September

Kevin Young, Night Watch: Poems
Knopf, September 2

A new Kevin Young collection is always good news for lovers of poetry (and anyone hoping to indoctrinate the poetry skeptical—seriously, Young’s poems are the perfect indoctrination tool). Night Watch—written over the course of sixteen years—explores identity and Black history. It promises to be a marvel of language, music, and impeccably rendered truths. –JG

Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Grove, September 2

I love Alameddine’s sardonic, clever novels, and especially his indelible characters, so I’m looking forward to his latest, in which a gay man living with his mother in Beirut is offered a dream residency in America—which causes him to revisit some of his most nightmarish days. Promises to be full of dry banter in the face of historical upheaval and emotional calamity, which is my favorite Alameddine mode. –ET

Joan Silber, Mercy
Counterpoint, September 2

Sometimes, life can come down to one decision. One act, one choice, that will define everything that comes after. Ivan, the protagonist of Mercy, knows this well. One night in the 70s, he and his best friend Eddie take heroin and Eddie has a bad reaction: Ivan thinks Eddie is dying, takes him to the ER, and leaves. This act, the abandonment of his best friend in his greatest time of need, is the greatest shame and weight that will haunt Ivan for the rest of his life. It’s what he carries, always, and it is what changes both their lives in enormous, untold ways. A story of love, tragedy, of paths diverging and intertwining, Mercy is human and moving, awful and beautiful. –JH

Eliana Ramage, To the Moon and Back
Avid Reader Press, September 2

Any story about somebody who wants to be an astronaut is bound to get my attention, but Ramage’s debut is a special one. It’s epic in scope, jumping across several decades and hopping the globe, but it never loses sight of the family story at its core and the Indigenous identities of its heroine Steph and her nearest and dearest. It’s a family novel, it’s an ambition novel, it is a novel that (you guessed it) shoots for the moon and makes it back safely to boot. –DB

Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken, The Wax Child
New Directions, September 2

Ravn’s The Employees is one of the absolute gems of a bright century for weird fiction so far and My Work was a spectacular and surprising turn, a vital exploration of modern motherhood—so I cannot wait to see what she does with a historical look at witches and witchcraft in Denmark in the 1600s. Also it’s apparently narrated by an actual wax doll, created by one of the accused witches? Sign me up, obviously. –DB

Bitter Karella, Moonflow
Run For It, September 2

Mushroom horror continues to be so very hot right now (hot enough to……grow mushrooms?!) and Karella’s debut novel is one of the best of the bunch. Set in a mysterious forest in Northern California (and expanding on the world of Karella’s delightful fiction-game Toadstools), Moonflow has weird mushrooms and feminist cults and folkloric monsters and real-life monsters and more. At times, it reads like a crime thriller and at other times it reads like a nature guide and at still other times it reads like Lynchian horror—but no matter the mode, it is a delight from start to finish. –DB

Nathan Harris, Amity
Little, Brown, September 2

Nathan Harris’ follow-up to his blockbuster debut The Sweetness of Water is another gripping historical novel. Amity follows a brother and sister in postbellum New Orleans, emancipated but still under threat from their former enslaver, as they travel across Mexico intent on freedom. Jason Mott says of novel: “The writing is flawless, the characters unforgettable and, most importantly, the story the world Harris builds never lets us go.” –JG

Zoe Dubno, Happiness and Love
Scribner, September 2

As a lover and supporter of bitches and haters, I am so ready for Happiness and Love. This novel about a woman who finds herself at a dinner party with her former art world friends seems extremely messy in a way that I love. Sitting in a room full of pretentious ex-friends and mentally eviscerating them all is a universal human experience. Dubno’s novel sounds equally thoughtful and nasty, clever and juicy and full of great drama. –MC

Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive!: Stories
Astra House, September 2

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a wonderful, wonderful writer. Her debut Candelaria was mesmerizing and magical, full of charming (or maybe “hexing”?) characters that seem caught between realities. There promises to be plenty more invention, viscera, and humor in these new stories, which feature decapitated quinceañera guests, a sentient tail, and a haunted punk house in Boston. What is most striking to me about Lozada-Oliva’s work is its tenderness in spite of the strangeness: she always loves the ghosts. No matter how surreal her writing gets, she never loses the thread of compassion. –JF

Nikki Giovanni, The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things
William Morrow, September 2

The final collection from one of our most beloved and celebrated contemporary poets, who died in December 2024, includes not only poems but, as the subtitle informs, other short fragments, prose works, and ephemera. It’s always hard to know how essential posthumous collections will actually be, but I’m always willing to take a chance on Giovanni. –ET

Helen Garner, The Season: A Fan’s Story
Pantheon, September 2

Add it to the collection of grandmother lit: Helen Garner, one of our most revered and lyrical writers, has written a spare, poignant, surprising story of soccer (or, football, or, “footy”) and grandsons. Garner and her grandson Amby become mutually obsessed with Australian footy as Amby’s team advances through the ranks of their league. Garner is a doting grandmother, but she is first and foremost a fan: she watches the team through her journalistic gaze, documenting the camaraderie, the bonds, the dramas, the high highs and low lows of team building in the face of extreme competition. A story of boyhood, of family, of sport, Garner is the voice to guide us through the world of footy and beyond, building us into as big of fans as she is. –JH

Leo Damrosch, Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
Yale University Press, September 2

Oh what a life Robert Louis Stevenson packed into his tragically short 44 years: despite suffering from chronic bronchitis (not a great thing to have in the middle of the 19th century), Stevenson managed to travel the world, spending ample time in France, California, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia and, finally, Samoa (where he earned the nickname that’s the title of this biography). All the while, Stevenson was able to write thirteen novels, seven story collections, eighteen works of nonfiction, and six poetry collections. A life as rich in letters as it was adventure, Stevenson’s is certainly worthy of Damrosch’s talents as a biographer. –JD

Edward Mendelson, The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway
Columbia University Press, September 2

It has been said that the entire world, future and past, can be found in the pages of Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic, Mrs Dalloway—as such, it is a book that demands rereadings and reinterpretations, and new critical frameworks for each generation of close readers. In his latest, billed as part criticism part love letter, Mendelsohn unravels Woolf’s densely packed themes—love, empire, mental health—in this essential companion to one of the 20th century’s most important novels. –JD

Claude McKay, ed. Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb, Letters in Exile
Yale University Press, September 2

The Jamaican-born queer writer and poet Claude McKay was a hugely important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and in the American Modernist movement. An acclaimed novelist whose 1919 poem “If We Must Die” remains one of the most iconic pieces of protest verse ever written, McKay was also “a restless world traveler who sought spiritual, artistic, and political sustenance in France, Spain, Moscow, and Morocco.” This hefty compendium brings together two decades of dispatches from the road with correspondents like W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Max Eastman, and Louise Bryant. –DS

Gene Pressman, They All Came to Barneys: A Personal History of the World’s Greatest Store
Viking, September 2

One of my more niche interests is the history of retail. Is it because I used to work at a mall? Maybe! The continued decline of brick and mortar shopping, even in the luxury space, feels like something beyond an inevitable result of late stage technocapitalism, even if I can’t articulate why. It’s not exactly nostalgia, but adjacent. And I love a retro New York story. I’ll probably read this with a vaporwave mix playing in the background. –OS

Sally Mann, Art Work: On the Creative Life
Abrams, September 2

Photographer Sally Mann’s 2015 Hold Still ranks among my favorite artist memoirs, in part because of Mann’s no-nonsense, irreverent style, but also because of her keen revelations about the nature of art-making. This new volume promises to give us more of the same, complete with photographs, letters, journal entries, and other ephemera, pasted right in. “This is a book about how to get shit done,” Art Work begins. Thank goodness she did. –ET

Eric Foner, Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays
Norton, September 2

Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner is the historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, some of the most consequential years in American history. His work is academically rigorous, but always legibly rooted in the personal experience of people, tracing the impacts as well as the sources and intents of systems. In everything, Foner is vigilant to the individual and collective stakes of American history and politics. Our Fragile Freedoms collects his more recent writing, reviews, and essays on issues across the historical spectrum from America’s founding to our current precarity. This isn’t just “did you know” anecdotes, and anyone trying to understand our American moment should be turning to Foner. –JF

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me
Scribner, September 2

The first memoir from the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things (and fearless, firebrand activist) will focus on Roy’s complex relationship with her late mother, who died in 2022. “I have been writing this book all my life,” Roy said of the upcoming memoir. “Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.” –DS, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Sarah Moss, Ripeness
FSG, September 9

There is no novelist working in the English language today better than Sarah Moss at the creation of mood. Deep, immersive, subtle, all-encompassing mood. And the key, of course, is that as a reader, you can’t see it happening… So, what is the mood of her latest novel, split between 1960s Italy and present-day Ireland, a story of family and regret and consequences? Rueful, bittersweet, nostalgic. (Perfect.) –JD

Natsuo Kirino, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Swallows
Knopf, September 9

I think all the time about Natsuo Kirino’s Out, which I first read in college and which I have been recommending to people (with strong stomachs and senses of humor) ever since. So it goes without saying that I am anticipating her newest book to be translated into English, in which a young woman signs up to donate her eggs and finds herself entangled in something much more complicated indeed. Considering Kirino’s skill in writing about women and bodies and the intricacies of class tension, my hopes are high. –ET

Terry McMillan, It Was the Way She Said It: Short Stories, Essays, and Wisdom
Ballantine, September 9

This motley prose collection from Terry McMillan, author of hit parades How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Waiting to Exhale, seeks to secure the popular writer’s place in the high canon of literary realism. In a glowing introduction, Ishmael Reed praises McMillan’s sentence craft, giving special props to her knack for rendering intimacy. As someone who first met and loved McMillan’s work through the Vaseline lens of this perfect Whitney Houston vehicle, I’m super excited to get better acquainted with the nuances of her short form voice. –BA

Alejandro Varela, Middle Spoon
Viking, September 9

I’ve been a fan of Alejandro Varela’s prose since inhaling his National Book Award long-listed debut, The Town of Babylon. Middle Spoon continues his stylish voyage across the rocky seas of young and young-ish modern love. Launching with the letters of a lovesick protagonist, this epistolary novel centers a recognizable Brooklyn Dad. Our unnamed narrator is queer, leftie, married-but-open, and nursing his first broken heart. Opening pages promise extremely delightful sentences, itchily close-to-home lifestyle critique, and a heart-forward analysis of the conundrum that is contemporary mating. –BA

Maggie Smith & Saeed Jones, eds., The People’s Project
Washington Square Press, September 9

Curated by two sterling poets, collecting prose and poetry and visual art, The People’s Project is a “community in book form” meant to help us all make that better world. With contributions from the likes of Chase Strangio, Imani Perry, Eula Biss, Joy Harjo, Marlon James, Ada Limon, Danez Smith, Mira Jacob, and many more, it’s pretty much certain to inspire. –DB

Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival
Norton, September 9

You might know how Christopher Marlowe died (murdered in a pub brawl). But Greenblatt’s biography of the Renaissance poet and playwright does more than unpack the ‘other’ bard’s short life; he suggests that it was really Marlowe, rather than Shakespeare, who lit the flame under the literary Renaissance of Elizabethan England. Marlowe “made it possible to write in a new way about violence, ambition, greed, and desire. He offered poetic liberation.” –EF

David Gelles, Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave it All Away
Simon & Schuster, September 9

Most of you reading this probably agree that the very idea of a “billionaire” is absurd and immoral: one person should not have that much money. However, if all the billionaires in the world (there are currently 3,028 of them) did what Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard did—GIVE ALL THE MONEY AWAY—it might redeem all the labor-exploitation, wage theft, and tax fraud that went into the creation of such obscene riches. Sadly, as this book clearly illustrates, Chouinard, is a rare, one-a-kind corporate genius, a founder who actually lived up to his ethical commitments, and (literally?) put his money where his mouth is—you won’t see too many other billionaires do what he did. –JD

Stephen Curry, Shot Ready
One World, September 9

Get ready for a book of Curry’s advice, philosophy, reflections, with 100 glossy photographs to boot. Curry is charming, he’s funny, and he’s here to look back at a long and storied career alongside his fans. It’s a career that’s far from over, but one that has already cemented him as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. The sport is one of beauty, and Curry is one of the emblematic visions of the game. Shot Ready is perfect for all Warriors fans or anyone who loves the game as much as Curry does.  –JH

Jacqueline Harpman, tr. Ros Schwartz, Orlanda
Seven Stories, September 9

Transit Books’ reissue of I Who Have Never Known Men turned into an unexpected hit this year thanks to BookTok and I cannot wait to see what all those readers make of another Harpman reissue, this one riffing on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the possibility of ever-shifting gender expression, the pains of repression and oppression, and the joys of a bit of queer chaos. –DB

Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
Riverhead, September 9

A lot has happened to Elizabeth Gilbert since I last checked in with her: I’d wager many readers still think of her as the Eat, Pray, Love protagonist, who went in search of answers, found them and more, settled down with the man she met in the course of her searching, and lived happily ever after. Except, as with any story, so much happened after the end. For Gilbert, what happened was she became best friends with a woman named Rayya, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer a decade into their best friendship, at which point Gilbert realized that she had been in love with Rayya for years. She left her husband, became Rayya’s partner, and stayed to help ease the way for Rayya into her death. The End.

Except, even still, there was more. Rayya was an addict, and during the course of her dying, relapsed and became addicted to cocaine again. Prompting Gilbert to realize her own sex and love addiction. Two addicts, in love with each other, in love with their dependencies, on a downward spiral. Till death do they part. The book is intense. It’s moving, and shocking. Raw and real. More recovery memoir than anything else: but also a book of genuine care and soul-searching, speaking from the abyss of an experience we’d all be lucky to never have. It’s a tremendous achievement, a heart-breaking journey into the depths and back. –JH

Tim Berners-Lee, This is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web
FSG, September 9

These have got to be pretty grim times for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, aka the guy who invented the internet and gave it away for free. Not because he didn’t become a billionaire but rather because his wonderful world wide web has devolved into an algorithmically dictated swamp of AI gobbledgook. Sir Tim, we’re sorry! Now that you’ve published your memoir, is there any chance you’ll come out of retirement and save the internet? Please? –JD

Jordan Castro, Muscle Man
Catapult,  September 9

The false dichotomy between gym rat and bookworm has stood for far too long. Castro’s sophomore novel, which follows a day in the life of a weightlifting-obsessed English professor “as paranoia slowly transforms his mundane environment into something more foreboding” promises to finally to reveal the truth: that you can be a jock and a nerd at the same time and, if you work hard and persevere, you, too can override the positive mental health effects of working out through the sheer force of neuroticism. –CK, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Leni Zumas, Wolf Bells
Algonquin, September 16

The thing about Red Clocks, Zumas’ previous novel, is that every cool writing professor I’ve ever known has a copy of it prominently displayed in their office. So I’m extremely looking forward to her new book, Wolf Bells. The novel is about a kind of retirement home where young people can live for free if they help out. The House is a fragile little commune run by a ex-punk singer, and its main mission is to be a place where everyone is welcome. But when two children show up at the house looking for help, The House and its mission are called into question. Wolf Bells is the newest entry in the socialist gothic canon. –MC

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, Good and Evil and Other Stories
Knopf, September 16

In the eight years since Fever Dream helped kick off the wave of US readers finally getting to experience the best of Latin American weird fiction in translation, Samanta Schweblin and her reliable translator Megan McDowell have maintained a steady flow of unsettling and odd stories at every length. This new collection promises nothing less than the biggest dichotomy of all—good and evil—and is sure to deliver tense, beautiful, soul-shaking stuff. –DB

Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
Liveright, September 16

Isn’t it wild that the rights of the American people are so often determined by how a comparatively small group of individuals chooses to interpret the Constitution? We the People looks at the complexities of amending the Constitution and the disproportionate power the amendment process grants the Supreme Court. In the years following cases like Dobbs, and barely a week after United States v. Skrmetti, it all just feels so unfortunately relevant. –OS

David McCullough, History Matters
Simon & Schuster, September 16

One need not agree with late historian David McCullough’s interpretations of the American past to respect his legacy as a writer and a researcher. And as we face a full-scale crisis in the humanities, fueled by book-bannings, authoritarian overreach, and widespread institutional cowardice, it is as important as ever to make the case for history in American schools that refuses to tailor its narratives to the rhinestone patriotism of the current White House. With this posthumous collection of essays, edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson, McCullough reminds us how important it is to try to understand where we came from, that we might know where we’re going. –JD

Mary Roach, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy
Norton, September 16

I love the way Mary Roach approaches a book project. It’s a deep dive not just into a specific odd or gross subject—say, human cadavers (Stiff) or space (Packing for Mars)—but into the weird, wonderful stories of the people who work around those subjects as well. In an age where stem cells can grow organs and scientists are 3D printing body parts, it’s a natural progression for Roach to consider questions of the human body and its failings: “When and how does a person decide they’d be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?” Speaking with researchers, surgeons, and amputees, Roach looks at what happens when the human body starts to fail, and who is there to fix it—and why. –EF

Adam Nicolson, Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood
FSG, September 16

It is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that when a man turns 37 he immediately wanders into the woods to look for birds—to “watch them” if you will. However, it is hard to ignore that evidence that birdwatching has become one of the most important pursuits of the post-covid elder millennial. If you are one of these men, or women, or person (or know one), this book is for you. Much, much more than just a field guide, though, Bird School is part philosophy part ecological diary, and reveals Adam Nicholson’s story of finding the natural world in an abandoned field near his home in Sussex, and the years spent investigating all the life therein. –JD

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
Little, Brown, September 16

In what might be the most compelling title of the year, Yudkosky and Soares, two early innovators in the field of artificial intelligence, send the clearest, direst warning yet. If we keep pursuing autonomous and superhuman AI it will eventually destroy us. Seems more important than your little ChatGPT parlor games, no? –JD

Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed, The Nightmare Sequence
Nightboat, September 16

A collaboration between poet Omar Sakr and visual artist Safdar Ahmed, The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the endless deluge of atrocities that have been committed in Gaza by Israeli forces since October 2023. A stark and painful interrogation of the act of witnessing, Sakr and Ahmed blend verse and image to consider, “the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas.” –DS

Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
Mariner, September 16

I’m a huge admirer of Angela Flournoy’s writing and was thrilled to read that a new novel (the follow up to her 2015 debut, The Turner House, which was a deserved finalist for the National Book Award) was on the horizon. The Wilderness—one half of a reported two-book, seven-figure deal—follows four Black women over the course of two decades of friendship, examining “how gender expectations, race, class and the shifting dynamics of city life” make their mark on them. –DS, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Mona Awad, We Love You, Bunny
Marysue Rucci Books, September 23

The Bunnies are back! In Awad’s Bunny, Samantha Heather Mackey falls in with a group of girls at their elite MFA program who use their weird, occult powers to turn bunnies into boys. In this sequel, Sam has published her first novel to critical acclaim, but the Bunnies aren’t happy with the way they’ve been portrayed. So they kidnap her. The Bunnies get to tell their side of the story: it’s an Alice in Wonderland, dark academia, slasher romp that is so much fun. –EF

Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here
Dalkey Archive Press, September 23

Listen, I will read anything that Helen DeWitt writes (or co-writes, with journalist Gridneff), especially when it’s giving so much Calvino right off the bat, and especially when it’s been a project of decades—n+1 published what was then its first chapter in (checks watch) 2008. Its publisher calls it “a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books, weaving together material as diverse as America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, Scientology, dream analysis, linguistics, email correspondence, screenshots, and graphs into a novel of unparalleled scope and vision.” Can’t wait to fight about all 600 pages with everyone. –ET

Dan Chaon, One of Us
Holt, September 23

Literary horror is a tricky genre, but few do it better than Dan Chaon. His latest novel is a “playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale” set in 1915, about orphaned telepathic twins on the run from a murderous con man who claims to be their uncle. The twins find refuge with the “Emporium of Wonders” in a traveling carnival, and travel the country, with their uncle in pursuit. Serial killers and carnival misfits? I’m in. –JG

Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You
Riverhead, September 23

Lockwood wrote about her experiences with COVID-fugue state in her London Review of Books diaries (bookmark this piece for sure); now, in novel form, Will There Ever Be Another You follows a young woman trying to keep her family—and mind—together during a pandemic. I am thrilled to read a novel about the pandemic, especially from Lockwood, who has already so aptly written about what it’s like to live inside the internet, outside of time, and with a failing body. I’m happy to remember when it all went so wrong, and I hope our general, misplaced distain for literature that looks too closely at the recent past doesn’t stop readers from grabbing this one. Let Lockwood hold a mirror up to ourselves! –EF

Jonathan Lethem, A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories
Ecco, September 23

Jonathan Lethem has always been my favorite of the literary Jonathans. The breadth of his output is the kind of thing more writers should aspire to: science-fiction, mystery, crime, literary fiction, humor, tragedy. Nothing less than the full breadth of human experience, you might say—and so I’m particularly excited for his having reached the level of literary fame that allows for a “new and selected” collection: an opportunity to meet Lethem in his fullest expression, whether for the first time or the fiftieth. –DB

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know
Knopf, September 23

The latest novel from the Booker prize–winning, bestselling author of Atonement is a little bit Cloud Atlas, a little bit Possession. We begin in 2014, as a renowned poet reads a new poem at his wife’s birthday party. Then we find ourselves in 2119, the world barely left after a nuclear event and the rising seas, as one scholar searches for that very poem. What can I say, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing! –ET

Sarah Gailey, Spread Me
Nightfire, September 23

Gailey is at their absolute best when writing horror (Just Like Home is one of the great haunted house novels of all time) and Spread Me goes full-bore. Not for the faint of heart or stomach, Gailey’s desert riff on John Carpenter’s The Thing manages to be both sexy and scary as hell. It will burrow its way into you and you’ll welcome it. –DB

E.Y. Zhao, Underspin
Astra House, September 23

Challengers, but make it table tennis. Underspin tells the story of a table tennis star who was destined for greatness, but wound up dead before he was 25. The story is told not by the star himself, but by those around him, those trying to make or break a future champion. I love a character portrait and I love a bildungsroman and I love a sports story that isn’t really about sports (“A League of Their Own isn’t a sports movie, it’s about sisterhood and the war!”), so this book sounds perfect to me. –MC

Ilana Masad, Beings
Bloomsbury, September 23

Writer and critic Ilana Masad is back with a riveting new novel about marriage, memory, and, best of all, extraterrestrial life. A couple goes on a drive through the New Hampshire forest, bathed in an unexplainable light. Years later, through hypnosis, their memories of this encounter reappear: what happened, what didn’t happen, who they are, who they were, all come into question. There are two other storylines throughout this work, that all navigate the ideas of fact and fiction, what to believe, and how to come to terms with who we are as people, or as aliens. Masad has created a stunning work that manages to both question everything, and answer all our dreams of what a genre-spanning, speculative novel can be.  –JH

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine
Thesis, September 23

Kingsnorth is one of the best writers, fiction or non-fiction, on the struggle between the natural world and the anthropocene. Against the Machine promises “a spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age” and a wide-ranging examination of the roots of our “line must go up” profit-above-all society and how the spread of that rot affects our very humanity. I don’t know about you but I feel like I need it, and yesterday. –DB

Frances Wilson, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel
FSG, September 23

Did you know that Muriel Spark started out as a literary biographer, writing epics on Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë? I’m excited to see one of our best modern novelists become the subject of her own tribute. Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel is a close, fond look at the ultimate writer’s writer’s early life and process. Written by Frances Wilson, a master of the form, this account looks at the art Spark made of “beginnings and endings,” and traces how my favorite Dame found her voice. –BA

Nicholas Beuret, Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition
Verso, September 23

I assume we’re all trying to channel our climate anxiety into something actionable, so I appreciate that environmental politics lecturer and advocate Nicholas Neuret’s book not only lays out the case against “green capitalism,” but also highlights the work of those fighting back against it. We need books that inspire action, and I welcome any work that contributes to mitigating unproductive despair and inspiring the fight ahead. –JG

John J. Lennon, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us
Celadon, September 23

Incarcerated journalist John J. Lennon is one of our most incisive writers on crime, incarceration, and the human lives behind statistics. A two-time finalist for National Magazine Awards, Lennon has written widely about his life in prison, and his first book tells the stories, in full color, of four men who have killed, and in doing so, naturally “challenges our obsession with true crime.” –JG

Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
Knopf, September 23

Does any book feel more timely right now than one that surveys the ruins of fallen society? Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp explores societal collapse from the stone age onward, using it as a lens to better understand human history as a whole. If it sounds a little heavy, keep in mind that Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus calls the book “deeply sobering and strangely inspiring.” Phew! –JG

Thomas Piketty, Equality Is a Struggle: Bulletins from the Front Line, 2021-2025
Yale University Press, September 23

It can be hard to keep up with Piketty’s work if you don’t speak French. He consistently publishes in Libération and Le Monde, but I rarely come across that day-to-day writing in translation. This collection offers a unique chance to read his first drafts on the pressing issues of the day: the seemingly global political lurch rightward, the brutal violence in Ukraine and Gaza, and China’s ascendance. There is hope and a vision for the future here too, especially in an “extended introductory essay arguing that an ecological socialism remains the best hope for global equality.” –JF

Joanna Walsh, Amateurs! How Users Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
Verso, September 23

The version of the internet that my generation came of age with, defined by user generated creativity within enclosed private platforms, has quickly moved from an imaginative culture to a mandatory part of our lives. How did posting become such a source of power and wealth? Amateurs! makes the case that platforms inviting us to create art as a means of communications became traps. Arguing that internet amateurism is “an aesthetic revolution as big as modernism,” Walsh traces both how it allows for greater activism and solidarity, while also creating the conditions for exploitation: AI resource guzzling, alt-right brain rot, and the brutal inequities of neoliberal economic extraction. –JF

Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur, Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories
Algonquin, September 30

I love a novel-in-stories!! The whole idea of it never fails to delight me and a novel in ghost stories might as well be written for me specifically. The latest from Bora Chung is about one night in a research facility for cursed objects—I’m anticipating horror, I’m anticipating weird humor, I’m anticipating the terror of the workplace, and sneaky insights on modern humanity to boot. For anybody who has ever pondered the Backrooms or visited the SCP Foundation, Midnight Timetable must be on your TBR. –DB

Kit Burgoyne, The Captive
Hell’s Hundred, September 30

Burgoyne is the pen-name of the Booker-longlisted Ned Beauman and here he goes full pulpy horror. A group of revolutionaries kidnap a young heiress only to discover that she’s very much pregnant—and that her shortly-thereafter delivered baby might be the Antichrist or something like it. What ensues is a madcap take on the classic devil-baby story, channeling both Rosemary’s Baby and Good Omens. Sounds like a total blast. –DB

Grady Chambers, Great Disasters
Tin House, September 30

As a poet-turned-novelist, I’m admittedly biased, but I’m a sucker for a poet novel. Grady Chambers, author of the collection North American Stadiums, brings his skills to bear on a coming-of-age story about six young men as they move through childhood and the diverging paths of early adulthood. Dana Spiotta writes, “With great compassion and an evocative sense of place and history, Chambers captures the intricate ways adulthood is shaped by the long shadows of adolescence.” –JG

Daphne du Maurier, After Midnight: Thirteen Tales for the Dark Hours
Scribner, September 30

A delicious title. An iconic writer. A compendium of her finest gothic tales. After Midnight brings together some of du Maurier’s most celebrated shorter works of psychological terror, including “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now,” alongside lesser-known stories like “The Blue Lenses” (in which a woman recovering from eye surgery finds she now perceives those around her as having animal heads corresponding to their true natures), and “The Breakthrough” (in which a scientist conducts experiments to harness the power of death. Oh, and it’s got an introduction by du Maurier superfan Stephen King. –DS

Souvankham Thammavongsa, Pick a Color
Little, Brown, September 30

Ning, a retired boxer, now owns a nail salon and as “Susan” she buffs and clips and polishes and tweezes. Thammavongsa’s excellent short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife likewise followed complex characters at the margins, power dynamics, class, and belonging. In her new novel, taking place during a single day at the salon, Thammavongsa sets her place as a “premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.” –EF

Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
Hogarth, September 30

Just in time for spooky season, Mariana Enriquez is here with her first piece of translated non-fiction: a walk through graveyards and cemeteries around the world. I absolutely adore Enriquez (Our Share of Night was my favorite novel of 2023, terrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure) and I cannot think of a better guide through not exactly the realm of the beyond—but rather, the all-too-real spaces where we, the living, must confront the inevitability of ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’ –DB

Gabrielle Hamilton, Next of Kin: A Memoir
Random House, September 30

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, author of the bestselling 2011 memoir Blood, Bones & Butter, is back with a book about her idiosyncratic family. Michael Cunningham calls it “piercing, horrifying, and perversely gorgeous,” and writes that “it charts, with almost murderous precision, the myriad ways in which family and fate collide.” I will be putting aside my annoyance about Hamilton being a superstar in two fields (food, prose) and reading. –ET

Werner Herzog, tr. Michael Hofmann, The Future of Truth
Penguin Press, September 30

Legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s personal exploration of the nature of truth (and how to find it in a “post-truth” era) mixes memoir, history, politics, poetry, science, and “fierce opinion,” all in a compact 128 pages. I can think of few artists whose musings on truth I’d rather have wash over me. Assuming Werner also narrates the audiobook, I intend to absorb this one aurally while taking a brooding autumnal walk in the woods. –DS

Terry Eagleton, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis
Yale University Press, September 30

If you’re a lapsed theory guy like me, you already know Terry Eagleton’s writing. As an academic and public intellectual, Eagleton has written dozens of witty, approachable, book-length essays on big ideas: literary theory, Marxism, humour (he’s English), and more. This latest book explores the innovative literary style of modernism through its works, ideas, and influence. His work is always rigorous and thought-provoking, but rarely stuffy. If you have an interest in art or ideas, Eagleton’s slim books are always appointment reading. –JF

Eleanor Johnson, Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980)
Atria, September 30

I get really excited about interpretations of horror that examine gender and bodily autonomy, and with the reversal of Roe as a starting point, Scream with Me gives horror cinema from the New Hollywood era a feminist reading, considering what films like The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Exorcist expose about the politics of American womanhood. –OS

Plestia Alaqad, The Eyes of Gaza
Little, Brown, September 30

In early October 2023, 21-year-old Plestia Alaqad was a recent university graduate hoping to pursue a career in journalism. Within a month, her homeland was in flames and Alaqad was broadcasting videos of destruction to millions of people around the world. In the weeks following October 7, as Israel rained down bombs on Gaza, Alaqad fled from neighborhood to neighborhood, documenting in her diary the brutality of the Israeli assault as well as the bravery of Palestinians on the ground, all while trying to commit to memory the faces of those around her “so somebody will have known them before the end.” An on-the-ground record of the early days of this ongoing genocide, The Eyes of Gaza is also a tribute to Alaqad’s brutalized homeland and an ode to the resilience of her people. –DS