While I'm sure that by the time I'm finished typing this post, I'll have heard of another few titles that I'm going to look forward to---the following are the ones as of this very moment and all fourteen of them are works I'm extremely excited to get to read next year:
JANUARY
If You { }: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope by Colin Fleming via Dzanc Books
One of a couple of these that I've had the pleasure of reading already but still look very much forward to getting a hard copy and enjoying the stories all over again. This is one to order now--so it arrives early next month! Any book that Colin Fleming publishes will be read by the EWN for sure.
From Dzanc's website:
A relationship ends in the space between [ ]. Abe Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe Two stroll the river in the afterlife, debating a second death. Two boys navigate jazz, baseball, and growing up in the second between the pitch and the swing. And a man from Living Dangerously sets off across the ocean on a pile of lobster traps, seeking the truth of the smoke on the wind.
With If You [ ], author Colin Fleming breaks the unwritten rule of the short story collection. In over thirty different styles, Fleming delivers a punk rock triple album in book form—compositions that display a dizzying range of fearless artistry, from horror to hyper-experimental to a story disguised as a grocery list. Together, these pieces resonate with unexpected chords, exploring the breadth of human experience and affirming that that narrative is everywhere, if we are able and willing to see it.
Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann via Alice James Books
A writer I've been enjoying the poems of for 15 years now since he co-ran a reading series out Detroit's Scarab Club for a time. Back when I could only read his work in literary journals and then via chapbook. This is his third full collection with the publisher.
From Publishers Weekly:
“Conceived as the assembled contents of a mail carrier’s pouch, the intimate and affecting third book by Olzmann (Contradictions in the Design) presents the poet as sender, receiver, and courier. … In language at once direct and artful, Olzmann memorably explores the question of how one might speak across the gulfs dividing humankind.”
The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy via Mariner
A long-time favorite around here, ever since before The Land of Elk was published, Percy follows The Ninth Metal with the sequel, the second title in his Comet Cycle. Enjoyed the first one quite a bit and looking forward to this one.
From Publishers Weekly:
"Percy’s masterful second Comet Cycle genre-bender (after The Ninth Metal) combines a missing-person case, romantic reconciliation, and a riveting sci-fi what-if imagining of a sentient fungi, spawned by debris from a passing comet, that symbiotically absorbs flora and fauna—including human beings. On the day the comet swept Earth with a dramatic meteor shower, “fun dad” Jack, a mycologist, took his eight-year-old daughter, Mia, on a mushroom study trip through a dank forest outside Seattle—where she vanished. This devastating loss breaks up Jack’s marriage to Nora, a type A police detective. Now, five years later, Nora investigates a series of eerie, ritualistic Seattle homicides, while Jack boozily self-destructs his academic career. The pair gradually reconnect by probing into the ominous fungal invasion—a line of inquiry that may lead them to Mia. Meanwhile, a sinister governmental operation attempts to militarize the fungus, developing it into a mind control serum. The juxtaposition of malignant military-industrial machinations and well-delineated human tension works wonderfully, and sci-fi fans will appreciate Percy’s extraterrestrial biological lore. It’s a thoroughly satisfying near-future glimpse of both disaster and salvation."
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells by Hannah Lillith Assadi via Riverhead
We really enjoyed Assadi's debut Sonora a few years back and have kept our eyes out for a second novel or story collection.
From the publisher's website:
Through the scrim of fading memory, an elderly woman confronts a lifetime of secrets and betrayal, under the mysterious skies of her island home
Off the coast of Georgia, near Savannah, generations have been tempted by strange blue lights in the sky near an island called Lyra. At the height of WWII, impressionable young Elle Ranier leaves New York City to forge a new life together on the island with her new husband, Simon. There they will live for decades, raising a family while waging a quixotic campaign to find the source of the mysterious blue offshore light—and the elusive minerals rumored to lurk beneath the surface.
Fifty years later, Elle looks back at her life on the mysterious island—and at a secret she herself has guarded for decades. As her memory recedes into the mists of Alzheimer’s disease, her life seems a tangle of questions: How did her husband’s business, now shuttered, survive so long without ever finding the legendary Lyra stones? How did her own life crumble under treatment for depression? And what became of Gabriel—the handsome, raffish other man who came to the island with them and risked everything to follow the lights?
Darkly romantic and deeply haunting, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells pulls us into a story of the tantalizing, faithless relationship between ourselves and the lives and souls we leave behind.
FEBRUARY
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James via Riverhead
Another author whose previous works, including the prequel to this novel, we've enjoyed in the past and generally always look forward to the next from.
From the author via an article in Brittle Paper:
We also know that the Dark Star trilogy is not a linear trilogy, meaning that readers who haven’t read Black Leopard, Red Wolf can begin with the new story. Moon Witch, Spider King is also not a typical sequel in the sense that it is not necessarily revealing a different period in the story’s chronology. Instead offers a different perspective. It essentially tells “the same” story but from a different perspective, this time Sogolon, the witch who goes on an odyssey with Tracker, the first book’s main character. James shared all this in an interview with Gizmodo.com. He says that apart form the alternative perspective, Sogolon’s account will challenge Tracker’s account of the story in the first book, especially his representation of Sogolon in extremely negative light. With this new book, Sogolon gets a chance to include her perspective on the already deeply complicated story.
Spontaneous Human Combustion by Richard Thomas via Keylight Books
Been enjoying Richard's work for about half a decade now it seems. Really enjoy his short work so this collection of stories should be right up our alley.
From a Starred Publishers Weekly review:
"Thomas (The Soul Standard) breathes fresh air into the genre of dark speculative fiction with a brilliant collection that teems with haunting elements, dark nostalgia for lost love, dysfunctional families, and self-torment. These 14 stories ably demonstrate Thomas’s skill at conjuring visceral emotion through immaculate detail work. The gut-wrenching “Repent,” about a crooked ex-cop who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his dying son, is told with an artist’s attention to scene setting. “Hiraeth,” about a farm boy with a “hole in his chest” who is robbed and subsequently punished by the men in the family, bristles with astonishing detail, realistic characters, and emotional depth. In “Ring of Fire,” an isolated scientist with an altered memory runs strange experiments on minerals, splicing horror and science fiction elements into an eerie tale about the evolution of the human mind amid isolation and interference. Equally devastating and refreshing, this is a collection to be savored by horror fans and literary readers alike."
MARCH
Chevy in the Hole by Kelsey Ronan via Henry Holt
Another one that I've read in advanced copy form but very much look forward to getting the copy I pre-ordered that has the actual cover on it and not just the title. Aspects of this novel hit me due to familiarity (lived in Flint for a couple of years two decades ago) and others didn't hit for that reason (never had any drug issues) but in both cases the work hit me just right. Found it to be honest about Flint, and the main relationship. Found the moving through the history of Flint and the main player's families from the mid-40's through recent water related events to be a great mechanism for keeping the story moving.
From the publisher website:
A gorgeous, unflinching love letter to Flint, Michigan, and the resilience of its people, Chevy in the Hole follows multiple generations of two families making their homes there, with a stunning contemporary love story at its center.
In the opening pages of Chevy in the Hole, August “Gus” Molloy has just overdosed in a bathroom stall of the Detroit farm-to-table restaurant where he works. Shortly after, he packs it in and returns home to his family in Flint. This latest slip and recommitment to sobriety doesn’t feel too terribly different from the others, until Gus meets Monae, an urban farmer trying to coax a tenuous rebirth from the city’s damaged land. Through her eyes, he sees what might be possible in a city everyone else seems to have forgotten or, worse, given up on. But as they begin dreaming up an oasis together, even the most essential resources can’t be counted on.
Woven throughout their story are the stories of their families—Gus’s white and Monae’s Black—members of which have had their own triumphs and devastating setbacks trying to survive and thrive in Flint. A novel about the things that change over time and the things that don’t, Chevy in the Hole reminds us again and again what people need from one another and from the city they call home.
APRIL
Stay Gone Days by Steve Yarbrough via Ig Publishing
We've read everything that Yarbrough has published and always look forward to the next one--looking forward to this one expanding on the setting for his work.
From the author's website:
After a childhood in Mississippi marred by a horrific family scandal, teenage sisters Ella and Caroline Cole escape their hometown, losing all connection to each other. While Ella finds stable domesticity in Boston, Caroline travels the world, from California to Poland, fleeing regrets and a man intent on violence. Despite the decades apart, each sister is never far from the other’s thoughts. Then, one day, Ella walks into a bookstore and sees a novel called Stay Gone Days. Will this novel, a heartbreaking tale of estranged sisters, help Ella and Caroline find each other and start down the hard road of reconciliation and forgiveness?
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel via Knopf
Like the author of the previous novel on this list, her first novel (first three actually) was published by Unbridled Books. Great books. Since then her work has exploded, Station Eleven was a best-seller that is currently seeing an interpretation on HBO Max. Another whose work I always look forward to the next. one.
From the publisher's website:
A novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space...A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
A Better Class of People: a Novel in Stories by Robert Lopez via Dzanc Books
As is becoming a fairly common refrain here--Lopez is one whose work we've been reading regularly since Dzanc published his 2nd novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River a little over a decade ago. We even read the books he publishes with other publishing houses!
From the publisher's website:
In an uncanny, distorted version of New York City, a man rides the subway through the chaos of an ordinary commute. He may have a gun in his pocket. He may be looking for someone—a woman named Esperanza.
Between stops, we shuttle back and forth through time and see a man who stands in traffic, the same man seizing and shuddering on a sidewalk, an institution where the man is housed with other undesirables, a neighborhood where all the residents have forgotten their names. Over everything looms the specter of a nameless menace, a pervasive sense that something—more than just a ride—is coming to an end.
With Robert Lopez’s signature innovation, A Better Class of People delivers a network of stories interconnected and careening like subway tunnels through the realities of modern America: immigration, gun violence, police brutality, sexual harassment, climate change, and the point of fracture at which we find ourselves, where reality and perception are indistinguishable.
148 Charles Street by Tracy Daugherty via University of Nebraska Press
We're fans of Daugherty's fiction, and have a couple of the literary biographies he's written but don't believe we've read them yet. This seems to be maybe merging the two in the best ways possible.
From the publisher's website:
Tracy Daugherty’s historical novel 148 Charles Street explores the fascinating story of Willa Cather’s friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. The women shared a passion for writing, for New York, and for the desert Southwest, but their sensibilities could not have been more different: Cather, the novelist of lyrical landscapes and aesthetic refinement, and Sergeant, the muckraking journalist and literary activist. Their friendship is sorely tested when Cather fictionalizes a war that Sergeant covered as a reporter, calling into question, for both women, the uses of art and journalism, the power of imagination and witness. 148 Charles Street is a testament to the bonds that endure despite disagreements and misunderstandings, and in the relentlessness of a vanishing past.
Poolside at the Dearborn Inn by Cal Freeman via R&R Press
Cal's third full collection--we've enjoyed the first two quite a bit--and have seen him read, most likely some of these poems, a few times now.
From the publisher's website:
Written in the shadow of the Ford Empire, Poolside at the Dearborn Inn touches on everything that tangled history connotes: labor battles, cars, ecological peril, and the inexorable strength of the human spirit. Freeman uses the lyric to annotate his world with an eye toward preserving the natural treasures of The Great Lakes Basin.
MAY
The Shared World: Poems by Vievee Francis vis Triquarterly Press
We were fortunate enough to catch a Francis reading shortly after her debut (three books ago) came out and have followed her work ever since. Each collection is different from the previous collection and always interesting. No cover to this one yet that we've been able to scare up.
From an interview Francis did with BrooklynPoets.org:
"The title is taken from a Naomi Shihab Nye poem. I wanted a larger framework to discuss and interrogate what I have always discussed and interrogated in my work, interconnectedness. Human to Human. Human to Nature. Human to Clime."
AUGUST
Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones via Gallery Press
A sequel to this past year's best seller My Heart is a Chainsaw--nobody writes horror movies in book form better than Stephen Graham Jones. The most difficult thing in being an SGJ fan is trying to keep up with his output (similar to the guy at the top of this list). Really enjoyed the first one so looking forward to the sequel.
From the publisher's website:
Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.
Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday.
Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.
SEPTEMBER
Campfires of the Dead, and the Living: Collected Stories of Peter Christopher via 11:11 Press
Peter Christopher's Campfires of the Dead is probably one of our two or three favorite collections that were published by Knopf when Gordon Lish was editing there. It's a collection we've read more than a few times and had hoped to include one day in Dzanc's rEprint series. If that couldn't happen, we're thrilled to see this--the book coming back to print, with more than a little boost.
From the publisher's website:
In September of 2022, we will be publishing the stories in Campfires of the Dead along with an unpublished story collection titled, The Living, in one collection.
NOVEMBER
Dr. No by Percival Everett via Graywolf Press
Well, this one has no real details yet online, nor a cover, but it's by Percival Everett so we are very much looking forward to it. There aren't many authors that have published 20+ books that we can say we've read each one, but Everett is certainly one of them.
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