Maggie Nelson! Julia Alvarez! Claire Lombardo! 25 new books out in paperback this April.
April is here, the fourth (and, for Eliot, the cruelest) month in a year that has felt like many cruel years already, dense with the weight of so much political tumult. But it may also be a month of beauty and boons, as well, a time of showers and slow-blooming splendor, and, of course, of new books to fall in love with. Today, I have twenty-five fresh new paperback editions to suggest that you consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from established stars to new literary lights worth watching, each coming out this April.
If you missed any of these before, or just want a beautiful new paperback edition (who doesn’t?), now is the time to pick them up. If the world feels like too much—and it often does—focus on these, instead. It’ll be worth it. Be well, and read deeply, as always.
*
Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was
(Vintage)
“One of those big, grown-up existential novels about parenthood and marriage and teenagers and friendship and family life….Like [Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler’s] best works, Lombardo’s finds the vast and epic and universal via specific attention to family life. But there is also something new to it, something that is both easy reading and profound at the same time, specifically on feelings of failure and abandonment, all of it cleverly brushed with wit and humor.”
–The Guardian
Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories
(Algonquin)
“A rich and moving saga of Dominican history emerges, embodied in the lives of irresistible characters… Her gifts for glowing prose and powerful narrative are still strong. Buried stories find their way to the light in this finely crafted novel.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Andrew Boryga, Victim
(Vintage)
“Victim is going to hurt some people’s feelings. But that’s exactly what smart, insightful social satire is meant to do. Andrew Boryga’s dazzling debut novel is the story of a hustler whose game is to benefit from the struggles of other people. He’s an identity politics confidence man. And yet he’s also someone you come to care about, and worry for, as the stakes of his hustle grow and grow. This is a fearless and ambitious debut.”
–Victor LaValle
Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations
(Graywolf)
“Drawn from nearly twenty years of genre-defying author Maggie Nelson’s work, Like Love offers incisive commentary on topics ranging from music and literature to feminism and queerness to motherhood and love.”
–TIME
Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
(Picador)
“[Sharpe’s] most liberating and poetic experiment yet. Made up of two hundred and forty-eight individual notes, it is a deft blend of memoir, theory, archival documents and lyrical reflections on her daily life….The notes build in momentum and assemble themselves into a mosaic that holds the relentless terror of Black life as well as its undeniable beauty.”
–The New York Times Magazine
Genevieve Kingston, Did I Ever Tell You?: A Memoir
(Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books)
“In bracing, vivid, generous prose and with crystalline candor, Kingston shares a page-turning and wholly unexpected story about the extraordinary gifts her mother left her, including the most powerful one of all: the tools Kingston needed to carry on without her mom. This book is so full of hard-won wisdom and surprising insight into the challenges and joys of living every day that I want to press it into the hands of everyone I know and say, simply, ‘You must, must read this.'”
–Will Schwalbe
Victoria Chang, With My Back to the World: Poems
(FSG)
“Victoria Chang is a tremendous, gorgeous, wonderful poet. Her writing is amazing….She uses artist Agnes Martin to inspire her while she writes about grief, loss, but also some of the hopefulness of the human experience. You’ll be underlining so much of this, along with quietly smiling at her wit”
–Isaac Fitzgerald
Alexandra Tanner, Worry
(Scribner)
“Worry paints a chaotic, riotously funny portrait of two neurotic sisters-turned-roommates inching toward a breaking point in their relationship. Set post-2016 election and pre-Covid, Tanner captures the zeitgeist of the late 2010s—from MLM schemes to a dog named Amy Klobuchar—without making them feel stale. Worry is a pressure cooker of a sisterhood story, interwoven with mommy issues galore, and heaps of Jewish humor.”
–Vogue
Steven Millhauser, Disruptions: Stories
(Vintage)
“More turmoil and magic in suburbia from one of America’s most accomplished short story writers….Each of these stories is open to interpretation as a study of prejudice, suburban narrowness, and groupthink. But Millhauser has always been too slippery a writer to pursue such obvious meaning-making; more often, the effect is that of Borges-ian strangeness and delight….Millhauser remains gifted at stretching time, space, and expectations.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Amor Towles, Table for Two: Fictions
(Penguin)
“Aficionados of Amor Towles’s carefully crafted fiction will be thrilled by this latest collection of elegantly presented short stories along with a novella….Long-standing admirers and new readers alike will take great delight in this entertaining collection
–The Guardian
Clair Wills, Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother’s Secrets
(Picador)
“Brilliant and moving…fascinating…a riveting study of a ‘typical’ twentieth-century Irish family, one both destroyed and bound together by its secrets….As it progresses, Missing Persons becomes less an effort to recover those missing relatives and more an inquiry into the mechanisms of disappearance, the ways that communities conspire to erase certain people from public life and collective memory.”
–The Atlantic
Robert Sullivan, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy o’Sullivan, America’s Most Mysterious War Photographer
(Picador)
“A large-hearted, wide-angled book, gutsy in the extreme, that cinches the reader tight to some of the most powerful landscapes in America. Robert Sullivan follows the nineteenth-century footsteps of photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, reports with artistry and passion on what they both saw, and makes you love the country in its darkness as well as its light. The double story—Sullivan’s and O’Sullivan’s—and the pinpoint details drew me in so I couldn’t put it down.”
–Ian Frazier
Hilary Holladay, The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography
(Princeton University Press)
“[A few] years after Rich’s death, at eighty-two, comes Hilary Holladay’s The Power of Adrienne Rich, which allows us to meet this prickly poet fresh and entire. It’s the first proper biography of her, and there’s a lot to unpack. This is a good story well-told.”
–The New York Times
Myriam J.A. Chancy, Village Weavers
(Tin House)
“Just beautiful…[a] love story for our times and for all time…feels new, fresh….Spanning Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Paris, Florida, Arizona and back again, this is a true Diaspora story—frankly told and sharply contemporary—that speaks into the silences around race, class, colour and the myths of nationhood, while affirming that no matter how far we are drawn apart it is the sea, the sea that holds us together.”
–Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Clare Beams, The Garden
(Vintage)
“With her singular lyricism, elegance, and candor, The Garden powerfully illuminates what is, for many women, a private and isolating grief. Ingeniously using elements of the gothic and weaving in today’s most pressing questions about female bodily autonomy, Beams captures the magic, strangeness, terror, and all-consuming pressure of pregnancy, as well as the desperate desire for certainty and the abiding hope.”
–Jessamine Chan
Fiona Williams, The House of Broken Bricks
(Holt)
“Fiona Williams captures the rural English countryside, exposing it to a loving and critical eye through a family haunted and grieving the loss of love, themselves, and the promise of the future….I really loved this book. The language, structure, and characterization are all exquisite, and Williams is clearly a writer in control of her craft.”
–Asale Angel-Ajani
Guido Alfani, As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West
(Princeton University Press)
“The rich, like the poor, are always with us. In fact, over many centuries—as this wide-ranging and ambitious book tells us—the richest in society have captured more and more of the overall wealth of Western societies.”
–Roderick Floud
Tracie McMillan, The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America
(Holt)
“The White Bonus is an unusually daring book that explores how racism has given unfair advantages to white Americans as we all pursue the American dream. Tracie McMillan profiles a range of Americans to show how their ‘white bonus’ results in advantages that can total hundreds of thousands of dollars. This original, compelling work investigates an undeniable inequity that America has too long ignored.”
–Steven Greenhouse
Angela Garcia, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City
(Picador)
“A true book can be many things, but it’s always a book no one else can write. This is a true book about love, the politics of abandonment, and addiction. Angela Garcia takes us through the wreckage of the war on drugs, revealing what this manufactured brutality now creates. That she maps the latticework of care of the anexos so carefully, as patiently as she comes into understanding her own quest, is not only one of the book’s many achievements, but also an act of grace.”
–Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures
(Ecco)
“Infused with heartfelt humor, Van Pelt’s elegant portrait of a widowed woman who finds understanding and connection with a clever octopus is refreshingly, if surprisingly, relatable. Despite the unorthodox relationship at its core, the debut novel offers a wholly original meditation on grief and the bonds that keep us afloat.”
–ELLE
Johanna Hedva, Your Love Is Not Good
(And Other Stories)
“This precise page-turner of a tale about bad or nonexistent mothers, race, and the erotics of painting masterfully pins the art world to the buckram of its specimen tray, pointed sentence after sentence. Here everyone loses gorgeously, definitively—and lucky readers learn a lot about the game.”
–Lucy Ives
Katrina Carrasco, Rough Trade
(Picador)
“An addictive treat sure to please fans of Sarah Waters and HBO’s Our Flag Means Death….Detailed historical research bolsters dynamic crime fiction in this spectacular queer adventure about opium smugglers in nineteenth-century Washington Territory.”
–Shelf Awareness
Grace Elizabeth Hale, In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning
(Back Bay Books)
“A profound act of narrative repair, in which a sheriff’s granddaughter, now a renowned historian, rolls up her sleeves to rip the dressing off one of the nation’s deepest wounds—one in which her own beloved grandfather was complicit. Fierce and unflinching, with moments of startling beauty as well as horror, this myth-breaking history dives into our nation’s darkest past, exposing not just what we have done but how we must learn to speak of these realities.”
–Ilyon Woo
Ari Berman, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It
(Picador)
“[A] labyrinthine political exposé….Berman pairs wide-ranging and historically grounded analysis of America’s minoritarian political system with a trenchant critique of its departures from democratic common sense. The result is an eye-opening dissection of partisan manipulation.”
–Publishers Weekly
Christopher Tilghman, On the Tobacco Coast
(Picador)
“Tilghman’s four-volume chronicle of the Mason family, having spanned centuries and continents, ends, as it must, around a dinner table—a domestic idyll at which the ghosts of a brutal history, both national and familial, keep trying to pull up a chair. A moving capstone to one of the epic projects in recent American literature.”
–Jonathan Dee
