Haruki Murakami! Sondheim! Parks and Rec! 23 new books out today.

By Gabrielle Bellot

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November 19, 2024, 4:21am

November has been quite a month, and one of the few constants it has had is its lack of constancy, its surprises. Still, one thing does remain consistent: that there will be new books to consider each Tuesday. Below, you’ll find twenty-three books out today in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. You’ll find well-known and up-and-coming authors alike; you’ll find beautiful new editions of classics that might make excellent gifts, as well as innovative new stories and explorations.

It may be a strange time for many of us, but there’s truly something comforting, if not salvific, about finding a new book to curl up with when the world seems to be spinning widdershins beneath us—and I hope these, which span such a wide range of styles and subjects, will do just that for you.

Read on, stay warm, and be safe, Dear Readers.

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Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (trans. Philip Gabriel)
(Knopf)

“Another beguilingly enigmatic tale from Murakami, complete with jazz, coffee, Borgesian twists, the Beatles, and other trademark motifs….blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Pulse), and coming-of-age story….[An] elegant fable that deftly weaves ordinary reality…with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful. Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Jane DeLynn, Colm Toibin (foreword), In Thrall
(Semiotext(e))

“Jane DeLynn’s newly republished coming-of-age novel set in the pre-Stonewall ’60s is comedic, haunting, and decidedly untidy.”
–Andrew Chan

Ursula Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler (foreword) The Dispossessed (5oth Anniversary Edition)
(Harper Perennial)

“The Dispossessed, [Le Guin’s] most intricate and beautifully realized book, channels her lifelong obsessions—Daoism, pacifism, humanity’s sacred relationship to the natural world—into a moving story that is also about loneliness, will, and what it means to return home. More than a novel, this is an ontological work of extraordinary imagination and compassion.”
–The Atlantic

Abigail Thomas, Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing
(Scribner)

“Reflections on aging from a master of the fresh and moving fragment….Thomas is always fun, smart, thoughtful, and pithy, modestly trying not to take up too much of your time….her candor is a gift to us all.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (illustrated by John Burgoyne)
(Scribner)

“The Serviceberry is a profoundly important book about how we might remodel consumer economies around mutuality, generosity, and bountifulness. The time you’ll spend reading this book will, like the time spent picking wild berries, nourish your soul, heart, and mind. I hope to give this book to everybody.”
–Anthony Doerr

Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
(FSG)

“For lovers of the history of literature, there is no better book to pick up….In a time in which books and book culture are under threat, Frank’s literary history proves to be more than just a trip through our greatest works; it’s an urgent call for daring in our reading and writing.”
–Chicago Review of Books

Langston Hughes, Danez Smith (editor), Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes
(Legacy Lit)

“Langston Hughes…wrote directly into the fullness and complexity of the Black experience. The suffering. The joy. The violence. The resilience. His poetry revels in the music of our language. His love for his people leaps from the page. What a gift that Danez Smith, one of our greatest living poets, serves as our guide through this stunning collection of Hughes’ early work. What a gift that we get to see the past and present meeting in this beautiful way.”
–Clint Smith

Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
(Seven Stories Press)

“Context Collapse is an erudite and a perceptive essay in the form of a poem, which traces the history of poetry from ancient orality to the electronic age. Using both the line and the footnote in a self-referential and sophisticated performance, it argues that what poetry is depends on the economic, social and technological conditions of its production.”
–Eugene Ostashevsky

Billy Collins, Water, Water: Poems
(Random House)

“[Billy] Collins remains the most companionable of poetic companions.”
–The New York Times

Ann Moschovakis, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth
(Soft Skull)

“Like Anna Kavan and Mary Shelley before her, Anna Moschovakis knows that the phone call is always coming from inside the building. An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a haunting in nine acts–a terrifyingly apt commentary on contemporary psychology in which what has been lost is somehow too close to touch.”
–Lucy Ives

Homeless, My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor
(Clash Books)

“My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor is a miserere of grease-soaked depression 2,100 fathoms deep. Surreal and achingly vulnerable. Anyone who has sat paralyzed in the darkest fathoms of human emotion will find this book unsettlingly relatable, and maybe even a little hopeful. Homeless took the kind of desperation that leads you to the point of no return and created something beautiful.”
–Alan ten-Hoeve

Ingvild Rishø, Brightly Shining (trans. Caroline Wright)
(Grove Press)

“Ingvild Rishøi’s Brightly Shining is a dazzling contemporary fable of hardship and grit about two sisters who refuse to lose hope. Curl up with it for instant hygge and a warming of the heart.”
–Lily King

Nate DiMeo, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past
(Random House)

“Nate DiMeo delves through history with a poet’s eye, recovering the strange and revealing and even wonderful detritus of our past and reflecting on it in profound ways. The Memory Palace is a beautiful, moving, and often funny book made out of our collective history and DiMeo’s unique sensibility.”
–Phil Klay

Jessie Van Eerden, Yoke and Feather
(Dzanc)

“Linking seemingly discordant experiences so apt they ring harmonious as playground song, Van Eerden ruminates within the mundane, connecting memories of past loves and losses to moments here and gone in a spidery blink, burrowing deep in search of illuminating connections. This moving collection explores the poetry only found in meditation on our deepest longings.”
–Southern Literary Review

Jim O’Heir, Welcome to Pawnee: Stories of Friendship, Waffles, and Parks and Recreation
(William Morrow)

“Filled with hilarious stories and sweet observations, Welcome to Pawnee is a book for any Parks and Rec fan. It’s funny and straight from the heart, and it took me back to the absolute joy it was to make this show with people like our dear Jim O’Heir. Jim did a great job of not Jerry-ing this book.”
–Amy Poehler

Traci Brimhall, Love Prodigal
(Copper Canyon Press)

“With each successive book, there’s even more grandness to Brimhall’s narrative voice. She writes with a commanding sense, with some poems feeling like the voice beaming to Job, and other poems arriving like a hypnotizing whisper at night….Another masterful book from one of our finest poets.”
–The Millions

Niall Williams, Time of the Child
(Bloomsbury)

“On the surface, Time of the Child by Niall Williams is an elegiac portrait of life in an Irish village in the Christmas season of 1962. But it is so much more than that. Somehow, by laying bare the inner lives of these decent country people, my own life feels so much richer for having read it. I was deeply moved by this novel.”
–Mary Beth Keane

Sascha Naspini, The Bishop’s Villa
(Europa)

“The Bishop’s Villa illuminates a dark slice of Italian history. Naspini exposes the brutality of the prison camp and highlights the immense courage of the Resistance fighters. Fans of The Book Thief and All the Light We Cannot See will be moved by the bravery and humanity shared among prisoners, civilians, and sympathizers.”
–Booklist

Richard Schoch, How Sondheim Can Change Your Life
(Atria Books)

“Richard Schoch presents the complexity of Sondheim’s work with clarity and accessibility. Sondheim continues to change my life, and this book will help many readers, listeners, and theatergoers to understand a bit better how he does it.”
–Ben Brantley

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
(Harper)

“I greatly enjoyed this superb chronicle of power and passion, which unfolds like the most improbable fiction, with the oddest cast of characters, the strange king and his favorite, and the court of enablers and plotters—a true Jacobean drama, except bloodier and sexier. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes with gusto and insight.”
–Paul Theroux

Jean Strouse, Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
(FSG)

“A riveting book about an amazing vanished world, a remarkable family and a great and mysterious artist, told with energy and vividness and sharp humor, full of extraordinary characters, some dubious, some shocking, some tragic, and sweeping with speed and brio over a great arc of time. No one could tell this story better, and what a story it is!”
–Hermione Lee

Marcus J. Moore, High and Rising a.k.a. The De La Soul Book
(Dey Street Books)

“High And Rising is, among other things, a love letter, but not one grounded solely in the romantics of the past. Nostalgia enriches the storytelling, the touchability of this historic group, but it is also an ode to how they touched the present, and how they will endlessly touch the future.”
–Hanif Abdurraqib

Rita Omokha, Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America
(St. Martin’s Press)

“With Resist, Rita Omokha has achieved a dual debut as an author. She has vividly captured more than a century of activism by young Black Americans, and filtered that saga through her own experience as a Nigerian immigrant being thrust into a society of ruthlessly binary racial identity. Part history, part memoir, part call to political arms, Resist is a valuable addition to our nation’s protest literature.”
–Samuel G Freedman