MOST ANTICIPATED

SEP.

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery (9/6) The if here is a harrowing conditional as crises fiscal, economic, personal, and meteorological assail a Jamaican family upon their arrival in America. Escoffery illuminates the ties that bind its strivers through pain, reckoning, arboricide, and maybe even redemption. Sacrificio, by Ernesto Mestre-Reed (9/6) Following his boyfriend’s death from HIV, Rafa has to make sense of the secrets his lover left behind in Cuba; he puts his grief to work as he grapples with the counterrevolutionary deeds of the deceased and the death-dealing of the state that looms over them all. The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell (9/6) For her latest journey back to the 16th century, O’Farrell takes inspiration from a source any English major should recognize—Robert Browning’s 1842 poem “My Last Duchess”— and explores the life and mysterious death of Lucrezia de’ Medici, who was married off to a duke at 15. Toggling between Lucrezia’s lavish upbringing and the crumbling of her union, O’Farrell knows how to take the most sumptuous liberties with history. On the Rooftop, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (9/6) Louisiana-bred matriarch and widow Vivian, having settled in San Francisco during the Great Migration, molds her daughters into a dynamic musical trio called the Salvations. But resisting Vivian’s unrelenting instruction and the powerful siren song of Negro exceptionalism, her daughters reimagine the biblical epigraph that a parent trains up her children in the way they should go. Strangers to Ourselves, by Rachel Aviv (9/13) Strangers to Ourselves plaits personal narrative—it opens with the author being hospitalized at 6 for anorexia—with stories of others who run up against the limits of psychiatry. For her much-anticipated debut, Aviv writes about people who occupy the “psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail.” Her language assuredly does not fail. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton (9/13) Beaton’s memoir covers the period when she left Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton at 21 for an oil boom spurting a wealth of high-paying jobs. As she settles into daily life in a tool shop, she begins to understand how that transience changes people—as well as her own complicity in the wholesale destruction of Indigenous land. Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma (9/13) This collection of short stories travels through a series of magically realistic, gently dystopian environments. A wealthy couple’s L.A. mansion has a ramshackle side wing for the narrator’s 100 ex-boyfriends; two former roommates on a night out in New York take G, a drug that turns you invisible and incorporeal. Ma creates here a composite portrait of alienation in fading worlds. Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré (9/20) At the start of her second memoir (translated from the French by Holly James), Debré is dating two women and living what she calls a monkish life apart from her newly ex-husband. When he curdles her queerness into an accusation of pedophilia, she loses her right to see her son. The plot of her life illustrates what she calls “the absurdity that comes with being a woman, the obscenity that comes with being a mother.” On the Inconvenience of Other People, by Lauren Berlant (9/23) The first installment of a planned trilogy, this is a work of and about the congested tableau of everyday life. To read Berlant is always to be provoked, unsettled, pried loose from what they memorably lanced as “comb-over” thinking. Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu (9/27) Early in his UC Berkeley days, Hsu develops a fast, profound friendship with a frat boy named Ken. But when Ken is killed in a carjacking just a few years later, Hsu can only fully reckon with the tragedy in the way he best knows how— by writing. Twentytwo years in the making, Stay True evocatively probes how much one human can truly impact another. I Fear My Pain Interests You, by Stephanie LaCava (9/27) In I Fear My Pain Interests You, Margot, the daughter of musicians, takes leave of New York City to search for a better future in the Pacific Northwest while fleeing her past. It’s in her new environs where she encounters a doctor, some film reels, and the truth behind her family’s secrets. Let yourself be lured into LaCava’s stylized settings, her exploration of 1960s cinema, and her bodily absurdities. The Furrows: An Elegy, by Namwali Serpell (9/27) Serpell’s second novel follows 12-year-old Cassandra, whose 7-year-old brother goes missing and whose mother refuses to give up hope while his body goes unrecovered; the ensuing turmoil is a gorgeous, surreal meditation on identity and mourning, one that squeezes the heartstrings and rarely relaxes its grip. Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie (9/27) Decades after they met in 1988 Karachi, two friends, now in their 40s, are living distinct new London lives on the other side of Pakistan’s turbulent 1990s: one the director of a civilrights organization, the other a VC titan. Shamsie moves among seasons, locales, and perspectives with liquid ease, keeping us in suspense until the very last page, pondering whether the bonds of this friendship can

withstand the slowmotion detonation of childhood secrets.

OCT.

Confidence Man, by Maggie Haberman (10/4) The New York Times White House correspondent is well known for her coverage of Donald Trump, which has both produced significant MAGA-era news stories and generated criticism from those who believe Haberman has prioritized access to Trump over journalistic rigor. Confidence Man, Haberman’s portrait of Trump and the path he traveled to the White House, will not want for attention upon its release—a month before the 2022 midterm elections.

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng (10/4) Ng goes fully dystopian: Her postrecession America has passed Chinascapegoating laws banning books and increasing surveillance. Bird, 12, whose Chinese American mother was one of a “dangerous” group of “dissidents,” gives the novel an almost folkloric quality, complete with a cryptic call to adventure, an underground network of coded messages, and the aid of a mysterious duchess.

Scenes of Subjection, by Saidiya Hartman (10/11) In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman argues that subjugation of the enslaved not only took many forms—from physical violence to other, more covert means of discipline and punishment like forced frivolity and imagined “bonds of affection” between enslavers and the enslaved—but that it continued to constrain what was possible for Black people even after emancipation. With a new introduction from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery’s ever-running machinations.

The Consequences, by Manuel Muñoz (10/18) In Muñoz’s new collection of short stories, his day laborers, teachers, and teenage mothers navigate love’s difficulties among the mundane frustrations of everyday living in which poverty, alienation, or death are less plot elements and more a baseline of suffering with which they must contend. They’re burdened with pasts for which they don’t make excuses yet seem unable to escape.

Come Back in September, by Darryl Pinckney (10/25) When Columbia undergrad Pinckney haphazardly (but successfully) enrolled in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creativewriting course across the street at Barnard, he kicked off a decades-long mentorship and friendship. Come for the intimate portrait of a crossgenerational bond forged through the excitement of 1970s literary New York and the upheaval of the AIDS crisis; stay for the compelling (and, at times, scandalous) rendering of a cultural milieu that simultaneously feels bygone and spectacularly familiar.

NOV.

My Pinup, by Hilton Als (11/1) Originally published as an essay in Harper’s, My Pinup is smart, sensual writing on a life of loving Prince and on the life of Prince himself. Als’s Prince is a clear Black queer vixen; an idol whose lyrics and performance provide instructions for living—he also serves as the frame, filter, and soundtrack for Als’s navigations of romance and heartbreak. This paean, an art object reminiscent of a chapbook or a novella, goes down like a tiny fruit tart made from a keenly demarcated recipe: complex, ambrosial, and brief. For a moment, you want more, but you’ve already been given enough. Fire and elegance abound in these intimate pages.

Offended Sensibilities, by Alisa Ganieva (11/8) In Ganieva’s latest book (translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio), set after Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance inside a Moscow cathedral that led to the members’ arrest and to Russia’s enacting a law that banned blasphemy or anything that overtly aims to offend religious sensibilities, a series of Russian officials begin dying mysteriously. Her earlier books, said to be the first Dagestani novels published in English, offer insight into the intersection of Moscow’s authoritarian politics and Russia’s Islamic separatist movements. Offended Sensibilities addresses the same crux— through political noir.

Personality and Power, by Ian Kershaw (11/15) British historian Kershaw, an expert on Hitler and Nazi Germany, brings a dozen of the 20th century’s most powerful and notorious European leaders together in his new book to explore how much any individual might single-handedly change the course of history. With the recent rebirth of the so-called charismatic leader in figures like Trump, Putin, Xi, and Erdogan, Kershaw’s inquiry into the political climbs of big personalities—and the impositions of their wills—could be instructive in what to expect from the “strong leaders” of today.

DEC.

The Passenger and Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy (12/6) The grim soothsayer of the absurd is back with his first novels in nearly 20 years. The Passenger tells the story of New Orleans salvage diver Bobby Western, whose investigation of a private plane crash in the Gulf immediately suggests foul play. Stella Maris, acting as a coda, revisits Western’s schizophrenic sister, Alicia, whose death by suicide opens the book. Death and God, McCarthy’s irreconcilable twin obsessions, haunt both siblings. With his combination of terse, flinty storytelling and elaborately ornate prose (returning loyalists will immediately recognize and delight at words like ectromelic, mothgnawn, and atavism in the prologue alone), McCarthy resumes his rightful place as contemporary fiction’s weatherbeaten prophet of the apocalypse.