March marches on, and though the month has just begun, it already, perhaps unsurprisingly, feels like many months of compressed time, if not more, days darkly alchemized into eons by so much political chaos. Still, there are always bright spots, if often well-hidden. And some of those bright spots are below: exciting new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry out today for your consideration.
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And bright they are indeed. In fiction, you’ll find an embarrassment of riches, with new work from Torrey Peters, Karen Russell, Sanjena Sathian, Brian Castleberry, Chris Campanioni, and more. In poetry, Mónica de la Torre offers up poems that Claudia Rankine describes as “Wordsworthian” and “kaleidoscopic.” And in nonfiction, which dominates the list today numbers-wise, there’s much to be intrigued by, including Mélikah Abdelmoumen on the unexpected friendship of Baldwin and Styron; Will Rees on hypochondria and famous literary hypochondriacs; Joyce E. Chaplin on Ben Franklin’s paradigm-shifting stoves; Alissa Wilkinson on Joan Didion and America; the history of NPR; and much, much more.
Stay safe, as always, Dear Readers, and if the news of the world or just the world itself gets too overwhelming, shift your focus to one (or many) of these. It’ll be worth it.
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Karen Russell, The Antidote
(Knopf)
“In The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo’d righteousness, motion over despair….Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio—The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes, with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world’s most lovable sentient scarecrow. It’s magic…propulsive, eminently readable.”
–Kaveh Akbar
Torrey Peters, Stag Dance: A Novella and Stories
(Random House)
“Stag Dance is a brilliant literary kaleidoscope. Peters shatters the familiar in four bold and imaginative tales, each powerful enough to reshape our understanding of transness and where we find it.”
–Nicola Dinan
Sanjena Sathian, Goddess Complex
(Penguin Press)
“Sathian (Gold Diggers) wraps a whip-smart satire of Millennial womanhood around an arresting story of mistaken identity…a dazzling Operation Shylock-esque hall of mirrors….Sathian’s social commentary is riotous…and she finds intriguing new angles on the doppelgänger theme….This is incandescent.”
–Publishers Weekly
Mélikah Abdelmoumen, Baldwin, Styron, and Me
(Biblioasis)
“Mélikah Abdelmoumen has painted an intimate and compelling portrait of what it means to live on the frontier between opposing communities. She has also birthed a personal and courageous meditation on the unexpected and striking friendship between two great American writers. In this polarized world, Baldwin, Styron and Me stands out as a polished gem.”
–Lawrence Hill
Will Rees, Hypochondria
(Coach House Books)
“In Hypochondria, Will Rees pulls off an almost impossible balancing act. He recalls his personal history with great clarity and vulnerability, and he assembles a dazzling archive of his fellow writers and hypochondriacs: Melville, Kafka, Freud, Sartre, Didion. Hypochondria, Rees shows us, is a specific case of fantasizing about what we cannot know—we are all, in our own ways, hypochondriacs.’”
–Merve Emre
Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978 – 1998
(Pantheon Books)
“In dreams and treasured quotations, conversations and therapy sessions, Garner uncovers the texture of minutiae, the vibration of grand thoughts, and the aftertaste of defeat. By the end, Garner is scorched, but like a spore rejuvenated by a cleansing fire, she emerges reanimated. Offering intoxicating insight into the creative mind, Garner’s diaries will tantalize the voyeur and inspire fellow visionaries who embrace such journeys of discovery.”
–Booklist
Mónica de la Torre, Pause the Document
(Nightboat Books)
“In Mónica de la Torre’s hands, opacity is all etymology….In these Wordsworthian poems, the speaker, distressed by the social order, turns, intrigued, to trees: their properties, lives, language, and entanglements. Rebounding their kaleidoscopic thinking and consciousness off the surfaces and textures of the landscape, the brilliant poems of Pause the Document remind us how we can ‘unfold as a flow’ inside language and life.”
–Claudia Rankine
Silvia Park, Luminous
(Simon & Schuster)
“Luminous is full of complex characters, damaged and broken and beautiful. It’s a novel full of pleasures, big and small, gorgeous sentences from which Park weaves a rich, layered story of family and work, of history and speculation, of Korea, past, present and future. A bold exploration of what it means to have a mind, a body, a self, and even a soul. An impressive debut.”
–Charles Yu
Mariam Rahmani, Liquid: A Love Story
(Algonquin Books)
“Hirsute, heuristic, and humorous, Liquid is an electric read. From Los Angeles to Tehran, past to present, academia to the bedsheets, Rahmani navigates these journeys with undeniable verve, serious street-smarts, and a glowing charismatic cool. The smoothest, smartest book I’ve read in quite some time and the dawning of a literary force.”
–Paul Beatty
Brian Castleberry, The Californians
(Mariner Books)
“Immersive, expansive, century-spanning, and deeply felt, Brian Castleberry’s The Californians takes you on a ride through three generations of artists, capitalists, patsies, dreamers, cheats—Californians. It’s a book that entertains and excites, a story of movies, of yearning, of how and why we make art, of how and why money both propels and traps, seduces and destroys. A story of failures and legacies passed down. A total pleasure of a book.”
–Lynn Steger Strong
Laurie Woolever, Care and Feeding: A Memoir
(Ecco)
“I was riveted by this fast-paced, scrupulously honest, and searching memoir that leaves no stone unturned, from the restaurant-world insider adventures of Laurie Woolever’s early career…and unvarnished struggles with marriage, motherhood, and work. Fans of Woolever’s writing about Anthony Bourdain will not be disappointed by this deeply personal and elegantly wrought story of sacrifice, love, and everything Woolever ate and drank along the way.”
–Emily Gould
Amy Griffin, The Tell: A Memoir
(The Dial Press)
“Amy Griffin’s courageous, generous memoir is both a reckoning with a terrible, all-too-common experience…and a searching and empathetic inquiry into the meanings of goodness, self-blame, and forgiveness.”
–Hanya Yanagihara
Alissa Wilkinson, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
(Liveright)
“Rather than offer a biography of Joan Didion and her enduring legacy in our internet age, New York Times film critic Wilkinson gives us a cultural case study of the country Didion wrote about. Deftly researched, this book is a thought-provoking look at postwar American culture and how Didion’s work serves as both solace and warning about the power of the stories we tell.”
–Booklist
Anders Nilsen, Tongues
(Pantheon Books)
“Tongues is an extraordinary reinvention of some of our oldest stories. Nilsen brings these old gods to an electrifying new life, and gives us a new sense of humanity as well, drilling into what we forgot to be afraid of and why we would have made ourselves forget. And the art of comics is reinvented as well in the process. It’s as if to tell this story, Nilsen had to remake everything he knew.”
–Alexander Chee
Chris Campanioni, VHS
(Clash Books)
“The peripatetic narrator of this dazzling novel, an American offspring of geopolitical exiles, has taken the trauma of his parents’ geographic dislocation and subsumed it into his linguistic and spiritual DNA, into the pith of his narrative bones. VHS takes the now-staid modes of much autofiction, turns them inside out, shocks them with a thousand volts of the Proustian instability of the self, and transmutes them into something memorable, incantatory, and wholly original and alive.”
–Ernesto Mestre-Reed
Alice Austen, 33 Place Brugmann
(Grove Press)
“Through an arresting symphony of the residents’ voices, debut novelist Austen carves a special place in the much-surveyed landscape of Holocaust fiction, especially in her homage to the importance of art. Equally remarkable is her ability to bestow attention on each of the many characters while still driving the plot forward….In a powerfully well-written novel, the most chilling thought is subtly said, ‘What is thinkable is also possible.’”
–Booklist
Steve Oney, On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR
(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
“It is a truth universally acknowledged: Public radio has always needed support from listeners like you. In this brash, swear-y backroom history, a decade and a half in the making, Oney shows how a loose network of radio stations called NPR struggled to stay on the airwaves and became a singular force in American life.”
–The New York Times
Edna Bonhomme, A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19
(Atria/One Signal)
“Pandemics thrive on inequities and widen them, providing more kindling for future plagues. This simple lesson has proven devastatingly difficult to learn. But I think that if everyone read Edna Bonhomme’s incredible, humane, insightful book—and I hope they do—we might stand a chance of actually breaking the cycle of neglect and panic.”
–Ed Yong
Raphael Cormack, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult
(Norton)
“Raphael Cormack is a brilliant archival sleuth and a riveting storyteller. In lives full of violent glamour, mystical illusions, and often hilarious twists set against the inhumanity of the two World Wars, Cormack’s madcap prophets reveal how modern politics and the occult are in fact propelled by the same question: do we dare to imagine another world?”
–Anna Della Subin
Michael Joseph Gross, Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives
(Dutton)
“I started lifting weights in 1956, when I was fourteen. When Stronger is in readers’ hands, I’ll be eighty-three—I’ll still be lifting. From the Histories by Herodotus to Pumping Iron—from Ancient Greece to Arnold Schwarzenegger—this is the enlightening history of weight training. I’m a full-time writer. I spend every day sitting on my glutes. Do your glutes a favor—read Stronger.”
–John Irving
Christopher Summerfield, These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
(Viking)
“A compelling and insightful exploration of large language models (LLMs) and their profound world impact. This work is both a great introduction to artificial intelligence and a thought-provoking analysis of its capabilities and limitations….A key addition to collections, this is more than just another tech book: it’s a guide to navigating the era of AI with awareness, and the writing encourages readers to think critically about how humans interact with the technology.”
–Library Journal
Padraic X. Scanlan, Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
(Basic Books)
“Rot brilliantly blends economic, social, and environmental history to deliver a stunning new account of one of nineteenth-century Europe’s most shameful tragedies. Padraic Scanlan joins clear-eyed, comprehensive research and analysis to deliver a persuasive indictment of faith in free markets. As illuminating as it is harrowing, Rot is a must-read for anybody interested in the histories of capitalism and empire.”
–Maya Jasanoff
Ali Watkins, The Next One Is for You: A True Story of Guns, Country, and the IRA’s Secret American Army
(Little Brown)
“Ali Watkins is a phenomenal writer. In this meticulously researched book, she tells in gripping detail the story of the hidden Irish-American supporters who were bolstering the IRA’s campaign. Watkins’ turns historical facts into absorbing details in a book that reads like a fast-paced thriller—I read this on the edge of my seat. I could not put it down. If you like Patrick Radden-Keeffe’s Say Nothing, you’ll love this.”
–Edel Coffey
Will Bardenwerper, Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
(Doubleday)
“Will Bardenwerper’s Homestand isn’t just a great baseball story, but a sensitive and searching look at the ways Americans have built up community, as well as the forces that tear it down. In one small town, he finds a potent symbol for the state of American civic life, and a guide to how we might protect it.”
–Phil Klay
Joyce E. Chaplin, The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution
(FSG)
“”It isn’t difficult to connect Ben Franklin to the modern world. Joyce E. Chaplin charts an especially original route, probing Franklin’s work on the stoves he spent half a lifetime inventing and reinventing, stoves that introduced a host of questions….From Chaplin’s engaging, wide-ranging pages a fresh Franklin emerges, this one an eighteenth-century aficionado of energy efficiency.”
–Stacy Schiff
