This is a month of great fiction releases from authors either familiar or new. And at least one author is both familiar and new—film director Pedro Almodóvar is making his fiction debut with The Last Dream (translated by Frank Wynne; HarperVia, Sept. 24), a collection of stories that give “his merrily transgressive takes on life a good literary workout,” according to our starred review. “I don’t distinguish between genres,” Almodóvar writes, and these 12 tales—written between the 1960s and today—feel sometimes autobiographical, sometimes gothic; among the characters are priests, actors, and vampires, and our review concludes that “every page [is] worth reading.”
Danzy Senna’s sixth book, Colored Television (Riverhead, Sept. 3), is about a novelist named Jane who’s been barely squeaking by—along with her artist husband and their two kids—as she spends a decade writing the “mulatto War and Peace.” When her editor rejects it, Jane works her way under false pretenses into a project with a hot TV producer who’s trying to develop a biracial comedy. There’s suspense: Will Jane decide there’s more artistry in television than in the literary world? Will she find success before her husband—or the producer—figures out what she’s doing? Our starred review calls this a “brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book.”
In his third novel, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 3), Garth Greenwell explores a 40-something poet’s life-threatening illness. After suffering an incredibly painful tear in his aorta, the narrator spends several days in the intensive care unit, giving him plenty of time to ruminate not only on the state of his body, the health care system, and his own powerlessness, but also on his life in the outside world. “Greenwell—such a finely tuned, generous writer—transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life,” according to our starred review.
Australian author Liane Moriarty is known for high-concept page-turners that make terrific TV shows. Her latest novel, Here One Moment (Crown, Sept. 10), opens with a scene that’s sure to grab the reader’s attention: A group of passengers are on an airplane headed for Sydney when a nondescript woman starts walking down the aisle and making predictions about her fellow passengers’ lives—specifically, how old they’ll be when they die and their cause of death. That baby in his mother’s arms will drown at age 7. Other people will be lucky enough to die of pneumonia or pulmonary disease at 84 or 103. A 42-year-old engineer will die in a workplace accident at 43. Should the woman be believed? “A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions,” says our starred review.
Louis Bayard specializes in historical novels, some starring literary figures such as Dickens and Poe and others featuring presidents Lincoln and Kennedy and their wives. His latest, The Wildes (Algonquin, Sept. 17), focuses on Oscar Wilde and his family in 1890s England, both before and after his infamous court cases, exploring the fallout as it affected Wilde’s wife, Constance, and their two sons. “Bayard turns the Wilde family’s tragedy into an engrossing, eternally relevant fable of fame, scandal, and love,” according to our starred review.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
