Buzz Books 2023: Fall/Winter

By Publishers Lunch

Buzz Books 2023: Fall/Winter is the 23rd volume in our popular sampler series. This Buzz Books presents passionate readers with an insider’s look more than sixty of the buzziest books due out this season—our largest collection to date. Such major bestselling authors as Naomi Alderman, Yangsze Choo, Kiley Reid, and Tia Williams are featured, along with literary greats Lauren Groff, Sigrid Nunez, Etaf Rum, C Pam Zhang, and more.
Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting and diverse debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Comedian and TV star Cedric the Entertainer’s novel is about close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. Jazmina Barrera, a Mexican nonfiction author, offers her first novel. Two YA authors, Ashley Elston and Emma Noyes, debut their first adult books. Among the others are Isa Arsén, Inci Atrek, Anna Bliss, Kim Coleman Foote , Madeleine Gray, Molly McGhee, Nishita Parekh, and Anise Vance.
Our robust nonfiction section covers such important subjects as addiction, forgiveness, lying, and grief; several memoirs about harrowing childhoods; and a definitive biography of John Lewis.
Finally, we present early looks at new work from young adult authors, including the New York Times bestselling Roshani Chokshi, Jason June and Melinda Salisbury, along with a YA debut by Court Stevens, who is a bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

Be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2023:Romance, coming in late May.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishers Lunch
• Release date: May 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781948586597

Book preview

Cover: Buzz Books Fall/Winter 2023

Buzz Books® 2023

Fall/Winter

Logo: Publishers Lunch, Ingram

Contents

Introduction

The Fall/Winter 2023 Publishing Preview

Part One: Fiction

Salar Abdoh, A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking)

Naomi Alderman, The Future (Simon and Schuster)

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Charlene Carr, Hold My Girl (Sourcebooks Landmark)

Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife (Holt)

Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone (Little, Brown & Company)

Naoise Dolan, The Happy Couple (Ecco)

Kemper Donovan, The Busy Body (Kensington Books)

Lisa Gornick, Ana Turns (Keylight Books)

Emma Grey, The Last Love Note (Zibby Books)

Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books)

Donna Hemans, The House of Plain Truth (Zibby Books)

Rosemary Hennigan, The Favorites (Graydon House)

Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster)

Ariel Kaplan, The Pomegranate Gate (Erewhon Books)

Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel (Ecco)

Vanessa Lillie, Blood Sisters (Berkley)

Vanessa Miller, The Light on Halsey Street (Thomas Nelson)

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books)

Nnedi Okorafor, Shadow Speaker (DAW Books)

Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer (Ecco)

Kiley Reid, Come and Get It (Putnam)

Melissa Rivero, Flores and Miss Paula (Ecco)

Lauren E. Rico, Familia (Kensington)

Etaf Rum, Evil Eye (Harper)

Natasha Solomons, Fair Rosaline (Sourcebooks Landmark)

Justin Torres, Blackouts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Bryan Washington, Family Meal (Riverhead Books)

Tia Williams, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (Grand Central Publishing)

Ashley Winstead, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour (Sourcebooks Landmark)

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead Books)

Part Two: Debut

Isa Arsén, Shoot the Moon (Putnam)

Inci Atrek, Holiday Country (Flatiron Books)

Jazmina Barrera (author), Christina MacSweeney (translator), Cross-Stitch (Two Lines Press)

Anna Bliss, Bonfire Night (Kensington Books)

Cedric The Entertainer, Flipping Boxcars (Amistad)

Ashley Elston, First Lie Wins (Pamela Dorman/Viking)

Kim Coleman Foote, Coleman Hill (SJP Lit/Zando)

Madeleine Gray, Green Dot (Holt)

Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (Astra House)

Emma Noyes, Guy’s Girl (Berkley)

Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton)

Anise Vance, Hush Harbor (Hanover Square Press)

Part Three: Nonfiction

Raymond Arsenault, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community (Yale University Press)

Alice Carrière, Everything/Nothing/Someone (Spiegel & Grau)

Myisha Cherry, Failures Of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better (Princeton University Press)

Christian L. Hart, PhD, and Drew A. Curtis, PhD, BIG Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped (APA LIfeTools)

Antonia Hylton, Madness: Crownsville, the Search For Sanity in a Segregated Asylum, and the Legacy of Race in Mental Health (Legacy Lit)

Patty Lin, End Credits (Zibby Books)

Brittany Means, Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways (Zibby Books)

Freda Love Smith, I Quit Everything: How One Woman’s Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife (Agate)

Part Four: Young Adult

Roshani Chokshi, The Spirit Glass (Rick Riordan Presents)

Jamie Jo Hoang, My Father, the Panda Killer (Crown BFYR)

Jason June, The Spells We Cast (Hyperion/Melissa de la Cruz Studio)

Soyoung Park, Snowglobe (Delacorte Press)

Yongje Park, The God of High School Vol. 1 (WEBTOON Unscrolled)

Sajni Patel, A Drop Of Venom (Rick Riordan Presents/Disney)

Melinda Salisbury, Her Dark Wings (Delacorte Press)

Court Stevens, Last Girl Breathing (Thomas Nelson)

Katarina E. Tonks, Death Is My BFF (Wattpad Books)

Credits

Copyright

Introduction

Buzz Books 2023: Fall/Winter is the 23rd volume in our popular sampler series. This Buzz Books presents passionate readers with an insider’s look more than sixty of the buzziest books due out this season—our largest collection to date. Such major bestselling authors as Naomi Alderman, Yangsze Choo, Kiley Reid, and Tia Williams are featured, along with literary greats Lauren Groff, Sigrid Nunez, Etaf Rum, C Pam Zhang, and more.

Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting and diverse debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Comedian and TV star Cedric the Entertainer’s novel is about close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. Jazmina Barrera, a Mexican nonfiction author, offers her first novel. Two YA authors, Ashley Elston and Emma Noyes, debut their first adult books. Among the others are Isa Arsén, Inci Atrek, Anna Bliss, Kim Coleman Foote , Madeleine Gray, Molly McGhee, Nishita Parekh, and Anise Vance.

Our robust nonfiction section covers such important subjects as addiction, forgiveness, lying, and grief; several memoirs about harrowing childhoods; and a definitive biography of John Lewis.

Finally, we present early looks at new work from young adult authors, including the New York Times bestselling Roshani Chokshi, Jason June and Melinda Salisbury, along with a YA debut by Court Stevens, who is a bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

Be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2023:Romance, coming in late May.

The Fall/Winter 2023 Publishing Preview

It’s another exciting season of new books ahead. Readers will find their way to many of the books previewed here and others yet to be discovered. To help you sift through the many thousands of planned fall and winter titles, we’ve selected what we think are among the most noteworthy literary, commercial, and breakout titles for adults, separated into four key categories.

You’ll be able to sample many of the highlighted titles right now in Buzz Books 2023: Fall/Winter; they are noted in boldface and with an asterisk. And please remember: because we prepare this preview many months in advance, titles, content, and publication dates are all subject to change.

Fiction

Fall promises new titles from some of the most exciting voices in literature. Kate Atkinson, Teju Cole, Michael Cunningham, and Jhumpa Lahiri all have new books coming out. Plus, Zadie Smith publishes her first novel since 2016. In our sampler, you'll find work by Lauren Groff, Sigrid Nunez, Justin Torres, Brian Washington, and many more.

The Notables

Naomi Alderman, The Future (Simon & Schuster, 11/7)*

Kate Atkinson, Normal Rules Don’t Apply: Stories (Doubleday, 9/12)

Paul Auster, Baumgartner (Grove, 11/7)

Edward Carey, Edith Holler (Riverhead, 10/31)

Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House, 10/17)

Michael Cunningham, Day (Random House, 1/30)

Ben Fountain, Devil Makes Three (Flatiron Books, 9/26)

Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead, 9/12)*

Benjamin Labatut, The Maniac (Penguin Press, 10/3)

Jhumpa Lahiri, Todd Portnowitz (Translated by), Roman Stories (Knopf, 10/10)

Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel (Ecco, 10/17)*

Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child: Stories (FSG, 9/5)

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity (Penguin Press, 9/19)

Karl Marlantes, Cold Victory (Grove, 1/9)

Hisham Matar, My Friends (Random, 1/9)

Alice McDermott, Absolution (FSG, 11/7)

Emma Noyes, Guy’s Girl (Berkley, 10/24)*

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead, 11/7)*

Tim O’Brien, America Fantastica (Mariner, 10/24)

Chuck Palahniuk, Not Forever, But For Now (S&S, 9/5)

Kiley Reid, Come and Get It (Putnam, 1/8)*

Zadie Smith, The Fraud (Penguin Press, 9/5)

Justin Torres, Blackouts (FSG, 10/10)*

Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend (Scribner, 10/3)

Bryan Washington, Family Meal (Riverhead, 10/10)*

Lawrence Wright, Mr. Texas (Knopf, 10/10)

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead, 9/26)*

Highly Anticipated

Mona Awad, Rouge (S&S/Marysue Rucci, 9/12)

Linnea Axelsson, Saskia Vogel (Translated by), Aednan (Knopf, 1/9)

Melissa Broder, Death Valley (Scribner, 10/24)

Gabriel Bump, The New Naturals (Algonquin, 11/14)

Kacen Callender, Stars in Your Eyes (Forever, 11/10)

Jillian Cantor, The Fiction Writer (Park Row Books, 11/28)

Charlene Carr, Hold My Girl (Sourcebooks Landmark, 10/10)*

Alba de Céspedes, translated by Jill Foulston, Her Side of the Story (Astra House, 10/10)

Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife (Holt, 2/13)*

Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger (Harper, 12/5)

Kemper Donovan, The Busybody (Kensington, 1/30)*

Ashley Elston, First Lie Wins (Pamela Dorman Books, 1/9)*

Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors (Bloomsbury, 10/17)

Alvaro Enrigue, (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, 1/9)

Jonathan Evison, Again and Again (Dutton, 11/7)

Tarryn Fisher, Disorder (Graydon House, 2/6)

Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach (Pantheon, 10/10)

Emma Grey, Last Love Note (Zibby Books, 11/7)*

Nicola Griffith, Menewood (MCD, 10/3)

Donna Hemans, The House of Plain Truth (Zibby Books, 1/30)*

Nathan Hill, Wellness (Knopf, 9/26)

Lindsay Hunter, Hot Springs Drive (Roxane Gay Books, 11/7)

Kotaro Isaka, Mantis (The Overlook Press, 11/7)

Paulette Jiles, Chenneville (William Morrow, 9/5)

Tim Johnston, Distant Sons (Algonquin, 10/17)

Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before Saying Goodbye (Hanover Square Press, 11/14)

Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day (Grove, 11/14)

Jean Kwok, The Leftover Woman (William Morrow, 10/10)

Vanessa Lillie, Blood Sisters (Berkley, 9/12)*

Kerri Maniscalco, Throne of the Fallen (Little, Brown, 10/3)

Daniel Mason, North Woods (Random House, 9/19)

Ayana Mathis, The Unsettled (Knopf, 10/24)

Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born? (Astra, 9/5)

Sandra Newman, Julia (Mariner, 10/24)

Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, 11/7)

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch (Knopf, 9/19)

Anna Pitoniak, The Helsinki Affair (S&S, 11/14)

Lauren E. Rico, Familia (Kensington, 12/26)*

Etaf Rum, Evil Eye (Harper, 9/5)*

Noelle Salazar, The Roaring Days of Zora Lily (MIRA, 10/3)

Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria, 9/5)

Viola Shipman, The Wishing Bridge (Graydon House, 11/7)

Natasha Solomons, Fair Rosaline (Sourcebooks Landmark, 9/12)*

Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour (Sourcebooks Landmark, 10/3)*

Noa Yedlin, Stockholm (HarperVia, 10/10)

Paul Yoon, The Hive and the Honey: Stories (S&S/Marysue Rucci, 10/10)

Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition (Counterpoint, 10/23)

Emerging Voices

Salar Abdoh, A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking, 11/7)*

Lola Akinmade Akerstrom, Everything Is Not Enough (William Morrow, 8/24)

Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Grove, 3/19)

Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California (MCD, 1/23)*

A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton (Scribner, 10/31)

Ye Chun, Straw Dogs of the Universe (Catapult, 10/17)

Eliza Clark, Penance (Harper, 9/26)

Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone (Little, Brown, 11/7)*

Christine Coulson, One Woman Show (Avid Reader, 10/17)

Claudia Dey, Daughter (FSG, 9/12)

Sarah Davis-Goff, Silent City (Flatiron, 10/17)

Ariel Djanikian, The Prospectors (William Morrow, 10/31)

Naoise Dolan, The Happy Couple (Ecco, 11/23)*

Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell (Dutton, 9/26)

Allison Epstein, Let the Dead Bury the Dead (Doubleday, 10/17)

Diana Evans, A House for Alice (Pantheon, 9/12)

Lexi Freiman, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 11/14)

Rosemary Hennigan, The Favorites (Graydon House, 11/14)*

Lisa Gornick, Ana Turns (Turner, 11/7)*

Lauren Grodstein, We Must Not Think of Ourselves (Algonquin, 11/28)

Guy Gunaratne, Mister, Mister (Pantheon, 10/3)

Greg Jackson, The Dimensions of a Cave (FSG, 10/24)

Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (S&S, 1/9)*

Louise Kennedy, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac: Stories (Riverhead, 12/5)

Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (Viking, 1/9)*

Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth, 9/5)

Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria (Astra House, 9/19)

Isle McElroy, People Collide (HarperVia, 9/26)

Marie NDiaye, Vengeance Is Mine (Knopf, 10/17)

Lauren Nossett, The Professor (Flatiron, 11/14)

Claire Oshetsky, Poor Deer (Ecco, 1/24)*

Nnedi Okorafor, The Shadow Speaker (DAWS, 9/26)*

Melissa Rivero, Flores and Miss Paula (Ecco, 12/5)*

Madeline Kay Sneed, Today Tonight Forever (Graydon House, 11/7)

Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future (FSG, 10/17)

Thrity Umrigar, The Museum of Failures (Algonquin, 9/26)

Katherine Vaz, Above the Salt (Flatiron, 11/7)

Ally Wilkes, Where the Dead Wait (Atria/Emily Bestler, 12/5)

Debut Fiction

The coming season is packed with debuts, including first novels from Vinson Cunningham and Millie Bobby Brown. Our sampler highlights work from Inci Atrek, Anna Bliss, Madeleine Gray and Molly McGhee, among others.

Yomi Adegoke, The List (William Morrow, 10/3)

Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library (Hanover Square Press, 9/5)

Isa Arsén, Shoot the Moon (Putnam, 10/10)*

John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire (Flatiron, 9/19)

Inci Atrek, Holiday Country (Flatiron, 1/9)*

Jazmina Barrera, Cross Stitch (Two Lines Press, 11/7)*

Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle (Verso, 10/10)

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, Alice Sadie Celine (S&S, 11/28)

Anna Bliss, Bonfire Night (Kensington, 12/26)*

Millie Bobby Brown, Nineteen Steps (William Morrow, 9/12)

Cedric The Entertainer, Flipping BoxCars (Amistad, 9/23)*

Vinson Cunningham, Consider the Years (Hogarth, 1/23)

Ashley Elston, First Lie Wins (Pamela Dorman, 1/8)*

Kim Coleman Foote, Coleman Hill: A Biomythography (Zando/SJP Lit, 9/5)*

Madeleine Gray, Green Dot (Holt, 2/27)*

Rosemary Hennigan, The Favorites (Graydon House, 11/14)*

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury, 8/29)

Justin C. Key, The World Wasn’t Ready for You: Stories (Harper, 9/19)

Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking (St. Martin’s, 12/5)

Daniel Lefferts, Ways and Means (The Overlook Press, 2/6)

Fran Littlewood, Amazing Grace Adams (Holt, 9/23)

Sarah Marsh, The Lip Reader (Park Row Books, 2/6)

Lisa M. Matlin, The Stranger Upstairs (Bantam, 9/26)

Dann McDorman, West Heart Kill (Knopf, 10/24)

Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (Astra, 10/17)*

Margaret Meyer, The Witching Tide (Scribner, 9/5)

Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton, 10/3)

Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton, 1/16)*

Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan (Graywolf, 9/5)

Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers (Catapult, 10/31)

Phoenicia Rogerson, Herc (Hanover Square Press, 9/5)

Shannon Sanders, Company (Graywolf; 10/3/23)

Julius Taranto, How I Won a Nobel Prize (Little, Brown, 9/12)

Amy Taylor, Search History (The Dial Press, 11/7)

James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild (The Overlook Press, 9/12)

Anise Vance, Hush Harbor (Hanover Square Press, 9/5)*

Jamie Varon, Main Character Energy (Park Row Books, 9/5)

Commercial Fiction

Some of the biggest names in publishing have books coming out in fall and winter, from Jessica Knoll, Stephen King, and Walter Mosley, to Brandon Sanderson, James Patterson and Janet Evanovich.

Kia Abdullah, Perfectly Nice Neighbors (Putnam, 9/12)

Mitch Albom, The Little Liar (Harper, 11/7)

V.C. Andrews, Losing Spring (Gallery, 10/17)

Kelley Armstrong, Hemlock Island (St. Martin’s, 9/12)

David Baldacci, David Baldacci Fall 2023 (Grand Central, 11/14)

Michele Campbell, The Intern (St. Martin’s, 10/3)

Lee Child, Andrew Child, The Secret: A Jack Reacher Novel (Delacorte, 10/24)

Richard Chizmar, Becoming the Boogeyman (Gallery, 10/10)

Lucy Clarke, The Hike (Putnam, 8/29)

John Connolly, The Land of Lost Things (Atria/Emily Bestler, 9/19)

Patricia Cornwell, Unnatural Death: A Scarpetta Novel (Grand Central, 11/28)

KJ Dell’Antonia, Playing the Witch Card (Putnam, 9/12)

Nelson DeMille, Alex DeMille, Blood Lines (Scribner, 10/10)

James Ellroy, The Enchanters (Knopf, 9/12)

Janet Evanovich, Dirty Thirty (Atria, 10/31)

Alice Feeney, Good Bad Girl (Flatiron, 8/29)

Vince Flynn, Kyle Mills, Code Red: A Mitch Rapp Novel (Atria/Emily Bestler, 9/12)

Ken Follett, The Armor of Light (Viking, 9/26)

Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Don’t Die (Counterpoint, 9/12)

John Grisham, The Exchange: After The Firm (Doubleday, 10/17)

Mark Helprin, The Ocean and the Stars (The Overlook Press, 10/3)

Craig Johnson, The Longmire Defense: A Longmire Mystery (Viking, 9/5)

Ragnar Jónasson, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Reykjavík: A Crime Story (Minotaur, 10/5)

Nancy Jooyoun Kim, What We Kept to Ourselves (Atria, 10/10)

Ariel Kaplan, The Pomegranate Gate (Erewhon, 9/26)*

Stephen King, Holly (Scribner, 9/5)

Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (S&S/Marysue Rucci, 10/3)

Michael Ledwidge, The Girl in the Vault (Hanover Square 11/7)

Asha Lemmie, The Wildest Sun (Dutton, 12/5)

Katia Lief, Invisible Woman (Atlantic Monthly, 1/9)

Jeff Lindsay, The Fourth Rule (Dutton, 12/5)

Nadine Matheson, The Kill List (Hanover Square, 10/3)

Jennifer McMahon, My Darling Girl (Gallery/Scout Press, 10/3)

Vanessa Miller, The Light on Halsey Street (Thomas Nelson, 9/5)*

Jacquelyn Mitchard, A Very Inconvenient Scandal (MIRA, 11/14)

Walter Mosley, Touched (Atlantic Monthly, 10/10)

Jo Nesbo, Neil Smith (Translated by), The Night House (Knopf, 10/3)

Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery (Pamela Dorman Books, 9/19)

Jason Pargin, Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia (St. Martin’s, 10/31)

James Patterson, 23 1/2 Lies (Grand Central, 9/12)

James Patterson, Cross Out: An Alex Cross Thriller (Little, Brown, 11/20)

James Patterson, Mike Lupica, Jane Smith (Little, Brown, 9/25)

J. D. Robb, Payback in Death: An Eve Dallas Novel (St. Martin’s 9/5)

Brandon Sanderson, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter (Tor, 10/3)

Jim Shockey, Call Me Hunter (Atria, 10/17)

Karin Smirnoff, Sarah Death (Translated by), The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons: A Lisbeth Salander Novel (Knopf, 8/29)

Alexander McCall Smith, From a Far and Lovely Country: No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (Pantheon, 10/17)

Caitlin Starling, Last to Leave the Room (St. Martin’s, 10/10)

Danielle Steel, The Ball at Versailles (Delacorte, 11/21)

Danielle Steel, Second Act (Delacorte, 10/3)

Danielle Steel, Upside Down (Delacorte, 1/2)

Daniel Sweren-Becker, Kill Show: A True Crime Novel About a Missing Girl and the TV Series That Shocked America (Harper, 10/3)

J.R. Ward, Darius (Gallery, 9/5)

Chuck Wendig, Black River Orchard (Del Rey, 9/26)

Tia Williams, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (Grand Central, 2/6)*

Nonfiction

As always, biographies and memoirs dominate this season’s nonfiction offerings, with musicians taking the spotlight: Fall will mark the publication of memoirs by Mary J. Blige, Melissa Etheridge, Juicy J, Thurston Moore, Sly Stone, Barbra Streisand, and Bernie Taupin, as well as Staci Robinson’s authorized biography of Tupac Shakur, plus Willie Nelson’s stories, Johnny Cash’s lyrics, and Dolly Parton’s fashion. Comedians, too, grab the mic, with forthcoming books from Maria Bamford, Gary Gulman, Leslie Jones, Aparna Nancherla, Aida Rodriguez, and Kenan Thompson, plus Elizabeth Pryor on growing up with her famous father and the Zucker brothers revisit the making of Airplane!.

Elsewhere in nonfiction, physicist Carlo Rovelli delves into black holes, Tracy K. Smith and Viet Thanh Nguyen deliver lyrical works on what it means to be American, Sloane Crosley publishes her first full-length work of nonfiction, and Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey help readers find happiness. This season will also see new collections by acclaimed essayists Roxane Gay and Ross Gay.

Essays, Criticism, & More

Louisa May Alcott, Liz Rosenberg (ed.), A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott (Notting Hill Editions, 10/24)

Chloe Aridjis, Dialogue with a Somnambulist (Catapult, 8/29)

Johnny Cash with Mark Stielper, Johnny Cash: The Life in Lyrics (Voracious, 11/14)

Noah Charney, Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art (Roman & Littlefield, 10/15)

Michel Faber, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us (Hanover Square, 10/24)

Rachel Feder, The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love (Quirk, 11/7)

Ross Gay, Delights: Book 2: Essays (Algonquin, 9/19)

Roxane Gay, Opinions (Harper, 9/6)

Myriam Gurba, Creep: Accusations and Confessions (Avid Reader, 9/5)

Keegan-Michael Key, Elle Key, The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey Through the Art and Craft of Humor (Chronicle, 10/3)

Phillip Lopate, A Year and a Day (New York Review, 10/10)

Kel McDonald (ed.), Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures (Iron Circus Comics, 10/10)

Aparna Nancherla, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome (Viking, 9/19)

Willie Nelson, Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs (William Morrow, 10/17)

Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (Grove, 10/3)

Dolly Parton, with Holly George-Warren, curated by Rebecca Seaver, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones (Ten Speed, 10/17)

Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage, Welcome to the O.C. (Mariner, 11/28)

Gay Talese, Bartleby and Me: A Reporter’s Life Among the Characters of New York City (Mariner, 9/19)

Benjamin Taylor, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather (Viking, 11/14)

Chris L. Terry, James Spooner, eds., Black Punk Now (Soft Skull, 10/31)

Jann S. Wenner, The Masters: Conversations with Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen (Little, Brown, 10/17)

Biography & Memoir

Raymond Arsenault, John Lewis (Yale, 1/2)*

Maria Bamford, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere (Gallery, 9/5)

Mary J. Blige, I Want to Be Where the Song Is: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 11/7)

Carlos Boozer, Every Shot Counts: A Memoir (Hanover Square, 9/6)

Blake Butler, Molly (Archway, 11/21)

Alejandra Campoverdi, First Gen: A Memoir (Grand Central, 9/12)

Alice Carrière, Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir (Spiegel & Grau, 8/29)*

Curtis Chin, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 10/17)

Anderson Cooper, Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune (Harper, 9/12)

Sloane Crosley, Grief is for People (MCD, 2/20)

Sasha DiGiulian, Take the Lead: Hanging On, Letting Go, and Conquering Life’s Hardest Climbs (St. Martin’s, 9/26)

Tim Dillon, Death by Boomers: How the Worst Generation Destroyed the Planet, but First a Child (Twelve, 10/3)

Eti Elboim, Sara Leibovits, The Girl Who Survived Auschwitz (One More Chapter, 9/19)

Melissa Etheridge, Talking to My Angels (Harper Wave, 9/5)

Michael Fanone, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul (Atria, 9/12)

Julia Fox, Down the Drain (Simon & Schuster, 10/10)

Steve Gleason and Jeff Duncan, A Life Impossible: Discovering Wisdom in a Fragile Existence (Knopf, 11/7)

Jackie Goldschneider, The Weight of Beautiful (Gallery, 9/26)

Gary Gulman, Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ‘80s (Flatiron, 9/19)

Will Hermes, Lou Reed: The King of New York (Farrar, 10/3)

Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann (tr.), Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir (Penguin Press, 10/10)

Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, 2/6)

Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences (Convergent, 11/7)

Sheila Johnson, Walk Through Fire (Simon & Schuster, 9/19)

Leslie Jones, Leslie F*cking Jones (Grand Central, 9/19)

Juicy J, Soren Baker, Chronicles of the Juice Man: A Memoir (Hanover Square, 8/9)

Miles Lagoze, Whistles from the Graveyard: My Time Behind the Camera on War, Rage, and Restless Youth in Afghanistan (One Signal, 11/7)

Stephanie Land, Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education (One Signal, 10/3)

Roland Lazenby, Untitled (Celadon, 10/24)

Laurence Leamer, Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession (Putnam, 10/10)

Donna Leon, Wandering Through Life (Atlantic Monthly Press, 9/19)

Fei-Fei Li, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI (Flatiron/Moment of Lift, 11/7)

Patty Lin, End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood (Zibby, 9/5)*

David Mamet, Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years In Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 12/5)

Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A California Memoir (Pantheon, 1/16)

Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything (Gallery, 11/7)

Martha McPhee, Omega Farm: A Memoir (Scribner, 9/12)

Brittany Means, Hell if We Don’t Change Our Ways (Zibby, 10/3)*

Thurston Moore, Sonic Life: A Memoir (Doubleday, 10/24)

Rich Paul, Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds (Roc Lit 101, 10/17)

Elizabeth Pryor, There Will Be No Laughing In This House: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 10/31)

Staci Robinson, Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography (Crown, 10/24)

Aida Rodriguez, Legitimate Kid: A Memoir (Harper One, 10/17)

Edel Rodriguez, Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey (Metropolitan, 11/7)

Amy Schneider, In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life (Avid Reader, 10/3)

Freda Love Smith, I Quit Everything: How One Woman’s Addiction to Quitting Helped Her Confront Bad Habits and Embrace Midlife (Agate Midway, 9/19)*

Jada Pinkett Smith, Worthy (Dey Street, 9/20)

John Stamos, If You Would Have Told Me: A Memoir (Holt, 10/24)

Sly Stone, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (Auwa Books, 10/17)

Barbra Streisand, My Name Is Barbra (Viking, 11/7)

Bernie Taupin, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me (Hachette, 9/12)

Kenan Thompson, When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice From a Professional Clown (Harper, 12/5)

McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso, 9/26)

Kerry Washington, Thicker than Water: A Memoir (Little, Brown Spark, 9/26)

Henry Winkler, Being Henry: The Fonz . . . and Beyond (Celadon, 10/31)

David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! (St. Martin’s, 10/3)

Politics & Current Events

Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Harper, 11/7)

Daniel Baer, The Four Tests: What It Will Take to Keep America Strong and Good (Avid Reader, 9/19)

Martin Baron, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post (Flatiron, 10/3)

H. W. Brands, Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics (Doubleday, 11/7)

Fredrik DeBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (Simon & Schuster, 9/5)

Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, 9/12)

Eva Fedderly, These Walls: The Battle for Rikers Island and the Future of America’s Jails (Avid Reaer, 10/24)

Aquilino Gonell, Susan Shapiro, American Shield: The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy (Counterpoint, 11/7)

Benjamin Herold, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs (Penguin Press, 1/23)

Gregg Jarrett, The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents (Broadside, 11/14)

Adam Kinzinger with Michael D’Antonio, Renegade: A Memoir of Defending Democracy in the Age of Trump (Viking/The Open Field, 10/17)

Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Crown, 10/3)

Edwin Raymond with Jon Sternfeld, An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing in America (Viking, 10/17)

Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Viking, 9/26)

Mike Rothschild, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Melville House, 9/19)

Cenk Uygur, Justice Is Coming: How Progressives Are Going to Take Over the Country and America Is Going to Love It (St. Martin’s, 9/19)

Vincent Vargas, Borderline: Defending the Home Front (St. Martin’s, 11/14)

Will Witt, Do Not Comply: Taking Power Back from America’s Corrupt Elite (Center Street, 9/19)

Social Issues

Dr. Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (Harper, 9/19)

Schuyler Bailar, He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters (Hachette Go, 11/7)

Arthur C. Brooks, Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier (Portfolio, 9/12)

David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 10/31)

Myisha Cherry, Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better (Princeton, 9/19)*

Jonathan Conyers, I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here: Finding My Voice, Finding My People, Finding My Way (Legacy Lit, 9/5)

Mauro F. Guillén, The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society (St. Martin’s 8/22)

Antonia A. Hylton, Madness: Crownsville, the Search for Sanity in a Segregated Asylum, and the Legacy of Race in Mental Health (Legacy Lit, 1/23)*

Michèle Lamont, Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World (One Signal, 9/12)

Natalie Lampert, The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control Our Fertility (Ballantine, 1/16)

Taylor Lorenz, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 10/3)

Sarah Lohman, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods (Norton, 10/24)

Bettina L. Love, Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal (St. Martin’s, 9/12)

Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Convergent, 9/12)

Amanda Montei, Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control (Beacon, 9/12)

Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (Penguin Press, 9/26)

Gina Rushton, The Parenthood Dilemma: Procreation in the Age of Uncertainty (Astra, 9/5)

Tim Schwab, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire (Metropolitan, 11/14)

Tracy K. Smith, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Knopf, 11/7)

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad, 10/17)

History and Crime

Azam Ahmed, Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance (Random House, 9/26)

Bret Baier, To Rescue the Constitution: George Washington and the Fragile American Experiment (Mariner, 10/10)

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Knopf, 9/26)

Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (Viking, 10/3)

Tom Clavin, The Last Outlaws: The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Gang (St. Martin’s, 11/7)

Rich Cohen, When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season (Random House, 9/5)

Kim Cross, In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America’s Child (Grand Central, 10/3)

Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns, Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo (Knopf, 10/31)

Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (Currency, 10/3)

Helen Garner, This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (Pantheon, 11/14)

Loren Grush, The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (Scribner, 9/12)

Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America (Dey Street, 9/19)

Susan Hendricks, Down the Hill: My Descent into the Double Murder in Delphi (Hachette, 9/19)

Steve Inskeep, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America (Penguin Press, 10/3)

Brian Kilmeade, Teddy and Booker T.: How Two American Icons Blazed a Path for Racial Equality (Sentinel, 11/7)

Elena Kostyuchenko, Bela Shayevich (tr.), I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country (Penguin Press, 10/17)

Harry N. Maclean, Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America (Counterpoint, 11/28)

Doug Melville, Invisible Generals: Rediscovering Family Legacy, and a Quest to Honor America’s First Black Generals (Black Privilege, 11/7)

Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI (Abrams, 10/10)

Liza Mundy, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA (Crown, 10/17)

Bill O’Reilly, Martin Dugard, Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts (St. Martin’s, 9/26)

James Patterson, Mark Seal, 24 Hours in Vegas (Little, Brown, 12/4)

David Petraeus, Andrew Roberts, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine (Harper, 10/17)

Douglas Preston, The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder (Grand Central, 12/5)

Amy Price, Behind the Door: The Dark Truths and Untold Stories of the Cecil Hotel (William Morrow, 10/3)

Daniel Schulman, The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America (Knopf, 11/14)

Deanne Stillman, American Confidential: Uncovering the Twisted Story of Lee Harvey Oswald and His Mother (Melville House, 11/7)

David Rabinovitch, Jukebox Empire: The Mob and the Dark Side of the American Dream (Roman & Littlefield, 10/15)

Business, Science and Technology

Roma Agrawal, Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way (Norton, 11/7)

Peter Brannen, The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World (Ecco, 12/5)

Rob Copeland, The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend (St. Martin’s, 11/7)

Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works (Norton, 10/3)

Lorraine Daston, Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 10/17)

Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 9/5)

McKenzie Funk, The Hank Show: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Built the Future But Couldn’t Outrun His Past (St. Martin’s, 10/3)

Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet (Norton, 9/12)

Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things (Viking, 10/3)

Christian L. Hart, Drew A. Curtis, Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped (APA LifeTools, 8/22)*

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures (One World, 1/9)

Tim Marshall, Astropolitics: How the Competition in Space Will Change Our World (Scribner, 11/7)

Marisa Meltzer, Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier (One Signal, 9/12)

Ben Mezrich, Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History (Grand Central, 10/24)

Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades (Flatiron, 11/14)

Carlo Rovelli, White Holes (Riverhead, 10/31)

Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin Press, 10/17)

Ganesh Sitaraman, Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It (Columbia Global Reports, 11/14)

Rachel Slade, American Hoodie: The Almost Impossible Quest to Make Things in Twenty-first Century America (And How It Got That Way) (Pantheon, 11/14)

Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (Penguin Press, 11/7)

Adam Welz, The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown (Bloomsbury, 9/19)

Erin Zimmerman, Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science (Melville House, 1/16)

Part One: Fiction

Salar Abdoh, A Nearby Country Called Love (Viking)

SUMMARY

A sweeping, propulsive novel about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves, in which two brothers struggle to find their place in an Iran on the brink of combusting.

EXCERPT

Chapter 1

Issa saw that that word—burn—had lately turned into a refrain for his friend, always hovering on the tip of his tongue, starting with a fire Nasser had fought down in the Zamzam district in south Tehran. Nasser knew the family of the burned woman, knew the piece of shit who drove her to pour gasoline on herself on the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year, the start of spring, when folks head to the parks to celebrate and throw bad luck into the wind.

He’d gone over to Beirut to search for love and had come back empty-handed, as usual. Nasser was there to pick him up from the airport. He broke the news that they’d have all day to rest before they had to head down to the Zamzam district to fight for the honor of a woman Issa had never known existed until now. It was bullshit, this chivalry. They were going to act out a scene of street theater only to flaunt themselves and not save any woman’s honor. This was the second time in four months that Nasser had asked him for backup in some skirmish like that.

Nasser didn’t really need the backup, yet he insisted on it. Maybe because the world of men could be pretty barren until men found each other. Which was rare. Mostly it was a relentless loneliness that one made up for with bravado in places like Jomhuri Avenue, where Issa had found himself selling expensive, Korean-made washing machines and refrigerators alongside Nasser for the last year. He had been kicked out of his university job because someone in the Selection Department had complained about his godlessness. That was what they called it—godlessness. He wasn’t sure where exactly the complaint had come from, and at that point, he didn’t care. There was always a complaint, always someone out to get you because they could. It didn’t matter where you lived or what wind of grievance blew your way. Still, Issa knew a couple of foreign languages, so a Good Samaritan at the university who felt sorry about the injustice from the Selection Committee had said they were looking for someone who could speak with embassy folk shopping along Jomhuri Avenue. The Russians, Italians, Turks, British, French, and Germans all had their embassies down around Jomhuri, and their people needed fridges and washing machines, didn’t they? Turned out none of them came to buy a damn thing at all, but there he had met Nasser, who was moonlighting during his forty-eight-hour off-shifts from his job as a fireman.

Then he’d backed Nasser in a fight.

Or rather, he’d executed an instance of precise violence in the other man’s place. Precise because Issa knew how to do it. He’d been trained in the art long ago and could still be quite good at it. And because violence was the glue that held their inadequate lives together. It wasn’t a way of life; it was life itself. And if Issa had at one time tried to escape that life, it was only because he’d been led to believe there were other options for men like them.

There weren’t.

That first time, a customer was slapping his own little boy on the back of the neck repeatedly while negotiating the price of a vacuum cleaner. Nasser had followed the man outside, and Issa followed Nasser onto Jomhuri Avenue, amid the thick crowds hustling cell phones and electronic paraphernalia underneath the Hafez Overpass.

Nasser catches up to the man, who looks like he is about to smack the boy again.

What’s going on? Has the kid broken your phone? Did he shit on your couch?

The man—big, flabby, his face oxlike—is disoriented for a second and asks if he left something in the store.

You did, you whore’s son. You left a bad taste, is what you left in the store. What has the boy done that you keep hurting him like that?

Issa stands there watching, near two policemen who know Nasser well enough to realize this is not yet their business, and for the time being, they shouldn’t butt in. The southwest corner of Jomhuri and Hafez is surely one of the most crowded thoroughfares in all of the Middle East. But where they stand, next to one of the fat pillars of the overpass, there’s space enough for anything. Issa watches the little boy—eight or nine at most. Already at that age he looks like life has beaten him down. If he knows how to smile, Issa doesn’t see it. This boy is soft. He lacks the rough unruliness boys his age possess. He is not ever going to get in fistfights and make his old man proud. Which is why the father treats the kid as he does. The man wants to unsoften the boy. And suddenly Issa wants Nasser to really hurt this man. Just plain flatten him. In fact, all the bitterness of the past several years funnels into this moment, and he recalls, for the umpteenth time, his flight from New York City back to Iran, a country he had not seen for over a decade—his crime a random search at a train station that turned up a few street-bought antianxiety pills, which in turn became a ridiculous charge of drug possession by a noncitizen.

Then a one-way ticket east. To here. To this corner of Jomhuri and Hafez.

Son. Nasser addresses the little boy gently. Is this man your father?

The boy nods.

Let go of his hand and go stand to the side for a minute, by those nice policemen.

The man finally gets it. Amazingly, he actually lets go of the boy’s hand. But then he says, I’m going to go right back into your store and get you fired.

You can try. Nothing will come of it. I’m their best salesman. They don’t fire good salesmen. And where do you think you are, Germany? This is Tehran, you idiot.

The man now looks in Issa’s direction as if wanting confirmation of all this, and Issa gives it. He’s not going to get fired for ruining your face. He might go to jail for two days or two weeks, but he’ll have his job when he comes back out. And he’ll find you again.

What do you guys want from me?

Not to hit the boy.

Before the man has a chance to say that it is not anyone’s business, Nasser adds, Everything is my business. Your kid especially.

Issa watches, listens. The father is the embodiment of all the things that are wrong with all of them. The man’s greasy hair no doubt smelling of onions and the sulfurous reek of yesterday’s kebab. The entire thing happens in less than five minutes. The policemen who have had enough amusement and must return to their clogged traffic finally intervene. They’re not going to let Nasser beat this guy. Nasser’s hands are far too heavy and relentless; everyone on Jomhuri Avenue knows this. It will be ugly. They agree that, instead, Issa must accompany the two-bit tyrant to one of the back alleys off Hafez, below the new monster mall that only sells cell phones. What is planned there is anybody’s guess. A chat perhaps. Or an exchange of money that Issa will then give to the cops for their time and trouble and, supposedly, looking out for the boy. But Ali the lockpick is there, like always. So is the one-eyed war vet who runs a discount grill from the back of his blue truck for the neighborhood drug addicts. And, of course, the addicts themselves, crazy-eyed, subdued, and hollow-cheeked.

This is where I shipped myself back to?

And then he applies what he knows best, a bone-crushing front kick to the man’s knee. It is the definition of precision, this kick, which he first learned from his old man thirty years earlier when he was a nine-year-old boy watching his father run a Shotokan karate academy below their two-bedroom apartment in the working-class district of Monirieh. But there’s nothing heroic in what Issa has done, and he knows it. The blow is mostly an expression of frustration. Still, it feels good when the man buckles and Issa tells one of the junkies to come up and give the fool a slap on the back of the head. "How does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change, gaav, you dumb cow?"

Later he tells Nasser, We didn’t do that boy any favors. You realize this, don’t you?

Why do you say that?

That no-good bastard will take it out on the kid.

Nasser considers this. How bad did you hurt him?

I think I broke his leg. Maybe.

You know how to fight?

My father ran a karate school in Monirieh. I grew up around that stuff.

It actually works? Karate, I mean.

It did today.

Nasser sighs. I wish we’d taken his address. You really think he’ll hurt the boy?

He’ll think twice about humiliating the kid in public from now on. That’s something.

Really? That’s enough?

It’s never enough.

His violence had been juvenile, he knew. But you simply had to believe sometimes—believe you could be doing a lot worse than the bad you’d already harvested. That was what he’d done when they’d told him he could hire a lawyer and beat the flimsy charge against him so he could remain in America. It had taken all of two seconds to decide he didn’t want a lawyer and he didn’t want to stay. Why all the fuss? He had been working the night shift in a hotel for the last eight years. Everyone he worked with was an immigrant like him. Chinese, African, Eastern European, Latin—all of them hustling for the next two-dollar tip on a four-hundred-dollar-a-night room. Maybe there was a transcendent story of emigration and success somewhere on the horizon, but Issa hadn’t found it yet and wanted no part of it now. His rent was too high—that was what mattered. His overpriced rat-trap hole-in-the-wall walk-up in the Bronx.

No. Sometimes there simply was no story of triumphing elsewhere in the world. Home was where one belonged, even if home was shit. And a decade had been more than enough for the flower of disillusion to turn into a forest.

Besides, work the graveyard shift for six months and even the air you take in begins to feel different; work it for eight years and you turn into a sleepwalker prone to seeking a cornucopia of deadening medicines. It was those meds that had gotten him thrown out of America, and he was not ungrateful for it. He’d gone back to the furnished, fully paid-for apartment that he’d shared with his dead father and dead brother in Monirieh and begun from zero, again. Besides selling washing machines, he slowly made up for the loss of the university job by teaching English courses and the conversational Spanish he’d picked up through years of working in hotels alongside Central Americans. Nowadays he taught in one of the better private language institutes in the city. The pay wasn’t bad and his apartment was, after all, his own. He wasn’t lacking. He didn’t have love—true—but he was working on it.

***

He rolled the window down. It was four in the morning and the desert air between the airport and the city smelled like desperation. He thought of all the men and women, himself included, who had tried their luck at being elsewhere in the world, all of them taking this same road to the airport and eventually being turned back from one country or another, penniless and broken—statuses denied, work permits not renewed, lives gone from nothing to nowhere.

The monumental Imam Khomeini shrine, just past the tollbooths at the threshold of the city, had a crushing presence at that hour. He was scared of the place and drawn to it at the same time. It had nothing to do with the larger-than-life fellow who was buried there and after whom the adjacent airport was named; rather, it was the sense that you could build sacredness out of nothing—one day there would be mud and dust in a place in the middle of nowhere, and a few years later pilgrims from the four corners of the earth would be flocking to those fresh minarets and domes, weeping as if this were a place as old as the stories of Hagar and Abraham.

He could not quite fathom any of this except to maybe pay some homage. Not quite a believer, and not quite enjoying the luxuries of disbelief either.

Nasser said, I still don’t understand what’s in Beirut for you.

The possibility of love.

You are a donkey.

He wasn’t going to argue the point. Nasser would not understand if he tried to explain that the love he sought was tied up in something as baroque as literary translation. The firehouse captain would simply call Issa a donkey again. How to explain to a guy like Nasser that you could actually give up years of martial arts practice for literature’s sake. It was futile. Issa’s grandfather had been a Shia cleric who had walked all the way from down south in the Lorestan province to Tehran. He had written books of Islamic Sharia law in Arabic that Issa still kept in Monirieh but had not been able to read until just a few years ago. His generation no longer had command of the Holy Book—it was like having a limb cut off, part of one’s self gone. So during all those years of the graveyard shift at the hotel when there were crawling hours of free time, he’d sat down to steep himself in the language of the Koran, in America of all places. Not because he had faith, but in fact because he did not have it. The immigrant life mostly took from you, just milked you dry. But if you learned the ways of another place, you might take a little back. America had not been ungenerous that way, even if it had eventually kicked him out. He had even started to take graduate courses toward another useless college degree while sleepwalking the daylight hours far from the hotel.

In Arabic he recited, "The beloveds are those whom we do not gaze upon."

Nasser cursed under his breath. You go to Beirut for four days and you can’t speak Persian anymore? What is it you mumbled?

Issa told him.

You really are a donkey.

Brother Nasser, those words were translated by a woman whom I wish to love.

When did you meet her?

I haven’t. Not yet.

Nasser shook his head, exasperated. Look, we have a fight tonight. Correction: I have a fight. You are there for backup, in case those fatherless whores decide to jump me. Here. He reached across the dashboard, brought out a small pouch, and told Issa to open it. Take that box cutter in there. If they decide to go with weapons, they’ll use daggers. They always do in Zamzam, those rotten lowlifes. But we’re not going to use daggers. All right? Just box cutters.

Nasser, you want me to watch your back in a place like Zamzam against people with daggers with only a box cutter? Have you lost your mind?

No, it’s you who has lost his mind. This so-called beloved of yours is in Beirut?

I think so.

So you don’t even know where she is? She probably lied.

Yes, it appeared that she had. And who she was, Issa still had no idea. He’d been catching her periodic translations from Arabic into Persian in one of the literary journals. But when he contacted the magazine, no one seemed to know who this translator was. There was only an email address. He had written and she replied immediately. Her name was Maysa. From Beirut. So, just as Nasser said, like a fool he’d gone there to try to find her. But the address she’d given in the Dahieh district in south Beirut didn’t exist. After a half hour of wandering aimlessly on foot, he was picked up by a Hezbollah security detail. This was their territory and the militia had eagle eyes on every block. What was he doing walking aimlessly in Dahieh? He’d told them the truth: love had brought him here. He was looking for Maysa; he showed them her poetry translations from a copy of the journal he’d brought along. They laughed, slapped him on the back, took him out for lunch, and finally said, Brother, you are a child. There’s no such address. No such Maysa here in Dahieh, or we’d know. We know every single poet in Dahieh. And every single snitch. And every single translator. And every Romeo. And now we know you. Go home and look for love where you can find it.

Nasser was gunning the engine, the highway mostly empty at that early hour except for the string of airport taxis on the Persian Gulf Highway. Before long they were in Monirieh, where nearly all the shuttered shops on the main avenue were sporting goods stores. A few years before Issa was born, his father had set up the dojo below their apartment, at a time when kung fu and karate were just starting to make their way into the country. During those early years there were only a handful of other Japanese hard-style dojos in Tehran. This gave the old man cachet, even though after the revolution they’d tried more than once to take over the dojo and throw him in jail because of his past. The only son of a cleric, he should have followed in his own father’s footsteps. Instead he’d become a professional military man, where he first learned karate from some of the Americans who had been stationed there in those days, and later he’d gone to Japan to study the art in depth. All this should have gotten him killed after the revolution, since his loyalties obviously lay elsewhere. But he was a child of the neighborhood and beloved by his Shotokan disciples. By the time he’d started letting Issa into the dojo for practice, the dust of the politics around them had finally settled. Meantime, Issa’s mother passed before the boy saw his second birthday, and his older brother had no interest at all in the compulsory swagger of their traditional south-central Tehran neighborhood.

A triangle of a father and two sons at odds with themselves and their closed-in, womanless universe.

The dojo was still there, empty. But it was still Issa’s property. As soon as he’d come back from New York a local boss had tried to strong-arm him into selling that prime space with its two access points to the main avenue. When he tried to get the shahr-khar off his back by promising to think about it, the guy had his men spread the old story of Issa’s brother being a kooni, a fag, as they called him, as the main reason their father had died so early, from heartbreak.

You would think these things were nothing, and that the world was a whole lot different now. But these things were everything in a neighborhood like Monirieh. And the world, Issa knew, was still mostly like Monirieh, not the New York he’d been living in. Those first times he saw men walking arm in arm, kissing each other, calling each other husband or wife at the hotel, he’d felt envy and then a recollection of grief for his dead brother. He wished for his brother, Hashem, to have had a semblance of what these couples had, if only for a day—even if he didn’t quite understand it all himself, even if it was as far from the world he had halfheartedly chained himself to during those last years that their father ran the dojo and pretended not to know his older son at all.

He would not forgive the Monirieh neighborhood for any of this, though he still knew each nook and cranny of each sporting goods store by heart. He could fight off an army of madar-fuckers who came at his door accusing the old man of having been an American stooge back in the day, but to bring up the past about his dead brother made everybody go back to bad old ghosts. He didn’t want this. What he wanted was peace and to be left alone mostly. Yes, his brother was gay—a queer, fag, fairy, or whatever else they would call him; and he’d loved him not because he was or wasn’t, but because they were brothers. Period. And since the day he’d opened his eyes in Monirieh until the day they finally killed Hashem, he’d had fights on his brother’s behalf because, well, that’s what brothers did for brothers.

Parked in front of his building, the only other people they saw were the municipality’s night workers sweeping the streets and collecting the garbage. They looked like little worker bees wearing face masks and yellow vests. He loved this city, to a point. He was and wasn’t glad to be back. It was the kind of place that made you imagine apocalypse had actually arrived, and it wasn’t impossible to live through it after all.

Nasser pointed to the empty dojo space. I don’t know why you don’t sell the place. You won’t have to work another day if you do that. What’s keeping you, Issa?

Sentimental value.

You are such a damn donkey. You are sitting on real estate people would sell their mother for. They’d sell their grandmother too.

He had already told Nasser about the local shahr-khar. They called him Haj Davood. Usually between six and nine p.m. you could find the guy in a real estate joint he owned just below Monirieh Square. He sat behind his fat desk gaping at his fingers and the fat, expensive rings on them, talking property and laughing over tired jokes with cronies and ass-kissers. The bodybuilding gym across the street also belonged to him. Property like Issa’s didn’t get sold without his approval. Haj Davood could make a buyer change their mind quickly.

Nasser, you already know my situation.

"So sell it to the shahr-khar."

He wants it for a song. My father ran himself to the ground over that place. It’s all I have in the world.

Rent it then.

Haj Davood would make sure the tenant doesn’t pay me after the second month and then doesn’t leave.

Then I’m going to have a talk with the man.

You can’t solve all the problems of this city with your fists, you know. The guy owns people. After a pause Issa added, "Why are we in a fight tonight? I mean, I know why. But is it necessary? The woman—Khoda, have mercy on her soul—is burned and gone already."

Shut your damn mouth. Don’t speak about the dead that way.

Sorry.

Khoda, have mercy…

Nasser’s voice trailed off. He had a reputation to uphold. He’d worked his way up the chain of command to become a captain in Tehran’s sprawling customs firehouse, where the opportunity for theft was too good to avoid. All that merchandise coming in and leaving the capital had to pass under the nose of the firehouse command. They couldn’t have an honest captain on the job, so the higher-ups had nudged him to move, and he’d leveraged that into a transfer to his own neighborhood. But these kinds of moves, like Issa’s return to Tehran, always had a cost. In Monirieh, Issa still had to protect the past without batting an eye, having an antirevolutionary father, a kooni brother; he had to be prepared to brawl at the mention of either of their names in any way less than respectful. If he didn’t, he’d be eaten alive. It was an exhausting man-eat-man world that made you want to run away. He had already done that once; he wouldn’t be doing it again.

He watched Nasser. The absurdity of their hollow lives as men of the Middle East. In the Zamzam district, a guy like Nasser cultivated the notion that protecting the weak was not a fairytale, but rather an occupation, a religion. An exhausting idea of valor that Persian classical literature had ingrained in their brains since first grade and they’d foolishly bought into and still believed in. Maybe they were obsolete men that way, living in a world that had already left them behind. Yet what other choice did they have?

He asked Nasser, Let’s say you beat up this guy today within an inch of his life, is it going to bring back his burned wife?

You don’t have to stand next to me tonight if you don’t want to.

A police car slowed down parallel to them. Nasser flashed his fireman’s badge and nodded. They nodded back and drove on. Issa’s mind wandered. He recalled his meager life as a hotel clerk in America. The place had been in the heart of Manhattan, and its old bar was famous as a drinking hole for legendary American writers going back several generations. This was a piece of information he carried inside him like a life jacket, as if he had been part of something bigger than being a mere night clerk with the lazy Middle Eastern accent whom drunken guests flirted with at three a.m.

He said to Nasser, Do you know how many women burn themselves in this country every day?

And every time a woman burns herself, the world ends.

It was a thought. Issa had to consider it. He said nothing.

Maybe you are just scared, Nasser went on.

You know I’m not.

Your karate is shit, brother.

That I already know. But I’m talking about tonight—why this fight in particular?

She was a distant relative.

You lie. You didn’t mention that before.

I don’t lie. Zamzam is full of people from my hometown. She is a distant relative. But that’s not actually why we’re fighting tonight.

Issa waited for him to continue.

Remember when the Plasco building burned down?

Issa remembered. It had been a few months back. Seventeen stories high, on the other side of Jomhuri Avenue across from the Friday Bazaar, Plasco was the first building of its kind in Tehran. This had been long before the revolution. But by the time it burned, the old structure was an oddity superseded by far more modern buildings. It had housed little shops and garment manufacturing outfits paying negligible rent and not budging from there. They said the place was burned on purpose. Whatever it was, it was a nightmare to witness during and afterward, like the World Trade Center in miniature, fire smoldering and breaking out again and again over the course of several weeks and making everyone in the vicinity sick.

Nasser looked hard at him. I can still smell that burned flesh at Plasco. It’s still with me. You understand? And when I smell that smell, which is all the time, I remember that poor woman.

There was nothing to say to that. Issa slid out of the car and grabbed his carry-on suitcase from the backseat.

I’ll pick you up at seven, Nasser called out. Get some sleep. Don’t forget the box cutter.

When the other man was gone, rather than going upstairs to the apartment, Issa unlocked the dojo and went inside. Fighting had a particular taste and smell. Practicing for fighting added a layer of scent that suggested fatigue and fear. After all these years the dojo still carried that tang. A karate academy in this neighborhood had meant brawls. And to be able to