October, astonishingly, is here already, bringing with it cooler weather, fiery and fading leaves, meditations on the passage of time and death as change, and, of course, spooky season. And, of course again, new books to read, including paperback editions of exciting tomes (some appropriately spooky, as you’ll see below). I’ve rounded up twenty-seven new paperbacks to consider below in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, with many literary luminaries, debuts to watch, and innovative, paradigm-challenging projects represented.
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It’s a bountiful month for new books, Dear Reader, and should you decide to sit by a fireplace or fire pit or under some warm sheets, I recommend having one of these with you. You’ll be glad you did.
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Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition
(Counterpoint)
“Yoshimoto packs a lot of detail and intrigue in this spare novel….A bestseller over three decades ago, readers familiar with Yoshimoto’s work will not want to miss this one. It is a welcomed addition to her oeuvre for English reading audiences and definitely worth the wait
–Library Journal
Bryan Washington, Family Meal
(Penguin)
“[A]n achingly and beautifully etched ensemble of young Americans learning to navigate a more universal and human struggle: grief….Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters—and readers—an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope and nourishment.”
–The Washington Post
Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
(Astra House)
“[A] luminous, acerbic and devastating debut novel….McGhee brilliantly articulates the neuroses of a young person trying to survive in a system rigged against him. The novel is a magical-realist office drama infused with millennial anomie, and McGhee’s canny, often bittersweetly hilarious prose reads as if George Saunders infiltrated the Severance writers’ room.”
–Rafael Frumkin
Tracy K. Smith, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul
(Vintage)
“In her second memoir, Tracy K. Smith breaks free of the bonds of singularity and finds a radical vision of Black kinship….This gathering of souls…this making way for a way, is a new kind of freedom-literature for sure…a memoir with gorgeous lyric flourishes like a poem, and language that entreats us to want to know more.”
–Dawn Lundy Martin
Ellyn Gaydos, Pig Years
(Vintage)
“Gaydos brings her experience farming, in particular breeding animals for slaughter, to a debut that’s in turns lyrical and brutal….It all adds up to a powerful meditation on the cycle of life….This one will stick with readers long after the last page is turned.”
–Publishers Weekly
Marion Gibson, A History of Witchcraft in Thirteen Trials
(Scribner)
“An empathetic survey of witch trials spanning seven centuries and three continents…this vividly drawn and often surprising account succeeds in its aim to provide an expansive vision of the witch trial that extends far beyond Salem.”
–Publishers Weekly
Shane McCrae, The Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems
(FSG)
“Following closely on last year’s Cain Named the Animals, McCrae’s eighth collection evokes the feeling of a life recalled in a hypnagogic state, an amalgam of memory, realization, and hallucination in which the poem serves as an instrument for measuring the most fleeting perceptions….Embedded among surreal meditations…and retellings of The Iliad…are personal lyrics recalling the biracial poet’s abduction by his white grandparents…innovative…his poetry echoes his hope that ‘what once seemed strange to you/ Becomes your heart.’”
–Library Journal
Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors
(Bloomsbury)
“This is historical fiction at its best….The House of Doors is immersive, transporting, and exquisitely crafted.”
–Cristina Henríquez
Ye Chun, Straw Dogs of the Universe
(Catapult)
“Straw Dogs Of The Universe is a multigenerational epic packed with action and adversity…the terror of being a Chinese migrant in nineteenth-century California. Devalued by railroad bosses, enslaved by brothel owners, and hunted down in the streets, every day is a challenge and every triumph is fleeting. In her debut English-language novel, Ye Chun chronicles the lives and dreams of her protagonists with utmost honesty and respect.”
–The Chicago Review of Books
Justin Torres, Blackouts
(Picador)
“The supreme pleasure of [Blackouts] is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality….Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays
(Algonquin)
“A raucous affair…these essays are arguments embedded in stories that stretch like rubber bands around the topics of laughter, basketball, skateboarding, gardening, time, dying, music, gratitude, and dancing. It’s impossible to read them without feeling a shift in your awareness of joy and its unexpected possibilities.”
–The Boston Globe
Curtis Chin, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir
(Little Brown)
“A captivating account of growing up gay and Chinese in 1980s Detroit….In lucid, empathetic prose, Chin mounts an elegy for a now closed community center that doubles as a message of compassion to his former self. Readers will be moved.”
–Publishers Weekly
Dwight Garner, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading
(Picador)
“Garner, whose book reviews are a highlight of the Times culture pages, serves up a commonplace book composed of literary quotations, advice for living, recipes, and a heaping side order of memoir….Garner’s mind—his ‘upstairs delicatessen’–is generous, excellent company.”
–The New Yorker
Alice McDermott, Absolution
(Picador)
“With Absolution, Alice McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart. McDermott is a storyteller who aims for the stars. Absolution takes us there, by way of wartime Saigon, and with a powerful reminder that good intentions can have consequences that jerk us awake over a lifetime. What a splendid, compelling book this is.”
–Tim O’Brien
Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers
(Catapult)
“A harrowing tale of Indigenous family separation….[Peters] excels in writing characters….With The Berry Pickers, Peters takes on the monumental task of giving witness to people who suffered through racist attempts of erasure like her Mi’kmaw ancestors. ‘White folks been trying to take the Indian out of us for centuries, ‘ a character tells Norma. ‘But now that you know, you gotta let people know.’ Peters is letting people know.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future
(Picador)
“The Future Future is a smooth, gripping read, displaying a remarkable sure-footedness when it comes to creating an atmosphere both inside and outside history….A bracingly feminist book…a terrific novel: a testament to female friendship, an adventure story, a political commentary and a hymn to the power of language crafted into a unique and compelling shape.”
–Erica Wagner
Lore Segal, The Journal I Did Not Keep: New and Selected Writing
(Melville House)
“For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature, as this generous sampler attests.”
–The New York Times
Philip Norman, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle
(Scribner)
“Here, the Fab Four’s inimitable chronicler Philip Norman gives us the portrait of Harrison’s remarkable life that only he can: myth-dispelling, richly detailed, and full of humor. The story of how this young, poor, quiet Liverpool kid rose to musical mastery and fame is the triumph of an oft-overlooked hero—and a delight on every page.”
–Ian S. Port
Thurston Moore, Sonic Life: A Memoir
(Vintage)
“Both a herculean work of research and a love letter—to Moore’s youth, to underground rock, and to a band that formed in downtown Manhattan in 1981 and went on to change music forever…an exuberantly detailed account….Sonic Life is a big book and it feels like a whole life is poured into it.”
–Vogue
Harry N. MacLean, Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America
(CounterPoint)
“Starkweather is a story about a different time in a different America . . . [A] grim story, and that grimness is the paradoxical joy of reading MacLean–the raw chill creeping through your veins that feels authentic to the place and the crimes, the lean and vivid sentences rivaling Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.”
–Carl Hoffman
Gabriel Bump, The New Naturals
(Algonquin)
“A Blithedale Romance for the twenty-first century, only less naive and more complex. Race, class and gender collide in all the ways they do in the so-called real world. Bump’s prose is fresh and frequently surprising. This is funny, sad, sad-funny and funny-sad and just plain smart.”
–Percival Everett
Margaret Meyer, The Witching Tide
(Scribner)
“A beautiful, haunting and utterly transporting novel that takes the reader back to a terrifyingly real witching England: a paranoic society where women’s lives are decided by gossip and grudges. Told from the perspective of a silent woman whose inner voice insistently pulls the reader along, The Witching Tide is atmospheric, moving and lyrical.”
–Naomi Wood
James Ellroy, The Enchanters
(Knopf)
“[The Enchanters] blends the real and imagined into the kind of atmospheric psychosexual spectacle fans have come to expect from the grand master of L.A.-noir….The plot of The Enchanters is sprawling yet intricate, a riveting series of events made all the more vivid by the precision of the details….Carnivalesque—literary roller coaster meets Tilt-a-Whirl.”
–The Washington Post
Sarah Ogilvie, The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
(Vintage)
“Sarah Ogilvie has brought to center stage a gallery of remarkable characters quite as astonishing, hilarious, terrifying and beguiling as any found in Dickens. The ‘ordinary’ people who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary reveal themselves to be anything but ordinary….The Dictionary People serves also, incidentally, as a marvelous record of the incidentals, the daily details, manners and modes of nineteenth century life. An unmissable wonderful achievement.”
–Stephen Fry
Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe
(Vintage)
“An untold story of colonial history, both epic and intimate, and a thrilling revelation, not about the invasion of the Americas by Europeans, but the journeys of Indigenous people to Europe. Caroline Dodds Pennock is the perfect guide, cannily and eloquently shifting the axis of global history away from its Eurocentric grip.”
–Adam Rutherford
Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
(Vintage)
“A magisterial history….A grand account….Bass…has done a great service by spending a decade researching and writing what will surely be the definitive history….Authoritative….Few studies will be so balanced….The book is a well-crafted, warts-and-all account from which almost no one emerges unscathed.”
–Financial Times
Loren Grush, The Six: The Extraordinary Story of the Grit and Daring of America’s First Women Astronauts
(Scribner)
“Tales of the space race enshrined in American history too often center on white men and elevate machismo….Grush skillfully weaves a story that, at its heart, is about desire: not a nation’s desire to conquer space, but the longing of six women to reach heights that were forbidden to them….Like space travel itself, The Six widens our vision of what it means to belong to ‘the whole family of humankind.’”
–The New York Times
