16 New Books To Read in November

November is sometimes a slow month, so we have gone more comprehensive: bringing you 16 books that combine a peculiar mix of pleasures: literary fiction haunted by the past, essays arguing for the joys of the present, and nonfiction examining the institutions and technologies shaping our future. There are new books from Gary Shteyngart, Louise Kennedy and Rachel Maddow, alongside a Grateful Dead deep dive, a fresh history of Broadway and a thriller set among London’s wealthiest residents.

• Stations — Louise Kennedy
  Kennedy follows the long afterlife of first love, tracing the ways regret and memory shape relationships across years. The author of Trespasses returns with a story in which the past is neither safely over nor easily redeemed.
  Publisher: Riverhead Books
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• A Glacier’s Guide to Dying — Michelle Porter
  A young Métis man searches for his missing father amid Montana wildfires, eventually reaching a glacier that seems to speak to him. Porter brings family inheritance, loss and the possibility of healing into a novel that crosses the border between realism and the uncanny.
  Publisher: Algonquin
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• Monsters of Ohio — John Scalzi
  Scalzi returns to a struggling Ohio town where a major employer is closing and the locals have problems that go well beyond the economy. A bizarre mystery involving a cow gives the author of Starter Villain room to mix small-town desperation, corporate misbehavior and his customary science-fiction mischief.
  Publisher: Tor
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• The Heights — Ian Rankin
  In this standalone thriller, the death of a concierge brings police scrutiny to an exclusive London high-rise overlooking Hyde Park. Behind the amenities and discreet wealth lie the secrets of the building’s privileged residents. Rankin swaps his familiar Edinburgh territory for an unusually vertical portrait of class and crime.
  Publisher: Cardinal
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• Long Wave — Daisy Johnson
  Johnson, the Booker-shortlisted author of Everything Under, turns to a multigenerational story of motherhood, obsession and family secrets. Her fiction has always made the familiar feel unstable; here, intimate relationships carry the force of an epic.
  Publisher: Riverhead Books
  Release date: November 24, 2026
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• The Sensualist — Gary Shteyngart
  Shteyngart’s first collection of personal essays is a case for paying attention to pleasure. He searches for a great martini, travels on an enormous cruise ship, encounters capybaras and considers the finer points of tailoring. Beneath the jokes is a serious question: what makes a life worth savoring?
  Publisher: Random House
  Release date: November 17, 2026
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• How to Be Less Useful — Priyanka Mattoo
  Mattoo argues that adulthood has become an endless exercise in efficiency. Through memoir and humor, she makes a case for dancing, napping, friendship and other activities that offer no obvious productivity dividend. It is an appealing counterpoint to a culture determined to optimize every waking hour.
  Publisher: Knopf
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• Take My Word for It — LeVar Burton, with Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts
  From Roots and Star Trek: The Next Generation to Reading Rainbow, Burton has helped generations think about stories and who gets to tell them. His memoir promises a more intimate account of the experiences and commitments behind that public career.
  Publisher: Random House
  Release date: November 10, 2026
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  • 
    Tiger’s Mouth — Lucy Tan
    From the author of What We Were Promised, a this sharp exploration of friendship, class, and ambition. Two young men named Jack meet during an internship at a technology company: Jack Chen has bluffed his way in; Jack Owens is the troubled son of the company’s billionaire founder. Their unlikely friendship becomes a rivalry as each covets the other’s life.
    Publisher: Ballantine Books
    Release date: November 17, 2026, Order/Preorder (Bookshop)
• The Absent Woman: The Genius of Janet Malcolm — Eve Sneider
  Janet Malcolm transformed the way journalists think about reporting, biography and their obligations to subjects. Drawing on archival material, Sneider investigates a writer who distrusted the pretense of objectivity and resisted celebrity, making this biography an unusually self-conscious exercise in telling another person’s story.
  Publisher: W. W. Norton
  Release date: November 10, 2026
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• Department of Fate — Rachel Maddow
  Maddow tells the history of the Justice Department through its battles over civil rights, corruption, political power and the rule of law. The book’s central concern is institutional: what happens when an agency charged with enforcing justice becomes vulnerable to the demands of the people who control it?
  Publisher: Crown
  Release date: November 10, 2026
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• The Imperfect City — Paul Goldberger
  Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Goldberger argues that great cities cannot be engineered into perfection. From New York to Singapore, he considers the productive tension between planning and improvisation, asking what makes urban life rich, surprising and humane.
  Publisher: Knopf
  Release date: November 17, 2026
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• Broadway in Black and White — John Mauceri and John H. McWhorter
  Mauceri and McWhorter trace how Black music, European theatrical traditions and immigrant cultures combined to create the American musical. Their history follows Broadway from ragtime to Hamilton, emphasizing how an entertainment form also helped shape the country’s understanding of race.
  Publisher: W. W. Norton
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• Friends of the Devil — Alex Pappademas, illustrated by Joan LeMay
  The Grateful Dead’s songs have always contained more characters and strange histories than a standard rock biography can accommodate. Pappademas and artist LeMay approach the band through its songbook, combining criticism, lore and more than 100 original paintings.
  Publisher: Random House
  Release date: November 3, 2026
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• Guilty Pleasure — Patricia Nilsson
  Nilsson investigates the online pornography business as an engine of the attention economy, following the money, platforms and data systems behind an industry that is simultaneously ubiquitous and opaque. The result promises to be as much about technology and corporate power as about sex.
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Release date: November 17, 2026
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• The Flying Death — Matt O’Hara
  O’Hara recounts a 1930s scramble to obtain a poisonous Amazonian vine and transform it into a source of modern medicine. The story connects scientific discovery to extraction and exploitation, asking who benefited from the pursuit of a miracle drug and who paid its costs.
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Release date: November 10, 2026
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