October
Katherine Dunn, Near Flesh: Stories
MCD, October 7
If you read Katherine Dunn’s 1989 cult classic novel Geek Love—about a travelling carnival run by two eccentrics who decide to breed their own freak show using various drugs using radioactive material to alter the genes of their children—and it didn’t change your life, well, I feel sorry for you. Dunn, who died in 2016, was a true original and this, her first and only collection of short stories—about motherhood, violence, and female desire—should be on the top of every Geek Love fan’s TBR pile. –DS
Lily King, Heart the Lover
Grove, October 7
Lily King is back, and quickly proving herself to be the master of the literary love triangle with her newest novel, in which an intricate college threesome reverberates unexpectedly into adulthood. Like everyone else, I adored Writers & Lovers, and cannot wait for this latest. –ET
Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls, Vaim
Transit Books, October 7
The first book by Fosse, and translated by the celebrated Searls, since the former was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vaim begins a planned trilogy set in a “remote Norwegian fishing village.” In it, a simple encounter unspools into three different stories, each equally invested in the vagaries of the human condition. –ET
Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together
Scribner, October 7
Will I read anything Chris Kraus writes? Oh, probably. But I am especially looking forward to this novel, which explores the aftermath of a murder in the depressed Iron Range of Minnesota, as an LA transplant becomes increasingly invested in—obsessed with—the case. No doubt it will be smarter and weirder than everything else you’ve ever read. –ET
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket
Penguin Press, October 7
After a twelve-year hiatus, the most reclusive man in American fiction is back with a Milwaukee-set Depression-era novel about a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye whose seemingly straightforward assignment (track down and bring home the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune) turns into something far more complicated when he’s spirited off to Hungary to tangle with “Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, and outlaw motorcyclists.” Sounds like a hoot. –DS
Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures
Riverhead, October 7
Brandon Taylor is without a doubt our laureate of hyper-intelligent yearning—nobody does it better. With his third novel, Minor Black Figures, Taylor brings his characters—in this case a contemporary artist and a very lapsed seminarian—into the throes of the cutthroat New York art world. And guess what? Hyper-intelligent yearning ensues. –JD
Fredrik DeBoer, The Mind Reels
Coffee House Press, October 7
In this debut novel from academic and critic DeBoer, a young woman goes mad in a dorm room—but not attractively, literarily mad; quite the opposite. Andrew Martin calls it “one of the most precise and harrowing depictions of mental illness I’ve ever read… a relentless, compassionate, and beautiful debut novel.” Good enough for me. –ET
Brenda Lozano, tr. Heather Cleary, Mothers
Catapult, October 7
In 1940s Mexico, one little girl is kidnapped as another gets adopted. Though the verbs could change, depending on who you ask. I see bones of the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona in this plot description. But Mothers, the latest novel from a reigning bard of women in crisis, Brenda Lozano, looks to be more thrilling than silly. The author who brought us Witches is interested in the class structures that drive mothers to desperate measures. Same here. –BA
Kay Chronister, Thin Places: Stories
Counterpoint, October 7
Hard for me to not slip in a Crypt Keeper voice when recommending this booo-tifully written skull-ection of short scaries. If you like horror that emphasizes a well-crafted sentence, you’ve probably already read Chronister’s The Bog Wife and should add her new collection to your TBR. Thin Places was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and is being reissued with four new stories just in time for spooky season. Chronister’s writing is beautiful, and her supernatural and atmospheric stories about lighthouse keepers, composers in remote villages, and swamp hoteliers have a little bit of Ghibli whimsy in places. But there is a clinging dread and mystery in these stories that will stay with you. Happy reading, boils and ghouls! –JF
Anbara Salam, The Salvage
Tin House, October 7
Anything that gets comped to Julia Armfield’s chilling and waterlogged Our Wives Under the Sea immediately hits my TBR and Salam’s latest looks like just the thing. It’s historical fiction, set in 1962 in Scotland as a marine archeologist explores a Victorian shipwreck—but stranger things are afoot, and oh yeah the Cuban Missile Crisis kicks off in the background to boot. I can already smell the brine. –DB
Grace Byron, Herculine
S&S/Saga Press, October 7
A “paranoid, self-annihilating” horror debut that the author elevator-pitched as a “trans girl Buffy”? Yes! I’m excited for this one, especially since I’m already a fan of Byron’s fantastic reviews and longform, in particular her piece for The Nation on a trans vegan cult obsessed with AI, which feels like it may have partially inspired this novel. Herculine follows a woman who escapes NYC and her demons, both literal and figurative, to an all-trans girl commune in Indiana. Naturally, things get a little wild at the rural commune, and our protagonist has to unravel frightening mysteries and contend with “disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast.” –JF
Zefyr Lisowski, Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love
Harper Perennial, October 7
I love the pairing of personal narrative with film criticism, and I thought Lisowski’s Girl Work was excellent. Horror is horrific in part because it brings humans a little too close to ourselves for comfort. It holds a mirror to the parts of us we don’t want to see. But it can also act as a space for solace and interpretation for those who love it, and that seemingly contradictory place is what excites me about these essays. –OS
Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late
Verso, October 7
What do we do when those in power resign themselves to accepting climate change as an inevitability? I don’t know! I’m just one person! But I am hoping that reading The Long Heat will help me understand a little better. –OS
Marisa Meltzer, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin
Atria, October 7
Hot on the heels of her bestselling cultural history of Glossier, Marisa Meltzer is back with another blended biography and style title, It Girl. Jane Birkin was an icon: a model, an actress, a singer, and one of her most well-known, enduring legacies is the eponymous Birkin bag by Hermes. But Meltzer peels back the layers of Birkin: the style, the image, the name we know so well, and reveals the woman behind it all. Based on her own rigorous reporting, interviews, and research, Meltzer delivers the first comprehensive biography of Jane Birkin to date. –JH
Coltan Scrivner, Morbidly Curious
Viking, October 7
Who doesn’t slow down at a car crash? Need to hear all the gory details of someone’s messy divorce, or cheating scandal? In this book, scientist Coltan Scrivner acknowledges this most gruesome urge, and provides evidence that it is connected to deep and primal survival instincts. The wish to see the worst that life can offer can be a form of self-education, or even preparation, like stockpiling a survival kit. Scrivner blends research, analysis, folk-tales, and pop culture to create a fascinating portrait of the human mind: why we seek the darkness, and what we can learn from it. –JH
Joy Harjo, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age
Norton, October 7
With a call-back to her best-selling memoir, Poet Warrior, former poet laureate Harjo has written a guide for young Native women trying to survive and thrive and 21st-century America. Part personal narrative part manual to a life well lived, Girl Warrior is a much-needed counterbalance to the digital churn and overwhelming whiteness of contemporary wellness feminism. –JD
Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Scribner, October 7
Wade’s first book, Square Haunting, was an incredible collective biography that not only explored the lives of five fascinating women, but captured a specific intellectual and artistic moment in London between the wars. Bringing that sharp eye for cultural iconography to her latest subject, Gertrude Stein, Wade reveals new details about Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and dissects the mythos of the high modernist salonniere with a forensic precision hitherto unseen in previous biographies. –JD
Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro, eds., Gaza: The Story of a Genocide
Verso, October 7
The ongoing horror of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza, undertaken by Israel and abetted by the United States, livestreamed and posted 24/7 for the uncaring world to see, remains difficult to fully comprehend. So perhaps it is best then, whenever possible, to give Palestinians a voice. Here then is Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, with contributions from some of the greatest Palestinian and Arab writers working today, including Mosab Abu Toha, Susan Abulhawa, Omar Barghouti, Huda J. Fakhreddine, Lina Mounzer, and Mary Turfah. –JD
Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
Penguin Press, October 7
In her most personal book yet, the author of Dopesick returns to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, to find out a simple question—what happened to it? And what happened, by extension, to America itself? I trust Macy to take me anywhere, and to tell me what it all means, even if the truth is hard to hear. –ET
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
MCD, October 7
It’s not just you: the Internet is worse than it used to be. So is the quality of the goods you can buy in a store, and the experience of shopping (online or in person), and the roads, and basically everything. If you’ve spent even a little time online in the last several years, you’ve probably come across Doctorow’s term “enshittification” and now he’s delivering a book on the idea—and, crucially, what we can try to do about it. –DB
Tim Curry, Vagabond: A Memoir
Grand Central, October 14
Whether he’s harmonizing with Muppet pirates, obsessively pursuing a child through a luxury Manhattan hotel, or just clowning around in the sewers with the denizens of Derry, watching Tim Curry masticate the scenery on screen is a joy forever. Vagabond is a celebration of the Rocky Horror legend’s life and work, and I plan to read it aloud to myself in my best impression of Curry’s mellifluous voice. –DS
Joe Jackson, Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
FSG, October 14
The end of the 19th century doesn’t get a lot of shine—presidents Garfield, Hayes, Harrison, and Cleveland melt into a blur for all but the most dedicated U.S. history nerds, and McKinley is best remembered for being polite enough to be assassinated so a more bombastic, self-styled war hero could take his place. Still, if you want to understand how our putatively isolationist nation became a colonial empire, that’s the unpopular era you have to dig into. Previous narrative histories like Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower have illustrated that the close of the 19th century was chock full of odd, memorable, baffling characters, which might provide some relief in a historical telling of the U.S.’s first brutal forays into empire-building. –CK
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
Knopf, October 14
Majumdar, author of the fantastic, bestselling novel A Burning, is back with her sophomore effort. In a near-future Kolkata, ravaged by climate change, one family is about to escape, until their visas are stolen. Majumdar follows their story as well as the story of the desperate thief. So it’s basically The Wire at the end of the world. Can’t wait to read this one. –ET
Adam Johnson, The Wayfinder
MCD, October 14
The Orphan Master’s Son author Adam Johnson’s most recent book (Fortune Smiles, which won the National Book Award back in 2015) was, for me, one of the most extraordinary short story collections of the 21stcentury, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting his follow-up for some time now, and it has finally arrived. A 736-page doorstopper billed as an exploration of “indigeneity, ecological balance, and the resilience of humanity,” The Wayfinder is a mammoth historical novel set in the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific during the height of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. It’s the story of Kōrero, a young girl who embarks upon an epic seafaring odyssey to save her people from starvation. –DS
Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here
Liveright, October 14
The long-awaited debut novel from Sparks looks like a delightfully autumnal read, about a mother and daughter who move into an apartment building that used to be a sanatorium and the weird people (living and dead) who they encounter there. Everything about it reminds me of Ray Bradbury and Annie Hartnett and I already know I’m going to want to stay in the Pine Lake Apartments forever (and maybe I will???) –DB
Sonora Jha, Intemperance
HarperVia, October 14
Dating competitions might make you think of reality TV, but Jha’s latest promises a lot more depth and introspection than you’ll see on the tube. Intemperance is about a woman who decides to spice up her 55th birthday with a competition for her love, inspired by the ancient Indian tradition of swayamvar, where potential partners vie to win a woman’s hand in marriage. The contest in Jha’s book becomes a magnet for people both supporting and protesting the project, from an inspired wedding planner to an aggrieved mens rights activist. I’m especially looking forward to reading these characters: as a former journalist, Jha has an excellent eye for evocative character detail. –JF
Quan Barry, The Unveiling
Grove, October 14
I think, actually, that Quan Barry can do anything. As longtime readers of this site may remember, I loved her exuberant, ridiculously fun novel We Ride Upon Sticks (’80s New England, girls field hockey, magic?). I also loved her contemplative When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East (monks, brothers, Mongolia). Did I mention she’s also a celebrated poet, and a beloved professor of same at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program? Her latest novel is another left turn, a work of literary horror set in Antarctica, in which a Black location scout for a production company making a film about the Shakleton expedition and then winds up stranded with a bunch of white people…and also something else. Yes, please, thank you. –ET
Thomas McGuane, A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories
Knopf, October 14
Patron saint of Montana fiction Thomas McGuane is one of America’s true short story titans (I have no idea how many stories he has published in the New Yorker, but it’s a lot), and at eighty-five seems to be showing no sign of slowing down. His latest collection, A Wooded Shore, consists of nine wryly comic tales of men “on the outskirts of America, habituating the motels, hot dog stands, and dive bars time forgot, grappling with a world that is swiftly changing, and dreaming of a return to the wooded shores of their youth.” –DS
Jelani Cobb, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-Present
One World, October 14
The subtitle says it all. Jelani Cobb, celebrated New Yorker staff writer, delivers a themed collection of new and selected pieces stretching back to 2012 and, in so doing, attempts to put some kind of narrative onto the tumult of the last 13 years. If anybody can do it, Cobb can. –DB
Anna North, Bog Queen
Bloomsbury, October 14
Bog wives, bog bodies—and now bog queens! Bogs, the bodies they hold, and the people who love them remain fascinating and I’m excited to see what Anna North does with them all, particularly after her delightful feminist riff on Westerns in Outlawed. This one purports to bounce between the present as a body is uncovered from a bog and the Iron Age story of how that body got there, and I’m all in already. –DB
Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem
Saga Press, October 14
New Ken Liu!! New Ken Liu!! On the heels of his recent translation of the Dao De Jing, Liu returns to original speculative fiction with this series opener that follows a famous “orphan hacker” as she tries to help save a kidnapped ‘dream artist’ who can manipulate shared virtual landscapes. It sounds like a great technothriller and Liu, one of our great speculative minds, is a sure-fire bet for a good time. –DB
Stephanie LaCava, Nymph
Verso, October 14
LaCava’s new book is a thriller and love story about a young assassin with dangerous habits, trying to outrun her past and navigate life as a student in New York. LaCava’s last book, I Fear My Pain Interests You, was raw, sexy, and cool, full of sharp observation despite the spare prose. Nymph sounds like it has a similarly austere and violent premise, and will move just as fast: LaCava’s work is like a razor. –JF
Eva Meijer, tr. Anne Thompson Melo, Sea Now
Two Lines, October 14
A new entrant in the “what do we do when the waters rise?” canon of climate fiction, from the polymathic Meijer (in addition to being a novelist, she’s a philosopher and a cross-species linguist, among other things). Although stories about the end of the world as we know it inherently feel a bit bleak, this one (about three women who take a boat out over a fully flooded Netherlands) looks like it could give some hope too—or at least encourage us to take another look at the resilience of the natural world. –DB
Michelle Tea, Little F
Feminist Press, October 14
The Feminist Press introduced me to Michelle Tea with the great Black Wave and I’m excited to see what her new novel brings. Jacket copy suggests an American road novel heading from Arizona towards Provincetown with two teenage queer runaways—and one of them is apparently a witch? Sign me up. –DB
Eve Babitz, ed. Lili Anolik, Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)
NYRB, October 14
Babitz’s LA is such an era. I love reading about it, and this feels like such an intimate window into an already fascinating space. –OS
Susan Orlean, Joyride
Avid Reader Press, October 14
When I was 13 years old I precociously pick up The Orchid Thief from the front table in Barnes and Noble. I’ve been a very honest “fan” ever since. Susan Orlean’s memoir promises insight not only into her start at alt-weeklies, her journalism, and her brilliant narrative nonfiction works, but also provides a blueprint for how to live a creative life. “Orlean inspires us to seek out daily inspiration and rediscover the marvels that surround us.” –EF
Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat To) the Modern Dictionary
Atlantic Monthly Press, October 14
If you’re reading this website, I assume you, too, are a word nerd (sorry). Stefan Fatsis, though, has taken lexicographical obsession several steps further in his deep dive into the dictionary, embedding as a lexicographer-in-training at Merriam-Webster to learn the secrets of those who curate our language. –JG
David Nasaw, The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II
Penguin Press, October 14
You’ve heard about the long 19th century, which supposedly began with the 1789 French Revolution and ended with WWI; I think it was longer. I don’t believe the 20th century really began until 1945. With that in mind, I’m really looking forward to this examination of America in the immediate aftermath of the war. Most popular history skips from Hiroshima to the economic boom of the 1950s—with maybe a sprinkling of the Marshall Plan in between—but our society was fundamentally reorganized by the war. In times of political upheaval, it’s important to remember that there’s always an aftermath—and how that aftermath is handled can have an enormous impact on the future of the nation. –CK
Jude Doyle, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism?
Melville House, October 14
Despite what right-wing propagandists want you to believe, trans liberation and women’s liberation are inseparable concepts (and not just because plenty of trans people are also women). Bodily autonomy, self-determination, and the right to privacy are centered in all of our movements, and books that consider these topics from trans masculine perspectives are few, but necessary. –OS
Joe Sacco, The Once and Future Riot
Metropolitan Books, October 14
From the cartoonist who brought us Palestine (2001), Footnotes in Gaza (2009) and, most recently, War on Gaza (2024) comes a searing interrogation of the 2013 sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh, India, that explores “the mechanics, dynamics, mythologies, uses, and abuses of political violence everywhere.” I’ve been an avid follower of Sacco’s work for years now. He’s someone who has more than earned the moniker of “greatest living comics journalist,” and The Once and Future Riot promises to be another painfully beautiful work of investigative journalism. –DS
Harper Lee, The Land of Sweet Forever
Harper, October 21
Yes, that Harper Lee. This collection of newly unearthed stories, essays, and articles promises a fresh perspective on the author of To Kill A Mockingbird. Alongside a framing introduction by Lee’s biographer Casey Cep, the collection traces Lee’s life from post-WWII Alabama to midcentury New York City, highlighting her early short fiction and later nonfiction magazine work for McCall’s, Vogue, and more. –JF
Charlie Porter, Nova Scotia House
Nightboat, October 21
Charlie Porter’s fashion journalism has been on my radar for a while. And I was most intrigued by his last book, which analyzed the style inherent to the Bloomsbury group. Porter’s debut novel takes that interest in playful forms to bold new places. Unfolding at the height of the AIDS crisis in 90s London, this diaristic reflection thrusts us right into our narrator’s skull, so we seek, remember, and mourn right along with Johnny Grant. Writing for Vogue, Anna Cafolla framed the book’s central question nicely. In the aftermath of profound disaster, “How can we connect again with radical queerness and countercultural ideas of living?” –BA
Claire-Louise Bennett, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
Riverhead, October 21
From the always inventive and fascinating author of Pond and Checkout 19, to my eye one of the most exciting writers currently working, comes a new novel about love, and the lack of love, and the communications and miscommunications between those closest to us. The human condition, in other words. Which might mean anything, but, who cares, it’s a Bennett novel, so I expect it to be brilliant and careful and river cold. Can’t wait. –ET
Erin Somers, The Ten Year Affair
Simon & Schuster, October 21
Cora and Sam meet in a baby group, and though happily married young parents, the chemistry is undeniable. As their lives intersect and intertwine, their worlds—and the novel—unravel into two parallel timelines: one where they pursue their feelings, and one in which they don’t. How could you not want to read a will-they/won’t they novel where both timelines actually play out? Can’t wait. –EF
Gish Jen, Bad Bad Girl
Knopf, October 21
Gish Jen is the absolute master of extremely funny devastation, and this novel—which centers on the tumultuous relationship between a mother and her daughter—is the perfect showcase for her skills. Aggie, born in Shanghai in 1925 to a wealthy family, moves to the US in 1947 to pursue a PhD. She marries and has a daughter, Gish, with whom she struggles in a way that feels too familiar. It’s described as an “engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel,” which… yes. –JG
Ha Jin, Looking for Tank Man
Other Press, October 21
From the National Book Award winning author of Waiting comes a novel for our times: a coming-of-age story about protest, in which a Chinese student at Harvard stumbles on the obscured history of the Tiananmen Square massacre. –ET
Mattia Filice, tr. Jacques Houis, Driver
NYRB, October 21
I’m intrigued by this book, which is a novel about a high-speed train driver in France—written from personal experience—blending prose and verse and other cacophonies. It’s billed as “a book about work, about the romance of the rails, but also about the tedium and intensity of doing such a job day in and day out, as well as the workers’ continual struggle to improve their working conditions through strikes and protests.” Solidarité. –ET
Sue Monk Kidd, Writing Creativity and Soul
Knopf, October 21
The bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees is releasing a craft memoir: reflections on what it is to be an artist, and how she has made a life of her art. Kidd believes firmly in the spiritual nature of being a writer, on the divine center from which creativity can spring, and she offers lessons, advice, thoughts and her own philosophical musings about the subject. One expects to walk away from this title a little more in tune with the burning core of our own artistic selves, and a wish to share it with the world. –JH
Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
Ecco, October 21
Motherland is award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe’s hybrid memoir/historical account of feminism in Russia. Tracing her personal relationship to feminism and the larger history of feminism in Russia, this book is both intimate and vast. From Lenin’s revolutionary lover to Pussy Riot to Putin, Ioffee explores Russian history from a feminist lens and attempts to answer the question: how did we end up here? –MC
Damion Searls, Analog Days
Coffee House Press, October 21
I’m a big fan of Searls’ translation work—see the Fosse entry above!—so I’m very curious to read his own debut novella, in which a group of friends at a cultural inflection point (2016, uh oh) “fall back on film and friendship and art as the last bastions of meaning in their fragmented lives.” Now more relatable and more timely than ever. –ET
Brandon Hobson, The Devil is a Southpaw
Ecco, October 28
Anytime I see the phrase “a novel within a novel,” I’m already hooked. Hobson’s latest follows Milton Muleborn, a man who has been jealous of his friend Matthew Echota, a talented Cherokee artist, ever since they were children in a juvenile detention center. Devil Is a Southpaw is partly Muleborn’s novel about he and Echota’s childhood, and partly Muleborn’s adult musings about the ways their imprisonment shaped the boys and their friendships. This book sounds fascinating and fresh and beautifully written. –MC
Susan Straight, Sacrament
Counterpoint, October 28
The question of what constitutes the COVID novel canon will probably be debated forever, but there’s no doubt that Susan Straight’s new book about ICU nurses will be one of them. Sacrament dives right into the nadir of the 2020 health crisis, following a group of nurses who have moved into makeshift housing near a California hospital, to isolate from their families during the height of the case surge. In the midst of the tremendous risk they put themselves in to protect their families, their lives back home become more complicated, and older griefs dovetail with fresh ones. –JF
Catherine Newman, Wreck
Harper, October 28
Catherine Newman has my heart: We All Want Impossible Things made sure of that, and now I’m here for the ride. Wreck is the follow up to Sandwich, a recent bestseller orienting around a middle-aged woman named Rocky, a funny, anxious, spirited, and relatable protagonist on vacation with her parents, her husband, and their young adult children. In Wreck we witness those beloved characters two years later. Some changes have occurred. Her mother has passed away, her daughter is in college. And much is still the same: she wonders about marriage, about lineage, about how to be both the person a family demands of her, while still being herself. Newman is my dream writer, and she channels the perfect cocktail of humanity into her characters, especially Rocky. Rocky is funny and dry and emotional and sometimes crazy and always loving, so loving, of her family, even as she struggles and panics. It’s a gift to get to be on the quest with her, and learn alongside her, about how to be alive, to be a person, to be good, to be worthy. –JH
Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting
Tor, October 28
Harrow-heads already know that she’s one of the best fantasy writers working—but this new book is a time-twisting Courtly Romance (an academic is thrown back in time to accompany his country’s most famous knight on her final crusade) with sneaky-deep reflections on storytelling, truth, power, and love that promises to be her best yet. I’ll follow Alix Harrow wherever she goes. –DB
Anthony Bourdain, The Anthony Bourdain Reader
Ecco, October 28
To add to the already hefty material of Bourdain-related media out there, here is a new compilation of all Bourdain’s writing, perfect for the connoisseur (or the obsessive). But there should be something for everyone here—Bourdain’s wisdom and musings ranged far and wide. He wrote about culture, about identity, place, about food, endlessly food, while acknowledging everything that food represents. He was a specific and respected voice, who left us with a lot to read, a lot to chew on. –JH
Kate Evans, Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen
Verso, October 28
I’m an Austen fan who loved Kate Evans’s Red Rosa, so I’m basically the target audience here. Particularly, I’m excited to see how Austen’s patchwork quilt is handled as a storytelling device, and what that means for the book’s artwork, panel to panel. It’s so cool when narrative and form meet. –OS
Susan Cheever, When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
FSG, October 28
There’s such a difference between writing about a parent and writing about that parent’s writing. It almost feels more personal and vulnerable to me, to view that relationship through the lens of the work and how that work came to be. –OS
Shea Serrano, Expensive Basketball
Grand Central, October 28
It’s tricky to write about something that looked cool. For example, that last sentence was a dud. This may be why most sportswriters stick to the well-trod path of objective coverage, allowing themselves scant editorializing beyond describing a player’s “explosive” thirty-point half or, as a playoff indulgence, tossing in the odd “miraculous” to describe a game-winning play. Shea Serrano does not write about sports that way.
Serrano is one of the few writers whose on-the-page enthusiasm is infectious, who can describe a particular spin move executed during a regular season game from 2006 and successfully transfer his excitement about it to the reader—even if you didn’t watch that game, never cared about that team, are only hearing about that player for the first time. I wouldn’t trust most writers to carry that off for the length of a full book; in this case, I have no doubt it’ll be a blast. –CK
Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
Knopf, October 28
A deep dive from historian Ellis—author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx—on how America’s founders debated, rationalized, and thought about the issue of slavery while drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Stacy Schiff calls it “an elegant, concise volume that illuminates the obfuscations, misunderstandings, and hypocrisy that continue to sabotage us today.” –ET
Sven Beckert, Capitalism: A Global History
Penguin Press, October 28
Sure, some of us might think the origins of modern capitalism can be traced directly to a few counting houses in 16th-century Amsterdam but apparently it’s more complicated than that. According to prize-winning Harvard historian Beckert’s latest, capitalism manifested around the world, at different times, from China to Africa and beyond. (So basically it’s everybody’s fault.) –JD
Mark Z. Danielewski, Tom’s Crossing
Pantheon, October 28
The announcement of a new Mark Z. Danielewski book is the sort to get the literary world talking—and the fact that it is a 1200+ page Western without (so far as I can tell) any of his usual meta-textual typographic trickery or design acrobatics leaves me wondering just what on earth I can expect. But I’m eager to find out what two friends saving two horses from slaughter in Utah in the 80s looks like from the mind that brought us House of Leaves. –DB
