Rumaan Alam! Gay Shakespeare! How Elon Musk killed Twitter! 26 new books out today.
It’s another Tuesday, just at that moment in September when its linger summeriness may begin to shift more decisively into the cooler fires of autumn, but there’s no shift in one thing: that September has a ton of new books to be excited about. And today is no exception.
You’ll find robust showings in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with anticipated fiction by Lauren Elkin, Will Self, Rumaan Alam, Tony Tulathimutte, Nora Lange, and many others; poetry collections from Kim Addonizio, Ted Kooser, Raymond Antrobus, Patrick James Dunagan, and others; and nonfiction exploring the LGBTQ context of Shakespeare’s—Shakesqueer’s?—plays and milieu; Richard Flanagan with a genre-defying account of genocide, war, family, and more; the iconic journalist Connie Chung’s memoir; a look at how Elon Musk toppled Twitter; and much, much more.
Riches and more riches. Read on—it’s a delightful day for new books.
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Lauren Elkin, Scaffolding
(FSG)
“[Scaffolding] shows off Elkin’s rich, scholarly mind to great effect….A book laden with lust and desire, amorous missteps and the ways in which we can often only understand ourselves in relation to the whims and choices of others.”
–Vanessa Peterson
Rumaan Alaam, Entitlement
(Riverhead)
“With an atmosphere that is sexy, enchanting, and unsettling, Rumaan Alam’s expert fourth novel probes concepts of privilege, wealth, value, and morality.”
–Shelf Awareness
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection: Fiction
(William Morrow)
“Phenomenal…few writers dramatize the effects of being perennially online as astutely and engagingly as Tulathimutte does here. Rejection is thoughtfully and artfully constructed and outrageously entertaining.”
–Booklist
Richard Flanagan, Question 7
(Knopf)
“A small masterpiece….It’s a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. That sounds hard going but it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down.”
–Mark Haddon
Will Tosh, Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare
(Seal Press)
“At once magisterial and saucy, Straight Acting gets to the heart of Shakespeare’s queer literary formation. Will Tosh writes with clarity and cheek, drawing on forgotten contemporaries, reminding us of the cultural status of ancient Greek texts and their sexual mores, and remapping a homoerotic geography of Elizabethan London…deeply researched…This fresh account kickstarts the queer canon of English literature: Shakespeare won’t go back in the closet again.”
–Emma Smith
Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown
(Pantheon Books)
“Witt, with a gimlet eye and a voice that never shies away from the truth…offers a tour of the years that begin with the surreal catastrophe of the 2016 election and through the COVID years and the murder of George Floyd, giving us insight to a time that all too often feels like a nightmare that has, like all dreams, begun to fade from memory. This remarkable book didn’t just allow me to relive that time, but helped me to understand it.”
–Ayelet Waldman
Raymond Antrobus, Signs, Music
(Tin House)
“Reading Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music, was an exhilarating (re)ride into the wonders and terrors of becoming a new parent. It’s hard to explain how much parenting can change a person, but Antrobus succeeds….Here is a beautiful mapping of a journey of this life that becomes this life in all of its anaphoric radiance. Each letter in these poems is bursting at the seams.”
–Victoria Chang
Kim Addonizio, Exit Opera: Poems
(NortonP
“National Book Award finalist Addonizio (Now We’re Getting Somewhere) uses frank, wittily caustic language to ask what life means and how to ride out its anxieties; she knows exactly how absurd our existence is, and she’s not backing down….Addonizio frames her life as an opera (‘maybe an aria sung by a feral kitten’), and as she contemplates the curtain (see her title), she turns in a gutsy, bravura performance.”
–Library Journal
Ted Kooser, Raft
(Copper Canyon Press)
“Kooser is a master of the subjective description. Empathetic without sentimentality, his eye ranges over all sorts of everyday subjects and finds material everywhere wherever the unpredictable particularity of the world can be glimpsed.”
–Georgia Review
Will Self, Elaine
(Grove Press)
“A shattering portrait of a woman trapped by her domestic responsibilities and lingering ‘postpartum neurosis’….Self pulls off a painfully authentic depiction of Elaine’s interior life, doing justice to her fierce anger and sexual desire along with her fears and humiliations. This is a tour de force.”
–Publishers Weekly
Nora Lange, Us Fools
(Two Dollar Radio)
“Nora Lange’s remarkably tender and moving Us Fools is a beautiful portrait of the parallel, intersecting, and occasionally derailing tracks of two sisters coming of age in an America as broken as ever. The backdrop is the Eighties Midwest farm crisis though Lange expertly weaves in classic literature, philosophy, and socioeconomics with a graceful touch….[A] truly singular and yet deeply, painfully, intimately American vision.”
–Porochista Khakpour
Mariana Enriquez, A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories (trans. Megan McDowell)
(Hogarth)
“Enriquez’s Our Share of Night earned her a prominent place among innovative South American writers, and the stories here deliver the same squelchy charms….A dozen pitch-black Argentinean stories laced with body horror, self-incrimination, and existential dread…solidifies Enríquez’s reputation as a purveyor of haunting and thought-provoking tales.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Abi Maxwell, One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman: A Mother’s Story
(Knopf)
“This book is a compelling and visceral portrayal of a mother’s pain, joy, hope, and heartbreak as she fights for her daughter’s right to safely be herself. As a parent of a transgender child and as an advocate, I am deeply grateful for Abi Maxwell’s vulnerability and honesty in sharing what too many families across the country are facing in these turbulent times…humanity [is] laid bare in these pages.”
–Jamie Bruesehoff
Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
(Penguin Press)
“Engrossing, precise….New York Times reporters Conger and Mac collaborate successfully on an ambitious narrative capturing how Musk engineered Twitter’s downfall, set against the vast financial stakes and dehumanizing aspects of the tech economy….Compelling fusion of business history and worrisome social narrative.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Connie Chung, Connie: A Memoir
(Grand Central Publishing)
“This delightful memoir is filled with Connie Chung’s trademark wit, sharp insights, and deep understanding of people. It’s a revealing account of what it’s like to be a woman breaking barriers in the world of TV news, filled with colorful tales of rivalry and triumph. But it also has a larger theme: how the line between serious reporting and tabloid journalism became blurred.”
–Walter Isaacson
Jillian Weise, Pills and Jacksonvilles: Poems
(Ecco Press)
“Jillian Weise is a genius of our time. The poems in Pills and Jacksonvilles are incisive and impious and anguished and indicting; they are blunt, they are coy, they are ruthless. Weise writes against the insidious normativity and ableism that permeates the literary world (and beyond) and toward a future that is wild and wide. And…this book does perhaps the most important thing that can be done in poetry (and beyond): it has a party at the end.”
–Natalie Shapero
Lyndsay Rush, A Bit Much: Poems
(St. Martin’s)
“A Bit Much has the kind of warmth, wisdom, and wit that will leave you crying, laughing, or cry-laughing. Lyndsay Rush’s poetry brilliantly blends both the playful and poignant parts of womanhood through sharp observations, creative wordplay, and killer punchlines, placing you back in the scenes of your life when you most needed to feel seen. Every woman who has been made to feel like they deserve less will cherish A Bit Much.”
–Kate Kennedy
Patrick James Dunagan, City Bird and Other Poems
(City Lights Books)
“Patrick James Dunagan is a champion of San Francisco poetics, both as an editor and a poet, and City Bird and Other Poems is a certain cause for celebration. Poems become embodied conversation with the city’s literary cosmos: resurrected voices of poets, aerials of city streets and landscapes. Irreverent and real City Bird is a book where the poems are life, and the maps are terrain.”
–Mary Catherine Kinniburgh
Louis Bayard, The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts
(Algonquin)
“Louis Bayard brings his singular historical imagination to this moving, multifaceted portrait of Oscar Wilde’s family. The Wildes is a marvel of tenderness, irony, heartbreak, and reclamation that demonstrates why Bayard is among the most essential—and most entertaining—interrogators of the past.”
–Anthony Marra
Esinam Bediako, Blood on the Brain
(Red Hen Press)
“Bediako is a promising new [Ghanaian American] voice…with insight, subtlety, and power, she shows the complexities of race and identity in a voice that is refreshingly honest and accessible to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider. This book throbs with true vulnerability about the human need to belong. Her talent is undeniable; she is a writer to watch.”
–Taylor Larsen
Sonia Purnell, Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue
(Viking)
“With Kingmaker, Sonia Purnell emerges as one of the most accomplished biographers of our time. Once again, she gifts readers with a vivid, glittering, sexy, scintillating, beautifully written portrait of a woman who drove twentieth-century history even as history was driving her….Kingmaker is a rich and nuanced study of power–its allure, its perils, the gratifications and the great cost of its pursuit.
–Liza Mundy
Chase Joynt, Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir
(Arsenal Pulp Press)
“Genre and form defying, Vantage Points is a remarkably subversive book by one of our generation’s most brilliant trans media-makers. At once a vigorous intellectual engagement with the work of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, a lyrical family counter-history, a formal experiment, and a powerful reckoning with inherited trauma, violence, and (relatedly) normative masculinity, Vantage Points is…as inventive as it is deeply moving.”
–Thomas Page McBee
Timothy Snyder, On Freedom
(Crown Publishing Group)
“A great and daring book. In this magnificent meditation on the nature and meaning of humanity, Timothy Snyder rejects the idea that freedom is merely the absence of restraint, establishing instead that it is the presence of the conditions necessary for people to choose a better future. Above all, Snyder’s insightful and powerful work reminds us that freedom is about humanity, and that creating a better world is up to us.”
–Heather Cox
Nemonte Nenquimo, Mitch Anderson, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People
(Abrams Press)
“Full of wisdom, sadness, flourishes of joy and more than a few psychedelic visions, We Will Not be Saved is testament not only to Nenquimo’s resilience but also her deep spiritual connection to her land and ancestors….[It] plant[s] readers right in the heart of the rainforest, immersing them in its sounds, smells and kaleidoscopic landscapes. Many are the memoirs that profess to tell untold stories, but here that claim is watertight.”
–The Guardian
David Brock, Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America
(Knopf)
“A full-throated denunciation of a corrupt, thoroughly politicized Supreme Court in which the true chief justice is Clarence Thomas….The Court, writes Brock, became Thomas’s the minute Amy Coney Barrett took Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the bench in 2020….Critics of the current Supreme Court will find plenty of support in Brock’s aggrieved, well-documented exposé.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Adam Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
(Verso)
“[A] field guide for navigating the difficult terrain in which we now find ourselves: situated between an accelerating climate crisis and an economy structured around fossil fuels. [Hanieh’s] insightful dissection of the often invisible ubiquity of fossil fuels in our lives—reaching far beyond energy into the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the medicines we prescribe—is integral to understanding not only why we remain so stuck in our fossil-addicted present, but critically how we might move beyond it.”
–Adrienne Buller
