October rolls on, the air slowly chilling, the leaves coolly burning, the transitional nature of October as a month of transformation gradually asserting itself. It is a time when the boundaries between things may seem more porous than ever, a time to reflect on where we are, what we have, what we’ve lost, and what, if anything, we can learn from those losses. And, of course, it’s a time for spooky season.
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With all of this in mind, I come bearing a bevy of new books to help you through this month of change, many highly anticipated and buzzed-about. Below, you’ll find a wide-ranging selection of fiction, poetry, and especially nonfiction to consider, ranging from a rerelease of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s classic novel about Typhoid Mary to reflections on Dorothy Parker’s time in Hollywood to urgent poetry from the Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha that captures some of the horrors of Gaza—and much, much more.
Add some, or many, of these intriguing offerings to your to-be-read lists, which, by now, may tower or sprawl quite imposingly. But adding to them is its own form of change, no? Read and reflect well, friends.
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Bruna Dantas Lobato, Blue Light Hours
(Grove Press/Black Cat)
“Blue Light Hours is a melancholy, strange, and love-suffused book, exploring a relationship through a medium that connected families around the world long before the Zoom era. Through Skype, a mother and daughter a continent apart create a dreamlike, almost womblike space….A quietly beautiful coming-of-age story that never loses sight of the people who come along—or don’t—for the transformation wrought by time and distance.”
–Lydia Kiesling
Mark Haddon, Dogs and Monsters: Stories
(Doubleday)
“Timeless spins on classic Greek myths….The author seems to be toying with the essence of storytelling, the way that it has persevered and sustained itself through the ages….The times may change but the stories remain the same in this ambitious, eclectic collection.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Tara Isabel Zambrano, Ruined a Little When We Are Born
(Dzanc Books)
“[E]motive, deeply loving, and sometimes erotic…we meet a talking orgasm with star dust in her edges, a girl who grows extra hands when her mother dies, a skinny boy who makes love to the Devil, thirsty ghosts. In these stories, whole lives, marriages, births, deaths, and afterlifes unfold….The stories build on one another—sensory, sensual, pulsing with life and color—leaving the reader breathless and starstruck by the wildly inventive twists of Zambrano’s vibrant prose.”
–Alex DiDranfesco
Lucy Ives, An Image of My Name Enters America
(Graywolf)
“Reading Lucy Ives’s essay collection is exhilarating. I was reintroduced to favorite topics and introduced to new favorites, always in the company of her extraordinary rigor, intelligence, and wit. This is the kind of book you want to read aloud to people you love, to assign, to give as a present—but don’t loan this one; you might not get it back.”
–Alexander Chee
Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife: A Memoir
(Beacon Press)
“Beautifully written, unbelievably brave, unflinchingly honest, Mad Wife is an indictment of heterosexual marriage and, specifically, sex within marriage…patriarchy has designed marriage to gaslight a woman for the entirety of a relationship, to distort her understanding of consent and her own desires, and to entitle a husband to his wife’s body. This memoir will have women readers reassessing every sexual encounter they’ve ever had with a partner and wondering why it has taken so long for a book like this to exist.”
–Donna Freitas
Aysegül Savaş, The Wilderness
(Transit Books)
“The transition from birth to mother is a space of true wilderness,’ writes novelist Savaş (White on White) in this perceptive reflection on postpartum motherhood. Savaş describes the monthslong period following the birth of her first daughter in Paris as more difficult than pregnancy or labor….As a personal chronicle, it’s arresting and deep, and makes for a rewarding entry into the growing pantheon of postpartum literature.”
–Publishers Weekly
Brittany Rogers, Good Dress
(Tin House)
“Through lush imagery, slick syntax, elegant diction, and play with form, Brittany Rogers is a generous and keenly observant poet. Good Dress knows Detroit and all its migrations….These poems force us to consider what we mean when we say home, and who gets to tell that story. Exploring gentrification, queer eroticism, motherhood, and church-girl-blues…Rogers makes it her business to insist we look at it all….This self-assured, dazzling debut has a story to tell.”
–Aricka Foreman
Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise: Poems
(Knopf)
“More than any news reporting, this heartbreaking collection makes vividly real the suffering in Gaza and what it’s like to face huge, ongoing loss….Abu Toha can be plainspoken, then turn around with a stark, horrific image that drops like hot coals….One mourns with Abu Tohu as he asks his dead brother, ‘Will my bones find you when I die?’ Highly recommended.”
–Library Journal
Tilsa Otta, The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist
(Graywolf)
“The Hormone of Darkness is a playlist curated con amor, cariño, and a feral proclivity for the ecstatic activation of queer mutant futures. Tilsa Otta’s poems beckon us into a nightclub of liberatory living….Matuk’s translations offer a lucid refraction that encompasses the writhing, vibrantly liminal spectrum of Otta’s tender, playful, and urgent work. This book demands you shake your tail toward dreams and desires ‘until the words break down.’”
–Angel Dominguez
CJ Leede, American Rapture
(Tor Nightfire)
“In Leede’s wholly possible American Armageddon, closed minds, cheese curds, and right-wing radio threaten to burn the whole shining city upon a hill to the ground. Cinematic, visceral, reflective, and palpable, American Rapture keeps you staying up late, hand on page ready to turn before you’re done with the one you’re on, and thinking about it for days on end when you finish. Bravo.”
–Ted Van Alst
Alia Trabucco Zerán, Clean (trans. Sophie Hughes)
(Riverhead)
“Clean is the opposite of what readers will feel when they finish this…uncomfortable, fascinating, lovely, and affecting novel….Hughes’ splendid translation assures it will resonate in many more places where people live with the alienation and superficiality of late-stage capitalism.”
–Booklist
Yvonne Battle-Felton, Curdle Creek
(Holt)
“Mind-bending…The debt to Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ is obvious, but Battle-Felton is drawing from a deeper well of influences, including Toni Morrison’s lyricism, the time-travel elements of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and the alternative universe of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad….Battle-Felton imagines this world exceedingly well. And she never loses sight of the novel’s central theme: how the need for communities to protect themselves unleashes its own anxieties and traumas.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Nikkya Hargrove, Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found
(Algonquin)
“Bracing, intimate, and immensely personal, Mama is also a quintessential story of our American generation: the story of growing up in the throes of Mass Incarceration. Now, as a mother and author, Nikkya shares that story with the same courage with which she faced so many challenges before. Anyone interested in forging a better American future should read this book.”
–Max Kenner
Gail Crowther, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood
(Gallery Books)
“This is a terrific book about a terrifying woman. Dorothy Parker broke boundaries, landed in the center of literary New York, and was seduced by the money and vanity of Hollywood. She was witty and brilliant, but with a cruel streak that blossomed when she drank. She had so much talent, and such a lack of control. This is a lesson in fame an in the destructiveness of your own demons. I was hypnotized by it.”
–Delia Ephron
Sophie Saint Thomas, Reproductive Rites: The Real-Life Witches and Witch Hunts in the Centuries-Long Fight for Abortion
(Running Press Adult)
“Reproductive Rites is not only a fascinating and engaging read but, in our current post-Roe climate, a necessary one. From the time of the Pharaohs to Donald Trump, Sophie Saint Thomas details society’s conflicted relationship with reproductive rights….The facts will help every reader understand how we came to find ourselves in our current position. And it’s all presented with wit, humor, and verve that make it an unputdownable read for every feminist.”
–Jennifer Wright
Kimiko Hahn, The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems
(Norton)
“Setting forty-three new works alongside poems chosen from Hahn’s 10 previous collections, this volume highlights her formal range and themes informed by her Japanese American heritage.”
–Publishers Weekly
Anthony Bourdain, Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical
(Bloomsbury)
“On page after page, Bourdain offers nothing but compassion….He was determined to tell the familiar Typhoid Mary story from the point of view of a cook, a profession they had in common.”
—Washington Post
Susan Minot, Don’t Be a Stranger
(Knopf)
“Minot exquisitely explores desire and denial, intimacy and illusion in a ravishing, haunting, and insightful tale of sexual ecstasy and emotional torment, integrity and creativity, self and motherhood.”
–Booklist
John Larison, The Ancients
(Viking)
“This ambitious novel reaches far, far deeper than almost any post-apocalyptic tale to reframe the stakes of the climate crisis. This is a novel written by a deep soul, whose commitment to the planet, his community, and his family is on display in these pages. Larison’s knife-sharp prose cuts right to the bone. He is one of our best. A true literary and intellectual maverick.”
–Nickolas Butler
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America
(Flatiron Books)
“Candid, unflinching….Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life.”
–Whiting Foundation Jury
Noam Chomsky, Nathan J. Robinson, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Endangers Policy the World
(Penguin Press)
“Blistering….The authors’ top-versus-bottom analysis becomes strikingly perceptive in a final chapter analyzing how today a global elite benefits from world-killing fossil fuels. This offers rich food for thought.”
–Publishers Weekly
Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America
(Legacy Lit)
“The Christian right has been threatening American plurality for decades, and its influence is on the rise. In Wild Faith, Talia Lavin thoroughly chronicles how this reactionary force is spreading through the US political system and sounds a clear alarm: Christian nationalism is a growing danger to democracy. To fully understand the peril at hand, you must read this book, which is both an investigative triumph and a warning.”
–David Corn
John Grisham, Jim McCloskey, Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions
(Doubleday)
“Framed should come with a warning label: Be prepared never to look at the justice system the same way again. In this collection of ten shocking wrongful-conviction cases, each stranger than fiction, you’ll come away outraged by how easily so many prosecutions can and do run off the rails…[Framed] rais[es] the alarm and crusad[es] for true justice.”
–Robert Kolker
Jared Sullivan, Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe
(Knopf)
“Valley So Low is more than a tale of unrepentant corporate evil and incomprehensible environmental destruction. It’s more, even, than a spellbinding courtroom drama. This brilliant, necessary book is a testament to the power of perseverance and a blueprint for challenging industry’s shrugged-off human costs. Valley So Low is a ballad, yes, but it’s also an anthem. And a triumph.”
–Margaret Renkl
Mary Anne Franks, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment
(Bold Type Books)
“In this bold and bracing account, Mary Anne Franks urges Americans to distinguish the legal question of protected speech from what speech society should promote. Combining concrete policy reforms with inspiring stories of individuals who speak against abuses of power, Fearless Speech exhibits the courage and concern for the public good that it advocates.”
–Martha Minnow
Bill Adair, Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy
(Atria Books)
“Beyond the Big Lie has it all. Bill Adair’s book is timely, engaging and important, especially in America’s fraught political environment. Democracy depends on truth, but truth-telling is in ever shorter supply, especially on the right. Bill Adair, with his long and storied record as an analyst of political lies, unearths the causes and looks ahead to the dire results of this freedom-killing epidemic.”
–Margaret Sullivan
