35 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: September 2024
Fiction
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker - September 3 (Little Brown and Company)
"One of the most essential books about domestic violence I've ever read--Madwoman is a breathtaking adventure, a fun house, a house of horrors, and ultimately, a love letter. Chelsea Bieker will break your heart and stun your senses. Chilling, satirical, and grip-your-seat daring, Bieker is a marvel, peerless in her storytelling; you won't be able to turn away from this book, not even for a second." – T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga - September 3 (Tin House Books)
In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions. Despite her husband's cautions, she soon becomes entangled in her clients' struggles: Alfred's nightmares stir up her own buried memories, and an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardizing the nameless narrator's marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not. Ruminative and propulsive, Ledia Xhoga's debut novel Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation.
I Don't Care by Ágota Kristóf (translated by Chris Andrews) - September 3 (New Directions Publishing Corporation)
Here, in English at last, is a collection of Ágota Kristóf’s short—sometimes very short—stories, which she selected herself, translated by the peerless Chris Andrews. Written immediately before her masterful trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), Kristof’s short fictions oscillate between parable, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone, often returning to the theme of exile: the twin impossibilities of returning home and of reconstructing home elsewhere. The world of the book has very hard edges: cruelty is almost omnipresent, peace and consolation are scarce. Austere and minimalist, but with a poetic force that shifts the walls in the reader’s mind, Kristof’s penetrating short fictions make for extraordinary and essential reading.
If Only by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund) - September 3 (Verso Fiction)
A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.
So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors - September 3 (Ballatine Books)
Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, hope, and the complexities of family, from the acclaimed author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein. But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize that the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from one another but from themselves. Imbued with Coco Mellors's signature combination of humor and heart, Blue Sisters is a story of what it takes to keep living after loss--and, ultimately, to fall in love with life again.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna - September 3 (Riverhead Books)
"I couldn't stop turning the pages, and only when it was all over did I realize what Senna had done. Addictive, hilarious and relatable, yes, but Colored Television is after something larger and more elusive, a very modern reckoning with the ambiguities triangulated by race, class, creativity and love. She nails it." - Miranda July, author of All Fours and The First Bad Man
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner - September 3 (Scribner Book Company)
"Creation Lake reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture. Only Rachel Kushner could weave environmental activism, paranoia, and nihilism into a gripping philosophical thriller. Enthralling and sleekly devious, this book is also a lyrical reflection on both the origin and the fate of our species. A novel this brilliant and profound shouldn't be this much fun." - Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
Small Rain by Garth Greenwell - September 3 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
"Greenwell writes with exquisite precision about pain and loss--but his novel is equally a meditation on joy, beauty, and above all, love. Small Rain is a triumph, one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." - Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
Quarterlife by Devika Rege - September 10 (Liveright Publishing Corporation)
"In the fashion of the big novels by Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh" (Biblio), Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. When the Bharat Party comes to power after a divisive election, Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai. With him is Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to embody her ideals through a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum. Meanwhile, Naren's charismatic brother Rohit, an amateur filmmaker, sets out to explore his roots and befriends the fiery young men of the Hindu nationalist machine. Their journeys lead them into an astonishing milieu of brutal debates and infatuations as fraught as they are addictive, feeding into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets--where the simmering unrest erupts. Hailed as "a landmark novel" (Indian Express), Quarterlife is a brilliantly innovative work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes (translated by Frank Wynne) - September 10 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
"Virginie Despentes is a true original, a punk-rock George Eliot with a keen taste for the pitiable innards of her characters: no one else has her slyly penetrating eye, her spiky sense of humor, her razor wit that cuts like wire through the accumulated crud of our age's default thought patterns . . A droll, hilarious, insightful record of our unfortunate times." ―Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell - September 10 (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, reordering the world with grace, beauty, and deep humanity. 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-Ajanu, author of A Country You Can Leave
Once More from the Top by Emily Layden - September 10 (Mariner Books)
"Lyrical, graceful, utterly propulsive, in Once More from the Top Emily Layden charts the meteoric rise of American megastar Dylan Read. With her effortless, confessional prose, Layden draws back the curtain of fame, asking us to consider how much female celebrities in particular have to sacrifice in the name of ambition, how much we expect them to reveal, or, in Dylan's case, conceal. Both an origin story and a fable, the last notes of this compulsive novel played in my head long after I'd put it down." - Ellie Eaton, author of The Divines
Old Wounds by Logan-Ashley Kisner - September 10 (Delacorte Press)
"A terrifying, masterful debut that's startlingly original while remaining pure horror to its bones. Old Wounds is a gripping exploration of gender, sacrifice and the real monsters we're running from." --Lex Croucher, New York Times bestselling author of Gwen & Art Are Not in Love
The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies by Maggie Cooper - September 17 (Bull City Press)
“Fun, feisty, and feminist, Maggie Cooper’s The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies takes readers on a ride through the twisty topographies of womanhood. From high seas adventures with lady pirates to the heart-strung struggles of lesbian spelunkers, these stories balance imaginative delights with head-spinning insight. The worlds in this chapbook are realms you won’t want to leave.” — Allegra Hyde, author of The Last Catastrophe
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin - September 17 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
"Scaffolding is a quietly incendiary disquisition on desire and containment, on the bonds that make and unmake us. It seized me wholly: I read it with the voyeuristic fervor of stalking a new crush, or doomscrolling an ex. It's also a tale of the unconscious as ultimate homewrecker, and is unafraid to upend the temporary structures of monogamy and domesticity, scrambling their contents, seeing how the pieces land. Elkin's novel is a powerful testament to the idea that what we want might obliterate us, and it fearlessly reckons with the equally high stakes of pretending otherwise." --Daisy Lafarge, author of Life Without Air
Us Fools by Nora Lange - September 17 (Two Dollar Radio)
"Past and present seep and bleed in this assured, richly ruminative, darkly funny debut. With exacting lyricism, Nora Lange chronicles the tumult and chaotic love between two unforgettable sisters. Us Fools is a marvel of brutal wit and wild charm--a brilliant, sweeping chronicle of a singular American family." --Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
Rejection: Fiction by Tony Tulathimutte - September 17 (William Morrow & Company)
"Rejection is unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one--not you, not me. Tulathimutte is a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius." --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman - September 17 (Dorothy a Publishing Project)
The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance. Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process. The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.
States of Emergency by Chris Knapp - September 17 (Unnamed Press)
"I wondered as I read: how did Chris Knapp manage to write such seamless surges of past and present; the sense of history crashing down on everyday life; such sadness and startling humor? Despite my futile hope that I could continue reading States of Emergency for a long while yet, I've finished it all too quickly: and I realize there is no trick to this novel's genius, only great depth. This is an incredible work." - Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam - September 17 (Riverhead Books)
Brooke wants. She isn't in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief? Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.
A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg - September 24 (Ecco Press)
"I loved leaping through time with the four Cohen women--Frieda, Nancy, Shelly, and Jess. Each woman is intelligent and self-sabotaging--the way we all can be--and they love each other fiercely, often from a careful distance. Attenberg's writing is sharp and incisive--it's a pleasure to watch the patterns she created unfold over forty years of these women's lives." -- Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward
Graveyard Shift: A Novella by M. L. Rio - September 24 (Flatiron Books)
Every night, in the college's ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.
One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn't there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom? Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks--and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney - September 24 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties--successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women--his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude--a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Non-Fiction & Poetry
My Infinity by Didi Jackson - September 3 (Red Hen Press)
"In the beautifully rendered book of poems, My Infinity by Didi Jackson, the speaker's voice is meditative, pensive, and warm. Tonally, these poems represent that time of day which is near dusk and twilight, when the day is mostly finished, but is scarred with too much knowledge. My Infinity grapples with the aftermath of a lover's suicide, alongside new love and joy. Whether it is corresponding with the visual art of Hilma af Klint or the natural world, nothing is too small for this speaker to look at, as with a microscope, and correspond with, as one might correspond with the moon. Here is a poet of witness of awe alongside the music of pain and grief, and of the 'mercy that strips us naked to each other.'" - Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT
Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh - September 10 (Scribner Book Company)
In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times--class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently. Now, this thought-provoking collection of more than thirty of her highly relevant, previously published essays from the past decade (2013-2024)--ranging from personal narratives to news commentary--demonstrates a life and a career steeped in the issues that affect our collective future.
First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream by Jessica Hoppe - September 10 (Flatiron Books)
"A powerful thunderclap of a memoir, Jessica Hoppe's First in the Family is a rich excavation of one woman's descent into addiction and the power found in laying it all bare. Hoppe's uncompromising voice doesn't hide behind platitudes but gently unravels damaging legacies tied to the "American Dream" with a much-needed critique of the recovery movement. A triumphant example of hope where breaking harmful cycles is not found in the individual achievement but in a collective one." - Lilliam Rivera, Award-winning author of Dealing in Dreams
Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir by Paul Rousseau - September 10 (Harper Horizon)
At some point in the course of Paul and Mark’s friendship, Mark acquired—legally and with required permits—five firearms. Those weapons lived with them in their college apartment. It was a non-issue for the two best friends. They were inseparable. They were twenty-two-year-old boys at the height of their college experience, unaware that everything was about to change forever.
The bullet ripped through two walls before it struck Paul’s skull. Mark had accidentally pulled the trigger while in the other room and—frightened for his own future—delayed getting treatment for Paul, who miraculously remained conscious the entire time. In vivid detail, Friendly Fire brings us into the world of both the shooting itself and its surgical counterpoint—the dark spaces of survival in the face of a traumatic brain injury and into the paranoid, isolating, dehumanizing maw of personal injury cases.
We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson - September 17 (Abrams Press)
Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador's Amazon rainforest--one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s--Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. Eventually, her ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture. She listened. Two decades later, Nemonte has emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. Her message is as sharp as a spear--honed by her experiences battling loggers, miners, oil companies and missionaries. In We Will Be Jaguars, she partners with her husband, Mitch Anderson, founder of Amazon Frontlines, digging into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, hacking away at racist notions of indigenous peoples, and ultimately revealing a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself.
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson - September 17 (One World)
Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take--from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer--to create. If you haven't yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world--or to see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it--this book is for you. If you haven't yet found your role in shaping this new world or you're not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you. With grace, humor, and humanity, Johnson invites readers to ask and answer this ultimate question together: What if we get it right?
Being Bad: Breaking the Rules and Becoming Everything You're Not Supposed to Be by Arielle Egozi - September 17 (Chronicle Prism)
Salon's inaugural sex and love advice columnist and author of the viral LinkedIn sex work post, Arielle Egozi, shares their journey as a queer, neurodivergent, child of immigrants who never quite fit into the social roles she was supposed to, instead choosing to embrace their multiple dimensions, and eventually discovering freedom--and true power--by being "bad" in a world that kept trying to force her to be "good." Using frameworks and philosophies cultivated from years of living, writing, speaking, and educating on sex, relationships, and identity through a queer and decolonizing lens, Egozi offers questions, practices, and tools to help you find your own power, and step into it--creating space for you to dream far beyond what your family, society, or capitalist culture expects. Being Bad offers you the permission to become who you are, however you choose to be.
One Day I'll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman: A Mother's Story by Abi Maxwell - September 17 (Knopf Publishing Group)
Abi Maxwell grew up in rural New Hampshire, one of eight kids in a poor town abutting a wealthier lakeside village. As a young couple, Maxwell and her husband planned not to have kids, but when Maxwell became pregnant, she knew she wanted to raise her child near the mountains and lake of her youth. When her six-year-old, who was known to the world as a boy, asks to wear pink sneakers, asks to be a witch for Halloween, asks to wear a girl's dance costume, Abi worries about how their small community will react. But when that child changes her name, grows her hair long, and announces that she is a girl, a firestorm engulfs the family. Weaving together the story of her own youth, marked by long afternoons skiing the mountains, a cottage on the lake, and a proud gay brother, but also by neglect and bullying that pushed her brother to the brink, Abi Maxwell contends with the rural America where she was raised and, years later, where she is now raising her daughter, as lawmakers nationwide push to erase the very existence of trans youth. Intimate and stirring, this book is essential reading for this moment in our history.
Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe - September 17 (Roxane Gay Books)
"The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I've ever read. It's a terrific, expansive story because the focus of this warm-hearted man always returns to his children. He's simply a wonderful parent, and that's what keeps the reader turning the pages.” - Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw
Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt - September 17 (Pantheon Books)
"I found myself deeply jealous of Emily Witt. Why didn't I spend the last 8 years dancing myself into an alternate, psychedelic universe? It seems after all to be the only sensible response to the fractured disaster that is the contemporary world. Witt, with a gimlet eye and a voice that never shies away from the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us, offers a tour of the years that begin with the surreal catastrophe of the 2016 election and through the Covid years and the murder of George Floyd, giving me insight to a time that all too often feels like a nightmare that has, like all dreams, begun to fade from memory. This remarkable book didn't just allow me to relive that time, but helped me to understand it." - Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day
Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad - September 24 (Grove Press, Black Cat)
"Animated by an extraordinary faith in the power of art to return us to the human in ourselves and each other, Recognizing the Stranger is a profound exploration of myth, meaning, the novel, the Palestinian struggle, and the work of Edward W. Said. The insights she finds into the present moment feel at once prescient and eternal and the result left me changed." -- Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast by Neesha Powell-Ingabire - September 24 (Hub City Press)
"Come by Here is both reminder and invitation. By bringing readers home with them to the Geechee Coast, Neesha Powell-Ingabire's essays show us that where we come from is powerful magic, strong enough that there are forces at work to keep us from our personal and collective histories. And that you have never ventured too far to lay claim to your roots. This book is Black. Queer. Southern. And unapologetic in its insistence that we serve as witness." - Minda Honey, author of The Heartbreak Years
