Robert Frost, Joni Mitchell, Picasso... 25 books out in paperback this February.

February is upon us, and, after a month of seemingly unending horrors, it is difficult not to feel a need for something else, for the quiet company of art, for something to relight our lanterns. Books cannot stop the world’s horrors, at least not on their own, but they can offer us just the something else we may need for a bit, or offer clarity on those terrors. To that end, I’m happy to recommend twenty-five books out this month (and one accidentally left off from last month!) in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, each in a fresh new paperback edition. You’ll find everything from comfort reads and revelatory new histories to expansive memoirs and dystopian marvels that shine new light on the tumult of our own world.

I hope you enjoy these. Add these to your piles this February, and stay safe!

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Fernando A. Flores, Brother Brontë
(Picador)

“Fernando A. Flores is a supremely confident writer, the type of writer who throws you into a situation with no explanation and expects you to keep up. Brother Brontë honestly feels like being in the middle of a Bosch painting—lots to look at, all chaos, but incredibly beautiful and carefully crafted….There are plenty of 1984-esque stories out there but this is by far the most exciting and thought-provoking one.”
–Reactor

Erin Crosby Eckstine, Junie
(Ballantine Books)

“Eckstine combines the lyricism of Jesmyn Ward and Toni Morrison with the speculative historical fiction of Tananarive Due and Leslye Penelope in a stunning debut that will also appeal to fans of Percival Everett’s James.”
–Booklist

Michael Amherst, The Boyhood of Cain
(Riverhead)

“A beautiful and profound novel about a boy’s coming to consciousness as his family falls apart. Utterly compelling and quietly devastating, I read this book with my heart in my mouth and could not put it down.”
–Mary Costello

Amanda Montell, The Age of Magical Overthinking
(Atria/One Signal)

“Written with wit, smarts, and self-deprecating charm, The Age of Magical Overthinking is at once a guidebook for the era of misinformation and an illuminating, palm-to-the-forehead reveal of the delusions that underlie our own beliefs. Rarely have so few pages explained so much, so entertainingly.”
–Mary Roach

Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare: A Memoir
(Vintage)

“Magical, endearing….Dalton’s memoir expands on the relatively little knowledge we have about this enchanting species, while also serving gentle commentary on the state of wildlife and the need to preserve their habitats….A sweet and curious meditation on what we gain when we allow the natural world to teach us.”
–BookPage

Adam Plunkett, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry
(Picador)

“Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost’s personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life…a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man.”
–The New Yorker

Shane McCrae, New and Collected Hell: A Poem
(FSG)

“McCrae approaches Dante’s allegorical vision with an urgency derived from a struggle that collapses the personal and the social, until the metaphysical realm seems the only possible stage….[He] exploits, in a way that few other modern poets have been able to, the power of allegory.”
–The New Yorker

Pádraig Ó Tuama, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other
(Norton)

“Pádraig Ó Tuama’s close reading [is] a gift. I was and am deeply moved.”
–Ada Limón

Kat Dunn, Hungerstone
(Zando)

“A rich and daring reimagining that brings the beating heart of Carmilla to life again. Hungerstone is a delicious tribute to the inherent horrors of womanhood and the desperate and exquisite vulgarity of desire. This is everything I dream of in a novel.”
–Ava Reid

Brittany Newell, Soft Core
(Picador)

“A crackerjack novel of a sex worker who comes undone after her ex-boyfriend’s disappearance….The wild ride is bolstered by striking prose and memorable imagery. It’s a stellar entry in the literature of unhinged women, up there with Mona Awad’s Bunny.”
–Publishers Weekly

Amanda Peters, Waiting for the Long Night Moon: Stories
(Catapult)

“[A] meaningful collection centering Indigenous people. Written in a woven style, integrating past and present, the stories often end at deft, surprising, and important moments….Stunning….Peters’ award-winning debut created an audience ready for anything she writes, and they won’t be disappointed by her memorable stories.”
–Booklist

Ramie Targoff, Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance
(Vintage)

“Targoff delivers a vibrant group portrait of four women writers in Elizabethan England, most of whom were ignored or obscured for centuries but were ‘resurrected’ by feminist scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries….Targoff’s narrative is full of vivid personalities and intriguing tales of court alliances and rivalries. It’s an enlightening study of the era’s literary scene and the women who persevered despite their exclusion from it.”
–Publishers Weekly

Jennifer Finney Boylan, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us
(Celadon Books)

“Boylan writes with great humor, wisdom, and warmth about what it means to be human—at different ages, and in different genders—in this confounding world. Compulsively readable and often outright hilarious, this book is a treasure.”
–Rebecca Makkai

Annie Cohen-Solal, Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973
(Picador)

“Annie Cohen-Solal is a life-historian in peak form. She captures Picasso’s multiple lives as he transcended borders and shattered genres—while suspected by France’s art establishment and surveilled by France’s police informers and snitches. Cohen-Solal’s Picasso was a worldly figure navigating a world of oftentimes cruel nationalism. Picasso the Foreigner is a remarkable work of art and an important work of research excavation.”
–Jeremy Adelman

Brian Castleberry, The Californians
(Mariner)

“The Californians is an absolute pleasure from end to end, a thrilling, century-spanning, wholly American tale of art and money, family and land, treasure and time. Few storytellers write with as much stylistic ambition as Brian Castleberry, and with The Californians he wins big off every bold bet he makes. A brilliant read for fans of Anthony Doerr, Dana Spiotta, and Don DeLillo.”
–Matt Bell

Alice Franklin, Life Hacks for a Little Alien
(Back Bay Books)

“[S]tunningly original approach to the literary form….Beautiful, moving, and life-affirming, Alice Franklin’s prose is a triumph to read. Totally addictive and brilliant. The prose flows like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting via Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, which is to say: Life Hacks for A Little Alien is sure to find its place as one of the best loved works of fiction.”
–Aimee Walsh

Ron Currie, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne
(Putnam)

“A furious page-turner that kept me up way past my bedtime, a beautiful hymn to the lingering ghosts of Maine’s French-Canadian past, and a harrowing meditation on what it means to assimilate into the great American experiment. The authenticity reaches up off the page and grabs you with two hands. Ron Currie is a literary beast.”
–Matthew Quick

Paul Lisicky, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell
(HarperOne)

“An astonishing exploration of what it means to lead an artist’s life—how to last, dig deep, change, to embrace one’s voice while in conversation with your heroes. There is no writer more attentive than Lisicky, and to see him turn his brilliance to Joni Mitchell is a thrilling wonder….This book exceeds all my extraordinarily high expectation—for its strangeness and honesty and beauty, and its ability to set the gossamer wings of song on the page. I loved it.”
–Elizabeth McCracken

Jeff Hobbs, Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America
(Scribner)

“A gut-wrenching page turner that will keep you on the edge of your seat, praying for the survival of a singular family—and the millions of Americans like them. In Seeking Shelter, Jeff Hobbs exposes the scourge of homelessness that’s tearing apart working families. This book is a new classic that’s perfect for fans of Random Family.”
–Emi Nietfeld

Keeonna Harris, Mainline Mama: A Memoir
(Amistad)

“Mainline Mama is love letter to the women whose lives collide with our country’s sprawling prison system. Keeonna Harris’s memoir about her years raising a child with an incarcerated partner shows how a well-seasoned spaghetti noodle can taste of devotion, and a state-approved kiss can be an act of resistance….Harris shows how that care sustains her on her long journey through the carceral system, and finally, how it helps her find her way home.”
–Lisa Riordan Seville

Nick Newman, The Garden
(Putnam)

“Nick Newman has spun the most haunting, gripping type of apocalyptic story: one that focuses on the fragile bonds of family and the dance between trust and survival. With shades of Shirley Jackson and Susanna Clarke, The Garden is a shapeshifting fable that will stay with you long after you leave it behind.”
–Sara Flannery Murphy

Allen Eskens, The Quiet Librarian
(Mulholland Books)

“Eskens renders a searing suspense of wartime that chronicles the loss of homeland and family, with an utterly unforgettable heroine and her heartbreaking journey for retribution. Potent and exquisitely written, The Quiet Librarian comes to life in brutal war-torn Bosnia and present-day Minnesota with a shocking conclusion that will leave you breathless.”
–Kim Michele Richardson

Amin Ghaziani, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution
(Princeton University Press)

“The sociologist Amin Ghaziani wants to turn a funeral into a party….Ghaziani makes the case that, though the shuttering of gay bars is sad, it prompted a renaissance for club nights, alternative dance spaces championed by people of color and gender-nonconforming people. Unlike the stationary gay bar that caters to the white gay man, these ticketed events are nomadic and inclusive, often popping up in warehouses on the industrial outskirts of sleepless cities…[in]a more progressive, sophisticated form….Ghaziani shines as an academic.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Jean Martin Bauer, The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century
(Vintage)

“Memorable…a close-up look at efforts to vanquish hunger amid both major, front-page disasters, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Syrian civil war, and…countless lower-profile calamities….What makes The New Breadline so compelling, though, are…the small details Bauer shares from a realm that usually operates out of the public eye…[will] leave the reader oddly hopeful about the prospects for mitigating these nightmares.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Janina Ramirez, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It
(Hanover Square Press)

“If you love history and think you know the Middle Ages, you absolutely must read Femina. With stories of warriors and leaders, scientists and artists, outlaws and royalty, Ramirez will captivate you and turn everything you thought you knew about medieval women upside down. Femina is an incredible achievement and the world is better for it. Run, do not walk, to get it.”
–Mallory O’Meara