September 25, 2020

Releases I'm Ready For, Fall 2020

One thing getting me through this year is good books, and the anticipation of more good books. I've been looking forward to reading these fall releases — and the wait is over for some of them, since the September books are already out.

TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM by Yaa Gyasi (September 1): Gyasi's debut, HOMEGOING, was an amazing epic covering centuries and generations of characters. Her new book is the much more intimate story of a family affected by addiction, mental illness, and loss, narrated by a scientist unsure how to square her work with her religious upbringing.

FIND LAYLA by Meg Elison (September 1): Back when I was enthusiastic about reading post-apocalyptic stories, I sank into Elison's THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE and the rest of the Road to Nowhere trilogy. FIND LAYLA is a refreshingly different genre of story, though still one with a character going through tough times, about a teen coping with family instability and online bullying.

TWELVE: POEMS INSPIRED BY THE BROTHERS GRIMM FAIRY TALE by Andrea Blythe (September 7): Andrea is a friend, but I don't think I'm being too biased in my enthusiasm for her writing. TWELVE is a small book of prose poems, beautifully produced by Interstellar Flight Press, that imagines what happens to The Twelve Dancing Princesses after the end of their fairy tale.

THE 99% INVISIBLE CITY: A FIELD GUIDE TO THE HIDDEN WORLD OF EVERYDAY DESIGN by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt (October 6): One of my favorite podcasts is 99% Invisible, which explores the design of objects, the built environment, and all kinds of topics we probably never even thought about. The book investigates the details of how cities work, and while I'm not sure if I'll read it straight through or dip in at random, I am excited to receive my copy.

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam (October 6): The interpersonal dynamics in Alam's THAT KIND OF MOTHER were so good that I'm not going to put off reading his new book, even though it involves some sort of potentially civilization-shattering disaster. Two families who don't know each other are forced together in a remote house while something horrible seems to be happening in New York City, and nobody is sure who or what to trust.

BLACK SUN by Rebecca Roanhorse (October 13): Roanhorse's work has received a lot of attention and awards, and I was intrigued by her new series after hearing her speak at WisCon's online convention. The Between Earth and Sky trilogy takes place in a fantasy world based on civilizations of the pre-Columbian Americas, and it promises celestial prophecies, power struggles, and great characters.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At BBC Culture, Hephzibah Anderson pages through the first drafts of classic novels: "The manuscripts of literary works-in-progress fascinate on many levels, from the flush-faced thrill of spying on something intensely private and the visceral delight of knowing that a legendary author's hand rested on the paper before you, to the light that such early drafts shed on authorial methodology and intent. Sometimes, the very essence of what a writer is trying to express seems to hover tantalisingly in the gap between a word deleted and another added in its place."

→ David Lerner Schwartz writes for Literary Hub about Percival Everett's new novel, TELEPHONE, published in three slightly different versions: "Books of course contain multitudes in that they contain characters who, like us, are contradictory, complex, and human in worlds so close to (or far from) our own. But here, depending on the version you've received, you're getting a slightly different Zach, a slightly different story. In one version he's perhaps more reticent, another more daydreaming, another more at odds, but these differences seem overall negligible. Across the versions, they average out to the same man, the same-ish experience. But to be wise to Telephone's instantiations is to believe that perhaps somewhere else things might work out differently."

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