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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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Vacationing with the Strayeds
At this point, we're all familiar with Cheryl Strayed's transformative solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that she wrote about in Wild. Yet at Condé Nast Traveler, she discusses how a recent family vacation to Laos reawakened her passion for travel. "Here we were on a sacred hill so far off from the place from which we had come, and so abundantly thankful for it. Perhaps the power of that very gratitude is the reason I travel."
Wild Ride
A lot of women feel a connection to Cheryl Strayed, but one reader's connection was personal. Strayed's lost half-sister found her when she just happened to check out Wild because she liked travel narratives. "She didn't know anything about me except when she read the description in my book of my early life, my mother and my father, she knew that father was hers, too. I don't name my father in the book but she recognized him," Strayed told NPR.
The Point of the Paperback
1.
“Why are they still bothering with paperbacks?” This came from a coffee-shop acquaintance when he heard my book was soon to come out in paperback, nine months after its hardcover release. “Anyone who wants it half price already bought it on ebook, or Amazon.”
Interestingly, his point wasn’t the usual hardcovers-are-dead-long-live-the-hardcover knell. To his mind, what was the use of a second, cheaper paper version anymore, when anyone who wanted it cheaply had already been able to get it in so many different ways?
I would have taken issue with his foregone conclusion about the domination of ebooks over paper, but I didn’t want to spend my babysitting time down that rabbit hole. But he did get me thinking about the role of the paperback relaunch these days, and how publishers go about getting attention for this third version of a novel — fourth, if you count audiobooks.
I did what I usually do when I’m puzzling through something, which is to go back to my journalism-school days and report on it. Judging by the number of writers who asked me to share what I heard, there are a good number of novelists who don’t quite know what to do with their paperbacks, either.
Here’s what I learned, after a month of talking to editors, literary agents, publishers, and other authors: A paperback isn’t just a cheaper version of the book anymore. It’s a makeover. A facelift. And for some, a second shot.
2.
About ebooks. How much are they really cutting into print, both paperbacks and hardcovers? Putting aside the hype and the crystal ball, how do the numbers really look?
The annual Bookstats Report from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which collects data from 1,977 publishers, is one of the most reliable measures. In the last full report — which came out July 2012 — ebooks outsold hardcovers for the first time, representing $282.3 million in sales (up 28.1%), compared to adult hardcover ($229.6 million, up 2.7%). But not paperback — which, while down 10.5%, still represented $299.8 million in sales. The next report comes out this July, and it remains to be seen whether ebook sales will exceed paper. Monthly stat-shots put out by the AAP since the last annual report show trade paperbacks up, but the group’s spokesperson cautioned against drawing conclusions from interim reports rather than year-end numbers.
Numbers aside, do we need to defend whether the paperback-following-hardcover still has relevance?
“I think that as opposed to a re-release being less important, it’s more than ever important because it gives a book a second chance with a new cover and lower cost, plus you can use all the great reviews the hardcover got,” says MJ Rose, owner of the book marketing firm Authorbuzz, as well as a bestselling author of novels including The Book of Lost Fragrances. “So many books sell 2,000 or 3,000 copies in hardcover and high-priced ebooks, but take off when they get a second wind from trade paperback and their e-book prices drop.”
What about from readers’ perspectives? Is there something unique about the paperback format that still appeals?
I put the question to booksellers, though of course as bricks-and-mortar sellers, it’s natural that they would have a bias toward paper. Yet the question isn’t paper versus digital: it’s whether they are observing interest in a paper book can be renewed after it has already been out for nine months to a year, and already available at the lower price, electronically.
“Many people still want the portability of a lighter paper copy,” said Deb Sundin, manager of Wellesley Books in Wellesley, MA. “They come in before vacation and ask, ‘What’s new in paper?’ ”
“Not everyone e-reads,” says Nathan Dunbar, a manager at Barnes & Noble in Skokie, IL. “Many customers tell us they’ll wait for the paperback savings. Also, more customers will casually pick up the paperback over hardcover.”
Then there’s the issue of what a new cover can do. “For a lot of customers the paperback is like they’re seeing it for the first time,” says Mary Cotton, owner of Newtonville Books in Newtonvillle, MA. “It gives me an excuse to point it out to people again as something fresh and new, especially if it has a new cover.”
3.
A look at a paperback’s redesign tells you a thing or two about the publisher’s mindset: namely, whether or not the house believes the book has reached its intended audience, and whether there’s another audience yet to reach. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s Rorschach. Hardcovers with muted illustrations morph into pop art, and vice versa. Geometric-patterned book covers are redesigned with nature imagery; nature imagery in hardcover becomes photography of women and children in the paperback. Meg Wolitzer, on a panel about the positioning of women authors at the recent AWP conference, drew knowing laughter for a reference to the ubiquitous covers with girls in a field or women in water. Whether or not publishers want to scream book club, they at least want to whisper it.
“It seems that almost every book these days gets a new cover for the paperback. It’s almost as if they’re doing two different books for two different audiences, with the paperback becoming the ‘book club book,’” says Melanie Benjamin, author of The Aviator’s Wife. Benjamin watched the covers of her previous books, including Mrs. Tom Thumb and Alice I Have Been, change from hardcovers that were “beautiful, and a bit brooding” to versions that were “more colorful, more whimsical.”
A mood makeover is no accident, explains Sarah Knight, a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, and can get a paperback ordered in a store that wouldn’t be inclined to carry its hardcover. “New cover art can re-ignite interest from readers who simply passed the book over in hardcover, and can sometimes help get a book displayed in an account that did not previously order the hardcover because the new art is more in line with its customer base.” Some stores, like the big-boxes and airports, also carry far more paperbacks than hardcovers. Getting into those aisles in paperback can have an astronomical effect on sales.
An unscientific look at recent relaunches shows a wide range of books that got full makeovers: Olive Kitteridge, A Visit From the Goon Squad, The Newlyweds, The Language of Flowers, The Song Remains the Same, The Age of Miracles, Arcadia, and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, as did my own this month (The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.)
Books that stayed almost completely the same, plus or minus a review quote and accent color, include Wild, Beautiful Ruins, The Snow Child, The Weird Sisters, The Paris Wife, Maine, The Marriage Plot, The Art of Fielding, The Tiger’s Wife, Rules of Civility, and The Orchardist.
Most interesting are the books that receive the middle-ground treatment, designers flirting with variations on their iconic themes. The Night Circus, The Invisible Bridge, State of Wonder, The Lifeboat, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Tell the Wolves I’m Home, Tigers in Red Weather, and The Buddha in the Attic are all so similar to the original in theme or execution that they’re like a wink to those in the know — and pique the memory of those who have a memory of wanting to read it the first time around.
Some writers become attached to their hardcovers and resist a new look in paperback. Others know it’s their greatest chance of coming out of the gate a second time — same race, fresh horse.
When Jenna Blum’s first novel, Those Who Save Us, came out in hardcover in 2004, Houghton Mifflin put train tracks and barbed wire on the cover. Gorgeous, haunting, and appropriate for a WWII novel, but not exactly “reader-friendly,” Blum recalls being told by one bookseller. The following year, the paperback cover — a girl in a bright red coat in front of a European bakery — telegraphed the novel’s Holocaust-era content without frightening readers away.
“The paperback cover helped save the book from the remainder bins, I suspect,” Blum says.
Armed with her paperback, Jenna went everywhere she was invited, which ended up tallying more than 800 book clubs. Three years later, her book hit the New York Times bestseller list.
“Often the hardcover is the friends-and-family edition, because that’s who buys it, in addition to collectors,” she says. “It’s imperative that a paperback give the novel a second lease on life if the hardcover didn’t reach all its intended audience, and unless you are Gillian Flynn, it probably won’t.”
There’s no hard-and-fast rule about when the paperback should ride in for that second lease. A year to paperback used to be standard, but now a paperback can release earlier — to capitalize on a moderately successful book before it’s forgotten — or later, if a hardcover is still turning a strong profit.
At issue: the moment to reissue, and the message to send.
“Some books slow down at a point, and the paperback is a great opportunity to repromote and reimagine,” says Sheila O’Shea, associate publisher for Broadway and Hogarth paperbacks at the Crown Publishing Group (including, I should add, mine). “The design of a paperback is fascinating, because you have to get it right in a different way than the hardcover. If it’s a book that relates specifically to females you want that accessibility at the table — women drawn in, wondering, Ooh, what’s that about.”
The opportunity to alter the message isn’t just for cover design, but the entire repackaging of the book — display text, reviews put on the jacket, synopses used online, and more. In this way, the paperback is not unlike the movie trailer which, when focus-grouped, can be reshaped to spotlight romantic undertones or a happy ending.
“Often by the time the paperback rolls around, both the author and publicist will have realized where the missed opportunities were for the hardcover, and have a chance to correct that,” says Simon & Schuster’s Sarah Knight. “Once your book has been focus-grouped on the biggest stage — hardcover publication — you get a sense of the qualities that resonate most with people, and maybe those were not the qualities you originally emphasized in hardcover. So you alter the flap copy, you change the cover art to reflect the best response from the ideal readership, and in many cases, the author can prepare original material to speak to that audience.”
Enter programs like P.S. (Harper Collins) and Extra Libris (Crown Trade and Hogarth), with new material in the back such as author interviews, essays, and suggested reading lists.
“We started Extra Libris last spring to create more value in the paperback, to give the author another opportunity to speak to readers. We had been doing research with booksellers and our reps and book club aficionados asking, What would you want in paperbacks? And it’s always extra content,” says Crown’s O’Shea. “Readers are accustomed to being close to the content and to the authors. It’s incumbent on us to have this product to continue the conversation.”
4.
Most of a paperback discussion centers on the tools at a publisher’s disposal, because frankly, so much of a book’s success is about what a publisher can do — from ads in trade and mainstream publications, print and online, to talking up the book in a way that pumps enthusiasm for the relaunch. But the most important piece is how, and whether, they get that stack in the store.
My literary agent Julie Barer swears the key to paperback success is physical placement. “A big piece of that is getting stores (including the increasingly important Costco and Target) to take large orders, and do major co-op. I believe one of the most important things that moves books is that big stack in the front of the store,” she says. “A lot of that piece is paid for and lobbied for by the publisher.”
Most publicists’ opportunities for reviews have come and gone with the hardcover, but not all, says Kathleen Zrelak Carter, a partner with the literary PR firm Goldberg McDuffie. “A main factor for us in deciding whether or not to get involved in a paperback relaunch is the off-the-book-page opportunities we can potentially pursue. This ranges from op-ed pieces to essays and guest blog posts,” she says. “It’s important for authors to think about all the angles in their book, their research and inspiration, but also to think about their expertise outside of being a writer, and how that can be utilized to get exposure.”
What else can authors do to support the paperback launch?
Readings have already been done in the towns where they have most connections, and bookstores don’t typically invite authors to come for a paperback relaunch. But many are, however, more than happy to have relaunching authors join forces with an author visiting for a new release, or participate in a panel of authors whose books touch on a common theme.
And just because a bookstore didn’t stock a book in hardcover doesn’t mean it won’t carry the paperback. Having a friend or fellow author bring a paperback to the attention of their local bookseller, talking up its accolades, can make a difference.
I asked folks smarter than I about branding, and they said the most useful thing for authors receiving a paperback makeover is to get on board with the new cover. That means fronting the new look everywhere: the author website, Facebook page, and Twitter. Change the stationery and business cards too if, like I did, you made them all about a cover that is no longer on the shelf.
“Sometimes a writer can feel, ‘But I liked this cover!’” says Crown’s O’Shea. “It’s important to be flexible about the approach, being open to the idea of reimagining your own work for a broader audience, and using the tools available to digitally promote the book with your publisher.”
More bluntly said, You want to sell books? Get in the game. Your hardcover might have come and gone, but in terms of your book’s rollout, it’s not even halftime yet.
“The paperback is truly a new release, and a smart author will treat it as such,” says Randy Susan Meyers, author The Murderer’s Daughters, her new novel The Comfort Of Lies, and co-author of the publishing-advice book What To Do Before Your Book Launch with book marketer and novelist M.J. Rose. “Make new bookmarks, spruce up your website, and introduce yourself to as many libraries as possible. Bookstores will welcome you, especially when you plan engaging multi-author events. There are opportunities for paperbacks that barely exist for hardcovers, including placement in stores such as Target, Costco, Walmart, and a host of others. Don’t let your paperback launch slip by. For me, as for many, it was when my book broke out.”
Topographies of Desire: The Millions Interviews Megan Kaminski
Megan Kaminski's first book of poetry, Desiring Map, revels in landscapes and ecosystems -- both natural and manmade -- as well as the disturbances that assault them. Her poems are often characterized as quiet, but they’re wrought with a subtle violence, such as where, according to poet Dan Thomas-Glass, the “jet set’s excesses and the bleak horizontals of the mid-country clash to great effect.” Joshua Clover calls Desiring Map, “a book that approaches us cannily, drenched in form, never word-spent and never without cocktails; a 21st century pleasure with a keen eye on the terrain and something to say.” Since I first encountered Megan’s poetry, I’ve been drawn to the intelligence, the linguistic precision, and the fascination with systems -- ecological, financial, neural -- that inform her writing. Megan teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas and also curates The Taproom Reading Series in Lawrence, recently named one of the top 10 reading series in the Midwest. Megan and I corresponded via email about Desiring Map, in a conversation that touched on “our very weedy human appetites,” the slippery boundaries of “I,” catastrophe theory, and admiration for “unflinching and unapologetic” female writers.
The Millions: The idea of place is central to so many of your poems in Desiring Map. From the prairie to the coast to the Florida wetlands, your language revels in site-specific spaces. Could you talk more about the role of landscape in your poems, as well as the ways that desire is evoked by environment? And also, having lived in many diverse locations, ranging from exotic (Casablanca) and cosmopolitan (Paris, LA, NYC), to the prairie (Kansas), could you speak to the ways that your physical environment informs, invades, and influences your writing?
Megan Kaminski: Yes, place and especially the "natural world" (and we can talk about how we want to define that) is very important to my creative project, and it's a tricky thing to write about in certain ways. As a writer, sitting at my desk or at a table typing away on my computer and looking out the window, I am always looking at the landscape -- here in the town where I live in Kansas, or in Oregon looking out at the ocean or the gorge, or in Paris looking down on the tree-lined street -- and of course its beauty inspires me, but there are problems with writing from that perspective. I'm wary of the tradition of the poet who stands outside of the natural world, observing it with some sort of special authority and then seeing it primarily as a site for personal transformation. I'm not interested in the kind of poetry that Evelyn Reilly describes as the "aesthetic use of nature as mirror for human narcissism.” I think that sort of rendering of landscape -- as background or as subservient to human demands and desires -- does real violence to the natural world, a world which we surely exist in, rather than outside of. That said, I am very interested in our very weedy human appetites, such as longing and desire.
Along with that exploration of human possibility in nature came questions of subjectivity in the questioning of the lyric "I." This questioning played out in the form of a slippery subject, an "I" that is fixed momentarily in a time/space, but then becomes quickly dislodged. I'm not willing, or perhaps even able, to abandon the lyric "I" in my poems -- at least without taking on a subject voice that has its own equally problematic implications -- but I am very interested in challenging and chipping away at the "I"’s authority. It's this beautiful thing, the way pronouns work -- the ease in which a person can slip into and out of the subject position. The "I" in my work that isn't necessarily the "I" of Megan Kaminski/poet.
TM: Could you talk more about the way that words function as landscape in your poems? There seems like an overlap between word and place for you, linguistic terrain and landscape. One specific passage that comes to mind is, “I put the words on the page / pulled from beneath skin / for what passes as something / simplified and promoted bilaterally / we exist for many reasons / concentrated on small pieces / of production and landscape.”
MK: I think that sense of overlap starts with the sense of landscape becoming language -- the movement from the world to the text. But there is also a sense in which language becomes landscape, too. I am very much interested in the dissolution of these boundaries between language and the outside world. And this all also very much relates to neural patternings, which also become landscape in the book (and vice versa). Much of this has to do with the nature of cognition on a very basic level. If all human thought occurs in language, then we are constantly dissolving in and out of language. I experience the prairie -- I see it before me, around me; I perceive it with all my senses -- and while this is happening my brain is also processing it all. The prairie is taken into my neural pathways and taken into language -- it translates and dissolves into my body, my thoughts, my tongue when I speak it. And at the same time, when I write about and talk about the prairie, it spills out of me into the world.
TM: There’s a subtlety and quietness to your writing that’s dually menacing and alluring. Like in the second poem of “Across the Ruins:”
Tracks carve through Florida florid wetlands
wilderness breaks down my estuarial intent
he fell in love with the s-curve of her neck to spine
simple mathematics
could explain the reappearance of other things too
do we all dream of swash-buckling adventures
and text anxiety mothers sharpening knives.
I admire how the domestic and wild as well as the textual and physical are in dialogue here and elsewhere throughout your work. What are the crucial tensions that pervade and inform your work?
MK: I am definitely interested in the tensions between wildness and cultivation, both in the natural world and in our own human natures. I just proposed a course for next year entitled “Weedy Appetites and Feral Longings.” (Actually, that’s my own secret title for the course -- I was afraid it would be confusing to students, so I officially called it “Literary Wildness and Incivility.”) Anyway, that is a long way of saying that I am continuing to think about what it means to be wild and uncivil, specifically as a rejection of cultivation.
One of the texts that weighs heavily in my imaginative considering is Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which presents a kind of feral domesticity. There is, at least at the beginning of the novel, very much a sense of a domesticity that entails keeping a home spiritually and emotionally for one’s family in the face of loss. Even though Sylvie is obviously a horrible housekeeper in the traditional sense of keeping things clean and tidy, there is a sense of care and looking after. Of course, that all kind-of falls apart -- but there is that seed of an idea. And maybe this is part of the reason why I keep being interested in and coming back to this tension.
There is something beautiful about providing a home and comfort, something beautiful about the domestic arts. But there is also this sense of having been mastered, of women being responsible and unrecognized for performing all sorts of affective labor, of performing domesticity as a way of submitting. This is all complex and tricky, though, because I do think that mothering (as well as other sorts of care-taking) is important work -- that kindness and nurturing has its own value. I’m more interested in gentleness, though, than in gentility.
And, of course, I am also interested in cultivation and wildness in the natural world. Weeds and feral animals cannot come into being without humans. Weeds were just plants before their growth became counter to productive agriculture, and animals have to have been domesticated at some point in order to become feral. So conceptually, weeds and feral animals reclaim the wild. I am also interested very much in the greening, both planned and unplanned, of Detroit and other post-industrial spaces around the world.
TM: In Desiring Maps, your long poem, “Carry Catastrophe” is made all the more delectable because it’s such an unlikely elegy for the financial markets. Could you talk more about its roots in catastrophe theory and the economic crisis?
MK: In some ways it might seem conceptually strange to have a long poem about the economic crisis in a book that is largely concerned with a revision of the pastoral genre and of human possibility within nature. I think these things are all very much connected. The first poems in the book came out of my research and thinking about enclosures, both contemporary and historic. John Clare's enclosure elegies were a source of inspiration, as were readings about contemporary enclosures and forms of resistance to this privatizing of the commons in Africa and South and Central America. Also playing into this were contemporary works like Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic (which in some ways revisits and revises Virgil’s pastoral mode) and Stephen Collis's The Commons.
I am very much interested in poetry as a sort of linguistic/creative commons and also as a method to think about the world, so it seemed essential to me to include a consideration of the economic crisis. And, yes, it is in some ways an elegy for the financial markets and perhaps late capitalism as well. As Joshua Clover said in a recent interview, “Late capitalism is terrible and ruins people’s lives but it also produces astonishing, beautiful things.” “Carry Catastrophe” is certainly filled with the beautiful stuff of late capitalism, but it also has a sense of impending collapse. The use of the imperative, which had more of a sense of imploring and seducing earlier in the book, becomes a little tyrannical here.
As for catastrophe theory, I’m sure that a mathematician could explain it better than I can, but I will give it a try. An early version of “Carry Catastrophe” was published as a chapbook by Grey Book Press, and in this version the cover depicts what is called a “cusp catastrophe.” The classic example of a cusp catastrophe, or at least the example that I was offered by a mathematician once, is that of a stressed dog who smoothly transitions from obedient to angry when subjected to moderate stress. However, with higher stress levels, the model changes, and there is a “fold point” where the dog becomes angry and will remain irretrievably angry even if the stress level is reduced (on the old model we would expect him to become obedient again). That’s the basic thought behind it -- the sense that once something/someone -- people/the economic system -- gets pushed far enough, his/her/its behavior is suddenly and permanently changed.
TM: You also write essays, and were just on a panel of women who write creative nonfiction for a literary conference in Seattle. You read your essay “Chatterbox Confessions” (forthcoming on Puerto del Sol), where you out yourself as a reformed chatterbox. You discussed how women are conditioned to be more aware of dominating conversations than men are, and also how the personal essay as a form has been less open to women (or, at least that comparably fewer women essay writers have been acknowledged). You cite Chris Kraus when you speculate, “Perhaps it isn’t that women lack the ability to coolly analyze and reflect on their personal experiences, the issue is instead discomfort on the part of readers and critics when they do so.” Could you speak more about this and strategic ways for women writers to approach this?
MK: Wow -- I’m definitely still working through this one myself. In some ways I think that writing is tricky business. In general, it is considered to be completely open to women. There are so many women writing and so many readers picking up their work. On the other hand, though, many major awards and prestigious publications are still very much dominated by men -- and, in my opinion at least, this does not reflect talent in the actual literary landscape. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young wrote a terrific piece, “Numbers Trouble,” which does a better job of exploring this subject than I could do here.
When I think about these issues, I keep going back to Deborah Tannen's assertion that “there is no unmarked woman” -- that every decision that a woman makes about how she presents herself is one that marks her, that conveys something about her. And I think this carries over into writing as well. One of my good friends is a very successful novelist. I was with her when she was approached by another (male) writer who was attempting to deride her work: “Aren’t all your books about the same thing?” My friend asked him what he meant by that. He replied without missing a beat -- “Well, aren’t they all about women?”
Seriously, how many times have you heard books dealing almost exclusively with men -- and there are a lot of them, referred to as “men’s fiction.” But if a woman writes about women -- who, by the way, make up half of the world’s population -- then that is a choice and the writing often gets ghettoized into categories like “women’s writing” or “chick lit.”
I also think that there are parts of our society (and in academia and in the literary community, too) that are still very conservative. There are some men and women who are still very uncomfortable with strong women and women’s voices that are unflinching and unapologetic. For me, though, these are some of the most vibrant and interesting writers. I’m thinking of some recent books that I have read that really stuck with me -- Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Use Me, Kate Zambreno's Heroines, Roxane Gay's numerous essays (on her blog and other journals), and Lidia Yuknavitch's gorgeous and brave essay, “Explicit Violence.”
TM: You’re very active within the literary community -- you run a reading series, The Taproom Reading Series in Lawrence, Kansas, you teach at the University of Kansas, and you recently finished a month-long stint as guest editor at Adam Robinson's Every Day Genius. Basically, you have your hands many pots. Would you talk more about poets, presses, and ideas that deserve more attention, and give us some pointers on who should be on our radar?
MK: Sure. I’m going to apologize in advance because I am sure that I am leaving a lot of people out, but here are a few people and presses who are on my mind right now.
I’ve been reading a few Oakland poets recently -- and their work has really been sticking with me. I’m in love with Kathryn Pringle's latest, fault tree (Omnidawn 2012), and also (perhaps, especially) her first book, RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY (Factory School, 2009). I’m working on a poetry manuscript and also some scholarly work about the body and the city/an ecopoetics of the city and so loved thinking about these things as I have been reading RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY. I am also very much enamored by Tiff Dressen's chapbooks Messages and Because Icarus-children. And Juliana Spahr’s work continues to be some of the most important writing in terms of shaping my sense of possibilities both in terms of poetry and in terms of seeing/living in the world. I’m teaching her book Well Then There Now (Black Sparrow 2011) in my poetry workshop next semester, and I am super enjoying revisiting it in preparation for that class.
I’m also really into Jordan Stempleman’s latest, No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter 2012). Jordan just read at a house reading in Kansas City, and I was reminded of how much I love his work. I don’t know where or when the new work he read that night is coming out in book form, but I am certainly looking forward to it.
Also: Evie Shockley, Erín Moure, Bhanu Kapil, Carmen Giménez Smith, Joshua Clover, Lisa Robertson, Joseph Massey, Dan Thomas-Glass, Hanna Andrews, Ji Yoon Lee, Gina Myers, Chus Pato, Jen Tynes, Danielle Pafunda, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Mike Sikkema, Sampson Starkweather, Shanna Compton, CA Conrad, Bruce Covey, Kate Greenstreet, Michelle Naka Pierce -- the list could go on and on.
As far as presses go, I would be remiss not to mention my own much beloved publisher, Coconut Books. I love the new books that they released this fall -- from Jenny Boully, Emily Toder, Hanna Andrews, and Christie Ann Reynolds. I’m also a big fan of Dorothy, Bloof Books, Birds LLC, Letter Machine, Ugly Duckling, Omnidawn -- really, there are so many wonderful small presses putting out great work.
Susanna Moore, Cheryl Strayed, and the Place Where the Writers Work
1.
It was Hans Weyandt at Micawbers Books in St. Paul who pressed the slim blue advance review copy of Susanna Moore's latest novel into my hands. It was good, he said, although he understood if I didn’t want to add any extra weight to my suitcase, and if I hadn’t heard of her, she was a very good writer. I hadn’t heard of her, but that’s no surprise. I don’t feel that I’m as well-read as I should be. Further, my suspicion is that 10 percent of the novelists get 90 percent of the publicity, and while very good books can and do rise to the top and catch the attention of the reading public, the correlation between talent and exposure is casual at best.
I did an event at Micawber’s that night, returned to my friend’s house and ate pizza, slept for a few hours on her living room floor and then woke up at three a.m., showered and dressed and slipped out with my suitcase to catch the 4:15 train to the airport. The stars were so bright as I was leaving Minneapolis.
By five thirty a.m. I was on a flight to the next city. This was the Midwestern tour: five cities in five days, condensed in such a manner so that I’d only have to take three days off from my day job. The size of my American publisher’s tour budget was somewhat smaller than the size of the tour I wanted -- they’d already sent me out to the South and Ohio in the late spring, and they’re sending me to Florida twice -- so I put five days worth of flights and cheap hotel rooms on a credit card and hoped the checks I’d been expecting from my French and Canadian publishers would arrive soon. I just wanted to be able to say I’d done everything I could for the book.
Two years ago I missed an event because of a canceled flight, which has left me endlessly paranoid, so I booked all of my flights in the early mornings when cancellations and delays are least likely. Paying for your own tour makes the stakes seem especially high. Each day began with an early-morning flight to a new city and ended with an event at a bookstore, an airport hotel. I slept four or five hours a night, went through airport security on autopilot, revived myself with coffee and dark chocolate-covered espresso beans in early-morning airports, spent sleep-deprived but pleasant days writing in cafes in strange cities, met at least two dozen booksellers, talked about my book every night, was so tired by the end that I had to carefully talk myself through the motions of getting ready for bed in that last airport hotel room in Milwaukee (“Now you’re going to brush your teeth”), could not possibly have continued at that pace for even one more day, and was improbably happy.
2.
I try not to accumulate much when I travel, because I only fly with carry-on luggage, but I respect Hans’s literary taste, and Susanna’s book seemed worth carrying with me. I read it when I got home. He was right. The book's wonderful.
Susanna Moore’s The Life of Objects is set mostly in Germany, over the course of the Second World War. Has any conflict in history been mined more thoroughly for fiction than the Second World War? Possibly not. I’ve lost track of how many World War II novels I’ve read. It can’t be easy to find a new angle.
Or perhaps, I thought while I was reading The Life of Objects, a new angle isn’t necessarily important. Perhaps all that matters is that the book must be extremely good, and The Life of Objects is exquisite. It’s the simply written story of a girl, Beatrice, who longs to escape the confines of the Irish village where she lives. It’s the kind of backwater where everyone knows everyone else, her sole career opportunity lies in working in her parents’ store, and despite her yearning for knowledge and her love of books, there is no possibility of a higher education. She begins making lace because making lace is a way to make the world disappear, and her work catches the attention of a visiting aristocrat.
She’s plucked out of the village, offered a household position with the aristocrat’s friends in Germany, the Metzenburgs. The year is 1938. When war breaks out they retreat to their country estate. The Metzenburgs, Dorothea and Felix, are possessed of both glamor and exquisite taste. Felix, in particular, is devoted to his objects: the paintings, the sculptures, the jewels. As the political situation worsens, Dorothea suggests that they leave, but Felix will never leave his objects and Dorothea will never leave Felix. Moore writes in a measured and elegant style. The Life of Objects combines elements of fairytale -- there’s a place on the grounds that all but qualifies as an enchanted forest -- and the kind of realism that brushes up against the edge of horror.
The novel is a subtle and brilliant chronicle of a slow slide out of normalcy into deprivation and surrealism, and of a character's transformation from a passive and dependent girl to a bold and independent adult. The writing is a miracle of clarity and beauty. It’s the kind of book I read and think, this is why I do this, and this is what I’ve come for. This is why I travel so hard, why I work seven days a week, why I write in the subway, why I usually close myself in my office on weekends instead of seeing my friends. Why all of us work so hard. It’s because it’s possible to write books like this, and because books like this exist in the world.
3.
I know a lot of writers, which means there are days when my social media feeds are clogged with relentless self-promotion. Everyone’s written a book, and everyone wants you to buy it.
This is a delicate point, because we do need to sell our books. Selling books is how we make our living, or at least part of our living. But there are days when I wish we could all just take a deep breath in the midst of all the hustle and remember what matters, because my personal opinion is that what matters the most is the work, not the sales numbers. I think that the fact that most of us will never be very well-known and will never make The New York Times bestseller list doesn’t matter as much as whether or not our books are any good. The marketplace is important but not that important, at least in the sense that I doubt anyone ever lay on their deathbed and thought, I wish my sales numbers had been better.
What matters is good writing, what matters is that there are people who love books enough to press them into your hands in far-off cities. We are here for the books, but I think it’s easy to get distracted by our longing for success and forget this.
4.
Cheryl Strayed has had a remarkable year, a one-in-a-million kind of year, a year with a bestselling memoir that got optioned by Reese Witherspoon and picked for Oprah's book club. Almost every bookstore I’ve walked into from Kentucky to Toronto has had the memoir, Wild, prominently displayed. I secretly cheer it on every time, because I think it’s a good book and because while I’ve only met Cheryl once, she seems very kind, and character matters a lot to me.
“The most annoying thing to come of this past truly good year,” she wrote recently on Facebook, "is the narrative that I 'came out of nowhere,' that I was 'an unknown writer' before WILD was published. Actually, I came out of a literary community of readers and writers who knew me quite well. Before WILD, I'd published a novel as well as many essays that were read by a national audience. I bristle at this narrative not so much on my own behalf, but rather on behalf of the many writers I love, admire, respect and read. There is a strong and vibrant literary culture that exists and thrives in this nation and it does not exist in a place called nowhere, whether you know about it or not. It's the place where the writers work."
I liked this Facebook status a great deal. I love writing, and love working in solitude for long hours. But it brightens my working days and evenings further sometimes to think of all the other writers in our separate rooms, all of us trying to create something lasting in the place where the writers work.
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