17 new books to look forward to.
Dear reader, I have two recommendations for you. The first recommendation is going to the freezer aisle of your local grocery store and taking home a big box of frozen mini eclairs. The second recommendation is going to your local indie and picking up a few of these brand-new books. Eat, read, repeat.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed
(Grove Press)
“[Nguyen] is driven to raptures of expression by the obliviousness of the self-satisfied; he relentlessly punctures the self-image of French and American colonizers, of white people generally, of true believers and fanatics of every stripe.”
–The New Yorker
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
(Knopf)
“Ishiguro uses his inhuman, all too human narrators to gaze upon the theological heft of our lives, and to call its bluff.”
–The New Yorker
Stephen King, Later
(Hard Case Crime)
“Does anybody write kids-with-strange-powers better than Stephen King? And, is there anyone on the scene who has more insider knowledge of the publishing industry?”
–The Washington Post
Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind
(Hogarth Press)
“Smallwood’s casually agonized and abundantly satisfying novel…provides the exact sort of thrill that can be found only through obsessive overthinking. Why live in the moment when you can dissect it like this?”
–The New Yorker
Patricia Engel, Infinite Country
(Avid Reader Press)
“Lively folktales of the Muisca peoples punctuate Engel’s remarkable novel as it illuminates the true costs of living in the shadows. Told by a chorus of voices and perspectives, this is as much an all-American story as it is a global one.”
–Booklist
Forsyth Harmon, Justine
(Tin House)
“…acutely captures that time in one’s life when imitation feels like the sincerest form of freedom.”
–O, the Oprah Magazine
Noémi Lefebvre, tr. Sophie Lewis, Poetics of Work
(Transit Books)
“This is not the kind of novel where things happen, but its bracing contemporary rhythms hold the reader’s attention. Lefebvre succeeds at mapping out an unquiet mind in the midst of crisis.”
–Publishers Weekly
Robert Walser, tr. Tom Whalen, Little Snow Landscape
(NYRB)
“[He] is a writer of pastoral idylls of quite bewitching calm, pitched between medieval dream poem and Romantic interlude.”
–4Columns
Paulina Bren, The Barbizon
(Simon & Schuster)
“…in this captivating portrait, the hotel comes alive again as an enchanted site of a bygone era, ‘a place of glamour, desire, and young female ambition.'”
–The Wall Street Journal
Alexander Wolff, Endpapers
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
“Ultimately the real energy of Endpapers comes not from Wolff’s impressive reconstruction of his father and grandfather’s biographies, but from the way he adds himself to the narrative, bringing us back to the present.”
–The Boston Globe
Kate Hope Day, In the Quick
(Random House)
“Perfect for fans of realistic depictions of space travel like Andy Weir’s The Martian (2014) and Jeremy K. Brown’s Zero Limit (2018).”
–Booklist
Julia Cooke, Come Fly the World
(Houghton Mifflin)
“An entertaining, insightful look into a gritty and glamorous era in air travel.”
–Kirkus
Leslie Lehr, A Boob’s Life
(Pegasus)
“A unique blend of memoir and social history that should have broad appeal to anyone who has breasts or has ever worn a bra.”
–Library Journal
Gregory Brown, The Lowering Days
(Harper)
“What emerges from the ashes of the mill’s demise are broken relationships between human and land, but also the capacity for forgiveness and exoneration, which Brown signposts with flowers emerging from the mill’s scorched soil.”
–The Boston Globe
Anne Lamott, Dusk, Night, Dawn
(Riverhead)
“In difficult times, is there a more soothing voice than Lamott’s? Her latest book on the trickiness of faith and hope is chock-full of her trademark wit, at once self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing.”
–BookPage
Minae Mizumura, tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter, An I-Novel
(Columbia University Press)
“Her dual identity makes her a keen critic of two very different cultures that are, in some ways, inseparable.”
–Asian Review of Books
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
(Verso)
“Angel raises intriguing questions about commonly accepted assumptions, and she offers reassurance to female readers. A provocative counterargument to recent feminist dogma.”
–Kirkus
