From a photobook by a literary Nobel Prize winner to a spy thriller about eco-anarchists from one of our great American novelists, the fall season features many of the year's best titles. CULTURED narrowed down a list of must-reads including a chronicle of Sophie Calle's surprisingly literary conceptual project documenting strangers (and friends) sleeping in her bed as well as the Paris-based Turkish novelist Ayşegül Savaş's study of early motherhood.
SEPTEMBER
Creation Lake
By Rachel Kushner
Scribner, September 3
In previous work, like 2013’s The Flamethrowers—centered on a woman artist in the 1970s moving from the rough streets of the downtown New York art scene to the rugged desert of land art in the American West—Kushner kept alive the dream of the great American novel, through the telescoping capaciousness of her prose, folding a complex and vivid universe tidily into a book like an heir of Don DeLillo.
With Creation Lake longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Kushner adheres more closely to the established genre-trappings of the spy thriller. In it, Kushner has written a page-turner saturated with sensory detail: an American spy, Sadie Smith, employed by a non-governmental agency to surveil a group of environmental activists in the French countryside, becomes ensnared by their charismatic leader.
Small Rain
By Garth Greenwell
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 3
In Small Rain, Garth Greenwell has written an affecting portrait of a man in the intensive care unit of an Iowa hospital following the sudden onset of mysterious pain. The novel crafts a portrait, both tender and abject, of life lived in close proximity to death under medical care, with art (especially poetry and music) and human connection as vitally buoying.
My Lesbian Novel
By Renee Gladman
Dorothy Project, September 17
If Renee Gladman’s work appeared in translation into English from a European language on a press like New Directions, she would likely be seen as a contender for the Nobel Prize. But instead, her continuous innovation in American English–from her early poetry, through the speculative fiction of her expansive Ravickian series, and to her signature essays, as in 2016’s Calamities—has left Gladman an under-recognized if widely influential literary figure. Her work continues to zig and zag around the expectations of genre.
Unsurprisingly, here, Gladman doesn’t simply deliver the lesbian novel you may expect from the title, though italicized flashes of a novel are found interspersed alongside the central dialogue between an interviewer and a character named Renee Gladman. The resulting book moves from intellectual ambition to bodily yearning, while exploring Gladman’s own compulsions to articulate thought in writing or to transcribe gesture in drawing. Gladman is also an accomplished visual artist, having had a solo show of works on paper at New York's Artists Space in 2023.
OCTOBER
The Use of Photography
By Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer
Seven Stories Press, October 1
For the last five decades, Annie Ernaux has documented her life with transparent frankness through a series of remarkable books for which she was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Use of Photography records her love affair with the journalist and, here, her coauthor, Marc Marie, pairing collaborative prose with a series of photographs. Of the photos, Ernaux writes, “eroticism is only represented by the abandoned clothes.” The book also documents Ernaux’s treatment at the Institut Curie for breast cancer and was written just prior to her landmark achievement, The Years.
The Wilderness
By Ayşegül Savaş
Transit Books (Undelivered Lecture Series), October 1
In her debut work of nonfiction, The Wilderness, the Paris-based Turkish novelist Ayşegül Savaş examines the transformation encountered when giving birth and becoming a mother, looking to the mythic significance of the first 40 days. “In Turkish, we speak of extracting the forty days, like a sort of exorcism. My grandmothers assure me that it will all get better after forty days are out,” she writes. Savaş distills and examines this limit-experience in a potent book that just barely surpasses 100 pages.
Ripcord and My Dead Book
By Nate Lippens with introduction by Eileen Myles
Semiotext(e), October 22
My Dead Book, by Nate Lippens, was the most memorable reading experience of the year for me when it was first released in 2021 by the small press Publication Studio. It then went on to break through in the U.K. in an edition by Pilot Press (iconic with its Jimmy De Sana cover photo). This fall gifts us with a new Semiotext(e) edition of My Dead Book, introduced by Eileen Myles, alongside a new book, Ripcord (simultaneously released by Pilot Press in a U.K. edition), which continues Lippens’s signature wit: dark and wry, queer and hilarious. The narrator of Ripcord, heartbroken after an affair with a married man, thinks of “Marianne Faithfull describing her voice as ‘loaded with time,’” (a fitting description of Lippens’s own) then asks: “What can you do but sing?”
NOVEMBER
The Sleepers
Sophie Calle, translated from French by Emma Ramadan
Siglio Press, November 2024
Sophie Calle is one of the great artist-anthropologists of our time. Siglio Press first published The Address Book in 2012, giving English-language readers access to Calle’s mischievous examinations of human behavior. In that project, a lost address book, found on the streets of Paris, was used to create a portrait of its owner by interviewing everyone listed within, resulting in an artists’ book that is equal parts photobook and literary examination, written in a distinctive detective-like tone.
Siglio’s latest Calle release, finely translated by Emma Ramadan, captures a similarly documentary mode. For The Sleepers, Calle invited and observed participants willing to sleep and be observed and photographed in the artist’s own bed. The resulting text, accompanied with 198 photographs that comprised her 1979 installation of the same title, is both a literary achievement and a document of a seminal performance at the start of her singular career. The release coincides with Calle's first U.S. career survey, "Overshare," at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland
New Directions, November 18
Tara Selter keeps reliving the same day, Nov. 18 (cleverly, also the release date of the U.S. edition). Rather than Groundhog Day, the 1993 film starring Bill Murray, which shares a similar conceit, the book more closely recalls, and brings poetic attention to, the cycles of domestic routine: the sounds of a long-lived-in house, the predictable habits of a spouse, and the steady established rhythm of a day. The novel opens on the 122nd Nov. 18 Selter has lived and Solvej Balle deftly attunes the reader into each repeating detail, rendering repetition into attentive nuance. The resulting book is a hypnotic feat of prose writing, and the first in a septology, Book II (which moves beyond Selter’s repeated Nov. 18), is simultaneously published, so you needn’t wait for the next translation to see where the series goes next.
