Virginia Woolf! Ishion Hutchinson! R. Crumb! 24 new books out today.
It’s April 15, just about midway through a month of drizzly days, blossoms, and ever more political chaos, a chaos rippling across the globe. It’s a difficult time to remain happy, hopeful, and certain of things from day to day, and yet one thing I remain certain about is that we need art, and that powerful, provocative, probing art still exists, art that can comfort and complicate. Art helps us through times like these. So, to that end, I’ve selected twenty-four new books out today to consider picking up, which span a remarkable spectrum of themes, tones, and ideas, all worth spending time with in a strange time.
Stay safe, as always, and let your to-be-read piles grow.
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Nettie Jones, Fish Tales
(FSG)
“Fish Tales is a fast, fearless book, told in snatches, and so full of life it practically vibrates in your hands. The fashion, the rollicking orgies, the sex, the coke, the bubbles, the queens, the most head-spinning combination of tenderness and toxicity—it ought to have been the sensation of its time. Thank heavens for the revival of Fish Tales; thank heavens for the fierce vision of Nettie Jones.”
–Justin Torres
Denne Michele Norris, When the Harvest Comes
(Random House)
“Epic, intimate, brutal, and tender, Denne Michele Norris has written a breathtaking testimony about the boundlessness of love. Each character enters like a light beam, puncturing your soul with joy, heartbreak, and unwavering faith in the ability to right their wrongs before time runs out. Seductive, symphonic, and sensitively rendered, When the Harvest Comes announces the arrival of a major new American voice.”
–Deesha Philyaw
Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven
(Knopf)
“Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven is a striking debut novel from a richly gifted poet and memoirist: an intensely conjured portrayal of the hopeless, all-consuming love of one lonely teenager for another and how it marks him for life. As in Hewitt’s poetry, the beauties of nature erupt throughout, seeming to express the things the two boys cannot voice and the cumulative effect is as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong.”
–Patrick Gale
Dan Nadel, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life
(Scribner)
“Crumb is fabulous, an engrossing biography, both intimate about the man but insightful about the times. Dan Nadel has written a revealing ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’—but also about the mature curmudgeon we all know as ‘R. Crumb,’ the signature Sixties artist of underground comics. Hilarious at times, poignant and always empathetic, Crumb is a marvelous trip crafted by a brilliant biographer.”
–Kai Bird
Heather Christie, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf
(Algonquin)
“A subtle marvel, this book, so many stories at once and all of them brilliantly told. Christle writes of mothers and motherlands and gardens and empires, of writing and seeing and looking again. And Virginia Woolf! Her haunting of these pages is a startling pleasure and provocation, a summons to read everything–our books, our lives–with the wondrous care Christle brings to each word of In the Rhododendrons.”
–Jeff Sharlet
Ishion Hutchinson, Fugitive Tilts
(FSG)
“In this erudite collection, Hutchinson, a NBCC Award–winning poet, ruminates on colonialism, diasporic identity, and home….Hutchinson elegantly probes the painful history of Atlantic slavery with a potent combination of intimate personal reflections and sophisticated artistic exegesis.”
–Publishers Weekly
Chris Santiago, Small Wars Manual: Poems
(Milkweed)
“Santiago hears the planetary majority’s endless aria, the one sung for centuries testifying their humanity to an impenitent martial minority. The way this book spins the mirror between what’s global and what’s domestic, and what’s history and what’s inside our bodies right now this second—t’s absolutely extraordinary, a dazzling ability I associate with only the very, very finest poets of any era. Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece.”
–Kaveh Akbar
Ariana Reines, The Rose
(Graywolf)
“Ariana Reines’s poetry is what happens when the goddess comes to earth. When ancient mysteries intersect with the effluvia of human life….In The Rose, suffering is erotic and exhausting. Love is poisonous and miraculous. The world is abject and hilarious. The goddess can breathe life into being but cannot defeat her own sorrows. The Rose is peerless, divine magic. There’s nothing in the world like it.”
–Jenny Zhang
Yuki Tanaka, Chronicle of Drifting
(Copper Canyon Press)
“Of his many gifts in this sterling debut collection, Tanaka’s discreet and subtle management of tone sits uppermost. In offering it consistently, he invites us, too, whether casual reader or professional poet, to commit to our own drifting, which just might, if carefully husbanded, lead to our own chronicle.”
–Johnny Payne
Andrew Porter, The Imagined Life
(Knopf)
“With its quiet confidence and elegant precision, The Imagined Life is a masterpiece of memory, music, and longing. Andrew Porter is one of our finest prose stylists, and everything he’s turned his attention to here—a troubled adult son struggling to understand his troubled father; the slow disintegration of an American family; a boy coming of age amidst the wine and weed of California in the early ’80s—shimmers into pure gold.”
–Kimberly King Parsons
Julia Elliot, Hellions: Stories
(Tin House)
“Julia Elliott’s fiction is its own country. Every sentence drips and unsettles, every character lusts and schemes, every landscape is alien and forbidding. But there is something eerily familiar pulsing underneath the wildness—the way your waking life snakes through the logic of your dreams. I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories.”
–Carmen Maria Machado
Lisa Harding, The Wildelings
(Harpervia)
“Lisa Harding’s The Wildelings, in the tradition of dark academia, shocks with the cruelties of belonging, the seductive power wielded in friendships, the impulse to control and subjugate. Impeccably paced, dark and disturbingly honest, The Wildelings reveals campus life as theatre of cruelty; but the real stagecraft lies in Harding’s ability to excavate the still beating heart of a shared past and bonds beneath those brutalities. Riveting, addictive and…beautifully human.”
–Una Mannion
Vinh Nguyen, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam
(Counterpoint)
“In Vinh Nguyen’s tour de force memoir, crafted with fierce emotional intelligence and heartbreaking vulnerability, the past is a parallel world where his family can be made whole again. From actual journeys, like his quixotic return to a Thai refugee camp with the aid of social media, to the poignantly fabulistic flights courtesy of fiction’s alternative maps, here is a writer forthrightly reaching for all the survival tools available to him….[A] homecoming of the self.”
–Monique Truong
Jessica Slice, Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World
(Beacon Press)
“This is such a glorious, revelatory book. Jessica Slice cuts through all the judgment and stereotypes to reveal the truth: disabled people are, in many ways, uniquely suited to and skilled at parenthood and are sources of wisdom, ingenuity, courage, and joy that the entire world can learn from.”
–Ed Yong
Gabe Henry, Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell
(Dey Street Books)
“In a tour-de-force that spans from Noah Webster to Mark Twain to Froot Loops to Twitter, Henry unpacks the mysteries of why English is such a joy to read and speak…but such a nightmare to spell. Enough is Enuf is a brilliant, thoughtful, often hilarious, and always highly entertaining masterclass on the nuances and pitfalls of our language. This book is required reading for anyone who loves—or hates—English spelling.”
–Jonathan Metzl
Sara Jafari, Things Left Unsaid
(St. Martin’s Press)
“Things Left Unsaid explores the rough edges of early adulthood with such clarity, unpacking what it means to both lose and rediscover yourself—and your relationships–in that hazy, messy era we call our twenties. Sara Jafari’s writing is as deeply perceptive as it is relatable, tackling both heavy themes and lighter topics with nuance and poise. Fans of Sally Rooney will eat up this brilliant novel, no doubt.”
–Genevieve Wheeler
Heather McGowan, Friends of the Museum
(Washington Square Press)
“Friends of the Museum is a marvel. I devoured this novel with such pleasure and finished with chills, dazzled by its sheer life. I’m in awe of Heather McGowan’s virtuosic talent. The depth of her compassion, her sharp eye and wry humor and, above all, her peerlessly rich and brilliant imagination that can conjure all of life, its singular, jangly wonder, in a day at the museum. One of my favorite novelists writing today.”
–Mona Awad
Ashley Whitaker, Bitter Texas Honey
(Dutton)
“Bitter Texas Honey is a remarkable debut. What sets up as a wryly comic künstlerroman—‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Republican’ (in the comparatively “innocent” days of Mitt Romney’s nomination)—deepens into an affecting story of loss and addiction….Best of all, Whitaker not only pivots from hilarity to heartbreak, but manages to build to a close that is—magically—both at once (fittingly reflective of her bitter-sweet title).”
–Peter Ho Davies
Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition
(Graywolf)
“Preciado’s monumental work brings the commitments of the bibliophile to bear on a time and a world now irreversibly out of joint. Drawing on theories of language, mind, technology, immunology to retell a story of this world, Preciado’s work…shatters the binaries responsible for the destruction of love and futurity. Here a song, there a poem, this is thinking across both genre and gender, undoing us in the best sense, and fighting against the worst forms of undoing.”
–Judith Butler
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity
(Viking)
“Across three thousand years we have the pleasure of MacCulloch’s erudite company as he explains how Christian thinkers have met the problem of desire….It is an epic tale, and MacCulloch is an undaunted guide. Who else could explain so knowledgeably (and so affably), say, eleventh-century Gregorian reform as well as the contemporary gay subculture of ‘gin, lace and backbiting’ in Anglo-Catholicism?”
–The New York Review of Books
Andre M. Perry, Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It
(Metropolitan Books)
“Provides a much-needed survey of the state of Black power as we head into yet another critical moment in American politics. Through careful study and thorough research, Perry has created a blueprint for building collective power in our communities and a brighter future for the next generation.”
–Kimberly Crenshaw
Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
“In an age of disinformation and deepfakes, here comes a slyly unassuming novel about the nature of truth and what really matters. The Fact Checker is a propulsive mystery about heirloom tomatoes, a missing woman, or slipshod journalism: take your pick. It’s also a moving portrait of what it’s like to be young and in love with the city, and the obsessions—and doubt—it can inspire.”
–Ben McGrath
Mark Synott, Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, The Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery
(Dutton)
“Part historical detective story, part modern-day seafaring saga, Into the Ice paints an indelible portrait of the delicate yet perilous world of the Arctic. But Mark Synnott has also done something else. Out of gin-clear fjords, ice floes the size of Walmart Supercenters, and century-old Inuit tales of marooned British mariners, he’s crafted a moving parable on ambition, hubris, and the price of ignoring Indigenous voices in a beautiful yet haunted land.”
–Scott Ellsworth
Joe Kloc, Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America
(Dey Street Books)
“In Lost At Sea, reporter Joe Kloc deftly leads us into and through the world of these housing insecure urban boat dwellers, vulnerable and colorful, as they attempt to find pleasure and beauty in the shadow of the failed American dream. It’s the most beguiling tale about houseboat dwellers since Penelope Fitzgerald’s classic Offshore.”
–Alissa Quart
