Daylight saving time is here, which means the sun is setting earlier, the weather is cooling, and you have an extra hour to enjoy some brand new books!
November is a treasure trove of discovery, full of genre-bending beauties, indie gems, and international delights. As we approach the holiday season, we encourage you to read widely and enjoy all that our book world has to offer readers!
Don’t Stop Snowing
By Gabriel Bump
Algonquin Books
I’ve been a big Gabriel Bump fan since his debut novel Everywhere You Don’t Belong, and I’m thrilled to say this may be his best novel yet. Don’t Stop Snowing is a tender and wry story about a young man who moves to Buffalo in hopes of finding a new, happier life. But he finds that healing is much less straightforward than he thinks, both for himself and his friends and neighbors, who are all suffering in their own ways. Like Saul Bellow or Stuart Dybek before him, Bump builds a realistically strange and utterly compelling world full of fragile, fractured love. Don’t Stop Snowing is a new height for an author who has already reached so many.
The Bewitched
By Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly
Translated by Raymond N MacKenzie
University of Minnesota Press
November brings us the new translation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly seminal work The Bewitched, which follows a young married woman who becomes infatuated with an enigmatic and disfigured priest. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s sharp interrogations of the politics of postrevolutionary France and the nature of obsession and passion continues to resonate today. What a joy it is to have this novel back in the hands of readers today.
Stations
By Louise Kennedy
Riverhead Books
Set in 1980s Ireland, Róisín and Red bond as the only two precious and disaffected teenagers can. But when Róisín is confronted with unsettling family news, she moves in with Red and sets off on diverging paths that will change their lives forever. Louise Kennedy masterfully charts the complexities of youth and the pain of unrequited love in this compassionate and hopeful novel.
Run-On: Fragments on a Cold Morning
By Phillip Garland
Tortoise Books
If you love a novel that can capture the rawness of our quiet moments like me, you need to read Run-On: Fragments on a Cold Morning. Written in a stream of consciousness selections, Run-On is set in one night and morning in the life of a young father, exploring the angst and fears of the life he now nurtures. Through this disorientation and exhaustion comes a blisteringly beautiful and nearly surreal meditation on family, aging, and love. This is a masterwork from Phillip Garland.
How to Be Less Useful: The Joy of Inefficiency
By Priyanka Mattoo
Knopf
In our world of constant activity, productivity, and efficiency, Priyanka Mattoo argues for an alternative to our endless optimization that can lead us to a happier life. How to Be Less Useful is a treatise on our inefficient pleasures, those rare moments where we divorce ourselves from time and responsibilities to truly enjoy the company of ourselves and those we love. If you find yourself wondering why time continues to pass you by, this book is for you.
Notes on Postcards
By Jennifer Croft
Catapult
From International Book Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft comes a poetic ode to the postcards that have accompanied her throughout her life and the wanderlust that drives her. Full of whimsy and wit, Notes on Postcards weaves together her life story through these bite sized modes of communication to highlight how our ephemera can compose a portrait of ourselves and our desires.
The Lies We Tell for America
By Ber Anena
Flatiron Books
In 2019, Ugandan writer Ber Anena is delighted to learn that she’s been accepted into Columbia University’s MFA in Writing, only to discover that the program will cost approximately $150K in tuition and fees. As she scrambles to secure funding and eventually moves to the United States, she begins to rewrite the narrative of the American Dream she had once accepted. The Lies We Tell for America is both an intimate memoir and a grand revision of the immigrant narrative.
Losers
By Colin Pope
University of Wisconsin Press
Class consciousness is the current that runs through Colin Pope’s latest poetry collection. The poems in Losers feature dishwashers, delivery guys, paper boys, and other characters who are caught within their circumstances, which builds a portrait of postindustrial, rural America with compassion and dignity. We need more art that interrogates class and celebrates the working class, so we’re thrilled to see Losers make its way to bookshelves this November.
Radio Night
By Yuri Andrukhovych
Translated by Mark Andryczyk
New York Review Books
Music and fiction come together in this delightfully strange novel about a musician in pandemic-era Eastern Europe who is forced to flee from an oppressive regime and the mob when he is implicated in the death of the dictator of his country. Radio Night is a dark comedy crime novel that weaves together full radio DJ monologues and playlists, making for an action-packed thriller that highlights the urgency of Ukrainian literature today.
Tiger’s Mouth
By Lucy Tan
Ballantine Books
When Jack Chen begins to work alongside Jack Owens, the depressed son of his company’s billionaire founder, the immediate bond becomes complicated by the pressures of their upbringings and future ambitions. Tiger’s Mouth is a page-turner that calls you to slowly savor its rich characterization, as Lucy Tan carefully crafts this story of privilege and self determination.
Dams
By Irene Solà
Translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Graywolf Press
In this metafictional masterclass, Irene Solà brings to life a land haunted by ghosts of the Spanish Civil War and the stories that her narrator Ada writes. Dams is rich with lore and complicated by the layers of storytelling, creating a genre-defying story about memory and desire.
Gold Country
By Vanesha Pravin
Ohio State University Press
Gold Country offers readers a number of stunning vignettes of labor and life in today’s United States, including an undocumented worker who waits on a celebrity, an orderly who steals credit cards for a fix, and more. Together, Vanesha Pravin highlights the disparity between aspiration and reality in light of the American Dream. These poems are worlds of simmering righteous rage and prayers for a better world.
