For bonus points, we'd strongly recommend shopping local and ordering these books from one of the many local bookstores that deliver (think of it as a virtual way to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day, which has also been postponed from its original April date). To help you with that, we've linked to independent bookstores' listings for the books we recommend below. If an event was not originally scheduled to happen at a bookstore, we've linked to the IndieBound page, from which you can choose your favorite local bookstore to support. For more book ideas, check out our quarantine book club and daily poem recommendations.
AVAILABLE NOW
The City We Became
(Released March 24, by NK Jemisin, who will have a livestreamed Town Hall event on April 1)
African American sci-fi and fantasy author NK Jemisin has earned an impressive number of awards for her works. In fact, she currently stands as the only person to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row, for all three of the books in her Broken Earth series (2015âs The Fifth Season, 2016âs The Obelisk Gate, and 2017âs The Stone Sky). She has an incredible knack for creating sympathetic, believable characters within the truly unbelievable, fantastic worlds she builds, which makes sense considering her background as a psychologist; she only stopped practicing to focus on her writing full time in 2016. Excited to read The City We Became, her forthcoming novel and the first in a brand-new trilogy in which âevery great city has a soul,â some cities like NYC have several, and five of its avatars must come together to save it. NYC, that is. LEILANI POLK
Deacon King Kong
(Released March 3, by James McBride, whose March 30 Town Hall event was canceled)
The National Book Award-winning author of The Good Lord Bird has a new, energetic novel set in 1960s Brooklyn. The book traces the events in a diverse community that lead to a drunken old deacon shooting a drug dealer in the projects. Kirkus Reviews calls the novel "an exuberant comic opera set to the music of life." JOULE ZELMAN
The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home: A Welcome to Night Vale Novel
(Released March 24, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, whose April 2 University Book Store event will be replaced by a livestreamed event on a TBA date in the near future)
If you're a fan of Welcome to Night Vale, you probably don't need us to explain much more to you about this book that's based on a character from the spooky podcast. If you don't know what we're talking about, you should probably go listen to the podcast before buying this bookâhere's more from Amber Cortes about it, written in advance of the podcast's July tour stop at the Neptune: "Something is just not quite right in the town of Night Vale. For one, thereâs the mysterious lights circling above every night, and of course there are the hooded figures at the dog park. If youâre part of the 'cult' that religiously follows the podcast, youâll know thatâs just the tip of the iceberg in this seemingly 'friendly desert community.' But even if you arenât, go to the show, set up like an old-timey live radio play, and experience host Cecil Palmerâs voice, which will simultaneously soothe your nerves and give you the shivers."
Here for ItâOr, How To Save Your Soul in America
(Released February 18, by R. Eric Thomas, whose April 16 Town Hall event will be livestreamed)
The playwright, author, host of The Moth, and senior staff writer at Elle will share personal experiences with and thoughts on being the "other," whether being queer in a conservative church growing up or being black in a predominantly white high school. JOULE ZELMAN
The Glass Hotel
(Released March 24, by Emily St. John Mandel, whose April 7 Elliott Bay Book Company event was canceled)
In this new, time-hopping novel by the author of the National Book Award-nominated Station Eleven, a woman disappears off a container ship, her husband tries to float a Ponzi scheme, and her brother, an aspiring musician, copes with a drug problem. The plot is very difficult to summarize, actually, but that's part of the fun. JOULE ZELMAN
In the Lateness of the World
(Released March 10, by Carolyn Forché, whose April 1 Elliott Bay Book Company event was canceled)
Carolyn ForchĂ© is one of the first and best practitioners of "the poetry of witness," a school of poets who use the form to record memories of war, famine, injustice, and every other rotten product of raw nature or human ambition. For the last 17 years, readers have had to content themselves with ForchĂ©'s nonfiction, her translations, her anthologies, and her scholarship on the El Salvadoran peasant movement. But now she's finally out with In the Lateness of the World, a new collection of post-apocalyptic poems shot through with rays of hope. Sort of like Pound's Cantos filmed by Steven Spielberg with a little Jorie Graham thrown in there. If that means nothing to you, here's a pretty indicative line from a poem about a group of people walking across a bridge laid out over a deep chasm: "Below us bladder-wrack, sea-froth and dulse, / sea against rocks in heave and salt, and between / bridge and sea an abyss we cross, as behind us / the headland recedes â cottages and boats, clouds and sheep, / a piping of oystercatchers dying out, and the callings / of kittiwake preparing to leave their nesting ground." RICH SMITH
New Waves
(Released March 10, by Kevin Nguyen, whose April 17 Elliott Bay Book Company event was canceled)
In addition to features editor at The Verge and senior editor at GQ, Brooklyn-based author Nguyen can now add "published novelist" to his resume, following the release of his debut novel, New Waves. According to Elliott Bay, it's "A wry and edgy debut novel about race and startup culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship." Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng also called it "A knowing, witty, and thought-provoking exploration of love, modern isolation, and what it means to existâespecially as a person of colorâin our increasingly digital age.â
The Power Notebooks
(Released March 3, by Katie Roiphe, whose March 24 Town Hall event was canceled)
Love her or (perhaps more likely) hate her, Katie Roiphe has been a daring, unique, and critical voice for decades. Sheâs argued against victimhood feminism, claiming that women actually do have agency and control over their actions, and was famously accused of planning to out the creator of the #ShittyMediaMen list. This won her few fans on the left, but Roiphe, undaunted, continues to speak her mind, whether itâs good or bad for her own reputation. If itâs ballsy, unapologetic women you like, Katie Roiphe is it. KATIE HERZOG
Recollections of My Non-Existence
(Released March 5, by Rebecca Solnit, whose March 17 Town Hall event was canceled)
Six years after Rebecca Solnit added a few new words to the lexicon of sexist experience in her smash-hit essay collection Men Explain Things to Me, the longtime writer and activist is out with a new memoir about her formative years in San Francisco. In Recollections of My Non-Existence, Solnit gives the Beats the drubbing she felt she couldn't give them back in the day, tells the stories of the people and places that inspired her writings, and compares the violence women faced then to the violence they still face today. Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein [was supposed to] interview Solnit onstage, so I've got my fingers crossed for an insider's take on the overlap between the riot grrrl scene and the SF literary activist scene in the 1990s. Regardless, this is a grand council of living feminist legends that must not be missed, especially when there's so much that continues to trouble the realm. RICH SMITH
Sharks in the Time of Saviors
(Released March 3, by Kawai Strong Washburn, whose April 23 Third Place Books event has yet to be canceled)
Hawaiian author Washburn's new novel was one of the New York Times' "13 New Books to Watch for in March." Here's why: "When 9-year-old Nainoa Flores is tossed overboard on a family vacation, the sharks soon start circling. But instead of the worst, the animals safely return the child â a blessing his parents see as the work of ancient Hawaiian gods. Washburnâs buzzy debut novel explores the shifting bonds of family and the inescapable pull of home." JAMIE REED
The System
(Released March 24, by Robert Reich, whose April 15 Town Hall event has yet to be canceled)
Trust economist, Berkeley professor, and social media celebrity Robert Reich to puncture capitalist myths of meritocracy and the free market. In his new book, subtitled Who Rigged It, and How We Fixed It, he explains how the rich have hijacked democracy and how to take back power for the majority. JOULE ZELMAN
Untamed
(Released March 10, by Glennon Doyle, whose March 17 Moore Theatre event was canceled)
Doyle, founder and president of the grassroots philanthropic nonprofit Together Rising and author of Love Warrior and Carry On, has a new memoir about "the joy and peace we discover when we [...] start trusting the voice deep within us." JOULE ZELMAN
Wow, No Thank You
(Released March 31, by Samantha Irby, whose April 5 Benaroya Hall event with Lindy West was canceled)
Hilarious and uncompromisingly feminist pals Lindy West (a former Stranger writer and author of Shrill) and Samantha Irby (author Meaty and other popular books, plus the bitches gotta eat blog) [were supposed to] appear on stage together for a new show about "womanhood, pop culture, body image and politics," which sounds absolutely killer. As Elliott Bay has it, Irby's new book features essays that "draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new life. Wow, No Thank You is Irby at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable." JOULE ZELMAN
Writers & Lovers
(Released March 3, by Lily King, whose April 16 Third Place Books event has yet to be canceled)
Lily King (author of Euphoria and The Pleasing Hour) has a new book out that, according to Third Place Books, is "an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman." It's received plenty of acclaim so far, including being chosen for the New York Times' "Group Text" book club. It also landed on the Indie Next Listâhere's more about why they chose it from bookseller David Enyeart: âCasey lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, waits tables, worries about her debt, and falls for the wrong man and the right one. She dreams, she grieves, and she worries about her health. In spite of it all, she manages to finish her novel. Lily Kingâs assured, closely observed story is a loving portrait of Casey and the writing life. I donât think thereâs a single unnecessary word in the whole thing. Writers & Lovers is a joy to read, a gift from a writer at the top of her game.â JAMIE REED
EXPECTED LATER IN APRIL
Afterlife
(Expected April 7, by Julia Alvarez, whose April 15 Central Library event was canceled)
A retired college professor and writer suffers a series of upheavalsâincluding the arrival of an undocumented, pregnant teenager at her house. This novel by the famous Dominican American writer (known for How the GarcĂa Girls Lost Their Accents, among other works) has been hailed as "a powerful testament of witness and humanity written with audacity and authority" by prominent local author Luis Alberto Urrea. JOULE ZELMAN
Attention: A Love Story
(Expected April 7, by Casey Schwartz, whose April 28 Town Hall event has yet to be canceled)
In her alarming New York Times feature, "Finding It Hard to Focus? Maybe It's Not Your Fault," neuroscientist and journalist Casey Schwartz painted a bleak picture of everyday life for a lot of us idiots who live on the internet: "This is us: eyes glazed, mouth open, neck crooked, trapped in dopamine loops and filter bubbles. Our attention is sold to advertisers, along with our data, and handed back to us tattered and piecemeal." While it hurts to be read to rights so completely, at some point someone had to look up from her smartphone and tell us that the giant corporations who run these addictive little robots in our pockets are juicing our lizard brains and robbing us blind. Schwartz more or less does that in her new book, Attention, which offers an accurate diagnosis of our collective disease, but also, helpfully, a few antidotes. RICH SMITH
Subduction
(Expected April 14, by Kristen Millares Young, whose April 24 Hugo House book launch has been rescheduled to October 2)
Rich Smith has called Millares Young a "crack Seattle journalist and novelist," and her new, meticulously researched historical novel sounds like a winner. Hear her read from this story of a Latinx anthropologist reeling from her husband's betrayal as she tries to carry out a fieldwork project on the Makah Indian Reservation in Neah Bay. When she begins an affair with one of her research subjects, Peter, love, trauma, and colonialism collide. JOULE ZELMAN
