The mornings are crisp. The days are shorter. Tomatoes and peaches have been replaced by apples and pumpkins at the farmer’s market. And the fall books are here! Autumn is always a busy time of year for books, with publishers releasing their big titles in the hope of capturing the interest of readers shopping for the holidays or looking to curl up with a blanket and a good book as the temperatures drop. There’s something for everyone this season, with thrilling debuts, thoughtful nonfiction, stunning poetry collections, and so much more. Readers will be particularly excited to see new titles from favorite authors like Scholastique Mukasonga and Samanta Schweblin and translators like Emma Ramadan and Megan McDowell. But don’t sleep on some of the new and exciting voices on this list too.

I’ve poured over the catalogs and galleys and highlighted just some of the best fall 2022 new releases in translation, and because there’s just so much to choose from, I’ve added notes for others you should seek out as well! And whether it’s just something about publishing this year or my ever constant love for works of short fiction, but there are a lot of new short story collections that caught my eye. So if you’d like to dip in and out of some incredible short fiction in what can be a busy time of year, you’re in luck.

Fall 2022 New Releases In Translation

One of the things Asia is most known for is horror. In fact, Japan and South Korea have produced many horror films throughout the years. Who hasn’t been terrified by The Ring or Sadako? Or those films featuring scary Japanese dolls? How about the zombies in Train to Busan?

The Asian continent also has plenty of horror movies and TV series based on its culturally diverse urban legends. Unfortunately, there’s just far and few between when it comes to books. Luckily, I was able to dig up some gems that are written by Asians themselves.

In this list, you’ll find horror stories based on urban legends: a white lady who is said to be haunting a street, scary college tales in India, a girl killed and thrown into a well, babies tossed in coin lockers, and urban legend ghosts in Southeast Asia. But before we get to them, just a note: I was only able to include books in English, specifically, ones from majority English-speaking countries such as India, Singapore, and the Philippines. I’m sure that there are more of these out there but that they aren’t available in English.

Find below are eight urban-legend horror books by Asian authors. Get ready to be frightened by a different kind of horror this scare season!

Skulls, bones, and skeletons are classic book cover iconography, with symbolism for myriad tones or themes: horror, poison, death, humanity, and, you know, just general coolness. I’d like to think skull imagery became popular in the literary world thanks to our friend Hamlet and his pal Yorick — the exhumed skull Hamlet monologues at — and for that, I’m eternally grateful for the bard.

The real joy in curating this list of books with skull covers is the variety of genre and audience. Skulls are not tied to any one genre, though of course, they tend to be more popular in horror, fantasy, science, and crime books. In the land of middle grade covers, the skulls tend to be subtle or cartoonish, while young adult and adult covers go hard in trying to give you nightmares.

I’m ranking these covers by prettiness to eerieness, because that’s how I roll. We have skulls of all styles here, from floral arrangements and abstract shapes to realistic illustrations and haunting manipulations.

A note: I tried to track down the designers for these gorgeous skull covers, but a few were elusive. Apologies to those designers, and if you find this, let us know to add your name for proper recognition!

Before this September, I hadn’t heard from Yara in months. They’re an Iranian journalist who has reported for the country’s most prominent newspapers and publications. We first met in New York in 2018 and bonded over the difficulties that come with reporting on Iran: they were rightly afraid of being arrested for their work, and I’ve been afraid that I will no longer be able to return to the country where I was born due to writing about it from abroad. As the Islamic Republic began to escalate the crackdowns on journalists, activists, and civil society, Yara—a pseudonym I’m using to protect their identity—was forced to leave Iran. But when their father was diagnosed with cancer, they had to return. They messaged me to say they were going back and let me know I likely wouldn’t hear from them. If the authorities knew that Yara was communicating with me, an Iranian dual national who works for the New York Times, they could accuse them of conspiracy, spying, and a whole host of other nonsensical charges. I worried about Yara, but I knew their silence meant they were safe. 

In September, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died after being detained in Tehran by the so-called Morality Police for breaking the “hijab rule.” On Twitter, a photographer named Niloofar Hamedi posted a photo of Amini unconscious in a hospital bed, with tubes coming out of her mouth, a swollen face, and dried blood on her ears. Her image enraged Iranians and sparked mass demonstrations. The protests are now in their fifth week and have spread to more than eighty cities and towns. It’s both the largest and most widespread uprising that the Islamic Republic has seen in its forty-three-year history. Many of us, familiar with the state’s history of lethal crackdowns, were waiting nervously for them to begin. Arrests have already started, as have periodic internet shutoffs. Hamedi is now in solitary confinement in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison.   

On September 26, during the third week of the protests, I finally heard from Yara. They had just been arrested and interrogated at the Ministry of Intelligence. “They will take me to jail for about two years due to my reports,” Yara wrote. “But I am not scared, something like hope is rising among us, hope for changes, for women, life, freedom, for visiting you in Tehran soon.” They said it may be a month or two until they have a court date and are sent to prison. In the meantime, they wanted to collaborate on another story. They sent me their notes and wrote, “Keep our fingers crossed that the internet will work tomorrow.” 

I first read Nancy Lemann’s novel Lives of the Saints in one sitting, on an airplane. I was spellbound, moved, and deeply charmed. Who was this woman? Why had I never read her before? How was she capable of articulating an experience of youth that, in all its wastrelness, was exactly like my own despite being completely different?

Lives of the Saints, first published in 1985, is a novel that undermines our expectations of narrative: Lemann’s fiction does not flow in the normal direction but loops in circles and rides along on digressions that resemble the chaos of real life. The book is remarkable for its restraint and for its lush detail. If it can be said to be “about” anything, it’s about a young woman named Louise who has returned to New Orleans from college in the North; she finds herself thrust back into the richly entangled social world of her childhood, back among the people she has always known, including Claude Collier, the only man who can break her heart “into a million pieces on the floor.” Lives of the Saints is peopled by eccentrics and doomed lovers and drunks and people who are always “Having a Breakdown.” It’s so rollickingly funny that in retrospect you might forget about its central tragedy, then reread it and get your heart broken all over again.

Like Cassandra at the Wedding and The Transit of Venus, Lives of the Saints has had a formidable afterlife, sustained not by support from the literary publicity machine but by a network of recommendations from die-hard fans, of which I am now one. (I don’t remember how or when I picked up my copy, but much of the current generation of fandom can be traced to Kaitlin Phillips’s 2018 recommendation in SSENSE: “Read this book in the bath.”) After finishing it, I ordered every single one of Lemann’s novels, and read them more or less back-to-back. It felt like absorbing a consciousness that suddenly made everything make sense. I, too, have Had a Breakdown. I, too, romanticize the impossible, the decaying, and the societies that have lapsed in a long slow deserved decline; I can be moved to tears by things like wisteria and particular angles of winter sunlight. One of her narrators even romanticizes the fall of the Ottoman Empire! 

Lemann’s story “Diary of Remorse,” in our Fall issue, has the same madcap, digressive quality that defines her novels as well as the same blend of humor, pain, and beauty. You can read a chat the two of us had on the phone in September below. We agreed, among other things, that youth is angst.

In 1994, the internationally acclaimed fiction writer Lucia Berlin met the New York School poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, where they were both visiting writers. “We just clicked,” Berlin said in a 2002 interview. “We cut through right away into each other’s deep feelings. It was like falling in love, or going back to your childhood best friend in first grade, that kind of really pure friendship.”

That friendship developed through a faithful and frequent correspondence, a literary exchange of about two letters per week over the course of a decade. Lucia was living in Boulder, Colorado, and later in Los Angeles; Kenward was dividing his time between New York City and Calais, Vermont. Despite the distance between them, the two writers came to depend on their intimate friendship and deeply valued their correspondence.

In the following letters dated between May 28 and August 5, 2000, Lucia and Kenward discuss a New York production of Kenward’s musical play, Postcards on Parade, and the books each was working on at the time: Lucia’s memoir, Welcome Home, and Kenward’s fourteenth poetry collection, Blast from the Past, which he wanted to dedicate to Lucia. They write about the books they’re reading, Lucia’s recent move to a trailer park, and the thrilling poetic visuals she sees from her windows.

Clarence Larkin’s commentary on THE BOOK OF REVELATION is written LIKE THIS, crafted with occasional capitalizations to emphasize IMAGES and TERMS. Reading it doesn’t feel like being shouted at but rather kind and intimate, as though he’s DIRECTING our attention in the same way a CHILD is directed to look at CARDINALS and CATERPILLARS during NATURE WALKS. Larkin directs the reader to symbols like THE SEVEN SEALS, a kingdom made of STONE, and the NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH. As a writing style, its effect is in guiding the EYE to see ONE THING over another. Eventually we’re pointed to this: a vision of the New City. There shall be NO NIGHT there: they need no candle, neither light of the Sun; for the Lord God giveth them LIGHT; and THEY SHALL REIGN FOR EVER and EVER.

***

I grew up in Willoughby, Ohio, the supposed subject of the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), in which a man falls asleep during his daily commute and DREAMS of a train station for a UTOPIAN TOWN. The opening narration begins: “This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor, all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’s protection fell away and left him a naked target.” A naked target, the episode suggests, for virulent daydreaming. It’s a cold winter, and Gart is an advertising executive so beleaguered by both wife and boss that his only respite is the commute he spends dreaming of a better place. As his life spirals horrific—his wife thinks he’s a coward, he fails at his job—Willoughby from the window waxes idyllic: parasols, pushcarts, summertime in 1888. It is a backward-looking fantasy, one he indulges in daily while sleeping.

vladimir nabokov said:

i confess i do not believe in time
in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger
didn’t finish the time part in time
to publish it with the being part
so everything-now must be not-being
there is a pine needle stuck in the screen
the side nearest me must be the being side
the one further away’s the time side
nabokov only said the first line
even when you have nothing to do
there’s not enough time in the day

there are 5 stinkbugs on the back porch—the stinkbugs don’t make you feel good or likable. but the one beautiful tree we have that i can see is still fulsome. in years past it’s always been the best & most long-lasting foliage tree & now, even in this year of all the leaves blown down & drabness, as i see it, it’s a glorious tree between the locusts, acting as if there’s not a stinkbug around.

Following the Attica uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale, a poet and a professor at Buffalo State College, began leading poetry workshops at the correctional facility—the first at a U.S. prison to be run by a non-inmate and an African American. Poems written by his students were published in 1974 as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica, by Broadside Press, the first major Black-owned publishing house in America. Below are several noncontinuous entries from the diary Tisdale kept during that time, beginning with his first day at the facility.

May 24, 1972

4:30 P.M.
“Anticipation”

“I could hardly believe my luck in having found her,” Vivian Gornick writes of the persona she created for her pivotal 1987 book Fierce Attachments, a rich, genre-redefining portrayal of fraught maternal bonds that the New York Times has anointed the best memoir of the past fifty years. “It was not only that I admired her style, her generosity, her detachment—such a respite from the me that was me!—she had become the instrument of my illumination.” That shock of wonderment and good fortune is familiar to all Gornick’s readers, and especially to the many writers of nonfiction who still pass around The Situation and the Story (2001)—in which those words appear—like a talisman. It’s a thrill to read Gornick’s precise, elegant account of how a voice and a narrative are made, and to see that process so masterfully demonstrated in her own work is often (as she herself has said of reading and rereading the likes of Edmund Gosse or Joan Didion) to become “enraptured.” 

It’s in that spirit that the Review will present Vivian Gornick with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at our seventieth-anniversary Spring Revel on April 4, 2023. Her engrossing Writers at Work interview, which appeared in issue no. 211 (Winter 2014), was the magazine’s second ever to focus on the art of memoir. 

Gornick’s exceptional contributions to literature over the past several decades span autobiography, essays, and journalism. Her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt—the research and writing of which she described, with characteristic élan, for the Review’s short documentary series My First Time—was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award. As a contributor to The Village Voice in the years that followed, she became a leading writer of the feminist movement while developing a unique style of criticism that blended literary analysis with clear-eyed observations of her own experiences. This style came to fruition in books including The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a groundbreaking collection of essays that debunked the insidious ubiquity of romantic love as a metaphor for happiness, and The Men in My Life (2008), a compassionate study of the struggle for inner freedom that is shared across genders. 

My favorite app is Find My Friends. If you do not know what this is, it’s an app that lets you share your location at all times with fellow iPhone havers. I have access to the locations of nineteen friends and they have access to mine. I also have two friends, both named Nick, who refuse to share their locations with anyone—but I have given mine to both of them out of loyalty, just because I like the idea that they know where I am. I like looking at the map of New York, seeing little bubbles with my friends’ initials pop up in the usual and the surprising places. Sara is at the office. Graham is at home. Ben is at the bar where he does trivia. This guy I met at a concert is in the East Village—who knows why he’s there? I realize this sounds really boring, and it is. But I love knowing where my friends are—that they’re exactly where they belong, or that they aren’t. Of course there are practical uses: there’s the chance you might be around the corner from someone, both at different bars, and have a serendipitous meetup. But I check Find My Friends constantly and impractically, as a little way of knowing where my friends are at any given time. I guess it makes me feel close to them in a stupid technology way, but I feel close to a lot of people in stupid technology ways. That’s why I spend so much time texting.

The best times to look are of course nights and mornings, especially on weekends. There’s a chance you might see that someone didn’t sleep at home! It would be indiscreet to mention this to them, or at least I never would, but it’s a fun little secret in your phone. I understand why many people think this is weird and creepy, but I am not one of them. Someone above the age of forty asked me recently how anyone in my generation has affairs, if we all know where others are at any given time. I told him I wasn’t really trying to have an affair. It was a good question, though, and maybe one day someone will put a location-sharing plot in a not-very-good novel: a man idly looking at Find My Friends only to discover that his wife is not where she said she would be. The house of cards that is life comes tumbling down, et cetera. That would probably be too tedious to put into a book, but it would happen in real life and it probably already has, possibly thousands of times. I will take my chances and try to avoid affairs.

The other night I met someone who asked for my number and immediately shared his location with me, indefinitely. I thought this was very funny and I shared mine back. We parted ways, and we might never see each other again. I just checked his location. Now he’s in Vienna! Life is full of surprises!

So why do book banners insist that they don’t ban books? Because the level of doubling down as book banning increases is, on one hand, impressive and on the other hand, is concerning about several key components of literacy.

Click through to see the Moms For Liberty member who cites BookLooks as a Moms For Liberty joint in order to get on a review team of a school library.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — spooky season! I’m not usually one for seasonal decorating, but Halloween is the special holiday that gets me excited to pull out my skeletons and witch hats to spread the spine-chilling cheer. If you love books and the haunting magic of October 31, then these bookish Halloween decorations are just what you need to ring in the holiday spirit(s). We’ve got adorable, creepy, and downright jump-scare worthy home goods sure to fright and delight. And some of them may be so wonderful they make their way into your year-round decor!

The first section of these decorations are made of upcycled books reimagined as Halloween magic. From books carved into 3D art to gorgeous prints on old book pages, they’re a beautiful way of bringing new life to books that might have otherwise ended up in the trash.

If the idea of cutting up books or painting over their words makes you squeamish, scroll on by to see decorations inspired by the love of books and specific horror titles that have become Halloween classics. Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and Stephen King’s works serve as some of the inspiration for these scarily wonderful decorations.

These book pumpkins can seamlessly make the jump from Halloween to Thanksgiving. $46+.

This book of spells comes with the witch built in! $36.

Creepy season is in full swing, and it’s time to get those horror novel TBR piles ready. Of course, there are plenty of kinds of horror novels you could pick up to celebrate the best time of the year. You could go for vampires, zombies, monsters… but you know what kind of horror stories really give off fall vibes? Ghost stories. Specifically, haunted house books. Yeah, there’s something about stepping foot into a haunted house that really gives off Halloween season.

If you’re a fan of haunted house stories, you’ve probably read some of the classics, like The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and/or The Shining by Stephen King. But where do you go from there? If you’re feeling haunted house-y this season and you’re looking for what to read next, here’s an idea. Why don’t you build your own ideal haunted house, and based on that, you can read the haunted house novel that best suits your style.

Looking to know what other results you could have gotten? Here they are!

The Library of Congress has named 23 U.S. Poet Laureates since the position was renamed in 1985, and they have named their 24th: Ada Limón, author of six poetry collections, five of which have either won or been nominated for a multitude of awards. Limón is only one of eight female poets laureate, and the seventh poet of color to hold the position. She is preceded by Joy Harjo, who served three terms.

Limón began her term in late 2022, and has not yet declared what project she will work on while she holds the position (part of what a Poet Laureate does). In the meantime, she has an impressive and gorgeous body of work to pour over, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. If you’ve never ready any of Adam Limón’s poems, this is the primer to start with.

Who is Ada Limón?

Before we dive in, a little background on one of the greatest contemporary poets of our time.

Ada Limón grew up in Sonoma, California, and now lives in rural Kentucky with her husband, their pug Lily Bean, and their cat Olive. She holds an MFA from the creative writing program at New York University, worked at various magazines during her time in NYC, and teaches poetry remotely at Queens University of Charlotte. She also happens to write lusciously beautiful and arresting poetry.

The recurring themes that Limón infuses her work with center around nature, our relationship with it and our observation of it; relationships, especially with her parents; identity; and chronic illness. She grounds her poetry in places: in the California of her childhood, the years she spent in New York, her life now in rural horse country. Her knowledge of growing things is so vast that she, at times, feels like a patient teacher showing us what flourishes in her garden and what flora and fauna live and thrive around her. She reminds us that we are part of a greater world that existed before us and will exist after us. Her work is heavily autobiographical, and she excels at plucking out a mundane aspect of life and polishing it to a shine, calling attention to that moment’s beauty.

We’ve made it to the home stretch of 2022, and while there’s still a ton of 2022 year fun to be had (hello, spooky season and the holidays!), we are winding down to the end of big release season with a lighter slate of offerings in our new YA comics and graphic novels releases. But don’t worry — there are still some excellent YA graphic novels and comics hitting shelves between now and January that you won’t want to miss! Think of it as a little breather between now and the first quarter of 2023 (spoiler alert: it’s gonna be a great one if you’re a comics fan!). PLUS, it gives you some time to get caught up on anything you might have missed from earlier this year!

Although the quarter is a little on the lighter side, it’s packed full of quality! Look for a great, new queer paranormal graphic novel co-written by Lumberjanes co-creator Shannon Watters, a fantastic memoir from The New Yorker cartoonist Liz Montague, a hard-hitting memoir from a survivor of a mass shooting, and a new addition to the Heartstopper world for those of you still watching the Netflix show on repeat!