Gay Talese! Gabrielle Korn! Poets respond to Taylor Swift 23 new books out today.

By Gabrielle Bellot

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December 3, 2024, 4:33am

December, astonishingly, is here, the tail end of a year that has felt remarkable for many reasons, too many, indeed, to list. And the year to come is one defined by extraordinary uncertainties, both in the United States and beyond. Still, we’ll always have books (well, one hopes, anyway!), and to that end, I have twenty-three scintillating new offerings for you in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Below, you’ll find hotly anticipated novels and story collections by Gabrielle Korn (queer cli-fi!); Julia Armfield with a novel influenced by King Lear; Weike Wang’s striking exploration of family and couple dynamics; Omar Khalifah with a mix of humor and horror in Palestine’s past and present; and much, much more. In poetry, over a hundred poets respond in verse to Taylor Swift lyrics; Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani have a highly giftable chapbook box set featuring new voices in African poetry; and Mackenzie Polonyi offers up innovative, multigenerational poems.

And in nonfiction, you’ll find a collection of Gay Talese’s writing, a new edition of Lucy Grealy’s classic memoir, a surprising history of the cello and its players, a look at the voyages across and many civilizations living across the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus set sail, and more.

The future is murky, but it’ll always be a bit better with something good to read by your side. Be safe and well, Dear Readers, and I’ll see you next week!

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Gabrielle Korn, The Shutouts
(St. Martin’s Press)

“[The Shutouts] shifts its critique from corporate white feminism to the sinister side of activist culture and cults of personality….Readers seeking cli-fi that celebrates queer characters and survival will find this a hopeful look at the future even after disaster.”
–Library Journal

Weike Wang, Rental House
(Riverhead)

“Funny and delightful, Rental House is a story for anyone who’s experienced demanding parents, misunderstanding in-laws, a vacation-gone-wrong, or mid-life questions about how to reconcile your own personality liabilities with those of the person you love most.”
–Elif Batuman

Julia Armfield, Private Rites
(Flatiron Books)

“Inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, this characteristically eerie and emotive novel explores faith, legacy, and grief for loved ones and for the world as we know it.”
–GQ

Gay Talese, A Town Without Time: Gay Talese’s New York
(Mariner)

“The [collection of essays] shines with the love that the author, the son of an Atlantic City tailor, bears for his adopted home, giving E.B. White’s legendary ode, Here Is New York, a run for its money….Even on rereading, Talese’s work gets better, like fine wine.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Lucy Grealy, Suleka Francey Jaouad (foreword), Autobiography of a Face (Thirtieth Anniversary Edition)
(Harper Perennial)

“A memoir of great beauty. In her intensely elegant prose, Lucy Grealy describes the loneliness of pain, the confusion of childhood, the slow shock of her disfigured face with an exquisite unblinking intelligence that is both gracious and, improbably, filled with joy. I love this book.”
–Cathleen Schine

Callum Robinson, Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman
(Ecco)

“I didn’t think it possible to blend the tones and sensibilities of James Herriott and Anthony Bourdain, but Callum Robinson has managed to do it—in wood! This wise and wonderful book takes the lucky reader as deeply into the grain of Britain’s primal medium as it does into the psyche of one its most gifted practitioners. Trees, chairs, and woodworkers alike will resonate differently once you’ve become Ingrained.”
–John Vaillant

Kristie Frederick Daugherty (editor), Invisible String: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift
(Ballantine Books)

“Meditative, varied, and visceral, paying tribute to Swift’s love of words and her deeply felt passions…[an] indelible, beautiful collection.”
–Booklist

Mackenzie Polonyi, Post-Volcanic Folk Tales
(Akashic)

“In Mackenzie Polonyi’s stunning debut collection, the human body becomes a landscape inscribed by multigenerational story, memory, and trauma. In these visceral lyric poems, boundaries between self and nature dissolve. Polonyi unearths ancestral connections…as her symptoms and injuries merge with her suspended yet rooted foremothers’ own ruptures. An alchemical blend of folklore and science….Blistering yet nurturing.”
–Christopher Salerno

Kwame Dawes, Chris Abani, Kumi: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set
(Akashic)

“[AA] collection of poems that speaks both softly and forcefully, as well as emotionally and ideologically, about what it means to be human and African today….Kumi is a tribute to a visionary and valuable investment in African poetry.”
–The Rumpus

Ella Baxter, Woo Woo
(Catapult)

“Smart, razor sharp, and witty, Woo Woo takes us on a wild journey of female ambition, art, social media, stalkers, and dinner parties full of people with exquisite mullets vaping. I’ll read anything Ella Baxter writes–and Woo Woo is unmissable.”
–Sarah Rose

Amanda Lee Koe, Sister Snake
(Ecco)

“Amanda Lee Koe has written a wild, sexy steroidal burst of a novel. A freewheeling retelling of an ancient Chinese legend, Sister Snake is an inquiry into self-reinvention, escaping one’s destiny, belonging and all that makes us human–or not.”
–Tash Aw

Pat Barker, The Voyage Home
(Doubleday)

“Barker’s vision of a world shaped by violence, a key theme in all her fiction, is equal to the tragic grandeur of ancient myth, and her insistence that ordinary people’s sufferings be given equal weight with the woes of the mighty gives it a contemporary edge. More brilliant work from one of world literature’s greatest writers.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Chris Bollen, Havoc
(Harper)

“A lot of books claim to be Highsmithian, but this one actually is: A highly readable, twisty, and shrewd satire presenting as a thriller about entitlement, loneliness, jealousy, and the eternal friction between the young and old. Utterly enjoyable.”
–Hanya Yanagihara

Patrick Hutchison, Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman
(St. Martin’s Press)

Imagine if Bill Bryson had decided to put down stakes during his walk in the woods and asked Charles Bukowski to help him refurbish a derelict shack deep in the forest of the Cascade Mountains. And there you have Patrick Hutchinson’s hilarious and poignant Cabin. Hutchison braves truck-swallowing mudslides, spiders vying for outhouse ownership, hermit meth tweakers, and glowing-eyed mountain lions (both real and imagined) to chronicle not only his dilapidated cabin’s transformation, but his own.”
–Bob Drury

Kate Kennedy, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound
(Pegasus Books)

“It is the cello’s capacity to live materially and biographically that Kate Kennedy explores in this strikingly original book. She organizes her account around four European cellists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose difficult and dangerous lives extended far beyond the good manners of the concert hall.”
–The Times (London)

Andrew Hui, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries
(Princeton University Press)

“A] stimulating history….Hui makes a convincing case that personal libraries were intimately bound up with Renaissance conceptions of selfhood. Bibliophiles will find much to ponder.”
–Publishers Weekly

Omar Khalifah, Sand-Catcher (trans. Barbara Romaine)
(Coffee House Press)

“For anyone looking for insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy.”
–The Millions

Zahid Rafiq, The World with Its Mouth Open
(Tin House)

“The World With Its Mouth Open is a brilliant debut collection, both restrained and revelatory. In eleven meticulously crafted stories, Zahid Rafiq details the human mechanics of modern-day Kashmiri life. There is so much of the world here, rendered in small intimate moments of grief, violence, humor, and wanting, every sentence taut as a tendon. Rafiq is a writer of considerable talent, and this collection marks the beginning of what will be a marvelous literary career.”
–Omar El Akkad

Cary Groner, The Way
(Spiegel & Grau)

“This epic journey through a near-future, postapocalyptic landscape blends extreme suspense with serene meditation…. Groner offers a contemplative take on the postapocalyptic genre that leaves room for hope but doesn’t stint on realism. This novel reads like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road meets Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
–Library Journal

Claire Mulley, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter
(Pegasus Books)

“Gripping, moving and important: an amazing and until-now neglected story of female WW2 heroism and secret derring-do. This tale of the resistance fighter Agent Zo is amazingly told and deeply researched by the excellent historian of WW2 espionage Clare Mulley.”
–Simon Sebag Montefiore

John Haywood, Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus
(Pegasus Books)

“Haywood has penned a sweeping, eye-opening maritime history of the North Atlantic Ocean. Crammed with fascinating stories and details, this narrative spans thousands of years. An expertly written and accessible survey of the pre-Columbian Atlantic world.”
–Library Journal

Glenn Adamson, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present
(Bloomsbury)

“A masterful cultural history, revealing how imagining the future has long been a way of remaking the present, not only for religious prophets, scientific thinkers, and science fiction writers, but in struggles for Native American sovereignty, civil rights, women’s rights, environmental justice, and more. In a moment when the future can seem too dark to contemplate, A Century of Tomorrows advances the liberatory possibilities of thinking about the days to come.”
–Louis S. Warren

Rémy Ngamije, Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space: A Literary Mixtape
(Gallery/Scout Press)

“I am actively jealous of Remy’s imagination and its daring. Here we have a writer who sees everything, from the absurdities and complexities of Namibian life and then offers them to you wrapped in humor and the tapestry of global south music to say we are all mixed. This is a journey across all genres to paint a picture of an Africa that has globalized onto itself – the West even though the present is peripheral. Through Remy, Windhoek sings its song. Take a listen!”
–Mukoma Wa Ngugi