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Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Books Five Upcoming Books I'm Excited to Read.
Posted by Alison Hallett on Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:29 PM
Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet
I love Lydia Millet. Her short story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was my most-gifted book the year it came out. (And, of course, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is an immensely satisfying genre-bender about the men who created the atom bomb.) Ghost Lights is about a bureaucrat who suspects his wife is cheating on him—sounds dull, but Millet's prose is incapable of being boring. Release date: October
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
The newest from the author of Election and Little Children—Perrota's prose is reliably funny and closely observed. The Leftovers is a departure from his more realistic previous efforts: It's about a suburban family who is "left behind" after millions of Americans were Raptured away. Release date: September
The Luminist by David Rocklin
Recent reading experiences suggest that Hawthorne Books publishes nothing but quality. Their next release is historical fiction about a British woman living in colonial India. Release Date: October
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
If you haven't read Toews' A Complicated Kindness, please do so at once—it's a pretty darn brilliant coming-of-age novel about growing up Mennonite in Canada. I also quite enjoyed her charming family road-trip novel The Flying Troutmans. Her newest is set once again in a Mennonite community, this time in Mexico. Release date: September.
Habibi by Craig Thompson
The creator of Blankets has been working on Habibi for years—it's a massive, ambitious-sounding attempt to bridge the divide between Christianity and Islam, through the stories of two refugee slave children. Release date: September
I'm also looking forward to Hilary Mantel's The MIrror and the Light, the sequel to her excellent historical fiction Wolf Hall, though I can't find any word on how progress on that is coming.
Anybody else got exciting titles on the horizon?
1
I'm looking forward to more Deep Focus books because the last one I read (Jonathan Lethem on They Live) was amazing. I also need to read that David Mitchell book that from a few months ago. And that collection of Roberto Bolano essays that just came out.
2
These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson. Erickson's novel isn't coming out until early 2012 though. :/
3
-Colson Whitehead's zombie novel, Zone One, is really good (October, I think?).
-Yannick Murphy's The Call is extraordinary (August).
-Steve Almond's new collection, God Bless America, is his best, I think, since My Life In Heavy Metal.
-I guess it was released this week, but Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty is fantastic so far.
4
New George Pelecanos novel The Cut
Ernest Cline's Ready Player One
Bruce Machart (Wake of Forgiveness) collection Men in the Making
Ed McClanahan collection I Just Hitched in from the Coast
and Joan Didion in a follow-on to The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights
5
Also, Butch Walker has a memoir coming out later this year which sounds pretty rad.
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