Eve L. Ewing! Pankaj Mishra! A history of nudity! 27 new books out today.
It’s another week in a year that feels, already, like multiple years have passed, a year of head-scratching and head-spinning tumult. In times like this, it can be worthwhile—self-salvific, even—to take a break from all the news, to pause your doomscrolling. And in that pause, it’s worth remembering that there are other, more inspiring things to focus on, like the brilliant authors working in these chaotic times. To that end, I’ve highlighted a whopping twenty-seven new books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction out today to spend time with instead.
You’ll find a remarkable range here. There’s so much, indeed, that I’ll let the books speak for themselves. Read deeply, and, when you feel too much doom and gloom filling you up, turn your attention, instead, to one of these lights.
*
Fernando A. Flores, Brother Brontë
(MCD)
“With nods to Fahrenheit 451 and The Grapes of Wrath, Flores’s Brother Brontë carves out a space for itself in the landscape of post-collapse literature—and one which it fills with as much human warmth and vibrant poetry as it does righteous anger and dystopian sadness. A visceral journey through a uniquely American future, and an essential read.”
–Tim Maughan
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional
(Riverhead)
“A novel of austere contemplation and personal devastation, its narrative driven by moral crisis rather than worldly action…reflections on mortality seep into its fabric. For this is not a book of answers. Rather, it is a challenge: about how to be in the world, and how to be alone.”
–Times Literary Supplement
Jack Wang, The Riveter
(Harpervia)
“Jack Wang’s assured and glorious debut novel…is a war story, a love story, and an exploration of the forces that hold us together or pull us apart. From the opening pages, we are dropped into the world of Josiah Chang, a Chinese Canadian serving in an elite paratrooper battalion during WWII. Themes of honor, duty, and brotherhood on the battlefield are interlaced throughout, adding philosophical depth to the action-packed scenes…unforgettable and emotional.”
–Melissa Fu
Eve L. Ewing, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
(One World)
“[Eve L. Ewing] contends that the American education system has been deeply shaped by systemic prejudice….She challenges readers to confront this uncomfortable truth so they can reimagine what schools could be.”
–Chicago Magazine
Edgar Gomez, Alligator Tears: A Memoir
(Crown Publishing Group)
“No one writes about the terrors of late-stage capitalism with such humor, candor, and aplomb. In every sentence, Gomez elucidates the unnecessary horrors of suffering in the American context. To our benefit (and relief), he accomplishes this feat with the wonder of a child and the wit of a satirist. Affecting and inspiring, Alligator Tears is more proof that Gomez is a writer who deserves our attention.”
–Alejandro Varela
Megan Marshall, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
(Mariner Books)
“Megan Marshall has written a powerful and haunting book about memory, family, friendship, and history. In these intricately braided essays, Marshall approaches her own life through the lives of others as she revisits her grandfather’s experience in World War I, a school friend’s tragic death, a stay in Kyoto, and a nineteenth-century biographical mystery. After Lives is an intimate and illuminating chronicle of the self from one of America’s best biographers.”
–Heather Clark
Shane McCrae, New and Collected Hell: A Poem
(FSG)
“McCrae approaches Dante’s allegorical vision with an urgency derived from a struggle that collapses the personal and the social, until the metaphysical realm seems the only possible stage….[He] exploits, in a way that few other modern poets have been able to, the power of allegory.”
–Elisa Gonzalez
Emma Ruth Rundel, The Bella Vista: Poems
(Unnamed Press)
“Emma Ruth Rundle’s debut collection of poems, The Bella Vista, is a gorgeous, fierce, and devastating account of romantic love. Rundle has found a new form for her prodigious lyrical gifts; here is a lucid and haunting collection that moves with a kind of dream logic to ‘summon the unseen.'”
–Deborah Landau
Elaine Equi, Out of the Blank: Poems
(Coffee House Press)
“These endlessly quotable, epigrammatic poems articulate the human experience with the ethereality of a harp and the coy trill of a cymbal. Equi’s linguistic dexterity and innovation are nonpareil.”
–Publishers Weekly
Margarita Montimore, The Dollhouse Academy
(Flatiron Books)
“Exceptionally inventive….Hints of Valley of the Dolls, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and of course Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House linger as the twisted entrapment of enviable, must-have fame is chillingly revealed….Superstars and wannabes reveal the impossible price of fame in this wildly inventive, convincingly plausible takedown of the entertainment industry.”
–Shelf Awareness
Alejandro Heredia, Loca
(Simon & Schuster)
“In this remarkable debut, Alejandro Heredia traces young lives from the streets of Santo Domingo to the streets of the Bronx, capturing the heartbreak of queer youth, a woman’s rebellion against the confines of motherhood, and, above all, the pain and power of friendship that extends across seas, and borders, and the struggle of working people to survive in America. It is the most generously written novel I have read in a very long time, and that generosity is a beautiful thing.”
–Adam Haslett
Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for a Little Alien
(Little Brown)
“Franklin’s fresh debut, inspired by her experience with autism, centers on an unnamed girl in southeast England known as Little Alien….Franklin delightfully renders her neurodivergent protagonist’s attempt to make sense of what’s ‘normal’ and to understand how language works. This has plenty of heart.”
–Publishers Weekly
Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History
(Penguin Press)
“This profoundly important and urgent book finds Mishra, one of our most intellectually astute and courageous writers, at the peak of his powers. His outrage is hard to ignore. But at the center of this urgent book is a humane inquiry into what suffering can make us do, and he leaves us with the troubling question of what world will we find after Gaza.”
–Hisham Matar
Philip Carr-Gomm, A Brief History of Nakedness
(Reaktion Books)
“[L]ucid and wide-ranging…strips bare the paradoxes….Using a snappy blend of history and imagery, [Carr-Gomm] invites readers to join him in making thrilling, confusing, funny, and beautiful realizations about that simultaneously mysterious and obvious state of unclothedness. From the rituals of witchcraft to the human art installations of Spencer Tunick to the non-nakedness of the Naked Chef, Carr-Gomm offers the revelation that…nakedness…holds the key to understanding politics, culture, and our very nature as human beings.”
–Kathleen Rooney
Rich Benjamin, Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History
(Pantheon Books)
“Talk to Me is a revelation. As unflinching as it is tender, it is the story of a nation and an intimate portrayal of a family. Rich Benjamin meticulously probes into Haiti’s vast history while sensitively revealing with the painful secrets that his mother and her sisters carried to America. This is a son’s homage to a complex, brilliant woman and a letter of longing to a Haiti that might have been, and could still become.”
–Maaza Mengiste
Justin Haynes, Ibis
(Overlook Press)
“Justin Haynes delivers an evocative coastal world where the tide and the sky have as much power as governments and borders. Ibis moves the reader through Caribbean history and nature, driven by a compelling ensemble, some looking for truth and some hiding it. Striking in its language and imagery, this debut comes alive with a vibrant mixture of beauty, mystery, and quiet ferocity.”
–Ravi Howard
Rupert Everett, The American No: Stories
(Atria Books)
“This is a storyteller unafraid to spike his black comedy with sudden and strongly brewed emotion….Individually, the stories are exhilarating; together, they add up to an intriguing self-portrait of an artist at work, presenting us with the multiple facets of an undaunted imagination, recut, repolished and ready to shine in the dark.”
–The Guardian
Eli Zukovsky, Mazeltov
(Holt)
“By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Eli Zuzovsky’s brilliantly observed novel offers a kaleidoscopic view of a young queer man’s life, his family and his times, through the lens of his bar mitzvah. Mazeltov is an unforgettable, virtuosic debut.”
–Claire Messud
David Levering Lewis, The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790 – 1958
(Penguin Press)
“Intricate, sumptuously written….An exquisite stylist and wide-ranging intellect….[The Stained Glass Window] is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined.”
–Publishers Weekly
Heather Cleary (editor), Gabriela Jauregui (editor), Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico (trans. Julia Sanches, Heather Cleary, Gabriela Jauregui, Julianna Neuhouser, and Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez)
(Feminist Press)
“Tsunami is a shock to the system, a seismic disturbance unsettling our narratives about the injustices women endure and the structures that enable them. Through these essays which scream against mass murder of women, challenge the erasure of indigenous struggle, and morph the oppressive norms hidden in our language, an alternate reality is already born.”
–Miriam Toews
Erling Kagge, After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice (trans. Kari Dickson)
(HarperOne)
“A distinctive, thoughtful, and quietly moving work by that rarest of creatures, a genuine philosopher-explorer. Erling Kagge has heard the call of the wild as clearly as anyone, and in this gem of a book he demonstrates how the North Pole has served as a container of countless human hopes, dreams, and sorrows—including his own.”
–Darrell Hartman
Diana McCaulay, A House for Miss Pauline
(Algonquin)
“What begins as one woman’s symphony of magic and loss soon unravels, stone by stone, secret by secret, until we’re left with nothing less than the brutal, turbulent, wild, and haunted history of Jamaica itself. Miss Pauline is the dazzling heroine of our times….The center cannot hold, things fall apart, the past is uprooted, the present holds on by thread, and in the midst of it all is Miss Pauline, strong, conflicted, driven, and remarkable.”
–Marlon James
Callan Wink, Beartooth
(Spiegel & Grau)
“Beartooth sank its teeth into me. I had a hard time closing the covers, getting out of my chair, because I was truly utterly transported to the logging roads and snow-melt rivers of Montana. Callan Wink treats nature as a holy altar and a widening mouth, and he writes a story that moves as fast as a bullet down a barrel. His characters and their troubles—especially the two misfit brothers at the heart of this novel—will live with me for a long time.”
–Benjamin Percy
Brigitte Giraud, Live Fast (trans. Cory Stockwell)
(Ecco)
“A gripping novel about grief and loss. In her autobiographical novel, Giraud chronicles the mundane events leading up to her husband Claude’s accidental death twenty years ago….Though it’s a tragedy of chance and circumstance, Giraud tortures herself, wondering if there’s something she did to contribute to this fateful accident. In elegant but straightforward prose, Giraud’s narrator asks a series of unanswerable questions….[an] elegiac novel.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Kevin Fagan, The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family, and Second Chances
(Atria/One Signal)
“Fagan traces the uniquely American slippery slope that leads to homelessness. A haunting proposal that the homelessness crisis is caused above all by a startling lack of compassion in American society.”
–Publishers Weekly
Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
(Basic Books)
“Beautifully and sensitively written, Summer of Fire and Blood tells the forgotten trauma of the sixteenth century–when thousands of ordinary people risked all they had in the hope of ushering in a new world. It takes the stories of our unlettered, peasant ancestors from the sidelines of history and, recentering them, restores their full humanity. And it warns us that the questions they posed are the very urgent questions that confront us again now.”
–Suzannah Lipscomb
Sam Rebelein, The Poorly Made and Other Things
(William Morrow)
“Taken on its own, each tale is horror perfection, as dread seeps in slowly until it explodes, and readers are left in breathlessly horrifying awe….A stellar collection.”
–Library Journal
