As the new year steams into action, the book season gets in full gear as well, greeting spring, summer, and fall with a long list of titles worth noting. From fiction that focuses on a range of contemporary concerns, to nonfiction reminding us that the past is always prologue, to poetry that summons attention, these are works to know, share, and read.

TURNING POINTS
In Michael Chabon’s The Night Garden (Harper, Oct.), a neuroscientist’s life is transformed when she encounters a psychotropic guru, while Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Riverhead, Feb.) features a woman who escapes the roiling world by entering a convent, and a gay Black painter navigates love and work in Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, Oct.). More transformative moments: Katie Kitamura’s Audition (Riverhead, Apr.), edgy roleplaying by a star actress and much younger man; Joan Silber’s Mercy (Counterpoint, Sept.), the consequences of abandoning an overdosing friend; Brendan Slocumb’s The Dark Maestro (Doubleday, May), a cello virtuoso’s challenges to criminals threatening his family; Thomas Schlesser’s Mona’s Eyes (Europa, Sept.), a man’s weekly museum visits with a granddaughter who is going blind; Lydi Conklin’s Songs of No Provenance (Catapult, Jun.), an indie folk singer’s fears for her career after an onstage indiscretion; Natalie Bakopoulos’s Archipelago (Tin House, Aug.), a translator’s changing sense of identity; Eric Puchner’s Dream State (Doubleday, Feb.), a bride’s shifting sense of the world when she meets her husband’s best man; and Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead, Sept.), a woman’s steep and sudden collapse into a severe mental illness. See also Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The School of Night (Penguin Pr., Sept.; tr. from Norwegian by Martin Aiken), battling ugly temptation; Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth (Atlantic Monthly, Feb.), recalling South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings; Adriana Trigiani’s The View from Lake Como (Dutton, Jul.), fleeing family secrets for glorious Italy; Lisa Scottoline’s The Unraveling of Julia (Grand Central, Jul.), inheriting a Tuscan villa and uncovering conspiracy; M.L. Rio’s Hot Wax (S. & S., Sept.), recalling violence on a long-ago rock-and-roll road trip; and Lisa Genova’s More or Less Maddy (Gallery: Scout, Jan.), choosing a career in stand-up comedy while dealing with bipolar disorder.

THE PARENT-CHILD BOND
Bryan Washington’s Palaver (Farrar, Nov.) features the complex love between a mother and grown son, while Lina relies on friends from centuries past to face her father’s confessions in Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records (Norton, May), and Carlos uses Grimms’ fairy tales to discover the father he never knew in Juan José Millás’s Only Smoke (Bellevue Literary, May; tr. from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead & Daniel Hahn). Two autobiographical tales: Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl (Knopf, Oct.), about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and actress Sonya Walger’s Lion (New York Review Bks., Feb.), about a fraught father-daughter relationship. See also Daniel Black’s Isaac’s Song (Hanover Square, Jan.), the queer Black son addressed in Black’s Don’t Cry for Me finding himself; Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes (Random, Apr.), a gay Black man facing his father’s death; Jojo Moyes’s We All Live Here (Pamela Dorman: Viking, Feb.), a put-upon woman resenting the return of her long-gone father; Claire Adam’s Love Forms (Hogarth, Jul.), a woman searching for the daughter she surrendered; Adam Haslett’s Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown, Jan.), an asylum lawyer and his mother addressing their estrangement; and Yrsa Daley-Ward’s The Catch (Liveright, Jun.), the first in the “Well-Read Black Girl × Liveright” series, with sisters believing they’ve seen their long-lost mother. Plus three touted debuts: Evanthia Bromiley’s Crown (Grove, Jun.), a pregnant single mother facing eviction; Quiara Alegria Hudes’s The White Hot (One World, Oct.), a teenage mother flees home; and Sam Sussman’s Boy from the North Country (Penguin Pr., Sept.), a son tending his dying mother.

COMING TOGETHER, COMING APART
FAMILY. Half siblings discover one another in Kevin Wilson’s Run for the Hills (Ecco, May), family ties to the Kingdom of the Happy Land emerge in Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Happy Land (Berkley, Apr.), and Gary Shteyngart’s Vera, or Faith (Random, Jul.) portrays a family with Russian, Korean, Jewish, and Protestant heritage beginning to shred. See also Jennifer Haigh’s Rabbit Moon (Little, Brown, Apr.), corrosively divorced parents confronting their daughter’s serious injury; Jess Walter’s So Far Gone (Harper, Jun.), a recluse seeking his kidnapped grandchildren; Susan Choi’s Flashlight (Farrar, Jun.), a father’s disappearance on the beach shattering his family; and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Untitled (Doubleday, Nov.), which considers what family means. Jeanine Cummins’s Speak to Me of Home (Holt, May) offers the multigenerational story of an uprooted Puerto Rican family; Jennifer Weiner’s The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits (Morrow, Apr.), a tale of two pop-group sisters; Sarah MacLean’s These Summer Storms (Ballantine, Jul.), a deceased father’s divisive inheritance game; and Bernhard Schlink’s The Granddaughter (HarperVia, Jan.; tr. from German by Charlotte Collins), a man’s search for the child abandoned by his deceased wife when she fled East Germany. In the alternative Japan of Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World (Grove, Apr.; tr. from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori), artificial insemination is de rigueur.

COMMUNITY. In Susan Straight’s Sacrament (Counterpoint, Oct.), California nurses bond when the pandemic hits. Tanya Guerrero’s Cat’s People (Delacorte, Apr.) features five strangers brought together by a stray cat; Ron Rindo’s Life, and Death, and Giants (St. Martin’s, Sept.), a small Wisconsin town as seen by a boy who grows to be a giant; Nell Zink’s Sister Europe (Knopf, Mar.), a fractious literary celebration in Berlin; Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion (Farrar, Aug.), a Black Southern community upended by events surrounding the preacher’s son; and Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (S. & S., Apr.), old friends, estranged siblings, and past lovers struggling to control the government of the Passage Rouge Nation.

FRIENDSHIP. Fredrik Backman’s My Friends (Atria, Jun.) reveals the close bonds of three small figures in a painting. Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness (Mariner, Sept.) features five Black women friends over 25 years; Lisa Ridzén’s When the Cranes FlySouth (Vintage, Aug.; tr. from Swedish by Alice Menzies), an aging man threatened with the loss of his one comfort: his dog; and Lisa Harding’s The Wildelings (HarperVia, Apr.), a friendship splintered by a blazingly alluring classmate.

ISSUES
In Colum McCann’s Twist (Random, Mar.), an Irish journalist covering underwater cables realizes the huge human cost of technology, while Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron, Mar.) is set on an Antarctica-adjacent island storing the world’s largest seed bank and threatened by rising sea levels. More big titles: Natasha Brown’s Universality (Random, Mar.), with violence at a Yorkshire rave disclosing the dangers of ideology, also disclosed in Mathias Énard’s The Deserters (New Directions, May; tr. from French by Charlotte Mandell), opening with a ragged soldier fleeing an unnamed war; Yoko Tawada’s Archipelago of the Sun (New Directions, Fall; tr. from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani), third in a trilogy about locating a lost Japan; Jason Mott’s People Like Us (Dutton, Aug.), two Black writers seeking peace in a gun-splattered world; Won-pyung Sohn’s Counterattacks at Thirty (HarperVia, Mar.; tr. from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert), about a group of young Koreans defying their bosses; Sergei Lebedev’s The Lady of the Mine (New Vessel, Jan.; tr. from Russian by Antonina W. Bouis), with secrets long sealed in a Ukrainian coalmine shaft continuing to reverberate; Nancy Johnson’s People of Means (Morrow, Feb.), a Black mother and daughter confronting racial injustice across decades; and Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me (Hogarth, Feb.; tr. from Spanish by Robin Myers & Sarah Booker), using poetry to secure justice.

EXILE & IMMIGRATION
In Boris Fishman’s The Unwanted (Harper, Mar.), a family is driven from their unnamed country by civil war, while Maya Arad’s Happy New Years (New Vessel, Aug.; tr. from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen), comprises an immigrant’s annual New Year’s letters to old college friends in Israel. Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World (Red Hen, Apr.) portrays a Beirut Armenian family enduring the Lebanese Civil War, Xhenet Aliu’s Everybody Says It’s Everything (Random, Mar.) follows the diverging paths of adopted Albanian twins, and Sara Hamdan’s What Will People Think? (Holt, May) and Betty Shamieh’s Too Soon (Avid Reader: S. & S., Jan.) both feature Palestinian Americans.

HISTORICAL: INTERNATIONAL
Titles that take readers back include Zora Neale Hurston’s revisionist, never-published The Life of Herod the Great (Amistad, Feb.); Ken Follett’s Circle of Days (Grand Central, Sept.), on building Stonehenge; Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) (Farrar, Apr.; tr. from French by Sam Taylor), an artist’s murder in Renaissance Florence; Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder (MCD, Oct.), a girl becoming queen of the Tu‘i Tonga Empire; Olive Senior’s Paradise Once (Akashic, Jun.), the 1513 Spanish massacre of a Cuban village; Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (New Directions, Fall; tr. from Danish by Martin Aitken), witchcraft trials in 1600s Europe; and Isabel Allende’s My Name Is Emilia del Valle (Ballantine, May; tr. from Spanish by Frances Riddle), a young writer’s journey to 1800s South America. Moving forward, Anne Berest & Claire Berest’s Gabriële (Europa, Apr.; tr. from French by Tina Kover) features love during the Belle Époque; Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier (New Vessel, May; tr. from Dutch by David McKay), an amnesiac Belgian soldier post–World War I; Shokoofeh Azar’s The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen (Europa, May), 50 years of modern Iranian history; and Ruben Reyes Jr.’s Archive of Unknown Universes (Mariner, Jul.), alternate viewpoints probing the Salvadoran war.

HISTORICAL: UNITED STATES
Princess Joy L. Perry’s portrays This Here Is Love (Norton, Aug.), two enslaved people and an indentured servant in 1690s Tidewater, VA; Lauren Willig’s The Girl from Greenwich Street: A Novel of Hamilton, Burr, and America’s First Murder Trial (Morrow, Mar.), rival lawyers working together for the defense; Morgan Jerkins’s Zeal (Harper, Apr.), romance and the legacy of enslavement, entwined; Norman Lock’s Eden’s Clock (Bellevue Literary, Jul.), a disabled Civil War veteran’s meet-up with Jack London; Dan Chaon’s 1915-set One of Us (Holt, Sept.), the fate of orphaned twins; Brian Castleberry’s The Californians (Mariner, Mar.), the great Western dream, from early cinema to nonfungible tokens; Brianna Labuskes’s Depression-era The Boxcar Librarian (Morrow, Mar.), on-the-rails libraries; Karen Russell’s The Antidote (Knopf, Mar.), a Nebraska town during the Dust Bowl; and Nishant Batsha’s A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (Ecco, Jul.), revolutionary stirring at Stanford University, prewar.

HISTORICAL: WORLD WAR II ERA
Pam Jenoff’s Last Twilight in Paris (Park Row, Feb.) pictures a Parisian department store turned Nazi prison; Danielle Steel’s Far from Home (Delacorte, Mar.), a woman hiding in Occupied France after her husband is shot in Germany as a traitor; and Alice Austen’s 33 Place Brugmann (Grove, Mar.), life in a Belgian Beaux-Arts apartment house during the war. See also Joseph O’Connor’s The Ghosts of Rome (Europa, Feb.), second in the “Rome Escape Line Trilogy” featuring Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty; Martha Hall Kelly’s The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club (Ballantine, May), with shared reading sustaining the community during wartime; Cara Black’s Huguette (Soho Crime, Dec.), a young woman’s post-Liberation survival; and David Wright Faladé’s The New Internationals (Atlantic Monthly, Jan.), cross-cultural weavings in postwar Paris. Plus two fantastical titles: Hayley Gelfuso’s The Book of Lost Hours (Atria, Aug.), moving from Kristallnacht through the Cold War and featuring a library storing memories in books; and Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt (John Murray, Sept.), set in an alternate England where World War II had no victors.

ART IMITATES LIFE
Reimagining real-life figures: Phil Melanson’s Florenzer (Liveright, Jun.), about Leonardo da Vinci; Ariel Lawhon’s The Pirate Queen (Doubleday, Oct.), about Irish sea captain Grace O’Malley; Philippa Gregory’s Boleyn Traitor (Morrow, Oct.), about Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law, instrumental in the execution of two queens; Veronica Chapa’s Malinalli (Primero Sueño: Atria, Mar.), revisiting the Nahua interpreter who assisted Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés; Ariel Dorfman’s Allegro (Other Pr., Mar.), with Mozart theorizing that both Bach and Handel were murdered; Marie Benedict’s The Queens of Crime (St. Martin’s, Feb.), Agatha Christie vs. Dorothy Sayers; Tatiana de Rosnay’s Blonde Dust (Grand Central, Jun.), with Marilyn Monroe befriending a young maid; Jerome Charyn’s Maria La Divina (Bellevue Literary, Oct.), Maria Callas sings again; and Jessica Francis Kane’s Fonseca (Penguin Pr., Aug.), reconstructing author Penelope Fitzgerald’s travels to Mexico.

SF l FANTASY l ROMANTASY

SF. Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle (Tor.com, Aug.); Cory Doctorow’s Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel (Tor, Feb.); Martha Wells’s Queen Demon (Tor, Oct.); and John Scalzi’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye (Tor, Mar.); plus two debuts: Silvia Park’s Luminous (S. & S., Mar.), featuring three siblings (including a robot) in unified Korea, and Andrew Ludington’s Splinter Effect (Minotaur, Mar.), starring a time-traveling archaeologist.

Fantasy. Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author (Morrow, Jan.), Gregory Maguire’s Elphie: A Wicked Childhood (Morrow, Mar.), James Islington’s The Strength of the Few (Saga, Nov.), Sarah Beth Durst’s The Enchanted Greenhouse (Bramble: Tor, Jul.), Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting (Tor, Oct.), T. Kingfisher’s Hemlock & Silver (Tor, Aug.), and Hannah Whitten’s The Nightshade God (Orbit, Jul.), plus Cassandra Khaw’s The Library at Hellebore (Tor Nightfire, Jul.) and R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis (Harper Voyager, Aug.), both dark academia titles. See also Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved the Library (HarperVia, Apr.; tr. from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai), sequel to The Cat Who Saved Books; and Ayana Gray’s I, Medusa (Random, Nov.), a Black feminist reimagining of the Greek myth.

Romantasy. Falon Ballard’s Something Wicked, (Putnam, Oct.), inspired by Moulin Rouge! and Shakespeare, and Stacey McEwan’s Forbidden Alchemy (Saga, Jul.), plus big-hit sequels: Harper L. Woods’s The Damned (Bramble: Tor, Oct.), Jasmine Mas’s Bonds of Hercules (Canary Street, Oct.), Sarah A. Parker’s The Ballad of Falling Dragons (Avon, Oct.), and Olivia Rose Darling’s Wrath of the Dragons (Delacorte, Jul.).

MYSTERY
Intriguing offerings include Anthony Horowitz’s Marble Hall Murders (Harper, May), third in the metafictional series starring detective Atticus Pünd and editor Susan Ryeland; Ann Cleeves’s The Killing Stones (Minotaur, Sept.), featuring the return of Jimmy Perez several years after the “Shetland” series; Richard Osman’s Untitled (Pamela Dorman: Viking, Sept.), with the “Thursday Murder Club” author introducing a new detective duo; debuter Maha Khan Phillips’s The Museum Detective (Soho Crime, Apr.), inspired by a real-life antiquities scandal in Pakistan;Charles Finch’s The Hidden City (Minotaur, Nov.), about a cold case involving an apothecary; and Jasper Fforde’s Dark Reading Matter (Soho Crime, Nov.), last in the “Thursday Next” series.

THRILLERS
Newsworthy titles include James Patterson & Imogen Edwards-Jones’s The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe: A True Crime Thriller (Little, Brown, Dec.); Scott Turow’s Presumed Guilty (Grand Central, Jan.); Reese Witherspoon & Harlan Coben’s Untitled (Grand Central, Oct.); David Baldacci’s World War II London–set Strangers in Time (Grand Central, Apr.); and All That We See or Seem (Saga, Oct.), Hugo and Nebula Award winner Ken Liu’s first SF thriller. Series favorites include Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf (Minotaur, Oct.), Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child’s Badlands (Grand Central, Jun.), Lee Child & Andrew Child’s Exit Strategy (Delacorte, Oct.), Mick Herron’s Clown Town (Soho Crime, Sept.), Lisa Gardner’s Kiss Her Goodbye (Grand Central, Aug.), Karin Slaughter’s We Are All Guilty Here (Morrow, Aug.), Nelson DeMille & Alex DeMille’s Tin Men (S. & S., Oct.), and Janet Evanovich’s King’s Ransom (Atria, Oct.), featuring Gabriela Rose. See also S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes (Pine & Cedar: Flatiron, Jun.), about a Black Southern family countering organized crime; Stacy Willingham’s Forget Me Not (Minotaur, Aug.), about a sister’s long-ago disappearance; Allen Eskens’s The Quiet Librarian (Mulholland, Feb.), with murder linked to the Bosnian war; Hank Phillippi Ryan’s All This Could Be Yours (Minotaur, Sept.), the stalking of a popular new author; Patrick Hoffman’s Friends Helping Friends (Atlantic Monthly, Mar.), going undercover to nail a white-nationalist group; Elliot Ackerman’s Sheepdogs (Knopf, Aug.), with two Marines, the comic Skwerl and Cheese, on puzzling mission; and John Boyne’s uncategorizable The Elements (Holt, Sept.), four different perspectives on the same crime.

HORROR
Kicking off with two revelatory tales of cannibalism: Olivie Blake’s Girl Dinner (Tor, Oct.), with sorority girls and their snobbish moms into the latest wellness trend, and Lucy Rose’s buzzy The Lamb (Harper, Feb.), whose flesh-hungry mother and daughter suggest how women squelch their passions. See also Catriona Ward’s Nowhere Burning (Tor Nightfire, Oct.), with a Rocky Mountains refuge, perhaps also a prison, for runaway teens; Rachel Eve Moulton’s Tantrum (Putnam, Aug.), a woman realizing that her newborn baby girl is a monster; Michael Wehunt’s The October Film Haunt (St. Martin’s, Sept.), a horror-film fan dragged into the sequel of the scariest movie she’s ever seen; Yiğit Turhan’s Their Monstrous Hearts (MIRA, Apr.), the Turkish author’s English-language debut about a writer inheriting a villa that could inspire or kill him; Japanese sensation Uketsu’s Strange Pictures (HarperVia, Jan.; tr. from Japanese by Jim Rion), the tale of simple-looking pictures inspiring terror; Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Black Flame (Tor Nightfire, Aug.), about a woman’s obsession with a nefarious exploitation film thought destroyed during the Holocaust; Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy (Scribner, Mar.; tr. from Spanish by Sarah Moses), about a woman cloistered in a secretive order as violent as the world outside; Isabel Cañas’s The Possession of Alba Díaz (Berkley, Aug.), about demonic possession; and, from Scott Carson (a.k.a. Michael Koryta), Departure 37 (Emily Bestler: Atria, Aug.), contemporary horror rooted in a Cold War mystery.

WOMEN STEP OUT
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count (Knopf, Mar.), four women beginning to question their choices; Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters (Graywolf, Feb.), a son discovering his mother’s various personae, which embrace seven decades of Egyptian history; Mischa Berlinski’s Mona Acts Out (Liveright, Jan.), a famed actress suddenly abandoning the family on Thanksgiving; Emilia Hart’s The Sirens (St. Martin’s, Apr.), women connecting over two centuries, linked by the salty sea; and Lauren Grodstein’s A Dog in Georgia (Algonquin, Aug.), with a woman lost to herself heading to the republic of Georgia to find a dog that’s lost too. Art imitates art in Paul Griffiths’s Let Me Tell You and Let Me Go On (New York Review Bks., Apr.), combined novels with Ophelia telling Hamlet’s story.

FUTURIST GLIFFS
In Ali Smith’s near-future Gliff (Pantheon, Feb.), titled after the Scottish word meaning a transient moment, boundaries are constantly redrawn. Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know (Knopf, Sept.) features a lonely 22nd-century researcher seeking an early-2000s poem presaging catastrophe. Jayson Greene’s UnWorld (Knopf, Jun.) introduces four interconnected souls (including upload Aviva) struggling with Alex’s inexplicable death. Earth starts spinning faster in Alex Foster’s Circular Motion (Grove, May). And in Stacy Nathaniel Jackson’s Afrofuturist debut, The Ephemera Collector (Liveright, Apr.), an archivist dodges violence with help from AI.

LOVE IS COMPLICATED
In Mitch Albom’s Twice (Harper, Oct.), a man magically blessed with getting a second chance at everything finds it doesn’t apply to love, while a husband and wife investigate possibilities beyond their marriage in Ada Calhoun’s Crush (Viking, Feb.), and a happily married man is devastated when his younger boyfriend drops him in Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon (Viking, Sept.). In Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted (Other Pr., Mar.), partygoers at a masked ball see their relationships differently after meeting T.S. Eliot’s legendary fortuneteller, and debuter Morgan Pager’s The Art of Vanishing (Ballantine, Jul.) depicts a museum employee’s love affair with the man in a masterpiece. Boys find forbidden love in Tash Aw’s The South (Farrar, May) and Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven (Knopf, Apr.). Titles showing how past events and choices shape the way people love include Loretta Rothschild’s Finding Grace (St. Martin’s, Jun.), Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s The Other Wife (Riverhead, Jul.), André Aciman’s Room on the Sea: Three Novellas (Farrar, Jun.), Aisha Muharrar’s Loved One (Viking, Aug.), Eowyn Ivey’s Black Woods, Blue Sky (Random, Feb.), Evie Wyld’s The Echoes (Knopf, Feb.), and Daniel Saldaña Paris’s The Dance and the Fire (Catapult, Jul.).

COMING OF AGE
In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft (Riverhead, Mar.), three young people come together in a rapidly changing Tanzania, while two young people from India have trouble adjusting to the United States in Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, Sept.). More key titles: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Untitled (Pantheon, Oct.), with a boy’s freeing of two horses leading to trouble; Brandon Hobson’s The Devil Is a Southpaw (Ecco, Oct.), two boys forging a friendship in juvenile detention; Jade Chang’s What a Time To Be Alive (Ecco, Sept.), woebegone Lola suddenly becoming famous by appearing in a viral video; and Mona Awad’s We Love You, Bunny (Marysue Rucci: S. & S., Sept.), with Bunny protagonist Samantha still battling mean girls. Plus key debuts: Natalie Guerrero’s My Train Leaves at Three (One World, Jul.), Afro-Latina singer Xiomara seeking Broadway stardom; Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth (Catapult, Nov.), grad student Avery struggling with a friend’s success; Lauren Morrow’s Little Movements (Random, Sept.), Layla trying to balance a dance career and marriage; Charlotte Runcie’s Bring the House Down (Doubleday, Jul.), actress Hayley coping with a malevolent review; Eli Zuzovsky’s Mazeltov (Holt, Feb.), Adam confronting family and queer lust at his bar mitzvah; Kyle Edwards’s Small Ceremonies (Pantheon, Apr.), Indigenous high school students in Winnipeg facing their hopes and fears; and C. Mallon’s Dogs (Scribner, Aug.), five high school wrestlers on one fateful night.

WORLD AT WAR
Ukraine. Lara Marlowe’s How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine (Melville House, Feb.) reports on a 29-year-old woman commander’s frontline battles; Danielle Leavitt’s By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine (Farrar, May) portrays the suffering and national spirit of ordinary Ukrainians; John Lechner’s Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare (Bloomsbury, Mar.) tracks private militias as part of Russia’s anti-West strategy; and chef/activist Olia Hercules’s Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Ukraine (Knopf, Aug.) explains how her #CookForUkraine has raised over $2.5 million for her country thus far.

Palestine/Israel. Israeli journalists Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot offer up-close commentary in While Israel Slept: How Hamas Surprised the Most Powerful Military in the Middle East (St. Martin’s, Sept.); Peter Beinart asks fellow Jews to reframe their persecution story in Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, Jan.); and Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza: A Short History (Penguin Pr., Feb.) shows that while the horror of the Holocaust shapes the West’s political outlook, the burdens of imperialism and decolonization shape the rest of the world. Responding to the bombardment of Gaza in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, Feb.), Egyptian Canadian novelist/journalist Omar El Akkad signals his disenchantment with the West for failing to live up to its values.

U.S. TURMOIL
Political Scene. In Coming Up Short: A Memoir of America (Knopf, Aug.) Robert B. Reich surveys a country felled by demagoguery and corporate excess since his baby-boom youth. Jelani Cobb’s Three or More Is a Riot (One World, Oct.) reflects on the socially convulsed last decade. In Paper Girl (Penguin Pr., Oct.), Beth Macy witnesses a shocking change in her Ohio hometown. More titles on the state of the nation: Josiah Hesse’s On Fire for God (Pantheon, Oct.), Chuck Schumer’s Antisemitism in America: A Warning (Grand Central, Mar.), Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement To Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury, Feb.), Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story (Graywolf, Jun.), and Shoshana Walter’s Rehab: An American Scandal (S. & S., Aug.).

Portraits of Black Lives. Award-winning journalists Lee Hawkins and Jonathan Capehart offer personal reflection with broader implications in I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free (Amistad, Jan.) and Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man’s Search for Home (Grand Central, May), respectively. In his memoir The Broken King (Grove, Mar.), IMPAC-winning novelist Michael Thomas reflects on race, trauma, and mental illness to portray three generations of Black American men. In her memoir The Waterbearers (Knopf, Sept.), Sasha Bonét reflects on her grandmother, her mother, and herself to portray Black womanhood.

Homelessness. Titles include Kevin Fagan’s The Lost and the Found: A True Story of Homelessness, Found Family, and Second Chances (One Signal: Atria, Feb.), Jeff Hobbs’s Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America (Scribner, Feb.), and Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown, Mar.).

Education. Jarvis R. Givens’s American Grammar (Harper, Oct.) addresses the U.S. school system as the locus of conflict over free speech, LGBTQIA+ content, and Black studies. Titles focusing on marginalized children include Noliwe Rooks’s Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon, Mar.), Elaine Weiss’s Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement (One Signal: Atria, Mar.), Eve L. Ewing’s Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism (One World, Feb.), Mary Annette Pember’s Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools (Pantheon, Apr.), and Ranita Ray’s Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom (St. Martin’s, Aug.), shortlisted for the 2024 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

GOING FORWARD
Titles seeking to rethink society’s approaches to contemporary crises include journalists Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s Abundance: What Progress Takes (Avid Reader: S. & S., Mar.), MacArthur Fellow Loretta J. Ross’s Calling In: How To Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel (S. & S., Feb.), Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu’s The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Random, Aug.), designer/futurist Nick Foster’s Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future (MCD, Aug.), and Robert D. Kaplan’s Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis (Random, Jan.).

ON WOMEN
Sarah Weinman’s Without Consent (Ecco, Nov.) analyzes the 1978 case leading to the first major spousal-rape trial in the United States, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen’s Saving Five (AUWA, Mar.) examines the consequences of her 2013 rape at Harvard, and Jen Percy’s Girls Play Dead (Doubleday, Nov.) expands on a New York Times Magazine cover story on how women react to sexual assault. Katrina Brownlee’s And Then Came the Blues: My Journey from Survivor to NYPD Detective First Grade and Beyond (Open Lens: Akashic, Aug.) recounts recovery from being shot 10 times by her fiancé, a law enforcement officer. Chloé Caldwell’s Trying (Graywolf, Aug.) considers challenges with infertility, while Lauren Christensen’s Firstborn (Penguin Pr., Mar.) faces losing an unborn child. See also Mary Ziegler’s Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction (Yale Univ., Apr.), Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves (Penguin Pr., Apr.), and The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Classics, Feb.; ed. by Roxane Gay), a paperback original.

INTERNATIONAL HISTORY
Collected essays by David McCullough explain why History Matters (S. & S., Sept.). More history: Nir Arielli’s The Dead Sea: A 10,000 Year History (Yale Univ., Jan.), William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, Apr.), Scott Anderson’s King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution; a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (Doubleday, Aug.), Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Pr., Apr.), and Andrew Morton’s Winston and the Windsors (Hanover Square, Oct.), plus two intriguing microhistories: Tim Queeney’s Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization (St. Martin’s, Aug.) and Dorothy Armstrong’s Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin’s, Apr.).

U.S. HISTORY
Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Liveright, Sept.) tracks a document not significantly emended since 1971, when the concept of originalism rose. Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America (Norton, Mar.), Kostya Kennedy’s The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America (St. Martin’s, Mar.), and Andrew Lawler’s A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution (Atlantic Monthly, Jan.) cover the colonial era. Linda Gordon’s Seven Social Movements That Changed America (Liveright, Mar.), John Fabian Witt’s Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (S. & S. Oct.), Jeffrey Toobin’s The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy (S. & S., Feb.), Clay Risen’s Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, Mar.), and John U. Bacon’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (Liveright, Oct.) encompass more recent history. Fresh perspectives come from Lindsey Stewart’s The Conjuring of America (Legacy Lit, Jul.), U.S. history from enslavement to Jim Crow told via conjure women; Danny Goldberg’s Liberals with Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles (Akashic, Oct.); Char Adams’s Black Owned (Tiny Reparations, Nov.), assaying the history of Black activism via Black-owned bookstores; Julian Brave NoiseCat’s We Survived the Night (Knopf, Oct.), drawing on the author’s Secwepemc, Jewish, and Irish heritage to probe challenges to Indigenous communities; and Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, Apr.).

WORLD WAR II & the HOLOCAUST
Jonathan Freedland’s The Traitor’s Circle (Harper, Oct.) commemorates Germans who resisted Hitler, while David Nasaw’s The Wounded Generation (Penguin Pr., Oct.) plumbs the trauma that continued to plague the United States postwar. Other key titles include Christine Kuehn Schiponi’s Family of Spies: The Untold Story of the Attack on Pearl Harbor and One Family’s Rise as Nazi Spies (Celadon, Dec.), Garrett M. Graff’s Destroyer of Worlds: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb (Avid Reader: S. & S., Aug.), and M.G. Sheftall’s Nagasaki: The Last Witness (Dutton, Aug.). Accounts of personal bravery include Debórah Dwork’s Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis (Norton, Jan.), Matthew Goodman’s Paris Undercover: A Wartime Story of Courage, Friendship, and Betrayal (Ballantine, Feb.), and The Last Secret Agent: My Untold Story as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines (St. Martin’s, May) by the recently deceased Pippa Latour, the last surviving woman British World War II spy, written with Jude Dobson. Holocaust remembrances include Jack Fairweather’s The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle To Bring Nazis to Justice (Crown, Feb.), about a German Jewish lawyer who fought to continue prosecuting Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials ended, and Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance (Scribner, Apr.) about the author’s great-grandfather, a German Jewish chemist devastated by his unwitting part in the creation of deadly chemical weapons.

SCIENCES & TECHNOLOGY
Elements, Animals & Us. Paul Hawken’s Carbon: The Book of Life (Viking, Mar.), Drew Harvell’s The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life (Viking, Apr.), Henry Gee’s The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction (St. Martin’s, Mar.), and Mary Roach’s Replaceable You: Seventeen Glimpses of the Fabricated Human (Norton, Sept.); plus Dalton Conley’s The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture (Norton, Mar.), challenging the entrenched either/or of human development, and Brian Buckbee’s We Should All Be Birds (Tin House, Aug.), healing from chronic illness with the help of an injured pigeon, written with Carol Ann Fitzgerald. Tech Future. This Is for Everyone (Farrar, Sept.), with Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, pondering how it can fulfill its promise; Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future (MIT, May), with AI pioneer De Kai advising how society can take control of AI’s future; Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, Apr.), with novelist and ChatGPT beta-tester Vauhini Vara on the good and bad delivered by tech companies; and Enshittification (MCD, Sept.), with Cory Doctorow explaining how platforms decline over time. New York Times critic Amanda Hess addresses tech-stressed motherhood in Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday, May). Neuroscience, Mental Health & Disability. Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking (Holt, Mar.) reveals the science behind ideological thinking. Other key titles include Laura Delano’s Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance (Viking, Mar.), Susanne Paola Antonetta’s The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today (Counterpoint, Sept.), and Alex Green’s A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle To Care for America’s Disabled (Bellevue Literary, Apr.).

ENVIRONMENT
In Gale Force (Harper, Nov.), Simon Winchester shows that wind, escalating in speed and fury, is a major climate worry, while Bill McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (Norton, Aug.) makes a case for solar power. In A Billion Butterflies: A Life in Climate and Chaos Theory (St. Martin’s, Apr.), Jagadish Shukla recalls a life’s work that includes winning the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for climate change research and founding modern weather prediction. Thomas E. Weber’s Cloud Warriors: Storms, Climate Chaos—and the Pioneers Creating a Revolution in Weather Forecasting (St. Martin’s, Jun.) explains how weather forecasting works, and Neil Shea’s Frostlines (Ecco, Dec.) shows how climate change has impacted the Arctic, while Cass R. Sunstein’s Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World—and the Future (MIT, Feb.), Malcolm Harris’s What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (Little, Brown, Apr.), and Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy (Algonquin, Apr.) consider climate solutions.

BUSINESS
Media. Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (One Signal: Atria, Jan.), Nathan Grayson’s Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen (Atria, Feb.), and Steve Oney’s On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR (Avid Reader: S. & S., Mar.). Labor. Jaz Brisack’s Get on the Job and Organize: The Making of a New Labor Movement (One Signal: Atria, Apr.), Michael D. Stein’s A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor (Melville House, Apr.), and Joan C. Williams’s Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How To Win Them Back (St. Martin’s, May). Corporate. Bill Gates’s Source Code: My Beginnings (Knopf, Feb.), Melinda French Gates’s The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward (Flatiron, Apr.), Faiz Siddiqui’s Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (St. Martin’s, May), and George E. Johnson’s Afro Sheen: How I Revolutionized an Industry, from Soul Train to Wall Street (Little, Brown, Feb.), with Hilary Beard.

LITERATURE

Biography. About celebrated authors, there’s Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe (Norton, Sept.), Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Aug.), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Borges (NYRB Classics, Aug.; tr. from Spanish by Valerie Miles; ed. by Daniel Martino), Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain (Penguin Pr., May), Wendy Hitchmough’s Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical (Yale Univ., Mar.), Alissa Wilkinson’s We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (Liveright, Mar.), and Eve Babitz’s Too L.A.: The Letters, Sent and Unsent, of Eve Babitz (NYRB Classics, Oct.; ed. by Lili Anolik); plus Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built (Random, Oct.). Memoir. From celebrated authors, there’s Donna Leon’s Backstage: Stories of a Writing Life (Atlantic Monthly, Aug.) and Julian Barnes’s Changing My Mind (Notting Hil, Mar.), blending memoir and essay; plus Geraldine Brooks’s Memorial Days: A Memoir (Viking, Feb.), Geoff Dyer’s Homework: A Memoir (Farrar, Jun.), Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, May), and Bernice L. McFadden’s Firstborn Girls: A Memoir (Dutton, Mar.). Essays. Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive (Penguin Pr., Nov.), Ishion Hutchinson’s Fugitive Tilts (Farrar, Apr.), Richard Russo’s Life and Art (Knopf, May), Andrea Barrett’s Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction (Norton, Feb.), Jamaica Kincaid’s Putting Myself Together: Writing 1973– (Farrar, Aug.), Jenny Erpenbeck’s Things That Disappear (New Directions, Fall; tr. from German by Kurt Beals), and biologist and Yale Younger Poet Katherine Larson’s Wedding of the Foxes (Milkweed, Jul.); plus Jane Harrington’s Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: How a Sisterhood of Storytellers Wove the First Enchanted Tales and Then Disappeared from History (Black Dog & Leventhal, Aug.) and We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories About Political Protest, Resistance, and Hope (Saga, Dec.; ed. by Karen Lord & others). Creativity & Craft. Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life (Washington Square, Apr.), Sue Monk Kidd’s Writing Creativity and Soul (Knopf, Oct.), Susan Orlean’s Joy Ride (Avid Reader: S. & S., Sept.), and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Reading the Waves: A Memoir (Riverhead, Feb.). Language. Speaking in Tongues (Liveright, May), Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee and translator Mariana Dimópulos in conversation; Yoko Tawada’s Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions, Jun.; tr. from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda); and deaf poet Raymond Antrobus’s The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound (Hogarth, Aug.).

WORLD ON FIRE. Volumes reckoning with the Middle East crisis include the bilingual anthology You Must Live: Palestinian Poets (Copper Canyon, Sept.; ed. and tr. from Arabic by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor), Lebanese Palestinian poet Hasib Hourani’s rock flight (New Directions, Apr.), a book-length poem of personal and communal history; and Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai’s Requiem: & Other Poems (New Directions, Apr.; tr. from Hebrew by Peter Cole), both a kaddish and a cry for peace. In Primordial (Graywolf, Mar.), Mai Der Vang limns Hmong suffering owing to the Vietnam War. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Future of Everything (MCD, Sept.) probes an immigrant’s frustration with the United States, while Esther Lin’s Cold Thief Place (Alice James, Mar.) looks at her immigrant parents. Chris Santiago’s Small Wars Manual (Milkweed, Apr.) and Jason Allen-Paisant’s Thinking with Trees (Milkweed, Jul.) address the ongoing trauma of imperialism. Carlie Hoffman’s One More World Like This World (Four Way, Mar.) brims with the dissociation wrought by contemporary life. Arthur Sze’s Into the Hush (Copper Canyon, Apr.), Harryette Mullen’s Regaining Unconsciousness (Graywolf, Aug.), Aracelis Girmay’s Green of All Heads (BOA, Fall), and Steven Duong’s At the End of the World There Is a Pond (Norton, Jan.) address trauma in a world increasingly undone by political and environmental disaster.

PERSONAL LOSS. In Foxglovewise (Farrar, Jan.), Ange Mlinko reflects on the loss of her parents to consider how people map their lives. In A Magnificent Loneliness (Four Way, Mar.), Allison Benis White grieves multiple deaths or near-death experiences around her. A Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize winner, Andrea Ballou’s Other Times, Midnight (Persea, Apr.) surfaces the pain of death, departure, and divorce. Leila Chatti’s Divine (Copper Canyon, Sept.) addresses a lost pregnancy and subsequent mental health crisis.

SEEKING TO RISE. Featuring a sequence about conjoined Black twins, magnificent singers born into enslavement, Kevin Young’s Night Watch (Knopf, Sept.) leads numerous meditations on whether and how people can rise above personal and worldwide crisis. Others include Iain Haley Pollack’s All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, Sept.), Cecily Parks’s The Seeds (Alice James, Oct.), Rachel Richardson’s Smother (Norton, Feb.), Rosalie Moffett’s Making a Living (Milkweed, Mar.), Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Winter of Worship (Copper Canyon, Jan.), and Sarah V. Schweig’s Jake Adam York Prize–winning The Ocean in the Next Room (Milkweed, Jan.). On healing: Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf, Oct.), finding a place in the world after abuse; and Valencia Robin’s Lost Cities (Persea, Aug.), considering the past to go forward.

LOVE/DESIRE/CONNECTING. Passion saves people, as evidenced by Kim Dower’s What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria (Red Hen, Jan.) and Ariana Reines’s The Rose (Graywolf, Apr.). Just as important: overall connectedness, as seen in 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Collection (Norton, Feb.; curated by Pádraig Ó. Tuama); Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Doggerel (Norton, Mar.), with Blackness and masculinity examined via canine companionship; Billy Collins’s Dog Show (Random, Nov.), also sparkling with canines; April Ossmann’s We (Red Hen, Apr.), seeking to mend political divisions through spirituality; and Rachel Trousdale’s Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem (Wesleyan Univ., Mar.), the inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize winner, clarifying one’s relationships with nature, art, and other people.

IMMEDIACY. Books offering a tactile sense of how people understand themselves through the world include John Liles’s Bees, and After (Yale Univ., Mar.), the Yale Series of Younger Poets winner; Robin Walter’s Little Mercy (Graywolf, Apr.), the Academy of American Poets First Book Award winner; Dissonance (Univ. of Chicago, Mar.), translator Kristin Dykstra’s first collection; and Elaine Equi’s Out of the Blank (Coffee House, Feb.). Tramaine Suubi’s Phases (Amistad, Jan.) explores humans’ vivifying connection to the moon, while Bruce Weigl’s Apostle of Desire (BOA, May) highlights the contrast between nature’s beauty and human violence. Garrett Hongo’s Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, Jun.) finds meaning between water and sky; Alberto Ríos’s Every Sound Is Not a Wolf (Copper Canyon, Apr.) illuminates backyards, byways, and the great Sonoran Desert; and Marissa Davis’s End of Empire (Penguin Bks., Jul.) visits her rural Kentucky home to understand Black womanhood. Alex Dimitrov’s Ecstasy (Knopf, Apr.) celebrates life lived fully beyond social constriction.

EXPRESSION. Referencing abstract expressionism, method acting, and space exploration, Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead (Copper Canyon, Sept.) asks whether it’s possible to express unmediated feelings, while Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The New Economy (Copper Canyon, Oct.) and Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan Univ., Feb.) ask how one might write in troubled times. (Spahr started by reading Brecht.) Martha Ronk’s Clay (Omnidawn, Apr.) shows how pottery making clarifies the creative process, while Chet’la Sebree, contemplating motherhood, interrogates the very act of creation in Blue Opening (Tin House, Sept.). Lyn Hejinian’s final work, Lola the Interpreter (Wesleyan Univ., Oct.), is an extended prose poem considering artists themselves. Collating prose, poetry, journal entries, and sketches, Marianne Boruch’s The Figure Going Imaginary: Life Drawing, Poetry, the Cadaver Lab; A Year in Pieces (Copper Canyon, Mar.) revisits the human anatomy/life drawing class that inspired Cadaver, Speak. Robin Coste Lewis’s Archive of Desire (Knopf, Oct.) recapitulates her performance with a cellist, composer, and artist, which plumbed poet C.P. Cavafy’s archives to assess desire and dispersion. In All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems (Persea, Sept.), a James Laughlin and Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice winner, Michelle Peñaloza upends colonial assumptions by uncovering surprising words and associations in archival materials. In My Perfect Cognate (Copper Canyon, Nov.), Natalie Scenters-Zapico looks to cognates in English and Spanish when both languages prove unequal to the task of describing severe postpartum depression. Heather Christle’s Paper Crown (Wesleyan Univ., Aug.) anticipates times when inner visions match the outer world. In Siren of Atlantis (Wave, Apr.), Cedar Sigo contemplates learning to write again after a stroke.

EXPLORING SELF-IDENTITY. Blending an intense desire for living with body shame and pain when endometriosis rendered conception difficult, Carey Salerno considers the very definition of womanhood in The Hungriest Stars (Persea, Nov.). Gabriel Fried’s No Small Thing (Four Way, Mar.) offers a visceral recall of a queer boy’s transformation. Amy Gerstler’s Is This My Final Form? (Penguin Bks., Apr.) examines the ongoing transformation of everything on Earth. Elise Paschen’s Blood Wolf Moon (Red, Hen, Apr.) blends light, grim historical events, and nature as she explores her Osage heritage, while debut poet Annie Wenstrup explores her Dena’ina heritage in The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan Univ., May). Janan Alexander’s come from (BOA, Apr.) moves between English and Arabic, between love for her mother and colonial loss. Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, Apr.) explores the borders of personhood. In How About Now (Harper Perennial, Nov.), famed Instagram poet Kate Baer considers friendship, marriage, and motherhood as she ages.

EPIC. Mary Jo Bang concludes her gloriously updated translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy with Paradiso (Graywolf, Jul.), while Shane McCrae’s New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Feb.) calls on literary ancestors to proffer a 21st-century inferno. Anne Waldman’s Mesopotopia (Penguin Bks., Aug.) captures the feel of history as she moves grandly from Mesopotamia to the 21st century. Martín Espada’s Jailbreak of Sparrows (Knopf, Apr.) ranges from family portraits to anticolonial uprisings to his work as a tenant lawyer. In Four Days in Algeria (Red Hen, Mar.), Clarence Major actually travels the world, his journeys a means of meditation. A book-length, dual-language poem, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s Algarabía (Graywolf, Sept.) narrates the journey of the trans figure Cenex.

LOOKING BACK. From veteran award winners, Ron Padgett’s Pink Dust (New York Review Bks., Mar.), Susan Howe’s Penitential Cries (New Directions, Fall), Brad Leithauser’s The Old Current (Knopf, Mar.), and Henri Cole’s The Other Love (Farrar, Jul.) look back wisely. Stephen Kuusisto’s Close Escapes (Copper Canyon, Apr.) assays memory from the perspective of blindness. Mary Helen Callier’s Alice James Award–winning When the Horses (Alice James, Apr.) interrogates childhood in the South, while Chaun Ballard’s Poulin Prize–winning Second Nature (BOA, Apr.) blends history, memory, and family story to present the landscape of Black America. In Red Wilderness (Four Way, Mar.), Aaron Coleman amplifies the voice of his ancestor, a soldier of the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry. The Essential C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon, May) spans four decades’ worth of work from star poet Wright, who died in 2016.

For even more titles, see the Prepub Preview Extra list online.