Books for fall 2022: Our 65 titles for the season, histories, thrillers and horror, fiction and non. Get reading.
CHICAGO — You know how we don’t notice the leaves on the trees until September arrives, nature flips its switch and emeralds become purples, reds and golds? That’s not the worst metaphor for the new fall book season — the big season for publishers (eyeing awards and holiday sales), and the best season for readers (facing more new titles than autumn foliage). There’s a fresh poignancy these days, as new books arrive during a time of resurgent book banning, and in the wake of a near-fatal stabbing of Salman Rushdie after years of threats. We’re noticing books now in a way that, not long ago, we did not.
What follows is not every new book this fall. It is no more complete than an inventory of all the pumpkins in Illinois. But it is a reminder that people who hate provocative ideas and original voices should be angry. In the next few months, we’re getting two books by Cormac McCarthy after 16 years of nothing, the first story collection in nine years by Oak Forest’s George Saunders and the first collection of stories ever by Chicago rising star Ling Ma. (Indeed, week after week of vibrancy from Chicago’s lit scene.) Not to mention, major histories of the pandemic, Trump’s White House, Jim Crow, Chicago architecture and the decline of democracy. And a history of American music by no less than Bob Dylan. And posthumous works by Katherine Dunn (“Geek Love”) and Paul Newman.
You know it’s going to be a rich season of reading in Chicago when even the new Stephen King is set in Chicago. Or rather, a portal to the underworld is found outside Chicago. Either way, eventually you’ll look up and notice: The world seems new again.
SHORTER DAYS
What does it say about Chicago that two of its most important contemporary exports write about America as a dreamscape, barely shy of dystopia? It probably just says that Booker Prize-winner George Saunders, who returns to the short story with (Oct. 18), and Ling Ma, whose remarkable new collection of weirdness (Sept. 13)delivers on the white-hot promise of her 2018 breakout “Severance,” are wide-awake. Saunders’ characters find a nation in moral decline, becoming playthings for the rich. Ma reads at times like Saunders’ heir. One character lives
