The Buzz Books Spring/Summer Preview

Every season, readers are looking for the most exciting new titles among the stacks that are published. That’s why four years ago, we at Publishers Lunch created Buzz Books, a free, bi-annual ebook filled with excerpts of great reads in literary and debut fiction, as well as nonfiction, that starts provocative, thoughtful conversation.

In addition, to help sift through the many thousands of titles each season, we’ve highlighted dozens of the most noteworthy and breakout titles to be published in the coming months. Today, in Buzz Books 2016: Spring/Summer, you’ll be able to read excerpts from many of these titles (noted with an asterisk). We hope you’ll use this list as a handy guide of what’s upcoming in the book world over the next six months.

–Sarah Weinman

FICTION

Publishers normally save their most prominent literary titles for the fall, but this season is not lacking in notable names, with new books from Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Nobel Prize winner Herta Muller, Anna Quindlen, and Pulitzer winner Annie Proulx, as well as sophomore efforts from Charles Bock, Jenni Fagan, Boris Fishman, Charlotte Rogan, and more. Look out, too, for emerging voices such as Booker-shortlisted Sunjeev Sanhota, Marie NDiaye, Hannah Pittard, Ramona Ausubel, and Elizabeth Poliner (featured image above is a cover detail from Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God).

The Notables

Don DeLillo, Zero (Scribner, May)

*Louise Erdrich, LaRose (Harper, May)

Mark Haddon, The Pier Falls and Other Stories (Doubleday, May)

Herta Muller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (Metropolitan, May)

Annie Proulx, Barkskins (Scribner, June)

Anna Quindlen, Miller’s Valley (Random House, April)

Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs (Little, Brown, April)

Stewart O’Nan, City of Secrets (Viking, April)

Helen Oyeyemi, What is Not Yours is Not Yours (Riverhead, March)

Dana Spiotta, Innocents and Others (Scribner, March)

Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God (Tin House, July)

Highly Anticipated

Charles Bock, Alice & Oliver (Random House, April)

Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light (Ecco, May)

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown, May)

Jenni Fagan, The Sunlight Pilgrims (Hogarth, July)

Boris Fishman, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo (Harper, March)

Manuel Gonzales, The Regional Office is Under Attack! (Riverhead, April)

Elizabeth Kelly, The Miracle on Monhegan Island (Liveright, May)

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, March)

*C.E. Morgan, The Sport of Kings (FSG, May)

Robin Wasserman, Girls On Fire (Harper, May)

READ AN EXCERPT FROM GIRLS ON FIRE

Charlotte Rogan, Now and Again (Little, Brown, April)

Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways (Knopf, March)

Amanda Eyre Ward, The Nearness of You (Ballantine, July)

Emerging Voices

Allison Amend, Enchanted Islands (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, May)

Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (Riverhead, June)

Mischa Berlinski, Peacekeeping (Sarah Crichton Books, March)

Mark Binelli, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits (Metropolitan, May)

Liz Moore, The Unseen World (Norton, June)

Bonnie Nadzam, Lions (Black Cat, July)

Marie NDiaye, Ladivine (Knopf, April)

Hannah Pittard, Listen to Me (HMH, July)

Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us As Breathing (Lee Boudreaux Books, March)

Alexis Smith, Marrow Island (HMH, June)

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Sarong Party Girls (William Morrow, July)

Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love (Knopf, May)

Ayelet Tsabari, The Best Place on Earth (Random House, March)

*Shawn Vestal, Daredevils (Penguin Press, April)

DEBUT FICTION

Spring and summer are prime time for new authors. We expect great things from new novels by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, Alison Anderson and Susie Steiner, and expect to hear similar plaudits about works by Sara Baume, Flynn Berry, Emma Cline, Yaa Gyasi, and many more listed below. Look out for debut fare from notable journalists and magazine writers too, like Slate’s Jessica Winter and Cosmopolitan books editor Camille Perri.

*Alison Anderson, The Summer Guest (Harper, May)

Sara Baume, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (HMH, March)

*Laura Barnett, The Versions of Us (HMH, May)

*Flynn Berry, Under the Harrow (Penguin, June)

READ AN EXCERPT FROM UNDER THE HARROW

Emma Cline, The Girls (Random House, June)

Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter (Knopf, May)

*Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, The Nest (Ecco, March)

READ AN EXCERPT FROM THE NEST

*Kemper Donovan, The Decent Proposal (Harper, April)

Chad Dundas, Champion of the World (Putnam, July)

Hannah Gersen, Home Field (William Morrow, July)

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (Knopf, June)

*L.S. Hilton, Maestra (Putnam, April)

Lynne Kutsukake, The Translation of Love (Doubleday, April)

Tiffany McDaniel, The Summer That Melted Everything (St. Martin’s, July)

Miroslav Penkov, Stork Mountain (FSG, March)

Camille Perri, The Assistants (Putnam, May)

Shobha Rao, An Unrestored Woman (Flatiron Books, March)

Steven Rowley, Lily and the Octopus (S&S, July)

Nina Sadowsky, Just Fall (Ballantine, March)

Paul Vidich, An Honorable Man (Emily Bestler/Atria, April)

Jessica Winter, Break in Case of Emergency (Knopf, July)

Jung Yun, Shelter (Picador, March)

NONFICTION

Start your conversations in the spring and summer with economist Thomas Piketty’s new book; a treatise on the Internet by Paul Ford; a number of books on feminism and culture by Lindy West (in our sampler), Jessica Bennett, Roxane Gay, and Peggy Orenstein; a new biography of James Brown by National Book Award winner James McBride; memoirs from Rob Spillman, Carrie Fisher, and Augusten Burroughs; and many more across an array of nonfiction categories.

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