23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024

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The publishing-world satire is ready to hang it up. To the grad-school roman à clef: You have been denied tenure. This year, the most exciting books avoid these ho-hum recent trends in favor of stranger pleasures, daring memoir, and the ruthless re-zhuzhing of classic American lit. Because you need, and deserve, to be surprised.

January

Dead in Long Beach, California, by Venita Blackburn (January 23)

Blackburn’s first novel, after short-story collections published in 2017 and 2021, is strange and gripping, dancing between sci-fi and family saga. When graphic novelist Coral finds her brother dead by suicide, she doesn’t tell anyone in her own life what happened. Instead, she impulsively starts responding to his texts as him, then escalates to impersonating him on social media. Meanwhile, a chorus-like narrative — which may be speaking in the voices of characters she invented — interprets the action, observing the tragic details of Coral’s 21st-century life like they’re writing an alien anthropology. —Emma Alpern

$27 at Amazon

$25.11 at Bookshop

February

Antiquity, by Hanna Johansson; translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson (February 6)

Johansson’s hypnotic debut, billed as a “queer Lolita story,” won awards and admiration in Sweden and has drawn comparisons to Marguerite Duras and André Aciman. The story begins when a queer writer in her mid-30s travels to Greece in pursuit of Helena, a fickle and self-absorbed older artist by whom she is enraptured. There she encounters Olga, Helena’s rebellious teenage daughter whose mention used to inspire jealousy. While the narrator obsessively charts the dimensions of their triangulation, a secret romance starts to develop between her and Olga: “When I looked at her it was as if I saw myself. When I kissed her I liberated her from something: her childhood, her mother.” A delicious slow-burn meditation on desire, envy, language, and memory. —Jasmine Vojdani

$26 at Amazon

$24.18 at Bookshop

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante (February 13)

The cultural critic’s account of her later-in-life gender transition begins with what she calls “the magic gender portal”: a face-swap app that revealed a parallel identity she’d been privately aware of since she was a child. “By feeding the snapshots of my life into the maw of the photo-altering software,” she writes, “I managed to force open a door in my subconscious, one festooned with padlocks and wax seals and warning signs in 19 languages.” Sante’s book is both a memoir and a cultural history (appropriate for the author of the classic New York history Low Life), outlining her early glimpses of trans life, the decades she spent governed by an “internal censor,” and her eventual sense of overwhelming clarity. —E.A.

$27 at Amazon

$25.11 at Bookshop

About Uncle, by Rebecca Gisler; translated from French by Jordan Stump (February 20)

A cumulative portrait of a family is drawn with dark humor and inexhaustible affection. As the world enters a pandemic-like state of idleness, a young woman moves to her family home on the coast of Brittany, where she and her brother help tend to “Uncle,” a corpulent war veteran who strains to move around the house. Through a series of digressions that seem to pull from Beckett, Kafka, and entomology, the narrator recounts the life of her mother’s brother, passing from a delightfully grotesque focus on his body (“I found that Uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet”) to an expansive and deeply empathetic vision of his past. Gisler, who is Swiss, writes in long, rushing sentences that pull you through an inventory of memory and pick up material truths along the way. —J.V.

$17 at Amazon

$15.76 at Bookshop

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison (February 20)

The past few years have seen plenty of memoirs about the destabilizing, lysergic early days of motherhood, but Jamison’s might be the first one that is also a divorce story. After marrying a fellow writer within a year of meeting him, the author watched helplessly as their incompatibility revealed itself and the rush of new love gave way to a growing sense of doubt — and, eventually, a painful split while their daughter was an infant. Jamison’s mode of nonfiction is compassionate but lets no one off the hook, least of all herself. —E.A.

$29 at Amazon

$26.97 at Bookshop

Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange (February 27)

In 1864, a Cheyenne boy flees the U.S. Army’s Sand Creek Massacre, comes close to starving in the Colorado wilderness, and trades names with another lost child. Eventually, he’s transported to a prison in Florida designed to eliminate Indianness, where he starts calling himself Jude Star. The violence and confusion of Jude’s life carries through to the lives of his ancestors in ways that Orange — in his first novel since 2018 Pulitzer finalist There There — traces with a subtle hand. The story leads all the way to Jude’s great-great-great-grandson, a teenager contending with a painkiller addiction as he tries to undo some of the knots tied by America’s antihuman program of assimilation. —E.A.

$29 at Amazon

$26.97 at Bookshop

March

Bite Your Friends: Stories of the Body Militant, by Fernanda Eberstadt (March 5)

In this collection of essays threaded through with Eberstadt’s memories of her mother — a mid-century writer and socialite whose struggle for meaning had devastating consequences for her body and her family — a cozy, pleasant life is the enemy of what the author calls “the bloody truths.” Performance artists, martyrs and saints, and Diogenes, the Greek “prophet of shamelessness and anti-power,” make appearances, as do the Russian protest group Pussy Riot and the poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Shuffling through references high and low, Eberstadt, rebuilding a sense of self after her children have entered adulthood, makes her own bold reach for significance. —E.A.

$28 at Amazon

$26.04 at Bookshop

My Heavenly Favorite, by Lucas Rijneveld; translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison (March 5)

Winner of the international Booker Prize in 2020, Dutch writer Rijneveld is back with his second novel — one told in retrospect, after the narrator, a veterinarian, is imprisoned for his relationship with a farmer’s underage daughter. Meanwhile, the unnamed daughter longs to have the body of a boy and struggles against insanity as she imagines having conversations with Hitler and Freud while obsessing over Kurt Cobain. The style is fevered; there are no paragraph breaks within chapters, and page-long sentences abound, exploring many of the same themes that drove Rijneveld’s first book: bucolic life, taboos, and abjection, among others. —Dilara O’Neil

$28 at Amazon

$26.04 at Bookshop

Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman (March 5)

Waldman’s Zeitgeist-y The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., about the dating woes of Brooklyn’s publishing intelligentsia, defined a certain type of 2010s literature. Now, a decade later, she’s back with her second novel, with no media people in sight. The book follows the conflicts between warehouse workers and management at a big-box store in the Hudson Valley, which is facing austerity measures in the face of Amazon and a slumping regional economy. Waldman incorporates 19th-century pastiche that is, frankly, refreshing after the rise and wane of the autofiction boom: The book even opens with a “family tree” style graphic at the start, in the form of an org chart of the workers. Help Wanted posits questions to the landscape at large: What does the working-class novel look like in the 21st century? And can a traditional novel capture the spirit of modern life? —D.O.

$29 at Amazon

$26.96 at Bookshop

James, by Percival Everett (March 19)

Everett is the hardest-working writer in America. The prolific writer — whose 2001 novel, Erasure, was adapted by Cord Jefferson into the recent film American Fiction — is set to publish his fourth novel in the past four years. James is a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the perspective of Jim as he escapes the slave trade. Everett has experimented with form his whole career: He’s retold Greek mythology, created stories within stories, reimagined his own identity as a character within a novel, and is now taking on the roots of American literature and myth head on. James’s epigraph is a snapshot of songs from the notebook of Daniel Decatur Emmett, a founder of the first blackface minstrel troupe, a wink at how Jim will play his intelligence to survive amidst his white counterparts. —D.O.

$28 at Amazon

$26.04 at Bookshop

April

Porn: An Oral History, by Polly Barton (April 2)

Barton, a British writer and translator, looks past the way some have learned to speak intellectually or objectively about pornography, as if it were at a remove from their reality. In this rare U.S. release by Fitzcarraldo Editions, British publisher and tastemaker of ambitious European literature, Barton collected 19 intimate conversations about porn that took place during the height of pandemic social distancing. Each person is anonymous, introduced only by age, gender, relationship status, and sexuality; they range in age from someone in their 80s who recalls getting off to Lady Chatterley’s Lover to people in their 20s who grew up on the internet. One person describes navigating an internet security lock that their partner accidentally installed, another describes a partner crashing a home computer by trying to find porn online; most describe the tricky web of porn consumption and relationships. —D.O.

$18 at Amazon

$16.69 at Bookshop

Sociopath: A Memoir, by Patric Gagne (April 2)

What if you could only release a terrible pressure by provoking a strong feeling — by stealing a car, or crashing a funeral? Patric Gagne’s Sociopath tells how the writer (who herself has been diagnosed as a sociopath) learned to stop treating her inability to identify her feelings by committing petty crimes, and to start trying talk therapy and building strong relationships instead. She studies her way out of sociopathic behavior, using her therapist as a study buddy and relationship counselor both, as well as building her own clinical practice, with a specialty in sociopaths. Read with care; you might find something here wildly specific to your own interior life. Then what will you do? —Choire Sicha

$29 at Amazon

$26.96 at Bookshop

What Kingdom, by Fine Gråbøl; translated from Danish by Martin Aitken (April 16)

This debut novel centers around the minute day-to-days of a patient in a mental hospital. Gråbøl, a Danish poet beloved by the likes of Olga Ravn and Celia Paul, weaves an intricate picture of a life lived under rules and restraint by creating a text that is simultaneously demure and porous, with an elliptical structure. (Some sections are only a paragraph long.) The narrator seems to mark her reality by fixating on physical objects: “I’m especially absorbed by the chairs; the way they receive me and others in the room, the light on them in the mornings,” she starts one section, before concluding: “I’m not mute, but I leave language to the room around me.” This book is especially exciting because its publisher, Archipelago, rarely puts out debut fiction, and the cover features artwork by Karoline Ebbesen, a Danish painter who was admitted to a mental asylum in 1885 and lived there for the next 50 years. —D.O.

$16.74 at Bookshop

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushdie (April 16)

The celebrated author tackles the brutal 2022 stabbing that almost killed him and left him sightless in one eye. Rushdie has lived under the threat of violence since 1989, when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering his execution for his depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses; although Iran’s government did not take credit for last year’s attack, Iranian media has expressed approval. “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” Rushdie has said. This is sure to be an intimate book about trauma and how to step back into life after being in hiding — as well as how to go on living after violence nearly takes it all away. —J.V.

$28 at Amazon

$26.04 at Bookshop

Real Americans, by Rachel Khong (April 30)

Lily Chen is an intern at a glossy magazine in 1999, right at the end of the expense-account era, who enters the orbit of a slightly older, much richer man named Matthew, the nephew of her boss. Years later, her son, Nick, attempts to find out the truth about his family and racial identity, troubled by the sense that his mother, who’s raising him alone in Washington state, is keeping something essential from him. Khong’s second novel — after 2017’s Goodbye, Vitamin — looks at the silences and gaps that form between generations with an eye toward both science and the surreal. —E.A.

$29 at Amazon

$26.97 at Bookshop

May

Black Meme: The History of the Images That Make Us, by Legacy Russell (May 7)

Russell’s 2020 hybrid nonfiction work, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, argued that the gap offered by technology between the body, gender, and the mind can harbor revolution. In her follow-up, Russell — now the executive director and chief curator of New York experimental art institution the Kitchen — explores American Black visual culture and identity creation from 1900 onward. From Michael Jackson’s “viral Zombiism” in “Thriller” to “memetic royalties” in Paris Is Burning to the “meme afterlife” of Lavish Reynolds’s Facebook Live recording of a police officer killing her boyfriend Philando Castile, Russell teases out how Black life and Black death shaped viral culture even before the birth of the internet. —J.V.

$20 at Amazon

$18.55 at Bookshop

Rebel Girl: My Life As a Feminist Punk, by Kathleen Hanna (May 14)

Almost a quarter of a century — believe it or not — after founding Bikini Kill with three college classmates and forcibly reconfiguring the male-dominated punk world, Hanna has written a memoir. Her unstable childhood, her zines and bands and friendships, and her relationship with Adam Horowitz of Beastie Boys are all detailed here, as well as the years she spent seriously ill with Lyme disease. Hanna is an icon of ’90s feminism. But she hasn’t been shy about assessing the riot grrrl movement’s blind spots and failures along with its achievements, which should make this especially interesting to read. —E.A.

$30 at Amazon

$27.89 at Bookshop

This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud (May 14)

Messud’s semi-autobiographical novel, her sixth, charts a course through five generations of Cassars, a family of pieds-noirs — people of French descent who settled in Algeria during France’s colonial rule — that gets displaced by the mayhem of war. In 1940, as the Germans advance on Paris, 8-year-old François Cassar, his younger sister, and his mother travel to L’Arba, a “dusty little town” on the fringes of Algiers. There, they move into a distant relative’s cluttered house and wait for news from their navy officer father and husband. Even decades later, François struggles to understand the forces that continue to draw his family apart. —E.A.

$30 at Amazon

$27.89 at Bookshop

Love Junkie, by Robert Plunket (May 14)

Robert Plunket — formerly of New York, currently of Florida — may be on the heels of becoming actually famous with this reissue of his 1992 novel. Mimi Smothers, a housewife back from a long stint in Iran with her chemical-engineer husband, has just moved to the Westchester village of Bronxville. After throwing a disastrous party for “Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III” through a volunteer job at the NY Arts Council, Mimi is sent down a long depressed tailspin that leads her to become part of a New York gay society through her boss, Tom Potts. There, she falls in love with Joel, a gay pornstar, and proceeds to become his doormat by assisting with his side gig, a male order service sending dirty underwear to fans. Mimi is a naïve yet vulgarly pathetic character, who judges everyone’s designer clothes while wearing Bermuda shorts and frumpy sweaters. One could read it thinking of the film that never was. (Madonna loved it so much she once bought the film rights.) —D.O.

$17 at Amazon

$15.76 at Bookshop

June

Parade, by Rachel Cusk (June 18)

With 2021’s Second Place — inspired by Mabel Dodge’s account of D.H. Lawrence’s visit to Taos, New Mexico — Cusk reminded her devotees that she can do more than write in a seemingly autobiographical mode. Now the author returns with Parade, which promises to subvert the conventions of the novel. We’ve seen bits of the book already: In the braided New Yorker short story “The Stuntman,” an artist begins painting his wife upside-down; then, on the streets of Paris, one woman physically attacks another, turning to admire the result before fleeing. “I believed that the relationship between visual art and human character was more violent and psychologically revelatory than that between authors and their words,” Cusk said of the story. If Parade resembles what we’ve seen so far, expect a masterful marriage of her fictional and essayistic modes probing moral questions about cruelty, relationships, and art. —J.V.

$27 at Amazon

$25.11 at Bookshop

July

The Coin, by Yasmin Zaher (July 9)

An elegant lady moves to New York, a place she finds depressing and filthy and which she comes to fear is filthifying her. But what choice does she have? She’s Palestinian, and for all her family’s money none of them had ever managed to leave — until now. In her debut novel, Zaher draws a Venn diagram of the glamorously neurotic and the politically oppressed, then sets her protagonist spinning in that maddening little overlap. —Madeline Leung Coleman

$27 at Amazon

$25.11 at Bookshop

August

An Honest Woman, by Charlotte Shane (August 13)

The author and essayist returns with a rigorous and compulsively readable memoir about her career as a sex worker and the possibilities of romantic love between men and women. Shane excavates her relationships with her father and the boys she grew up with, measuring the harm of inherited lessons about sex and the value of girls’ hotness against the power and freedom sex work later afforded her. “My sense that I wasn’t sexually appealing could have kept me from sex work,” she writes, “but instead, I think, it drove me to it.” This personal and professional investigation resonates and entices. —J.V.

$26 at Amazon

$24.17 at Bookshop

The Volcano Daughters, by Gina María Balibrera (August 20)

In this novel, based on the 1932 massacre of up to 30,000 mostly Indigenous people in El Salvador, a pair of sisters flee genocide: Garciela, who was raised in a community perched near a volcano but removed at age 9 and forced to serve as an oracle to dictator “El Gran Pendejo” (The Big Asshole), and her long-lost sister Consuelo. As the years pass and Garciela’s gruesome prophetic visions take shape, the sisters escape to Paris, California, and beyond, variously losing and recovering each other. “Stories all have masters who control the way they’re told and whom they’re told to,” the author writes. This tale is told by a chorus of lively ghosts, who “are dead but we sing, we cackle, we lose our shit, we tell you exactly what we think …” A bilingual, mythological, and original debut about resistance and survival. —J.V.

$28 at Amazon

$26.04 at Bookshop

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