25 books out in paperback this February!
It’s difficult, perhaps, not to feel that this past month has felt longer than a typical January, its natural disasters, sudden shifts, and political upheavals making this month seem as though a whole year or more had already rushed by. As February approaches, there is an inevitable sense of tension in the air about what the rest of the year holds.
Still, there are things to come that we know will be good, things that will bring us joy and rouse our curiosity, things that will make us ask questions in more pleasant ways than senseless executive orders. One of those things is the promise of new books, and today I bring news of twenty-five books newly being released in lovely paperback editions this February. It’s quite a month for paperbacks, with releases from well-established and exciting new names alike, including work from Judith Butler, Colm Tóibín, Russell Banks, Leslie Jamison, Rachel Lyon, Margot Livesy, Anna Funder, and many, many others.
I hope you’ll find much to delight in here, bits of bright and fascinating (rather than fearsome) dark to explore. Be safe and well, Dear Readers, especially those of you dealing directly with the aftermath of January’s wildness. And remember that books can help and heal more than we may realize, though not always in any direct way. Instead, how they help and heal may not be apparent in our lives for days, months, or years to come. But they always matter, always reshape some aspect of us by our encounter with them.
So read on, always.
*
Colm Tóibín, Long Island
(Scribner)
“Fifteen years ago, Colm Tóibín won readers’ hearts with his best-selling novel Brooklyn. Now, with the sequel, Long Island, he just might break them… Tóibín writes beautifully about the struggle between the comfort of the familiar and the hope for something better.”
–Columbia Magazine
Russell Banks, American Banks
(Vintage)
“What a beautiful farewell gift the great Russell Banks has left us in American Spirits. Better than anything I’ve read, this book gave me hope about our current political situation—it gave me a way to think of it that isn’t all despair. These three utterly compelling stories are so truthful about America as to be almost unbearable. They’re funny, frank, full of love and each of them delivers an epic punch, in its own flavor—they feel Shakespearean in their daring…beautiful, elegiac.”
–George Saunders
Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made
(Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books)
“[An] outstanding debut, a historical novel that thrums with the commingling tensions of its backdrop: the lead-up to the WWII Japanese invasion of what is now Malaysia. Chan writes her characters—particularly the conflicted protagonist, Cecily Alcantara, a former espionage asset to the Japanese Imperial Army—with a precision that neither flinches from the brutality of war nor ignores the humanity within. This is a book with real staying power.”
–ELLE
Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries
(Picador)
“Sorting through 10 years’ worth of her own journal entries, Sheila Heti embarks on a grand project to rearrange them in novel ways to make new meaning. Rather than a cosmetic endeavour, Heti births something far more profound, at times redefining the very idea of writing.”
–Vogue
Rick Bass, With Every Great Breath: New and Selected Essays, 1995 – 2023
(Counterpoint)
“Amiable tales from a natural-born storyteller….Whether it’s a lamentation for his many dead dogs or a new, insightful piece on how Hemingway’s hunting and fishing helped shape his writing, the congenial Bass always delights. Readers will enjoy dipping in and out of thoughtful, heartfelt essays oozing with sentiment and affability.
–Kirkus Reviews
Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People
(Picador)
“Sloane Crosley grappl[es] with an apartment break-in and, not long after, the death of a dear friend and colleague by suicide. In prose that is both personal and raw—and yet somehow still makes room for Crosley’s rightfully-heralded wit—Grief Is for People is a powerful, touching memoir….[T]his is not a grim or dark book—but a poignant and relatable one, with a sly humor and heartbreaking candor that beautifully expresses anger, acceptance, and love.”
–Isaac Fitzgerald
Declan Ryan, Crisis Actor: Poems
(FSG)
“One of the finest debuts in recent memory. There have been very few Irish poets in the past half-century who could be compared to Seamus Heaney….Ryan, however, conjures up that extraordinary ghost, though the ghost has him by the scruff of the neck.”
–The New Criterion
Rachel Lyon, Fruit of the Dead
(Scribner)
“A brutal, brilliant reimagining of the Persephone/Demeter story, shifted seamlessly into a twenty-first-century thriller of addiction. My heart was pounding for teenage Cory, coerced into a billionaire’s Hades, and for her mother, who dismantles her own compromised life to bring her daughter back from the brink. Fruit of the Dead is a scathing and stunning indictment of patriarchal mythology.”
–Maria Dahvana Headley
Margot Livesy, The Road from Belhaven
(Vintage)
“The Road from Belhaven is a marvel. In this radiantly beautiful novel, Margot Livesey introduces us to Lizzie Craig, an unforgettable nineteenth-century Scottish clairvoyant haunted by her future as much as her past. Livesey has crafted a story as thrilling as it is thoughtful, one animated by life’s fundamental question: how do we change?”
–Anthony Marra
Hanna Johansson, Antiquity (trans. Kira Josefsson)
(Catapult)
“Gorgeous, lacerating….Johansson’s creation, in Josefsson’s translation, reminds us of our own tendency to narrativize life, to write ourselves out of the intimate joy of immediate experience by stepping back and fiddling with the details, fashioning an ideal self. Antiquity feels destined to be a classic, as multifaceted, revealing, and transformative as works by Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Nabokov. Its power comes from its vulnerable, gorgeous prose.”
–Asymptote
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
(Picador)
“A cogent and deeply thoughtful case against the right’s attempts to limit ideas of gender to male and female, offering philosophical and historical evidence to support a fluid system in which all people might present authentically.”
–Bethanne Patrick
Chantha Nguon, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
(Algonquin)
“Chantha Nguon connects to the joy of the sight, scent, taste, texture, and even sound of food, and when there is no food to eat she connects to the memory of food. In this potent narrative of unbreakable, inviolable, female power, each recipe is an act of grace, transformation, resistance, and reclamation.”
–Alice Randall
Jordan Salama, Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story
(Catapult)
“[A] beautiful, soulful story ranging across continents and languages, topographies and etymologies, time and space. Through a pastiche of maps, diaries, and archival materials, Jordan Salama attempts to piece together a lost family history, and the result is both delightfully idiosyncratic yet somehow still universal, revealing a great deal about the elusive concepts of identity and home, and what it means to find one’s place in the world by following one’s roots.”
–Jennifer Senior
Mariah Stovall, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both
(Soft Skull)
“An impressively strong and inventively structured debut….I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both is a rare thing: a genuinely successful rock novel….This is an excellent novel, compassionate and filled with a sparkling intelligence about the human condition.”
–NPR
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz
(Scribner)
“This richly imagined and densely plotted story refreshes the crime genre and acts as a fun house mirror reflection of contemporary attitudes toward race—all set to a thumping jazz age soundtrack. Standing alongside Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this is a challenging evocation of an America that never was.”
–Publishers Weekly
Helen Humphrys, Followed by the Lark
(Picador)
“Humphreys is a born storyteller, her prose jumping through the life and times of Thoreau, like a gentle river current in summertime. The result is a novel of astonishing insight into Thoreau’s complicated spiritual, and often tragic life.”
–Ron Halvorson
Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life
(Vintage)
“Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. And this in a narrative that grips the reader and unfolds through some of the most consequential moments–historical and cultural–of the twentieth century.”
–Geraldine Brooks
Leslie Jamison, Splinters
(Back Bay Books)
“A candid and perceptive look at divorce, motherhood, and personal reinvention….With unbridled vulnerability, Jamison writes of being a child of divorce, the challenges of dating as a single mom, and the overwhelming nature of juggling childcare and working. Splinters is a window into how difficult it is to pick up the pieces of one’s own life while caring for another.
–TIME
Carrie Sun, Private Equity: A Memoir
(Penguin)
“Carrie Sun’s nuanced and shocking memoir depicts a woman’s rise in a high finance dystopia where an employee’s life is never private and nothing is equitable. Private Equity is the account of years of leashed efficiency that left her a wild and breaking heart and, eventually, the courage to speak its bitter, unsparing truth.”
–Honor Moore
Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife
(Holt)
“Like the foxes who populate its pages, The Fox Wife is vivid, enigmatic, and enchanting. Choo’s fresh new fable conjures a world where danger and intrigue are forever entwined with sublime and sensory delights.”
–M. L. Rio
Philip Fracassi, Boys in the Valley
(TOR Nightfire)
“A riveting, and horrifying, tale of survival set against a punishing and vivid backdrop. Think William Peter Blatty and William Golding blended together…but still the insights and angles are all Philip Fracassi.”
–Victor LaValle
Peter Handke, The Second Sword: A Tale from the Merry Month of May, and My Day in the Other Land: A Tale of Demons: Two Novellas
(Picador)
“These two well-crafted if surly novellas from Nobel winner Handke (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) deal with isolation and the outsider’s attempts to reconcile himself with society….With a tortuous and winding narration, Handke eschews traditional storytelling in favor of psychological study….Handke’s ill-tempered visions are feverishly thrilling.”
–Publishers Weekly
Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories
(Picador)
“[A] bracing new history of the global opium trade….Ghosh’s tentacular history embraces opium’s entanglement with furniture, architecture, gardens and its role in modern wars. His forensic analysis of opium-factory paintings is particularly fascinating….But it’s Ghosh’s big-picture thinking that has made his nonfiction so influential….[A] huge achievement.”
–The New York Times Review
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World
(Scribner)
“[A] moving and sensitive rumination… Joyce shows how the supreme value of the peasant is generational survival: The great task is to hand on to the child the land the peasant has inherited, making one’s own existence a kind of interlude between past and future. His beautifully written book is equally in-between, haunted by the ghosts of the dead but also full of the warmth of human sympathy.”
–The New York Times Book Review
James L. Swanson, The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack and the Fight for Survival in Early America
(Scribner)
“In this magnificent book, James Swanson brilliantly uncovers the long-forgotten Deerfield Massacre. His vibrant prose transports readers back to 1704, a distant and forgotten America, a period even the Founders would not recognize….Swanson’s thriller-like narrative is an epic tale of survival that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Highest recommendation.”
–Patrick K. O’Donnell
