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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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Too Many Heavens: On Travelogues to the Great Beyond
“Even faithful Christians doubt that there really is a kingdom of heaven. I want all of My doubting children to believe My kingdom is real. This will lead them to be more faithful, obedient and pure of heart so that they can enter My kingdom.”
-- Jesus Christ, as quoted by Choo Thomas in Heaven is So Real!
In 1943, a 20-year old Army private named George G. Ritchie Jr. died of pneumonia in a military hospital. “No evidence of respiration or cardiac impulse,” declared a medical officer in his notarized statement, unaware that Ritchie’s befuddled spirit was wandering the hospital that very moment. To Ritchie’s confusion, no one could see or hear him, he passed through everything he tried to touch, and then he saw his own body with a sheet pulled over its lifeless head.
A man made of light entered the room and introduced himself as the son of God, though he needed no introduction. Jesus took Ritchie on a tour through various realms of the afterlife: a hell on Earth in which alcoholic souls possessed the bodies of passed-out drunks for a quick fix, where guilt-ridden souls of suicides were trapped in a loop of apologizing to the ones they hurt, and crowds of spirits vainly attempted to satisfy endless, torturous cravings; a moderately happy purgatory for scientists who were blind to Jesus because they had their noses too deep in science books; and finally, the glorious city of heaven where only those who were filled with love called home. Then Ritchie awoke to find himself under a sheet – alive and with a mission to tell the world what he had seen.
Ritchie’s peek into the afterlife first entered the public record in 1963. In her introduction to Ritchie’s heaven memoir Return from Tomorrow, Elizabeth Sherrill recounts interviewing Ritchie for a series in Guideposts magazine called “Life After Death.” “By then the whole subject of threshold experiences – people who, near death, believed they'd had a glimpse of another world – was very much in the air,” she wrote. In 1978, she turned Ritchie’s spiritual adventure into a book called Return from Tomorrow. A 30th anniversary edition followed in 2007.
For the past decade, perhaps in unintentional homage to George G. Ritchie Jr., more and more people have been dying, visiting heaven, and returning to write about it. Christian author Tim Challies dismisses this relatively new genre as “heaven tourism” and derides the stories as “paganism in the guise of Christianity,” because true Christians shouldn’t need first-hand testimony to believe in heaven. Many Christians agree – a few to the point of writing unpopular ebooks criticizing specific heavenlogues for contradicting scripture, like Heaven Is For Real: The Book Isn't (2011) by D. Eric Williams and A Christian Rebuttal to Marvin J. Besteman's My Journey to Heaven (2012) by Robert Alan King. But these books are terribly rated and mostly garner comments like this: “Dear Mr. Eric Williams, I did not and I do not plan on reading your disgusting book. I hope you rot and burn in hell. That is all. Love, an angel.” Inevitably, then, there are rebuttals to the rebuttals, such as A (COMPREHENSIVE) CHRISTIAN REBUTTAL TO THE [CULT] "CHRISTIAN" REBUTTAL TO DR. EBEN ALEXANDER'S "PROOF OF HEAVEN" by Robert Alan King (2013), by “AHS”.
Then there are those (like myself) who don’t trust these heaven books because the existence of a blissful, supernatural plane of existence for dead people who played by the rules seems less plausible an explanation for flights through gold-plated cities than does trauma-induced hallucinations. Besides, a lot of people have near death experiences and see nothing, so why interpret visits into heaven as proof of an afterlife but not treat visits into nothing as proof of a post-life void?
Yet when I started hearing about people who had gone to heaven and looked around before coming back, and that one of them claimed to see Jesus astride a rainbow-colored horse, I was intrigued. It was Colton Burpo who made the audacious claim that Jesus’s ride resembles Starlite from Rainbow Brite, and he became my entry point into the heaven-and-back phenomenon. Now a teen, Colton’s tales of going to heaven during an appendectomy at the age of 3 years and 10 months formed the basis of the New York Times best seller Heaven is For Real (2010). His father Todd wrote the book with pro writer Lynn Vincent, and it was such a hit that a cinematic adaptation starring Greg Kinnear as Todd Burpo is set for release in 2014. This wild success is impressive but not anomalous. Eban Alexander’s Proof of Heaven (2012) and Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004) have also spent time on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. The Amazon reviews of such books are mostly raves from believers, and the authors have no trouble fielding softball questions from interviewers who seem eager to accept their stories. Strange as it may seem to the sectarian and secular skeptics, people read and enjoy these books as factual depictions of the afterlife, and it’s only when authors admit their heaven stories are fake (I Went to Heaven and I Saw God, 2012, by Ben Brocard) or offer a mere fleeting, mysterious glimpse of the afterlife (Waking up in Heaven, 2013, by Crystal McVea) that heaven-hungry readers turn on these tourguides to heaven.
Do you believe that George G. Ritchie and Colton Burpo went to heaven before returning to earth? And if so, would it surprise you to hear that Ritchie didn’t spot Jesus on a rainbow horse, and that Colton didn’t see alcoholic souls possessing passed-out drunks, or a purgatory for scientists? One of the major problems with the heaven-and-back literature, at least for those looking to it for inspiration and hope, is that none of the people who have been there agree about what it’s like. These authors aren’t publicly disputing each other’s testimonials – which is too bad, because that would make for great daytime talk show fodder – but if you read more than one of the books, the discrepancies are hard to miss. Of course if heaven is as vast and magical as it would have to be to entertain an ever-growing immortal population, you can’t expect every post-life travelogue to look identical. But when these reports contradict each other in fundamental ways, it raises obvious questions about their veracity. For those who want to believe that any of these authors went to heaven, you pretty much have to read only one of the books and swear by that one, or be highly skilled at ignoring inconsistencies.
To be fair, there is some overlap between the 10 or so heaven-and-back books I’ve read or skimmed (most of the books contain a lot of earthbound filler that I didn’t mind missing). All of them said that heaven is an exceptionally bright place, and that this is mostly due to the luminescence of God and Jesus. This is why most testimonials agree that there is no real night in heaven, though even here there is some discord. Oden Hetrick (Inside the Gates of Heaven) says that he saw sunsets in heaven and a “gloaming period” when heaven dims and the hustle and bustle slows, while the other authors described a constant brightness reminiscent of Winston’s prison cell in 1984 or Christmas in Antarctica forever.
Most of these books do make one thing pretty clear: if you plan on going to heaven, you better be prepared to worship God and Jesus all the time, because that’s the main pastime there. One book breaks ranks on this point, thank God – Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander. Alexander wasn’t religious before going to heaven, and perhaps that’s why his heaven avoided most of the Sunday school clichés that devout Christian authors encounter in the great beyond. Alexander didn’t see Jesus or any other Biblical figures, no angels hassled him to join a choir, and he could only talk to his non-personified God through an orb of light serving as interpreter – all of which seems to rule out dutiful worship as an expected activity for frittering away the afterlife. Technically you could sing glorious praise to that orb, but you’d probably feel a little weird about it.
Just about every visitor to heaven says that the time they spent there was more real than anything they ever experienced on earth. Typically they illustrate this through an analogy. In Waking up in Heaven, Crystal McVea wrote, “What I experienced in heaven was so real and so lucid and so utterly intense, it made my experiences on Earth seem hazy and out of focus — as if heaven is the reality and life as we know it is just a dream.” Eben Alexander compares life on earth to a decent enough movie, and heaven to the moment when you step outside the theater into a wondrous summer afternoon and wonder why you squandered those hours inside. Mary Neal (To Heaven And Back, 2012) calls earth the analog cathode-ray-tube television to heaven’s digital HDTV. And the title of Choo Thomas’s heaven travelogue, Heaven is So Real! (2006), tells us where she stands.
And these books do at least help to resolve a paradox at the heart of Christian attitudes about the afterlife: if heaven is so great, why don’t all believers want to die as soon as possible? Well, the authors who have been to heaven do want to die – they all practically beg for death to save them from this mediocre dump that God threw together in a week, which puts them in the awkward position of having to explain to their friends and family that yes, they wish they weren’t here with them anymore. It seems then that religious people who cling to life either don’t believe in heaven as much as these authors do, or don’t fully appreciate just how wonderful heaven is. As Choo Thomas writes, “[The Lord] has shown me that many believers are, in reality, functional atheists — they don’t really believe there is a heaven.” This could explain the incredible popularity of these books amongst the God fearing, whom you might have thought needed no convincing.
Indeed, the premise behind this burgeoning genre is that religious faith is withering and God and Jesus must take drastic measures to bring us back into the fold. Everyone who comes back from heaven does so reluctantly, sometimes as an answer to prayers, but usually with divine orders to tell the world what they saw, so that we might truly believe again. Curiously, though, this marketing strategy is all over the place. For instance, Jesus asked Choo Thomas to tell the world everything she witnessed in heaven, but God asked Alex Malarkey (The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, 2010) to withhold most of the details. Worse, God supposedly wants heaven’s visitors to bolster our collective faith, but manages to send everyone back with totally conflicting stories, which makes them easier to dismiss as intricate fantasies, wishful thinking or even just lies.
Let’s consider just a few of the major disagreements.
Is it true about Saint Peter and the pearly gates?
The stereotypical image of heaven’s entrance is of pearly gates, with Saint Peter as the bouncer checking names off a list, but none of the heaven testimonials I read found this to be entirely true.
Not that they could agree on what was true.
Of heaven’s gate, Marvin Besteman (My Journey to Heaven, 2012), wrote, “And no, I don’t remember it as being ‘pearly.’” Instead, it was a mahogany wood gate. Beyond that was a glass gate that kept Marvin from entering heaven proper, while allowing him a glimpse inside as Saint Peter parlayed with God over whether it was Besteman’s time or not – making half of the stereotype correct. The testimony of Oden Hetrick, however, suggests the reverse is true. That Saint Peter greets new arrivals “is not quite right” Hetrick says, because it’s angels who call us in, but the gates to heaven are in fact pearly: “The gates are like pearl because they are concentrated white light.”
Colton Burpo told his father Todd that heaven’s gates were made of gold but had pearls on them. Alex Malarkey said the gate was white and “looks like it has scales like a fish.” And Ian McCormack (A Glimpse of Eternity, 2008) didn’t notice a gate at all. For him, God acted as a physical door to heaven, stepping aside to reveal a tunnel into a garden-like kingdom.
What colors are in heaven?
Everyone who goes to heaven agrees that it’s colorful enough to rival an acid trip. Marvin Besteman summed it up best:
The thing about the colors in heaven is that they are all shot through with a brightness, a luster that seems to incorporate the sun's rays, the moon's beams, a fire's flicker, and a star's glitter, stirred together by a master lighting director and splashed out over the canopy we will spend eternity watching.
In general, whenever heaven incorporates some familiar aspect of life on earth, it’s safe to say that heaven’s version will crank it up to 11. So when an interviewer asked Colton Burpo if heaven was in color or in black and white, his response – “It’s all the colors we have here on earth. And then some more” – hardly seemed controversial.
But Colton’s view has a critic. While Oden Hetrick also enjoyed heaven’s dazzling color scheme, he didn’t notice new colors. In fact, in an interview, he claimed heaven is even missing a color. The color you won’t find in heaven? Orange:
So there are five major colors in heaven; gold, red, purple...blue and green. You might say well, where’s orange? I don’t know except orange is the color of some flesh, maybe that’s why that color is omitted. But then gold is very close to that. ...The sky color is usually [gold].
Well, actually, heaven has a blue-black sky with pinkish clouds – at least according to Eben Alexander.
What are we like in heaven?
It thrills Fox News and 700 Club interviewers when Colton Burpo informs them that in heaven, everyone is in their late 20s or early 30s. “I gotta say I love that part!” is the sort of comment this inspires. And not to worry if you fall off a cliff during your most awkward pimply teenage phase: Colton says that if you die young, you will age until you reach your late 20s or 30s – and this is true even if you die as a fetus. (Why some people age a little more than others is not clear.)
But not everyone returned with such crowd-pleasing news. Marvin Besteman saw “children and grown-ups of all ages.” Saint Peter, for instance, was around 55. And in 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper notes that when he first got to heaven, he saw people of a “wide variety of ages — old and young and every age in between.” In later interviews, however, Piper referred to everyone in heaven as “ageless,” which concurs with Mary Neal, who prefers “timeless.”
No humans have wings in heaven, according to Oden Hetrick, but we can float, move by the power of thought or hitch a ride in a flying chariot that God’s will powers and controls.
Unless Colton Burpo is right, and everyone in heaven has wings except for Jesus.
How do we learn in heaven?
Heaven returnees are split over how we absorb new information in the great beyond. Most of the authors I’ve read say we communicate telepathically and learn everything in heaven through osmosis, but a few say that rote learning is enforced. Eben Alexander speaks for the osmosis side:
Thoughts entered me directly...and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life...The knowledge given me was not "taught" in the way that a history lesson or math theorem would be. Insights happened directly, rather than needing to be coaxed and absorbed. Knowledge was stored without memorization, instantly and for good.
By “for good,” he meant while you’re in heaven – Alexander forgot much of what he learned when he returned to earth, just as so many of us forget math and chemistry the second we graduate high school. Crystal McVea, Don Piper, and Marvin Besteman corroborate this Lawnmower Man–esqe approach to learning, but Oden Hetrick and Colton Burpo argue that learning in heaven harkens back to the 19th century Prussian model. Hetrick said there are angel-led education sessions in the Temple of Instruction, and Colton said Jesus taught classes and assigned homework.
How many evil heads does Satan have?
Even though neither went to hell, Colton Burpo and Alexander Malarkey both saw Satan. In Heaven is For Real, Colton wouldn’t describe Satan, either because the memory paralyzed him with fear or he hadn’t concocted a convincing description at that point. But in an interview with 100 Huntley Street, Todd Burpo said Colton eventually claimed Satan had “seven heads and ten crowns,” which would make him identical to “the beast from the sea” in Revelations. This gave Todd’s scripture-literate interviewer a perplexed pause, and it doesn’t jibe with the three-headed, moldy-bodied, screechy-voiced Satan that Malarkey saw, so who is the real “Great Deceiver” here?
Is there sex in heaven?
Of all the afterlife observations to reach a perfect consensus, of course it would be this one: there is no sex in heaven. Now it’s not that most of the visitors to heaven specifically denied the existence of sex there – they just failed to mention sex at all. So let’s be optimistic for a moment. Absence of evidence of sex in heaven is not evidence of the absence of sex in heaven. It may simply be that you don’t get to see or have sex in heaven your first few hours there. Or maybe you do, and heaven’s returned visitors are smart enough to leave that part out, given that most of them are married or below the age of consent.
Unfortunately, Oden Hetrick does directly deny us sex as spirits, explaining that we don’t have reproductive organs because there is no flesh and blood in heaven. Hey, that doesn’t stop food consumption in heaven – Jesus even kills and cooks a fish for Choo Thomas. Nevertheless, the lack of sex in heaven makes some sense. If we could reproduce in heaven, everyone born there would get to skip the pains and disappointments of life on earth all together, which hardly seems fair. Beyond that, sex is arguably an awkward redundancy in a place where everyone already experiences eternal bliss and supernatural interconnectedness.
So there may not be sex in heaven, but according to Hetrick, there is videotape – one of our pastimes in heaven will be watching a video recording of our lives. “Now that’s enough to make somebody behave isn’t it?” Hetrick winked, before clarifying that when Jesus forgives our sins, he edits those sins from our life’s videotape. So be sure to have a lot of Jesus-sanctioned sex within the bonds of marriage while you can, since re-watching hardcore scenes from your honeymoon over and over is the closest you’ll get to sex in the afterlife.
Can you see God’s face in heaven?
To briefly paraphrase everyone...
Alexander Malarkey: No, you can only see up to God’s neck.
Oden Hetrick: Yes, he looks like a handsome young man with a bright, shiny face.
Ian McCormack: No. You’ll die if you do.
Don Piper: Perhaps, but you can’t return to earth if you do.
Choo Thomas: If by God you mean Jesus, then no. You can however see that Jesus has a large frame and wavy hair parted in the middle.
Crystal McVea: No, and God doesn’t have a human form either.
Colton Burpo: Yes. God looks like a larger version of the angel Gabriel. The Holy Spirit is “kind of blue,” by the way.
Eben Alexander: Not unless you count the orb of light.
So where do all of these contradictions leave us?
One possible conclusion is that none of these people actually went to heaven. Call this the Hitchens/Harris/Challies view. It certainly has an intuitive appeal. For one thing, if they’re all sure they went to heaven, and they know that for instance you can or cannot see God’s face, why aren’t they criticizing the obvious frauds who either couldn’t or could? That they don’t all ferociously debate each other implies insecurities about their own visions.
Another possibility is that only one of them went to heaven, but then who to believe? My money would be on either Eben Alexander or Crystal McVea. Both of them were skeptics before going to heaven, which makes them somehow more credible than a professional reverend like Oden Hetrick or the pastor’s son Colton Burpo who recounts his trip to heaven with the cold affectless demeanor of a psychopath. Plus, of all the heavens described in these books, Alexander’s is the only one that doesn’t sound like a climate-controlled version of hell. And McVea’s life story of childhood abuse, unhappy relationships, familial loss, and feeling worthless is so tragic and compelling – and her attitude through it all so admirably upbeat – that I like think of a divine being reminding her that she is loved.
Or it may be that there is no one definitive heaven because heaven is what each of us wants it to be. If the thought of singing praise until you’re hoarse in an blindingly bright, antiseptic gold-paved city for eternity makes you feel a little sick, maybe you’ll end up somewhere more dreamy and conceptual, like Eban Alexander’s afterlife.
But there is another possible explanation for these inconsistencies that would answer the skeptical Christian’s concern that these books undercut the primacy of faith. Maybe God shows every visitor different heavens and tells them to write about these conflicting characters, activities, and landscapes because he’s up to his old mysteriousness business. Does God want to hint to us that heaven is really real, while teasing our craving for evidence by sending us garbled, contradictory messages about what’s actually there – forcing us to rely on faith again after all?
Oh God, you sneaky devil you.
Images via jsab008, eaukes, bloemhoff, and sun_chaser/Flickr
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