It’s almost time to stop searching for beach-reads and start considering titles to curl up with beside a fire. What about a dystopian techno-futurist fantasy? Or a history of Wikipedia? All joking aside, this season’s best new releases will be just as enjoyable tucked inside a quiet cafe as on a park bench under the foliage. Pulitzer winners and cultural critics alike are publishing titles so good, they’re sure to be the subject of all your dinner party conversations this fall.
Agrippa by Robert Harris
Genre: Historical Fiction
When: Sept. 1
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The best-selling author of Conclave (the book behind everyone’s favorite papal Oscar-winner) returns with an immersive exploration of ancient Rome’s descent into dictatorship.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Who’s ready to see the Caesar and Octavious fan edits this fall? Hot off the heels of Conclave’s cultural takeover, Agrippa is sure to strike up a similar frenzy.
American Scoundrel by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark
Genre: Biography
When: Sep. 1
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Most recently, readers will remember Kai Bird as the Pulitzer-winning author of American Prometheus, the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Now, he’s joined by Goldmark, his wife and researcher, in deconstructing the life of Roy Cohn.
Why It’s Worth a Look: After serving as the chief aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, Cohn became a mentor to a young Donald Trump, shaping the philosophies and tactics that have come to define contemporary American life.
The Castle by Jon Ronson
Genre: Psychology
When: Sep. 1
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, famously beloved by shame-ees like Harry Styles, is back with a deep dive into the masculinity crisis.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Promising to be Ronson’s “darkest book yet,” the author balances humor and genuine distress in this look at the lengths men are willing to go to achieve the dreams they’ve been sold—often by dubious means.
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Sept. 1
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Booker Prize–winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings returns with another doorstop. This time, we’re teleported to 1980s Jamaica.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Embedded in this story, which centers eight gay men brutally beaten while rehearsing for a play, is a fascinating examination of the violence otherness can inspire, and how a community becomes complicit.
Switzy by Emma Cline
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Sept. 8
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Cline’s latest sees a man sitting idly on a private plane with his assistant. He’s heading out on an unremarkable journey to visit his daughter in the U.K., and see a friend in France. But he finds himself unraveling along the way.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Over the course of his travels, our protagonist confronts the promises he made over a lifetime, the accomplishments he sacrificed for, and what he’s left with as he drifts from scene to scene.
Taipei Story by R.F. Kuang
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Sept. 8
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Katabasis and Yellowface author offers a coming-of-age story set at an intensive language program in, of course, Taipei.
Why It’s Worth a Look: When Lily Chen—a Chinese-American student who traveled to Taipei to connect with her roots—learns her grandfather has died, she’s forced to accept the incomplete family history that remains.
Roll the Calls by Ari Emanuel
Genre: Memoir
When: Sep. 22
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Ari Emanuel is one of our most famous dealmakers—the CEO of WME and inspiration behind Entourage’s Ari Gold. Now, he’s emptying out the skeletons in his closet.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Roll the Calls promises both a classic, American rags-to-riches tale, as well as a dishy look inside the entertainment biz. This is no formal, tame, legacy write-up.
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Sept. 29
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Pachinko author returns with a story about a middle-class Korean family upended by the 1997 financial crisis.
Why It’s Worth a Look: As the Koh family relocates, first to Sydney and then to Southern California, the author spins a moving account of immigration and assimilation across generations.
No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention by Mahmoud Khalil
Genre: Memoir
When: Sept. 29
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Palestinian activist and Columbia graduate student recounts his unlawful arrest from his New York home by ICE agents and his time spent in a Louisiana detention center.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Locked up under the threat of deportation, Khalil reflects on what it means to be unlawfully targeted by an unrestrained government, and the cruel realities of the immigration camps he was held in during the birth of his son.
Ply by Hernan Diaz
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Sept. 29
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust imagines a future overrun by technology. An orphan in this dismantled society becomes a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity to sell it on the black market.
Why It’s Worth a Look: A society “overrun by technology” sounds remarkably close to what we already have, doesn’t it? Diaz offers a sharp critique of our lack of course correction.
This Cursed Beautiful Land by Evan Gershkovich
Genre: Memoir
When: Sept. 29
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: After being arrested under false espionage charges in Ukraine, Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal writer, recounts his almost 16-month detention in a Russian prison.
Why It’s Worth a Look: An American child of Russian immigrants, the former The Moscow Times reporter imbues his memoir with a sense of humor and humanity, all documented from within a small cement cell.
Blockers by Michael Lewis
Genre: Political Science
When: Oct. 6
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Lewis tells the stories of six dedicated government employees known as “blockers” who lost their jobs under the early days of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Why It’s Worth a Look: If Lewis could make mortgages thrilling in The Big Short and statistics sexy in Moneyball, he is sure to pen a gripping account of the security guards, scientists, and wildfire experts wrongly deemed “no longer necessary” in making America run.
Agate Head/Stone Soup by Patricia Lockwood
Genre: Poetry
When: Oct. 6
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: A poetry collection in two parts, Lockwood’s newest release traces her time as a metalsmith with her signature, memoiristic charm.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The quirkier the poem, the better. The Booker Prize-finalist poet crafts intimate and comedic passages about robot dogs, Jane Austen, and… McLovin?
Partita By Barbara Kingsolver
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Oct. 6
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Pulitzer-winning author of Demon Copperhead turns to a former music prodigy who moves back to the farm country where she grew up. She finds peace in the outdoors—until a call from a former lover exposes the fault lines in the life she’s built.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Kingsolver shifts between past and present in this account of how the decisions we make, no matter how small, reverberate through the years.
The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke
Genre: History
When: Oct. 13
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Cooke chronicles the encyclopedic creation, history, and cultural dominance of Wikipedia, the largest repository of human knowledge ever collected.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Here, Cooke examines what it could mean to lose a wealth of shared, human-generated content during the uncertain, unregulated age of AI.
Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Oct. 13
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Just one year after winning the Pulitzer Prize for her memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li is back with her first novel in almost five years about two young musicians dashing around Europe in the midst of the Romantic Era.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Li explores salient modern topics through a historical lens, asking what it means to be an artist during a time of upheaval, the lengths one goes to for artistic success, and how much love is worth sacrificing along the way.
Citizen Kim by Jonathan Van Meter
Genre: Biography
When: Oct. 27
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The culture journalist shines a new light on America’s most well-known face. The biography is culled from hours of interviews with Kim Kardashian’s inner circle, and the icon herself.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Van Meter looks past the tabloid fixation on Kardashian’s years of reality television stardom and public scandal to paint an unlikely and complex portrait of a businesswoman, criminal justice reform advocate, fashion muse, and mother.
The Revolutionary: Zohran Mamdani and the Remaking of American Politics by Ross Barkan
Genre: Nonfiction
When: October 27
Where: Rizzoli
What it is: A little under a year after Zohran Mamdani’s election, Barkan traces the New York mayor’s unlikely rise to power, talks to the friends and enemies he’s made along the way, and explores the newer, younger era of politics Mamdani is ushering in.
Why it’s worth a look: It’s a particularly salient subject for Barkan. Before his own rise in politics, Mamdani was one of a number of young idealists working on Barkan’s own 2017 senate campaign.
On the Calculation of Volume, Book V by Solvej Balle
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: Nov. 17
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: In the fifth installment of Balle’s time loop series, protagonist Tara Setler has become accustomed to her unusual life, and finally begins to reckon with what she’s gained and lost in her estrangement from the humanity around her.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Balle deftly turns this supernatural premise into an examination of the all-too-human realities of loss, marriage, and connection.
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