As the end of January creeps nearer and—depending where you are—the weeks of wintry weather may be keeping you in, you may be finding yourself in search of something bright, warm, and charming to peer at. A well-lit fireplace, perhaps, or the ineffable swirls of steam from a cup as hot water alchemizes into air. No matter your preferences, you’ll find it better with a book by your side, and what better than something brand-new, its contours unknown, its memories with you yet to be made. Below, you’ll find a whopping twenty-six new ones out today to consider.
There’s a poignant novel from acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar, Calvino-esque literary fables from C.D. Rose, an expansive Jamaican-Canadian queer debut novel from Christina Cooke; a collection of poems by Keith Taylor that breathe life into the everyday; powerful reflections on the Holocaust, including a never-before-published firsthand account from survivor József Debreczeni and a critique of historical shortsightedness about the Holocaust’s atrocities in a provocative new book by Dan Stone; a new biography of the revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon; a blunt revelation of racism in the medical field; Crystal Hefner’s memoir of escaping from the shadow of Playboy; and much, much more.
No matter what you’re in the mood for, I hope you’ll find somewhere warm and cozy to curl up with one of these. It’ll be worth it.
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Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
(Knopf)
“Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. Martyr! is the best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives—like grace—when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair.”
–Lauren Groff
Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed
(Other Press)
“Christiansë’s novel isn’t just a stunningly intimate, heart-wrenching history of slave life in Africa. Her protagonist’s furious yearning for freedom (‘Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go’) becomes a haunting meditation on love, loss and the stories we choose to tell in order to survive. Gorgeous and tragic, Unconfessed ultimately reveals a confession almost too terrible to bear and impossible to forget.”
–People
C.D. Rose, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
(Melville House)
“A book [of literary fables] that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson.”
–The Washington Post
Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
(FSG)
“[A] perceptive biography….Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon’s thinking…the nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon’s life fit together….Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon’s two masterworks….A striking appraisal of a towering thinker.”
–Publishers Weekly
Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story
(Mariner)
“A holocaust history for our times, passionate as well as scholarly, and written with a sharp eye to the growing threat of the radical right in the present. Stone is not afraid to question the verities that have become attached to this most catastrophic epoch of modern history, and he challenges readers to confront its scope and enormity anew.”
–Jane Caplan
József Debreczeni, Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (trans. Paul Olchváry)
(St. Martin’s Press)
“Devastating in the simplicity of its language, Debreczeni’s book is of immense eyewitness historical value and one of the greatest pieces of lost Holocaust literature from behind the newly descending Iron Curtain.”
–Stephen L. Ossad
Keith Taylor, All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977 – 2017
(Dzanc Books)
“Publication of Keith Taylor’s All the Time You Want is an important event. Everyone who has been listening for years to this essential poetic voice has reason to rejoice anew. Taylor’s arguments in favor of the ordinary communal life…introduce us to a deep and quiet understanding of how life works….And in his poems about the natural world, he has created a space one enters gladl….Reading this book is like opening a door outward into a realm whose refreshment we find we are badly in need of.”
–Richard Tillinghast
Alexander Sammartino, Last Acts
(Scribner)
“What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn’t stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere, Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage—that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards, has found a worthy heir.”
–George Saunders
Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy
(Catapult)
“After her younger brother dies of sickle cell anemia, Akúa returns home to her native Jamaica with his ashes in hopes of reconnecting with their estranged older sister, discovering both love and violence along the way. Christina Cooke’s Broughtupsy is a searing, touching, and often funny meditation on family fault lines drawn by migration, homophobia, cultural difference, and sibling order, from a talented new writer among us.”
–Emily Raboteau
Laurie Frankel, Family Family
(Holt)
“Frankel’s back! Without giving away too much of her dizzying plot, which is supercharged with cliffhanger chapter endings and parallel reveals, the novel is dedicated to the premise that not every adoption story is one of trauma—along the way we will enjoy many fine young characters (Kevin Wilson fans who haven’t yet tried Frankel should) and classic Frankelisms….Full of warmth, humor, and sound advice.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Lee Gutkind, The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction
(Yale University Press)
“he Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting offers an insightful overview of the recent history of creative nonfiction and the struggles that early practitioners faced in legitimizing the genre. This is a must-read for all writers.”
–Jennifer Anderson
Jacqueline Alnes, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour
(Melville House)
“Like an episode of Maintenance Phase meets the essay collection The Empathy Exams, The Fruit Cure brings both rigorous reporting and fearless self-examination to bear on questions far beyond health, athletics, wellness, and food. What Alnes is interested in here is nothing less than the mysterious relationship between our thinking minds and our physical selves and the essential joyful horror that is having a human body.”
–Emma Copley Eisenberg
Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In
(St. Martin’s Press)
“A perceptive personal meditation on the late 1990s and early 2000s pop culture that shaped her childhood….Kennedy provides memoir by way of cultural commentary, cleverly using her hybrid approach to highlight the ways in which trends and media popular during one’s formative years profoundly influence one’s identity. Told with wit and candor, this will strike a chord with Gen Yers.”
–Publishers Weekly
Balsam Karam, The Singularity
(Feminist Press)
“The Singularity by Balsam Karam is a novel about loss and longing–a mother who misses her child, children who miss their mother, and all of those who miss their country as they try to feel the new earth in their new land. A deeply moving work of fiction from a true voice of Scandinavia.”
–Shahrnush Parsipur,
Daisy Goodwin, Diva
(St. Martin’s Press)
“Daisy Goodwin’s richly imagined world makes Diva an irresistible page-turner. Blending high drama with an artist’s eye for detail, Goodwin breathes life into [Maria Callas,] one of the greatest and most tragic stars of the twentieth century. Whether you’re an opera aficionado or simply love an epic tale of love and ambition, Diva is a pure delight.”
–Amanda Foreman
Crystal Hefner, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself
(Grand Central Publishing)
“[Hefner’s] frank memoir scratches some of the glitter off Playboy’s notorious legacy of sexual freedom, luxury, and excess. An illuminating tell-all.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Zachary Pace, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am
(Two Dollar Radio)
“Zachary Pace’s I Sing to Use the Waiting is an exhilarating mix, part memoir, part examination of queer identity, part investigation into corporate heteronormativity and the internalized homophobia it produces in children and others who are still growing into who they are–and so much more, all of it approached via the lenses of the singers (and their lives) whom Pace encountered at pivotal moments in their own growing up….[A] beautifully provocative, smart, and tender book indeed.”
–Carl Phillips
Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
(Scribner)
“Fluke is the intellectual equivalent of a slap across the face….Klaas’s beautifully written application of chaos theory to human experience won’t just shift your paradigm, it’ll detonate it.”
–Jonathan Gottschall
Benjamin Herold, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
(Penguin Press)
“Disillusioned breaks open the quiet racial injustice eating away at the heart of American suburbs. Shattering the myth of upward class mobility through meritocracy, Disillusioned shows us how white supremacy disenfranchises POCs even as they fulfill the requirements of the American suburban middle class dream—and how even…the intended beneficiaries of that dream…are starting to wonder if it’s a dream they can still afford to believe in. A necessary read for everyone in an American suburb today.”
–Michael Eric Dyson
Brian Allen Carter, Bad Foundations
(Clash Books)
“Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr is a raw and ferocious journey into the heart of the working class. It bleeds desperation and devours hope. Brian Carr is a blue-collar Raymond Carver, a Midwest Philip Roth who opens the pulsating wound that is the myth of the American Dream.”
–S. A. Cosby
Tanja Maljartschuk, Forgottenness (trans. Zenia Tompkins)
(Liveright)
“It’s no coincidence that time and memory are the big topic today, feeding off the anxieties of the world. [The Ukrainian writer] Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel is about the giant blue whale of time swallowing everything living on its way. What she is interested in is not even disappearance but tracelessness. Both personal and political, this book rages against time and oblivion as all true literature does.”
–Georgi Gospodinov
Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
(Legacy Lit)
“Antonia Hylton expertly weaves together a moving personal narrative, in-depth reporting, and illuminating archival research to produce a book that left me breathless. Madness is a haunting and revelatory examination of the way that America’s history of racism is deeply entangled in our mental health system. A profoundly important book that helps us make sense of an underexamined aspect of our country’s history.”
–Clint Smith
Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine
(Viking)
“Uché Blackstock has made something abundantly clear: If you want to understand a society, look at its hospitals. Dr. Blackstock, one of the most insightful and impactful public voices in medicine, shares her remarkable personal story and her profound insight regarding race, gender, and health inequality….However, this book is so much more than a compelling memoir….Armed with concrete steps for addressing inequality, readers will be inspired to become better stewards of our communities and society.”
–Imani Perry
Jenn M. Jackson, Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
(Random House)
“In their enlightening new book, Black Women Taught Us, Jenn M. Jackson celebrates the iconic Black feminists who built a movement, and also shares their own personal story of growing and learning with these brilliant canonical thinkers. It is intimate and essential reading, a beautiful bridge connecting ancestral and contemporary Black women activists.”
–Deesha Philyaw
David Reynolds, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him
(Basic Books)
“Who inspired Churchill as he rose to the pinnacle of power? And how did he himself seek to mold how history would view him? No one is better placed to address these deceptively simple questions than David Reynolds, and he succeeds splendidly in this magnificent book. A fresh and captivating study of the nature and crux of political leadership.”
–Fredrik Logevall
Simon Shuster, The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
(William Morrow)
“Shuster’s book is a narrative tour de force that takes us deep behind the scenes of the Ukrainian president’s bunker during the tensest days of Russia’s war against Ukraine. An astonishingly intimate portrayal of the former comedian turned wartime leader battling to save his nation–and Europe–that nevertheless keeps a doggedly honest and critical balance. This is the Zelensky book we’ve been waiting for.”
–Catherine Belton
