The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
Genre: Fiction
When: On sale now
What It Is: Less than a month off the press, this new novel from Angela Flournoy is already a National Book Award finalist. It follows five Black American women over the course of a 20-year friendship, from young adulthood to middle age, as they navigate class, relationships, and the proverbial “wilderness” of finding one’s own footing.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Flourney’s 2015 debut novel, The Turner House, was also a finalist for the National Book Award. The Iowa Workshop alum is barreling toward a long career in literature, making this essential reading for those looking to keep up with the conversation this fall.
Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood
Genre: Memoir
When: On sale November 4
What It Is: There are plenty of memoirs out this fall, from Arundhati Roy’s much-anticipated Mother Mary Comes to Me to the instantly salacious 107 Days from former VP Kamala Harris, but I’ve got my eye on Margaret Atwood’s tell-all.
Why It’s Worth a Look: In perhaps the most divisive gender moment of recent history, it’ll be interesting to hear the circumstances that bore us The Handmaid’s Tale and how Atwood feels about the work four decades on. The public’s proclivity for using the story’s iconography in protest movements puts the book in league with George Orwell’s 1984.
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
Genre: Thriller
When: On sale October 7
What It Is: The author of Gravity’s Rainbow and Inherent Vice now brings you Hicks McTaggart, PI. For his first release in more than a decade, the now 88-year-old author sends his beleaguered private eye chasing after the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune across the globe. There are Nazis, an economic depression, and bumbling police officers. Of course, we have all those things in real life too, but the escapism here is still well-worth the ride.
Why It’s Worth a Look: There is an absurd amount of cheese talk in this book. A “Cheese Corridor Incursion” has characters riled up and “the Gorgonzola squadri” are sent railing not far behind. Inexplicably, this fascination goes back to the author’s first work, V, in which an artist obsessively painted cheese danishes again and again.
The Unveiling by Quan Barry
Genre: Horror
When: On sale October 14
What It Is: A Black film location scout is riding a luxury Antarctic cruise liner with a swath of jolly white vacationers. Then, disaster strikes: they all end up stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Birds of prey descend. The very ground beneath their feet is spitting scalding geothermal steam.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Like most horror setups, the real threat here will turn out to be, not the unfortunate setting, but the people you’re stuck there with. Watching tourists turn on one another never really gets old.
Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach
Genre: Science
When: On sale now
What It Is: We’ve reached that point, the one science fiction movies talk about. We can swap our limbs for metal ones, put a replacement heart in if ours fails, or grow new parts in a lab if need be. Mary Roach talks to researchers, doctors, lab techs, and more to see how well these advancements are actually working, and who they’re really made for.
Why It’s Worth a Look: This latest work comes from the seven-time bestselling author who gave us Stiff, an exploration of cadavers; Bonk, a close look at sex; and Gulp, which was specifically interested in the alimentary canal. Bodies are weird, but Roach just gets them.
The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
Genre: Short stories
When: On sale November 4
What It Is: Across five stories, Salman Rushdie looks at the final moments of life. His cast of characters—including a pair of bickering old men, a musical prodigy, and a student wandering after hours—traverse the three countries in which Rushdie has lived and worked: India, England, and America.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Rushdie really needs no introduction, but let’s just say that a musing on life and what we leave behind is well worth picking up when it comes from an author who has himself survived several assassination attempts, was knighted for his contributions to literature, and is a foremost master of magical realism.
The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee
Genre: Posthumous release
When: On sale October 21
What It Is: Oh, posthumous releases—you can’t live with them (if you catch my drift), and we can’t quite seem to live without them either. I’m thusly bequeathing the strange publications their own genre here. Harper Lee only ever really got to publish one book in her lifetime, but boy was it a knockout. The To Kill a Mockingbird author had one other novel released a year before her passing—a manuscript found in a safety deposit box, widely considered to be an earlier draft of her first book—and now we’re getting a collection of her short stories and essays to boot.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Like much (I’d argue most) posthumous writing, this will more so be a look inside the mind of a prominent writer than new work of staggering genius. But with so little available from such a prominent literary voice, HarperCollins has an excellent case for cracking the safe open just a little wider.
The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon
Genre: Nonfiction
When: On sale now
What It Is: Why this isn’t on more fall book lists, I really can’t say. The same year that Sing Sing went to the Oscars, we have a man on the inside releasing a real account of how a correctional facilities shape the minds of their inhabitants. This author is serving the 24th year of his 28-to-life sentence for murder, drug sales, and gun possession, and talks to four other men about what happened after their own acts of unspeakable violence.
Why It’s Worth a Look: John J. Lennon (we have to assume the “J” was added for differentiation) went into prison with a ninth-grade education and, after joining a writing workshop inside, has been published in Esquire, The Atlantic, and Washington Post Magazine. His first book is also one of the first of its kind, and a significant addition to the conversation surrounding the ultimate goals of rehabilitative justice.
We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat
Genre: History
When: On sale October 14
What It Is: After his father abandoned his family, Julian Brave NoiseCat was left to learn about his Native heritage on his own. NoiseCat and his non-Native mother joined an urban Native community in Oakland, California, and spent time with family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. Here, the writer and Oscar-nominated filmmaker traverses the same ground and stories he grew up on for a new audience in his debut book.
Why It’s Worth a Look: We Survived the Night is written in the style of a “Coyote Story” once commonly told by NoiseCat’s community, and nearly wiped out in the midst of colonization. NoiseCat deftly blends personal details, historical accounts, and on-the-ground reporting in this one-of-a-kind look at contemporary Indigenous life.
The Uncool by Cameron Crowe
Genre: Music
When: On sale October 28
What It Is: Okay, I’ve snuck a second memoir in here. But this is a music book first and foremost. Everything with Cameron Crowe is. The Almost Famous writer and director here offers another up-close look at the dirty ’70s, as he goes on tour with Zeppelin and hobnobs with Bowie.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Intimate details about the lives and dressing room dramas of some of music’s biggest names is of course a reason to pull The Uncool off the bookstore shelf, but the even juicer allure for any young creative is how Crowe learned to transform youthful happenstance and a bit of talent into some of our most beloved works of art. It’s a story he’s been happy to tell a few times over, but never quite as unvarnished as this.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez
Genre: Essays
When: On sale now
What It Is: Argentinian author and Booker Prize finalist Mariana Enriquez is well-known for her gothic horror stories. Now, she’s taking a different turn with a collection of essays chronicling her time spent walking through cemeteries. This, apparently, has been a lifelong passion. Then, the body of a friend’s mother was discovered in a common grave following her disappearance during the country’s military dictatorship. Enriquez decided to look closer at the places we lay to rest.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The author calls these essays “excursions through death,” having readers follow her through North and South America, to the catacombs of Paris, and off to Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery. She talks to locals, weaves in a bit of folklore, and shares her own findings. If you get a thrill as the weather turns crisp, this book is for you.
Startlement by Ada Limón
Genre: Poetry
When: On sale now
What It Is: The 24th Poet Laureate of the United States has compiled some of the best works of her career into a single tome, along with a selection of new poems. In these pages, Limón grows from youthful exuberance to mature reflection over the course of two decades, investigating both the mundane and existential with equal fervor.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Poet Laureate, who served for three years up until this past April, emerged from the project to a different world than the one she began chronicling. She recently told AP, “It’s really important to remember where our power comes from and however we use our art. However we use our voices or our ears or our paintings, our bodies, whatever it is that we do to make this work, the art, the work of life, I think we need to keep doing it and we need to make sure that we aren’t losing sight of the soul.”
in your life?
