Best Fall Books of 2019 Will Get You Through the Months Ahead

Where the Light Falls: Selected Stories of Nancy Hale View on Amazon The sands of time have reaped over some of our best writers, but after this collection launches, Nancy Hale will no longer be one of them. Hale is our next Lucia Berlin—neglected in her lifetime, then rediscovered after her death. In these 25 arresting stories, Hale writes about complex women who live quiet lives of confusion and desperation, locating the hugeness of human feeling within the minutiae of domestic life. Perceptive and luscious, these stories are unmissable. Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays View on Amazon The acclaimed essayist returns to her signature cocktail of memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism in this dazzling collection about the outer reaches of human connection. Jamison reports on surprising subjects, such as lonely whales and break-up museums, while also turning her eye inward for a poignant meditation on her own experiences of marriage, giving birth, and becoming a stepmother. Acute in her analysis and nourishing in her observations, Jamison is at the height of her powers here as she investigates what we owe one another. The Water Dancer: A Novel View on AmazonAfter Between the World and Me, Coates became one of our foremost public intellectuals, and as such, his fiction debut arrives with immense expectation. This fantastical novel of the human spirit’s triumph over unimaginable oppression doesn’t disappoint. Through the story of Hiram Walker, an escaped slave with fantastical powers seeking to rescue the family he left behind, Coates explores the profound dehumanization of slavery, producing a soulful, kinetic novel that can’t be missed. The Topeka School: A Novel View on AmazonIn this ambitious, formidable novel, one of the very best of the Trump era thus far, Lerner asks: how does one raise a good son? When high school senior Adam Gordon takes a troubled loner under his wing, the consequences for their small community are disastrous. With acute social insight into the crisis of toxic masculinity and deep psychological penetration into one Midwestern family, this is the rare novel of ideas that never skimps on depth of feeling. Frankissstein View on AmazonOne of our finest thinkers on sex and desire reimagines Frankenstein for a new age of medicine, science, and body positivity. In this multi-dimensional novel, Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein at Lake Geneva; later in time, a transgender doctor falls in love with an AI expert, a divorced man launches a groundbreaking sex doll, and a cryogenics facility houses bodies that aren’t as dead as they seem. Campy, smutty, and thought-provoking, this reboot of the OG science fiction novel pulls a totemic story into the 21st century, proving that when it comes to the morality of bodies and minds, we haven’t evolved at all.