You know what’s scary this fall?
How many new books are coming.
So many that no less than Thomas Pynchon, publishing’s favorite recluse, is back. Not to be outdone, even Harper Lee returns with a posthumous collection. But you know what’s scarier? How many new scary books are coming between now and November, and beyond. Horror, hotter than hot in recent years, will be approaching late-aughts-dystopian-sci-fi surplus this fall. ‘Tis the season.
The endless to-be-read list on your phone, the ready-to-be-read stack on your bedside table, should expect company, regardless of whether you read cozy mysteries or harrowing memoirs. Autumn is a cornucopia, I guess. Or a Santa’s sack, too stuffed to close. Or, closer to the truth, a reminder that, like the season itself, time is short, days grow dark, turn on a light, stay up long after you should be in bed, wrap that blanket around. Just begin.
Now You See Them
“When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line.” That’s the opening of Thomas Pynchon’s “Shadow Ticket” (Oct. 7), which is set, for a while, in Milwaukee. It tells the story of a roving private eye (shades of “Inherent Vice”) searching for a Wisconsin cheese heiress in the early 1930s. But this is Pynchon: Soon we’re in Hungary, talking Capone, baseball, fascists, jazz, ghosts. At 88, he’s looser than ever. Harper Lee’s “The Land of Sweet Forever” (Oct. 21) is 16 archival pieces, a bit of fiction, plus oddities — a cornbread recipe, a fan letter to Oprah Winfrey.
Chicago Fictions
Three Chicagoans, three fiction debuts. Barry Pearce’s wonderful “The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories” (Nov. 11) is a love letter to a recognizable Chicago, full of snowbound dibs and Irish bars, hidden storefronts and class conflicts across neighborhoods. Don’t sleep on this one. Same for two others: Painter Harmonia Rosales’ lovely and ambitious “Chronicles of Ori” (Oct. 14) mixes examples of her art throughout a retelling of African mythologies, namely a Yoruba legend about the spirits that created humanity. “Great Disasters” (Sept. 30) is Chicago native Grady Chambers’ portrait of Chicago friends and their life paths after the events of Sept. 11.
Murky Truths
“Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival” returns historian Stephen Greenblatt (“Will In the World”) to the Bard via a compelling portrait of Christopher Marlowe and the repression of their Elizabethan age. Mariana Enriquez’s “Somebody is Walking on Your Grave” (Sept. 30) finds the great Argentine horror writer (“Our Share of Night”) mixing memoir and legend for a global survey of cemeteries. Chicago knows “redlining.” Temple University’s Bench Ansfield lays out an ugly history in “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City” about “brownlining,” their term for discriminatory insurance policies that led to house fires, often set by landlords.
Celebrity Tell-Some
Oomph. He probably would have loved the irony, but we’re getting a memoir from Ozzy Osbourne, who died in July. The title? “Last Rites” (Oct.7). Speaking of posthumous: “Insomnia” (Nov. 11) is the juicy second memoir by the late Robbie Robertson of The Band, a snapshot of his druggy, meandering friendship with Martin Scorsese. Roy Wood Jr., of “The Daily Show,” takes a clever approach to memoir: “The Man of Many Fathers” (Oct. 28) considers the influences on his trajectory, from his late father, beloved Chicago radio reporter Roy Wood Sr., to working at Subway. My favorite of this bunch is “The Uncool” (Oct. 28), a kind of literary addendum to filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s classic “Almost Famous,” fleshing out his years as a teenage correspondent for Rolling Stone.
True Midwest Lore
Ever heard the story of Robert Wadlow? Nearly 9 feet tall? Alton native? The largest known man in history? Wisconsin’s Ron Rindo had the wise idea to reimagine him in the 21st-century Midwest. His novel, “Life & Death & Giants,” reads like a warm, clear word-of-mouth smash. Songwriter John Prine, Maywood native, less spectacular legend, gets the appreciation treatment in Tom Piazza’s “Living in the Present with John Prine.” Michael Schumacher, arguably the leading expert on Great Lake shipwrecks, returns with “Along Lake Michigan,” tracing the biggest disasters through 1940. Or a few decades before the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior, which gets an absorbing “Perfect Storm”-esque literary narrative in “The Gales of November” (Oct. 7). (You can cross your father off your Christmas list.)
Novel History
I’m a sucker for a melancholy daydream, and here are two clever fictional meanders in cultural history. Sam Sussman’s “Boy From the North Country” (Sept. 16) is about a kid just outside of South Bend whose mother one day casually mentions she knew Bob Dylan. And curiously enough, he looks a little like Robert Zuckerman. Olivia Laing’s “The Silver Book” (Nov. 11) is a speedy, elliptical noir set among queer lovers in 1970s Italy, leading to the (real) 1975 murder of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.
One-stop Refresher Courses
“We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” (Sept. 16) by Harvard’s Jill Lepore is one of the year’s most engaging reads, an epic profile of the strange, often contradictory life and interpretation of the document guiding this nation. As brief as Lepore goes deep is “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written” (Nov. 18), Walter Isaacson’s stocking stuffer history (just 80 pages) of the Declaration of Independence. Tackling everything else: Eric Foner’s “Our Fragile Freedoms” is a few decades’ worth of essays on American history — from Chicago 1968 to the failures of school textbooks.
You Do You
If fall is memoir time, the theme this year is daughters and mothers. “The Perils of Girlhood,” by former Chicagoan Melissa Fraterrigo, takes a childhood, and adulthood, in pieces, spread between essays on her daughters, Judy Blume, mace, creeps, school violence, a dad’s anger. My favorite of this subgenre was “A Silent Treatment,” Jeannie Vanasco’s unsettling account of what happened when her mother moved in with her — and the pair stopped talking entirely. I wish I could offer something more hopeful here, but even Elizabeth “Eat, Pray, Love” Gilbert returns with “All the Way to the River.” It’s not about her mother, but it is about how she left her husband and fell in love with her best friend, who had terminal cancer, and also a cocaine problem.
The Returns of the Kings
The arts may be the only place the long-winded can reminisce without an eye roll. So don’t take the title of Margaret Atwood’s first memoir, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts” (Nov. 4), as tentative — this is a lively, winding, traditional walk through a life well observed, from the wilderness of Quebec to Hulu’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” John Irving is back at the Maine orphanage of “The Cider House Rules” for “Queen Esther” (Nov. 4), about a 4-year-old victim of antisemitism who traces her life across the 20th century. The title alone of Salman Rushdie’s “The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories” (Nov. 4) is a nod to a late-in-life return to the fabled writer’s past, reflecting on freedom of speech and the Mumbai of “Midnight’s Children.”
Brainy Thrillers
Three irresistible premises that deliver. Quan Barry’s “The Unveiling” (Oct. 14) should be a Hulu series before you finish reading this sentence — a Black film scout is marooned on an island in the Antarctic with white, rich tourists. Part dark satire, part ghost story. Joan Silber’s “Mercy” is a touching study of a man who leaves a friend for dead, then follows the way one decision can haunt a lifetime. Ilana Masad’s “Beings” (Sept. 23), not quite speculative fiction, not entirely family drama, juggles generations of trauma with UFO abductions, lonesomeness and queer love, telling the story of a couple whose supposed alien abduction resurfaces years after the encounter.
Cozier Thrillers
He’d cringe at being called “cozy,” but former Chicagoan Charles Finch, back with his latest Victorian mystery, “The Hidden City” (Nov. 4), is the most reliable detective novelist around. That said, he’s got competition for that title: Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins returns in “Gray Dawn” (Sept. 16), as does Mick Herron’s Slough House spies for “Clown Town.” John Grisham has a new courtroom drama, “The Widow” (Oct. 21). The one question mark is “Gone Before Goodbye” (Oct. 14), by an odd couple, Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon.
History, But Not Exactly
Did you know rape within marriage wasn’t illegal nationwide until 1993? Sarah Weinman, whose approach to true crime looks far beyond murder, returns in “Without Consent” (Nov. 11), a harrowing study of how a 1978 rape case and its debates over gender reverberate decades later. A cornerstone of true crime, profiling, is the heart of “The Monsters We Make” (Oct. 14), by Rachel Corbett of New York magazine, who travels from Sherlock Holmes to the Chicago roots of the Unabomber. “School Yearbook” (Nov. 10), by critic Kate Eichhorn, similarly digs past the history to consider yearbooks as public relations, as a credit check, as criminal evidence. “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore” (Nov. 4), by Char Adams of NBC News, considers how the rise and fall (and rise again) of Black bookstores traces a history of Black activism. Save room then for “Capitalism: A Global History” (Nov. 25), an early contender for a Pulitzer, Sven Beckert’s readable, never dull doorstop of how more people came to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
The Known World
My favorite sub-sub-genre might be the secret life of things we know. “Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China” (Nov. 4) is a mouthful of a title, but Jonathan Slaght’s story — how the tiger was shaped by history, politics and conservation — is more pure widescreen epic. Adam Nicolson attracted 56 species of birds to his backyard by cocooning himself in a backyard shed. The result is his lovely “Bird School” (Sept. 16). There can never be enough Elizabeth Kolbert, so I’ll take the new collection, “Life on a Little-Known Planet” (Nov. 4), a greatest hits of the New Yorker environmental writer. Mary Roach, you may argue, is a nature writer, except her one-word bestsellers (“Stiff,” “Gulp”) consider the human. “Replaceable You” (Sept. 16) is her latest very funny oddball survey about the ways in which people try to recreate people.
The Unknown World
If real-world horror is a bit much right now, a couple of fantasies: “Katabasis,” by the rising literary superstar R.F. Kuang (of “Babel” and Yellowface”), reads like a blockbuster, the tale of a student who follows her teacher, the world’s greatest magician, into hell itself; “The Poisoned King: Impossible Creatures, Book Two” continues Katherine Rundell’s breezy adventure to a set of islands where mythical monsters live. For folklore fans: “Witchcraft” (Oct. 7), by Argentine cartoonist Sole Otero, reads like a puzzle and resembles a concert poster, spreading its story of witches and victims across generations; “House of Day, House of Night” (Dec. 2), the return of Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, tells the story of a village after World War II, its population now down to only a handful of uncanny, unusual figures.
Hot Takes
There are so many good essay collections this fall, I’ll just give you titles and a few of their subjects. “Three or More is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025” (Oct. 14), by the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb: quitting Twitter, Minneapolis and George Floyd, “the misuse of American history.” Zadie Smith’s “Dead and Alive” (Oct. 28): mediating your time, the death of Martin Amis, student protests. A posthumous David McCullough collection, “History Matters” (Sept. 16): a history of his typewriter, human nature, luck. Amitav Ghosh’s “Wild Fictions” (Nov. 19): decolonization, Indian clothing, climate migration. Lawrence Wright’s “Headshots: Profiles, Essays and Reflections” (Oct. 7): stranger danger, Jimmy Carter, animal rights. Terry McMillan’s “It Was the Way She Said It” collects a smatter of her essays.
Days of Future Past
Ian McEwan doesn’t do apocalypse like other novelists. “What We Can Know” (Sept. 23) jiggers across a century, to tell the story of an obsessed scholar, decades after the world’s coasts have drowned, hunting through England for a mysterious poem that offers “a promise of a better future.” A brighter tale of hope: During the very early 20th century, spurred by astronomer Percival Lowell, supported by Nikola Tesla in a speech at the Auditorium Theatre, many Americans were certain of life on Mars. David Baron’s “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America” tells a fascinating tale of a sweet delusion.
Artful Memoirs, Literally
“We Survived the Night” (Oct. 14), by filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, another of the year’s best, is a loving tale of father and son braided around a fleet history of Indigenous sorrow and resilience. Susan Orlean, who needs a statue erected for her decades of remarkable profiles in The New Yorker and Esquire, turns the focus on herself for “Joyride” (Oct. 14). Creativity itself as a way of life constitutes the heart of Sally Mann’s “Art Work: On the Creative Life,” which weaves her photography among stories of controversy, rejection and happy accidents. A life in the arts has always been Patti Smith’s finest subject. “Bread of Angels” (Nov. 4) considers influences on that life, from being a sickly child in a Logan Square boardinghouse to long walks with Sam Shepard. What began as a tirade about a nonprofit using illustrator Raymond Biesinger’s work without permission became “9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off” (Oct. 21), a clever memoir of sorts, about the ways artists have their work stolen, shamelessly or sometimes legally.
Artful Biographies, Literally
It’s been 20 years since Jeff Chang’s masterful “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation,” but he’s back in a big way with “Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America” (Sept. 23). Chang rejects the legend and opts for a dense portrait using rarely-seen archives, of a man whose immigration reflected the rise of Asian American communities. Susana M. Morris’ “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler” similarly traces how a marginal voice in a once marginal genre, science fiction, in fact told a history of Black power, along with warning about American fascism. And because some artists we never entirely know: “Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift” (Oct. 7) is one of the first serious considerations of Swift as a writer, but also how “sound can transform what the words do.” The author is Stephanie Burt, who teaches a course on Swift at Harvard. The excellent Ron Rosenbaum is the author of “Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed” (Oct.21), otherwise: Does mankind need another Bob Dylan book? It does; this one is about the lyrics. Specifically, despite Dylan’s inscrutability, Rosenbaum argues for consistency.
Ripped From the Headlines
Beth Macy, best known for “Dopesick,” writes in “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America” (Oct. 7) that she left Urbana, Ohio, for college driving a “rusted Mustang, praying the whole way that its slippery clutch would not give out.” Some 40 years later, she returns to Urbana, now full of resentment and conspiracies, its middle class barely there. “Luigi: The Making and The Meaning” (Nov. 4) is John H. Richardson’s study of how the shooting of a healthcare CEO last December became a perverse celebration of kismet. “Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok” (Sept. 30) is, fittingly, a history in real time, tech reporter Emily Baker-White’s examination of how a Chinese social media platform became “a titan of soft power.” Elizabeth Buchanan’s lively “So You Want to Own Greenland?” (Sept. 16), compares the country to James Blunt (one or two hits, show up occasionally) and lays out why no one’s conquered it.
The Next Greats
Patricia Lockwood’s “Will There Ever Be Another You” (Sept. 23), and Angela Flournoy’s “The Wilderness” (Sept. 16), two of the best novels of the year, are also good examples of smart writers meandering smartly. Flournoy tells how five women ping off each other and decades of social upheaval. Lockwood, best known for her sad, hilarious — sadlarious? — memoir “Priestdaddy,” finds the irreverence in mental illness, but moreover, the difficulty of holding a linear train of thought in the 21st century. “Heart the Lover” (Sept. 30) returns Lily King to what she does better than anyone these days: fast-moving romances that only slow unexpectedly for a sock in the gut.
Native Novels
I couldn’t say if it’s a great time to be an Indigenous fiction writer, but the latest by Adam Johnson (Pulitzer winner, member of the Cheyenne River Sioux) and Brandon Hobson (National Book Award finalist, citizen of the Cherokee Nation) are certainly great. Johnson’s “The Wayfinder” (Oct. 14), that rare plain-spoken epic, is set at sea among a community making its first steps beyond their remote home. Hobson’s “The Devil is a Southpaw” (Oct. 28) juggles a pair of friends in juvenile detention with their jealousies, their futures, plus escapees and Duran Duran and surrealism.
Books on Books
It doesn’t feel like autumn without a good literary bio. One of the more illuminating: “When All the Men Wore Hats” (Oct. 28) is Susan Cheever’s remembrance of John Cheever, her father, carefully separating his stories from “layers of actual incidents” embedded within. Gerald Howard’s “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” (Nov. 4), nominally a biography of the great literary critic, is better described as a walk through the creation of a literary canon. Edward Mendelson’s “The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway” (Sept. 16) is another kind of literary biography, a tight course on the life and meanings of Virginia Woolf’s great novel.
Words on Words
There’s barely a page of Stefan Fatsis’ “Unabridged” (Oct. 14) where I didn’t laugh. Or chuckle. No, guffaw. Here is an inside look at the staff behind the Merriam-Webster dictionary, from arguments over naughty words to why it included two words made up on “The Simpsons” (“cromulent” and “embiggen”). Finally, Yale’s “Why I Write” series continues with iconoclastic story writer Lydia Davis. “Into the Weeds” (Sept. 16) is my favorite. Reflecting on the difficulty of describing why she writes for a living, Davis decides: “I’m not sure I want to know.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
FALL ARTS 2025
Look for all of our guides, Top 10 lists and critics’ picks for what’s coming:
- MOVIES and TV AND STREAMING
- THEATER, COMEDY and DANCE
- CLASSICAL MUSIC AND JAZZ, plus LIVE MUSIC concerts for pop, rock and hip hop
- ART OPENINGS and MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS