March 19 (UPI) — From short story collections and literary horror to memoir and essay collections, several new books are slated for a spring arrival.
Readers can expect new work from such authors as Louise Erdrich, Ali Smith, Lena Dunham and Han Kang.
Check out our selection of fiction and nonfiction titles available for preorder ahead of their upcoming release.
Fiction
Seasons of Glass & Iron
Amal El-Mohtar’s short story collection offers “glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth,” an official synopsis states.
The book, which arrives Tuesday, tells stories via letters and journal entries, the description continues.
In addition to the titular piece, the collection includes such tales as “The Green Book,” “Madeliene,” “The Lonely Sea in the Sky,” “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun” and “The Truth About Owls.”
Python’s Kiss
Love Medicine author Louise Erdrich is set to release a short story collection Tuesday.
Python’s Kiss features short stories from Erdrich and illustrations from her daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe.
Stories follow a girl who dedicates her life to a rock, a confrontation involving a thief who sings, and a revenge scheme in “a corporately owned afterlife,” per the description.
Body Double
Hanna Johansson’s sophomore novel follows Naomi and Laura’s relationship as Laura begins to look more and more like her partner. Elsewhere in town, a woman starts sensing that someone is watching her.
Body Double is due on bookshelves April 7.
“This alluring and propulsive thriller explores deception and authenticity, obsession and the uncanny,” according to an official synopsis.
Kira Josefsson translated the novel into English.
My Dear You
Rachel Kohng’s short story collection features vignettes about a woman who is haunted by her exes after adopting a cat, a god that erases humans and a woman’s budding friendship with a sex doll.
My Dear You arrives April 7.
Khong’s work has received the California Book Award for First Fiction.
Patient, Female
In Patient, Female, readers will find a story about a couple who vacation on their dead neighbor’s dime and a narrative about a mother navigating her autistic son’s unique relationship to his grandmother, who is dying.
Julie Schumacher’s story collection lands on bookshelves May 5, and blends humor and sorrow throughout.
“Each protagonist — ranging from girlhood to senescence — receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings and the absurdity of the human experience,” an official synopsis reads.
Glyph
How to be Both author Ali Smith is back with a new novel.
In Glyph, estranged sisters who once created a ghost together are reunited by a phantom horse.
“Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness,” an official synopsis states.
Smith, whose writing has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize four times, will see her latest novel arrive on shelves May 19.
Nonfiction
On Witness and Respair
Salvage the Bones author Jesym Ward’s essay collection arrives May 19.
Ward, the recipient of two National Book Awards, writes about the literature that had the biggest impact on her life in On Witness and Respair.
“Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies,” an official synopsis states.
I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling
Emily Rapp Black examines how humans process and transmute loss and grief through art making in this hybrid memoir and craft book.
I Would Die if I Were You, which hits bookshelves May 19, supports creatives who are “approaching their ‘hard’ stories.”
Rapp Black, who lost her son to a terminal illness, suggests that community, and storytelling within those spaces, allow us to “reach our fullest potential.”
Light and Thread
Nobel Prize winning author Han Kang, well known for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian, gathered essays, poems, images and journal entries in Light and Thread.
The book, which arrives Tuesday, is translated by Maya West and e. Yaewon and Paige Aniyaha Morris.
“She writes of the wonder of following the thread we call language into the depths of other hearts, and her profound sense of an electric current which joins writer and reader,” an official synopsis reads.
Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World
Political writing and memoir from across Anne Enright’s career form the basis of Attention, which arrives April 7.
“She interprets Sophocles’ Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter,” per an official synopsis.
Enright’s work has been awarded the Man Booker Prize and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Famesick: A Memoir
Girls creator and star Lena Dunham is back with a new book, out April 14.
Famesick is Dunham’s meditation on how it feels to inhabit her body amid ongoing illness, all while building her wildly successful career.
“‘Famesick’ is, ostensibly, about the years 2010-2020 — a decade in which my life changed profoundly and permanently, in which nearly every strand of my DNA reconstituted itself. But it’s also about illness as teacher, body as tattletale, our societal relationship to women on the edge, and the conditions that create art vs. the conditions that create happiness,” Dunham said.
