Welcome to my favorite month of the year! To paraphrase L.M. Montgomery, I’m sure glad that I live in a world where there are Octobers…and October book releases! This month has one of the biggest lists of new books hitting shelves, which means it’s really impossible to narrow it down to just ten. Please know that I hated leaving out so many great books, and you should definitely be on the lookout for new YA books by Isabel Ibañez, Aden Polydoros, Huda Fahmy, Christella Dabos, Brandy Colbert, Kosoko Jackson, Candice Iloh, Ryan La Sala, Tillie Walden, and so many more! (A handy tip? Check out our New Release Index for all the books coming out this month.)

I chose a nice mix of debuts, books by authors who might not be on your radars yet but definitely should be, and some of my personal most anticipated reads. Because it is October, after all, definitely be on the lookout for some of the spookier books for Halloween and seasonal reading, but know there’s something here for everyone —romance, thriller, contemporary, historical fiction, and even a holiday romance (because those holidays are just around the corner!).

So grab your favorite fall beverage and a cozy sweater, and get ready to read!

Kelly Jensen is out this week, so Erica Ezeifedi and I are filling in on censorship news. Unfortunately, none of us can be Kelly, even with our forces combined, so we’re trying something a little different in the censorship news round-up. Instead of one big story and dozens of bullet points, we have each picked a few book ban stories this week to write a paragraph about — think Today in Books: Censorship Edition.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989) was digitally restored and rereleased in theaters across Taiwan earlier this year. Running two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the melancholic art-house film shows in painstaking detail the dissolution of a Taiwanese family prompted by political regime change following World War II. In 1945, the Japanese surrendered Taiwan; soon after, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang party (KMT) would retreat from China to the island, violently suppress native uprisings, and officially claim the island as its own in 1949.

“This island is so pitiful. First the Japanese and then the Chinese. They all rule us but none take care of us,” one of the film’s protagonists says in Taiwanese, a language that the KMT banned from schools. The English subtitles were less subtle: “They all exploit us and no one gives a damn.”

I attended a sold-out showing on opening weekend. In a somewhat surreal coincidence, the rerelease date coincided with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Just hours before I saw the film, I’d biked to a public square where a crowd of mostly Taiwanese people waved Ukraine’s blue-yellow striped flag. When Ukraine’s anthem was played, everyone put their hands on their hearts. One Ukrainian mother said to me, “Taiwanese people know what it’s like to have a crazy neighbor.”

Today China claims it will take Taiwan by force; the threat of regime change is never far. In Hong Kong, where the film was also rereleased this year, protesters, among them high schoolers, have been imprisoned and sentenced for subversion. But to be fair, in Taiwan—a country ruled by six successive colonial powers—it would be difficult to find a release date that didn’t take on a deep sense of resonance and foreboding. The year City was released, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party killed thousands of nonviolent protesters in Tiananmen Square. In contrast, Taiwan was on the cusp of freedom. It burst with national awakening. Soon, activists who read Mandela in prison would be released and run for election—and win.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf brings into sharp focus the question of what to do with one’s life. I’m referring not to the text, to the content, to anything written on the pages, but to the objects: the books, the five published volumes.

The first bit of Woolf merch I ever bought, in Woolworths in about 1975, was a beautiful Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Waves. On the cover was a portrait of the author by someone called Vanessa Bell. I couldn’t read what was inside, gave up after about five pages, and never tried again. Around the same time, I bought similarly lovely editions of To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I did get through, under compulsion, at university, though I struggled with the preciousness, the sense of someone walking—writing—around on tiptoe. That was pretty much it for me and Woolf’s fiction until the pandemic when I was nudged toward it by an unlikely enthusiast from the American West. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Larry McMurtry writes of how, after a serious illness, he found, for the first time in his adult life, that he couldn’t read fiction—unless it was by Proust or Woolf. I picked up the novels again and, despite McMurtry’s lobbying, failed to make any progress.

Which was surprising because I had, by then, come around to Woolf in several ways. In 2003 I’d gone to see Patti Smith perform at Charleston, the home of Virginia’s sister, Vanessa. This was one of several rustic hubs of Bloomsbury life, and it’s obvious, as you are shown around the bright rooms with their painted furniture, the sanctuary and liberation this place offered from the oppressive dreariness of English life between the wars. The handmade look is like a precursor of the make-do aesthetic I was familiar with from London squats in the eighties, which remains my ideal of interior design. This fitted in well with Smith’s performance when she read passages from The Waves, which sounded much better as Virginia’s clipped English “yellow” became Patti’s New Jersey “yellah.” If it sounded almost impossibly cool and contemporary that was because in places the original had given way seamlessly to Smith’s stream-of-consciousness improvisations.

Shortly after that I read plenty of Woolf that I could relish: A Room of One’s Own, the essays in The Common Reader, the essays on almost everything, in fact, and, crucially, the Selected Diaries and Selected Letters, published by Vintage and bought in Delhi in 2010. For me, then, Woolf fell into that subsection of writers whose minor works or private writings I preferred to the major ones. The closest comparison was with John Cheever, whose work can be arranged in an ascending order of importance, which is an exact inversion of the generally accepted hierarchy of merit: novels, stories and, at the peak, the posthumously published Journals. There’s also an overlap with D. H. Lawrence, much of whose best writing after Sons and Lovers is scattered across essays, travel books, dashed-off poems and letters. We’ll come back to Lawrence a little later.

Sometimes, as the Review’s print deadline looms, I catch myself fantasizing about a return to university life. I should clarify that, in this fantasy, “university” is a quiet, spartan room, with a bed, an armchair, and a constant supply of paperback classics. It is entirely lacking in lectures, academic conferences, or tenure-track infighting, and also bears no resemblance to my actual experience as an undergraduate: a fog of nervous smoking, romantic dysfunction, and tearful struggles to conjure up an essay on, say, doorframes in the work of Henry James.

Sadly, there is, to my knowledge, no program or job at which reading is the sole responsibility—and, of course, nothing complicates a love of books like the attempt to build a life around them. Not one but two pieces in our new Fall issue suggest, for instance, that even too much Shakespeare can have side effects: in Rosalind Brown’s “A Narrow Room,” a conscientious student on deadline for an essay about the Sonnets finds herself continually waylaid by an erotic triangle of her own invention, while Ishion Hutchinson recalls his undoing as a homesick sophomore alone in a windowless yellow closet in Kingston, Jamaica, obsessing over local folklore, Crime and Punishment, and Hamlet. And in Munir Hachemi’s rollicking “Living Things,” translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches, four arrogant, well-read young men spend the summer after graduation working in the South of France, searching for that “hazy, ill-defined thing that we coined experience,” only to find that their education has in no way prepared them for the outside world, with its onslaught of corruption, exploitation, and force-fed chickens.

My tendency to romanticize university likely originates from those moments when getting through the assigned reading became an almost mystical interlude. I sometimes think of the night I spent with The Book of Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century text usually considered the first autobiography in English. A visionary with a less-than-kosher approach to the saintly life, Kempe had run a brewery that went bust and given birth to fourteen children before she persuaded her reluctant husband to join her in a vow of chastity and embarked on a whistle-stop pilgrimage—much to the irritation of her fellow travelers, who quickly tired of her God-given gift of tears. I’d loved Margery, her shameless grandiosity and the frankly sexual tone in which she wrote about God and his Son, and I’d forgotten about her until a few years ago, when I came across Robert Glück’s ravishing, funny, heartbreaking novel Margery Kempe (1994), which interweaves her story with that of his all-consuming affair with a younger, richer man. As Glück tells Lucy Ives in his new Art of Fiction interview, he, too, first discovered Kempe as an undergraduate, while studying medieval literature at UCLA, and was drawn to her precisely “because she set everyone’s teeth on edge,” but it wasn’t until he found himself in anguish over a breakup that he realized he could set his midlife crisis alongside hers. The novel broke over me as what Kempe would call a “revelacyon,” and turned me—as it has many others—into a proselytizer for Glück, who has a knack for conveying the religious power of desire. “When people would ask me—and sometimes they did—to write about them,” he tells Ives, “I’d reply, ‘First, you have to break my heart.’ ”

Glück, incidentally, is not a believer in the “short story”; he prefers the conte, the tale, or the piece of gossip. We’ll leave you to ponder the differences—I’m not sure I can always tell; it’s possible that my mind was somewhere else during that particular lecture—as you read this issue, which also includes an Art of Theater interview with Lynn Nottage, poetry by Bei Dao and D. A. Powell, and debut fiction by Liam Sherwin-Murray.

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won a 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges wrote:

For seventy years and counting, The Paris Review has remained wonderfully distinctive and sophisticated, never short on chic art direction, impeccable curation, or international flair. The interviews make you ache to have been in the room for the conversation. Readers will find exceptional work by feted writers in every issue, but The Paris Review does not rest on its legacy: it deftly employs its footing as the standard bearer for American literary magazines to uplift talent that hasn’t yet gotten its due.

We are deeply grateful to the Whiting Foundation for providing the literary ecosystem with vital funding and support, and we congratulate our fellow 2023 winners: Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mizna, n+1, Orion, and Oxford American.

Every summer, my mother would take me and a friend to Salisbury Amusement Park to eat fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar and go on the roller coaster until we were sick and then get our minds blown by the 2001 Space Oddity dome, which spun us around in complete darkness while a narrator intoned about galaxies and time warps. But best of all: every hour, on the hour, the Solid Gold Dancers jogged out of a pit in the center of the fairgrounds and, sweating under the August sun in full gold lamé, would kick, spin, leap, and boogie for fifteen minutes while disco music boomed (those loudspeakers carried barely any treble, which made for a peculiar version of disco). Sunrays glinted off the sequins and I was hypnotized. It all jumbled together in my mind, the sensations, the nausea, the ecstasy. That gold-flecked feeling of 1979 faded away until thirty-five years later, when my French husband, Bruno, took me to the nightclub in Montmartre that started it all: the Moulin Rouge.

I walked through red velvet curtains into the past and straight onto the set of the sweetest magical movie flop of my youth, Xanadu! Roller skates, a swimming pool rising up out of the stage where we could see women dancing underwater. In costumes made of diamonds and skin. I was in heaven. The show lasted two hours. It had everything: a fantastic light show and sound system, constantly changing sets—a castle, a pirate ship, a circus, a London street corner at the turn of the century, a … a Chinese opium den?

Even though the women had naked boobies, they still looked like angels. I think angels do have naked boobies, now that I’ve seen this show. And there were so many of them! A teeming flock or herd. Singing and kicking and dancing. Costume changes for every act. A personal favorite was the giant red-feather puffballs with legs sticking out. No arms, no head, just a big red puffball on legs. One act featured good-natured Siamese twins, another strongmen who balanced whole humans on a single elbow, wow! At the Moulin Rouge, clowns are bare-breasted along with the angels. And I shouldn’t have been surprised that in France, one clown act per nightclub experience was not enough … there had to be two.