What do your fall reading plans look like? There’s a lot to be said for beach reads or the doorstoppers you might hole up with during the winter months, but finding the right book for fall is a bit more complicated. For our September recommendations, we’ve offered a wide variety of styles and stories, from nonfiction grappling with big ideas to thrilling novels set in a bygone place or time. Perhaps one of these 10 books is the work you’ve been looking for as the weather gets colder and the days get shorter.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures (Sept. 17)
“Climate action needs way better vibes,” said Urban Ocean Lab co-founder Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in a New York Times interview earlier this year. It’s not hard to look at What If We Get It Right? as Johnson’s foray into correcting that aspect of the debate around climate change. Her new book offers readers a number of ways to think about what the future might hold, and features contributions from thinkers as varied as Bill McKibben, Marge Piercy and Kate Marvel.
Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music (Sept. 10)
If you only know Franz Nicolay from his work as a member of The Hold Steady, you’ve only experienced a fraction of his artistic output. Both as a solo artist and a member of multiple bands, Nicolay has spent decades as a working musician — and that’s before factoring in the multiple books he’s written. Band People is his latest, and it’s a candid look at the lives of musicians who don’t spend as much time in the spotlight — all conveyed with a virtuoso’s touch.
Adam R. Rosenthal, Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life (Sept. 17)
Spend enough time reading the news in 2024, and you’ll eventually find yourself reading about the Singularity, biohacking or advanced research into human longevity. It can be dizzying to consider what’s likely and what’s more speculative about these reports — to say nothing of the science and philosophy underlying them. Cue Texas A&M professor Adam R. Rosenthal, whose new book puts the search for immortality into a context that’s both new and timeless.
Carson Ellis, One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary (Sept. 10)
If you’ve ever kept a journal, have you ever looked back at it from a remove of several years, or even longer? That’s what writer and artist Carson Ellis did with her new book One Week in January, revisiting the journal that she kept for one week in 2001 and adding artwork inspired by those thoughts and events. ”[T]he deeper I get into the book, the less it feels like illustration,” Ellis wrote in 2023; this book provides a singular look at past and present colliding.
Rumaan Alam, Entitlement (Sept. 17)
Few works of fiction tapped into the zeitgeist as well as Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel Leave the World Behind, a story of two families reckoning with world-changing events that dovetailed uncannily with early-pandemic anxieties. Alam’s followup continues its predecessor’s reckoning with big questions, but ventures into different territory: here, the protagonist is a young woman working for a billionaire who begins questioning her own beliefs about money and power.
Emily St. James and Noel Murray, Lost: Back to the Island: The Complete Critical Companion to the Classic TV Series (Sept. 17)
Earlier this year, Lost became the latest acclaimed television series to surface on Netflix, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the show’s ABC debut. (And if reading that sentence made you sigh at the passage of time: you and me both.) The time seems right for a deep dive into the series’ creation, production and legacy — and the team of Emily St. James and Noel Murray is ideally qualified to explore what the show meant at the time and it means to watch it in 2024.
Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream (Sept. 10)
In the right hands, the story of a complicated life can become the stuff of great literature. Jessica Hoppe’s new memoir First in the Family chronicles her own experience in recovery and the harrowing experiences of members of her family — and explores where attempts to address addiction can fall dramatically short. Kirkus Reviews called this a “raw, at times unsparing memoir,” and it promises to be a gripping and thought-provoking exploration of one family’s experiences.
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Pedro Almodóvar, The Last Dream (Sept. 24)
For decades, audiences have marveled at director Pedro Almodóvar’s singular cinematic vision, one that rarely takes viewers where they’d expect but often involves memorable characters, bold twists and haunted desire. In this book, translated by Frank Wynne, Almodóvar revisits his own writings for a cross-section of his interests and obsessions, encompassing fiction and nonfiction alike. “The through line here is the restless churn of Almodóvar’s imagination and storytelling sensibility,” wrote The Observer’s Guy Lodge — and if you’ve ever wanted to go deeper into this filmmaker’s world, this is a perfect way in.
Dan Kois, Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Sept. 17)
Dan Kois’s 2023 novel Vintage Contemporaries was a subtly all-encompassing read, a book about the hold great books can have on readers that was an enthralling read unto itself. How do you follow that up? In Kois’s case, it’s with a swerve into the uncanny. Here, Kois tells the story of a group of middle school students navigating threats both mundane and supernatural in their hometown. With Halloween not far away, this is a fine gateway into a spookier key of literature.
Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (Sept. 3)
Few writers today blend big ideas with memorable characters the way that Rachel Kushner does. Her novel The Flamethrowers is one prime example of this, a politically-charged story of love and art set against a turbulent moment in history. Creation Lake finds Kushner heading further into the land of espionage, focusing on an American spy in France who is gradually drawn into the orbit of the group she’s been surveilling, raising the stakes and moral complexity.
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