2024 Summer/Fall Books: A Biased Preview, Part I

I should say a few words about who these previews are for and why they’re the way they are. I’ve been doing them for a few years now. They began as an outgrowth of my attempt to keep track of new books that I might want to pitch to someone, because, for a long time, reviewing a book was the most reliable way for me to write something maybe decent and have fun doing it and learn a few things and then get paid to boot. So that bias informs my selections: I’m always looking for nonfiction books that will fill holes in my education (no better way to learn something than to have to explain it to the general reader); major new works of art, in whatever sense of “major”; important reissues, in whatever sense of “important”; authoritative new editions of established classics; books that are at risk of falling through the cracks. Books that, in other words, you could get a lot of unfinished intellectual business out of the way by reviewing, and then write something you can pretend is definitive about it. My preview is thus much heavier on university- and small-press books than the other ones tend to be. Also, it reflects my personal interest in Christian theology.

It’s much lighter on new fiction and poetry. I feel bad about this, but the fact is that reading a hundred blurb-summaries on The Millions or LitHub makes me feel as if there is only one novel or collection of poems in the world, always emerging but never published. It tells the simultaneously epic and intimate story of a bisexual accountant from Brooklyn who is hired by a mysterious firm to catalogue all the fine shades of emotion that are passing out of the world due to a vaguely-described catastrophe that is known only as “The Event” (always capitalized), while also caring for her aging and difficult mother. This prose of this book is immaculate, observant, alive, perfect but also wonderfully imperfect, like that summer fling who inexplicably smelled of vinegar. On the whole, it probes our most painful and ecstatic personal and cultural fissures with the rough, sensitive fingers of a tuba repairman, until the reader is forced to utter the ninety-nine safewords of God. Also it mixes genre and literary.¹

This book doesn’t exist, of course, and thank God; the actual novels described in those previews are surely better than this book would be. But reading catalogue copy and preview-language makes me feel as though it is the only book that exists. So I cede a lot of that territory to The Millions and LitHub.