Garth Greenwell! Sally Rooney! Joe Sacco! 24 books out in paperback this September.
Fall is here, a season with a name rather suggestive in the unsettling times we find ourselves in—but art can always help us navigate the strangedark. To that end, I come bearing new books to consider as September rolls around. Below, you’ll find a collection of bright lights in this grim moment, with twenty-four books in fresh paperback editions to consider in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. If you missed them in hardcover, or were just waiting for the paperbacks, I can’t recommend enough checking these out. You’ll find beloved authors, promising debuts, and noteworthy up-and-comers alike.
I hope you add these to your to-be-read piles. Whether they comfort or compellingly confound, spend some time in their worlds when you need to be somewhere else—and no one can blame you for wanting to be elsewhere for a bit! Stay safe, Dear Readers, until next time.
*
Garth Greenwell, Small Rain
(Picador)
“Small Rain was one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had….A novel about a man stuck alone in a hospital bed should be inert, but Small Rain is anything but, a reminder of the wonder available in our individual humanities should we take the time to look and listen.”
–John Warner
Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
(Picador)
“Intermezzo is perfect—truly wonderful—a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements….She leans fully into her gifts here: more characters, more complication, ‘more life,’ as Margaret thinks….Is there a better novelist at work right now.”
–The Observer
Roddy Doyle, The Women Behind the Door
(Penguin)
“[The Women Behind the Door is a] miracle of a novel….[W]ith Paula, Doyle has created a fictional character as memorable as Molly Bloom or the Wife of Bath.”
–Associated Press
Joe Sacco, Paying the Land
(Metropolitan Books)
“Anyone trying to wrap their heads around Thanksgiving myths about Pilgrims and Indians while also acknowledging their role in the occupation of lands stolen from indigenous people and the continued demand for fossil fuels and other resources that has brought us to a state of climate emergency needs to read this incredible work of comics journalism by a masterful researcher, storyteller, and artist.”
–Thi Bui
Deborah Levy, The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies
(Picador)
“A dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more….Taken together, Levy’s extraordinary observations…amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters….Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind.”
–Publishers Weekly
Aaron Robertson, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
(Picador)
“In this stunning narrative, Aaron Robertson beautifully unveils the hidden spirit of Black utopian yearnings….The Black Utopians deftly shifts from intellectual history to cultural critique to personal memoir. In doing this, Robertson answers a profound question: what does it mean to be free? The Black Utopians is thus more than just a gripping story; it is an indispensable resource for all those who dream of horizons, and who imagine unimaginable worlds.”
–Alex Zamalin
Paul Muldoon, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore: Poems
(Picador)
“Like any solid poetry collection for the ages—and that’s the gist of [Paul Muldoon’s] oeuvre—it’s also of the ages….Muldoon could write about anything. His relationship to poetic form is fundamentally playful….Now as ever, Muldoon’s poems do their paradoxical best, looking backward as much as they do forward, to straddle two worlds at once.”
–Open Letters Review
Jesse Ball, The Repeat Room
(Catapult)
“Speculative fiction in the purest sense but also a work of fiction that takes big structural risks. The Repeat Room isn’t solely a book about capital punishment, but it does feel like a way to heighten certain elements of the debate over it, all the while reckoning with some of its author’s themes of choice. If you’re encountering Ball’s work for the first time here, you’re in for a challenging but rewarding read.”
–Tobias Carroll
Chloe Aridjis, Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays, and a Portrait Gallery
(Catapult)
“Mexican American writer Aridjis conjures the strange and marvelous in this dazzling collection of stories and essays . . . A surreal mood and intellectual heft sustain and unify the varied collection. Readers will eagerly turn the page to see where Aridjis takes them next.”
–Publishers Weekly
CJ Leede, American Rapture
(TOR Nightfire)
“A blistering, feverish ride through a uniquely American apocalypse. Leede crafts a deeply compelling descent through an unraveling heartland. Sure to rattle the cages of our Puritanical nightmare country.”
–Chuck Wendig
Ed Simon, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain
(Melville House)
“I truly admire the hell out of this book. It’s thrilling yet erudite investigation into the long history of a Faustian bargain with the devil. It uncovers the way the sinister transaction, however mythic, has been incorporated into literature, culture—and contemporary human nature. Eye-opening and pleasurable reading that is also cause for self-reflection.”
–Ron Rosenbaum
Jason de León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
(Penguin)
“For seven years, de León tracked the lives of both migrants crossing the border and the coyotes who shepherded them. He unveils a profoundly intimate account of their world—of the work, the terror, and the human connections made on their treacherous journeys. A National Book Award finalist, Soldiers and Kings seeks to buck the dangerous stereotypes that are often associated with migrants and smugglers, and instead, shows their fully nuanced stories.”
–TIME
Sarah Smarsh, Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class
(Scribner)
“Smarsh’s ability to interweave stories—including aspects of her life—places her in the tradition of working-class journalism exemplified by Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich and others…The deep empathy that animates Smarsh’s prose combines with a rigorous intellect committed to uncovering and explaining structural causes of our current cultural moment.”
–The Los Angeles Times
Attica Locke, Guide Me Home
(Mulholland Books)
“Locke writes with deep affection about her native east Texas, but also unflinchingly exposes its deep racism: the personal, political, and economic history that allows wealthy white people to manipulate people of color. Locke weaves together the mystery of Sera’s disappearance with the fraught realities of Trump-era Texas….Powerful and unsettling, full of layered characters and difficult choices…a mystery for readers who appreciate nuance and resist too-tidy endings.”
–Shelf Awareness
Rivers Solomon, Model Home
(Picador)
“Solomon reimagines the haunted-house genre in this poignant exploration of the ghosts that ‘unexorcisable, go on inside of us’: namely, our parents and our childhoods….Solomon evokes the real-life horrors of racism, abuse, and generational trauma, deftly exploring how a human being can become a quasi-haunted house. Coming on the heels of Sorrowland and The Unkindness of Ghosts, Model Home proves Solomon’s tremendous talent for reinventing genre.”
–Esquire
Virginie Despentes, Dear Dickhead (trans. Frank Wynne)
(Picador)
“Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk-rock George Eliot with a keen taste for the pitiable innards of her characters: no one else has her slyly penetrating eye, her spiky sense of humor, her razor wit that cuts like wire through the accumulated crud of our age’s default thought patterns….A droll, hilarious, insightful record of our unfortunate times.”
–Alexandra Kleeman
Craig Brown, Q: A Voyage Around the Queen
(Picador)
“Q is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth unlike any other…absorbing, edifying and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.”
–The Washington Post
Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering
(Back Bay Books)
“The long-awaited follow-up to The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s groundbreaking 2000 debut, explores the watershed moments that define this new age of societal upheaval…with curiosity and humor.”
–TIME
Ingrid Robeyns, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
(Astra House)
“Robeyns has written an essential book from a radical point of view. It is high time someone asked the question, “Is there such a thing as having too much money?” Along with its corollary question, ‘So what are we going to do about it?’ Robeyns tackles both with deep knowledge, experience and empathy.”
–Abigail Disney
Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding
(Picador)
“I time traveled with Lauren Elkin and found myself in a Parisian apartment, soaking in human stories and palpitating with new discoveries as I turned each page. What a rich, tantalizing narrative defying conventions.”
–Xialolu Guo
Matt Haig, The Life Impossible
(Penguin)
“Haig’s wise and moving novel is both a mystery and a love story, a fantasy and a billet-doux to the planet. Perhaps its greatest gift lies in showing us that it is possible to dismantle the boundaries we have built, grasp the connections previously hidden, and appreciate life in all its richness.”
–The Guardian
Jandy Nelson, When the World Tips Over
(Dial Books)
“A gloriously intricate and expansive YA/adult crossover….Nelson’s style is playful [yet her] writing reverberates with the pain of loss and longing….Almost nobody [in the novel] is who they initially seem, and often seemingly random moments turn out to have a far deeper significance…offer[s] an excellent gateway to the work of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and many others.”
–Just Imagine
Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
(Scribner)
“Pulse quickening…Chip War makes a whale of a case: that the chip industry now determines both the structure of the global economy and the balance of geopolitical power. But the book is not a polemic. Rather, it’s a nonfiction thriller—equal parts The China Syndrome and Mission Impossible….If any book can make general audiences grok the silicon age—and finally recognize how it rivals the atomic age for drama and import—Chip War is it.”
–The New York Times
Giles Milton, The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War
(Holt)
“In addition to relying on a vast archive of official records of events, Milton also uses accounts written by some of the less prominent observers of this political alliance which brings a sense of immersion and immediacy….Outstanding writing and research make The Stalin Affair an authoritative and lively account that shows how despite tensions, strong egos and different approaches to leadership, these unlikely partners worked together to win the war.”
–BookPage
