Paradise Lost! R.E.M.! The Village Voice! 21 books out in paperback this November.

It’s November, and I’m happy to be back with a new slew of book recommendations. I’ll be taking a step back from my weekly round-ups for the moment, but I’ll still be here at the end of each month to call attention to the beautiful paperback editions that you should have on your radar, especially if you missed any of these in hardcover. And so, I’ve put together a list of twenty-one that you should consider checking out in fiction and nonfiction, covering a remarkable array of themes, foci, styles, trajectories, and more, some cozy, some quirky, some provocative, all worthy of a place in your ever-embiggening to-be-read piles.

I hope you enjoy these!

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Joseph O’Neill, Godwin
(Vintage)

“Joseph O’Neill’s storytelling abilities get pushed to the max with Godwin….A continent-spanning epic about the horrors of white saviorship, colonialism, [and] the ends of capitalism, Godwin is continuously gripping, the type of book to linger in your mind deeply after its last words.”
–Our Culture Mag

John Vercher, Devil Is Fine
(Celadon Books)

“Vercher (After the Lights Go Out, 2022) masterfully builds a haunting tale of grief, family secrets, and unacknowledged crimes of racism that inevitably resurface. With dark humor, psychological suspense, ghost-story elements, and echoes of Percival Everett’s Erasure (the source of the film American Fiction), Devil Is Fine is a multilayered portrayal of one man’s struggle with his personal demons and a white society’s steadfast refusal to confront its own.”
–Booklist

Nayantara Roy, The Magnificent Ruins
(Algonquin)

“As gorgeous as it is wise, Roy’s voice soars and whispers with uncanny insight and wit, transporting us across continents, charting not only the distance between Calcutta and New York, but the stranger more mysterious abyss between childhood and adulthood, between family and home, between daughter and mother, and perhaps between life as we want it to be and life as it is–messy, complicated, beautiful, and sad. A page-turning, heart-rending family epic.”
–Sunil Yapa

Orlando Reade, What In Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost
(Astra House)

“Wonderfully written, intelligent and moving. Orlando Reade follows the enduring conversation between Milton’s Paradise Lost and revolutionaries across the centuries. Reade reminds us that literature is action, that epic poetry has the power to liberate minds, pens, and voices. Behind every revolution is a song. As it turns out, so often that song has been Paradise Lost.”
–Leah Redmond Chang

Edwin Frank, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
(Picador)

“Edwin Frank tackles an ambitious project that’s ideally suited to his service as the longtime editorial director of New York Review of Books and founder of the NYRB Classics series….A well-informed and lively survey of the novel’s dramatic transformation in the twentieth century.”
–Shelf Awareness

Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
(Picador)

“Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have assumed that human beings want to know the truth about the world and themselves. What if this is an illusion? Gleaning insights from ancient myths and modern novels, Saint Augustine, Sigmund Freud, and a rich variety of other thinkers and writers, Mark Lilla argues compellingly that a will to ignorance is as strong in human beings as any interest in knowledge. Writing with admirable clarity and subtle charm, Lilla gives us a highly original study of what our desire not to know means for our lives.”
–John Gray

Pat Barker, The Voyage Home
(Vintage)

“The third volume in Barker’s Trojan War series moves to Mycenae for a bloody climax….Barker’s vision of a world shaped by violence, a key theme in all her fiction, is equal to the tragic grandeur of ancient myth, and her insistence that ordinary people’s sufferings be given equal weight with the woes of the mighty gives it a contemporary edge. More brilliant work from one of world literature’s greatest writers.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Richard Price, Lazarus Man
(Picador)

“Price delivers a remarkable excavation of urban angst in this story of a five-story East Harlem tenement building that collapses….As [Price’s] vivid characters cross paths following the tragedy, they compose a searing snapshot of contemporary Harlem annotated with the author’s precise observations…Price once again proves he’s the bard of New York City street life.”
–Publishers Weekly

Georgia Hunter, One Good Thing
(Penguin Books)

“In One Good Thing, Georgia Hunter builds a whole world from the complicated sweep of history and the heartbeat of one young woman’s struggle to survive. The novel is a fascinating glimpse into a piece of World War II history I knew very little about, and a truly moving portrait of what it means to be brave. Lili’s journey is thrilling and intimate: I made myself read slowly in order to savor it. It entered my dreams. I did not want this beautiful book to end.”
–Lauren Fox

Peter Ames Carlin, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography
(Vintage)

“Vivid….Peter Ames Carlin’s book isn’t just a cultural biography of the band going back to its formation in the-then sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. It’s also a poetic meditation on what made so many of the band’s songs stand out, and continue to shine….A fascinating history of a different era in music.”
–Associated Press

Tricia Romano, The Freaks Came to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture
(PublicAffairs)

“A brilliant oral history that chronicles not only the Village Voice, the most important alt-weekly of our time, but also the history of New York City during the latter half of the 20th Century. One of the best narrative oral histories I have ever read–seamlessly edited, with anarchy on almost every page.”
–Gillian McCain

David Mamet, Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood
(Simon and Schuster)

“The book has a constant stream of stories and tangents…readers will consistently be entertained. As a bonus, Mamet’s own cartoon sketches decorate the text.”
–Library Journal

Anna Montague, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund
(Ecco)

“In this assured, hilarious, and surprisingly tender debut, Anna Montague shows how the unexpected journeys we go on to find ourselves can happen at any age. It’s an exploration of identity and queerness, family and grief, all packed into one rollicking road trip. Populated by a cast of wholly unforgettable characters, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? is the best kind of novel—one that leaves you loving the people around you a little bit more, and craving your next adventure.”
–Grant Ginder

Sergio de la Pava, Every Arc Bends Its Radian
(Simon and Schuster)

“A mind-bending detective story…[it] reads a bit like if Raymond Chandler and Jules Verne dropped acid together and started contemplating the nature of evil and the future of artificial intelligence. Summarizing any de la Pava novel—where formal hijinks abound and digressions range from The Honeymooners to theoretical physics—in one sentence feels almost obscenely reductive, but even those bare-bones descriptions make clear that this is not a writer in search of approval.”
–Publishers Weekly

Signe Pike, The Shadowed Land
(Atria Books)

“When I learned that The Shadowed Land is about a forgotten Scottish queen, and Merlin’s twin sister, I dove in and was immediately swept away by this lyrical page-turner. Though the book takes place in the sixth century, the power struggles over religion and control feel very contemporary. Historical fiction fans will love this gorgeous, sweeping saga.”
–Janet Skeslien Charles

David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World: Essays
(Picador)

“[Graeber] pieces apart themes of debt, democracy, play, care, the Occupy movement, piracy, puppets, police, and jobs deemed to be ‘bullshit’…these essays brim with surprising angles, unexpected perspectives, and a joyful interest in the world. Graeber’s abilities as an anthropologist, a professor, a nonviolent organizer, and an interpreter of anarchism all come together in a jovial prose….Deliberately off the mainstream, this engaging collection of intellectual, approachable essays is both a good entry point for those readers unfamiliar with Graeber’s work as well as a worthwhile read for audiences who know his writing well.”
–Library Journal

Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
(Norton)

“The Extinction of Experience is a beautifully expressed ode to the vanishing components of life that remain unplanned, unresearched, and unrecorded. Rosen is an excellent guide, explaining why there’s no substitute for seeing, feeling, and touching the world directly.”
–Adam Alter

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Attention Today
(Verso)

“In Disordered Attention, Claire Bishop continues her careful and astute examination of the centrality of performance in contemporary art initiated in the now classic Artificial Hells. Guaranteed to become a fundamental reference, Disordered Attention offers its readers not only a survey of some of the most significant works in very recent performance and visual arts but it advances a whole new theory of spectatorship for the age of social media…sharp analysis and clear prose.”
–André Lepecki

Emmanuel Carrère, V13: Chronicle of a Trial (trans. John Lambert)
(Picador)

“Emmanuelle Carrère has written what will surely be remembered as a classic account of the Paris attacks trial, one that is rigorous and admirably self-effacing. Yet as heartbreaking as V13 is, Carrère never succumbs to despair, or to a seductive pessimism about France’s future: his book is an affirmation of life, of survival, of the bonds of community and solidarity that allow us to rebuild in the aftermath of shattering violence.”
–Adam Shatz

David S. Brown, A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War
(Scribner)

“No one who encounters David Brown’s new re-telling of the infamous ‘Nebraska Bill’ will be in any doubt that it was the most toxic piece of legislation ever to pass a U.S. Congress. With a sharply ironic pen, Brown walks us through the terrible unfolding of the year 1854 and the deadly ways it pointed the nation toward civil war. A tour de force.”
–Allen C. Guelzo

Tom Holland, Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age
(Basic Books)

“In this marvelous book, Tom Holland shows us the Roman empire at its height, in all its splendor and squalor, sophistication and superstition, majesty and cruelty. Ranging far and looking deep, he tells us about emperors and subjects, about a world that is at the same time both familiar and very alien. Highly recommended.”
–Adrian Goldsworthy