Hi nerds,
I recently had a bookseller rite of passage: I attended my first Winter Institute, the annual industry convention hosted by the American Booksellers Association for independent bookstores across the country. This year, 1,600+ stores attended. It was madness.
It’s a packed three days of panels, vendor tables, publisher sales rep appointments, author signings, and more. I was there for my day job in publishing, but I managed to sneak away a few times to catch talks I wanted to attend—and I got to meet SO many fellow booksellers in the wild. I have literally never felt more popular in my life. I’m still riding the high of being pointed at across a room and hearing someone yell “Sunny’s?!” at me.
A big part of Winter Institute is access to upcoming titles that publishers bring with them. There’s something called a galley room (a galley is an advanced reading copy of a book, also referred to as an ARC), which is full of thousands of unreleased titles that are free for the taking. Just after breakfast on the first day, the doors open and absolute chaos ensues. I’m talking people stacking 30+ books in their arms, trying to shuffle through a sea of other people doing the exact same thing. Watching 1,600 people descend on a room full of books is something I won’t forget anytime soon especially because I was right alongside them.
I get a ton of galleys in the mail every day at the store. My sales reps at each publisher are usually happy to send whatever I want for stock consideration, so I wasn’t feeling particularly feral about grabbing everything I saw. But I still came away with my fair share.
The following is my bounty—and I’m going to tell you why each title made the cut and was worth lugging home.
I fucking STAN Hernan Diaz. His hit rate is 2/2 and I'm sure Ply will be a banger as well. I actually got to meet him during an authors reception at Winter Institute, and I told him that I always recommend In the Distance to customers when they come in looking for a Western to prank them. He signed my book with the following: "To CJ, with so many thanks for misleading readers into my work." 🥲
About the book:
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination
Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich downtown art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could be either a contraption devised by a deranged mind or a machine that will change the very fabric of reality.
After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz now gives us a glimpse into the future. Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.
Like I mentioned, I was really attending Winter Institute in a publisher capacity and the majority of the time I was behind a folding table handselling upcoming titles from the publisher I work for's catalog. Our table neighbors were the Canadian publisher, Biblioasis. Their sales rep described their table as being segmented into pastoral novels vs. hysterical novels, and directed me to Love Novel when I expressed I was more interested in the hysterical. The author of Love Novel is Croatian, and I am too! I don't think I've read anything translated from Croatian before, so this cemented that this was the book for me.
About the book:
Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us to the frontlines of a war waged between kitchen and bedroom.
Love in late capitalism: in an unnamed city, a husband and wife wage a silent war of rage and resentment. He, an out-of-work Dante scholar, is trying to change the world--and write a novel. She was once a passable actress, but now she's failing at breastfeeding. They take on gigs and debts. He drinks cheap wine; she cleans obsessively. In their two-room flat the tension rises and turns exquisite: the rent is past due, their careers have stalled, the regime is crumbling, and there's always the baby, the baby who won't stop crying.
Intense and astutely ironic, devastating and darkly comic, Ivana Sajko's Love Novel takes a scalpel to the heart of modern married life.
I gotta be real with you, this was a cover grab. What a compelling and minimal treatment! I love the sense of scale here. The published FSG is usually a safe bet for me as well, so after reading the description on the back this one came home with me.
About the book:
After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other.
Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.
At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother’s friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.
Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark’s The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.
I loved Daniel Mason's debut novel, North Woods. I handsell this a lot at the store and find it works for a lot of recommendation requests I get. I was able to get this one signed as well and meet Daniel and he was nice enough to sign one for my boss Matt, who was the person who recommended North Woods to me in the first place. Hi Matt I know you're reading this.
About the book:
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind—a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Soft Skull is another indie publisher who consistently do weird shit that I'm into it. The desert landscape made me pick this one up (always looking for arid desert rep in a novel!) and the description sold me.
About the book:
A complex mother-daughter relationship is taken to a new level in this fresh and propulsive novel of family curses, blood-thirsty ghouls, and budding romance set against the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas
Ellis Karsten spends nights working triage in the ER and days having the same conversation with her mom. The early onset dementia is exhausting, but the real challenge is their curse—Ellis’s family must feed daily on blood, or risk becoming mindless, skinless killing machines. When Ellis’s uncle, who supplies their blood, vanishes, she takes it upon herself to find a new source, aided by a prickly paramedic who’s equal parts unpredictable and intoxicating. But as Ellis fights to balance her bloodthirsty nature with a new relationship, her mom’s impossible demands transform into panicked warnings that a fabled monster, “The Flayed Man,” is stalking them.
As she traverses the desert in search of blood, Ellis risks her safety and her family’s secret, until it becomes clear that her mom is right: something ancient and hungry is hunting them, and it has come for her mom. Blood hunger begins to overtake Ellis, transforming her body into something ghoulish and frightening—exactly what The Flayed Man wants. In the end, she must decide who to trust, what she’s willing to sacrifice, and whether she is worthy of a life, and love, beyond her curse—or if she’s going to succumb to instinct and ravage the world.
This seemed to be the book in the galley room that most people were eager to get to first. I liked Station Eleven, both the book and show, but have not read anything else from this author! The premise of this one sounds more interesting to me compared to the rest of her backlist. Absolutely hate this cover though, so lazy!
About the book:
The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answers.
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
I cruised around some other publisher tables and stopped by Coach House, where their sales rep told me this was Marxism meets sci-fi. Say no more, I'm in. I think this one is going to hurt my brain.
About the book:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Annihilation in this poetic space-age fable of proletarian internationalism.
At the end of the twenty-first century, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, a minor Marxist politician's speech is interrupted by the arrival of an iridescent, pill-shaped object. It brings him, briefly, to another world, and to a state of ecstasy he will struggle to interpret upon his return. Soon, many others will be offered the same incantatory opportunity. Rival states attempt to capitalize on these developments, and a cynical spy sets an elaborate psychological operation in motion. Thousands of miles away, on an agricultural commune near the Caspian Sea, a young poet spends her nights troubled by prophetic dreams. The politician, the spy, and the poet will be ineluctably drawn into one another's orbits, as will the mysterious Bell Letterist, author of a text about "the interdimensional will to the aesthetic" - a powerful motive force that requires human solidarity in order to thrive.
The Coffin of Honey is inspired equally by apocryphal stories of Alexander the Great, Bolaño-esque tales of literary vanishings, thousand-year-old Persian poems by exiled princesses, and the fever-dream conclusions of every parapolitical conspiracy theory that might just be true.
Similar story here, I really liked Sorrow and Bliss, this authors debut. I thought it depicted depression in a really precise and exact way and I am excited to read more from her. I also hate this cover but it is giving the upmarket broad audience appeal I'm sure it is intended to.
About the book:
The “brilliant” (Ann Patchett) and much beloved author of the critically acclaimed Sorrow and Bliss returns with a tender and hilarious novel about heartbreak and the journey from isolation and loneliness towards love.
Sophie Pattison loves books. And as well as a dream job at a local book festival, she has a husband she adores, a lifelong best friend, Emma, and a brother she’s always been close to. Which makes you wonder why since Christmas Sophie has been living alone, estranged from Emma, avoiding her brother, and about to be fired.
Now it feels like the only thing she has left is reading. When Sophie re-discovers an author she first read in her twenties, the words on the page reach her in a new way—becoming both solace and company. Devouring every one of her novels, Sophie begins to dream of meeting her, knowing she never will. But what if she did? What if, by then, the author feels like a friend? What if, for Sophie, it feels almost like love?
In this much anticipated novel, Meg Mason captures the heartache and dark humor of our relationships in all their complexity, giving us a story about the power of connection and an ode to the inexplicable nature of the human heart.
Lastly, I was able to meet Melissa Albert and grab her adult debut. She has a strong career as a YA author in the SFF space. I love this weird ass apothecary meets 1970's horror novel cover. I also feel weirdly connected to her because our last names are almost the same lol.
About the book:
The haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.
Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.
In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.
Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s fantasy world?
The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.
That's it! A conservative haul if you can even believe it. I hope this was interesting and put some new books on your radar.
Love what we do? Become a paid subscriber for less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community. We're currently raising funds through our membership program to buy a class set of books for our programming that benefits our local prison, Books Behind Bars.
