In my opinion, every season is reading season, but there’s something about fall that makes you want to nestle down with a good book and a good drink. And with the new season comes an abundance of new books all vying for your attention. Below, City Paper’s book critics have dug into some upcoming and recent releases with local ties that span genres and styles to give you a head start on your fall reading list. It’s also another reminder that great things come from D.C. —Sarah Marloff
Her Own Happiness by Eden Appiah-Kubi
Release date: Sept. 5, via Montlake Romance
Genre: Romance
From Amazon Publishing’s Montlake romance imprint comes Her Own Happiness, a cheerful sophomore effort from the D.C.-born Maryland native Eden Appiah–Kubi, loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s Emma. (Appiah-Kubi’s first novel, 2021’s The Bennet Women, also bears the imprint of another, even better known, Austen classic.) In Her Own Happiness, best friends Maya, a plus-size, pansexual artist, and Ant, an asexual lover of plants and nature, exemplify the beauty and strength of platonic Black love … at least, at first. But can their blossoming, romantic feelings survive the machinations of celebrity “girlboss for good” Emme Vivant, who sets Maya in her mentorship sights?
Emma is perhaps more of a launching pad for Her Own Happiness than a direct blueprint. If Austen is an arch, at times cynical, witness to societal foibles, Appiah-Kubi is perhaps the sweeter sister, critical of class inequality but earnest and broadly optimistic when it comes to human behavior. All the same, Austen fans will seize on the references; in (fictional) coverage, Vivant is described by Washingtonian as “handsome (WTF?), clever, and rich,” while Maya muses, “Truth was, there’s no perfect place for a Black queer woman, especially one without a small fortune.”
At heart, Her Own Happiness is a cozy, good-natured tale of love and friendship, following characters who do not define themselves by their hip body piercings or artsy tattoos but, rather, through kindness toward others. Appiah-Kubi combines escapist descriptions of fashion and travel with an honest look at how so many of our lives have been shaped by COVID-related isolation and uncertainty. Residents of the DMV will delight in regionally specific callouts, including Rock Creek Park, Takoma Park, and Washington City Paper (hey, that’s us!). —Annie Berke
Unreliable Narrator by Aparna Nancherla
Release date: Sept. 19, via Viking Press
Genre: Memoir
Who am I to hold forth on comedian Aparna Nancherla’s new essay collection Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome? This debut book is an insightful, savvy read. It recognizes up front that “impostor syndrome—like probiotic yogurt—does primarily get marketed toward women and minorities.” Clearly, Nancherla’s wholesome and society-critiquing voice deserves the pop cultural space to be understood as panoramically human. “I’ll never find all the answers. But there’s meaning in trying, and meaning can be everything,” she writes.
Now based in Los Angeles, the D.C.-born, McLean-raised Nancherla was perceived by her physician parents and older sister as a shy, passionate kid who didn’t quit, who first told jokes in public at an open-mic night in Tysons. She turned 30 before her first big break as a writer-performer on the 2012–2013 TV show Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell. With her ever-bigger jobs and personality-specific opportunities that followed, she explains, “Every day was Take Your Doubter to Work Day!”
Deemed a “unicorn” in show business, Nancherla has built a versatile career as a second-generation Indian American woman who leans into onstage jokes about treating her anxiety and depression. “I think it’s hard, in comedy, or in any field maybe, to not have people put you in a box,” she said in a 2017 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. “But I don’t think of myself as ‘the Mental Health Comic.’”
Her wide-ranging book also delves into her creative process, being online, and finding love that feels like home, as well as filler bits of uneven quality. Some major pieces stay on thematic task by dissecting her experiences through an informed lens of destigmatizing all mental illnesses. While documenting her eponymous topic was “an extremely agitating and disorienting process,” Nancherla stays brave because she can. “Being completely, painfully honest is the only worthwhile place I know to begin,” she writes. “Life can so often be a grotesque maze of smoke and mirrors.”
Everybody hurts, even as the era shapes any humor in our public responses to that private fact. Way back in 2012, Nancherla tweeted, “Any pizza can be a personal one if you cry while you eat it.” Seemingly reasonable self-doubt in a world this duct-taped may indeed be an unreliable narrator. But that voice inside, the one that wants to dream and do, is reliable. It’s all we’ve got. —Diana Michele Yap
Scenic Overlook by Anne Ray
Release date: Oct. 1, via Awst Press
Genre: Fiction, Novel-in-stories
Recalling a childhood memory of her father digging in the front yard, the protagonist of Anne Ray’s evocative Scenic Overlook explains, “I think of that day now and half of it has the flatness of looking into a television, a projection. The other half has the roundness, sharpness, of looking through a telescope.” This novel-in-stories from independent, Austin-based Awst Press follows Katie, a college dropout with a bone-deep loneliness and a penchant for wandering, as she grows up, moves away, and makes various homes for herself in the American West. Scenic Overlook, as the title suggests, is more about what Katie sees than who she is, and her desire to become more than an absence, a void, in her own life, carries across the book’s 13 chapters.
Of these installments, “Answering Machine” stands out as a topical treatment of abortion that delves deeply into the intricacies of women’s friendships. Of her relationship with her friend Yahlie, with whom she lives and shares not just expenses but emotional intimacy, Katie says, “These days we’re more like two pioneer women who’d met face to face on the Oregon Trail and became traveling companions after losing their wagon trains in a snowstorm.”
Characters like Yahlie and Katie’s brother, Danny, are delicately rendered; together with the snapshot quality of the collection and the reflective quality of the narration, Scenic Overlook reads more like a memoir than a novel. An Elliott City native currently working as a digital archivist of radical and historical press materials, Ray has produced a skillful debut that will appeal to readers and viewers of Into the Wild and Nomadland. —Annie Berke
Company by Shannon Sanders
Release date: Oct. 3, via Graywolf Press
Genre: Short stories
D.C.-area writer Shannon Sanders won the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers with her story “The Good, Good Men.” It’s a stunner of a piece, an exploration of the growing distance between two brothers as they prepare to run off yet another opportunistic boyfriend from their mother’s life. The story was originally published in Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series in 2019, and it’s the opener for her new short story collection, Company, that comes out from Graywolf Press on Oct. 3.
“The Good, Good Men” is the perfect introduction to Sanders’ writing. Her voice and style are reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout and Deesha Philyaw, with her beautiful, layered plotlines and character-based world building. This is not a loud collection, but instead a deeply moving one. The stories are linked, the feel almost novel-like, with every character offered the chance to step into the spotlight. Each story becomes a hero’s tale—even characters we were sure, earlier on, were the villains. Sanders’ craft is precise, her writing absolutely gorgeous, but it’s this care and love for the flawed humans she’s created that captures our hearts as we read. Her work is quietly propulsive, the collection a fast, often funny read despite its thorny subject matter. Families are complicated, loving, and sometimes even terrible, Sanders shows us, but also funny as hell.
We’re right there with her the entire time. It’s not hyperbole to say that I laughed, cried, and was completely devastated by the end of this collection. I’d fallen so in love with this world, and with Sanders’ writing, that it was very hard to put Company down. (Sanders will read from Company at 7 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Politics and Prose.) —Hannah Grieco
Bad Questions by Len Kruger
Release date: Oct. 3, via Washington Writers’ Publishing House
Genre: Fiction
Novels that are very funny and truly sad are rare, but Washington metro area writer Len Kruger’s Bad Questions is one. Set in Silver Spring and Rockville, Maryland, in the late 1960s, it traces the mistakes, confusion, and above all questions of seventh grader Billy Blumberg, whose father, his Hebrew school principal, has just committed suicide. It’s impossible to read this book and not get frustrated with Billy—the way you get frustrated with any stubborn adolescent, especially one who won’t stop asking questions that turn into, and turn their answers into, pretzels. “I could think of plenty of questions,” Billy tells the reader. “I was the Albert Einstein of questions. They came to me when I blinked my eyes, when I heard houses settling and telephones ringing, when I shoveled macaroni and cheese into my mouth.”
But then, given the strangely unexpected plot, it is really very fitting that this kid would make so many unlikely inquiries. To avoid a spoiler, all I’ll say is that the plot involves a junior high teacher, who tells her class, “At some point in your lives your minds will snap. All of you. Do you understand? Snap. Crackle. Pop … You—each and every one of you—will enter the Kingdom of Madness. It may be for the briefest of seconds. It may be for a week. It may be for a year … But it will happen … And there’s not a thing you can do about it.”
This somewhat crazed teacher delivers this oration at the novel’s beginning, then pops up later, weirder than ever, and alters the course of Billy’s interior life. He also gets into trouble, but that’s to be expected of a solitary, introverted, somewhat wacky teenager, whose very depressed father has just killed himself. Suicide looms over the book and, naturally, Billy’s entire life. Indeed, the novel begins with Billy lighting his father’s yahrzeit, the candle in memory of the dead, and ends with it. In between, the story is filled with narrator Billy Blumberg asking, as always, lots of questions. —Eve Ottenberg
Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession by Laurence Leamer
Release date: Oct. 10, via G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Genre: Biography
In Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession, Washington, D.C.-based author Laurence Leamer (Capote’s Women) peels away the glamour of Hollywood to detail the director’s troubling relationships with eight high-profile blonds who starred in his movies. These actors include Ingrid Bergman (Notorious), Grace Kelly (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest), Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), and June Howard-Tripp (The Lodger).
Readers unfamiliar with Alfred Hitchcock’s methods will learn about his obsession with these women and, explicitly, how he controlled every aspect of their lives including what they wore and how they styled their hair. On set, Hitchcock made his stars uncomfortable. During the filming of Vertigo, he placed a plucked chicken inside Novak’s dressing room, and he bombarded Hedren with dirty jokes throughout a lunch date. But he really crossed the line when he made “a sexual proposition so unspeakably crude that for the rest of her life [Tippi] could not even repeat his words,” Leamer notes in the book.
Leamer also guides readers through the actors’ personal lives starting with Bergman’s divorce from Petter Lindström and her marriage to Italian director Roberto Rossellini. He then delves into Novak’s battle with bipolar disorder and Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco.
Hitchcock was a master craftsman, but his seedy behavior, which would not be tolerated today, diminishes his accomplishments. Hitchcock’s actions, which Leamer so astutely documents, would make a cogent horror film—no editing required. —Wayne Catan
Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, edited by Hannah Grieco
Release date: Nov. 14, via Alan Squire Publishing
Genre: Short stories
There’s something deeply human about the urge to run away. We all, at one point or another, have longed for escape—be it from the mundane, the stress, or the fear that exists in our daily lives. Those feelings are captured succinctly, and sometimes beautifully, in the new release of short stories from Alan Squire Publishing. Edited by City Paper contributor Hannah Grieco, Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away is a compact collection, totaling just over 200 pages, which means most of the aforementioned 40 stories are on the extreme end of short. Though the quick reads make it difficult for the reader to submerge themselves in, they offer brief moments of that craved escapism: We can run away in these pages and come back however quickly we like.
The collection features 40 writers (for the 40 stories), including local fiction author Amber Sparks, whose 2020 short story collection And I Do Not Forgive You was named a best of the year by NPR and the Washington Post; Aubrey Hirsch, whose byline frequently appears in my email via Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell At Me newsletter. Hirsch’s story in Already Gone is a haunting and sexually gruesome reimagining of the biblical tale of Lot’s wife; like the bruises mentioned in the pages, the story lingers. However, it’s Deesha Philyaw’s “Mother’s Day” that stands out most for me. Author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (being adapted for television with Tessa Thompson executive producing), Philyaw’s short is a beautiful story of a mother choosing herself over her adult children. It pulls you into the bright colors of Miami and offers thoughts on family and commitment that are worthy of reflection. If you long for a quick kind of escapism, this collection is for you. —Sarah Marloff