We’re moving ever deeper into October, that month of mundane and marvelous transformations (and, often, political surprises) and, as always, I have new reads to recommend. Today, you’ll find twenty-four new books in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to consider, with established authors and debuts-to-watch both represented below.
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You’ll find a new entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series and experimental fictions from William Melvin Kelley, as well as intriguing new novels and stories from Poupeh Missaghi, Anna Montague, Laura Imai Messina, and more. In poetry, you’ll find four new collections to check out from Ben Okri, Aditi Machado, Emily Hyland (the Emily, for fans of Detroit-style pizza, of Emmy Squared), and Emily Jungmin Yoon. And in nonfiction, there are stirring memoirs from Sarah LaBrie, Jennifer Neal, and André Aciman, as well as the ever-controversial-and-conversation-worthy Peter Singer on the plight of the turkey; Emily Herring on the charming French philosopher Henri Bergson; Nicholas Fox Weber on the painter Piet Mondrian; a new remembrance of John Lennon and Yoko Ono; and more.
Add some of these to your ever-towering lists! It’ll be worth it, even if one of the tome towers topples. Sometimes, after all, cleaning up fallen books is just how you find your next read.
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Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel
(MCD)
“An eerie and evocative coda to [Jeff VanderMeer’s] Southern Reach horror-fantasy trilogy….This foray into the human cost of bureaucratic paranoia and the abandonment of logic to ‘hope, prayers, and blessings’ provokes, mystifies, and challenges readers in turn. VanderMeer’s horrifying declaration of the impossibility of knowing the other is a knockout.”
–Publishers Weekly
Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum
(Coffee House Press)
“To read Sound Museum is to watch The Zone of Interest fall into gentle banter with Tár on an elevator, bringing us so close to the mouth of evil that we can feel her breath. I left this book so unsure how to define character or cruelty, I could barely remember how to walk across the room.”
–Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Laura Imai Messina, The Heartbeat Library
(Overlook Press)
“This is a masterful second book by Messina, author of The Phone Booth at the End of the World (2021); from the richly drawn characters to the slow unveiling of the story to the constant presence of the ocean, nature, and the steep hill that Shūichi lives on—reading this lovingly drawn story is an immersive experience. A powerful, unforgettable tale of love that is made more poignant by the loss that preceded it.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Sarah LaBrie, No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir
(Harper)
“Once I opened this brilliant memoir, I needed to finish it. When I wasn’t reading, I was thinking about Sarah LaBrie’s story, turning over in my mind her most devastating observations about motherhood, madness, and creativity. This book is stunning, one of the best memoirs I’ve read in a decade. No One Gets to Fall Apart deserves a place alongside modern classics like Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Tara Westover’s Educated.”
–Susannah Calahan
Jennifer Neal, My Pisces Heart: A Black Immigrant’s Search for Home Across Four Continents
(Catapult)
“This is a captivating and unflinchingly honest account of the highs and lows of being a black woman out in the world, coupled with a detailed history of the many global perceptions of race that is both eye-opening and informative. As a black woman who has also lived and worked in Asia, Australia and Europe, so many of Neal’s observations resonate deeply.”
–Fiona Williams
André Aciman, Roman Year: A Memoir
(FSG)
“Fans of André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name will swoon for this vivid, heartfelt account of the time he spent as a teenager in Rome….A standout memoir from a master of emotional nuance who always reminds us to ‘look for the human.’
–Jessica Olin
Ben Okri, Wild: Poems
(Other Press)
“[Okri’s] writing takes on the great riddles of existence—freedom and consciousness, truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence—spinning them into shimmering, allegorical texts…at a time of deep reckoning and crisis…his work feel[s] all the more prescient.”
–The New York Times
Emily Jungmin Yoon, Find Me as the Creature I Am: Poems
(Knopf)
“I can always depend on Yoon’s poems to achieve tenderness through an unbridled desire to flay history clean from its bones. Not only do these poems edify with knowledge, they’re also revelations of feeling, wonder, and resolve, traveling through routes circuitous and vexed as the finest essays. But most remarkable of all, they position love as a method, a mode of seeing and being, perhaps even a future. Bravo.”
–Ocean Vuong
Aditi Machado, Material Witness
(Nightboat)
“Material Witness proves itself able to imagine a different kind of living and a different poetic form, one that entails embracing indeterminacy, transformation, and interchange. . . the material witness, struggling to look clearly upon a world from which she cannot find the adequate distance, is not only a dilemma but also an invitation, the conditions of possibility for a kind of work (poetic or otherwise) which will radically transform both self and environment.”
–Sammy Aiko Zimmerman
William Melvin Kelley, Dis//Integration: 2 Novellas & 3 Stories and a Little Play
(Knopf Doubleday)
“A posthumously published work by a major (if unsung) Black novelist reminds readers of his imaginative brio, verbal ingenuity, and abrasive wit….All you can do is marvel at Kelley’s arresting collage-like portrait of the artist as an intellectual nomad, clinging to the core of what makes him human—and humane. There’s cleverness and craft in abundance here. Also, wisdom and even warmth.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta
(Harper Perennial)
“The legends of Oedipus and his daughter Antigone are told through two interwoven story lines in Haynes’s dark, elegant novel….Haynes’s greatest achievement is imagining a full world surrounding Sophocles’s tragedies, thrusting two minor characters in their respective plays to the forefront and bringing the myths vividly to life.”
–Publishers Weekly
Anna Montague, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
(Ecco Press)
“A road trip novel with a tremendous amount of heart—I ached along with the characters, rooted for them, wished them all the best. Truly a novel that asks you to consider the winding, secret path to love that sits lodged in every person’s breast. Anna Montague has written something bright and lovely here, a novel that is above all quietly beautiful.”
–Kristen Arnett
Eleni Stecopoulos, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing
(Nightboat)
“Sure to alter the terms by which we understand illness and health, Eleni Stecopoulos’s deeply original meditation is an aesthetic experience and an education. Composed of lines of flight and incantations, learned excavations, and critiques of cure, Dreaming in the Fault Zone introduces a wholly new language by which to understand illegible pain…should be required reading. This book’s radical incursion is irresistible.”
–Mary Cappello
Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People
(Basic Books)
“With flair and verve, Herring unveils the life and philosophy of the enchanting and trailblazing icon of change and creativity: Henri Bergson. The result is a fascinating biography and magnificent revival of this brilliant thinker who was once the most influential philosopher in the world. Herring’s beautifully compelling narrative shows how Bergson’s ideas still hold the power to illuminate the human experience and the meaning of life.”
–Skye Cleary
Nicholas Fox Weber, Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute
(Knopf)
“In Mondrian, the monk of modernism finally gets the flesh-and-blood portrait he deserves. The lifelong ‘quest for the absolute’ does not shelter Mondrian from the temptations of love, the rewards and difficulties of friendship, or the profoundly playful spirit of jazz. Instead they enrich his art. This monk can dance.”
–Mark Stevens
Emily Hyland, Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story
(Howling Bird Press)
“Divorced Business Partners is an ambitious poetic debut. Hyland covers a universe of emotional ground—one that announces itself in the tradition of Plath, Sexton, and Olds—inviting the reader into the interior of a failing marriage and a breaking heart as it journeys towards healing. The language is precise and sharp. Her work spirits us straight to the red-hot center. We emerge triumphant.”
–Délana Dameron
Nate Lippens, Ripcord
(Semiotext(e))
“How did I become the library of everyone I love? Nate Lippens asks in Ripcord….A great deal of Ripcord reckons with the harsh reality of being exiled from your family and having to make a life for yourself amongst people who lead their lives with thoughtless privilege. But Lippens doesn’t wallow in self-pity or let the book be weighed down my pessimism. In fact, he sees the necessity of darkness….Lippens relays the chaos of dating apps…Ripcord…serves as a haven.”
–Hobart
Céline Minard, Plasmas (trans. Annabel L. Kim)
(Deep Vellum)
“Plasmas is six stories that, as an archipelago—vaguely disquieting, wonderfully styled—constitutes a unique literary planet, if not a constellation of heretofore unclassified matter, forming an unprecedented unknown.”
–Le Monde
Mario Desiati, Spatriati (trans. Michael F. Moore)
(Other Press)
“An ode to the young, irregular, irreverent generation…combines the poetry of love with the harshness of an internal struggle…between the desire to stay in the small Apulian town where Claudia and Francesco were born and the dream of escaping to a lively, cosmopolitan Europe.”
–Elle (Italy)
Peter Singer, Consider the Turkey
(Princeton University Press)
“The noted animal rights ethicist and activist delivers a plea to leave Meleagris gallopavo off the holiday table….The reader may be shocked enough by [Singer’s] descriptions to adopt the same view….A well-considered exhortation to give a thought to a badly treated bird.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Patrick Cockburn, Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism
(Verso)
“Claud Cockburn was one of the great journalists of the twentieth century, an irreverent anti-careerist, steeped in the politics of Central Europe, happiest courting risk….Patrick [Cockburn] has now written an excellent account of him, supplying much new or buried information.”
–Andrew Gimson
Dan Hancox, Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World
(Verso)
“Hancox provides, in lucid and passionate prose, a compelling account of the new psychology of crowds. He shows an impressive command of the technical literature, the historical record and contemporary events, resulting in a broadside against the reflex condemnation of crowds that we hear so often in the mouths of politicians and journalists….Read this book. And, when you have finished, you will never use the word ‘mob’ again.”
–Stephen Reicher
Ed Nakamura, Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Culture
(Drawn & Quarterly)
“Nakamura debuts with an exuberant tribute to the zine he and fellow UCLA student Martin Wong cofounded in 1994….Giant Robot…cover[ed] taste tests of Asian food, interviews with film stars and musicians, and commentaries on Asian American history and identity….the zine paradoxically found success thanks to its refusal to prove itself to a mainstream culture in which Asian Americans were often cast…as ‘decor in a white protagonist’s surroundings’…a rousing ode to a vibrant period in pop culture history and an intriguing look at shifting notions of Asian American identity.”
–Publishers Weekly
Elliot Mintz, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me
(Dutton)
“Radio personality Mintz debuts with a vivid account of the decade he spent as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s confidante, fixer, and friend….It’s a captivating and intimate window into the complicated lives of one of rock’s most legendary couples.”
–Publishers Weekly
