Our Most-Anticipated New Books for November 2023
“I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez’s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny — good and strong company.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Written like a crooked Métis jig, A Grandmother Begins the Story follows five generations of women and bison as they reach for the stories that could remake their worlds and rebuild their futures. This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters—including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land—heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction.
If you're gnawing at the bit to see Emerald Fennell's Saltburn, this one's for you. A modern look at class consciousness and country houses, The Manor House Governess is Jane Eyre with a genderfluid protagonist and an eye for details.
A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present—loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media.
When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of over a hundred children who are research subjects in an unprecedented thirty-year study of personality development that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in what she feels is an abusive marriage and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped her identity and life choices.
This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.
With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.
Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Columbia University Professor Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.
Attention Keegan-heads! This trio of stories from contemporary Irish superstar Claire Keegan is a showcase of her talent in the short form. Many people consider her stories perfect, but you don't have to take my word for it!
“Day is a portrait of the life of a family, preceding, during, and immediately after the pandemic, rendered in fragments, almost as if assembling forensic evidence, not of a crime but of quiet tragedies and quiet, heroic endurance. There’s deep recognition here, bordering on revelation.”
—Tony Kushner
In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
A delight! Alan Garner is a master of gentle whimsy. Luminous, evocative, and sparely told, Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth, folklore, and the stories we tell ourselves. Perfect for fans of Max Porter and Helen Oyeyemi.
Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar team up to tackle the slippery, esoteric idea of literary tone. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of "I know it when I see it." Samatar and Zambreno are here to pin it down or, at the very least, give us readers and scholars a framework with which to approach it.
A totally awesome anthology, co-edited by our patron saint of genre-defying, Carmen Maria Machado. Hear from contemporary writers like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Larissa Pham, Alexander Chee, Hanif Abdurraqib (and many more) on the games they play and how gaming fits into their lives. Sitting at the nexus of narrative, race, politics, and entertainment, video games and gaming culture are the well-deserved topic of meditation in essay form.
More than 40 percent of the world's estimated 7,100+ languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of this century. As with the decline of biodiversity, language loss has been attributed to environmental degradation, developmentalism, and the destruction of Indigenous communities. This book brings together leading experts and younger scholars across the humanities and social sciences to investigate what global language justice looks like in a time of climate crisis. Examining the worldwide loss of linguistic diversity, they develop a new conception of justice to safeguard marginalized languages.
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