Literary Hub - 22 Novels You Need to Read This Fall

Sandra Cisneros, Martita, I Remember You
Vintage, September 7 (tr. Liliana Valenzuela)

The House on Mango Street was THE book of my teenage years. It was for me, as I’m sure it was for many others, the first introduction to a Cisneros sentence—the way it glitters and lifts from the page, the way it delves into the most intimate of relationships in just a few words. Martita, I Remember You/Martita Te Recuerdo feels like a continuation of that magic. A dual language edition novel, it follows Corina as she moves to Paris from Chicago to become a writer. In Paris, Corina’s dreams falter in the face of little money, homesickness, and sleeping on the floor of the metro. Even so, her life in the city gleams with underground parties and a friendship with two other women, the latter bringing up questions of how we carry the ties that bind us, even after so much time, and how we return to them. And the English/Spanish edition underscores a recurring theme in Cisneros’s work: how the languages we speak help shape our relationships and the intimacies we forge.

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

Doubleday, September 14

If you’re looking for a good time, call this number. After all, you can always count on Colson Whitehead. His latest is a literary crime caper set in Harlem in the 1960s, in which Ray Carney, despite his best efforts to be an upstanding furniture salesman and family man, gets dragged into his shady cousin Freddie’s unsavory business dealings. Whitehead’s prose is warm and flexible, nailing mood and detail without being particularly lyrical, inviting you to turn the pages without any cheap tricks. I expected nothing less from the master of genre-bending. The settings particularly pop in this novel, which is simply begging to be a TV series that celebrates the bygone days of New York City, but you also get some good old family drama and a hell of a lot of fun for your money. Best of both worlds. 

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

Viking, September 21

If what you need right now is to sink into a big, warm, literary bath, this is the book for you. It’s not that Ozeki’s latest novel isn’t challenging, it’s just that it manages to be so while also being pure pleasure, especially if you’re the kind of person who once had mostly books for friends. In the opening pages, Benny’s father, Kenji, is killed in a bizarre chicken truck accident, and after that, he begins to hear the voices of the things around him (most notably, his book, which is also the book you are reading) which, helpfully, his mother begins to hoard. To escape the cacophony of voices and the disregard of his classmates, Benny retreats to—you guessed it—the library, where he finds notes hidden in books that seem to be written just for him, which lead him to a host of quirky characters, among other things. It’s a big book in more ways than one, complex and ambitious and wide-ranging, but honestly also just so charming I found it hard to walk away from, even when I was done. 

Mariana Dimópulos, Imminence 

Transit Books, September 7 (tr. Alice Whitmore) 

Home alone with her newborn for the first time, the protagonist of Mariana Dimópulos’ Imminence feels . . . nothing. “I have to touch him now,” she says. “I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest the way they said it would.” This lack of feeling prompts the reflections that fill the rest of the novella, which occurs between her present life—the intermittently placid and chaotic moments of early parenthood in a Buenos Aires apartment—and flashbacks to what came before: her lovers, the shifting alliances of friendship, her relationship to womanhood, the many small decisions that brought her here. Mariana Dimópulos immerses us in this domestic world with a narrative that is sometimes disorienting, always captivating, and filled with quiet poignancy. 

Louise Erdrich, The Sentence 

Harper, November 9

The majority of Louise Erdrich’s new novel takes place over the span of one year, from the Day of the Dead in 2019 to the Day of the Dead in 2020. It’s a year most of us remember all too vividly and perhaps aren’t too eager to re-live, but Erdrich pulls it off and more so with this refreshing, sprawling ghost story. The protagonist, Tookie, is an endearingly blunt Ojibwe woman who once went to prison for transporting a body across state lines as a favor to a white friend (unbeknownst to her, the body happened to also be transporting crack cocaine) and since being released, now works in a bookstore in Minneapolis with other Indigenous people. One of her most annoying customers, Flora, who unconvincingly insists that she too is Indigenous, passes away and begins her next chapter of existence as a doubly annoying ghost. But as Flora continues to haunt the bookstore, Tookie must grapple with the unresolvedness of this woman who she brushed aside, her own varied past, and the inescapable violence of living in America.