Copyright Vulture
Photo-Illustration: Vulture Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here. Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. Cursed Daughters, by Oyinkan Braithwaite $25 $29 now 14% off $25 Braithwaite’s first novel, 2018’s thriller My Sister, the Serial Killer, was a breakout success. Cursed Daughters is more of an intergenerational saga, mixing comedy and tragedy in the way all families do. On the same day that Ebun’s beloved cousin Monife drowns, Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi. Could it be that the cousin is the infant reincarnated? The anxious family conviction that Eniiyi will live and die like Monife trails her throughout her life — as does the idea of a curse that makes it so all women in the Falodun family “will suffer for man’s sake.” Skeptical as any teenager, Eniiyi sets out to transcend it all. —Emma Alpern Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. Flat Earth, by Anika Jade Levy $24 $26 now 8% off $24 Energetic and episodic, Levy’s debut follows Avery, an aspiring writer who feels she’s coming up short compared to her filmmaker best friend, Frances. (The book shares a title with the film Frances is working on.) The novel is in many ways a string of dazzlingly deadpan and sharp observations about navigating the strange world of now, from predictive advertising to sugar babying to dead college friends. Avery possesses a “sense of reality becoming less legible and more apocalyptic” and decides to take a copywriting job at a right-wing dating app. (“My mother said that my aptitude for self-presentation suggested some sort of spiritual deficiency,” Avery, characteristically direct, quips.) Flat Earth is a delight. —Jasmine Vojdani Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories, by Salman Rushdie $25 $29 now 14% off $25 Old age, backward glances, and global and American politics are all represented in Rushdie’s five stories, his first fictions published after he was attacked in 2022. In “The Musician of Kahani,” he revisits the setting of Midnight’s Children many years later; the action starts around the year 2000, slipping into a magical-realist mode in its description of a child-prodigy pianist who “grows strikingly tall at an early age” as if her body knows she has to reach the pedals. “Oklahoma,” about a rivalrous pair of writers, is a dense, shuffling story with references to Kafka, Schiller, and Italo Calvino. All of them, in some way, ask the question of what it means to die. —E.A. Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. $25 When a well-intended mother flies unexpectedly to Tokyo to reconnect with her son, who moved there over a decade earlier, their estrangement becomes all the more apparent: The son spends days tutoring English and nights in gay bars while the mother slowly explores the neighborhood and mulls over his changes. (When did he become such a neat freak?) Washington’s reflection on the homes we leave and find patiently observes how kin can slowly find their way back to one another. —J.V. Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. In 1974, Nicholas, a near-anonymous young British man, is running from something when he meets the costume and set designer Danilo Donati on a street in Venice. The older man takes Nicholas under his wing — or is it Nicholas who is attaching himself to Danilo? Their relationship is both intrinsically unequal and romantic, one of many fraught attachments in Laing’s historical novel. Swept up in the cinema-making of Italy’s auteurs, Nicholas finds himself on the sets of Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a harrowing film about the death throes and reincarnations of fascism made just before the director’s murder. It’s a fragmented, unsettling vision of a moment not unlike our own. —E.A. Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. In this book-length work of hybrid nonfiction, Percy brings her unflinchingly compassionate gaze to trauma suffered by victims of sexual assault. She speaks with survivors, weaving a tapestry of experience — those psychological and physiological responses to attack that have stumped everyone from law enforcement officers to the survivors themselves, including freezing, agoraphobia, and non-epileptic seizures. Percy generously threads in her own memories throughout, from her singular upbringing surviving the Oregon wilderness to her own passivity in early sexual experiences with men. This is a groundbreaking and nuanced testimony. —J.V. Saved View Want to be emailed when products you’ve saved are over 20% off? Success! You'll get an email when something you've saved goes on sale. Yes New! You can now save this product for later. The first two installments of this Danish series introduced a Groundhog’s Day–like conceit: A woman wakes up on a random day again, and again, and again. More than a thousand November 18s in, Tara Selter, the protagonist of Balle’s literary fantasy, has at last found a few other people who are trapped in her late-autumn time loop. As her circle expands, so does the world of the book, though she’s still attached to her husband, Thomas, a normal time-dweller. Small as it is, Tara’s new society makes for a number of twists in Balle’s narrative puzzle. —E.A. 7 New Books You Should Read This November
