Ten Books We’re Looking Forward To This Fall

It’s fall, the undisputed top reading season and publishing’s showcase time. Here are 10 titles to keep on your radar that critics, including yours truly, have loved or are looking forward to.

Bright Young Women, Jessica Knoll

Knoll inverts the true crime genre by focusing her novel on a serial killer’s victims. A thinly veiled though never-named Ted Bundy type is the culprit, yet Luckiest Girl Alive author Knoll intentionally shifts the lens to characters like Pamela Schumacher, who discovers the aftermath of the unthinkable at her sorority house one cold January night, and Ruth Wachowsky, trying to find herself in the wake of a divorce and her mother’s death. Bright Young Women asks who and what deserves our attention, and how true crime’s fascination with digging into darkness is misguided. (Available now)

People Collide, Isle McElroy

McElroy’s 2020 debut The Atmospherians captured readers with its depiction of two lifelong friends, one recently cancelled, who start a cult to reform men. Equal parts wry and insightful, the book ended up on numerous publications’ best-of lists. Now comes People Collide, the story of a couple who switch bodies. One morning Eli realizes he’s inhabiting Elizabeth’s body. Eli’s search for his missing wife prompts a deep reckoning about their marriage, his identity in both bodies, privilege, and class. (Available now)

Holly, Stephen King

It’s been a while since I read King’s books, but online kerfuffle over his inclusion of COVID protocols as part of his newest novel spurred me to see what all the fuss was about. I’m glad I did, though less for the COVID details than the chance to once more dive into the creepy worlds King creates. Detective Holly Gibney, first introduced in Mr. Mercedes and reappearing in The Outsider, is on the trail of young women who have disappeared. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say the truth leads her to some very human horrors instead of the supernatural ones King may be better known for, which makes Holly all the scarier. I guarantee you won’t be looking at senior citizens the same way. (Available now)

Happiness Falls, Angie Kim

Happiness Falls has already racked up spots on a ton of most-anticipated lists, as well as being tapped for Good Morning America’s book club. This literary thriller hinges on a father’s disappearance and his family’s search, but we quickly learn there are multiple levels – and lots of secrets – to this story. Son Eugene and his father head out for their usual morning hike in the park; Eugene returns late, hyped up, and alone. Eugene also has many medical conditions, including one that robs him of speech, which naturally makes the investigation difficult. Mia, the driven narrator, has no such issue. Twists and turns abound as Kim digs deep into the ties that bind this family and the deceptions they fuel. (Available now)

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, Taylor Lorenz

If you don’t know who Taylor Lorenz is, you’re likely not among the extremely online people to which her book’s title refers. The gifted technology correspondent for the Washington Post and frequent guest on cable news programs has also become the whipping girl for Libs of TikTok (who she unmasked), among other far-right extremely online people. In her first book, Lorenz chronicles the rise of now commonplace aspects of the Internet — momfluencers, TikTok creators, sponsored Instagram posts – as well as the market forces that shaped them. Her call to action is not about digital detoxes, but about consumers demanding more control (and better behavior) of their online spaces. (Available Oct. 3)

Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business, Roxane Gay 

Essayist and commentator Gay has opinions, and this retrospective anthology collects selected musings from the past decade on topics as free-ranging as reproductive rights, rage, taking her podcast off of Spotify, voting despite disillusionment, and Jada Pinkett Smith. Indeed, among my many favorite things about Gay’s writing is her clarity on matters large and small. She will unpack a Supreme Court decision and also the Fast & Furious movies. This volume is a thoughtful survey of her recent work, and includes a new introduction that maps the toll of expressing opinions publicly and on an increasingly large platform. You may not always agree with Gay, but she will make you think. (Available Oct. 10)

Family Meal, Bryan Washington

If you are a Washington fan after Lot and Memorial (and I am), Family Meal will be transcendent territory. It follows Cam, who’s moved back to Houston after the death of his boyfriend. There, he reconnects with a childhood friend and his family. Like Washington’s previous works, Family Meal excels at its sense of place and the communities that don’t always occupy center stage in fiction. Washington reflects a carefully observed reality that may not be his reader’s without explanation, guardrails or hand-holding, and that’s part of what makes him such a vivid chronicler and craftsman. Yearning, loss, sex, and belonging all play a role in this tale, as does Washington’s always-evocative food writing. (Available Oct. 10)

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, Molly McGhee

Title aside, when we first meet Jonathan, he’s a mess. Six figures in debt, devoid of ambition and friends, he takes a seemingly fortuitous exit ramp from his financial problems through a new job. But it’s a doozy. He’ll enter people’s dreams as an “auditor,” and a cleaner of sorts. Success will grant him forgiven school loans. It’d be easy to paint McGhee’s debut as a kindred spirit to Apple TV+’s Severance, but there’s more at play here. Jonathan’s not so great at this new gig, and the more he learns about the auditing office, the more sinister his real-life boss Kai becomes. This has comic moments, and true tragedy, and all along the way McGhee delves into the dystopia a workplace can become. (Available Oct. 17)

The Reformatory, Tananarive Due

Legendary Black speculative fiction writer Due sets her newest novel at a fictionalized version of the Dozier school, the Florida reform school for boys that made headlines for its decades of horrific abuse (and also served as inspiration for Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys). Due discovered a decade ago that her great-uncle died at the school at age 15, and she dedicates her story to him. We meet 12-year-old Robert, a Black child sent to the school in 1950 for kicking a white boy. Turns out Robert can see the haints that roam the building’s halls, and the superintendent wants Robert to help catch them. It’s a propulsive ghost story rooted in real-life horrors. (Available Oct. 31)

Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon, editors

This anthology finds writer like Alexander Chee and Hanif Abdurraqib extolling the value of video games, from storytelling to diversion to solace. There are few things I enjoy more than writers seriously and smartly considering aspects of pop culture frequently dismissed as lowbrow (like, former New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum’s take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and this volume looks to be exactly that. Machado, author of In the Dream House, pens the introduction. We are indeed ready, player one. (Available Nov 21)