chee shouted it out in his 2022 Year in Reading entry. So I'll give Chee the floor: "Han’s novel, set in Korea and America, is about an ajumma who is determined to keep taking care of her family from beyond the grave, whether they want her to or not. It’s also a great novel to read if you ever wanted, say, more novels from Iris Murdoch (I am like this)." —SMS Hangman by Maya Binyam [F] Binyam, a contributing editor at The Paris Review, makes her debut with a strange and searching novel about exile, diaspora, and the quest for Black refuge in the U.S. and beyond. Tavi Gevinson and Maaza Mengiste gave this one lots of love, and Namwali Serpell hails Hangman as a "strikingly masterful debut" that is "clean, sharp, piercing." —LF Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang [F] Chang follows up her much-loved debut novel Days of Distraction with a story collection that spans the U.S. and Asia, chronicling the lives of immigrant families and expectant parents, housewives and grocery clerks, strangers and neighbors and more. Jason Mott and Raven Leilani both blurbed, but what takes the cake is the endorsement from George Saunders, who calls Chang "a riveting and exciting presence in our literature." —LF The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger [NF] De Beauvoir. Arendt. Weil. Rand. These four philosophers are the subjects of Eilenberger's ambitious group biography and intellectual history, rooted in these women's parallel ideas and intersecting lives, both of which were largely shaped by WWII. I've long been fascinated by each of these thinkers separately, and I can't wait to see how Eilenberger synthesizes their philosophies and probes the connections between them. —SMS How to Care for a Human Girl by Ashley Wurzbacher [F] Wurzbacher's debut novel follows two sisters who become unexpectedly pregnant—and simultaneously have to decide whether or not they will see those pregnancies through. Wurzbacher, also the author of the story collection Happy Like This, explores "the battle between the head, the heart, and the body" that all women experience, in the words of Michelle Hart, positing that "even in the grips of indecision women must get to decide their own lives.” —LA Liquid Snakes by Stephen Kearse [F] In his second novel, Kearse poses a timely question: What if toxic pollution traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? Mourning his stillborn daughter, killed by toxins planted in Black neighborhoods by the government, one man decides to take justice into his own hands. Hannah Gold calls this "a brilliant novel that manages to be, among other things, a pharmacological thriller and an incisive meditation on the poison-pen letter." —SMS I Hear You're Rich by Diane Williams [F] In her latest collection, Williams, the godmother of flash fiction, delivers 33 short stories that offer glimpses into the mundane and exhilarating beauty of everyday life. Lydia Davis and Merve Emre (who once called Williams “the writer who saved my life—or my soul, if one believes such a thing exists”) count themselves as megafans, and for good reason. —Daniella Fishman Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland [NF] Shapland's first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was stellar, and her latest, an essay collection on capitalism's creep into our bodies, minds, and land, looks great. Shapland is especially attuned to the porousness that characterizes modern life, having been diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity—literal thin skin. Alexander Chee calls this a "wrenching, loving, and trenchant examination" of everything from healthcare and nuclear weapons to queerness and feminism. —SMS August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan [NF] Not only is this the first authoritative biography of Wilson—its author actually knew the influential playwright, interviewing him many times before his death in 2005. Hartigan, an award-winning theater critic and art reporter, doesn't just recount Wilson's life but analyzes his work, studying his use of history, memory, and vernacular in such indelible plays as Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A much-needed record of Wilson's life and work that will help secure his legacy and introduce him to future generations. —LF The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush [NF] In this follow-up to the Pulitzer-nominated Rising, Rush watches the world melt. Chronicling a months-long journey to the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, she and a group of scientists study how climate change is changing our planet—and what this means for our future. But she's also thinking about her own future: she wants to become a mother. But is it ethical to bring a kid into the world right now? This, and many other salient questions, propel the book. —SMS The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle [NF] We all know Eliot as a genius novelist—but what about as a formidable philosophical mind? In a new study of the Middlemarch author, Carlisle tries to deliver a fuller portrait of Eliot as a woman and a thinker, for whom the question of marriage was particularly salient to her life and work. Carlisle, a brilliant philosophical mind herself, is perfectly matched to her subject here. The kind of book you savor page by page. —SMS Las Madres by Esmeralda Santiago [F] The author of the iconic 1993 autobiography When I Was Puerto Rican returns with a novel that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, centering on two generations of women: close-knit group who call themselves "las Madres," beginning in the 1970s, and their daughters, in present day. Santiago has made her name shining a light on Puerto Rican and Nuyorican life through both nonfiction and fiction, with this latest novel continuing that project. Bee Sting by Paul Murray [F] Perhaps best known for his 2010 tragicomic novel Skippy Dies, Murray returns with a story of family, fortune, and what it means—or whether it's even possible—to be a good person amid societal upheaval (or collapse, depending on how you look at it). As four members of a fairly ordinary family come up against twists of fate in various and sometimes life-changing ways, Murray chronicles their diverging trajectories in what Emily Temple calls "cool-water prose mixed with his trademark wry darkness." —SMS Daughter of the Dragon by Yunte Huang [NF] As a lover of Old Hollywood, I practically lept out of my seat when mention of this biography began circulating among my fellow cinephiles. Huang dazzles with a modern reevaluation of the life and career of Hollywood’s first Chinese-American film star, Anna May Wong, detailing the all too common racism, sexism, and ageism that ran rampant through Hollywood (and still does, for that matter). Unsurprisingly, that story is brimming with juicy tidbits, like the fact that both Walter Benjamin and Marlene Detrich harbored massive crushes on Wong. —DF Surreal Spaces by Joanna Moorhead [NF] In this illustrated biography, the brilliant artist and writer Leonora Carrington—a Surrealist practitioner and vanguard among women painters—finally gets her due. Her fiction (beloved by everyone from Luis Buñel to Sheila Heti) has been resurrected thanks to the valiant efforts of the New York Review of Books and its Dorothy Project, and with this biography published by Princeton UP, her equally dramatic life story will have its moment in the sun too. —SMS Wifedom by Anna Funder [NF] The lives of literary wives have come under renewed scrutiny in reason years, and thank goodness for that. (See: Vera Nabokov, Nora Joyce, every woman in Carmela Ciuraru's Lives of the Wives.) So I'm thrilled to see Eileen O'Shaughnessy emerge from the shadows in Wifedom, which reveals the integral part she played in husband George Orwell's work, as well as her own merit as a writer. Funder asks: Are the roles of wife and writer forever at odds? —SMS Holler, Child by LaToya Watkins [F] Following up her debut novel Perish, Watkins delivers an 11-story collection that foregrounds the family and turns on loss, hope, reconciliation, and freedom. Per Deesha Philyaw, "Every story, every character, every line of LaToya Watkins's Holler, Child is a revelation." As is most of what Watkins writes—be sure to check out this stunning essay she wrote for us just last year. —LF Dialogue with a Somnambulist by Chloe Aridjis [NF/F] Come and take a lap with Aridjis, most recently the author of Sea Monsters, as she guides us through this murky daydream of a book. In this collection of stories and essays, Aridjis’s muses are both quotidian and uncanny: a plastic bag drifting through the wind (a la Katy Perry), a sea-monkey-eating grandma, astronauts in existential crisis. Interested yet? Well, try this on for size—the Deborah Levy calls the book an assortment of “sublime treasures from one of our boldest writers.” —DF Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto [F] Per Elizabeth McCracken, this one is "a knockout. 11 knockouts, one KO for every story." (Man, she's good at blurbing.) Indeed Kakimoto's debut collection tells 11 stories of contemporary Hawaiian identity, mythology, and womanhood. Unruly sexuality, generational memory, and the ghosts of colonization collide in what promises to be an auspicious short-fiction debut. —SMS Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter [F] Based on her award-winning story in Harper's Magazine, Leichter's second novel centers on a family who discovers a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet—and must contend with the repercussions of their discovery. In Terrace Story, blurbed and beloved by Jessamine Chan and Hernan Diaz, Leichter asks: How can we possibly nurture love with death always hanging overhead? —LF September My Work by Olga Ravn, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell [F] I've been a fan of Ravn's since I read her bleak, brilliant sci-fi novella The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken. Her latest, My Work, explores childbirth and motherhood by mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, letters—with her signature experimental flair. I'm especially interested to read Ravn via Smith and Russell, who together have previously translated Tove Ditlevsen. —SMS The Fraud by Zadie Smith [F] Smith returns with her first novel since 2016's Swing Time. Her first work of historical fiction, The Fraud, is set against a real legal trial over the inheritance of a sizable estate that divided Victorian England and, in the story, captivates the Scottish housekeeper of a famous novelist. Smith probes questions of truth and self-deception, fraudulence and authenticity, and what it means for something to be "real." —LF Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li [F] Li's been the sort of fiction writer other writers talk about over a few rounds with not-so-hushed awe since her first story collection hit shelves in 2005 and The New Yorker figured out that pretty much any piece she turned in was worth printing. She's mostly known as a top-notch novelist now, but this return to short fiction—her first collection in 13 years!—should remind those not already passing copies of The Vagrants along to their friends like they're introductory leaflets to some secret society why they fell in love with Li in the first place. —Allen Charles I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel [F] Patel's debut is one of the first great social media novels (along, perhaps, with Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This). A bold, electric, and ruthless tale of sex, class, status, obsession, self-destruction, and the worst parts of being online, all told from the perspective of a beguiling unnamed narrator involved in a troubled romance, Rachel Yoder calls I'm a Fan "a scathing ode to the psychos and shitheads." —SMS End Credits by Patty Lin [NF] Lin, a former writer for Desperate Housewives, Breaking Bad, Freaks and Geeks, and Friends, recounts her tumultuous years in Hollywood as not only the sole woman in the writer's room, but the only Asian person as well. At a moment of reckoning for the entertainment industry (see: Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down), Lin's memoir of ambition, power, and sacrifice couldn't come at a better time. —SMS Creep by Myriam Gurba  [NF] Gurba first captivated the literary world with her scathing essay on American Dirt, which was among first of what would soon be a tsunami of takedowns. In her equally ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection, Gurba considers the idea of "creeps"—both the noun and the verb—as an illuminating instrument for her cultural criticism. The blurber roster is astonishing and includes Luis Alberto Urrea, Imani Perry, Morgan Jerkins, and Rachel Kushner, who writes, "I loved Creep and already consider it essential reading, a California classic." —SMS Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels [F] First off, can we hear a little commotion for the cover? I mean—stun-ning. But as for what's inside: Michaels's disturbingly topical novel follows an aging poet who agrees to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI named Charlotte. I'm very much looking forward to this study of the intersections of art, labor, capital, and creativity—a book that I wish wasn't as timely and relevant as it is. —SMS Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas [F] I first encountered Thomas as a critic via his wry and razor-sharp review of the recent 1776 revival. So I'm excited to read his debut novel, the story of two estranged friends looking back on their formative years at a small Quaker high school in early-aughts lower Manhattan. Sarah Thankam Mathews and Kiley Reid both loved this one, and Pulitzer winner Paul Harding gave it a hearty "Bravo." —SMS Rouge by Mona Awad [F] The latest from Awad, the author of the hit 2020 novel Bunny, is pitched as Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut—a horror-tinted gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress store clerk whose mother's sudden death sends her in obsessive search of youth and beauty. Mary Karr herself says that she "couldn't put it down." —LF The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas, translated by Lizzie Davis [F] In this tale of a son’s peculiar homecoming, Cárdenas (author of the fantastic 2015 novella Ornamental) mystifies with the story of a crime like no other. After 15 years away from home, a biologist returns to his Colombian village only to find it strikingly different from when he last left it. Amid a tangled web of conspiracy, nothing is as it seems. What happens, Cárdenas asks, when you get stuck in the one place to which you swore you’d never return? —DF The Young Man by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer [NF] In the Nobel winner's latest, Ernaux reflects on an affair she had with a man in his twenties when she was in her fifties. The romance foregrounds various contradictions: why can men have younger lovers, but not women? How is it that Ernaux feels both aware of her age and ageless in the presence of her paramour? It's a blessing, really, that there is still more Ernaux for Anglophone readers to discover and savor (even if the French did get to read this one a year ahead of us). —SMS Daughter by Claudia Dey [F] Dey's latest novel, after 2018's Heartbreaker, centers on a woman and her one-hit-wonder novelist father. Living in his shadow and caught in his orbit, she strives to make a life—and art—of her own. Raven Leilani and Miriam Toews are both fans, and Sheila Heti praises Dey for capturing "feelings and struggles I haven't encountered in other novels. I loved this beautiful book." —LF Glitter and Concrete by Elyssa Maxx Goodman [NF] From the Jazz Age to Drag Race, journalist and drag historian Goodman offers a timely Technicolor history of drag in New York City and the role it's played in both queer culture and urban life. Noted New Yorker (and excellent writer) Ada Calhoun calls this a "glamorous, giddy history" and "a love letter to New York City past and present." —SMS Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters by Lynnée Denise [NF] Thornton is one of the most important figures in the history of rock and roll, yet she's been largely excised from our cultural memory. Denise offers a desperately-needed corrective in this volume about the art, life, and legacy of Thornton, whose song "Hound Dog" (later recorded by Elvis) changed the course of American music. A standout installment in the University of Texas Press's always great Music Matters series. —SMS How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto [F] In Taranto's debut novel, a grad student follows her disgraced mentor—a star professor embroiled in a sex scandal—to a university that is a safe harbor for scholars of ill repute. A crisis that tests her commitment, marriage, and conscience ensues. Jonathan Lethem calls this one work by "a stunning new talent, announcing itself fully formed"—indeed, a premise like this takes both deftness and confidence to pull off. Sounds like Taranto pulls it off and then some. —SMS Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote [F] Foote's debut traces the entwined fates of two families during the Great Migration in a work of "biomythography," a term coined by Audre Lorde. Andrew Sean Greer calls this, the inaugural title published by Sarah Jessica Parker's imprint, a "masterpiece" and Jacqueline Woodson says, “Once in a while, a writer comes along with a brilliance that stops the breath—Kim Coleman Foote is that writer.” Glossy by Marisa Meltzer [NF] Cards on the table: I am, as the kids say, a Glossier girlie. But one need not be to pick up Glossy, a bombshell exposé and study of corporate feminism that reveals for the first time what exactly has gone down at Glossier under the leadership of Emily Weiss, who stepped down last year. If you don't believe me, take Tina Brown's word for it; she calls this a book "the portrait of a female CEO we've been sorely lacking." —SMS The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff [F] Groff follows up her 2021 novel Matrix with another work of historical fiction, trading her 12th-century monastery for a Jamestown-esque colonial settlement. When a servant girl escapes to the wilderness, she's forced to rethink the laws of civilization and colonialism that she's internalized. Part-adventure, part-fable, classic Groff. —LF Doppelganger by Naomi Klein [NF] The impetus for this book is actually kinda funny—Klein, upset that she keeps getting confused with the respected-feminist-writer-turned-ostracized-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf, looked into the nature of digital doppelgängers. But that led her down a far more fruitful and fascinating path toward questions of identity, psychology, democracy,  communication in the modern age, and, ultimately, this book. And it's Judith Butler-approved to boot! —SMS The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride [F] McBride appears incapable of writing a book that's not a massive success. Following Deacon King Kong (an Oprah's Book Club pick), The Good Lord Bird (a National Book Award winner), and The Color of Water (which has sold more than 2.1 million copies worldwide), one wonders if McBride was at all daunted by his own track record when he started work on The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a novel about the entwined destinies of people living on the margins of a small Pennsylvania town in 1972. Either way, he has yet to miss, so his latest will surely be another triumph. Sing a Black Girl's Song by Ntozake Shange, edited by Imani Perry [NF] This posthumous collection of unpublished work by the visionary Shange, edited by Imani Perry and with a foreword by Tarana Burke, introduces readers to never-before-seen essays, plays, and poems by the foundational writer behind the paradigm-shifting 1975 play for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow was enuf. Shange, who died in 2018, was an intellectual giant, in conversation with writers like Morrison and Walker, who never quite got her due in life. —SMS Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter by Rachel Shteir [NF] Friedan's legacy is complicated and sometimes contradictory, and in the first biography of Friedan in more than 20 years, Shteir tries to capture her subject in all her (often frustrating) complexity. A myopic and mercurial crusader, whose devotion was sincere and priorities warped, Friedan deserves a biography that can capture her fullness. And with her rigorous research, interviews, and archival dives, Shteir looks up to the task. —SMS Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva [F] Lozada-Oliva's follow-up to her wonderful novel-in-verse Dreaming of You was pitched to me as Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Needless to say, it got my attention. Cults, earthquakes, and a mysterious buffet inside a mall pepper the daunting journey that one woman must take to save her granddaughters and possibly the world. —SMS Wild Girls by Tiya Miles [NF] Miles, a brilliant historian and author of the National Book Award-winning All That She Carried, looks at trailblazing women throughout U.S. history, from Harriet Tubman to Louisa May Alcott to Dolores Huerta, to consider how their girlhood experiences outdoors shaped their lives and work. Miles is a wonderful writer, rigorous researcher, and visionary scholar, and here she takes a totally unique (and characteristically ingenious) perspective on how the natural world influenced many of our most consequential women thinkers and leaders. —SMS The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay [NF] Gay is back with a follow-up to his tender and uplifting 2019 book The Book of Delights. I'm admittedly curious to see what other delights he could possibly have in store—the first book was a perfect little gem that didn't exactly demand a sequel—but I trust Gay completely as both a charming prose stylist, a seasoned practitioner of noticing, and a keen observer of the quotidian joys that are all around us. —SMS Bartleby and Me by Gay Talese [NF] Sixty years ago, Talese wrote in Esquire that "New York is a city of things unnoticed." He spent the next six decades doing quite a bit of noticing, chronicling the people (and places and moments) that make the city what it is. In his latest, he remembers the "nobodies" that he's profiled over the course of his career, the cast of characters perhaps who are not as recognizable as, say, Sinatra or Ali, but nevertheless essential threads in our cultural fabric. —SMS The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright [F] Enright, best known for her 2007 Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering, follows three generations of women who contend with their inheritances from one man—a celebrated Irish poet—that continue to shape their lives. A women-centered family portrait punctuated with lyrical poems, Sally Rooney calls The Wren, The Wren "a magnificent novel." —LF The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken [F] Knausgaard returns with another dazzling tome on the human condition, narrated from the dual perspectives of long-lost siblings struggling with the timeless conundrum of responsibility vs. self-actualization. Here Knausgaard fashions his own theories of what it is to love, to lose, to live, and be part of a family. Patricia Lockwood says it best: "Just as we begin to wonder where he is taking us, whether he is capable, he gets us there.” —DF Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee [F] Admittedly, I hadn't heard of the Italian novelist Elsa Morante until I read Carmela Ciuraru's delicious group biography Lives of the Wives. I've been wanting to read Morante's sprawling, 800-page magnum opus Lies and Sorcery, now reissued by that most prodigious reissuer NYRB, ever since. Natalia Ginzburg once called Morante the writer of her generation that she admired most, and in Ginzburg we trust. —SMS Wandering Through Life by Donna Leon [NF] Leon's Commissario Brunetti books—a Venice-set mystery series with 31 installments (so far)—made her a literary legend. But she's largely stayed out of the spotlight—until now. In her eighties, Leon looks back on her own adventurous life, traveling the world, settling in Italy, and discovering her passion and aptitude for writing. I'll be honest, the cover alone sold me here—this is exactly what I want to look when I'm 80: sunglasses, bob, blazer, blindingly cool. You just know she's got some good stories in her bandoleer. —SMS 50 Years of Ms. edited by Katherine Spillar, foreword by Gloria Steinem [NF] When it launched in 1971, Ms. Magazine was one of the most radical publications on the market, broaching subjects that had long been kept out of popular discourse. With Steinem at its helm, the feminist magazine was essential reading for the era of women's liberation. This collection of mag's best writing includes work by Toni Morrison, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Allison Bechdel, and many more. Essential reading for anyone looking to understand the radical roots of mainstream feminism. —SMS Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre, translated by Heather Cleary [F] Translated by the great Heather Cleary, the debut novel by Fabre made waves in Mexico, earning him the prestigious Elena Poniatowska Prize. (By the way, if you haven't read Poniatowska, read Poniatowska.) Based on the true story of the theft of the body of Saint John of the Cross from a monastery in Ubeda. Part road-trip novel, part coming-of-age tale, part slapstick comedy, Recital of the Dark Verses is bound to make a splash with Anglophone readers. —SMS Love in a Time of Hate by Florian Illies, translated by Simon Pare [NF] Surely there's nothing like a book about a bevy of emotionally damaged creative geniuses staring down what must have seemed to them like the end of the world to rile up the sort of lit dork who's made it this far down this list. This one seems promising, cramming practically every pre-war fave, problematic or no—Sartre and de Beauvoir! Dietrich and Nabokov! Arendt and Benjamin! Dalí and Picasso!—into a history of artists caught between financial collapse and rising fascist violence. Anyway, sound familiar? —AC Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang [F] The followup to Zhang's debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold considers the ethics of seeking pleasure against the backdrop of a world in disarray. As environmental catastrophe looms, a chef escapes the city to take a job in an idyllic mountaintop colony, where nothing is as it seems. Among the novel's fans are Raven Leilani, Roxane Gay, and Gabrielle Zevin, who declares, "It's rare to read anything that feels this unique." —LF Jane Campion on Jane Campion by Michel Ciment [NF] I'll just let Harvey Keitel blurb this one: "Jane Campion is a goddess, and it's difficult for a mere mortal to talk about a goddess. I fear being struck by lightning bolts." —SMS People Collide by Isle McElroy [F] McElroy's sophomore novel, which comes on the heels of their debut The Atmospherians, chronicles a husband and wife who switch bodies, only for one of them to disappear without a trace. A fresh take on a classic trope, propelling this speculative story is the question of how this metamorphosis could transform their fraught union. Torrey Peters writes, "I predict Isle McElroy’s People Collide will inaugurate an entire genre." —LF This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara [F] Vara’s story collection, which follows her Pulitzer-nominated debut novel The Immortal King Rao, examines human relationships and our intrinsic yearning for connection. The book's all-star roster of blurbers includes Deesha Philyaw, Danielle Evans, Elizabeth McCracken, and Lauren Groff, and Pulitzer winner Andrew Sean Greer says This is Salvaged is "for readers who need clarity and hope–that is to say: everybody.” —LA The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell [NF] Since her death in late 2021, Didion has been iconized (i.e. flattened, simplified) even more than she was in life. She was, of course, cold and beautiful and utterly California—but there was much more to her than that. So it's reassuring to hear the brilliant Hua Hsu report that McDonnell's new volume on Didion "avoids simple platitudes, approaching the great writer with a fierce, probing intelligence." Didion deserves no less. —SMS Catland by Kathryn Hughes [NF] Against the backdrop of the twentieth-century cat craze, Hughes documents the life of artist Louis Wain, whose human-like illustrations of cats prompted an explosion of interest in feline houseguests across society. Despite his whimsical art, Wain's own life was steeped in adversity, and he was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, which may have played a role in his work. An accomplished academic, Hughes enlivens this history of the nation's first brush with catmania. —LA American Gun by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson [F] With mass shootings now endemic to American life, two veteran Wall Street Journal journalists look at one of the most common culprits—the AR-15—to figure out how we got here. Tracing the weapon's history and embrace by the gun industry, the duo reveals the various financial, political, and cultural interests at play in the horrific assent of a killing machine. Esteemed MLK biographer Jonathan Eig calls this "social history at its finest." —SMS Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches [F] In this work of autofiction, Weiner—a respected Peruvian journalist and writer—considers the legacy of imperialism through one woman's family ties to both the colonized and colonizers. A study of the intersections of the personal and historical, violence and race, love and desire, I think/hope Undiscovered will be Weiner's breakthrough moment for Anglophone readers—the blurb from Valeria Luiselli is certainly a good sign. —SMS The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson [F] Wilson made waves in 2017 as the first woman to publish an English-language translation of The Odyssey, with its controversial opening line: "Tell me about a complicated man." She's been outspoken about the role her womanhood does and doesn't play in translating, telling the LA Review of Books, "The stylistic and hermeneutic choices I make as a translator aren’t predetermined by my gender identity." Still, there's something exciting about experiencing Homer via a woman's translation, which until now had not even been an option for Anglophone readers. I'm looking forward to Wilson's take on The Iliad. —SMS October The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector, translated by Benjamin Moser [F] Of all the incredible things she wrote, Lispector considered her 1961 novel The Apples in the Dark "the best one." This reissue, translated as always by Moser, concludes New Directions' ambitious—and wildly successful—mission to retranslate all her fiction and reintroduce the innovative, enigmatic, and enthrallingly glamorous Brazilian writer to an Anglophone audience. A fitting capstone to a remarkable publishing endeavor. —SMS How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair [NF] Tracing the arc of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, Sinclair—an accomplished poet—chronicles how she found her voice as a woman and a writer. Among the book's fans are such literary giants as Marlon James, Natasha Trethewey, and Imani Perry, who places Sinclair in "the pantheon of great writers of the Caribbean literary tradition," alongside Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid. —LF The Loneliness Files by Athena Dixon [NF] Dixon's memoir-in-essays was acquired by Tin House editor-at-large Hanif Aburraqib, which is one of the best endorsements I can imagine. Chronicling the days of a child-free middle-aged woman living alone, The Loneliness Files considers how it feels to be a body behind a screen, and what it means to fall through the cracks of connective technology. The rare exploration of internet existence that sounds like it has something urgent to say. —SMS Company by Shannon Sanders [F] At the center of Sanders's debut is the Collins family, whose members and acquaintances are the recurring cast of this collection's 13 stories. In each story, a guest arrives at someone's home—sometimes invited, sometimes unexpected—and some conflict emerges. It's a great premise for a collection, as master short-fictioneer Deesha Philyaw can attest: "Shannon Sanders's stories simply blew me away." —LF The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda [F] An instant bestseller in Japan when it was first published in 1988, The Premonition follows a young woman from an apparently loving family who is nagged by the feeling that she's forgotten something important from her childhood. Yoshimoto is one of Japan's most celebrated writers, and it's thrilling to see her now dazzle Anglophone readers, including Ling Ma, who says, "Reading Banana Yoshimoto is like taking a bracing, cleansing bath." —LF The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut [F] Labatut is best known for his 2021 gripping book When We Cease to Understand the World and also this incredible interview with Public Books. His latest undertaking, The Maniac, centers on the life and legacy of Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, who invented game theory and the first programmable computer. Like When We Cease, The Maniac audaciously collides fact and fiction. —SMS Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward [F] A new Jesmyn Ward book is always an event. The two-time National Book Award winner returns with her fourth novel, the story of Annis, an enslaved girl sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her. We follow her on her miles-long march as she recalls the stories and memories that are her inheritance, and attunes herself to the natural world and spiritual realm that surrounds her. Pitched as Ward's "most magnificent novel yet," I can't wait to find out for myself. —LF Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz [NF] Do you ever find yourself using TikTok slang unironically, or referring to yourself (perhaps derogatorily) as “chronically online”? Well, Taylor Lorenz has the book for you! The acclaimed and oft-controversial WaPo reporter makes her literary debut with a comprehensive mapping of the internet’s history. From social to economic influences, Lorenz shows us the good, the bad, and the ugly of the World Wide Web and how it's evolved since its humble inception. A mammoth task to be sure—but if anyone is up to the challenge, it’s Lorenz. —DF Nefando by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker [F] The author-translator duo behind the much-loved and much-decorated National Book Award finalist Jawbone returns with a techno-horror story of six young artists in Barcelona, each of them somehow connected to Nefando, a controversial and mysterious video game that challenges their identities and their consciences. With characteristic daring, Ojeda explores the entangled physical and virtual spaces we all inhabit, whether we like it or not. —SMS A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen [NF] In his first memoir, the Pulitzer-winning novelist explores the themes that have always informed his writing—refugeehood and colonization, history and memory—through a newly personal lens. The book has gotten lots of love from Cathy Park Hong, Laila Lalami, and Gina Apostol, and Susan Straight raves that it "belongs with James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other writers whose memoirs take apart ‘the American Dream’ with laser precision." —LF The Beauty of Light by Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, translated by Ethen Mitchell [NF] In this slim volume of interviews, some of the last ones of Adnan's life, journalist Laure Adler talks with the poet and painter about her creative process, belief in beauty, and destiny as an artist. Adnan, who died in 2021, is an effervescent presence on the page and in conversation, doling out profound insights with ease, candor, and generosity. —SMS Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner [F] Gumbiner's sophomore effort has got Californian literary royalty from Claire Vaye Watkins to Tommy Orange to Dave Eggers heaping on the praise, with the latter even calling him "a sort of 21st century Steinbeck." Fire in the Canyon, about a grape grower and his family whose crops and lives are devastated by wildfire, does seem to take a leaf from the Steinbeck vine. —AC The Halt During the Chase by Rosemary Tonks [F] Praise be to New Directions for reissuing Tonks’s cult classic some 50 years after its publication. Set in high-society England, The Halt During the Chase evolves into a poignant criticism of love and marriage in the modern age, as well as what it means to fight for your individuality in the face of oppression on the level of both socioeconomics and intimate relationships. Nobody writes about angsty women like Tonks. —DF Our Strangers by Lydia Davis [F] Davis returns with a story collection written with her characteristic wit and dazzling prose. In an extremely badass move against the corporate monopoly on bookselling, Davis will not be selling the book via Amazon, releasing it only in physical bookshops and select online outlets such as Bookshop.org. (This is also the first-ever title published by Bookshop.org.) Parul Sehgal once called Davis “our [modern] Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew”—it doesn’t get much better than that. —DF Is There God After Prince? by Peter Coviello [NF] Coviello navigates the current “Age of Lost Things,” a world obsessed with nostalgia for the past and the impending disaster of the future. Exploring our yearning for entertainment amid turmoil, Coviello examines how art’s meaning transforms alongside us. The Sopranos, Gladys Knight, Sally Rooney, The Shining, Joni Mitchell, Paula Fox, Steely Dan—no piece of culture evades his gaze. Through the lens of what Coviello calls “enstrickenness,” he wonders: Is there genuine hope to be found through sentimentality? —DF Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann [NF] With Cormac McCarthy now one with that Cimmerian empyrean through whose inky waters no helmsman has yet steered and returned, Herzog may be our greatest living witness of the beauty beside the bleak. If not, he's certainly the most widest-ranging—who else has made such compelling films about conquistadors, cave paintings, and equally murderous Renaissance composers and Alaskan bear populations, let alone made a convincing (sorta) cop of Nick Cage? Who knows what he'll say about all that in a memoir, but whatever it is, it's probably weird enough to be worth reading. —AC Bluebeard's Castle by Anna Biller [F] From the filmmaker behind the excellent 2016 cult film The Love Witch comes a subversive, feminist gothic spin on the classic fairytale. In this version, Bluebeard is a handsome and charming baron, whose love transforms Judith, a successful, if sensitive, novelist, into a new woman. But as you might have guessed, all is not what it seems. A perfect literary debut for a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. And that cover! —SMS Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz [F] I've long been fascinated by Lahiri's work as a bilingual author and translator, writing in both her native English and her adopted language, Italian. In this new story collection, she translates herself. In collaboration with fellow translator (and Knopf editor) Todd Pornowitz, Lahiri welcomes Anglophone readers into these nine stories, originally written in Italian and lovingly set in Rome. A feat of both self-translation and collaborative translation—and a monument to the art of translation itself. —SMS Family Meal by Bryan Washington [F] Washington can't seem to miss—his first two books, Lot and Memorial were both critical darlings, and his new novel, about two young men and former best friends whose lives collide once again after an unmooring death, doesn't look like it'll be any different, brimming as it is with Washington's signature motifs of food, love, and intimacy. "It takes a generous writer to show us the world in this way," says Rumaan Alam, "and Bryan Washington is one of our best.” —LF So Many People, Mariana by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated by Margaret Jull Costa [F] Following her smart and scathing novel Empty Wardrobes, written in 1966 and published in translation by Two Lines in 2021, de Carvalho's story collection about ordinary women struggling to find their purpose is yet another gift to Anglophone readers. In stark, unsentimental prose, the late Portuguese literary powerhouse studies class, society, and gender with surgical precision. Per Joyce Carol Oates: “There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho’s vision and the originality and severity of her voice.” —SMS Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes, translated by Jill Foulston [F] The late Cuban-Italian astonished Anglophone readers earlier this year with the sardonic and subversive Forbidden Notebook, translated by none other than Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante (who counts de Céspedes as an inspiration). Now, Atra House has kindly blessed us with yet another de Céspedes novel, a tale of love and crime in fascist Italy, with an afterword by Ferrante herself. —SMS Down the Drain by Julia Fox [NF] When I heard that Fox was coming out with a memoir, I had hoped it would be a highlight reel of her best TikTok story-times—but the real thing promises to be much juicier. Fox, known for her out-of-the-box style and no-fucks-given attitude, finally gives us the lowdown on her mysterious come-up, from her breakout role in Uncut Gems to her ill-advised fling with Ye. Will we be getting an eyeliner tutorial? Will Simon & Schuster stage a baby Birkin giveaway to promote the book? Time will tell. —DF A Year and a Day by Phillip Lopate [NF] From one of the pioneers of the personal essay comes a new kind of experiment in creative nonfiction, for him at least: blogging. In 2016, Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about whatever he felt like, and A Year and a Day compiles 47 of the resulting essays. Naturally, the topics range widely, from death and desire to James Baldwin and Agnes Martin. There is something wonderful about watching a total pro try something new—and Lopate, unsurprisingly, rises to his own challenge. —SMS Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin [NF] It's about time somebody held Big Publishing as accountable for the decades-long insipidification of American literary culture as, say, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and Sinykin seems as game as any. The past half-century of publishing history has been all about corporate conglomerates that have shepherded readers and writers alike into a future where the book as product is of more importance than literature as sociocultural lodestar. Will Sinykin's analytical history make Dick Snyder shake in his grave? Doubtful, but here's hoping. —AC Mr. Texas by Lawrence Wright [F] Wright is one of our greatest (and one of my favorite) living nonfiction writers, combining in all his work masterful reportage with elegant prose. (See: The Looming Tower, Going Clear, The Plague Year, etc.) His latest novel (following his eerily prescient pandemic novel that came out... right before the pandemic) is a send-up of Texas politics, following a dark-horse candidate to risk it all for a seat in the Lone Star State's House of Representatives. —SMS Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore [NF] The founding member of Sonic Youth chronicles his creative life, from his small-town teen years to his arrival to the late-seventies East Village to his role at the center of the No Wave scene with the formation of one of the most consequential bands in rock history. Colson Whitehead's blurb is so delightful that I'll give it to you in full: "Downtown scientists rejoice! For Thurston Moore has unearthed the missing links, the sacred texts, the forgotten stories, and the secret maps of the lost golden age. This is history—scuffed, slightly bent, plenty noisy, and indispensable." —SMS The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts by Gregg Hecimovich [NF] In this groundbreaking study, Hecimovich solves the mystery of the identity of the first Black woman novelist whose book, The Bondwoman's Narrative, first made waves in 2002, at which point her identity was unknown. Hecimovich's account is at once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, shedding light not just on one trailblazing enslaved woman, but on the era that defined her life and erased her work. —LF Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee [F] McGhee's debut novel follows a self-proclaimed loser—the titular Jonathan—who lands his dream job but is soon faced with a crisis of morality (and reality). Critiquing the crushing weight of debt, the porousness of life and work, the disappointments of late-stage capitalism, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is pitched as "a debut novel for the modern working stiff." —LF Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth [F] Following her debut novel of feminist horror Motherthing, Hogarth's latest explores motherhood from yet another angle, considering how women's labor is (de)valued. When a new mother, once happy to stay at home, discovers an opportunity to do what looks like "meaningful" work, she jumps at it, only to become embroiled in a dangerous mystery. —LF They Flew by Carlos Eire [NF] The early modern era of European history is full of accounts of the impossible: people flying. Just as skepticism and empirical science had begun to supplant religious belief in the paranormal, tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft began to emerge, reflecting conflicting ideas about the natural world and the rocky transition into the secular age. My girl St. Teresa of Avila is just one case study in Eire's exquisite and relevant examination of reality and belief. —SMS The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell [F] The scope of Thirlwell's latest is sweeping, to put it mildly. It spans 1775 to this very moment, France and America and the Atlantic and the Pacific and also the moon. While we know the story centers on a young eighteenth-century French woman named Celine who finds herself slandered, the pitch for this one is admittedly vague. Not to worry—its star-studded lineup of blurbers includes Sheila Heti, Colm Tóibín, Salman Rushdie, and Edmund White, who calls the novel "so unthinkably original." —LF Tremor by Teju Cole [F] It's been a dozen years since Open City, Cole's his first novel to be published in the U.S., which he followed up with an essay collection and multiple volumes combining photography with criticism. He returns to the novel now with Tremor, about a West African man teaching photography at a celebrated New England school, which Katie Kitamura calls "an intimate novel about destabilization and catastrophe." —AC Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) by Sly Stone [NF] You couldn’t pick a more perfect inaugural title for Questlove’s new publishing imprint—a tell-all memoir by Sly Stone himself. For the first time ever, fans of Sly and the Family Stone can learn the band’s history straight from the source. With his trademark swagger and groove, Stone reflects on the allure of stardom and what happens when you get burned by the spotlight and traces his own evolution from enigmatic frontman to full-on pop-culture phenomenon. —DF One Woman Show by Christine Coulson [F] The conceit of Coulson's novel immediately got my attention: One Woman Show tells the story of a twentieth-century woman's self-realization entirely through museum wall labels. Coulson herself spent 25 years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which she dreamt of using the Met's strict label format to capture people as works of art. If that doesn't sell you, Maira Kalman herself is a fan of the book. "I read it in one fell swoop," Kalman says. "It is brilliant." —SMS The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie [NF] Linguist, lexicographer, technologist, and writer Ogilvie sheds light on the many far-flung volunteers who helped assemble the Oxford English Dictionary, which was the first of its kind. The identities of those volunteers may surprise you—they include three murderers, a noted pornography collector, and Karl Marx's daughter. Ogilvie uncovers the people and the work that went into defining the English language, word by word. —SMS Vengeance is Mine by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump [F] A new NDiaye novel is always an occasion. The French author—best known for 2009's Three Strong Women, which made her the first Black woman to ever win the prestigious Prix Goncourt—returns with a tale of a horrific triple homicide that exhumes mysterious memories from a lawyer's childhood. Tess Gunty reports being "hypnotized from the first word to the last"—as one is when reading NDiaye. —SMS The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin [NF] In this debut speculative memoir, Lin isn’t afraid of her demons. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, Lin struggled to manage her illness while caring for her cancer-stricken father. Unhappy with the rose-colored narratives about recovering from mental illness, she takes a different approach here, leaning into the darkness. Inspired by Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan ghost stories, Lin blends memoir and horror—plus stunning illustrations—to consider what it means to coexist with anguish. —LA Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang [F] Chang, the author of Gods of Want and Bestiary, weaves a novel full of ghosts and entrails, stray dogs and red string. When best friends Anita and Rainie encounter a lot of strays who can communicate with humans, the girls learn they are preceded by a generation of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs, and Anita convinces Rainie to become a dog with her; horror and beauty ensue. Now that's a premise! —LF Death Valley by Melissa Broder [F] Following up her hit novel Milk Fed, the ever-bold Broder takes readers along on one woman's journey into the California high desert in this darkly comedic exploration of grief, illness, and womanhood, catalyzed by a mysterious succulent. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah hails this as a "journey unlike any you've read before." —LF The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis [F] Best known for her 2013 novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, Mathis returns with a multi-generational novel that follows a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. Set in the 1980s, and split between the racially and politically turbulent city of Philadelphia and the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama, The Unsettled is a meditation on inheritance, justice, and the meaning of family. Marilyn Robinson calls this "a fine, powerful book." —LF Madonna by Mary Gabriel [NF] Gabriel, the author of the stellar group biography Ninth Street Women, turns her gaze to an unexpected subject for her latest outing: Madge herself. Having previously written about Victoria Woodhull and Karl and Jenny Marx, I'm dying to see how Gabriel chronicles the life of one of the world's biggest pop stars. It clocks in at 880 pages, so I think it's safe to say Gabriel is nothing less than thorough. —SMS A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls [F] Fosse's Septology was one of the breakout novels of last year, thanks in part to a one-woman campaign spearheaded by Merve Emre, whose profound love and admiration for the book proved infectious on Twitter and beyond. So expectations are high for the next novel from one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, the details of which are still scarce. This will be the literary event of October (pending Emre's New Yorker review). —SMS The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore [F] In the follow-up to her beguiling debut novel The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore delivers yet another work of historical fiction, this time set amid the French Revolution. Inspired by the true story of Tarrare, a French showman and soldier noted for his rapacious appetite and unorthodox eating habits, seemingly at odds with the poverty that surrounds him. According to legend, he could devour cats whole—certainly a fascinating historical figure to build a novel around. —LA November Pandora's Box by Peter Biskind [NF] It's a dire moment for television. The medium is in peril thanks to corporate conglomeration and big (dumb) bets on streaming, and good TV is becoming increasingly hard to find. Enter Biskind, one of the wisest, weirdest cultural critics out there. Tackling the fall of network TV, rise of cable, and middling new era of streaming, this interview-packed volume might just have the answers to a question that keeps me up at night: How come TV sucks now? —SMS In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl by Merilee Grindle [NF] Grindle unearths the story of the pioneering anthropologist Zella Nuttall, whose study of Aztec culture and cosmology transformed our understanding of pre-Columbian Mexico. She was the first to accurately decode the Aztec stone calendar, and also rediscovered countless pre-Columbian texts previously thought to have been lost—all the while juggling single motherhood with her career. This is the first biography of Nuttall—and one that sounds long overdue. —SMS Cross Stitch by Jazmina Barrera, translated by Christina MacSweeney [F] Barrera reteams with translator MacSweeney on her debut novel, following her breakthrough 2020 essay collection Linea Nigra. Three childhood friends—Mila, Citali, and Dalia—now college-aged, embark on what they hope will be the trip of a lifetime to Europe, only to be faced with the signs they are each steadily changing and drifting from one another. Now, adult Mila reflects on that formative friendship and fateful trip when she learns that Citali has drowned. Barrera asks: What do we lose to adulthood? —SMS The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan [F] Already a massive bestseller across the pond, Dolan's latest novel is a sly study of modern love, centered on a couple barreling toward their wedding and three friends who might just tear them apart (and for pretty good reason). A wry and contemporary take on the marriage plot, The Happy Couple is well-loved by Colm Tóibín and Booker winner Douglas Stuart, who declares himself "fully in awe of Dolan's talent." —SMS Comedy Book by Jesse David Fox [NF] Fox is the smartest and funniest comedy critic working today. So there's no one I would rather read on the history, legacy, and inner workings of the form. From highbrow to lowbrow, stand-up specials to TikTok stars, Dave Chappelle to Ali Wong to Jerry Seinfeld to Jon Stewart, Fox offers a sweeping chronicle of one of our most potent cultural forces, as well as a look inside how humor actually works. —SMS The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez [F] Nunez turns her gaze to our contemporary moment and the trappings of modern life in her ninth novel, the plot details of which are admittedly scarce. We know that it has a solitary female narrator, and that there's also an adrift Gen Zer and a parrot named Eureka in the mix—that's about it. But what difference would it really make? It's Nunez! Just read it! —SMS How to Be Multiple by Helena de Bres, illustrated by Julia de Bres [NF] This study of twinhood sits at the intersection of the intellectual and the personal—philosopher Helena de Bres is a twin herself, attuned to the uncanniness of being a twin as both a scholar and a sister. Confronting questions of consciousness, free will, and selfhood, she mines art, myth, popular experience, and her own experience to get to the bottom of this fascinating reproductive quirk. Chloé Cooper Jones, a fave of mine, calls this one "a must-read," so I have no choice but to follow suit. —SMS My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand [NF] Babs wrote a tell-all memoir and it's 1,024 pages long. That's literally all you need to know. —SMS . . To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith [NF] To Free the Captives finds the Pulitzer-winning poet soul-searching and heartsick, grappling with our national identity amid endemic racist violence. In doing so, she attempted to assemble a new vocabulary of American life. At a moment where words seem to no longer have mutually-understood meanings—or, often, no meaning at all—Smith's linguistic mastery and poetic vision are sorely needed. —SMS The Sisterhood by Courtney Thorsson [NF] Starting in early 1977, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and other Black women writers would meet monthly at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to discuss their work over gumbo and champagne—I know! They called themselves "The Sisterhood," and this remarkable community (which came to include Audre Lorde and Margo Jefferson, among others) is the subject of Thorsson's book, which I quite literally pre-ordered the split-second she announced on Twitter. —SMS Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin [NF] I'll read Elkin's writing on just about anything, but the topic of "art monsters"—which originated in Jenny Offil's 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation—is both a) extremely up my alley and b) a truly perfect fit for Elkin's literary sensibilities. Clocking in at 368 pages, this book has some real intellectual (and physical) heft to it and spans the work of Kara Walker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and many, many more. —SMS Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil [F] In her debut novel, McNeil considers a theme that's run through much of her work, including her first book Lurking: the intersections of life, labor, and technology. Wrong Way centers on Teresa, who gets a job at a fintech corporation that's launching a fleet of driverless cars. The lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is strong, but as she learns more about her new employer, she must reckon with the existential perils posed by artificial intelligence, unchecked capitalism, and the gig economy. —SMS Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra [F] Basra's debut novel follows a starry-eyed cinephile who leaves his rural village in Punjab to pursue his dreams of becoming an actor. (He fancies himself a Sami Frey type.) Of course, things don't work out as he plans, and nothing on his journey is quite what it seems. Happy is an indictment of the global migration crisis, a meditation on diaspora, and an argument for the right to a vivid inner life. —LF Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern by Jacqueline Taylor [NF] Taylor chronicles the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator who expanded our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Using Meredith as a lens to study the role architecture played in early twentieth-century Black middle-class identity, Taylor shows that Meredith, like so many other Black cultural producers, wasn't marginal to the modernist project but rather central to its definition. (Also, this book has my vote for Title of the Year.) —SMS The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump [F] Bump's sophomore novel follows a young Black Boston woman who constructs a separate society with her husband in search of a Black utopia. But as more interlopers want in, conflicts surface, food gets scarce, and the outside world intrudes, and the sustainability of utopia comes into question. A great premise to be sure, but what really sold me is this incredible blurb from the Percival Everett: "A Blithedale Romance for the 21st century, only less naive and more complex... This is funny, sad, sad-funny and funny-sad and just plain smart." —SMS The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman [F] I can't remember the last time a novel's premise amused me this much—a writer absconds to Hollywood after writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist and subsequently gets her sort of canceled, and in her hurt, is radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Yes, please! Esteemed fictioneers Zain Khalid and Joshua Cohen both blurbed, a great sign in itself, but the conceit alone is too tantalizing to pass up. —SMS Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park [F] Park, a founding editor of The Believer, imagines an alternate secret history of Korea—one where the Korean Provisional Government still exists today—in his second novel. Propelled by twists and mystery, Same Bed Different Dreams weaves together Korean history, American pop culture, and modern technology to explore utopia, reality, and our inevitable, undeniable interconnectedness. —LF Day by Michael Cunningham [F] The Virginia Woolf fanfictionalist-extraordinaire is writing about crumbling marriages again and yeah, OK, I'll bite. Everyone from Francine Prose to Ocean Vuong has blurbed the thing, with the Irish contingent particularly keen on it, pulling in a one-two punch from Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín: Cunningham, says the latter, "crafts a glorious sentence, and at the same time he tells an achingly compelling story," in what the former calls "writing about love and loss in tones that are both unsparing and tender." —AC Critical Hits, edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado [NF] If Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is the first "Great American Gamer Novel" (as per Nathan Hill), then this is certainly our first Great American Gamer Essay Collection. Writer-gamers like Alexander Chee, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Larissa Pham reflect on the video games and gaming experiences that shaped them, and what the medium can teach all of us about our culture and ourselves. —SMS Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright [F] Blakely-Cartwright's seductive debut adult novel (she's previously the author of the kid's book Red Riding Hood) of power and friendship got one of the best blurbs I've ever seen—a ringing "Obsessed!" from Chloë Sevigny. The novel tells the story of one woman's affair with her daughter's best friend, probing the inner lives of each of the three women caught up in this strange triangle. This one also got plenty of love from Yiyun Li and Hermione Hoby, a sure sign of greatness. —SMS Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno [NF] Samatar x Zambreno—an intellectual match made in heaven. Together, they tackle the most slippery aspect of literary theory: tone. How does it work? Can it be preserved in translation? What can it teach us? Per the inimitable Cristina Rivera Garza: "Just as the world laments the apparent lack of insightful literary criticism as well as the dwindling number of venues that support it, here comes the dazzling Committee to Investigate Atmosphere with a piece of criticism like no other." —SMS The Death of a Jaybird by Jodi M. Savage [NF] Pitched a The Year of Magical Thinking meets Somebody's Daughter, Savage's memoir-in-essays spans three generations. Savage honors and elegizes the complicated relationships she had with her mother and grandmother—the women who raised her—and explores how all Black women must navigate various (and sometimes contradictory) roles and identities in the world. —LF The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Haydn Trowell [F] In 1968, Kawabata became the first Japanese writer tow in the Nobel Prize for Literature, with novels like Snow CountryThousand Cranes, and The Sound of the Mountain enrapturing international readers. Now available in English for the very first time is The Rainbow, published in 1934, about three half-sisters living in Japan just a few years after the end of WWII, as they struggle to make sense of the postwar world in which they are coming of age. —LF December Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman [NF] Since his decade-long stint at the helm of Poetry Magazine, Wiman has kept himself busy putting out volumes of poetry and books on faith. The metaphysical poetic tradition isn't exactly at its most popular in the Year of Our Exhausted Skepticism 2023, but a good case could be made for Wiman as the heir to George Herbert—a case Protestant poet laureate (okay she's a novelist, but still) Marilynne Robinson might cosign, having argued that Wiman's "poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world." This volume is not just one but two twofers, blending poetry, criticism, theology, and memoir. —AC Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn [F] A queer love story set in Brooklyn—it's been done before, to put it mildly. But a queer love story set in Brooklyn in the year 2050, as the calamitous effects of climate change encroach on the city and the only people guaranteed survival are those accepted into an experimental weather-safe, city-sized facility overseen by a reclusive girlboss-billionaire? Now that's a novel I'm dying to read. —SMS Songs on Endless Repeat  by Anthony Veasna So [NF/F] Soon after Veasna So's essays and debut story collection Afterparties captured the attention of the literary world, we were forced to grieve his sudden death. This posthumous collection of stories and essays affirms his versatility, secures his legacy, and bittersweetly reminds us of what could have been. But let's focus on the sweet part, as well as the humor and joy to be found in this book—as the late So himself once wrote in this very publication, "I actually recommend everyone to stop taking books so seriously." —SMS The End of the World is a Cul de Sac by Louise Kennedy [F] Kennedy, who published her much-acclaimed debut novel Trespasses last year at the age of 55, returns with a collection of short stories that explore the lives of women living in various kinds of poverty—material, emotional, sexual—while still finding beauty and joy amid such lack. Says Emma Donoghue, "The only other writer I can think of who packs this much moving, terrible life into each story is Alice Munro." —LF Everywhere an Oink Oink by David Mamet [NF] Is Mamet an idiot-asshole who wrote a few pretty good plays a long time ago but otherwise sucks? Yes. Does he also probably have some deliciously juicy behind-the-scenes stories from his four decades in Hollywood? Also yes. —SMS The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? What part, if any, should it play in feminist thought and women's liberation? Flock searches for the thorny, unsettling answers in three parallel lives. —SMS The Complications by Emmett Rensin [NF] Rensin, a former editor at Vox, agitates for a total re-understanding of severe mental illness by offering his own account of living with schizoaffective disorder. Finding the usual calls for the rejection of "stigma" gravely inadequate, he confronts the many faults of current mental health narratives and the hierarchies they contain. Memoir, history, and cultural criticism collide to make an impassioned case for a new approach to severe mental illness in our conversations, our scholarship, our policies, and our hospitals. —LF [millions_email]