Four Books I Loved Coming Out This Spring

Just some recommendations for your post-winter reading

Last month I wrote about how hard—though rewarding—I find writing professional book reviews. They’re tough. Also tough are those “most anticipated” lists in which you’re supposed to pretend you’ve surveyed the thousands of books being published in a given season and carefully selected the Top 10 (or 50 or however many) best ones for your discerning readers. But part of the pleasure of having this newsletter is I can write whatever I want here and ignore the (useful) constraints of professional reviews and the (annoying) SEO-focused framing of listicles.

So today I thought I’d just recommend four excellent books coming out soon that I have happened to read. I won’t pretend to have read everything coming out—or even a fraction of my ever-expanding stacks of galleys—but these are four books I loved and think you might love too.

(All the links below go to Bookshop.org.)

James by Percival Everett

(out March 19th from Doubleday Books)

Percival Everett has long been one of my favorite contemporary authors, and now in his 60s he’s been on a truly remarkable run. Since 2020, Everett has published four novels: Telephone, The Trees, Dr. No, and now James. Three of those are among the best novels I’ve read in the last decade. The fourth, Dr. No, wasn’t as strong IMHO but was still a fun and inventive novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. Telephone, The Trees (which I reviewed here), and now James are each astounding. And each are also quite different. Although that will be no surprise to anyone familiar with Everett’s genre-and-style-hopping work.

Briefly, James is Huckleberry Finn retold from the perspective of Jim. It has all the energy and humor of Twain’s work—in Everett’s own unique voice of course—and adds a whole new level of depth to the story. Everett does something quite clever with the language that I don’t want to spoil. Since I’m not writing official reviews here I can just leave it at that. Telephone was a Pulitzer finalist, The Trees was a Booker finalist, Dr. No won the PEN/Jean Stein Award, and American Fiction—and adaptation of Everett’s essential Erasure—is currently a Best Picture nominee. This feels like Everett’s moment and I’d be shocked if James isn’t competing for the major awards this year. It deserves to.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

(out March 12th from Viking)

Rita Bullwinkel follows up her excellent and weird story collection Belly Up with a knockout punch of a debut (excuse the pun please). Headshot explores the lives of eight young women in a youth boxing competition. Bullwinkel narrates their fights as well as well as their hopes, dreams, pasts, and futures in a roving third person POV. Each of the characters feel distinct and alive—something tricky to pull off in this format, I think—and the prose is excellent sentence by sentence and chapter by chapter. It’s fun, moving, and inventive. I’ll have more to say about it in a couple weeks as I interviewed Bullwinkel for this newsletter’s interview series. (Full discloser, I know Bullwinkel IRL as the kids say.) If the above sounds interesting, make sure to put Headshot on your radar.

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini (translated by Jordan Landsman)

(coming out May 7th from Transit Books)

Transit was founded less than 10 years ago but has quickly become one of the best indie presses around. And if you are, like me, a fan of surreal and fantastical literature I think you will be blown away by The Novices of Lerna. I was unfamiliar with Bonomini, but he was a contemporary of Argentine giants like Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. This book can hold its own with that company.

The Novices of Lerna is a novella plus stories collection that I imagine will be called “magical realism” since American reviewers love to call anything from Latin America that. Don’t expect the lush magic-filled world of a Marquez. This work, especially the titular novella, is more in the vein of the spare, unsettling, and philosophical fiction of Kafka, Buzzati, and Ocampo. Maybe a dash of Robert Walser in there too. The title novella follows a man who gets a fellowship to a strange school where every student is his exact doppelgänger. I loved it. Other stories in the collection veer toward pure surrealism, such as the bizarre and excellent “The Bengal Tiger” that opens:

Reboot by Justin Taylor

(out April 23rd from Pantheon)

Taylor is another author I know in real life, and also another author I’ve roped into an interview for this newsletter. So I’ll have more to say about the book when that interview is published. For now, let me say I tore through Reboot, which is a sharply written and hilarious novel about a has-been actor in a downward spiral who tries to fix his life with a (yes) reboot of the Buffy-by-way-of-Baywatch teen drama that made him briefly a star. There’s so much Taylor does here well that many other authors fumble imho. One of those is the satire of the internet and social media, which is spot on. Another is insanity and absurdity of modern fandom culture. And this is also one of the few novels I’ve read that handles the COVID pandemic well, something so much fiction just avoids. There’s plenty more timely stuff here too including Roguelike video games, Hollywood nonsense, right-wing conspiracy politics, and a general look at our culture of endless rebooting.

The Werewolf at Dusk by David Small

(out March 12th from Liveright)

As long as I’m talking spring 2024 books, I’ll remind my readers that I’m extremely honored to have a story included in David Small’s forthcoming graphic story collection. My story is the title one, about an aging werewolf, and there is an original by Small and a third by Jean Ferry. All three are strange stories eerily evoked with Small’s astonishing and expressive art. Perhaps I can post a page as a preview:

Obviously, my text appears in the book but I would have loved it even if that wasn’t the case. Small is just an astounding artist—see his bestselling memoir Stitches—and to see his images applied to strange horror stories is about as up my alley as a book could be.

So there you go. Four books I loved and have nothing to do with and a fifth I loved and am involved with. If they sound appealing, I hope you’ll check them out.

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If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”

Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).