Our Most Anticipated Books of September 2023
"I did everything I could to avoid writing my historical novel,"Zadie Smith said in her recent New Yorker article. Thankfully for us readers, the ghost of Dickens won out and The Fraud was born.
A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.
“Utterly haunting and entirely riveting; The Witching Tide is an unflinching account of the horrors of witch trials, told in a mesmerizing voice from an extraordinarily talented author. It sent shivers down my spine and brought me to tears.” —Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne
Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001) was a Senegalese poet and philosopher who in 1960 also became the first president of the Republic of Senegal. In African Art as Philosophy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne uses a unique approach to reading Senghor’s influential works, taking as the starting point for his analysis Henri Bergson’s idea that in order to understand philosophers, one must find the initial intuition from which every aspect of their work develops. In the case of Senghor, Diagne argues that his primordial intuition is that African art is a philosophy.
The final collection from the late, great poet and Barnard professor Saskia Hamilton. Marked with a new openness and freedom—a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can’t be said—the poems give way to Hamilton’s mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: “the asphalt velvety in the rain.”
From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?
"Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s virtuosic, word-drunk sentences cast bridges across the abysses of history and the gaps between the stars. In Digging Stars, she chronicles a family’s fractures and a young woman’s determination to conquer the terrors of both outer and inner space. This is a brave and moving book." — Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman's annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.
Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.
An intimate, evocative history of drag in New York City exploring its dynamic role, from the Jazz Age to Drag Race, in queer liberation and urban life.
“A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.” —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half
A sprawling cacophony of voices come together in Danial Mason's ambitious new novel. North Woods is the story of one lonely cabin in the New England woods and the series of lovers, soldiers, sisters, animals, and all other manner of persons who inhabited it across the centuries.
Living legend Gay Talese revisits his pioneering career profiling the many “nobodies” who make New York so fascinating, culminating with the strange and riveting story of Dr. Nicholas Bartha, who blew up his Upper East Side brownstone—and himself—rather than give up his beloved patch of NYC real estate.
Sy Montgomery, noted science writer and author of such titles as How to Be a Good Creature and The Soul of an Octopus, returns with a good, hard look at... what else? Turtles. Turtles, which are not true reptiles, but actually something much more ancient, are some of the longest-lived vertebrates out there. Montgomery takes readers under the shell of turtle rescuers, aficionados and herpetologists to try and understand what makes these slow-moving critters so fascinating.
In his latest book, philosopher and Columbia professor David Z Albert argues that the distinctively strange features of quantum mechanics begin to make sense once we conceive of the wave function, vibrating and evolving in high-dimensional space, as the concrete, fundamental physical "stuff" of the universe. A major new work in the foundations of physics, A Guess at the Riddle is poised to transform our understanding of the basic architecture of the universe.
From the creation of the universe to 2023, David J. Helfand, former chair of the Astronomy Department at Columbia University, takes readers on a tour of time and demonstrates how the tiniest of particles--atoms--can unlock the answers to the biggest questions. Questions like: is this medieval manuscript real or a forgery? How old are the stars? What really killed the dinosaurs?
Our Lady of Ancient Epics returns. Emily Wilson's long-awaited translation of The Iliad brings her signature zest and liquidity to Homer's ancient classic. Hold on to your ankles, kids, it's gonna be a wild ride to Troy!
“With impeccable reporting, Adam Nagourney gives us intimate portraits of the men and women of The New York Times who reported upon and wrote the headlines of world happenings, and sometimes (to their embarrassment) made headlines themselves. In the style of a first-rate dramatist, he captures what happens behind the scenes in the newsroom, and in his long, wonderful book I did not find one page that failed to interest me.”—Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power
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