August 30, 2024, 4:37am
September is here! It’s still a surprise to me that the fall is here already. But what should come as no surprise is that with a new month before us, there’s a veritable bounty of new books to look forward to, as well as books newly out in paperback. And for paperback reprints, it’s an excellent month, filled with beloved authors, striking new talents, and such a variety of subject matter that almost anyone should find something for them in my list today.
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Below, you’ll find no less than twenty-six paperbacks in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to consider, including notable work from Zadie Smith, Jesmyn Ward, Joyce Carol Oates, Ben Lerner, Naomi Klein, Paul Murray, Héctor Tobar, Jennifer Neal, and more. If you missed these before, I strongly recommend checking them out this time around. It’s more than worth it. Read deeply as the weather (perhaps) cools, and let those to-be-read piles grow gloriously tall.
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Zadie Smith, The Fraud
(Penguin)
“In all of her books Smith has paid attention to a mixed-up London and particularly to Willesden, where she grew up. In this novel, she is quite actively digging into London’s history, trying to understand how a person like her, with European and Jamaican ancestry, came to exist here in the first place. What forces deposited Black people on these shores?….As always, it is a pleasure to be in…Smith’s mind….Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
(Scribner)
“Superb….Angry, beautiful, raw, visceral, and heartfelt, Let Us Descend is the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours….Ward has taken Black history in a time of racial and political turmoil and used it to scream about grief and injustice, but also about beauty, queer love, history, determination, and joy.”
–NPR
Joyce Carol Oates, Zero-Sum: Stories
(Knopf)
“Powerfully wrought….Zero-sum games are played for lethal stakes in this collection of arresting stories by one of America’s most acclaimed writer….Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism and ever-shifting identities.”
–Heather Steele
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
(Picador)
“This story of mistaken identity would on its own be gripping and revealing enough, both as a psychological study and for its explorations of the double in art and history, the disorienting effects of social media, and the queasy feeling of looking into a distorted mirror. But the larger subject of Doppelganger [is] a far more complex and consequential confusion….A uniquely astute account of the scrambled political formations that have come out of the pandemic.”
–The New Republic
Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
(Picador)
“Tobar’s book should be read in the context of other works that, for more than a century, have tried to elucidate the meaning of latinidad….More than these other works, though, it engages in contemporary debates and issues, such as how Latinos have related to Blackness and indigeneity, the question of why some Latinos choose to identify as white, and the political conservatism of certain Latino communities. It is also the most lyrical and literary of the genre.”
–The Atlantic
Martha McPhee, Omega Farm: A Memoir
(Scribner)
“In this unputdownable pandemic memoir about midlife spin-out, Martha McPhee recounts, with candor and grace, the raw, vital work of clearing the wreckage a chaotic childhood has left behind.”
–Ada Calhoun
Ben Lerner, The Lights: Poems
(FSG)
“Light takes many forms in these poems: Stars, fireflies, flashes of silver, ‘city lights, the necklace / lights of bridges.’ Perhaps most enlightening of all is Lerner’s ability to lift up art, gentleness, and a certain slowness without dismissing the urgency of our present. In precise verse and time-bending prose, these poems are meditative, not at all rushed. Fans of Lerner’s fiction are sure to find another favorite here.”
–The Boston Globe
Elisa Gonzalez, Grand Tour: Poems
(FSG)
“This vivid, searching début collection traverses and troubles borders between nations, languages, lovers, the past and the present, the living and the dead; combining reflections on art and history with astute observations of everyday life, Gonzalez contends with the world’s capacity for profound suffering and for near-unbearable beauty in equal measure.”
–The New Yorker
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
(Picador)
“Murray’s writing is pure joy—propulsive, insightful and seeded with hilarious observations….Through the Barneses’ countless personal dramas, Murray explores humanity’s endless contradictions: How brutal and beautiful life is. How broken and also full of potential. How endlessly fraught and persistently promising. Whether or not we can ever truly change our course, the hapless Barneses will keep you hoping, even after you turn the novel’s last page.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures
(Algonquin)
“There’s no powder keg like a family secret. And when it explodes, nothing in the past is ever as it was, and nothing in the future is ever the same. The Museum of Failures is a symphony of secrets and lies, love and hate, regret and forgiveness, but more than that, the unraveling of everything one holds dear to find something more precious and elusive: oneself. Powerful and engrossing.”
–Marlon James
David Diop, Beyond the Door of No Return (trans. Sam Taylor)
(Picador)
“Diop has brought his capacious mind to bear on an earlier period of encounter between Europe and Africa….It’s hard to imagine a more gripping or fertile subject for Diop’s fictional exploration….Romantically and dramatically is how he tells it here, with a delight in narrative that honors Senegalese oral culture….This is a novel with enough frame narratives to make the ghost of Joseph Conrad come and listen.”
–The Guardian
Jennifer Neal, Notes on Her Color
(Catapult)
“Remember how the half-hidden rides at amusement parks seemed riskier than the out-in-the-open, sky-high roller coasters? Because you’d hear a scream get swallowed up behind the façade of a mountain range and not know what was going to come next. Reading Jennifer Neal’s impressive debut, Notes on Her Color, a magical journey about music and race and queerness and passing and mothers and daughters, reminds me of those mysterious, thrill rides.”
–Gene Kwak
Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career
(Picador)
“Coulter is a delightful, funny guide, giving us an insider’s view of Amazon’s quirks and toxicities, and she’s alert to the personalities and characters around her (including glimpses of Jeff Bezos and his management style)….An engaging, well-paced, and thoughtful memoir, Exit Interview takes a clear-eyed look at women in corporate America, particularly tech, noting how far from parity they remain in those worlds.”
–BookPage
Diana Helmuth, The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft
(Simon & Schuster/Simon Element)
“This is a book that I shall keep. It is the best available portrait of witchcraft in contemporary America. It is also highly intelligent, extremely funny, and good-hearted, and it asks some profound questions to which it provides plausible answers. Understanding attitudes to magic is another way of understanding people, and this book enables us to do both better.”
–Ronald Hutton
Andrew Amelinckx, Satellite Boy: The International Manhunt for a Master Thief That Launched the Modern Communication Age
(Counterpoint)
“As with Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Amelinckx develops his two narratives suspensefully and in excellent historical detail before braiding them together with the skill of a master weaver. No account of the technocratic 1960s is complete without this thrilling tale.”
–Booklist
Oksana Vasyakina, Wound (trans. Elina Alter)
(Catapult)
“The dangerous territory of being a queer woman in present-day Russia is the subject of this novel—movingly translated by Elina Alter—which follows a young lesbian poet as she makes the trek from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia to bury her mother’s ashes.”
–Vogue
Claudia Dey, Daughter
(Picador)
“Daughter is a breathtaking and brilliant novel about the exquisite pain and agony that come from loving and needing certain people in our lives to love us back, to love us better. It is also about how we are relentless animals, wild and searching, trying to get our crushed, hungry bodies into our wolf packs. I was profoundly moved by it, so uncompromising and so true.”
–Miriam Toews
Diana Evans, A House for Alice
(Vintage)
“Broad in range, vivid in detail, alight often with eloquent language, Evans’ fourth novel, set among a Black community in London, takes time to reveal itself. Sprawling but always engaging, the novel’s cast is filled with rounded individuals, their problems and options as Black, middle-class Londoners showcased at work and play and contemplation, with humor and empathy.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Sarah Viren, To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories
(Scribner)
“A thrilling, labyrinthine and ultimately illuminating reckoning with what it feels like to be caught up in a vortex of post-truth, conspiracy, and lies…To Name the Bigger Lie is a fascinating and deeply disturbing account of our contemporary age of weaponized falsehoods. That what most of us experience only through the news came for her life so personally makes for heart-in-throat reading….Viren’s ability to unspool complicated tangles…is unparalleled.”
–Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
Cameron McWhirter, Zusha Elinson, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15
(Picador)
“American Gun is an engrossing read. It is both a revealing biography and a thorough autopsy of…the AR-15 rifle. Created in a garage but worshipped as if born in a manger, the AR-15 has become destructive weapon of choice in many mass killings and a source of heartbreak that gnaws at the souls of millions of Americans every day…exhaustive research and superb writing…Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson…answer the question: what would the inventor of the AR-15 think about the monstrous ways it is being used today?”
–Hank Klibanoff
Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty
(Holt)
“Wolff, author of a spate of books skewering the dysfunctional Trump presidency, returns to his investigation of the Murdochs with a fast-paced, gossip-filled recounting of family drama—rivaling Succession in intrigue and bitter strife—and the travails and scandals that have roiled Fox News….Wolff is merciless.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Fran Littlewood, Amazing Grace Adams
(Holt)
“I can’t remember the last time I read a novel with such unbridled enthusiasm. Amazing Grace Adams is a raw, uproariously hilarious portrait of parenthood, love, and family; it’s also a profound examination of the way language can both save us and fail us when we need it the most. I’d walk across London on the hottest day of the year with Fran Littlewood—hell, I’d walk anywhere with her. I’m begging you: read this book.”
–Grant Ginder
Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte
(Berkley Books)
“At once romance, horror, historical fiction, and an adventure narrative about war, Vampires of El Norte elegantly navigates a multiplicity of genres to deliver an engaging story that cements Cañas as one of the best new voices bridging the gap between romance and speculative fiction….The Hacienda was great, but Vampires of El Norte is even better.”
–NPR
Jo Nesbø, The Night House (trans. Neil Smith)
(Vintage)
“Nesbø deftly guides readers on a journey much larger than many will expect from the slim volume….Expectations of genre, setting, and mood are subverted as a simple horror novel unfolds into a story that encompasses grief, mid-life crises, and more.”
–Library Journal
David Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
(Picador)
“One of the most creative books ever published on the history of piracy….[Graeber] successfully pairs two kinds of history from below: maritime and Indigenous. This is a highly unusual combination and a winning one. He treats ordinary people, especially women, as thinkers, creators, and makers of history. His theory and methods are as democratic and egalitarian as the culture he seeks to illuminate.”
–The Nation
Kate Clancy, Period: The Real Story of Menstruation
(Princeton University Press)
“In energetic and funny prose, Clancy castigates Western societies, especially scientists and physicians, for menstrual stigmas both ancient and modern….[Period] conveys a consistently positive view of menstrual blood, the menstrual cycle, and the bodies of people who menstruate….In the end, Clancy simply wants periods to be understood and respected for the remarkable biological process they are.”
–Science
