'Review/Preview': Fall Books

Arianna Rebolini, Former Buzzfeed Book Editor and now publisher of her own newsletter, "Reading Habits,” joins to share some of the fall book releases she’s looking forward to in our latest installment of “Review/Preview.” Arianna's Recs: THE PERISHING by Natashia Deon (fantasy/historical fic) — Deon is a practicing criminal attorney and somehow has also managed to write two phenomenal novels. This one is hard to summarize neatly but it's essentially about a Black woman in 1930s LA who realizes she's immortal when she starts receiving "memories" from different time periods—past and future—and meets a man she's certain she's connected to. It grabs you right away, maybe the best opening chapter I've read all year, and that energy never falters. NEW YORK, MY VILLAGE by Uwem Akpan (lit fic) — I tend to think the publishing world overestimates readers' interest in books about publishing, but Akpan's debut novel—about Ekong, a Nigerian editor doing a fellowship with a small press in NYC—is such a fresh take, a really sharp skewering of this self-serious, highly competitive world (in publishing but also, broadly, in NYC) and is especially good at calling out the racism that comes from people who are certain they aren't racist. It's also really enlightening about Nigerian history—Ekong is in the US working on an anthology about the Biafran War and Akpan weaves in a lot of that historical context, so I personally ended up really learning a lot about something I had no awareness of.  THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE by Richard Osman (mystery) — This is the second book in Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, and it's really just a classic, very charming, very fun whodunnit. The Thursday Murder Club is a group of friends in their 70s who live in a retirement community and meet weekly to discuss cold cases—and then, of course, happen to solve one of them. In this sequel, the foursome get wrapped up in a multi-million dollar diamond robbery gone wrong and find themselves in a get-the-killer-before-he-gets-you situation. BEWILDERMENT by Richard Powers  (lit fic/cli-fi) — Powers is such a beautiful writer whose love of the natural world comes through so powerfully in his work—in this one, a widowed astrobiologist (Theo) is trying to help his 9-year-old son, Robin, deal with the trauma of his mother's sudden death, while also managing his intense anxiety about the destruction of the planet and behavioral problems that keep getting him in trouble at school. Their relationship is really moving, and it cuts to the core of the climate crisis—what life/world are leaving for our children? FUZZ: WHEN NATURE BREAKS THE LAW by Mary Roach (nature/nonfic) — Another nature book, this one from the incredibly entertaining science writer Mary Roach. FUZZ gets into the ways humanity clashes with animals and the (ridiculous!) ways we try to maintain control, try to pretend we can force the natural world to live by our arbitrary laws. Roach is the best at taking something that could be dry and making it impossible to put down.  1000 YEARS OF JOYS AND SORROW by Ai Weiwei (memoir) — This one's a memoir but is as much about Weiwei's father —one of China's most prestigious poets! I had no idea!—as it is about Weiwei himself. Talking about his own artistic development, his ability to leave China and pursue those dreams in the US after his father, exiled to working camps after the Cultural Revolution, had his creative life cut short, Weiwei makes clear how and why art and politics are inextricable.  THE SENTENCE by Louise Erdrich (lit fic/magical realism) — Anything Erdrich does is gold, imo. This one is a little meta (it's about a group of indigenous booksellers in a Minneapolis bookstore called Birchbark Books, i.e. Erdrich's Minneapolis bookstore) and a little wacky (an annoying customer who dies on All Souls' Day 2019 and then spends the next year haunting Birchbark Books) but it's the perfect blend of funny and heavy. That year is, of course, a tumultuous year in Minneapolis, and watching these characters deal with the literal haunting alongside metaphorical hauntings (generational trauma, police brutality, systemic racism) is illuminating.