Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019, Part 2

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OCTOBER

Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
FSG, October 1

Lerner’s latest novel is as brilliant and heady as ever, and manages to stand inside the genre he helped popularize—autofiction—while also stretching and warping it outward. It concerns a young man named Adam growing up in Topeka with a family a lot like Lerner’s; as the narrative jumps from character to character—including his parents and, notably, a social outcast in Adam’s class—we follow his story from childhood to his (very) current adulthood. The result is a deep, idiosyncratic portrait of a family and a place in time, and a novel that asks difficult questions about how we got here—and how anyone gets anywhere.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Silvina Ocampo, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell, The Promise, and Silvina Ocampo, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, Forgotten Journey
City Lights, October 1

Year by year, more of the great Argentinian Silvina Ocampo is restored to us, like the lost work of a luminously dark seer. Borges and Calvino were in her thrall: the fantastic Mariana Enriquez has written an entire book on her. Yet Ocampo remains an obscure writer to most. Yet what work she wrote, what an incredible life she lived. These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. In The Promise, a woman falls overboard a transatlantic ship and confronts her regrets and longings as she bobs in the freezing water. Forgotten Journey gives us 28 short stories, translated into English for the first time, providing a surprising glimpse of the birth of gothic fiction in Latin America which dates back to the 1930s. Lusciously strange, uncompromising, yet balanced and precise, there has never been another voice like hers.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said
Penguin Press, October 1

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein brought down an empire of abuse and brought forth a worldwide chorus of voices calling for those in power to believe women. With She Said, they tell the story of how that reporting reached the public and process what followed, as their initial reporting spurred dozens of other investigations of violence, sexual harassment, and abuses of power.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest Most Destructive Industry on Earth
Crown, October 1

This is no brisk repurposing of a presenter’s frequently told opinions. Blowout looks to be a huge, heavily researched history of corruption within the oil and gas industry, a practice strangling so many democracies today. (No galleys are available as of yet.) It also aims in part to explain why our federal government has felt so hijacked in recent years. In a field of energy history and malfeasance that includes Pulitzer Prize winners like David Yerzgin’s The Prize, which covered 1850 to 1990, and Steve Coll’s tremendous book on ExxonMobil and American Power, Private Empire, there’s a lot to compete with here, but hopes are Maddow brings—as she often does—something new.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Brendan Simms, Hitler: A Global Biography
Basic Books, October 1

Historian Brendan Simms has given himself quite the hill to climb, and I’ll be interested to see how he manages. In this new biography, Simms argues that from the earliest years of Adolf Hitler’s career, he was reacting primarily to the threat of American capitalism rather than that of political systems like communism. Hitler’s assertions of Aryan superiority, Simms contends, were underscored by fears of German obsolescence. I imagine the only thing more challenging for a historian than writing a revisionist history of a great hero is writing one about one of our most contemptible villains.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Stephen Chbosky, Imaginary Friend
Grand Central, October 1

The author of Perks of Being a Wallflower, or, as I like to think of it, my high school bible, goes full Stephen King in his new supernatural thriller of epic proportions. Imaginary Friend follows a boy and his mother as they flee to a small town to escape a violent past. The boy vanishes into the forest for days, and upon his return, instructs the townspeople to build a treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or the entire town will meet an unbearable fate. This is my kind of Christmas novel!

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein
Grove Press, October 1

I’ve loved Jeanette Winterson ever since reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in college, so I’m particularly excited for Frankissstein to be unleashed. Moving between Lake Geneva in 1816 and Brexit Britain, this love story dives into developments in artificial intelligence, sex robots, the weight of having a body, and the way we all might just be vessels for age-old stories told over and over again. Winterson plays with language in a way that is always a delight, and the way she collapses time really ties it all together in the end.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Paul Hendrickson, Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
Knopf, October 1

Paul Hendrickson has made a life of taking the figures we think we know, and revealing how little we actually understood them. From the depression-era photographer Marion Post Wolcott to the war-maker Robert MacNamara and the writer Ernest Hemingway, his subjects tend to be complex, ambitious men and women caught in the thrust of outsized times. Hendrickson has his work cut out for him with Wright, certainly the most written about architect in the world. Yet this, his longest book might be his most beautifully written—there’s a tone of absolute curiosity and respect, a judiciousness about probing a long-dead psyche, and a depth of understanding about how hidden demons often contribute to art, all of which make this book absolutely riveting, as if all the buildings it describes have yet to be built.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Staceyann Chin, Crossfire
Haymarket, October 1

Poet and international spoken word superstar Staceyann Chin is releasing her first full-length collection of poetry. I can’t wait to see what happens when she takes her queer Jamaican feminist performing sensibilities from the stage to the page.

–Kevin Chau, Editorial Fellow

Kevin Coval, Everything Must Go
Haymarket, October 1

Part of Haymarket’s BreakBeat Poet series, Everything Must Go is a graphic poetry collection, with text by Kevin Coval and illustrations by Langston Allston. A vibrant yet solemn portrait of Chicago’s Wicker Park in the 90s, this collection examines gentrification and commemorates what gets lost in the process.

–Kevin Chau, Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Grand Union: Stories
Penguin Press, October 8

Just as Feel Free, her NBCC-winning collection of nonfiction last year, made it clear that Zadie Smith is our best living critic, Grand Union will make it apparent she’s also one of our finest short story writers, too. Assembling tales from the past two decades with ten brand new ones, Grand Union showcases a huge range of effects, from lyric elegy to high satire and even farce. The compression and swiftness of these tales are opposite skills to the ones Smith has plied in her five, wondrously different novels. Yet to watch these tales unfold is to feel a gladness that only virtuosity—and emotional depth—can ignite.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Michael Frank, What Is Missing
FSG, October 8

When a woman’s husband, a famous writer, dies, she finds herself back in her childhood city of Florence, where she meets a sensitive teen and his charismatic father. What ensues between them is part love-triangle, part surrogate family, described with Frank’s habitual acuity, empathy, and fearlessness.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Katie Lowe, The Furies
St. Martin’s, October 8

In the late 1990s, a study group at a girls’ boarding school brings together four young women with an interest in mythology, whose studies quickly turn toward the dark and dangerous. Their anger and intensity is given space in a way we don’t often see in coming-of-age stories about young women, and the result is gripping and satisfying.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Jac Jemc, False Bingo
MCD x FSG Originals, October 8

A second collection of stories from the author of the celebrated The Grip of It. “These seventeen stories explore what happens when our fears cross over into the real, if only for a fleeting moment,” the publisher writes. “Identities are stolen, alternate universes are revealed, and innocence is lost as the consequences of minor, seemingly harmless decisions erupt to sabotage a false sense of stability.” Here for it.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
Bloomsbury, October 8

If you haven’t read Deborah Levy, a section of your life—a glad, less alone, more laughter-filled one—has yet to begin. Start with her two memoirs, or the gloriously perfect summer read, Swimming Home, then try Black Vodka, her recently rereleased short stories. By that point, it’ll be time for The Man Who Saw Everything to come out from Bloomsbury. This latest novel might be her most ambitious, for it brings together Levy’s power for observation, humor, clever framing and thinking while appearing to simply tell a story. Here it all begins with a tiny bit of a car accident, and a fork in reality parts which Levy explores brilliantly.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives
Simon & Schuster, October 8

Over the past few years, Saeed Jones has emerged as a fantastic poet and a major critical voice in the literary and cultural space, and I can’t wait to read his coming of age memoir. After all, as he writes, “People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.'”

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Daniel Mendelsohn, Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
NYRB, October 8

Daniel Mendelsohn’s ability to tilt pop culture through the vast complexities of Greek drama has given our bloodsport and binge-watching a depth we desperately need. These essays, collected from his work for the NYRB and elsewhere, bear re-reading as Mendelsohn remains our most unflinching critic, and clearly our most knowledgeable. First and foremost, though, he knows his own mind, so you never feel backed into a phenomenon on a wave of hype, or like a rubberneck watching a malcontent mean spiritedly crapping on the latest craze. Like all great critics, he transmits his curiosity in every sentence, and his dismay with humor. Even when you disagree with Mendelsohn, the feeling upon reading a piece by him is like having gone to Chinese food after the film you just watched with the smartest, most unpretentious friend you possess, and having hashed it out.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Josephine Rowe, Here Until August
Catapult, October 8

If you we’re a fan of Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably pick up Here Until August. (If you haven’t read A Loving, Faithful Animal, you should probably, definitely also do that.) Eavesdrop on neighbors, spend some time in the Catskills, and meet a dog named Chavez in Rowe’s new short story collection. In eerily beautiful prose, she takes you places you might think you know, and leaves you there to find your way out.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing
Sarah Crichton Books, October 8

A new collection for one of our most celebrated essayists and naturalists, in which she looks at erosion both physical and metaphysical, political and ecological, in art and in land. A must for anyone who loves the desert.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

James B. Stewart, Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law
Penguin Press, October 8

Anyone curious as to how the FBI wound up investigating both presidential candidates in 2016 needs to read this upcoming book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James B. Stewart. He has a long history of finding the goods. A former lawyer at Cravanth, Swaine & Moore, Stewart has investigated the practices of giant corporate law firms in the 80s, insider trading and the Clinton impeachment in the 90s, Michael Eisner’s once-storied time at Disney in the 2000s, and lying in general in the 2010s. He is meticulous, rigorous and extremely well-wired into halls of power. Tired of talking points and scoring points? It’d be a shock if this book doesn’t reshape our sense of the political context come fall.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Tim O’Brien, Dad’s Maybe Book
HMH, October 14

Are you as happy as I am that Tim O’Brien has written a book addressed to his two boys? The “father imparting lessons to son” genre has really picked up in the last few years, and here O’Brien collates the advice he has been thinking of giving his children since 2003. It is nice to know that the author of The Things They Carried finds joy and peace in his family. Maybe he’ll even have something to say to me.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Amaryllis Fox, Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA
Knopf, October 15

Amaryllis Fox’s path to the CIA began with the killing of Daniel Pearl, her writing mentor, by a terrorist group in Pakistan. Her work at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service drew the attention of the CIA, who recruited her for what would become a 10-year career there, some of it spent undercover on some of the most sensitive missions in the world.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race
W. W. Norton, October 15

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a light-skinned black man, the son of a black father and a white mother. He himself is married to a white Frenchwoman. The complexions of his own two children are so light, in fact, they could pass for white. So what is a man to do with these realities, and why does it matter at all? Williams prods our received wisdom about race, identity, and identitarianism in his new project. With the birth of his daughter, Williams said during an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, “the fiction of race was thrust into my social consciousness.” Can one “retire” from blackness and whiteness? Williams is prepared to make a sure-to-be controversial case in the affirmative.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Jokha Alharthi, tr. Marilyn Booth, Celestial Bodies
Catapult, October 15

The winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize concerns three sisters in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, and the ways their lives unfold in a changing landscape. This is not only the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize, but it is also the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, and is thus a major, exciting literary event.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Doubleday, October 15

Whether it’s all of science or most of the English language, or just a tiny part of the earth called England, Bill Bryson has proven himself a fabulous guide to what is knowable, never becoming a know-it-all, or even a know-it-some, on the page. Even on an off day he’s one of the funniest writers of prose in English. He’s still in fine form judging by his latest book, even if it was promoted by a heightened awareness of the finiteness of the meat comet we all dive through the days in.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Emily Flake, That Was Awkward: The Art and Etiquette of the Awkward Hug
Viking, October 15

I’ve stopped counting the hugs that don’t quite work out. There is no name, as far as I’m aware, for the special kind of horror when two people attempting to wrap their arms around one another’s bodies both lift their arms like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Do you try again? Flee? I’m hoping humorist Emily Flake’s new book will show me how it’s done. The title alone was enough to make me giggle. And it comes before Christmas, no less! Would my grandmother be offended if I gave this to her?

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Azra Raza, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last
Basic Books, October 15

Today, a patient with cancer is as likely to die of the disease as one was 50 years ago—despite the fact that cancer treatment is now a $150 billion industry. Following the diagnosis with leukemia of her husband, himself a noted oncologist, Doctor Azra Raza describes how medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, and how we can and must do better.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Benjamin Percy, Suicide Woods
Graywolf, October 15

There’s something terrifically satisfying about a very dark short story, so I’m very excited to read this collection of “horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods.” Also, I once heard Benjamin Percy read, and he has the deepest voice I have ever heard, so fingers crossed that he reads the audiobook himself.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again
Random House, October 15

Why yes, I do want to spend more time in the world of Olive Kitteridge! How kind of you to offer, Elizabeth Strout!

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay
Ecco, October 15

Steph Cha has won universal acclaim for her Juniper Song series, with its focus on portraying LA through the eyes of a millennial detective more concerned with friendship than romance, and I am psyched for her first stand-alone. Your House Will Pay was inspired by the complex history and tensions in 90s-era LA, and takes a hard look at the long-term consequences of bigotry, prejudice, and shame. It’s even better than its cover! And that’s saying something, cause the cover is absurdly gorgeous.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Elton John, Me
Henry Holt, October 15

Well-known fact about me: I’ve been a fan of Elton John, and the embarrassment of riches that is his back catalog, for many years now. Little-known fact about me: I’m named after Elton’s song Daniel, which my mother was listening to a lot while pregnant with me. New fact about me: just last week I went to see Rocketman, which I found to be a visual and aural delight. For all these reasons and more, I’m pretty excited to read, or at least skim, his official autobiography when it’s released in the fall.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Sharon Olds, Arias
Knopf, October 16

Pulitzer Prize-winner Sharon Olds is back with a new collection of lyric poetry. As the drama of the crumbling world plays out around her, Olds’ speaker comments on all the elements of the mess we’re in, probing into issues of race, class, family, violence, love, and loss. In this gorgeous, urgent collection, Olds injects her incisive observations with a fluid operatic voice.

–Kevin Chau, Editorial Fellow

Edmund Morris, Edison: A Life
Random House, October 22

Just before he died this spring, Edmund Morris had completed final changes to his years-in-the-making life of Thomas Edison, still the most prolific and transformative inventor in American history. We think of Edison as the inventor of the light bulb, but more than 1,000 other patents poured out of his Menlo Park lab in Edison’s lifetime. The phonograph. Early film technology. Improvements on the telegraph. Microphones in telephones. Motion picture cameras. Distributors for electrical power. He dabbled in electronic voting. He made a kind of early tattoo gun. Batteries for electric cars. The list is astonishing, and in this huge, tremendously well researched biography, the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning Morris has finally given him the biography he deserves.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Nathalia Holt, The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History
Little, Brown, October 22

Long before Disney released Frozen, its first female-directed, full-length feature, a group of women were working to animate the stories that enthralled children across the country. Nathalia Holt looks at the inner workings of the Disney studios and the personal stories of the women whose artistry and skill helped form the basis for Disney’s golden age, along with what it took for them to contribute in an entertainment industry led by men.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Jami Attenberg, All This Could Be Yours
HMH, October 22

I love secrets—even if they’re fictional secrets. All This Could Be Yours is, according to its publisher, “a novel of family secrets” so I am fully prepared to devour it. Add to that how much I adored Attenberg’s last novel All Grown Up, which managed an enviably deft balance of sharp humor and kindness, and I’m pounding my fork and knife on the table chanting “BOOK! BOOK! BOOK!” in anticipation.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

John Le Carré, Agent Running in the Field
Viking, October 22

John le Carré’s 25th novel is set in London in 2018, and will apparently be tackling “the division and rage at the heart of our modern world.” Otherwise, we’ve got very few details to work with: the publisher tells us that the protagonist, “in a desperate attempt to resist the political turbulence swirling around him, makes connections that will take him down a very dangerous path.” Which tells us exactly nothing, so we’ll all just have to wait patiently—or steal an advance copy.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Alexandra Jacobs, Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch
FSG, October 22

I would read anything about theatrical legend Elaine Stritch, whose career took her from the highball-wielding brassiness of Stephen Sondheim’s Company to the tornado-esque maternal force she wielded in as Jack Donaghy’s mother in 30 Rock. This biography offers a close look at her life, from the theaters and sound stages of Hollywood and London to personal challenges.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

André Aciman, Find Me
FSG, October 29

Call Me By Your Name is a perfect book; I feel similarly about the film adaptation, different (in some ways) as they are. Find Me checks in with Elio, his father Samuel, and Oliver years after the events of the first novel. I’m normally against sequels, but in this case, I can only trust that Aciman, with all his prodigious gifts, will do right by his wonderful characters.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Allison Moorer, Blood: A Memoir
Da Capo Press, October 29

Allison Moorer is known for songs of ragged, poetic honesty—and for the emotional clarity of her country western ballads. Her debut memoir exhibits these qualities and more. When she was 14, Moorer’s father shot and killed her mother then himself in the front yard of their Alabama home. Retelling this story and its aftermath, Moorer eases into the heat of memory and trauma and returns with a tale of sisterly love and protection, of self examination, recalling the ways she learned to avoid her alcoholic father’s tempestuous rages. It’s heartbreaking to watch sisters learn to harmonize their behavior for safety, as they learn to do it with their voices. A series of riffs on family objects gives this intense, necessary book room to breathe before it brings yet more truth to a childhood more than survived.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Lee Child, Blue Moon: A Jack Reacher Novel
Delacorte, October 29

Jack Reacher simply wants to do a good deed for an elderly couple, and in the blink of an eye he’s caught between a war waging between Albanian and Ukrainian criminal gangs. Such is the life of Lee Child’s aging hero, now into his twentieth book—fed-up with the way the world pounces on the weak. Always getting roped into conflicts a little improbably big for a Monday morning. If only justice were so easy, solvable or deliverable (with vengeance) in 290 pages . . . which is why these books, carved out of concrete sentences though they may be, are continuously, briefly, satisfying.

–John Freeman, Executive Editor

Lynda Barry, Making Comics
Drawn and Quarterly, October 29

I’m not a particularly visual person. I’ve never been able to draw. (Seriously, even my stick figures suck.) So there’s something very appealing to me about Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and in this follow-up to Syllabus, she shares her curriculum once more. She encourages doodling. She wants you to see yourself as a monster, as as superhero, and all the shades in between. For people who are sometimes too precious about what they put on the page, I think this explosive kind of creativity is just what we need.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Jon Krakauer, Classic Krakauer: Essays on Wilderness and Risk
Vintage, October 29

Jon Krakauer is most famous for his book-length account of the life and death Christopher McCandless, Into the Wild, a gripping, deeply reported adventure story that is at once a classic American wilderness narrative (man seeks something in the woods) and interrogation of the same (what was missing in McCandless’s life that led him to his self-deluded doom?). And there’s plenty more where that came from! This paperback collection (which first appeared as an ebook last year) covers a vast range of Krakauer’s storytelling territory, from New Mexican caves to the highest peaks on earth to… the planet Mars. There is escapism here, yes, but recognition that we can never really outrun ourselves.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Christopher McDougall, Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero
Knopf, October 29

I, like roughly three million other running enthusiasts, was briefly obsessed with Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen when it appeared a decade ago. Now, roving journalist and good-natured running proselytizer Christopher McDougall is back with another inspirational of borderline insane people racing inhumanly long distances. Except, TWIST: this time Chris isn’t just pounding the pavement with his fellow homo sapiens. In Running with Sherman, he recounts his efforts to rehabilitate the body, mind, and spirit of a weary donkey by entering them both in the pack burro racing World Championship.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump, The Cheffe
Knopf, October 30

In the best sense, Marie NDiaye’s writing rarely lets you breathe. And why should it, when there is so much to say about the lives of the women she writes about? The Cheffe is coming to the states courtesy of her longtime translator Jordan Stump. The novel tells of an accomplished female chef who thrives despite the toxicity of a male-dominated field. It is a story of perfectionism and carnal affairs, the latter especially being a NDiayen trademark.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor