The Buzz Books Spring/Summer Preview

Every season, readers are looking for the most exciting new titles among the stacks that are published. That’s why four years ago, we at Publishers Lunch created Buzz Books, a free, bi-annual ebook filled with excerpts of great reads in literary and debut fiction, as well as nonfiction, that starts provocative, thoughtful conversation.

In addition, to help sift through the many thousands of titles each season, we’ve highlighted dozens of the most noteworthy and breakout titles to be published in the coming months. Today, in Buzz Books 2016: Spring/Summer, you’ll be able to read excerpts from many of these titles (noted with an asterisk). We hope you’ll use this list as a handy guide of what’s upcoming in the book world over the next six months.

–Sarah Weinman

FICTION

Publishers normally save their most prominent literary titles for the fall, but this season is not lacking in notable names, with new books from Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Nobel Prize winner Herta Muller, Anna Quindlen, and Pulitzer winner Annie Proulx, as well as sophomore efforts from Charles Bock, Jenni Fagan, Boris Fishman, Charlotte Rogan, and more. Look out, too, for emerging voices such as Booker-shortlisted Sunjeev Sanhota, Marie NDiaye, Hannah Pittard, Ramona Ausubel, and Elizabeth Poliner (featured image above is a cover detail from Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God).

The Notables

Don DeLillo, Zero (Scribner, May)

*Louise Erdrich, LaRose (Harper, May)

Mark Haddon, The Pier Falls and Other Stories (Doubleday, May)

Herta Muller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (Metropolitan, May)

Annie Proulx, Barkskins (Scribner, June)

Anna Quindlen, Miller’s Valley (Random House, April)

Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs (Little, Brown, April)

Stewart O’Nan, City of Secrets (Viking, April)

Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours (Riverhead, March)

Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others (Scribner, March)

Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God (Tin House, July)

Highly Anticipated

Charles Bock, Alice & Oliver (Random House, April)

Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light (Ecco, May)

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, May)

Jenni Fagan, The Sunlight Pilgrims (Hogarth, July)

Boris Fishman, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo (Harper, March)

Manuel Gonzales, The Regional Office is Under Attack! (Riverhead, April)

Elizabeth Kelly, The Miracle on Monhegan Island (Liveright, May)

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, March)

*C.E. Morgan, The Sport of Kings (FSG, May)

Robin Wasserman, Girls On Fire (Harper, May)

READ AN EXCERPT FROM GIRLS ON FIRE

Charlotte Rogan, Now and Again (Little, Brown, April)

Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways (Knopf, March)

Amanda Eyre Ward, The Nearness of You (Ballantine, July)

Emerging Voices

Allison Amend, Enchanted Islands (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, May)

Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (Riverhead, June)

Mischa Berlinski, Peacekeeping (Sarah Crichton Books, March)

Mark Binelli, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits (Metropolitan, May)

Liz Moore, The Unseen World (Norton, June)

Bonnie Nadzam, Lions (Black Cat, July)

Marie NDiaye, Ladivine (Knopf, April)

Hannah Pittard, Listen to Me (HMH, July)

Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us As Breathing (Lee Boudreaux Books, March)

Alexis Smith, Marrow Island (HMH, June)

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Sarong Party Girls (William Morrow, July)

Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love (Knopf, May)

Ayelet Tsabari, The Best Place on Earth (Random House, March)

*Shawn Vestal, Daredevils (Penguin Press, April)

DEBUT FICTION

Spring and summer are prime time for new authors. We expect great things from new novels by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Alison Anderson and Susie Steiner, and expect to hear similar plaudits about works by Sara Baume, Flynn Berry, Emma Cline, Yaa Gyasi, and many more listed below. Look out for debut fare from notable journalists and magazine writers too, like Slate’s Jessica Winter and Cosmopolitan books editor Camille Perri.

*Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest (Harper, May)

Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (HMH, March)

*Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us (HMH, May)

*Flynn Berry, Under the Harrow (Penguin, June)

READ AN EXCERPT FROM UNDER THE HARROW

Emma Cline, The Girls (Random House, June)

Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter (Knopf, May)

*Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, The Nest (Ecco, March)

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THE NEST

*Kemper Donovan, The Decent Proposal (Harper, April)

Chad Dundas, Champion of the World (Putnam, July)

Hannah Gersen, Home Field (William Morrow, July)

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (Knopf, June)

*L.S. Hilton, Maestra (Putnam, April)

Lynne Kutsukake, The Translation of Love (Doubleday, April)

Tiffany McDaniel, The Summer That Melted Everything (St. Martin’s, July)

Miroslav Penkov, Stork Mountain (FSG, March)

Camille Perri, The Assistants (Putnam, May)

Shobha Rao, An Unrestored Woman (Flatiron Books, March)

Steven Rowley, Lily and the Octopus (S&S, July)

Nina Sadowsky, Just Fall (Ballantine, March)

Paul Vidich, An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler/Atria, April)

Jessica Winter, Break in Case of Emergency (Knopf, July)

Jung Yun, Shelter (Picador, March)

NONFICTION

Start your conversations in the spring and summer with economist Thomas Piketty’s new book; a treatise on the Internet by Paul Ford; a number of books on feminism and culture by Lindy West (in our sampler), Jessica Bennett, Roxane Gay, and Peggy Orenstein; a new biography of James Brown by National Book Award winner James McBride; memoirs from Rob Spillman, Carrie Fisher, and Augusten Burroughs; and many more across an array of nonfiction categories.

Politics and Current Events

Peter Bergen, The United States of Jihad (Crown, April)

Shirin Ebadi, Until We Are Free (Random House, March)

Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror (Penguin Press, July)

Amy Goodman et al., Democracy Now! (S&S, April)

Karen Greenberg, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, May)

Thomas Piketty, Why Save the Bankers? And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis (HMH, April)

Social Issues

Alex Abramovich, Bullies: A Friendship (Holt, March)

Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel, We (Atria, March)

Jessica Bennett, Feminist Fight Club (Harper Wave, May)

Adam Cohen, Imbeciles (Penguin Press, March)

Joanna Connors, I Will Find You (Atlantic Monthly Press, April)

Roxane Gay, Hunger (Harper, May)

Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson, End of Discussion (Crown Forum, June)

Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex (Harper, March)

Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies (S&S, March)

*Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (Hachette, May)

Emily Winslow, Jane Doe January (William Morrow, May)

Dave Isay, Callings (Penguin Press, April)

Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow, Streetfight (Viking, March)

Science and Technology

Dean Burnett, Idiot Brain: What Your Head is Really Up To (Norton, July)

Duncan Clark, Alibaba (Ecco, April)

Paul Ford, The Secret Lives of Web Pages (FSG, June)

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (Scribner, May)

Tom Vanderbilt, You May Also Like (Knopf, May)

 History and Crime

Joseph Madison Beck, My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in 1930s Alabama (Norton, June)

Howard Blum, The Last Goodnight (Crown, April)

Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts (HMH, March)

Skip Hollandsworth, The Midnight Assassin (Holt, April)

Barry Meier, Missing Man (FSG, May)

Nathaniel Philbrick, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Viking, May)

Annette Gordon Reed and Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright, April)

Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery (HMH, April)

Scott D. Seligman, Tong Wars (Viking, July)

Essays, Criticism, and More

Lesley M.M. Blume, Everybody Behaves Badly (HMH, June)

Annie Dillard, The Abundance (Ecco, March)

Kathryn Harrison, True Crimes: A Family Album (Random House, April)

Melissa Fay Greene, The Underdogs (Ecco, May)

Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World (Doubleday, July)

Joshua Hammer, The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu (S&S, April)

Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (Twelve, May)

*Chuck Klosterman, But What If We’re Wrong? (Blue Rider, June)

Mark Kurlansky, Paper: Paging Through History (Norton, May)

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (Picador, March)

Cynthia Ozick, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics (HMH, July)

Andrew Solomon, Far and Away (Scribner, April)

Biography & Memoir

Augusten Burroughs, Lust & Wonder (St. Martin’s, March)

Diana Abu-Jaber, Life Without a Recipe: A Memoir of Food and Family (Norton, April)

Timothy Egan, The Immortal Irishman (HMH, March)

Eric Fair, Consequence (Holt, April)

Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist (Blue Rider, April)

Diane Guerrero with Michelle Burford, In the Country We Love (Holt, May)

Claire Harman, Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart (Knopf, March)

Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (Knopf, April)

Paul Mariani, The Whole Harmonium (S&S, April)

James McBride, Kill ‘Em and Leave (Spiegel & Grau, April)

Moby, Porcelain (Penguin Press, May)

Claudia Roth Pierpont, American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building (FSG, May)

*Rob Spillman, All Tomorrow’s Parties (Atlantic Monthly, April)

Elaine Showalter, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (S&S, March)