From Ferrante to Woodward: a full fall season in books
NEW YORK ( AP) — The best news about the fall season in books is that there will be a fall season in books.
The coronavirus has shut down cineplexes, performance centers, museums and comedy clubs, but books can still be enjoyed at the scale and in the settings the creators intended. While most physical stores are offering just partial service and traditional author tours are on hold, publishing itself has so far avoided the catastrophic drops and disruptions that have left other industries wondering if they have a viable future.
“It’s been a relief, not just in a business sense but as a person, to know we’re still turning to the familiar act of reading,” says Reagan Arthur, executive vice president and publisher of Alfred A. Knopf.
“We’ve been lucky,” says Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper division at HarperCollins Publishing. “All in all, we’ve managed to keep our business going fairly well.”
If anything, there could be too much of a fall season, the traditional showcase for literary works. Books in an election year always struggle for attention, but this year the election has never been more consuming and the publishing schedule never more crowded.
Many releases were postponed from the spring and summer as the virus spread; Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt says the number of new books expected is up around 30 percent from the same time in 2019. Meanwhile, chronic shortages in printing capacity have led publishers to postpone some releases to 2021, among them Sasha Issenberg’s 900-page book on samesex marriage, “The Engagement.”
This fall is among the richest in memory for fiction, with Elena Ferrante, Marilynne Robinson, Phil Klay and Ngugi wa Thiong’o among many writers with books expected. Don DeLillo’s “The Silence” looks ahead to a shutdown and “mass insomnia” in 2022 brought on by a digital crash.
Sigrid Nunez’s first book since “The Friend,” winner of the National Book Award, looks back to a precarious, pre-pandemic world. Nunez began “What You Are Going Through” in 2017 and completed it last year, well before the virus spread. Like “The Friend,” it is a story of death and companionship, loneliness and obligation, what she calls in her book “Messy life. Unfair life. Life that must be dealt with.” Much of the book centers on the narrator’s conversations with a dying friend who has asked as a final wish that they vacation together in New England.