DECEMBER

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Ryan Schreiber, Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever
MCD, December 1

Ryan Schreiber was nineteen years old when he started Pitchfork on the family desktop in his Minnesota home, employing a quirky little decimal scale from 0 to 10 to rate new albums. In 2015, the site sold to Condé Nast for an undisclosed sum. The decades in between were a revolution for music criticism, digital media, fandom, and the way in which musicians interacted with their fans and critics. If Pitchfork was also your homepage when you were in college, this history-of will be a must read.  –EF

Matthew Salesses, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
Little, Brown December 1

Matthew Salesses’ debut memoir explores his relationship with his wife, Cathreen, and her subsequent death from cancer. Salesses’ fiction and his craft writing are consistently revelatory, and I expect his writing on consumptive and transformative experience of grief will be consuming, wrenching, and essential.  –JG

Colm Tóibín, The Bridge
Scribner, December 1

I’m eager to read this brand-new novella from the always brilliant Tóibín (Brooklyn, The Master), which serves as a sequel of sorts to his 2006 novella A Long Winter. In The Bridge, a young man named Miquel lives in a house with his father in the Catalan Pyrenees. The year before, his mother left home in a drunken rage and froze to death in a winter storm. Miguel’s younger brother then abandoned the family when he returned home from the army to news of his mother’s death. Now, a new bridge is opening which promises to end the isolation of these Pyrenees villages, but a series of mistakes, betrayals, and bad luck lands Miguel and his father a transformative two-year prison sentence.  –DS

Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Primeval and Other Times
Riverhead, December 1

Primeval and Other Times, Tokarczuk’s third novel, was originally published in Poland in 1996, and first in English in 2010. It is a postmodern account of a mythical village, told in 60 anecdotes. Some are about mushrooms. Personally, I miss the fragment novel, so I’m happy to see Riverhead reissuing it now.  –ET

Zachary Mason, Fabrications
Grove Press, December 1

Mason’s publisher promises that “Fabrications is… influenced by Borges and Calvino, and for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and Emily St. John Mandel,” which is quite a quartet! If the book fulfills even half of that promise, it’ll be my favorite read of the year.  –CK

Sara Baume, Opening Night: A Story of Art and Friendship
FSG, December 1

Irish writer Sara Baume attended a party for an exhibition by artist Mollie Douthit and was particularly struck by two small paintings. It turned out that Mollie, an American artist who was living and working in Ireland, lived alone in a cabin only a few miles away from Sara. Their quick friendship, fueled by soup and a monthly swim in the Atlantic, turned into an artistic partnership as well, with Sara writing the text for Mollie’s new exhibition. Opening Night is an intimate story of what it means to live as an artist, musing on creativity, memory, as well as the complexities of health, love, family, and artistic failure.  –EF

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Best Journey in the World: An Antarctic Story
Little, Brown, December 1

As a sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson is a great storyteller AND a prodigious describer of geological phenomena (just crack into any of the Mars trilogy books). So it makes sense that he’d tell his own true story of visiting Antarctica (inspired largely by an early account of the continent’s exploration called The Worst Journey in the World) to research the reality of life in inhospitable conditions for the aforementioned trilogy.  –JD

Jenny Uglow, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer
FSG, December 1

If you’ve been wanting to spend more time in nature, reading this book is a great first step. A Year with Gilbert White follows the journals of the “father of ecology” as he observes the natural world in his Hampshire village. It kind of sounds like a nonfiction version of North Woods—which means it’s going straight to the top of my TBR.  –MC

Ellena Savage, The Ruiners
Catapult, December 1

When I hear a book described as a “sexy, cerebral eco-thriller” my ears immediately prick up. This comic debut novel from Australian author Savage is the story of a young couple—he a brooding Balkan fiction scholar, she a frustrated Melbourne waitress—who use her surprise inheritance to purchase a decrepit house on a remote Greek island. Once ensconced, the couple and their friends find themselves “enmeshed in an environmental struggle that brings the mistakes of the past—and new betrayals—into sharp relief.”  –DS

Park Seolyeon, tr. Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Rehired
HarperVia, December 8

Our own McKayla Coyle’s blurb for A Magical Girl Retires sold me on that book and I’m delighted that we’re getting a sequel, with more magical girls and strange bureaucracy and zippy manga-inspired delights. Now to wait for the matching Nomad Edition paperback… –DB

Stephanie Krzywonos, The Blue Hours: My Summers and Winter in Antarctica
Washington Square Press, December 1

Who amongst us is not fascinated by Antarctica, that mysterious, unforgiving desert at the end of the earth? In the wake of her best friend’s tragic death, Xicana writer Stephanie Krzywonos left her entire life behind and moved, for six polar summers and one pitch dark winter, to the White Continent. There, she traced “the stories of female, queer, and BIPOC explorers often left out of the annals of Antarctic history to ask: Who truly belongs in Antarctica?”  –DS