Fall books preview: the best American writing from Chabon to Safran Foer
After a lackluster start to the year, the autumn brings fiction from returning big names and non-fiction that takes on everything from education to segregation
Intimations Alexandra Kleeman
Last years You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine established Kleeman as a millennial novelist to watch and earned her comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. Shes a patient, lyrical chronicler of young urban people and this new collection of 12 short stories sees her take on all stages of human life in her unique style.
Commonwealth Ann Patchett
Patchett, best known as the writer of Bel Canto, has not published a novel since 2011s State of Wonder. Commonwealth is another of her multilayered narratives, which follows two families over the course of a few decades that are united by a single moment of infidelity.
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Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids Nicholson Baker
Baker is the sort of writer who can make the preparation of a bowl of Cheerios an intricate and fascinating enterprise. Generally he works in fiction, but Substitute is a memoir of his month spent teaching kids in Maine as a substitute in elementary and high schools. This is not investigative journalism per se, but Baker delivers an analysis of American schools that is entirely his own.
Here I Am Jonathan Safran Foer
The author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close delivers a doorstopper of a third novel that catches a Jewish American family in a moment of personal and geopolitical, crisis. It reportedly took him 10 years to write and moves between action in Israel and the US as the personal and political collide.
Moonglow Michael Chabon
Allegedly based on a story Chabons own grandfather told on his deathbed, Moonglow begins with Alger Hiss in the aftermath of the Red Scare and takes us through his grandfathers life right back to his death. It is told as a kind of fictionalized speculative memoir, with the main character referred to by the narrator as simply my grandfather.
Darling Days iO Tillett Wright
Currently a co-host of MTVs Suspect, Wright rose to prominence writing a column for the New York Timess T Magazine online. Wright prefers to eschew the gender binary, using male pronouns where necessary but otherwise subscribing to no gender. Darling Days is his first book, chronicling Wrights life among downtown artists and misfits.
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America Patrick Phillips
In 1912 a girl was murdered in Forsyth, Georgia. Three black men were accused of the crime, though they did not stand any sort of fair trial: all three were dead within a day. The looting and burning of black homes and farms that followed was, in effect, a racial cleansing. Phillips traces the history of the event in vivid detail.
Nicotine Nell Zink
Zink lives in Europe, but this new book is set in New Jersey. Again Zinks ferocious intelligence and sense of humor are on display here, setting smart but professionally and personally unsatisfied Penny Baker on a collision course with the squatters who live on a property shes inherited. They are the ones who christen the property Nicotine.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Ruth Franklin
Once considered just another horror writer, Jacksons reputation as a novelist in America has been uneven. In a new biography, Franklin traces Jacksons loneliness and marginalization as a woman married to a fierce critic Stanley Edgar Hyman who was as much a hindrance to her work as he was a support.
The Red Car Marcy Dermansky
Its difficult to classify Dermanskys work. The elements of the plot always suggest a thriller, but as in her celebrated last outing Bad Marie Dermansky wants to unsettle rather than horrify you. In The Red Car, a young woman in Queens receives the titular vehicle as her inheritance from an old boss and has to set off on a trip to San Francisco to recover it.
The Angel of History Rabih Alameddine
Alameddines follow-up to An Unnecessary Woman follows Jacob, a gay Yemeni American poet who lost a lover and many friends during the Aids crisis and who was brought up in a Cairo brothel. The action is set in a hospital waiting room and theres a purgatorial element at play as Satan and Death appear before him to rake over his life.
Today Will Be Different Maria Semple
Semples Whered You Go, Bernadette, was a breakout hit of 2013: funny, fresh and unpretentious, even though its main character was a very precocious young girl. Today Will Be Different is a bit different. Middle-aged Eleanor is looking to change her life in Amazon-drone-dwelling Seattle, with most of the action taking place over the course of one day, but theres a graphic novel inserted into the book.
The Mothers Brit Bennett
Bennetts debut starts with an abortion, then weaves from that premise the fates of three friends in southern California. Narrated in part by a chorus of Mothers, the book is written in arrestingly direct and clean prose. This is Bennetts first novel, though she is also known for her online essays.
A Gamblers Anatomy Jonathan Lethem
The game in question in Jonathan Lethems 10th novel is backgammon. Bruno Alexander is a world-class player who travels around winning money off marks, but hes also suffering from a brain tumor, oh, and hes telepathic. Alongside Zink, Lethems the best absurdist working in American writing right now and this book promises to be a customary wild ride.
My Own Words Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The memoir of the supreme court justice who became an unlikely meme in the last three years perhaps needs no recommendation. But those curious about how a young woman from Brooklyn made her way past innumerable sexist naysayers are in for a treat. Much recommended as a Christmas gift for smart, ambitious nieces. And nephews, too.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/01/fall-books-jonathan-safran-foer-michael-chabon