18 new paperbacks coming out this January.
Behold: the first paperbacks of the year.
*
Jean Chen Ho, Fiona and Jane
(Penguin, January 3)
“A wonderful debut … [Fiona and Jane] is a book that is built on memory, a book that speaks to the importance and difficulties and richness of friendship.”
–Ploughshares
Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People
(Hogarth, January 3)
“[Manguso’s] prose is, like a red wine reduction, boiled down to its most potent iteration, It’s all killer, no filler with Manguso.”
–AV Club
Jami Attenberg, I Came All This Way to Meet You
(Ecco, January 3)
“[A] fierce memoir of personal transformation.”
–USA Today
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In the Dark
(William Morrow, January 10)
“Rich in scope and vision, with each nested story masterfully rippling across others, this is a visionary novel about grief, resilience, and how the human spirit endures.”
–Esquire
Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto
(Grove Press, January 10)
“Reimagines memoir as a manual for creativity, activism, and reinvention.”
–Seattle Times
Quan Barry, When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East
(Vintage, January 17)
“Engrossing … Its unconventional storytelling and fantastical elements will appeal to fans of Barry’s other books.”
–The Boston Globe
Sjon, Red Milk
(Picador, January 17)
“The landscape of Red Milk is built of such lightning bursts of strangely sharp detail, where the use of colors stands out.”
–4Columns
Andrew Lipstein, Last Resort
(Picador, January 17)
“A brilliant morality tale about what happens when a person refuses to learn from their mistakes, all the way down to the final scene, which had me laughing out loud and punching the air.”
–Vulture
Sara Freeman, Tides
(Grove Press, January 17)
“As well as being beautifully atmospheric, Tides is an intriguing exploration of the effect of sheer propinquity on romance.”
–Financial Times
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen
(Holt Paperbacks, January 17)
“Baldwin has penetrated a sensational crime with his considerable novelist’s skill for seeing things the rest of us don’t. In the process, he’s delivered a stinging indictment of racial stagnation.”
–Kirkus
Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters
(Riverhead, January 17)
“An engaging, relevant work that delves into the linguistic past in order to predict China’s future success in the world.”
–Kirkus
Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers
(Anchor, January 24)
“Otsuka’s signature spare style as a writer unexpectedly suits her capacious vision … The Swimmers has the verve and playfulness of spoken word poetry.”
–NPR
Morgan Thomas, Manywhere
(Picador, January 24)
“These breathlessly imaginative stories are all the more remarkable for the elegant, organic ways in which the author unhooks language from its entrenched assumptions about men and women.”
–New York Times Book Review
Charles J. Shields, Lorraine Hansberry
(Holt, January 24)
“…sparkling … One of the most brilliant aspects of Shields’s study is its nuance.”
–The Chicago Review of Books
Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Jennifer Croft, The Books of Jacob
(Riverhead, January 31)
“Sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit … The comedy in this novel blends, as it does in life, with genuine tragedy.”
–The New York Times
Lawrence Wright, The Plague Year
(Vintage, January 31)
“Translates the complexities of epidemiology into plain English … Wright is at his commanding best.”
–Star Tribune
Delia Ephron, Left on Tenth
(Back Bay, January 31)
“We can trust her not to romanticize life’s big moments. Monumental though they may be, they are often messy, confusing, and oddly timed — and Ephron is going to be straight with us about it.”
–The Washington Post
Julia May Jonas, Vladimir
(Avid Reader Press, January 31)
“A witty dance with the ghost of Nabokov and a razor-edged commentary on academia at our current fraught moment.”
–The New York Times Book Review
