Buffy! Viet Thanh Nguyen! Andrea Long Chu! 23 new books out today.
The wheel of the year continues to turn, its its pace at once chaotically swift and glacially slow, and, as we reel from the staggering effects of ever more political chaos in the United States and around the globe, chaos that seems to dominate every media headline, it may seem difficult to turn your attention to other things. But never fear: there are beautiful, wonderful, provocative, and curious bits of art to turn to. If anything is constant in this time of madcap madness and creeping American fascism, it is that there will be new books to get excited about each week, new things to call our companions in a time when we need companions of all kinds more than ever.
I’ve selected twenty-three below to consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, with a star-studded list of authors and themes that range widely. You’re almost certain to find something—or many somethings!—to take home with you. As always, stay safe, Dear Reader, and let those to-be-read piles—those clusters of companions-to-be— gloriously expand.
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Katie Kitamura, Audition
(Riverhead)
“You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood—and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.”
–Hernan Diaz
Jon Hickey, Big Chief
(Simon & Schuster)
“We’ve been waiting for the great Native American political novel, and here it is—a gripping story that illustrates the intricacies and intrigues of reservation politics. The book examines Native sovereignty, power, and corruption at the fictional Passage Rouge Nation, as well as issues of Indigenous community, family, and identity. Not to mention, Jon Hickey creates fantastically compelling characters and weaves in a healthy dose of Native humor. A tremendous debut.”
–David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Lyn Steger Strong, The Float Test
(Mariner Books)
“With surgical precision, Lynn Steger Strong dissects and then elegantly reconstructs an American family on the brink: of falling apart, of finding themselves, of saying all the things left unsaid….Strong’s clear and confident voice and prose makes the unvarnished truths in this book sting. But that same quality makes the moments of profound tenderness and humanity linger. The Float Test—and the Floridian world of this clan—will stay with me for a long time to come.”
–Xochitl Gonzalez
Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other
(Belknap Press)
“Brilliant, rigorous, and generous, To Save and to Destroy is part autobiography, part criticism, and wholly illuminating. A dazzling feat from one of today’s great writers and thinkers.”
–R.O. Kwon
Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays
(FSG)
“The moral clarity and seriousness of purpose throughout Andrea Long Chu’s Authority feels so correct, so inevitable in her prose, one almost forgets how rare it is. In an era of ethical infantilization, shitty cynicisms, and limpid rhetorical hygienics, Chu names exactly, irreducibly, what she sees and feels and believes. It’s thrilling….Like all truly great works of criticism, Authority makes remaining alive feel not just possible but worthwhile.”
–Kaveh Akbar
Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
(Pantheon)
I’ve been waiting for a follow-up to Vauhini Vara’s magazine piece ‘Ghosts,’ where she introduced us to…a predecessor to ChatGPT…that had the potential to replace writers like herself. What she’s delivered in Searches is a riveting, provocative and deeply personal exploration of our ambivalent relationship with technology that spans from our earliest history to the advent of the internet to the race to dominate artificial intelligence. This is a book that will challenge your notions of what it means to be human…deeply engaging…[and] infused with curiosity and humor.”
–Cecilia Kang
Hasib Hourani, rock flight
(New Directions)
“Hourani’s eye-opening debut book of poetry communicates the feelings of dislocation and precarity that have attended his own experiences and that of Palestinians in exile through striking images of movement, migration, and flight.”
–Booklist
Laurent Binet, Perspective(s) (trans. Sam Taylor)
(FSG)
“[Perspective(s)] blends the postmodern playfulness of Umberto Eco with the vigor of Dashiell Hammet….Binet’s novels [are] full-blown alternate histories in which he has let loose the reins of his imagination….[Binet] is also skilled at fast-paced narrative…funny and very gripping.”
–Magdalena Miecznicka
Kevin Nguyen, My Documents
(One World)
“Nguyen draws on the legacy of the U.S. government’s internment of Japanese Americans during WWII for this intelligent and chilling novel….This poignant narrative is an emotional roller coaster.”
–Publishers Weekly
Meredith Hambrock, She’s a Lamb!
(ECW Press)
“A diabolical journey through one woman’s deep delusions and desperate ambition. Hambrock brilliantly doles out tragicomic tension inspired by the Chekhov and Shakespeare referenced, all to a brutally hilarious and just plain brutal effect through the thoughts and actions of an unforgettably Machiavellian character. She’s a Lamb! left me breathless!”
–Deb Rogers
Kristin Russo, Jenny Owen Youngs, Slayers, Every One of Us: How One Girl in All the World Showed Us How to Hold On
(St. Martin’s Press)
“A heartfelt story of how one couple’s mutual obsession allowed them to remain in each other’s lives, this tender, funny, and totally charming tale of love, divorce, and podcasting is as much an ode to queer community as it is to a certain vampire slayer.”
–Booklist
E. A. Hanks, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road
(Gallery Books)
“E.A.Hanks has accomplished something I didn’t know was possible. She has written a travel memoir that reads like a thriller and a gorgeous one at that. With breathtaking prose and at breakneck speed, Hanks takes us on an odyssey across America in search of her elusive past. I cannot think of a writer since Joan Didion who writes about place and the characters that inhabit it quite in the way Hanks does. I was myself struck by her literary lightning over and over again.”
–Mary Morris
David Denby, Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer
(Holt)
“A marvel. I cannot recall the last time I devoured a book as I did this one….The writing is sensational: witty, persuasive, lyrical, passionate. The reader laughs, grimaces, tears up, is alternately delighted and disgusted, by the antics and sometimes unmet ambitions of these four oversized, manic Jews….As a cultural history of postwar America, Eminent Jews stands alone.”
–David Nasaw
Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History
(Norton)
“I can’t wait to press Joe Mungo Reed’s Terrestrial History into the hands of anyone curious about climate disaster and colonizing Mars. While tech magnates litter our planet with flaming spaceship debris, Reed masterfully traces the human costs of these endeavors.”
–Adrienne Westenfeld
Joanna Rubin Dranger, Remember Us to Life: A Graphic Memoir
(Ten Speed Graphic)
“This complex personal history is contextualized by the book’s interrogation into Sweden’s role in abetting the Holocaust….The decades-old loss of family the author never knew feels palpable and immediate, and the lack of government action in the face of blatant evil is searing and prescient.”
–Library Journal
Thomas Morris, Open Up: Stories
(Unnamed Press)
“The stories in Thomas Morris’s Open Up are capable of both astounding imaginative flourishes and evoking the quietest moments of everyday intimacy with heartbreaking attentiveness. These stories are always pleasurably off-kilter, as gently acerbic and sadly wise about the world as the work of George Saunders, Wendy Erskine and Etgar Keret, but written with an assuredness and poignancy that is all Morris’s own.”
–Colin Barrett
Katie Mitchell, Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores
(Clarkson Potter)
“At a time when our stories are being challenged, banned and erased, Prose to the People isn’t just a love letter to Black bookstores—it’s a reminder of why they matter now more than ever. These spaces aren’t just about books; they’re about resistance, remembrance and making sure our voices are heard, no matter who tries to silence them.”
–Essence
Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
(Celadon Books)
“Of all the creative partnerships of the past century, none seems more resonant or permanent than that of the two Liverpool boys who met as teenagers, collaborated for a dozen years, and altered the world’s expectations of what popular art can accomplish. Ian Leslie’s new book is the best study of that friendship, from improbable beginning to melancholy end—and of all the songs produced between—that we have ever had.”
–Adam Gopnik
Gardiner Harris, No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson and Johnson
(Random House)
“Harris conducts consummate investigative journalism in this gangbuster exposé of the Johnson & Johnson corporation…takes readers on a dark and devastating ride through a corporate pattern of greed and malfeasance that becomes more disturbing with each revelatory chapter….Comparisons to Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain (2021) are obvious, although Harris’ work is all the more stunning…An absolutely unforgettable must-read.”
–Booklist
Greg Hewett, No Names
(Coffee House Press)
“With a poet’s expansive vision, Greg Hewett writes about all the ways that music crushes the distance between decades and individual lives, especially queer lives in search of orientation points. No Names charms with specificity and, in exchange, offers a life force.”
–Paul Lisicky
Kate Folk, Sky Daddy
(Random House)
“This is the craziest, funniest book I’ve read in a while. And I read a lot of crazy, funny books. Get your boarding pass out and get ready for some turbulence. Sky Daddy is insane.”
–Gary Shytengart
Funmi Fetto, Hail Mary: Stories
(Harper)
“Funmi Fetto’s vignettes take us from Nigeria to the UK, from triumph to tragedy, through shocking tales of desperation and deliverance. She shines a necessary light on the ways in which religion, patriarchy, and colonialism oppress Nigerian women in a culturally layered and gripping collection of stories that are also a testament to their resilience.”
–Vanessa Walters
Amitav Acharya, The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West
(Basic Books)
“Amitav Acharya’s The Once and Future World Order offers a refreshingly original take on a potential post-West world order. With a lucid, perceptive, and provocative critique of the current global system, Acharya’s survey of the past and visualization of the future dynamic between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’ is stimulating for all who care about international relations in our globalized world!”
–Shashi Tharoor
