23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: October 2024
Fiction
Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner - October 1 (Grove Press)
"Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters is a cocktail of raw poetry, needle sharp insights, and propulsive, almost projectile honesty. I can't get over how deftly it pivots from funny to mean to vulnerable to wise, often on a single page. Lerner explores the contours of complicated relationships with an intoxicating ferocity that--we come to realize--amounts to no less than an act of love." -- Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins and To & Fro
Model Home by Rivers Solomon - October 1 (MCD)
"Intense, original, and wonderfully unpredictable--those adjectives describe Rivers Solomon as much as this novel. Model Home is a story of a haunted house and haunted people; profound family secrets lie at the heart of this book as well as, surprisingly, blessedly meaningful touches of love and hope. Rivers Solomon is an astonishingly talented writer." --Victor LaValle, author of Lone Women and The Changeling
Suggested in the Stars by Yoko Tawada (translated by Margaret Mitsutani) - October 1 (New Directions Publishing Corporation)
As Hiruko--whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue--and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko--and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)--they empower each other against despair. Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada's famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this "strange, exquisite" (The New Yorker) trip to end.
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister - October 1 (Counterpoint LLC)
Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a "bog-wife." Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails--or refuses--to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future. At once a gothic eco-horror, a psychological drama, and a family saga, The Bog Wife is a propulsive read for fans of Shirley Jackson, Karen Russell, and Matt Bell that speaks to what is knowable and unknowable within a family history and how to know when it is time to move forward.
Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento - October 8 (University of Pittsburgh Press)
“These thematically linked stories deliver an intricate study of Zambian women living both in Zambia and abroad who are weighing their options for whom to love, where to live, where to work. The author, with a poet's restraint, has written stories that deftly negotiate the challenges and tribulations women face when they feel the pressure and duty to yield to the will of family, community, customs, country, and spiritual beliefs. Obligations to the Wounded is a graceful, touching, and generous collection.” --Angie Cruz, Drue Heinz Literature Prize judge and author of How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Women's Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery - October 15 (Harpervia)
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There's Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There's Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there's Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student. The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they'd better make the most of it while it lasts. As trenchant as the novels of Dawn Powell and Rona Jaffe and as immersive as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lessons in Chemistry, Women's Hotel is a modern classic--and it is very, very funny.
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato - October 15 (Grove Press, Black Cat)
"Blue Light Hours is a spellbinding meditation on distance and intimacy, holding close and letting go. In attentive linguistic brush strokes, Bruna Dantas Lobato offers a tender and dynamic portrait of the mutual care between a mother and a daughter as they navigate life apart. Resplendent." --Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch, winner of the National Book Award
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán (translated by Sophie Hughes) - October 15 (Riverhead Books)
Estela came from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born. They wanted a housemaid: "smart appearance, full time," their ad said. She wanted to make enough money to support her mother and return home. For seven years, Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, made their meals, kept their secrets, witnessed their fights and frictions, raised their daughter. She heard the rats scrabbling in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora; she knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter's rebellion as she grew up, the mother's coldness, the father's distance. She saw it all. After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela stops speaking, breaking her silence only now, to tell the story of how it all fell apart. Is this a story of revenge or a confession? Class warfare or a cautionary tale? Building tension with every page, Clean is a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the height of her powers.
An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance by Diana Oropeza - October 25 (Future Tense Books)
“Diana Oropeza’s An Incomplete Catalog of Disappearance is a marvel. Suspend your logic, allow yourself to be pulled into the labyrinth, trust “a certain unfocusing of the eyes,” and you’ll be fascinated by what, gently and quietly, appears through the blur. I already can’t wait for Diana’s future books.” – poupeh missaghi, author of Sound Museum
Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta - October 29 (Grand Central Publishing)
"Feast While You Can is a truly monstrous romance, by turns alluring and appalling, sexy and grotesque, kinky and transportive. It's Call Me By Your Name meets Stephen King's It, for lesbians. It threw me against the wall and I loved it." --Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea and Private Rites
Masquerade by Mike Fu - October 29 (Tin House Books)
“Masquerade captures that ephemeral blossom of youth, of carefree days bumming smokes from crushes and spilling cocktails on strangers, as well as the dreaded anticipation of loneliness and self-doubt on the last train home. From here, it provokes the reader to take part in an irresistible mystery. Mike Fu's writing is vivid and cinematic, unforgettably rendering the vibey-cool of diasporic Shanghai and the restless pulsing of New York's heart.” --Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies
Non-Fiction & Poetry
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand - October 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries--tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.
The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America by Aaron Robertson - October 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
"A richly braided and beautifully written account that combines history, personal memoir, and journalism to explore the search for a black utopia. Robertson's tone is elegiac and lyrical, his method grounded in colorfully detailed characters and painstakingly reconstructed examples. This wise and often moving book offers both a slice of a particular utopia as well as a more general portal onto the quest for a better world that has propelled so much human history. A deeply original and major contribution to the literature of utopia." --Akash Kapur, author of Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia
The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies by Deborah Levy - October 1 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy. Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations; each page is a beautiful, questioning composition of the self. The Position of Spoons is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.
The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family's Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life by Amy Bowers Cordalis - October 7 (Little Brown and Company)
A perfect blend of memoir and history, The Water Remembers speaks passionately to environmental justice and conservation, as well as responsible stewardship. Engrossing, Amy Bowers Cordalis recounts her twenty-year fight against the United States government, chronicling how she evolved from a naïve Westernized 22-year-old to an advocate for her people. The Water Remembers involves genocide, assimilation, and oppression, but victory, in protecting one's home, environment, and way of life.
Country Queers: A Love Letter by Rae Garringer - October 8 (Haymarket Books)
Part photo book, part memoir, part oral history project, this volume paints a vivid portrait of queer and trans experiences in rural areas and small towns across the US. After years as a DIY, minimally funded, community-based oral history project, the work now takes a new form in Country Queers: A Love Letter--a book of full-color photos and interviews with rural folks from Mississippi to New Mexico and beyond, with Garringer's account as traveler and interviewer woven through the pages. In these intimate conversations, we see how queerness--shaped, as all things are, by race, class, gender, and more--moves in rural and small-town spaces, spotlighting how country queers make sense of their lives through reflections on land, home, community, and belonging. While media-driven myths suggest that big cities are the only places queer folks can find love and community, Country Queers resists that trope by centering rural queer and trans stories of the joys, challenges, monotony, and nuances of their lives, in their own words.
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman - October 8 (Scribner Book Company)
John Edgar Wideman's "slaveroad" is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists. An impassioned, searching work, Slaveroad is one man's reckoning with a uniquely American lineage and the ways that the past haunts the present: "It's here. Now. Where we are. What we are. A story compounded of stories told, retold, untold, not told."
Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha - October 15 (Knopf Publishing Group)
"In Forest of Noise, his astonishing second book, Mosab Abu Toha is the essential poet embodying the humanity of Gaza, the precious hopes and dreams of all humans, the searing collective cries of children, the indelible honest conscience, the heart and soul. Miraculously he has continued speaking and writing through the horrific genocide of his people and beloved place. His elemental poems dissolve the empty rhetoric and posturing with simple, striking truth. Not blows. Who else among us founds a library in our early twenties? Today Mosab's books may be crushed, but his most powerful spirit is not." --Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist
An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays by Lucy Ives - October 15 (Graywolf Press)
What would you risk to know yourself? Which stories are you willing to follow to the bitter end, revise, or, possibly, begin all over? In this collection of five interrelated essays, Lucy Ives explores identity, national fantasy, and history. She examines events and records from her own life--a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son--to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored. With bracing insight and extraordinary range, she weaves new stories about herself, her family, our country, and our culture. Here Ives retrieves shadowy sites of pain and fear and, with her boundless imagination, attentiveness, and wit, transforms them into narratives of repair and possibility.
Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer - October 22 (June Road Press)
“Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer is an exquisite collection that weaves together personal loss and the enduring spirit of a place and people grappling with ruin. These poems praise in the aftermath. They praise in the minor key. And the effect is dazzling. Kiefer is an immense lyrical storyteller and philosopher. Mother-loss parallels both a mill town’s and a poet daughter’s desire for wholeness in what crumbles—bodies, worlds. Here is a saltbox crafted with care, a shelter of pinewood, and a speaker who, when everything else falls away, will hold even ‘empty space.’ Built with such spare, deft architecture, these poems brim with tenderness, irony, and heart.” —Jennifer Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal and Landscape with Headless Mama
My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss - October 22 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
An unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves. In My Good Bright Wolf, this bright light of contemporary literature explores the trap of postwar puritanism and second-wave feminism, the narratives of women and food that we absorb through our childhoods and adulthoods, and the ways in which our health-care system continues to discount the experiences of women, minorities, and anyone suffering from mental illness. With her characteristic commitment to finding the truths in stories, Moss examines what she thought and still thinks, what she read and still reads, and what she did--and still does--with her hardworking body and her furiously turning mind.
No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir by Sarah Labrie - October 22 (Harper)
"LaBrie's spellbinding prose is a metaphysical experience: cinematic, poetic, philosophical, and wholly stunning. If psychiatric disability has impacted your life, or if you've ever been lonely, or if you enjoy having exceptional writing light up your brain, this book is an essential gift. It's that rare gem that somehow holds dazzling intertextual craft and prodigiously tender honesty in equal turn, to sublime effect. This memoir will never leave me." -- Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa
Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold - October 29 (Soft Skull)
In a political moment when social panics over literature are at their peak, Dangerous Fictions is a mind-expanding treatise on the nature of fictional stories as cultural battlegrounds for power. Fictional stories have long held an uncanny power over hearts and minds, especially those of young people. In Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold traces arguments both historical and contemporary that have labeled fiction as dark, immoral, frightening, or poisonous. Within each she asks: How "dangerous" is fiction, really? And what about it provokes waves of moral panic and even censorship?
