Fall Books

There are lots of great books coming this fall. Unfortunately, some of the best will be ignored by the prestige reviews and national papers.

July is almost over, so it’s a good time to look at fall books. Which ones look interesting? Which ones will be talked about even if they are terrible? Are there any hidden gems? Which ones am I most excited about?

Well, there is a bumper crop of literary biography this fall, along with some interesting collections of essays and letters.

We have Ray Bradbury’s Selected Correspondence (Simon & Schuster, November), for example, which contains “letters from his late teens to his ninth decade.”

Benjamin Taylor’s biography of Willa Cather will likely make a splash, and hopefully for the right reasons. It’s called Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather (Viking, November).  It’ll be interesting to see how it compares to Hermione Lee’s 2017 biography of Cather.

Helena Kelly’s The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens (Pegasus, November) could be either fascinating or terrible. From the jacket: “This dynamic new study of Charles Dickens will make readers re-examine his life and work in a completely different light. First, partly due to the massive digitalization of papers and letters in recent years, Helena Kelly has unearthed new material about Dickens that simply wasn’t available to his earlier biographers. Second, in an astonishing piece of archival detective work, she has traced and then joined the dots on revelatory new details about his mental and physical health that, as the reader will discover, had a strong bearing on both his writing and his life and eventual death.”

I don’t know what to make of Adam Sisman publishing a second biography of John le Carré. He published the first in 2015. This one, called The Secret Life of John le Carré (October, Harper), is being pitched as the book he “could not publish while le Carré was alive.” We’re told it will be full of salacious details. (Here’s a piece in The Guardian earlier this year reporting on it.) Will it? More importantly, will it have anything interesting to say that was not already said or suggested in the first biography? I suppose we’ll find out.

Sarah Ruden, whose excellent translation of the Aeneid was published in 2008, has a biography of Vergil set to appear in August from Yale. From the jacket: “Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct his life. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil’s work, she brings to life a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable, even at great personal cost.”

I am much looking forward to David Yezzi’s biography of Anthony Hecht, Late Romance: Anthony Hecht―A Poet’s Life (St. Martin’s, November). As you may know, Yezzi was the executive editor at The New Criterion for many years before accepting a professorship at Johns Hopkins University, where he helped relaunch The Hopkins Review. From the jacket: “In Late Romance, David Yezzi―himself a renowned poet and critic―reveals the depths that informed the meticulous surfaces of Hecht’s poems. Born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in Manhattan, Hecht saw his father lose nearly everything during the stock market crash of 1929. He grew into an accomplished athlete, actor, writer, and eventually a soldier in the crucible that consumed the world. Returning from the war, Hecht struggled to reconcile what he had witnessed and experienced, suffering from mental illness that required hospitalization. But he found the means to channel his emotions into poetry of lasting meaning, control, and depth; along with Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop, Hecht remains a vital presence in letters.”  

Eva Hoffman writes about Czeslaw Milosz’s life and work for Princeton’s “Writers on Writers” series, which is slated for August.

Robert Boyers’s Maestros & Monsters: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner (Mandel Vilar Press, September) could be interesting. It’s one of those books that’s off the beaten path. What did Sontag and Steiner say to each other when they talked? How were they similar and different? Does the author have any interesting tidbits to share? Etc. Or it could be insufferably pretentious.

Nick Triplow’s biography of Ted Lewis, the author of Get Carter, looks interesting. It’s called Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of British Noir (Soho, December). From the jacket: “Like Philip Hoare’s Melville in The Whale or James Sallis’ Chester Himes: A Life, Triplow more than uncovers the forgotten godfather of the modern British crime story; he also spins a noir morality tale with a poetry all its own.”

I am not a fan of Gay Talese, but if you are, I suppose you will want to read his memoir Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener (Mariner, September).

We also have:

Patti Hartigan’s August Wilson: A Life (Simon & Schuster, August): “The first authoritative biography of August Wilson, the most important and successful American playwright of the late 20th century, by a theater critic who knew him.”

Arthur Krystal’s Some Unfinished Chaos: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Virginia, September): “A biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, organized around three periods of Fitzgerald’s life, offering considerations of Fitzgerald's life and art as well as of the larger context of life in America during those periods. Some Unfinished Chaos teases out Fitzgerald’s many contradictions and charts our evolving relationship with this iconic author.”

And Robert Morgan’s Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (LSU, November): “Focusing on Poe’s personal relationships, Morgan chronicles how several women influenced his life and art. Eliza Poe, his mother, died before he turned three, but she haunted him ever after. The loss of Elmira Royster Shelton, his first and last love, devastated him and inspired much of his poetry. Morgan shows that Poe, known for his gothic and supernatural writing, was also a poet of the natural world who helped invent the detective story, science fiction, analytical criticism, and symbolist aesthetics.”

There are several forthcoming collections of essays that look interesting. I have enjoyed Arthur Krystal over the years and reviewed his book This Thing We Call Literature (Oxford, 2016). His latest collection of essay, which is being pitched as his last, is A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now (Virginia, 2023): “Krystal simply regards himself as someone who writes sentences to see where they take him. In A Word or Two Before I Go, Krystal offers us—if he is to be believed—his final collection. These eleven essays and one evocative story range in subject matter from the depredations of aging and the anomalies of cultural appropriation to the friendship between Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling and the day Muhammad Ali punched Krystal in the face.”

I am also much looking forward to poet and novelist Amit Majmudar’s memoir, Twin (Slant, August): “Shortly after learning they would become the parents of twins, the physician-writer Amit Majmudar and his wife received a devastating in utero diagnosis: one of the twins had a potentially fatal congenital heart defect. Written in the form of an extended letter, Twin A recounts the epic story of the open-heart surgeries, complications, and prolonged recoveries that Majmudar’s son survived in infancy and early childhood. But the narrative turns into something much richer and more expansive than the mere description of a surgical history. Thanks to Majmudar’s ample gifts as a wordsmith, medical and scientific information frequently give way to original poetry and fables, family history, and a series of evocative religious and philosophical reflections about matters of life and death.”

I am a big fan of Diane Glancy’s poetry and prose and can’t wait to read her latest: Psalm to Whom(e) (Turtle Point, October). From the jacket: “In Psalm to Whom(e), the restless and astonishing Diane Glancy continues to break new ground with a hybrid collection of personal writings that considers the relationship between place and faith; the need for movement, stability, and inner exploration; and the search for home.”

Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in December: “Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman’s preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, framed by two more, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman’s thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and more join his own.”

George Scialabba’s collection of essays, Only a Voice, will be published by Verso in August: “In Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time.”

In To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf, November), the poet Tracy K. Smith “draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.”

In general biography and history, you may want to be aware of May Beard’s Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (Liveright, October). It is a “sweeping account of the social and political world of the Roman emperors by ‘the world’s most famous classicist’.” Let’s hope it’s not too sweeping.

We also have:

Thomas Harding’s The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing (Pegasus, August): “In this first biography, Thomas Harding provides a full, unvarnished, and at times difficult history of this complex and fascinating character. Throughout his long career, he was written about in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Was he, as described by some, the ‘greatest salesperson,’ ‘the world’s best networker,’ ‘the publisher’s publisher,’ and ‘a great intellectual’? Was his lifelong effort to be the world’s most famous host a cover for his desperate loneliness? Who, in fact, was the real George Weidenfeld and how did he rise so successfully within the ranks of New York and London society?”

Paul A. Rahe’s Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 418-413 B.C. (Encounter, September): “The great expedition to Sicily described in the sixth and seventh books of Thucydides’ history can be depicted in a variety of ways. By some, it has been thoughtfully treated as an example of overreaching on the part of the Athenians. By others, it has been singled out as a sterling example of patriotism, courage, and grit on the part of the Syracusans. Never until now, however, has anyone examined this conflict from a Spartan perspective – despite the fact that Lacedaemon was the war’s principal beneficiary and that her intervention with the dispatch of a single Spartiate – turned the tide and decided the outcome. In Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War, Paul Rahe first outlines the struggle’s origins and traces its progress early on, then examines the reasons for Sparta’s intervention, analyzes the consequences, and retells the story of Athens’ ignominious defeat. Rarely in human history has a political community gained so much at so little cost through the efforts of a single man.”

Lee Jackson’s Dickensland: The Curious History of Dickens’s London (Yale, September): “Lee Jackson traces the fascinating history of Dickensian tourism, exploring both real Victorian London and a fictional city shaped by fandom, tourism, and heritage entrepreneurs. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, Jackson investigates key sites of literary pilgrimage and their relationship with Dickens and his work, revealing hidden, reinvented, and even faked locations. From vanishing coaching inns to submerged riverside stairs, hidden burial grounds to apocryphal shops, Dickensland charts the curious history of an imaginary world.”

Thomas A. Bogar’s history of Theatre on the American Frontier (LSU, November): “For two centuries, nearly all historical accounts of American theatre have focused on New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. As a result, the story of theatre on the frontier consists primarily of regional studies with limited scope. Thomas A. Bogar’s Theatre on the American Frontier provides an overdue, balanced treatment of the accomplishments of the troupes working in the trans-Appalachian West.”

Jennifer Burns’s Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November). Last conservative? Bah. That bit of hyperbole aside, the book could offer an interesting take on Friedman, though I hope a real Friedman specialist reviews this (if it is reviewed). From the jacket: “In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman’s extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman’s longstanding collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz, as well as his complex relationships with powerful figures such as Fed Chair Arthur Burns and Treasury Secretary George Shultz, and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman’s key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America’s first neoliberal―and perhaps its last great conservative.”

And, finally, we have Garrett M. Graff’s UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here―and Out There (Simon & Schuster, November): “From the post-war Project Blue Book to the Pentagon’s modern-day Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, bestselling author and historian Garrett M. Graff presents the first serious narrative history of humanity’s hunt for alien life—including the military and CIA’s secret, decades-long quest to study UFOs.”

A few titles of literary criticism and linguistics caught my eye. I hope someone commissions John McWhorter to review this book: Caleb Everett, A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think (Harvard, September). From the jacket: “We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.” I, for one, don’t buy it, but I’m already looking forward to the debate this will hopefully spark.

We also have Vereen M. Bell’s evaluation of The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (LSU, October) and Bécquer Seguín’s “history of contemporary Spanish fiction through the prism of novelists’ newspaper columns,” which sounds interesting. It’s called The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain (Harvard, January).

Richard Schoch’s history of Shakespeare’s house (Arden, November) looks interesting: “Based on original research in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and featuring two black and white illustrated plate sections which draw on the wide array of material available at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this book traces the history of Shakespeare's birthplace over four centuries. Beginning in the 1560s, when Shakespeare was born there, it ends in the 1890s, when the house was rescued from private purchase and turned into the Shakespeare monument that it remains today.”

This will probably be too technical to be interesting to most readers, but since I am working on a book on this at the moment, I will likely pick this up: Alan Singer, Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature (Routledge, August): “Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature is a foray into current debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience in its own right? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature? Attending to the Literary addresses all of these questions with a view to challenging the notion of literarity as merely representative of experience. On the contrary, Alan Singer shows how literarity is an enacting of experience.”

I’ll also pick up Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment: Essays (Harper) on this topic and will mention it here, even though it won’t be published until February. Here’s a snippet from the jacket: “Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant, influential, and revelatory critics of her generation, a talent who famously skewers and celebrates literary works with unsparing acuity. Her writing—acerbic, prismatic, and staggering in its genius and forthrightness—has crashed the London Review of Books website twice. Oyler delights in using her biting insights like a crowbar, whether smashing shibboleths in her essays or shattering conventions in her first novel Fake Accounts. But what is the significance of being an author, critic, and social media personality in today’s fraught world; how do these fragments form a whole and what is the relevance? Lauren’s classic Oylerian response: Who cares?”

As far as poetry goes, you will want to pick up Scott Cairns’s Lacunae: New Poems (Iron Pen, November) and Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear: Poems (Able Muse, November).

In November, Knopf will publish the Collected Poems of Anthony Hecht (edited by Philip Hoy), which includes “late and uncollected work.” If you’re a fan of Hecht, you might want to pair this with the Yezzi biography.

Yale will bring out a selection of Thomas Hardy’s poems (edited by David Bromwich) in September.

Some other books of poetry to be aware of include: Kevin Prufer’s The Fears (Copper Canyon, October) and Shane McCrae’s The Many Hundreds of the Scent: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October).

I don’t keep up with contemporary fiction enough to tell you who’s worth reading and who’s not. (Not that I am completely without opinion on the topic.) But I do feel obliged to at least inform you that Zadie Smith has a new novel out this fall. So, too, does Alice McDermott, Paul Auster, Teju Cole, J. M. Coetzee, Lauren Groff, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. We’re told the Knausgaard novel is “sprawling.” Who’d have guessed?

I will leave it to John to make the fiction recommendations, though I will say that the new Cole novel, Tremor, sounds as bad as Open City: “A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis . . . Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst ‘history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,’ but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy.” History may be brutal, but is it more punishing than reading Cole?

No links today, folks. Thanks for reading, and hopefully there is something on this list that piques your interest.