It feels like every single leaf there is to drop in DC has dropped, now gracing the sidewalks with an array of yellow and red and brown. My walk at work today was much chillier than normal, so now it’s the best time of the year to put together a fall reading list for yourself or get a gift for someone with the holiday season. If you’re like me and enjoy leaving a candle on for hours at night while you’re reading (you’re not supposed to, I know), here’s some advice—the $10 ones at Target last a while and are just as good as any others, with perhaps a broader flavor range. Down with exorbitantly priced boutique candles!
Dear Thorns, Karen Olsson (November 3)
Lora, a wildlife specialist in Texas who extensively studies the ocelot, has managed to separate the personal from the professional well enough until a much younger intern, Ben, arrives and stirs up her past memories and relationships.
I Regret I Am Able to Attend: A Life Among Artists, Jessica Craig-Martin (Nov 10)
New Yorker photographer Jessica Craig-Martin’s memoir, a dishy coming-of-age story in the glamor of 70s and 80s New York, is a wild and snappy adventure for the nostalgia fanatics.
Roadshow, Nikki Ervice (Nov 10)
In this strikingly affecting debut, a New York-based burlesque performer—“Dog-Faced Girl” pays the rent, after all—learns of her mother’s cancer diagnosis and travels by car up to Alaska in the face of her imminent death.
The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm, Eve Sneider (Nov 10)
Eve Sneider reveals some of the mythos behind the famously austere journalist and author Janet Malcolm’s nearly sixty-year career.
Humpty Dumpty, Harold Rogers (Nov 10)
In this bold and plucky debut, a small-town football hero’s life becomes unraveled as his mother and sister fly in and reveal the cracks in his story on the eve of his career-defining game.
The Key Biscayne Affair, Xita Rubert, translated by Julia Sanches (Nov 10)
I’m all for anything exploring the surreality of Florida, my home state, and Xita Rubert’s debut novel wherein a Spanish philosophy teacher relocates from Boston to the Sunshine State, only to become unsettled with the moral ambiguity of his new neighbors.
Universe of Grace, Rachel Calnek-Sugin (November 17)
For fans of Beautyland, Rachel Calnek-Sugin follows Grace, who at just six years old, is told she isn’t human by a jaguar at the Bronx Zoo. A mixed-race child whose mother fled Chinese political violence and father is the son of a Holocaust survivor, Grace spends the rest of her life trying to find out who or what she is.
Nanny Nanny, K Chiucarello (Nov 17)
In K Chiucarello’s debut novel, an unnamed narrator who provides childcare for the kids of wealthy writers starts to reflect on an abusive ex that put them in the hospital. Both a mesmerizing treatise on the labor of care plus a dissection of domestic violence.
Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: In Search of Kylie, Michael Cragg (Nov 17)
After her late-career comeback with “Padam Padam” and her biggest tour in years, the Australian pop icon’s thirty years of hit-making is documented by journalist Michael Cragg’s definitive story. As a Kylie superfan, I’m on the edge of my seat.
Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else, Patricia Nilsson (Nov 17)
This is one to read in public. “We live in a world where more people have access to free porn than to clean tap water,” Patricia Nilsson writes in her rollicking and necessary investigation into how porn has saturated into everyday life.
Fieldwork As a Sex Object, Meena Kandasamy (Nov 24)
A young accidental reality star’s life is upended when she finds a deepfake porno of herself, terrorizing her immediate family and leading her to be “digitally stoned by a militia of Hindu incels hell-bent on her annihilation” in this acclaimed novelist’s newest.
Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever, Ryan Schreiber (December 1)
As a reader and fan of the legend-making music site, this memoir from the founder, who established the publication at nineteen, is sure to fall on welcome ears.
The Ruiners, Ellena Savage (Dec 1)
Billed as a “sexy, cerebral eco-thriller,” a waitress comes upon a landfall of cash left by her late father, and with her scholar boyfriend purchases a fixer-upper on an island off the coast of Greece, only to become enmeshed in the struggles of global capitalism and environmental sustainability.
Wild Aster, Anna Hogeland (Dec 1)
In this sweeping historical novel, a young baby named Mae is stolen from her adoptive parents by her biological mother. Following her life, she remakes herself again and again as she reckons with her own past.
The Co-Creation: How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth, Olivia Judson (Dec 1)
As a fan of evolutionary psychology, I’m all for learning about how Earth created life and, vice versa—we apparently gave it back. How have we transformed the planet, and does it bode well for the future?
The Convert: Five Stories and a Novella, Tova Reich (Dec 22)
The legend of whip-smart and outrageous Jewish satire returns with her new collection full of an overbearing mother of a gifted child, Brooklyn-based Russian ex-pats, sons planning their mother’s demise, and… Josef Mengele, in Jerusalem, of all places. Reich is always ridiculous and always revolutionary.
