Check out the 27 new books out today!
September may be drawing to a close, but if you’ve somehow made it through the month without finding any new books to add to your list, you’ll find yourself in luck, as there are still many, many brand-new books coming out before October. Below, you’ll find a roving list of novels, story collections, poetry, anthologies, memoirs, and nonfiction histories. You’ll find a powerful tribute to Joan Didion, histories of Frank Herbert’s Dune and The New York Times alike, a new anthology of Caribbean writing, comedic writing that pushes boundaries, fiction and nonfiction that defamiliarizes gender and desire, an array of striking novels, and much, much more. I hope you’ll find something below to curl up with as the weather cools below, if you haven’t already!
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C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey
(Riverhead)
“The way Zhang writes about food and desire and human failings is exquisite—sensually detailed, at times visceral. This is a tremendous novel that explores the way people will break when the world itself is broken. Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional.”
–Roxane Gay
Ayana Matthis, The Unsettled
(Knopf)
“The Unsettled crosses generations and landscapes, digs in the Southern soil and walks mean Northern city streets. Expansive and explosive, this beauty of a novel showcases Ayana Mathis’s grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read.”
–Jesmyn Ward
Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell
(Dutton)
“This first novel from Elliott is an evocative, cerebral study of womanhood, identity, and selfhood wrapped in Haudenosaunee legend….Often funny, often chilling, And Then She Fell studies an Indigenous woman’s unraveling in a world that she’s ashamed to feel so disconnected from, and Elliott tells her story with assuredness and weight.”
–Booklist
Evelyn McDonnell, The World According to Joan Didion
(HarperOne)
“Evelyn McDonnell has written a wonderfully fitting tribute to Joan Didion: one that avoids simple platitudes, approaching the great writer with a fierce, probing intelligence, flawless language, and the impulse, which drove Didion’s finest work, to understand the dreams of another.”
–Hua Hsu
Adam Nagourney, The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism
(Crown Publishing Group)
“With impeccable reporting, Adam Nagourney gives us intimate portraits of the men and women of The New York Times who reported upon and wrote the headlines of world happenings, and sometimes (to their embarrassment) made headlines themselves. In the style of a first-rate dramatist, he captures what happens behind the scenes in the newsroom, and in his long, wonderful book I did not find one page that failed to interest me.”
–Gay Talese
Patricia Spears Jones, The Beloved Community
(Copper Canyon Press)
“Jones’s poems, written during the past two decades, vibrate with a noticeable hunger and irresistible energy, unashamed to explore the nuances of intimacy via the looming specters of pop culture and history.”
–Publishers Weekly
Ryan Britt, The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune, from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies
(Plume Books)
“This is quite simply a remarkable book…there may be a more comprehensive book about the Dune novels and films, but for right now, this book ranks number one.”
–Booklist
Eliza Clark, Penance
(Harper)
“As bleak as it is compelling, Penance is a perfect dark satire of the voyeuristic true crime industry and the media’s complicity in sensationalising the pointless destruction of human lives into a vulgar, grubby money-making circus.”
–Charlotte Vassell
Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures
(Algonquin)
“There’s no powder keg like a family secret. And when it explodes, nothing in the past is ever as it was, and nothing in the future is ever the same. The Museum of Failures is a symphony of secrets and lies, love and hate, regret and forgiveness, but more than that, the unraveling of everything one holds dear to find something more precious and elusive: oneself. Powerful and engrossing.”
–Marlon James
Ben Fountain, Devil Makes Three
(Flatiron)
“Ben Fountain’s powerfully written novel is many things at once—a spy thriller, a family saga, a love story, a treasure hunt, and a tale of brutal political repression, all set in the charged atmosphere of early 1990s Haiti. By succeeding at all of these, Devil Makes Three reminds us not only of the ways an ambitious, fully engaged novel can further our understanding of the world, but also of how pleasurable and satisfying reading such a novel can be.”
–Imbolo Mbue
Lisa M. Hamilton, The Hungry Season: A Journey of War, Love, and Survival
(Little Brown)
“An intimate, thoughtful portrait of a Hmong family’s journey from Laos to Thailand and eventually to California….Extensively researched, nuanced, and compassionate, The Hungry Season is a detailed look at an immigrant experience often overlooked. Hamilton’s gripping narrative will leave readers better educated about the recent history of Southeast Asia and awed by Ia’s grit, humor, and dedication to the family that surrounds her and the family she left behind.”
–Shelf Awareness
McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death
(Verso)
“A capacious offering to transfeminine truth—witty and wild, soft and scathing, broken-hearted and open-hearted. Moving toward the future by excavating the past, Wark makes space for complexity, innovation, self- determination, and communal possibility in ‘the sparkle of one’s difference.'”
–Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Lol Tolhurst, Goth: A History
(Hachette)
“The Cure wrote the book on Goth, so who better to literally write the book on Goth than one of the Cure’s founding imaginary boys? By joining the dots of his own unique story with the darkest and most romantic moments in pop culture, Tolhurst has crafted a fascinating tome that is part memoir, part travelogue, part textbook, and most of all, the definitive guide to what has always been one of music’s hardest-to-define genres.”
–Lyndsey Parker
Lore Segal, Ladies’ Lunch: And Other Stories
(Melville House)
“Segal brings her rapier wit to this intelligent collection….Segal’s unfailing ear and light comedic touch belie the momentous, existential nature of her subject matter. This is funny and moving in equal measure.”
–Publishers Weekly
Nora Fussner, The Invisible World
(Vintage)
“Uncanny, moving, and gripping,The Invisible World has all the pleasures of a suspenseful thriller and all the art of a novel that asks: who has the ability to see beyond the everyday, and who has the privilege of ignoring those dimensions? It is at once a loving warm story about sensitive oddballs and a critique of the ways our complex human lives get collapsed in the name of legibility and, sometimes, entertainment. If UNReal and Twin Peaks had a baby, this novel would be it!”
–C. J. Hauser
Vauhini Vara, This is Salvaged: Stories
(Norton)
“It takes tremendous courage and wit to look with wonder at the darkest, most shameful places in the human heart and make them hilarious, tender, and deeply moving; Vauhini Vara, with her grand-scale compassion and moral complexity in This is Salvaged, can do this magic with astonishing ease. I’ve been a fan since I read the story ‘I, Buffalo’ years ago, and am so glad to (finally!) have a collection of Vara’s stories in hand to admire and love!”
–Lauren Groff
Adam Welz, The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown
(Bloomsbury)
“A book both celebratory and heartbreaking, Adam Welz revels in the marvels of life’s diversity and delivers a devastating account of ecological crisis. He brings climate breakdown’s effects on the more-than-human world to vivid life, revealing in the process the interconnectedness of all species.”
–David George Haskell
Caitlin Moran, What About Men? A Feminist Answers the Question
(Harper)
“This very funny writer addresses the dearth of discussion and support for men’s problems, applying a sympathetic eye….Reassuring, enlightening, and inspiring.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Philippe Sands, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage
(Knopf)
“A moving story of human tragedy and injustice with the complexities of international law to great effect. A neat work of detailed legal points and history, and a deeply felt narrative about the injustice of deportation and the dwindling number of Chagossians with strong ties to their homeland. Madame Elysé is an impressive, courageous figure and emblem, putting a human face on colonialism’s continuing wrongs….There is much to appreciate about this little-known story in Sands’s sensitive telling.”
–Shelf Awareness
Sarah Coolidge (editor), Elektrik: Caribbean Writing
(Two Lines Press)
“These extraordinary translations of Caribbean voices surge with defiance and music. Each ‘I’ asserts itself among the topography of memory and inhabiting, navigating the presence of the past within homelands and female bodies…radical and reclamatory.”
–Alina Stefanescu
Adam Mansbach, The Golem of Brooklyn
(One World)
“Jewish humor goes back a long way. And to a pantheon that includes Brooks, Bruce, Seinfeld, and David, add Mansbach at its virtual apex, with acerbic wit and an absurd premise: a supernatural avenger, a folklore savior of persecuted Jews, let loose in Trump’s America. Such satisfying calamity, this crisp book is easily the funniest novel I’ve ever read, and yet achieves an uncanny profundity. Mansbach’s voice is absolutely singular.”
–Dan Charnas
Ron Rash, The Caretaker
(Doubleday)
“The potent and rewarding latest from Rash (The Risen) centers on a Southern man whose simple life is challenged by the tenets of loyalty, friendship, family, and honesty. Blackburn Gant is a solitary man, scarred by a battle with childhood polio and left behind in Blowing Rock, N.C., by his family….The lyrically nuanced prose faithfully evokes the Appalachian landscape….This is exactly the kind of humanitarian storytelling that fans have come to expect and savor from him.”
–Publishers Weekly
Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
(Little Brown)
“I’ve thrown around the word ‘Luddite’ often…so Brian Merchant’s rich and absorbing history of the movement was, for me, both a revelation and an embarrassment. The embarrassment is at…how the lessons I’d taken from their effort were based on a silly caricature. The revelation, in Brian’s deft telling, is that technology never has to be inevitable, that we humans have agency over how we live with the machines, and that perhaps the best way to figure out what to do about the future is to look to the past.”
–Farhad Manjoo
Mavis Gallant, Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews
(Nonpareil Books)
“Riveting…rollicking…elegantly captures a changing France reckoning with the cultural revolutions of the mid-twentieth century.”
–Publishers Weekly
Isle McElroy, People Collide
(Harpervia)
“Beyond the gender binary and the public’s assumptions based upon appearances, McElroy’s insightful novel also examines class, privilege, the art world, and family relationships….People Collide is sly, clever, funny, provocative, and compelling. It offers a world and a story to get lost in.”
–Shelf Awareness
Scott W. Berg, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul
(Pantheon Books)
“A complex, capably narrated history of the 1871 fire that remade Chicago….In the end, [the city’s elites’] remaking of Chicago helped shape the form of the modern city–architecturally stunning but also sharply segregated by class and race….A strong contribution to the history of not just the fire, but urban America generally.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Nabila Ramdani, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic
(PublicAffairs)
“A timely and nuanced reflection upon the problems facing France—racism, polarization, colonial amnesia, an elitist education system—and the solutions needed to fix them. Required reading for anyone wishing to grapple with the challenges facing the twenty-first century world.”
–Martin Evans
