From Shakespeare to Tigers, 17 books out in paperback this November.

It’s November, and this year that means a madcap month: America’s existential midterms; a potentially even more charged Thanksgiving than usual depending on what happens in said midterms; international elections; international conflicts that seem to have no end; weather transitions amidst the chaos of climate change; and more. In other words, it’s a month where having good things to read may be even more essential and cathartic than usual, and, to that end, I have seventeen books to recommend in fiction and nonfiction, each out in a lovely new paperback edition this November.

Stay safe, especially in a month where so much is at stake, and let these be your literary companions when you need them.

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Sara Levine, The Hitch
(Roxane Gay Books)

“I’m a huge fan of Sara Levine, her improbable and wild imagination, her exceptional comedic talent, and most importantly, her ability to lean into the strange complexities of human nature to create a story that will upend you entirely. In The Hitch, Rose Cutler holds onto everything in her life with a death grip of certainty, but when her nephew Nathan believes the spirit of a dead corgi now inhabits his body, the novel opens up, in beautiful and bizarre ways, to the pleasure—and terrors—of being out of control.”
–Kevin Wilson

George Packer, The Emergency
(Picador)

“A propulsive Orwellian novel….Packer writes with spare elegance and mounting urgency, and while the depictions of rising class and intergenerational conflicts have clear parallels to real-world matters, the novel never loses its taut dramatic edge. It’s a knockout.”
–Publishers Weekly

Anika Jade Levy, Flat Earth
(Catapult)

“If Mary Gaitskill and Renata Adler spent a weekend collaborating on a sequel to Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, maybe you’d have some precedent for Flat Earth. Anika Jade Levy’s razor-thin, razor-sharp debut novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. In fragments that blaze like iPhone faces in dark bedrooms at 3:00 a.m., Flat Earth captures a zeitgeist from its daily ephemera to its unhinged gestalt, transmuting the mess into a brilliant, visceral, funny, provocative, resonant, essential work of art.”
–Justin Taylor

Daniel Swift, The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare
(Picador)

“The Dream Factory is one of the most exciting and original books about Shakespeare that I’ve read in years. Deeply researched, beautifully written, it brings to life how Shakespeare ‘became Shakespeare’ and created his early masterpieces at the Theatre in Shoreditch. A thrilling story, well told.”
–James Shapiro

Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
(Penguin)

“Want to know why America is fractured? Read Paper Girl, an indispensable account of how things got so ugly here. Beth Macy grew up poor, with an alcoholic dad, in Urbana, Ohio, yet through education she made the jump to the middle class. Returning to her homeplace, she probes the factors that make a move like hers almost unimaginable for the kids who sit in the same classrooms as she did. Heartfelt, intimate and enraging, it is more than a memoir; it’s a manifesto.”
–Geraldine Brooks

Jen Percy, Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation
(Vintage)

“Jen Percy has captured, in the most lyrical and authentic way possible, what it means to be a woman alive today. The threats, the systems, the brutality and the beauty. Girls Play Dead illustrates what our best books can do, what they can say in a time of crisis, and indeed, why we need them for our very survival. I read it, got to the end and immediately began again. It is so full of wisdom and heart and somehow—I don’t know how she’s done it—makes me feel less alone in the world. I am fully in awe of this book.”
–Rachel Louise Snyder

Kevin Moffett, Only Son
(McSweeney’s)

“Kevin Moffett’s Only Son perfectly captures the long ache of fatherhood in all its baffling beauty. It’s an extraordinary book about the sometimes tender, sometimes distant, always mysterious relationship between fathers and sons, written with wit and warmth and just enough sting to make it real.”
–Nathan Hill

Cynthia Zarin, Estate
(Picador)

“Imagine you are a woman in the late summer of life. You are undeluded yet obsessive about love. If you could, without mailing the letter, write everything to an elusive man whom you share secretly with other women—would you lay yourself bare? And supposing that in unspooling your reflections, in a shimmering stream of consciousness that threads the labyrinth of your past, you manage to keep your heart intact, accepting the irony that you will not get an answer—that none of us will—you might succeed in writing a novel like Estate, though it doesn’t, to my knowledge, have a like. It’s ravishing.”
–Judith Thurman

Olivia Laing, The Silver Book
(Picador)

“Sublime….[A] visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking….Laing’s prose is taut and clear-eyed, even at its most sensational….This unsentimental style brings the 1970s Italian cinema scene to vivid life, making the work of Pasolini and Fellini feel fresh, daring and urgent.”
–The New York Times

Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined
(Picador)

“[Indignity is] gripping, evoking the work of Elena Ferrante in its invocations of fevered girlhood, marriage, friendship and intellectual debate in webs of family, class struggle and politics….Albania comes across as a fascinating, soulful place, at once fiercely itself and implicated in wider geopolitics. So, too, is Ypi’s quest to understand her grandmother [Leman] both particular and universal, historical and timely….By the final page, we both know and do not know Leman. Yet she will stay with me—fragmented, buffeted by history, eroded by time, but indelible all the same.”
–The New York Times

Ellen Huet, Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult
(Picador)

“With her ultra-vivid reporting, Ellen Huet guides us through a surreal San Francisco subculture where sex served as currency and the boundary between empowerment and exploitation was obliterated. This isn’t just a tale of one cultish company—it’s a mirror held up to tech’s dark side, so full of greed and self-delusion.”
–Ashlee Vance

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
(Basic Books)

“[A]n extraordinary and brilliant book. In Roper’s evocatively beautiful, crystal-clear prose, the complex landscapes of early sixteenth-century Germany—physical, psychological, spiritual, social, and political—unfold….She shows us the dreams and deeds that shaped the Peasants’ War, the greatest popular revolt in western Europe before the French Revolution, and the ways in which that war shaped the future that followed. This is a profound account of an attempt to change the world, a sensational narrative that is both human and humane, illuminating, resonant, and unsettling.”
–Helen Castor

Eshani Surya, Ravishing
(Roxane Gay Books)

“Ravishing is a poignant portrait of what it often feels like to be a woman in the world, up against impossible standards and a beauty industry determined to capitalize on them by any means necessary. I can’t imagine a novel more perfect for the current moment we’re in, or more important. In a time when it feels like the only acceptable option as a woman is ceaseless self-improvement, Ravishing is a much-needed moment to pause and remember exactly who benefits from ever-changing beauty trends and standards—and who is hurt by them.”
–Olivia Muenter

Viola van de Sandt, The Dinner Party
(Little Brown)

“[A] powerful story of a woman’s suppressed rage that manifests over the course of one disastrous evening….Raw emotion and legitimate anger….Van de Sandt’s exploration of the countless ways women diminish themselves so that the men in the room can take up space remains urgent, and Franca’s story, terrifyingly real.”
–The New York Times

Nalini Singh, Such a Perfect Family
(Berkley)

“Singh (There Should Have Been Eight) comes in hot and never lets up in this exhilarating standalone thriller about a man whose string of dead lovers starts arousing suspicion….Singh shrewdly toys with readers’ expectations en route to some truly bombshell revelations. Even genre veterans are likely to be fooled by this devilish puzzler.”
–Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution
(PublicAffairs)

“The definitive book on the Cambodian Revolution.”
–The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jonathan C. Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China
(Picador)

“This feast of a book is as rare a creature as the animals, people, and wild places it brings to life: it’s an epic and breathless adventure, stuffed with campfire stories, laughs, brushes with death, and the deep history of a place so rich and strange it seems conjured from ancient myths. If you liked Owls of the Eastern Ice, you’ll love this return to the Sikhote-Alin with the plucky, half-mad Russians and Americans who risked their lives to save the greatest of the great cats.”
–Jonathan Meiburg