Cheever on Cheever! Tracy K. Smith! 20 great books out in paperback this month.

October is here, and, with it, the thrills and chills of Spooky Season, a month of masks, madness, merriment, magic, and, of course, marvelous things to read (whether they be spooky or not). It has been a year of almost indescribable horrors, and yet there is something comforting, at times, in turning from the all-too-immediate terrors of the world to horror in art. Sometimes, encountering darkness in fiction or in a history or in another’s life becomes an unexpected opportunity for release, for catharsis, for focusing one’s energy elsewhere. And, of course, the same is true for art that seeks to comfort rather than frighten.

Below, you’ll find twenty books to consider reading this October, each in a wonderful new paperback edition out this month. You’ll find moving novels, long-awaited story collections, biographies and memoirs, new histories, genre-blurring nonfiction, and more.

I hope you’ll add these to your to-be-read lists, Dear Readers, and stay safe.

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Bryan Washington, Palaver
(FSG)

“[Palaver] is permeated by a deep affection for the city of Tokyo, its cuisine, its mass transit, its look and feel….The unpretentious way Washington writes about food is a throughline in his work, from Lot to Memorial to Family Meal. Somehow his simple menu descriptions are enough to incite ravenous hunger….Enough for the reader who appreciates texture and delicacy, queer authenticity, and a well-placed crisped oyster.”
–The Boston Globe

Oyinkan Braithwaite, Cursed Daughters
(Vintage)

“A virtuosic tour de force….Enchanting, sparkling with wit and tactfully straddling reality and the supernatural….A haunting meditation on moral ambiguity, the bonds of cousinhood, and the constraints of gender….Once I became immersed in ‘Cursed Daughters,’ I hardly wanted to leave Lagos.”
–Hudson Warm

Katherine Dunn, Near Flesh: Stories
(Picador)

“[The stories] feature all the hallmarks of Dunn’s oeuvre: the body as site of both fascination and repulsion; a natural sympathy with misanthropes and the marginalized; dark comedy and outrageous violence; an openness to genres such as sci-fi, horror, and magical realism; and an attitude toward romance that anticipates what we’ve lately taken to calling heteropessimism….Near Flesh sheds welcome new light on Dunn’s work and working methods, but the book’s greatest value may be to remind us that she wasn’t a one-book wonder—that an oeuvre does, in fact, exist.”
–Justin Taylor

Susan Cheever, When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
(Picador)

““[Susan Cheever’s] first book about her father fused memoir and biography; this one fuses memoir and literary appreciation. She aims to help us read Cheever’s best stories, and if in this ‘sequel of sorts’ she seems to be squeezing one last drop, she provides welcome context, clues to her father’s very particular genius. As a writer and a daughter of a writer, she’s also exploring the wellsprings of creativity, which she does with openhearted elegance.”
–The Atlantic

Tracy K. Smith, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times
(Norton)

“Using her rare blend of lyric precision, intellectual depth, and civic consciousness, Tracy K. Smith considers how language can reshape, resist, and reform a nation. Smith resists numbness, defies borders, and offers a deeper articulation of what is truly at stake: our shared humanity.”
–Mahogany L. Browne

Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
(Picador)

“The Schuylers have their ideal biographer in Amanda Vaill, whose captivating, rich story reveals the revolutionary strength of women adroitly using their influence to shape and preserve the very history that later excluded them. This meticulously researched, beautifully written book brings these amazing women back to life with the fiery drama and brilliant insight they deserve—the full story behind the fascinating women in Hamilton.”
–Carla Kaplan

Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures
(Riverhead)

“[A] major literary occasion….Taylor tackles politics, love, religion, and the New York City art world with a depth of complication that still feels incisive….[He] forges perhaps the most compelling story of life under the weight of opinion and perception that I’ve read.”
–The Chicago Review of Books

Jaquira Díaz, This Is the Only Kingdom
(Algonquin)

“This is the Only Kingdom is beautiful, stunning, striking—a story built to haunt you in all the very best ways. The family sits here as a slippery spiral, telegraphing the past, present, and future with a gorgeous willingness to break it all open. Love tender and aching like an unseen bruise. No one writes like Jaquira. She’s in a league of her own.”
–Kristen Arnett

Brenda Lozano, Mothers
(Catapult)

“Brenda Lozano has written a powerful and haunting tale, full of twists and surprises, but also incisive observations on what it means to be a woman and a mother—both in 1940s Mexico and in the world today.”
–Miriam Toews

Hester Kaplan, Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography
(Catapult)

“A magnificent combination of memoir and biography, Twice Born is a work of reconciliation and a resurrection of the extraordinary man who gave us Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and at last, through his daughter’s magic, his own passionate heart.”
–Megan Marshall

Jennifer A. Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party
(University of Minnesota Press)

“In this important book, Jennifer A. Delton shows that Minnesota politics underwent a fundamental change during the 1940s, and argues that its direction illuminates the building of a ‘new Democratic political order.’ Delton does an excellent job of showing how [Hubert] Humphrey got involved with questions of racial justice as mayor. A tremendously impressive feat of scholarship, it is also short, breezily written, and full of pleasing anecdotes and pen portraits…a thoroughly good story.”
–American Historical Review

David Nasaw, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II
(Penguin Books)

“Nasaw challenges us to rethink World War II’s domestic impact in The Wounded Generation. Bestowing a new name on the ‘greatest generation,’ he excavates the war’s consequences for ‘the bodies, hearts and minds of those who fought, those who awaited their return and the nation that had won the war but had now to readjust to peace.’ Nasaw deftly explores the ambivalent legacy of a war that Americans have been taught to think of as the good one….[He] eloquently humanizes the story of an entire generation.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Carson Faust, If the Dead Belong Here
(Penguin Books)

“Carson Faust’s powerful debut novel swept me away with its glorious prose, compelling characters, and compassionate heart. Faust’s story charts a course of horror and loss, with moments so terrifying I had to turn on an extra light to keep reading. Yet the structural refrain that underpins this wonder of a book always returns to love. I gladly surrendered to the ferocious brilliance of this multi-generational tale, admiring the courage of young Nadine who is a ‘student to the dead.’ What lingers is the thought that perhaps we all are.”
–Mona Susan Power

Jane Hamilton, The Phoebe Variations
(Zibby Publishing)

“Few writers have a body of work as varied, successful, and beautifully written as Jane Hamilton’s. The latest addition to her oeuvre, The Phoebe Variations, is a wildly original story of complicated and unlikely family arrangements, the fluidity of identity, and just about every kind of love imaginable. Hamilton juggles her story lines and unforgettable characters with…humor, warmth, and flawless prose….Exactly the kind of life-affirming novel the world needs now.”
–Stephen McCauley

Falon Ballard, Something Wicked
(Putnam)

“Sizzling….The publisher bills Something Wicked as Macbeth meets Moulin Rouge!, and the book delivers some seriously spicy moments that weave together those stories’ themes.”
–Booklist

Joe Jackson, Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
(FSG)

“In this exhaustively researched history, Jackson contends that the Spanish-American War of 1898 shaped the United States into an imperialist power much like the ‘European empires it disparaged.”
–The New Yorker

Scott Miller, Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj
(Picador)

“This propulsive account…brings to vivid life a little-known episode of WWI—the U.S. crackdown on an American-based movement to oust the British from India….The result is a thrilling excavation of a forgotten revolutionary moment in American and world history.”
–Publishers Weekly

Andrew Bustamante, Jihi Bustamante, Shadow Cell: An Insider Account of America’s New Spy War
(Little Brown)

“Nail-biting…An unusual window into the normally closed world of spies’ private lives….Part autobiography, part true crime–or rather, true espionage–their tale of the hunt for a highly placed mole, which is also partly an exposé of the sometimes-dubious practices of CIA corporate culture, is a page-turning read.”
–The Telegraph

Georgia Summers, The Bookshop Below
(Redhook)

“Summers loads this enchanting fantasy with sensory details and imaginative lore about London’s underground network of magical bookstores. Her vivid prose makes the dust and mustiness of the antique bookshop palpable.”
–Publishers Weekly

Christina Henry, The Place Where They Buried Your Heart
(Berkley)

“The Place Where They Buried Your Heart is a cosmic blast of haunted house horror in which Christina Henry explores the complex bonds of families—both the ones we lose and the ones we gain—and how those relationships can be found in the most unexpected of places. It’s a story about monsters, and murder, and loss, but it’s also a story about the ferocity of love, and the improbable ways it can capture our hearts.”
–Philip Fracassi