New Gabriel Garcia Marquez! Vinson Cunningham! 23 new books out today.
It’s another Tuesday in March, the Year-of-Our-Ultimately-Arbitrary-Calendars 2024, but it also isn’t just any other Tuesday, for this is the day that we finally get new work, Until August, from Gabo, as the esteemed Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was affectionately known. (Despite the title, you will not, in fact, have to wait until August to read it; it’s out today.) It’s certainly a special day for me, for Garcia Marquez has long been a writer near and dear to my heart, as I write about here and here. Although there is understandable controversy surrounding the publication of Gabo’s posthumous novel, it’s here one way or another, and you’ll have the chance to decide for yourself what to make of Until August.
Of course, while a new Garcia Marquez novel dominates the headlines, there are many other brilliant, bewitching new books to consider today. Vinson Cunningham shares an audaciously titled new novel with us about fatherhood, politics, belief, and more; the eclectically talented Morgan Parker offers us a new essay collection about existing as a Black woman throughout human history; Emily Raboteau’s inventive memoir braids together birds, the Bronx, motherhood, and impending apocalypses; Katie Gee Salisbury tells us the true story of Anna May Wong, often considered the first Chinese American star in Hollywood; Adam Clay and Laura Henriksen have distinct but compelling new poetry collections; there’s new fiction from Rita Bullwinkel, Adam Boryga, and many others; and much, much more. (You’ll even find a gripping account of flannel in America, blurbed with unparalleled enthusiasm—at least for this topic—by none other than Stephen King.)
It’s a day of beautiful abundance in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The world may often seem a bit sickly and off-kilter, but it’s in times of cholera that love shines even more brightly, and may you find something bright, bold, and beautiful below to take with you on your own journey through the years—of solitude or its opposite—hopefully yet to come.
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Gabriel García Márquez, Until August (trans. Anne McLean)
(Knopf)
“García Márquez worked on Until August in his final years as dementia increasingly eroded his ability to write. Its publication comes a decade after his death, and García Márquez’s sons admit…that the Nobel laureate himself said, ‘This book…must be destroyed.’ But upon returning to the drafts years later, his sons believed the book to be better than García Márquez had judged….This posthumous novella delivers graceful insight into the fickle human heart, serving as an absorbing—if quiet—epilogue to García Márquez’s towering oeuvre.”
–Bookpage
Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations
(Hogarth Press)
“This is a novel of so many things—love and pride and pity and politics and sex and God and fatherhood—but, ultimately, it is about the human ambition to make sense of the troubled waters of our times. Brilliantly written, piercingly smart, quietly subversive, Great Expectations will be one of the talked-about novels of the year. I couldn’t help thinking that there was a touch of Fitzgerald in Cunningham’s words, borne back not just ceaselessly but also gracefully into the too-recent past.”
–Colum McCann
Andrew Boryga, Victim
(Doubleday)
“You will burn through Victim and find your hands scalded when you are done. It’s not just because of the tight, engaging prose and pitch perfect voice of our narrator, Javier—but because no one is innocent in this stinging satire that turns everything about meritocracy and success on its head. Boryga pulls no punches, and leaves you alternating rolling with laughter and cringing as a result.”
–Xochitl Gonzalez
Morgan Parker, You Get What You Pay For: Essays
(One World)
“Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For tracks a Black woman’s interiority with trenchant insight and puckish humor. Parker explores the epigenetic effects of structural anti-Blackness through her powerful meditations on loneliness and depression. She carves out her vulnerability with a poet’s scalpel.”
–Cathy Park Hong
Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
(Holt)
“Interspersing punchy essays with striking photos of bird murals in her Bronx neighborhood, Raboteau chronicles her search for solace as a Black woman and mother in a world awash in political rage and threatened with climate disaster.”
–The New York Times
Geraldine DeRuiter, If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury
(Crown Publishing Group)
“If You Can’t Take the Heat is a hysterical and incisive journey through the world of food and feminism. The essays will cause you to snort with laughter and then make the tender muscle of your heart ache. Whether she’s writing about growing green onions during lockdown or the sexism of the restaurant industry, Geraldine is smart, sarcastic, delightful, and sharper than a kitchen knife. This book is an absolute delight!”
–Lyz Lenz
Adam Clay, Circle Back
(Milkweed Editions)
“Circle Back‘s originality is found in the deep exploration of common shared emotion. Clay uses the singular experience of his speaker, whether through grief, quarantine, the end of the world, as an example we can all relate to. I am struck by his thin flowing strophes that resemble James Schuyler’s Morning of the Poem….Clay’s intimate and tender interrogation of the state of the world—its nature, its inhabitants, its grief, its joy, its destruction—feel familiar because they are real.”
–Matthew Buxton
Laura Henriksen, Laura’s Desires
(Nightboat)
“‘Laura’s Desires,’ the eponymous long poem of the forthcoming Laura’s Desires (Nightboat, March 2024) examines bodies and how they gather-in subway cars and movie theaters, on camping trips and at living room sex parties. The poem manages to create on the page the same spaces of possibility that I seek at an in-person reading. Encounters between the speaker and lovers, friends, strangers, art, and the natural world provide sustained and fleeting moments.”
–Stella-Ann Harris
Katya Apekina, Mother Doll
(Overlook Press)
“I’ve been a fan of Katya Apekina since her first novel, the delightful and brilliant The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish. Her second, Mother Doll, is just as strange, wild, offbeat, and hilarious as her first, a profoundly moving story about maternity, inherited grief and joy, and the way that the children that mothers bear inside them must, in turn, bear the collective weight of their ancestors. I absolutely loved it.”
–Lauren Groff
Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot
(Viking)
“Headshot is a knockout, a novel as fierce and vibrant as its girl boxers. I’ve never read a book like this, that captures girlhood and life itself in the fleeting moments that make us.”
–Rachel Khong
Joel H. Morris, All Our Yesterdays
(Putnam)
“Lady Macbeth is surely one of our most instantly recognizable characters, a shorthand now for heartless and overweening ambition. In All Our Yesterdays, Morris has given her the deep, nuanced, and complicated backstory she deserves. With witches! Thoroughly engrossing, highly recommended.”
–Karen Joy Fowler
Ramie Targoff, Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance
(Knopf)
“Ramie Targoff has written a vivid, finely crafted portrait of four extraordinary Renaissance women whose writing…defied all the rules. Mary Sidney’s translations, Ameilia Lanyer’s poems, Anne Clifford’s diaries, and Elizabeth Cary’s dramas contained radical messages of autonomy at a time when women had few legal rights….Targoff, an esteemed scholar…restores these women to the starring roles…in this fresh, galavanting, and indispensable history of Renaissance England….Scholarly storytelling at its finest.”
–Heather Clark
Katie Gee Salisbury, Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong
(Dutton)
“History has long neglected the wild and inspiring story of Anna May Wong, a taboo-smashing star whose career left an indelible mark on Hollywood. With impeccable research and eloquent prose, Katie Gee Salisbury captures not only Wong’s grand ambition and delicious swagger, but also the significant challenges and prejudices she faced during her career. Not Your China Doll is sure to enthrall anyone fascinated by audacious, before-their-time women.”
–Karen Abbott
Daniel Lewis, Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Culture
(Avid Reader Press)
“Daniel Lewis channels the wisdom of twelve of the planet’s most eloquent teachers–the oldest, the tallest, and even the extinct–to share their deep time lessons with us. With the precision of a scientist, the skill of a historian, and the voice of a poet, Lewis speaks for the trees. If we listen, we will grow to love these twelve trees deeply, and come to recognize how closely our own lives and fates are linked to theirs.”
–Melanie Choukas-Bradley
Gina Chung, Green Frog: Stories
(Vintage)
“Gina Chung’s Green Frog is remarkable. The stories hit, each one, and land with such seeming perfection. Chung’s book sits next to my all-time favorite story collections by masters of the craft: Karen Russell, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, and Ted Chiang….There is so much raw power and emotion in these stories that after finishing each one, I felt more and more alive. Green Frog is an unforgettable dream.”
–Morgan Talty
David Small, The Werewolf at Dusk: And Other Stories
(Liveright)
“The collection is more adult picture book than graphic novel and is immensely enjoyable. Small’s linework is striking in its expressiveness and energy, figures and forms leaping across the page while eyes and lips simmer with emotion. Broad patches and layers of color imbue the illustrations with a gorgeous painterly quality….Surreal and searing.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Lyn Slater, How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon
(Plume Books)
“What happens when you begin to live outside of the expectations of your culture, your family, your sense of yourself and your sense of your own possibilities? These are the questions I asked myself as I read Lyn Slater’s remarkable memoir, a wise and funny story of the path she did not expect to find herself on, which is also the path where she found herself anew. How To Be Old is How To Live, too.”
–Alexander Chee
Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In
(Norton)
“This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of [trans] counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.”
–Michelle Tea
Louisa Onomé, Pride and Joy
(Atria Books)
“Onomé blends humor and pathos in her captivating adult debut….Onomé’s rich storytelling is enhanced by authentic descriptions of traditional Nigerian music and foods, such as Egosi soup and chin chin, as her characters come together amid great loss. Readers will savor Onomé’s vibrant portrait of a family.”
–Publishers Weekly
Jane Kamensky, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below
(Norton)
“A riveting, humane, and essential contribution to modern feminist history. Jane Kamensky has written a biography that reads like a novel, an astute intellectual work that recognizes and humanizes the role of sex workers in recent women’s movements. Thanks to this book, I am proud to recognize the place of Candida Royalle in my own lineage.”
–Melissa Febos
Steven Kurutz, American Flannel: How a Band of Entrepreneurs Are Bringing the Art and Business of Making Clothes Back Home
(Riverhead)
“I was hooked from the very first page. Kurutz’s writing is tight, vivid, always on point. The story he tells is as important as it is absorbing. First, it’s an uplifting tale of good old American inventiveness and stick-to-it-iveness, the best kind of underdog story. It is also a cautionary tale about what happens when a country becomes so rich and complacent that it forgets how to create as well as buy. I can confidently say this will be one of my favorite books of 2024.”
–Stephen King
Leslie T. Chang, Egyptian Made: Women, Work, and the Promise of Liberation
(Random House)
“What do women want? What does freedom mean? How does capitalism translate through the prism of cultural expectations and pressures? Leslie T. Chang’s meticulous reportage offers Anglophone readers an intimate window into the varied lives, triumphs, sorrows, and dreams of women in contemporary Egypt—and invites us to examine both the global reach of patriarchy, and the universal nature of human ambitions and dream.”
–Anna Badkhen
Jim Sciutto, The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War
(Dutton)
“The Return of Great Powers is a brilliant warning shot across the world’s bow. If we want to avoid a new world war, our leaders are going to have to pull the blinkers from their eyes—and this superb book can help shatter our complaisance. Jim Sciutto is saying, quite clearly, ‘Wake up, folks. A world war could easily happen.’ It is a warning worth heeding.”
–James Stavridis
