A remarkable number of intriguing books are coming out in the four weeks between February 25 and March 25. These are the ones I've been most looking forward to:
→ THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker (February 25): I loved the big, bold premises and fantastic execution of Walker's previous two novels. In THE AGE OF MIRACLES, Earth's rotation begins to slow. In THE DREAMERS, a town is gripped by an epidemic of sleep. The speculative stakes are more personal this time, with a single character "struck by a mysterious psychological affliction," but since Walker's characterizations are always excellent, I'm expecting another fascinating story.
→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes (February 25): I first became a fan of Holmes through the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, so I'm delighted that her new book revolves around podcasting. This is sure to be another smart and funny romance, like EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER and FLYING SOLO.
→ WOODWORKING by Emily St. James (March 4): St. James is a television critic I've been following for years. Her debut novel has a ton of potential for great character connections and conflicts: A high school teacher realizes she's trans, and she seeks the guidance of the only other trans woman she knows, who is one of her students.
→ STAG DANCE by Torrey Peters (March 11): The drama, humor, and raw honesty of DETRANSITION, BABY captivated me, so I'm eager to read more from Peters. Her new book is a collection of four stories (billed as "one novel and three novellas") examining gender across a range of genres—including a tall tale about lumberjacks.
→ THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones (March 18): The only one of Jones's many, many novels I've read so far is THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS, but it's stayed with me for both the compelling story and the horrifying mental images. So I'm excited and scared to pick up his latest, a vampire story set at multiple points in the history of the American west.
→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal (March 18): I've enjoyed Kowal's Lady Astronaut series, an alternate history in which the space program is accelerated and given higher stakes by a meteor strike that wreaks havoc on Earth. This is the fourth book, and I believe originally planned as the last, though Kowal has probably left room to write more (and has already published many short stories from the same universe).
→ TILT by Emma Pattee (March 25): This is a debut by an author I have no previous experience with, but I knew I'd be reading it when I saw the premise: A big, big earthquake strikes Portland, Oregon, and a character at the end of her pregnancy tries to walk home through the wreckage. I've heard good things.
Good Stuff Out There:
→ Emily Temple at Literary Hub asks, What should the cover of Pride and Prejudice look like?: "...despite the fact that we're told not to judge books by their covers, we do. Like the clothes you wear (as Austen herself would confirm), a book's cover does—or at least can—change our perception of it, even after it's been read. Book covers can provide a kind of tonal context, or at least give the reader some hints as to how its publisher wants the text to be understood. It's easy, despite that, for a great book to transcend a dopey cover—many have done this—but it's also possible for a great cover to elevate our experience of a dopey book. A little, anyway. Perception being, after all, reality."
2 comments:
I'll need to see this list.
I will of course be posting my reactions to the books once I've read them, and I'll let you know which I think you'd like!
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