It’s another Tuesday in September, and the wheel of the year continues to turn quickly, so quickly that I am still vaguely expecting it to be the end of August. When time seems to move too fast, it might be the time to slow down with a delightful new book by your side. And, fortunately, I have many an option for you to consider. Below, you’ll find no less than twenty-eight new books in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. There are many well-known authors and highly anticipated debuts represented below, including fresh work from Roddy Doyle, Monique Roffey, Elizabeth Strout, Jerald Walker, Cebo Campbell, Brian Evenson, Paul Muldoon, Jamie Quatro, and more.
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It’s a week of bookish riches. Enjoy, Dear Readers, and let those to-be-read stacks expand!
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Roddy Doyle, The Women Behind the Door
(Viking)
“With The Woman Who Walked Into Doors Roddy Doyle understood what we call ‘coercive control’ before society gave it a name. You might think that achievement enough, but he also gave us the wounded, yearning, beautiful heart of Paula Spencer. The character is a hymn to female generosity; the ordinary, discardable kind that keeps the world turning. Reading her voice for the first time sent a pang of recognition through me, followed by love.”
–Anne Enright
Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything
(Random House)
“Strout reminds us that storytelling can be powerful; that most people’s lives go unrecorded; and that paying witness to everyday events is a gift. With tenderness, honesty, intimacy, and compassion, Strout uses her cunning powers of observation to draw readers beyond the mundane to the miraculous complexities where true friendship lies….An absolute must-have.”
–Booklist
Monique Roffey, Passiontide
(Knopf)
“Passiontide is a resounding testament to the rebellious spirit and bravery of Caribbean women. This is an urgent and deeply necessary novel about women reclaiming their own power and future in the face of gender-based violence. Monique Roffey has written a firebrand womanist text, a battle cry, a rousing vision of change for a better, possible world. By the end of this book, I was ready to join the revolution.”
–Safiya Sinclair
Seamus Heaney, Christopher Reid (editor), The Letters of Seamus Heaney
(FSG)
“If letter writing is an art form, then Seamus Heaney was one of its master practitioners. Christopher Reid’s eight-hundred-page selection from what he assures us was an ‘enormous output’—’I have had to cut back severely to make a book of publishable proportions’—is a trove of delights as much as it is a literary testament….[T]he style in the letters, many of them obviously composed at breakneck speed, is astonishing in its quality and unflagging grace.”
–The Guardian
Jerald Walker, Magically Black and Other Essays
(Amistad Press)
“Poignant, hilarious, and slyly self-indulgent, Magically Black and Other Essays is a totally original investigation of one eloquent writer’s lived Blackness. Whether he’s teaching Black literature, facing a MAGA neighbor, worrying about his teen-aged sons, or second guessing White people, Jerald Walker’s voice is unique. What a gem of a book!”
–Nell Irvin Painter
Melissa Petro, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification
(Putnam)
“Equal parts self-help, memoir and social investigation, Petro’s triumphant debut methodically presents how shame has pervaded almost every aspect of our lives, and offers up ways to free ourselves from it….Petro invites us to get ‘quiet and curious’ in our efforts to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.”
—BookPage
Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky
(Coach House Books)
“Stuart Ross doesn’t hold back, happily for us. In letting his poems go where they want to go, sometimes by leaps and bounds, he reminds us that poetic rules are meant to be broken and that the results, in the hands of a skillful poet, can be moving, or amusing, or subversive, or exhilarating, or all of the above. His work brims with surprises. From start to finish, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky is a delightful and thoroughly engaging book.”
–Charles North
Anselm Berrigan, Don’t Forget to Love Me
(Wave Books)
“Anselm Berrigan’s voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry, for its singular welding of candor, political awareness, and humor that attempts, with a very high rate of success, to co-opt the commercial and political jargon of our times to return it to higher purposes.”
–Virginia Konchan
Paul Muldoon, Joy in Service: Poems
(FSG)
“Truly, is there any living poet with as skilled and rambunctious an ear as Paul Muldoon?….One of the pleasures of Muldoon’s poems is the way they make reality seem to go right to the verge of surrealism, the very shaky lip of it.”
–Jesse Nathan
Jamie Quatro, Two-Step Devil
(Grove Press)
“In this spellbinding story of good and evil, revelation and madness, Jamie Quatro ponders all the ways in which innocence and vulnerability can be exploited in a culture that deliberately turns from human suffering. Beautiful and brave and brilliant, shot through with mystery and love, Two-Step Devil is a novel that only Jamie Quatro could have written — and only, I suspect, with an angel peering over her shoulder.”
–Margaret Renkl
Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants
(Simon & Schuster)
“Part Afrofuturism, part delicious fever dream, a lost father and his fractured daughter set out on a road trip toward a misunderstood utopia that reveals the sacred wisdom of who they are and the significance of their people. Cebo Campbell is a master griot….Sky Full of Elephants is a thrilling, original work that allows us to look deeply at each other and ask if ‘white ain’t an idea no more,’ what are the unlimited possibilities for the idea of black?”
–Asale Angel-Ajani
Ayelet Tsabari, Songs for the Brokenhearted
(Random House)
“In her new novel, Ayelet Tsabari’s craft is at its apex. Her characters are alive, the story skillfully structured, and the tragic, hidden history of Yemenite Jews expertly woven into the lives of people you will laugh with and shed tears for. To read this book is also to encounter an Israel and Palestine few of us are familiar with nowadays….A love song for a time long past, overflowing with emotional intelligence and psychological insight.”
–Jonathan Garfinkel
Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant…and Completely Over It
(Tiny Reparations Books)
“With a singular sense of humor, Brathwaite demands the necessary space for Blackness and queerness to thrive in a society that refuses to make it. Appropriately critical of the predominantly white spaces that make up the entertainment industry, what’s most refreshing is Braithwaite’s willingness to self-critique….Equal parts raw and hilarious, Rage is a timely manifesto for those who are tired of waiting for change and are ready to furiously create it.”
–Hari Ziyad
Anne Anlin Cheng, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority
(Pantheon Books)
“Anne Anlin Cheng, one of the nation’s most eloquent scholars of race and gender, has given us a luminous gift in Ordinary Disasters–a coordinated flight of inner stories that wheel and dive through history, pain, love, consciousness, art, childhood, parenthood, the Asian experience in America, the conundrums of time and mortality. A powerful, courageous book, extremely artful, maybe her best.”
–Richard Preston
Rebecca Spiegel, Without Her: A Chronicle of Grief and Love
(Milkweed)
“Without Her is one of the most sensitive, profound, and honest accounts of grief and suicide loss I’ve ever encountered. [B]eautiful and bracingly direct prose….This book is a gift to those seeking to understand what it’s like to sift through the unanswerable questions left in the wake of a loved one’s suicide, or to anyone trying to keep going after losing someone they don’t know how to live without.”
–Chris Stedman
Devika Rege, Quarterlife
(Liveright)
“An ambitious, unusual, formally risky novel that attempts nothing less than a full-scale portrait of India circa 2014. About a quarter of the way through, it opens out into something odder, incorporating many more characters, a more panoptic view of India on the cusp of becoming a world power. Rege is a talented young writer, finely attuned to the psychology of her characters….A promising first outing by a skilled writer.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Emily Layden, Once More from the Top
(Mariner Books)
“A perfect, lyrical gut-punch that probes desire and ambition, what it means to be a “good girl” and the necessary armor that requires….At once fast-paced and richly textured, Once More from the Top is one of the most significant works about the creative process, memory, friendship, and coming-of-age that I’ve ever read.”
–Rachel Kapelke-Dale
Meg Pokrass, First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories
(Dzanc Books)
“When you begin a collection of flash fiction by someone as synonymous with the genre as Meg Pokrass, you can’t help but go in with the highest of expectations. With First Law of Holes, Pokrass’s new and selected stories, not only does she meet these expectations, but far exceeds them. What a pleasure it is to take this journey through this foundational writer’s career…[and] to watch her evolve into the master she has become.”
–Michael Czyzniejewski
Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
(Norton)
“In an era when excessive screen time and the pressure to curate our lives for social media are just two of the many powerful technological forces that diminish our ability to be fully present, actualize our best selves, and meaningfully engage with the world around us, Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience is a timely and insightful call to reclaim our humanity.”
–Evan Selinger
Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
(Harper)
“In a fiery account as chilling as a legal thriller, Rebecca Nagle lays bare centuries of injustice in Oklahoma and the southeastern lands from which the American government exiled her ancestors and thousands of other Indigenous peoples. By the Fire We Carry is a clear and courageous call for justice.”
–Tiya Miles
Bill Ayers, When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation
(Beacon Press)
“For over fifty years, as an activist, an educator, a writer, and a mentor, Bill Ayers has been a freedom fighter determined to change the world for the better. In his newest book, When Freedom Is the Question…his wit, wisdom, and passion for justice offer an eloquent illumination of the challenges and opportunities facing social movements today. In its pages, we find history lessons, hard truths, and poetic inspiration. Read it and resist!”
–Barbara Ransby
Dahlia de la Cerda, Reservoir Bitches: Stories (trans. Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary)
(Feminist Press)
“I couldn’t put this book down! Equal parts punk, brilliant, and urgent, with a side of Mexican goth. Dahlia de la Cerda’s blend of raw, at times brutal storytelling is exactly what we need right now. A force on its own that refuses to be tamed, the writing here is a literary gift.”
–Julián Delgado Lopera
Katherine Packert Burke, Still Life
(Norton)
“Katherine Packert Burke has written such a warm book on red-state trans loneliness and the very real loves, cis and trans, that circle it. I love the jokes and nicknames; the riffs on Paul Cézanne, Stephen Sondheim, and Gossip Girl; and the care with which its three core characters face their losses and departures. I loved them–and more importantly, Burke does too. You’ll feel it.”
–Jeanne Thornton
Molly Aitken, Bright I Burn
(Knopf)
“An astonishing second novel after her brilliant debut, Molly Aitken takes Alice Kyteler—the first woman condemned as a witch in Ireland—and breathes life into a woman as gentle as a candle’s flame, and as destructive as an inferno. Lyrical and wildly imaginative, readers will love and fear Alice in equal measure and remember her story long after they’ve finished the last page.”
–Megan Barnard
Karen Salyer McElmurray, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways
(University of Kentucky Press)
“A great pleasure to read. These lyrical essays explore what it means to leave a place where one has deep familial roots and to travel far and wide, geographically and culturally, without ever escaping the pull of home and its mysteries, richness, and sadness.”
–Zoe Zolbrod
M. G. Sheftall, Hiroshima: The Last Witness
(Dutton)
“M.G. Sheftall’s Hiroshima presents as a master class in eyewitness storytelling. As poignant as it is powerful, this gripping narrative chronicles one of history’s darkest nightmare moments–the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945–and the memories of its surviving eyewitnesses. As the events fade from living memory, Hiroshima is at once a brilliant tribute and a cautionary tale.”
–Annie Jacobsen
Brian Evenson, Good Night, Sleep Tight
(Coffee House Press)
“Peeling back the thin veil that separates our humanity from the incomprehensible and the decadently weird, Brian Evenson crafts a masterful and utterly beguiling collection of literary unease with Good Night, Sleep Tight. With a pervasive sense of isolation and existential worry leaking from story to story, this disturbing collection proves why Evenson remains the undisputed master of short literary horror fiction.”
–Eric LaRocca
Benjamin Resnick, Next Stop
(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
“Next Stop is either prophetic—with its depiction of flailing morality, administrative cowardice, and fact-resistant discourse–or it is timeless….I’m reminded of both Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven….What you will find here is what we all hope to find as readers: a good story about people up against the odds; people who are, ultimately, us.”
–Derek B. Miller
