September 3, 2024, 4:01am
What a start to September! It’s a new month and new season alike, and to usher it in, you’ll find a veritable cornucopia of new books to consider adding to your lists. Below, you’ll find no less than twenty-seven options in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. You’ll find both celebrated authors and new names, covering a remarkable span of topics and genres.
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Time may well be rushing along, but it feels better with books by your side, and I strongly recommend checking out one—or many!—of these scintillating new offerings.
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Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
(Scribner)
“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
Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman
(Little Brown)
“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
Danzy Senna, Colored Television
(Riverhead)
“When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career….The rant about teaching Gen Z versus millennial college students is sure to kill any college professor…and the story of Jane’s doomed second novel, an opus on biracial characters in history that she’s spent ten years writing, is literary satire par excellence, like R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface or Everett’s Erasure.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Edwidge Danticat, We’re Alone: Essays
(Graywolf)
“Danticat begins this short but powerful collection of essays by quoting Haitian-born poet Roland Chassagne. The cited work includes the phrase the author chose for her title. ‘We’re alone is the persistent chorus of the deserted, as in no one is coming to save us,’ she writes. ‘Yet, we’re alone can also be a promise writers make to their readers, a reminder of this singular intimacy between us. At least we’re alone together‘… Moving essays on Haiti, literature, and life’s vicissitudes.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Mark Bostridge, In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter
(Bloomsbury)
“A haunting and utterly engrossing book—not just a brilliant study of Adele Hugo’s obsessive and unrequited love, but full of revelations about the biographer himself, as he pursues the truth about her life, and finds in the process many parallel truths about his own.”
–Claire Harman
Amy Reading, The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker
(Mariner)
“Amy Reading has recreated a lost, gilded literary world in her smart and evocative biography of Katharine White, the longtime editor at The New Yorker who helped shape postwar American literature. One finishes this book with enormous gratitude for Katharine White’s quiet but fierce commitment to reading, writing, and women, and…for all the drama, humor, and literary gossip that make The World She Edited the next best thing to cocktails at the Algonquin.”
–Heather Clark
Kelly Caldwell, Letters to Forget: Poems
(Knopf)
“It is almost impossible to say I feel blessed by Letters to Forget because within it is great pain, loneliness, loss, and ordinary madness. Yet Kelly Caldwell has composed with a lyrical precision and syntactical range that approach transcendence. I return to the image of Gentle flesh carrying in the great sleep a storm. It comforts as it haunts….[S]tunning intimacy. Lionhearted, brilliant, and tender, as she is made new, so are we.”
–TC Tolbert
Cass Donish, Your Dazzling Death: Poems
(Knopf)
“[A] moving and powerful elegy, while also being mysterious and perhaps mystical in its invocations of our body’s place in the natural world. But this is not an elegy with consolation. It’s one that bravely and vulnerably pushes us into the depths and stakes of the unimaginable. With clarity and messiness, tenderness and rage, Cass Donish makes unforgettable art out of the impossible intertanglings of grief, desire, bewilderment, and all the love that survives.”
–Daniel Borzutzky
Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, Marcel Hernandez Castillo, Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora
(Harper Perennial)
“The poems in this anthology howl, perspire, fall in love, reimagine myth, lose language, find language, have faith in poetry, disbelieve in poetry, repurpose the brutal language of ICE spreadsheets, turn to consider the border, turn away and consider everything but the border–and in this way, page by page, the poems in this anthology are among the best ever written. They will shake you to your core.”
–Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Biyi Bándélé, Yoruba Boy Running
(Harper)
“Just when you think you know all the African slave heroes—those superhumans who were abducted and sold, only to rise above their condition and give back to the societies that sold or enslaved them—you meet Ajayi Crowther. Yoruba Boy Running, Biyi Bandele’s final gift to world literature, is as important and as riveting as it is generous, raising Ajayi Crowther to a place beside Equiano Olaudah, Fredrick Douglas and Phyllis Wheatley.”
–Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Vigdis Hjorth, If Only (trans. Charlotte Barslund)
(Verso)
“A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman’s life in Hjorth’s breathtaking latest….Hjorth’s narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush….Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she’s acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist’s self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It’s an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot.”
–Publishers Weekly
Corinna Chong, Bad Land
(Arsenal Pulp Press)
“Bad Land is a masterpiece about family, how it rips us apart and also tethers us forever, for better or worse. Chong shows how some loves are unequivocal and indelible, as though they are cast in stone. This novel is surprising at every turn—touching, unsparing, saturated with truth about love and abandonment. All those damaging, enduring human entanglements, old as the dinosaurs. Chong’s narrator, Regina, has the pull of a planet. I love every sentence here.”
–Lisa Moore
Sara Fitzgerald, The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T. S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime
(Rowman and Littlefield)
“Fitzgerald (Conquering Heroines) offers a heartbreaking biography of Emily Hale (1891–1969), T.S. Eliot’s secret love….Eliot comes across as by turns pitiful and detestable…and though Fitzgerald succeeds in reconstructing Hale’s career as an amateur actress and director, it’s the riveting, star-crossed love story that steals the show. This makes for a powerful complement to Anna Funder’s Wifedom.”
–Publishers Weekly
Stacy A. Cordery, Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire
(Viking)
“A lusciously long and lively biography follows beauty entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden’s creation of an upscale empire that evolved and gained in strength over the decades from the early twentieth century. Cordery, whose previous subjects include Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Juliette Gordon Low, keeps the emphasis on Arden the businessperson, noting year by year her innovations and new projects….[B]eguiling.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Laurent Bouzereau, The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens
(Running Press Adult)
“A singular voice in a generation of ‘Pure Cinema’ practitioners, De Palma remains more complex, personal, and deep a filmmaker than most. Laurent Bouzereau’s The De Palma Decade does a terrific job at parting the veil on one of De Palma’s most prodigious periods and witnessing the birth of an American auteur that managed to manipulate, enchant, and terrify audiences worldwide…an indispensable text for all those of us intent in deciphering the master.”
–Guillermo del Toro
Tomas Tranströmer, Bright Scythe: Selected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Patty Crane)
(Sarabande Books)
“Immediate, bodily…vivid…full of intent and personality. To my ear, Crane has so far made the best English version of Tranströmer….Tranströmer’s poetry is concerned with precisely how little we’re able to really see, yet how much that little is worth. His is a tense, taut music, easier to hear in Crane’s slightly relaxed interpretation.”
–The New York Times Book Review
Rigoberto González (editor), Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology
(Library of America)
“This vibrant collection brings together 253 poems by 186 Latino poets from the early seventeenth century through 2023, showcasing a dynamic poetic tradition that engages with social and political issues and personal experiences….The breadth of voices ensures a comprehensive look at the evolution of Latino poetry. Casual readers and scholars alike have much to gain.”
–Publishers Weekly
Hiromi Kawakami, Under the Eye of the Big Bird (trans. Asa Yoneda)
(Soft Skull)
“Speculative, artful….[It] sketches out the end of the world while simultaneously positing nearly unthinkable solutions and grappling with fundamental questions about identity, evolution, memory, and individualism….A wild take on humanity’s last stand and our flawed understanding of who we are.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Kevin Lambert, May Our Joy Endure (trans. Donald Winkler)
(Biblioasis)
“Baroque and philosophical, May Our Joy Endure captures the sensibilities and excesses of the elite. A novel about the housing crisis told from the perspective of those causing it….Lambert’s writing is lyrical and rapturous. In this book, he proves himself a satirical and whimsical Robespierre, hailing from small town Quebec.”
–Heather O’Neill
László Krasznahorkai, Herscht 07769 (trans. Otillie Mulzet)
(New Directions)
“Krasznahorkai’s latest postmodern experiment explores small-town discontents in post-unification eastern Germany. Brilliant, like all of Krasznahorkai’s books—and just as challenging, though well worth the effort required.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Jessica Anderson, Aline Batarseh, Yosra El Gazzar, Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation
(Haymarket)
“Deploying a unique combination of creative design, scholarly rigor, and unwavering moral commitment, Visualizing Palestine helps us glimpse the myriad cruelties and excruciating asymmetries of Israeli apartheid, colonization, and rapidly escalating violence against Palestinian people. This is political art and popular education at its most urgent and potent.”
–Naomi Klein
Porter Fox, Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans that Feed Them
(Little Brown)
“In order to learn about the superstorms that are reshaping everything we think we know about life on planet earth, Porter Fox turns to those who know the ocean best, the sailors and scientists who have spent most of their lives in conversation with sea. With muscular, captivating prose, he carries readers into the dead center of our ongoing planetary tumult, asking…what previously unimaginable worlds might these tempests make possible?”
–Elizabeth Rush
Tyler Mahan Coe, Wayne White (illustrator), Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette
(Simon & Schuster)
“[Tyler] is both a storyteller and a tenacious reporter, and he cuts through myth and hype in order to find truth and beauty and danger and other things that are at the heart of this music. He doesn’t glad-hand or favor trade. He’s after the real deal and won’t stop until he lands on it, until he conveys it to all of us in ways that haven’t been approached in the past. His show’s enormous success is proof that country music’s characters and history have relevance today.”
–Kyle Young
Alice Driver, Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
(Atria / One Signal Publishers)
“A freelance journalist uncovers the inhumane conditions plaguing the Tyson Foods meatpacking plants in Arkansas. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Driver, author of More or Less Dead…began interviewing poultry workers at Tyson plants across the state…a vital work of journalism. An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Melissa Deckman, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy
(Columbia University Press)
“Deckman shows how Gen Z is already—and will continue—shaping the future of our democracy. Pairing original survey data and rich interviews with Gen Z activists, Deckman’s intersectional analyses complicate conventional narratives and demand that we take Gen Z women and queer Gen Zers seriously as agents of political change…innovative and ultimately optimistic…a must-read for scholars, students, practitioners, and the public alike.”
–Kelly Dittmar
Richard Beck, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life
(Crown Publishing Group)
“On 9/11 the United States lost its mind, succumbing to a protracted bout of hubris, ineptitude, and heedless violence. Today Americans are inclined to expunge from memory the disasters that ensued. Richard Beck refuses to forget. In this eloquent and insightful account, he tallies up the perverse consequences of our own folly. An extraordinary achievement.”
–Andrew Bacevich
Robert Hutton, The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler
(Pegasus Books)
“Hutton has revealed the brilliance of the ‘master of deception,’ Dudley Clarke. It took a true creative eccentric like Clarke to become the brains behind the success of the SAS and commandos in North Africa. Meticulously researched, The Illusionist is simply superb.”
–Helen Fry
