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Fiction
Devil Makes Three
by Ben Fountain
A thrilling tale of corruption and ethics in the aftermath of the 1991 Haitian coup d’état, told mostly through the eyes of a scuba tour guide, an undercover agent, and a local.
Tom Lake
by Ann Patchett
To pass the time while sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lara Nelson entertains her daughters with stories of her long-ago theater camp boyfriend who became a Hollywood star.
The Fraud
by Zadie Smith
In a tale based on a true story, a man claiming to be the thought-to-be-dead heir to a fortune appears. At the trial that ensues, tensions mount when key witnesses enter the picture.
Coleman Hill
by Kim Coleman Foote
Both new to New Jersey and newly widowed in 1916, Cecilia and Lucy become like family as they raise their children under similar conditions. A mishap between their kids changes everything.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
In the 1930s, the Jewish proprietors of the titular grocery store harbor a Black child at risk of going to the ward, and their white neighbors attempt to intervene.
Nonfiction
The World According to Joan Didion
by Evelyn McDonnell
This biography of the much beloved and lauded writer goes beyond the facts and brings in a personal account of the author’s own relationship with Didion, not shying away from the less savory parts of Didion’s past.
The Young Man
by Annie Ernaux
The Nobel Prize winner’s latest, published in France in 2022, is now available in the U.S. Chronicling her affair with a man younger by an eye-raising amount, Ernaux interrogates all the pleasures and stigmas that come with a May-December romance.
The Quickening
by Elizabeth Rush
The Pulitzer Prize finalist chronicles a 2019 trek to the Thwaites Glacier, whose melting could disastrously change the planet, and views climate change in the context of the next generation along with a chorus of under-represented voices.
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein
The author’s own experience being mistaken for Naomi Wolf inspired this critical look into binaries and conspiracy theories that scrutinizes and humanizes the things that divide us.
Bartleby and Me
by Gay Talese
This pioneer of journalism returns with a new collection of essays. The eponymous piece links Melville’s fictional scrivener and a real-life doctor who, after a court mandated he hand over his brownstone, said, in his way, “I would prefer not to.”
This article appears in the September/October 2023 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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Comments
Several of these new books here are enticing, but I’d want to read ‘The World According to Joan Didion’ first.