Publishing trends come and go, but you can always depend on the fall season to be fabulous, whatever books might be on the menu. This year is no different, so we’re delighted to bring you our annual Fall Preview Issue, spotlighting 150 books across the genres for readers of all ages. At the front of the issue you’ll find our reviews of all these titles, some of them appearing here for the very first time.
We also emailed some of our favorite authors—all with new releases this fall—to learn more about their books and to find out what fall books they are looking forward to. Read on to find our correspondence with Annie Ernaux, whose memoir The Young Man is her first release in the U.S. since winning the Nobel Prize last year; Teju Cole, whose novel Tremor is his first work of fiction in 12 years; and Jason Reynolds, the former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, who is releasing his first picture book, There Was a Party for Langston (with illustrations by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey). And that’s just the beginning.
Elsewhere in the issue, you’ll find columns by editors Laurie Muchnick, Eric Liebetrau, Mahnaz Dar, and Laura Simeon, highlighting some fall books that demonstrate the range and the quality of the season’s offerings in fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and young adult. To kick things off, I’ll offer my own fall TBR list—the books I’m especially looking forward to:
Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir by Alice Carrière (Spiegel & Grau, Aug. 29): The fall schedule is typically chockablock with marquee names, but the debuts are inevitably strong. This memoir by the daughter of artist Jennifer Bartlett and actor Mathieu Carrière promises to be, according to our starred review, “spellbinding”—the account of a privileged and unorthodox childhood and a struggle with mental illness.
North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House, Sept. 19): I’m besotted with Mason’s fiction, especially his novel The Winter Soldier and his story collection, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth. His new novel tracks the fortunes of a New England home and its fascinating inhabitants—both living and ghostly—across three centuries in a dizzying array of styles. Our starred review calls it “multitudinous and magical.”
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove, Oct. 3): The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (2015) and The Committed (2020) is another writer whose new work I eagerly anticipate. This fall, Nguyen returns with a memoir, reflecting on his family’s experience as refugees from Vietnam arriving in California in the 1970s, as well as his own development as a writer and a citizen in a country whose grapplings with the Vietnam War remain incomplete. Our review calls the book “lyrical and biting.”
Family Meal by Bryan Washington (Riverhead, Oct. 10): Houston, Texas, is once again the setting for this new novel by the author of Lot and Memorial. Family, food, gay life, grief, addiction—they’re all here in their many permutations. Says our starred review: “Washington brilliantly commits to his style and preoccupations in a novel about the often winding journey to family.”
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
