It’s Time for a Big Ol’ Fall Book Preview

The Book Review

In this fall book preview episode of The Book Review podcast, host Gilbert Cruz is joined by guests Joumana Khatib and MJ Franklin to discus

Key takeaways

• Fall book season is particularly robust this year, with many large-scale, ambitious works from prominent authors.
• Marlon James returns to literary fiction with 'The Disappearers,' a 600-page epic exploring trauma, justice, and disappearance after a violent hate crime.

Main topics

• Fall book season preview
• Literary fiction highlights

Notable quotes

"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Conclusion

With an abundance of ambitious and diverse titles across genres, this fall promises

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi, it's Alexa Y. Bell from New York Times Cooking. We've got tons of easy weeknight recipes, and today I'm making my five-ingredient creamy miso pasta. You just take your starchy pasta water, whisk it together with a little bit of miso and butter until it's creamy. Add your noodles and a little bit of cheese. Mmm. It's like a grown-up box of mac and cheese that feels like a restaurant-quality dish. New York Times Cooking has you covered with easy dishes for busy weeknights. You can find more at NYTCooking.com. Speaker 1 (0:33) I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review. Okay, these are my seasons ranked in reverse order. These are specific to me. I live in the Northeast. Please do not write in. Please do not quibble. Please do not argue. Number four, summer, the worst. I've said it before on this podcast, summer is the worst. I like vacations. I hate the heat. This is undeniable. Number three, spring. You get that magical feeling in the air. Oh, the season's going to turn. This is great. You know what else you get? Allergies. The worst. Number two. Now we're cooking. Winter. You have sweaters. You have the holidays. You have hot cocoa. It's cold. Yes, that is annoying. But sweaters. Refer to my previous statement. Number one. It's possible that you've guessed it, given where we are in the calendar. Fall is the absolute best season. I will quote. Speaker 1 (1:24) a book titled The Great Gatsby, which says life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. And crisp air or not, there are fewer bugs, there are apple cider donuts, and lots of books. Fall book season is here when many publishers just flood the zone with books. And I'm here with two of my favorite guests to talk about fall book season. Jumanica T, welcome back. Hi, Gilbert. For once, I don't disagree with anything you just said. Speaker 1 (1:51) For once, possibly the only time. MJ Franklin, you know him. He is the host of our monthly book club discussion. MJ, welcome back. Thank you for having me. I do disagree. However, I did love the inclusion of a quote. I love a quote. You do love a quote. So I'm back on board. Thank you very much. That was a take. All right. We're going to talk about books that are coming out in September, October, November. We're going to do a lightning round at the end because there are so many. We just cannot fit them all in. But first, I want to go big picture. Speaker 1 (2:20) MJ and Shubhana, as you both know, having worked at the Book Review for many years, fall book season is always a big deal. However, it feels like this fall is a little bit bigger than falls that we've had over the past few years. It's a lot bigger, both in terms of the number of huge returning authors and literally bigger. Every book seems giant. Every book seems above 500 pages. It's a lot to read. It's exciting, though. It is exciting. Speaker 1 (2:47) The summer season is always a little slow, and to pull back the curtain a little bit, working at the book review means you spend a little bit of that time getting ready for the fall, reading ahead some of these big books. Oh, yeah. I mean, one of my fondest beach days was spent reading a book coming out in November that I will tell you about towards the end of this podcast. I also feel, just with this job, like Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time. I'm like living in one season, reading for another. Like, it's very confusing where we are at. Speaker 1 (3:16) any given point. The wonderful thing is it's not going to be confusing for our listeners. We're going to hold your hand. We're going to walk you through the next several months. And we are going to talk about a bunch of books that we are excited for. I will start, talk about a big book and an exciting book. In September, Marlon James is back with his book, The Disappearers. It's his big return to literary fiction. You may remember Marlon James from his book. A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the Booker Prize in 2015. After that, he started this fantasy series. Speaker 1 (3:50) Three books all covering the same story but told from a different perspective. Now he's back to literary fiction. And this is a literal big book. I think it's around 600 pages. It's an epic that covers about 20 years. It's told in eight sections. But at the center, there is a horrific gay bashing in Kingston. And then afterward, the victims start to disappear. The question is, why are they disappearing? Where are they disappearing to? What happens to those who remain? The book is brilliant. It's tackling ideas of justice and moving on. And what does revenge look like? This is a revenge novel. Marlon James is also so smart. Like, it's dense with allusions to other books, plays, movies, a lot of music. This is a tough, challenging book. But it's also, I think, brilliant. It is so good. That is The Disappears by Marlon James. Speaker 1 (4:48) Okay, I have a weird, slim, totally worthwhile book. This is called The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar. If you're a reader, you probably know him for Homeland Elegies, which is one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year in 2020. He's also a really decorated... playwright. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner. His work deals a lot with American identity, draws on his background, his experience growing up with Muslim heritage. And he's just one of the most, it's like cerebral, but like with force behind his writing. Like he is a brain, but there's real action there. This is a weird. book. I love it. It's okay. So it's, it's, it's auto fictional. Stay with me here. It follows a character who is a writer named Ayad Akhtar, who moves from New York City to the Hudson Valley during the pandemic. Speaker 1 (5:45) He gets an adjunct teaching job at this small college where he has a friend who's a professor. And he decides to set up a course called Discoveries in Autofiction or something like that. So you can sense right from the jump that he's positioning himself to write a campus novel, something that's wading into the cultural debates of the time. And then all of a sudden, the character Ayad Akhtar is... riding his bike, and he gets clipped by a pickup truck. And it's a really debilitating injury. He's briefly comatose. And when he awakes, he finds that his entire existence and, like, window onto life is draped in this sort of... Speaker 1 (6:35) I mean, it's the radiance of the title. It's sort of this ethereal, shimmering kind of veil over his perception. And he finds that he's more compassionate. He is sort of moved to tears more easily. His sex drive is almost non-existent, although I would argue that it's sublimated, but that's something for another podcast. And he begins to think like, oh my gosh, I think maybe this was a racially motivated accident by the guy who hit me on the bike. And then there's this like crisis on campus with a student. It's disturbing and it's very quicksilver and I loved it. Great ending also. Great, maddening ending. You mentioned several words that I think might be intimidating to readers. Autofictional. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. It sounds abstract, but what I want to stress is that this book has a sense of humor to it. He delivers everything almost like with a wink. Speaker 1 (7:31) It is weird. It is abstract and auto-fictional, but like, he knows, you know, he knows. Like, there's something about the sensibility of this book that feels playful and mischievous and the opposite of intimidating, even as it deals with these heady subjects. I think that's totally right. Like, he really is so obviously having fun. And I think that this is a book that it's almost prismatic where it's like, if you read it... and you're in one frame of mind, something will stick out at you. If you come back to it again, something else will strike you. That's what I like about it. I mean, it feels very alive and very, like, fertile in that way. So that was The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar. I am here to talk about American Scoundrel by Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark. Oh, does it have to do with New York City history? A little bit. A little bit. I'm sorry, I could only be me. Speaker 1 (8:23) Actually, I'm not going to apologize for that. Yeah, don't apologize for being you, Gilbert. You can only be Gilbert. There's no other Gilbert on Earth. Say that again? Are you going to say that in the mirror every morning now? This is a book about Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn, yes, is a figure of ill repute now in New York City history. But he also is someone who was fairly relevant in mid-century America. is most well known now, I think, for being one of Donald Trump's early mentors. When now President Donald Trump was working with his father in real estate in New York in the early 70s, he got to know Roy Cohn, and he liked Roy Cohn because Roy Cohn was someone who got his way, and he got his way through often nefarious means. You can trace his lineage back to... Speaker 1 (9:19) being a lawyer for Senator McCarthy during the communist witch hunt in the 50s. He helped prosecute the Rosenbergs in the early 50s. If you are an artsy person who loves theater, you might know Roy Cohn's name because he's a character in Angels in America, the Tony Kushner play. And he is an incredibly dark influence, some would argue. I think Kai Bird would argue this on modern American history. which is why it's important to read about him. Kai Bird is also interesting because he was the co-author of American Prometheus. It was the Pulitzer-winning biography that eventually got adapted into the movie Oppenheimer, which won all those awards a couple years ago. He wrote that book with Martin Sherwin, who has since passed away, and he has written this book with his wife, Susan Goldmark. I'm interested in this. Speaker 1 (10:10) I'm interested because villains, and I think Roy Cohn is someone we can characterize as a villain, are interesting to read about. This sounds like the opposite of an MJ book. It sounds like a dense biography. I don't read a ton of biographies. That's for no reason other than... You can only be you. I can only be me. I think someone said that once. That said, this sounds so good. Yeah. I cannot wait to read this. That's American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Byrd and Susan Goldmark. I have another one. It's Switzy by Emma Klein. Speaker 1 (10:46) You may know Emma Klein from books like The Girls, that was her debut novel, or The Guest, which was a big summer hit in 2023. That was about a woman who was scamming her way through the Hamptons. Switzy is a huge pivot. This book follows a man at the end of his life. He has what seems to be dementia or some type of Alzheimer's, and he is traveling to Switzerland. Switzy, to do Dignitas, that's assisted dying. He wants to end his life on his own terms. As he's traveling, he's thinking about his life, he's thinking about his career, he's thinking about his daughter and his family, and he's thinking about a huge friendship that really haunts him in his life. This book is a farewell tour of sorts. However, it doesn't feel like dour, it doesn't feel unduly depressing. It feels... Speaker 1 (11:42) existential and meditative. It's about what do you do when you know that the end is near? How do you look back on your life and make peace with it? There's a fascinating sense of alienation here. This man is almost like a living ghost. He knows that he's ending his life. He may or may not have told other people in his life, and you're just watching him navigate the living with this knowledge of what's about to happen. It's intense. It's great. I think I read it basically in one sitting. I also have Speaker 1 (12:12) aging men with money in my life. I've made choices. I have many questions. And they can only be themselves. And there were moments where I sort of had to just put the book down where I was like, oh my God, I can just