With apologies to T. S. Eliot, December might be the cruelest month \u2014 at least for publishing. As imprints focus on awards season and holiday sales, several of this month\u2019s best titles are out as paperback releases. Never fear, readers; these soft-covers deliver great plots and will also leave room in your budget for the best kind of gifts: more books! Happy holiday reading.<\/p>\n
FICTION<\/p>\n
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Casanova 20: Or, Hot World: A Novel<\/a> What if you were so beautiful you could seduce anyone, but lost that allure? Would you sink into depression, or would you seek a new path through the world? Adrian, at the end of his 20s with countless \u201cfriends\u201d of all genders, exits the global pandemic with his mojo gone. The one person who loves him platonically, Mark, is older, ill, and living across the country. Together they grapple with how to be seen in a society that ignores so many of us.<\/p>\n The Definitions: A Novel<\/a> \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live,\u201d said Joan Didion famously,<\/a> and in Greene\u2019s new dystopian novel, survivors of a neurological virus have lost the ability to define words, let alone tell stories \u2014 they\u2019re in a place known as \u201cThe Center\u201d but have no memories. The tension derives not from further illness or uprising, but from the absolute unrecognizability of a world where meaning exists only in fleeting moments and can rarely be shared.<\/p>\n Television: A Novel<\/a> Rothery, a filmmaker, started writing short stories during the pandemic, and now in her stylish debut novel focuses on the town she knows best, Los Angeles (the cover photograph is a still from one of her movies). Verity, an irascible but hugely successful aging Hollywood star, alternates narration with his younger best friend Helen in a story involving an aspiring scriptwriter named Phoebe. Pay attention, carefully, to what inspires the title.<\/p>\n House of Day, House of Night: A Novel<\/a> First published in 1998, this early gem from Nobel Prize winner Tokarczuk<\/a> takes place in Silesia, a region of Poland close to the Czech Republic and influenced by its Bohemian culture. Like the author\u2019s more recently acclaimed \u201cconstellation,\u201d or spread-out novels, \u201cHouse of Day\u201d includes vignettes with her obsessions \u2014 mushrooms, dreams, deaths \u2014 and multiple, vivid characters living in a single village.<\/p>\n Gal\u00e1pagos: A Novel<\/a> Colombian writer V\u00e9lez debuts with a story that winds up on a ship full of dying artists. The never-named illness (clearly HIV\/AIDS) retains the vocabulary and symbolism of a plague narrative. The queer friends aboard in 1992, including painter Lorenzo and his partner Juan B., know that they\u2019re never going to disembark. Instead, Decameron-style, they tell stories about their past lives and looming deaths, with grotesque details heightening urgency.<\/p>\n NONFICTION<\/p>\n In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace, and Revolution<\/a> Theodore Roosevelt believed life should take place \u201cin the arena\u201d where creation and conflict occurred, which historian Brown (\u201cA Hell of a Storm\u201d) demonstrates to be Roosevelt\u2019s own milieu, whether on foot, in the saddle, or occupying the Oval Office. Fortunately, the author isn\u2019t writing a hagiography. He portrays our 26th president fully, covering his maverick spirit as a soldier and statesman, but also the lifelong racism that influenced some of his policies.<\/p>\n This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days<\/a> Founder and sole member of The Mountain Goats<\/a>, singer-songwriter Darnielle is also a novelist (\u201cDevil House<\/a>,\u201d e.g.) and now, definitely a poet: The lyrics tied to a year\u2019s worth of sunrises and sunsets range from unexpectedly tender to horrifically sad. The beauty of the collection is that each entry, while varying in quality, feels authentic \u2014 wrung with pleasure or pain from this wildly talented artist\u2019s commitment to life on earth.<\/p>\n A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction<\/a> The Story Prize-winning McCracken<\/a> knows a lot about writing fiction, but think of her new title less as a craft book and more as a guidebook for first-time tourists and seasoned travelers alike. The author reminds us all that \u201cno process is wrong that leads to the first draft of a book.\u201d Or, as McCracken once said of bowling: \u201cI like the fact that it\u2019s difficult, impossible to perfect, but people are really devoted to it.\u201d This volume is all strikes, no spares.<\/p>\n Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs<\/a> Berryman\u2019s \u201c77 Dream Songs<\/a>\u201d won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry<\/a>. To read these unpublished dream songs 60 years later feels like finding treasure and acknowledging that you like the rough-cut gems as much as the polished ones. Henry, the great poet\u2019s alter ego, reappears in all his ambiguity and confusion, an all-American, unremarkable, yet observant \u201cunheroic hero\u201d in the words of Shane McCrae, who writes the Introduction to this collection.<\/p>\n
By Davey Davis
Catapult: 304 pp., $18
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By Matt Greene
Henry Holt: 176 pp., $18
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By Lauren Rothery
Ecco: 256 pp., $28
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By Olga Tokarczuk
Riverhead: 336 pp., $28
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By F\u00e1tima V\u00e9lez
Astra House: 208 pp., $22
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By David S. Brown
Scribner: 496 pp., $31
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By John Darnielle
MCD: 560 pp., $36
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco: 208 pp., $27
(Dec. 2)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
By John Berryman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 192 pp., $28
(Dec. 9)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n