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October books do not shy from reality. If you’re wondering about Taylor Swift’s meteoric rise to fame, for example, a Harvard professor has written an entire book explaining it. Or if you’re curious about why social media platforms keep noticeably worsening, a tech critic has the answers. There’s also a new novel about the unique pressures on Black artists. It’s finally soup season, so curl up with a tasty bowl and a good book.
‘Dear New York’
Humans of New York, a photography project that has amassed more than 12 million followers on Instagram, was begun by Brandon Stanton in 2010. The social media page offers a consistent stream of portraits and interviews with citizens of New York City (though the IG recently pivoted to photos of and dialogues with Gazans).
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Stanton’s new book is a love letter to all five New York boroughs, as told across five hundred pages of color photos. Alongside the book release, Grand Central Terminal is doing a massive art installation that projects Stanton’s photos and interview quotes on the station walls and on digital screens. (out now, $37, Amazon; St. Martin’s Press)
‘Shadow Ticket’
Pynchon’s ninth novel is also his first in a dozen years, a “supercharged noir” set in prohibition-era Wisconsin that heralds a return to form with “genre parodies,” “ornate zingers,” “lollygagging but frequently hilarious descriptions” and a “Chandleresque, Depression-era yarn involving a missing heiress and a disaster-prone private eye,” said The New York Times. At the ripe age of 88, the famed author of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Inherent Vice” has apparently still got plenty of tricks up his sleeve. (out now, $24, Amazon; Penguin Press)
‘Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift’
Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt made headlines in 2023 — some incredulous, some complimentary — when she taught an undergraduate course examining Taylor Swift’s lyricism alongside poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Now, non–Ivy League students can appreciate Burt’s exhaustive insights into the pop star’s career in the scholar’s new book, “Taylor’s Version.”
Using Swift’s first eleven albums (this was written before “The Life of a Showgirl”) and the record-breaking Eras Tour, Burt analyzes Swift’s ascent to the top of pop culture amid her chronic “ambition,” “wish to be loved” and “perilous, and occasionally ridiculous, desire to please everyone,” Burt said to the Times (out now, $30, Amazon; Basic Books)
‘Enshittification’
Technology critic and novelist Cory Doctorow coined this book’s titular phrase to “describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time,” said Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker. Despite the clear deterioration of digital platforms — the corporations that own them seek only to make more money, not to maintain a user-friendly experience — and the advent of unhealthy practices like “doomscrolling,” most people can’t quit their screens.
Doctorow’s book “moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate” and “shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them and — most important — how they can be undone,” said the official book description. (Oct. 14, $30, Amazon; MCD)
‘Minor Black Figures’
Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor, author of 2020’s “Real Life,” is back with a new story set in the New York City art world and one centered around Wyeth, a young painter who also happens to be both Black and gay. In “search of a new subject,” Wyeth struggles to “square his sense of integrity with pressures on Black artists to represent their culture,” said Publishers Weekly. “He also frets over whether he can make a career as a painter.” “Minor Black Figures” ultimately explores what it means to be Black, gay and a professional creative in the modern world. (Oct. 14, $29, Amazon; Riverhead Books)
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