Happy New Year, readers. 2023 had its ups and downs (mostly downs), but as always, at least it brought us some very good books. But now that you’ve read all the books last year had to offer (right?), it’s time for a brand new list.
Here are the books Literary Hub editors are most looking forward to (so far!) in the months to come.
JANUARY
Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made
S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, January 2
This highly anticipated debut novel from Vanessa Chan tells the story of a housewife turned spy in occupied Malaya during WWII. The chapters alternate between Cecily’s perspective and those of her children: her teenage son, one of many who’s gone missing; her daughter Jujube, who spends her days catering to Japanese soldiers; and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, hidden away for her own safety. An epic historical novel that’s both propulsive and poignant—expect to see this one about town. –Eliza Smith, special projects editor
Tara Isabella Burton, Here in Avalon
Simon & Schuster, January 2
Tara Isabella Burton is a fascinating thinker and writer—she has a doctorate in theology from Oxford, and in addition to novels she writes nonfiction on things like contemporary American post-religious spirituality and our obsession with self-branding. I particularly loved her 2018 novel Social Creature (think Tom Ripley gets Instagram), so would I like to read her new book about a possibly magical theater cult? I would, I would. –Emily Temple, managing editor
Mike McCormack, This Plague of Souls
Soho Press, January 2
I was blown away—or let’s be specific and say both profoundly moved and intellectually thrilled—by Irish writer McCormack’s 2016 Solar Bones, a novel about death (and also, necessarily, life) told in a single, enthralling sentence. Thus it is no surprise I am very much anticipating his next book, an “existential noir” in which a man returns home from prison to find his house empty, his family gone—and calls from a mysterious man who claims he can reveal the truth. –ET
Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole
Soho Crime, January 2
This promising debut looks perfect for our Internet sleuth-y, murder-fixated age. It’s about a woman named Teddy whose sister, Angie, disappeared ten years ago, leaving behind a cold case and a broken family. Now their father has killed himself, and upon going through his belongings, Teddy discovers that he was involved in a Reddit community concentrated on solving Angie’s case. Teddy can’t help herself and falls down the “rabbit hole” of the Reddit community’s obsession, and allows it to take over her life. She forms a friendship with another member of the community, and slowly but surely loses sense of any previous priority, loses sense of who she was before. It’s twisty and addictive, just like the Reddit community, and the reader becomes as obsessed as Teddy is to solve this mystery. –Julia Hass, contributing editor
Alvaro Enrigue, trans. Natasha Wimmer, You Dreamed of Empires
Riverhead, January 9
Hell yes. I’m very much looking forward to reading another one of Enrigue’s bonkers, brain-bending historical novels (in his 2016 novel, Sudden Death, also translated by Wimmer, the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo play tennis with a ball made from Anne Boleyn’s hair). Cortés also features heavily in Sudden Death, and Enrigue returns to his story in You Dreamed of Empire—but of course, it will not be the story we know, but a strange, fantastical version, Enrigue-style. Can’t wait. –ET
Julie Myerson, Nonfiction
Tin House Books, January 2
Myerson’s latest novel is an urgent, edged book about a novelist’s relationship with her daughter, who has sunk into a dangerous form of drug addiction, and also her own, cold, mother, or rather her memory of her. As a new parent I thought I might not be able to handle this novel, but as it turned out, I couldn’t stop reading. –ET
Olivie Blake, The Atlas Complex
Tor Books, January 9
Olivie Blake concludes her much-celebrated dark-academia trilogy in suitably devastating fashion. The six Alexandria Society initiates are back together and back in the library, but not for long: their dangerous caretaker Atlas Blake is still working on his world-ending plan. Expect equal parts romantasy and philosophy—Blake writing about the ethics of power is always a fun ride. –Drew Broussard, contributing editor
Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer
Ecco, January 9
The latest from PEN/Faulkner nominee Oshetsky is about a young girl trying to come to terms with the death of her friend. But instead of facing the tragedy, she spins happily-ever-after stories for herself—until a strange creature called Poor Deer makes its way into her tales and demands the truth. By turns strange, beautiful, and tragic, Oshetsky’s story of tragedy and redemption is charming and eerie. –DB
Elizabeth Flock, The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice
Harper Books, January 9
Journalist Elizabeth Flock looks at justice with a Taddeo-esque approach, telling the stories of three women who killed after a wrong. There is a Southern U.S. woman who killed her rapist; the leader of a northern Indian gang that avenges victims of domestic violence; and a fighter in an all-female militia in Syria, where ISIS is working to dismantle the lives and rights of women. –JM
Jami Attenberg, 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round
S&S/Simon Element, January 9
Devotees of Attenberg’s fiction (All Grown Up, All This Could Be Yours, many others), and her pandemic-sparked newsletter, Craft Talk, have used her 1000-words-a-day-in-summer model to push novel and book projects along, helped by Attenberg’s feel-good approach to the sweaty toil of ~generative~ work. This offshoot of the project stretches the approach to get you through the year and includes tips from other Names like comedian and essayist Josh Gondelman. It will be the new Bird by Bird, you heard it here first. –JM
Jill McCorkle, Old Crimes: Stories
Algonquin Books, January 9
Those waiting for more of Jill McCorkle following her most recent novel Hieroglyphics are in for a treat. Her new short story collection is out January 9, and includes a couple who bring a confession booth into their home, initially for fun, and a phone-line service-man (think the Norman Rockwell painting) who feels estranged from his family in the mobile age. Take me there, Jill! –JM
Hisham Matar, My Friends
Random House, January 9
American-Libyan Hisham Matar has written an exile novel with the Arab Spring at its center, pushed along by the power of fiction. Khaled’s journey from Libya to the UK begins when he hears a short story read on the radio about a man eaten alive by a cat–it’s the early days of his waking up to understand the Qaddafi regime. He leaves his parents behind and moves to London to study. There, he attends a protest that turns ugly, stranding him outside his country and family. People who loved Matar’s In the Country of Men will be on this one early. –JM
Linnea Axelsson, trans. Saskia Vogel, Aednan
Knopf, January 9
This family epic about two Sámi families begins in the 1910s with matriarch Ristin leading a reindeer migration meets with the new border between Sweden and Norway, rupturing family and culture. Fifty years on, Lise is “educated” in a boarding school for indigenous children, and her daughter Sandra later on fights for Sámi land rights. Listen to a sample here. –JM
Lea Carpenter, Ilium
Knopf, January 16
At last Lea Carpenter is back (after 2018’s Red, White, Blue) with another sideways approach to the international spy novel—in this one, a young woman is swept off her feet by a much older suitor, but after they’re married, he asks her for a “favor”…never a good thing. –ET
Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland
FSG, January 16
Marie-Helene Bertino’s wry, melancholy, utterly bewitching third novel is the coming-of-age story of a young Philadelphia woman named Adina who also happens to be an alien—born in 1977 to a hardworking Italian-American “Earth mother” but “activated” at age four by her extraterrestrial superiors and tasked with sending dispatches about the nature of humanity back to her home planet (though where that planet is, what life might be like there, or what her true kin even look like, Adina does not know). Deftly blurring the line between reality and metaphor to create a work of exquisite beauty, joyfully off-kilter humor, and aching sorrow, Beautyland, and Adina’s lonesome journey, will fill and then shatter your heart. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor-in-chief
Susan Muaddi Darraj, Behind You is the Sea
HarperVia, January 16
This debut novel-in-stories from the award-winning author of A Curious Land: Stories from Home and the Farah Rocks children’s book series is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore, focusing on three immigrant families and their differing experiences of life in the U.S. Muaddi Darraj, a vocal advocate for Palestinian culture who won an American Book Award in 2016, has written a rich, complex, and moving immigrant story with a beautifully-rendered ensemble cast. –DS
Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
Pantheon, January 16
If you’ve fantasized about moving back to your childhood home, you know it can never be quite the same. For Manjula Martin, a tree-change to the Sonoma forests is defined by the naked threat of forest fires and climate change: in 2020, she was evacuated as the state burned. A personal history turned examination of fire and ecology, The Last Fire Season is strangely timely amid a balmy winter some have never experienced before. –JM
Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Doubleday, January 16
Kyle Chayka is a master at capturing truths about our online existence (like why the internet isn’t fun anymore) in a manner as astute as it is entertaining. His sophomore book “traces the creeping, machine-guided curation” of the all-powerful algorithm “as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces.” I’m as terrified as I am excited to read this one. –Jessie Gaynor, senior editor
Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Knopf, January 23
This satirical autobiographical debut novel by Iranian-American writer and Poetry Editor of The Nation is the story of a newly sober, martyr-obsessed orphaned son of Iranian immigrants who embarks on a quest to uncover for a long-buried family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. The buzz around Martyr has been intense, and if it’s even a fraction as good as the wildly effusive blurbs suggest (“An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven’t loved a book this much in years,” said Tommy Orange, while Lauren Groff called it “The best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness.”), it promises to be one of the most dazzling debuts of the year. –DS
Lee Gutkind, The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction
Yale University Press, January 23
Though I am sure there were plenty of people who knew how to be weird while telling true stories prior, Lee Gutkind is credited with “fathering” the CNF movement in the ‘60s. Here, he traces his own route from Easy Rider bikie to academic and writer, and looks at how writers like Joan Didion, Uptown Sinclair, Janet Malcolm and James Baldwin navigated the gap between facts and storytelling. –JM
Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy
Catapult, January 23
I’ve been looking forward to this since I heard Cooke read the opening pages nearly two years ago. Set in the 1990s in Jamaica, this assured debut begins when Akúa’s brother dies and she leaves Canada to return to her native Jamaica in the hopes of reconnecting with her sister, Tamika. But when Akúa starts spending her time with a stripper, the difficult realities of being gay in a religious family and in a homophobic society provoke a reckoning for Akúa and Tamika. –DB
Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
FSG, January 23
In 2023, with Verso, Adam Shatz published Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which looked at the sometimes thorny relationship between contemporary writers’ writing and their politics, so a biography of Frantz Fanon makes sense as the subject of his new book. The Rebel’s Clinic charts the life of Fanon, who left Martinique to fight for France in WW2, then found himself drawn into Existentialism in the postwar years. An examination of one of the pre-eminent writers and activists of the postcolonial period, The Rebel’s Clinic also serves as a primer for Fanon’s most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. –Samuel Rutter, contributing editor
Kiley Reid, Come and Get It
Putnam, January 30
As a massive Such a Fun Age fan, I’ve been waiting for the new Kiley Reid for a long time. I thought her 2020 novel was so incisive and accessible, plotty and smart, that it makes me all the more excited for her next venture. Reid was good at every part of that story: depicting whiteness, the bond between babysitter and child, being 25 and lost, she could do it all, and did it all with warmth and empathy, even for the characters who didn’t always deserve it. This new book promises all the same ability at depth and poignancy through a fun, plotty story: a campus novel this time, about an RA named Millie, and her entanglement with a visiting professor. It’s a perfect recipe for a great January read: in a college setting, about discretion and desire, about money, want, and, most importantly, it’s by Kiley Reid. –JH
Chris Dixon, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet
Random House, January 30
One of the curious things about the internet is that discourse about the internet is often led by the same VCs and tech visionaries looking to capitalize on it, as evidenced by the rupture around EA in 2023. Read Write Own promises to put the eras of internet in context up to web3, and is blurbed by Bob Iger, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban (“Shark Tank; Dallas Mavericks”) and the president of Coinbase. –JM
Gregory Pardlo, Spectral Evidence
Knopf, January 30
When one of America’s foremost poets publishes a collection for the first time in nearly a decade it is a major event—particularly when that poet is uniquely suited to grappling with what’s been going on in America over the past nine years… Spectral Evidence is Gregory Pardlo’s first collection of poetry since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, and it picks up where Digest left off. As ever Pardlo moves through poetic registers with ease, from high to low and back again, as he witnesses the world in all its terrible beauty. From fallen heroes of professional wrestling (seriously) to this country’s infinite hostility to its Black citizens, Pardlo’s is the poetic eye (and heart) we need right now. –Jonny Diamond, editor in chief
Ijeoma Oluo, Be a Revolution
Harper One, January 30
Ijeoma Oluo’s breakout hit So You Want To Talk About Race came out in 2018 but was discovered by many readers as the 2020 murder of George Floyd galvanized people across the U.S. to face the racist undercurrents. Be a Revolution sets out to look at how everyday people are using anti-racist approaches to reform systems big and small–in schools, in hospitals, in criminal justice–and map a way forward for those who want to push for change. –JM
Kwame Alexander, ed., This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
Little, Brown, January 30
This collection of “resilient joy” includes work from Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and Terrance Hayes that captures poignant moments of beauty and pride: Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home” through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. I feel this will make a good gift in 2024. –JM
