Gotham at War
by Mike Wallace
Wallace, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is back with another chronicle of New York City. This door stopper, the third in his Gotham series, covers the city’s struggles in the first half of the 20th century, and shows how the fight against American fascism rose from a local concern taken up by recent Italian and Jewish arrivals to a national campaign that helped propel the country into the global battle against the Nazis.
Oxford University Press, Oct. 1
Shadow Ticket
by Thomas Pynchon
“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.” So begins Pynchon in his first novel in a dozen years, grabbing you by the collar the way a mob enforcer might to refresh your memory. Remember his genre parodies, his outrageous names (howdy, Zoltán von Kiss), his ornate zingers, his lollygagging but frequently hilarious descriptions? It’s all here in this supercharged noir — a Chandleresque, Depression-era yarn involving a missing heiress and a disaster-prone private eye.
Penguin Press, Oct. 7
The Four Spent the Day Together
by Chris Kraus
The author of “I Love Dick” returns with a novel that merges autofiction and true crime, told in three parts. The first introduces us to Catt Greene, a girl growing up in working-class Connecticut in the 1970s. We then move on to her rocky marriage and her adult life as a writer. The final part recounts her obsession with a murder case involving three young people and someone they met online.
Scribner, Oct. 7
Near Flesh
by Katherine Dunn
The only story collection by the author of “Geek Love” has arrived, nearly a decade after her death. These 19 pieces — some lengthy, others just quick sketches — capture many of the curiosities, domestic anxieties and derangements that Dunn explored in her other work, often with pitch-black humor. Her characters stick with you: a woman who plans to have sex with robots, a troubled teenager who dreams of meeting aliens, a college student who has a thoroughly disappointing affair with an older poet. Prepare to be unsettled.
MCDxFSG, Oct. 7
Ginster
by Siegfried Kracauer; translated by Carl Skoggard
First published in 1928 and now being reissued, “Ginster” is the German antiwar novel you may not have heard of: a wry and darkly humorous counterpart to Erich Maria Remarque’s sobering mainstay “All Quiet on the Western Front,” whose release it preceded by a year. While its flailing, self-absorbed antihero remains far from the front, the book is no less pointed in its take on wartime hypocrisies and the misuse of power.
New York Review Books, Oct. 7
Gertrude Stein
by Francesca Wade
This new portrait of the life and legacy of the great literary modernist — a onetime medical student turned expat novelist, playwright, art collector, saloniste and confidante of Hemingway and Picasso — draws on previously unexamined archival material, emphasizing Stein’s talent for innovation and making the case that her greatest invention may have been herself.
Scribner, Oct. 7
The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus
by Matthew Restall
The celebrated historian Restall (“When Montezuma Met Cortés”) takes on Columbus’s ever-shifting legacy — from seafaring hero to colonialist villain to inept functionary and everything in between — and gets at the flesh-and-blood man behind the centuries of messaging.
Norton, Oct. 7
Burt, a notedprofessor of English at Harvard, drew headlines in 2023 when she first taught an undergraduate class that read Swift alongside Coleridge, Wordsworth and other poets. The book that spun out of the course is even more exhaustive; after all, Burt can now also consider “The Tortured Poets Department” and the Eras Tour in analyzing how the singer “depicts her need to be loved, alongside her ambition.”
Basic Books, Oct. 7
It Girl
by Marisa Meltzer
Was Jane Birkin more than a muse? Meltzer (“Glossy”) makes the case that the gimlet-eyed 1960s style star — an English rose whose youth-quake beauty and decade-plus romance with Serge Gainsbourg led to a long if mercurial career in music, acting and activism — deserve a closer and more generous look.
Atria, Oct. 7
Minor Black Figures
by Brandon Taylor
Taylor’s latest follows a Black painter in New York struggling with a creative block while also starting a new relationship with a former seminarian who abandoned the path to priesthood. Through this tale, the author explores the complexities and ethics of art, love, race, religion, ambition and more.
Riverhead, Oct. 14
The Wayfinder
by Adam Johnson
Guided by mysterious strangers, a girl ventures from her remote Polynesian island to save her people from doom. OK, it’s hard not to think of “Moana” at first — but the new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Orphan Master’s Son” unfolds into a powerful and original epic as the girl navigates an oceanic empire locked in a bitter power struggle. Deadly politics, tragic romance and dangerous sea journeys keep the drama at a spirited boil.
MCDxFSG, Oct. 14
Workhorse
by Caroline Palmer
It’s the early 2000s and Clo is a young assistant at an elite fashion magazine in New York City, where she considers herself the only “workhorse” among an office of “show horses”: rich, thin, pedigreed 20-somethings who seem to move effortlessly through a rarefied world in which Clo is desperate to claw her way up. This debut novel by the former editor of Vogue.com is a fast-paced and funny examination of ambition and its consequences.
Flatiron, Oct. 14
Joyride
by Susan Orlean
The New Yorker staff writer and author of “The Orchid Thief” looks back at her career — from the moxie that snagged her a first writing gig in 1978 to the plum place she occupied in the heyday of magazine journalism. Glimpses into her working methods abound, including a knack for finding great stories “hiding in plain sight.”
Avid Reader Press, Oct. 14
Vagabond
by Tim Curry
Come for “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (“I can’t imagine a better role to enable me to embrace my contradictions”) and stay for stories about the making of “Clue,” “Legend” and “Muppet Treasure Island.” But don’t expect much personal detail in this defiantly unsentimental memoir by the British actor, who began to look back after a debilitating stroke in 2012.
Grand Central, Oct. 14
Enshittification
by Cory Doctorow
Tired of staring at the screen as your blood pressure rises, but unable to look away? Doctorow, a prolific novelist and technology critic, coined the phrase that gives his book its title to describe how digital platforms inevitably become worse over time, yet harder to quit. While enumerating how we got here, his manifesto proposes solutions that go beyond pulling the plug (or pulling out your hair.)
Verso, Oct. 14
1929
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
For this novelistic account of the 1929 stock market crash, Sorkin — a New York Times reporter and the author of “Too Big to Fail,” about the 2008 crash — combed through newspapers, archives, memoirs and other sources, including never-before-seen minutes of meetings at the Federal Reserve. His tightly focused portrait of history’s most spectacular financial collapse highlights the often tragic miscalculations of the bankers and politicians who were swept up in it — a cautionary tale, the author suggests, for the present day.
Viking, Oct. 14
Unabridged
by Stefan Fatsis
For this spirited examination of the state of language, Fatsis embedded at Merriam-Webster, seeing firsthand how the vernacular sausage is made. Just who gets to decide when “doomscrolling” and “rizz” make the cultural cut, or how to treat questions of pronoun usage and politically fraught verbiage? The questions are thornier — and older — than you may have guessed.
Atlantic Monthly Press, Oct. 14
King Sorrow
by Joe Hill
Hill is back with a dark, bloody campus novel about Arthur, a college student who gets blackmailed into working for a dangerous drug dealer. Wanting out of the situation, Arthur uses a mystical book to summon a dragon to fight his foes. But this dragon is not a tool: It demands a sacrifice, or else.
William Morrow, Oct. 21
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
by Claire-Louise Bennett
The Irish author of “Checkout 19,” which was named one of The Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, returns with more elevated auto-fictional musings, written in her signature stream-of-consciousness style.
Riverhead, Oct. 21
The Ten Year Affair
by Erin Somers
Two young parents meet-cute at a Hudson Valley baby group. Unfortunately, they’re both married to other people. What comes next is not in fact a 10-year affair, but something trickier — a dual story line in which Somers explores ideas of monogamy, motherhood and modern living in the vein of Miranda July’s “All Fours” or Julia May Jonas’s “Vladimir.”
Simon & Schuster, Oct. 21
Girl Dinner
by Olivie Blake
An adjunct professor struggles to regain her mojo after having a baby; a sorority recruit wonders how to embody the radiant, high-achieving glow of her house sisters. Both find that the answer is … very high protein in the wicked new novel from the best-selling author of the Atlas fantasy series, who pivots here to exploring the outer reaches of modern do-it-all feminism. To say more would, well, spoil the meal.
Tor, Oct. 21
This Is the Only Kingdom
by Jaquira Díaz
“This Is the Only Kingdom” starts with a body, then works backward — a sprawling family tale that takes root with a teenage love story in a working-class barrio of 1970s Puerto Rico and carries through a murder investigation 15 years later. Exploring issues of race, sexuality and family legacy, Diaz imbues her debut novel with a kaleidoscopic sense of time and place.
Algonquin, Oct. 21
Finding My Way
by Malala Yousafzai
Like countless teenage girls before her, Yousafzai arrived at Oxford University eager to taste the heady freedoms of higher education: making out with boys, dancing all night, wearing skinny jeans. Unlike most of them, she had a Nobel Prize, ongoing death threats and a whole world watching (paparazzi shots of her in those skinny jeans landed in The Daily Mail). In dismantling a sainted image no actual human could live up to, the Pakistan-born laureate finds a dynamic and surprising new voice.
Atria, Oct. 21
Motherland
by Julia Ioffe
A Russian-born American journalist, Ioffe comes from a long line of women professionals, including three generations of doctors, born in the Soviet Union, where working women — along with no-fault divorce, paid maternity leave and child support — were long the norm. Weaving family history into the larger story of the country’s groundbreaking “attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person,” “Motherland” offers a fresh take on Russia’s turbulent 20th century and the shifting gender politics of its present.
Ecco, Oct. 21
Pride and Pleasure
by Amanda Vaill
The award-winning Vaill, who’s previously turned her biographer’s lens on Gerald and Sara Murphy and Jerome Robbins, dials back the clock to the colonial-era New York of the five wealthy Schuyler sisters. “Hamilton” may have brought attention to the elder sisters’ romantic rivalry, but theirs was also a much longer story of philanthropy, political engagement and a young country shifting beneath their feet.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 21