No long preamble here. Just a taste of what I’m most looking forward to in 2024. (At least, of what I *know* will be published. Publishing houses don’t release their full slate at the beginning of the year, and some of the Big Name Fall Books won’t be disclosed until late spring. So while I’ve heard there’s a Rumaan Alam coming, for instance, I don’t know a thing about it yet.)
The Adversary by Michael Crummey (February 6, Doubleday)
Michael Crummey wrote my favorite novel of 2019: The Innocents was set in the mid-eighteenth century on the ice-bound coast of Newfoundland, and told the story of a brother and sister whose isolation and intimacy test the boundaries of human relationships. The Adversary is set just down the coast, in the same exact time period, and also revolves around a brother/sister pairing, but in this case the narrative is blown wide open, a rollicking, sea-water-glazed tale of sibling rivalry gone wild. Abe Strapp is a brute, and his sister the Widow Caines is an odd duck. They’ve loathed one another since childhood, but as adults they are capable of inflicting grievous harm on each other and their struggling town, so as this feud rages on for years, the stakes continue to grow higher. Crummey is famous for his authentic historical language: you’ll finish knowing more than a few delicious early colonial insults to throw at your foes.
Heroines by Kate Zambreno (Semiotext(e), March 5)
Nowadays, everyone has a favorite neglected literary wife or mistress (well, everyone I care about, at least): maybe it’s Françoise Gilot or Celia Paul, Jane Bowles or Vivienne Eliot. We’ve spent the past decade excavating them from the rubble of modern criticism, under which many of them were left to molder, as if they were merely furniture. As part of that renaissance, in 2010 the novelist and essayist Kate Zambreno published Heroines, which combed back over the lives of these women and freed them from the cages of musedom and helpmate, placing them back into the centers of their own lives. The book was an underground hit, the kind that other writers doggedly referred to in their own work, the kind that spurs a thousand imitators. Now, Semiotext(e) is republishing it — and hopefully throwing a big publishing party for Zambreno, where all her readers can gather ‘round and dish about the women she brought back to life.
A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen (New York Review of Books, March 19)
Elizabeth Bishop took Marianne Moore to the circus. W. E. B. Du Bois and William James visited Helen Keller together. Literary history is brimming with these unexpected encounters, moments when two figures of decided import collided in an entirely gaga way. For a long time, I hoped to one day write a book about this phenomenon, but Rachel Cohen, author of Austen Years (one of my favorite memoirs of all time) apparently beat me to it, and I’m grateful that I’ll get to read about these serendipitous events in her sharp, opalescent prose. The New York Review of Books, that arbiter of overlooked canon fodder, is republishing A Chance Meeting (it originally came out in 2005), so you can already imagine it will be in the hands of at least one rider on every Brooklyn subway line this spring.
All the World Besides by Garrard Conley (Riverhead, March 26)
Two men in love. In Puritan New England. Echoes of The Scarlet Letter. What more can one ask for? Despite the continuing threads of priggish hyper-morality in this country, our earliest days are an under-examined era in literature, too rarely invoked except in reference to “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or the condemned Goodies of Salem. But Conley, whose memoir Boy Erased chronicled his own experience as a young gay man forced into conversation therapy in the Deep South, knows of what he speaks, and while I don’t place much faith in blurbs, All the World Besides has remarkable praise from Douglas Stuart and Garth Greenwell, two men who have defined the contemporary gay novel.
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (W.W. Norton & Co., May 14)
I’ve been carrying this novel around in manuscript ever since I begged Messud’s publicist to get me a copy tout de suite. It begins in 1940 Salonica, where an Algerian naval attache is posted too far from the war in France for his liking, but too close to it to keep his family safe. It extends all the way through mid-aughts New England, where that navy man’s family has eventually decamped, and in between it circumnavigates the Western hemisphere and the confusion of life in exile. Messud’s fiction usually keeps to the very recent past (The Emperor’s Children, her best-known book, was published in 2006 and focused on the events of September 11) but in This Strange Eventful History she opens herself wide to the redrawing of national borders, and looks closer up at the lifelong discomfort of displacement.
Ask Me Again by Claire Sestanovich (Knopf, June 11)
The premise of Sestanovich’s debut sounds a little tame: a pair of friends with divergent backgrounds (rich Manhattanite vs. working class Brooklynite) and paths forward (a posh degree vs. what sounds like an embrace of cult life) figure out how to live in relation to one another, like two planets circling the same star. But Sestanovich’s short story collection Objects of Desire proved her a kind of master psychoanalyst of twenty-something in-betweenness, an acolyte of a young Shirley Hazzard perhaps. (It also landed her on the National Book Foundations “5 Under 35” list.) I’m expecting the kind of fiction that lures you back into your own confusion, one of my favorite varieties.
Bear by Julia Phillips (Hogarth, June 25)
Have you read Bear by Marian Engel? The one about the librarian who ends up in a, ahem, relationship with a bear while she spends the summer alone at a remote Canadian cabin? I can’t help but think that Phillips, whose first novel, Disappearing Earth (a finalist for the National Book Award) is set in the verdant and culturally rich landscape of far east Russia, knows Engel’s Bear, knows her way around an evergreen forest, and knows how to spin a lyrical and graceful story that will wallop all of us. Her Bear is set on an island in the Pacific Northwest but also features an ursine creature who ends up as a close companion to a young woman. Hmmm.
Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa (Pantheon, August 13)
You’re probably only familiar with Ogawa’s most recently translated novel, the fascism fable The Memory Police, in which the residents of an isolated Japanese island slowly lose objects — gemstones, photographs, the written word, limbs — along with the memories of those objects, to some mysterious force. But Ogawa is a powerhouse in her native country, and the bits of her backlist that have been translated into English are well worth your time if you like to be quietly unsettled about the state of the world (me, ha). There’s Hotel Iris, about a young girl drawn into an abusive nightmare by a dogmatic older man, and The Diving Pool, which contains three of the most morally complex novellas of the past century, along with a short story collection called Revenge, and the uncharacteristically sweet and doting The Housekeeper and the Professor. In Mina’s Matchbox, it’s 1972 and twelve-year-old Tomoko heads to her wealthy aunt’s house on the coast, where she’ll encounter a cast of familial characters like something out of Clue: most enticing is her slightly older cousin Mina, a fantastical storyteller. Ogawa’s fictional children are always aware that they are on a precipice, walking the line between innocence and culpability, and so this newest novel has a special allure to it.
The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya (Pantheon, August 13)
I’m a sucker for artists who hang other artists out to dry. That moment in Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs when Friend One realizes that Friend Two has made a piece of blisteringly cruel video art based on Friend One’s pathetic life? Like a dagger to my eyeball! Likewise, in Hamya’s sophomore novel (after the brilliance of her debut, Three Rooms), a young playwright stages a new work that lays bare the fumbling and antiquated mores of her novelist father and his generation. There are shades of Milton in here (the blind poet’s daughters famously took his dictation, as the playwright does here for her father), and I’m looking forward to seeing just how thoroughly Hamya can filet and saute the literary world.
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, September 3)
A new Jackson Brodie! After a half decade! IYKYK.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami (Date TBD)
Why haven’t I given up on Murakami? Am I just a sucker for literary disappointment? With every fresh translation I hope his new fiction will bring me back to the strange desire I felt to reach into the pages of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and press on the protagonist’s mysterious blue facial bruise. Instead, I end up griping about all the sexualized young girls and nonsensical lunar references. So, we’ll see whether this one, due out sometime in 2024, surprises or disappoints.
Plus A Few More…
Followed by the Lark by Helen Humphreys (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 13)
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham (Hogarth, March 12)
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday, March 19)
Long Island by Colm Toibin (Scribner, May 7)
Parade by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 18)