RELEASE DAY RECOMMENDS : 9.2.2020
Every week the publishing industry opens the gates of brand spanking new books and out comes a deluge of new and possibly amazing releases. And every week our Founder and sometimes reviewer, Noah Sanders, will act as your donut-shaped floatation device to keep you and your brainy little head above the waters of what you should read.
This week: one man looks at the suburbs, one man goes from the suburbs to the revolution, two women go on a treasure hunt for family secrets and much, much more.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2ND
Owed
Joshua Bennett
Penguin Books
Joshua Bennett is some kind of prolific. While he isn’t wiling his days away as a professor of English and Creative Writing at a little school called Dartmouth, Bennett has published not one, but two books in 2020 alone. Owed, his second book of 2020 and his second collection of poetry, is a celebration, a book of healing, a conversation with those “we’ve been taught to think of as insignificant.” But who am I to sit here trying to explain to you what a book of poetry is about?
Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains
Kerri Arsenault
St. Martin’s Press
We’d read Mill Town if it was only a description of the irrevocable damage a paper mill does to the small town of Mexico, Maine. But in Kerri Arsenault’s capable hands, Mill Town is a - as the title reads - a reckoning with her past as a citizen of Mexico, Maine, of her connection to the place, and her own emotional wrangling with the security the paper mill gave her and what sacrifices were made for it to do so. Are you not salivating at your computer right now? Does this emotionally charged dissection of the collapse of the middle class because of an insidious corporate structure not pull your eyes (and your checkbook) to the screen? It should, it really should.
Ruthie Fear
Maxim Loskutoff
W.W. Norton
You really just have to sweetly whisper the words, “literary western” into my earholes and I’m pretty much sold. The landscape! The chaw-hocking characters! The great American archetypes clashing into the hot desert sun! Or, as in Maxim Loskutoff’s new book Ruthie Fear, a "technicolor” gaze into our nation’s extremely complicated history through the eyes of a young Montanan named Ruthie Fear. There’s encroaching natural disaster, a headless apparition and harbinger of doom and Ruthie’s hardened father all tied together into the story of the re-emerging American West. I’ll take it.
Having and Being Had
Eula Biss
Riverhead Books
Eula Biss doesn’t mess around with her topics. Her award winning non-fiction work - On Immunity - grappled with her society’s and Biss’s own issues with vaccinating her kids. In Having and Being Had Biss throws down the gauntlet in terms of American economy, of capitalism, of what it means to have money and what it means to not have any whatsoever. You want to read what Eula Biss thinks about Beyonce? About IKEA? About Pokemon? Well here you go, Eula Biss slowly, methodically, tearing apart the capitalistic structure - and all the rest of red-blooded Americans - exist within.
It has been quite a while since I dipped my nose into Hari Kunzru’s White Tears - a scathing take down of white America’s unfettered absorption of African-American music - and I still sometimes wake in the middle of the night, sweaty, thinking of the book’s final pages. And because I enjoy raking myself across the literary coals, I am absolutely excited about Kunzru’s new book - Red Pill. An author in a small German town, procrastinates on writing a book as he binge watches a violent reality-television cop show. When he meets the creator at a party, things go awry, ideas get blown out of proportion and he starts to wonder if he isn’t just straight up losing his mind. It’s going to be weird, it’s going to be intense, it’s going to expand our meager minds.
Noah Sanders wonders why he just can’t read books that make him laugh.
