Seventeen Titles Hit Paperback This November, From Shakespeare to Tigers

By Tom Whitfield

Seventeen books — thirteen publishers' worth of fiction and nonfiction — arrive in paperback this November, and the list runs from Shakespeare's Shoreditch playhouse to great cats in the forests of Russia and China.

The roundup, framed by its compiler as reading for "a madcap month" of midterm elections and international conflict, leans heavily on Picador, which accounts for six of the seventeen titles. Every entry comes with a blurb from a named critic or outlet. The question a practical reader will ask: what does this change for your November stack? Answer: cheaper editions of books that arrived in hardcover to serious praise, and a second chance at several debuts.

Which fiction leads the list?

Sara Levine's The Hitch (Roxane Gay Books) drew Kevin Wilson's endorsement: "I'm a huge fan of Sara Levine, her improbable and wild imagination, her exceptional comedic talent." The novel follows Rose Cutler, whose nephew Nathan believes the spirit of a dead corgi inhabits his body.

Anika Jade Levy's debut Flat Earth (Catapult) earned Justin Taylor's comparison to "Mary Gaitskill and Renata Adler" collaborating on a sequel to Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights — a compressed, fragment-driven novel he calls "essential."

Cynthia Zarin's Estate (Picador) gets Judith Thurman's verdict: "It's ravishing." Kevin Moffett's Only Son (McSweeney's), on fathers and sons, is praised by Nathan Hill for "wit and warmth and just enough sting to make it real."

Eshani Surya's Ravishing (Roxane Gay Books) targets the beauty industry. Viola van de Sandt's The Dinner Party (Little Brown), per The New York Times, charts "a woman's suppressed rage that manifests over the course of one disastrous evening." Nalini Singh's thriller Such a Perfect Family (Berkley) — "Even genre veterans are likely to be fooled," warns Publishers Weekly — concerns a man whose string of dead lovers arouses suspicion.

What about nonfiction?

Daniel Swift's The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare (Picador) draws the strongest critical name on the list, James Shapiro: "one of the most exciting and original books about Shakespeare that I've read in years."

George Packer's The Emergency, also from Picador, is "a propulsive Orwellian novel... It's a knockout," per Publishers Weekly — a fiction entry slipped into a heavily nonfiction field. Beth Macy's memoir Paper Girl (Penguin), on growing up poor in Urbana, Ohio, is called by Geraldine Brooks "more than a memoir; it's a manifesto."

Jen Percy's Girls Play Dead (Vintage) won Rachel Louise Snyder's full-throated praise: "I am fully in awe of this book." Olivia Laing's The Silver Book (Picador) recreates 1970s Italian cinema — Pasolini and Fellini — in prose The New York Times calls "taut and clear-eyed, even at its most sensational." Lea Ypi's Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Picador), evoking Elena Ferrante, traces her grandmother Leman against Albanian history.

Ellen Huet's Empire of Orgasm (Picador) investigates a San Francisco wellness cult; Ashlee Vance calls it "a mirror held up to tech's dark side." Lyndal Roper's Summer of Fire and Blood (Basic Books) covers the German Peasants' War, "the greatest popular revolt in western Europe before the French Revolution." Elizabeth Becker's When the War Was Over (PublicAffairs) remains, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review's judgment, "the definitive book on the Cambodian Revolution."

Jonathan C. Slaght's Tigers Between Empires (Picador) closes the list — a follow-up to Owls of the Eastern Ice that Jonathan Meiburg calls "an epic and breathless adventure."

All seventeen land in paperback across November. Blurb-driven praise is the list's currency; the hardcover reception, not reissue marketing, is the better guide here.