Forthcoming Fiction

John Wilson looks forward to new novels from Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Pynchon, and more.

In an earlier column, I think, I mentioned the primal delight I felt when I first grasped the notion of “forthcoming books” and learned that there were resources—not least, publishers’ seasonal catalogues—that routinely provided such intelligence. I had no idea then that I would spend almost forty years working as an editor, always looking ahead, thinking about review possibilities.

Even now, I do my best to keep track of what’s coming down the road—not least, what new fiction is coming from writers I’ve long admired, but also fiction that sounds intriguing from writers I haven’t read, not to mention reissues, new translations of novels or stories I’ve long valued, and more.

At the top of my current list, unsurprisingly, is Shadow Ticket (marvelous title), the new Thomas Pynchon novel coming in October. I hope that an enterprising editor has already signed up Alan Jacobs to write about it (though Alan may do that on his own site). He’d be my first choice, hands down, though there are others whose takes I’d love to see, too.

Also noteworthy is The Ballad of the Last Guest, a novel from Peter Handke, whom I’ve read and re-read with profit since his first books began to appear in English translation decades ago. Much that has been written about Handke over the last quarter-century is rubbish. This new book, due in December from FSG, is very good; it would provide a perfect point of departure for a big retrospective piece.

Another title high on my list for the fall is Of Seven Fir Trees and Snow, a gathering of early stories by Thomas Bernhard (translated by the excellent Douglas Robertson), published by Seagull Books, source of so much good writing in translation (and maker of handsome volumes).

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Two books coming from University of Chicago Press, both of which are “fiction-adjacent,” demand inclusion here. First, The Complete Notebooks of Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom and due in November. When I was fourteen and reading Camus for the first time (in the summer of 1962, two and a half years after his death), he was hands-down the most respected writer of the day. It would be hard for readers now (unless they’re as old as I am, or even older) to imagine the combination of moral and artistic authority he commanded. The second book, coming in January 2026, is a book about the filmmaker Robert Bresson by the philosopher Robert B. Pippin. It would be nice to see a piece in which these two were discussed together.

And add to the fiction-adjacent category Leo Damrosch’s Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, which Yale University Press will publish in September. Stevenson’s Kidnapped was among the first “real novels” I read (it might even have been the first), and it holds a special place in my heart.

I can imagine some readers of this column shaking their heads, saying, “Man, I feel sorry for this guy. He seems to be living in the past.” I assure you that I am always on the lookout for interesting “new” writers, and I’m sure I’ll encounter some in the coming months. Still, it figures that many of the books I’m looking forward to are by writers I’ve been following for decades—T. C. Boyle, for instance, whose long-awaited novel No Way Home is scheduled to be published in the U.S. in the spring of 2026. Most unusually, it will first appear in a German translation this fall!

Much of my fiction-reading, of course, is re-reading. I just re-read, for the first time in many years, Philip K. Dick’s novel The Game-Players of Titan, in which “pre-cogs” feature prominently. Even among those who have read all of PKD’s books at least once and many of them multiple times (I’m in that group), this novel tends not to be highly regarded. Dick wrote many of his books as fast as he could type—and he was a very good typist. There is, I’ll concede, a slapdash quality to this one, which features so many reversals and plot-twists from left field that the effect is dizzying. And yet (for me, least) this is a case in which excess succeeds (and the book really is very funny, if you can suppress the impulse to throw it across the room). If you’re in the mood for something different, check it out.

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