Twenty Books Hit Shelves: Garmus, Li, Harjo Lead the October Slate

Twenty fiction and nonfiction titles from houses including Scribner, FSG, Knopf, and W. W. Norton arrived in bookstores on Tuesday, with new work by Bonnie Garmus, Yiyun Li, Joy Harjo, M. John Harrison, and Adam Grant among the slate.

The roundup spans literary novels, poetry, criticism, memoir, and popular nonfiction. Most of the critical framing, however, comes from publisher-supplied jacket blurbs rather than independent reviews. A caveat: nine of the twenty endorsements cite trade publications such as Kirkus and Library Journal that run pre-publication reviews, not post-publication criticism.

Yiyun Li's Music Against the Night lands at FSG with a quote from novelist Ann Patchett, who wrote: "Music Against the Night may well be the most perfectly constructed, moving, and beautiful novel I've ever read. Yiyun Li is the best of all of us." Patchett's endorsement runs longer than most blurbs in the roundup, but it is still a blurb.

What does the slate reveal?

The list tilts toward established names rather than debuts. Garmus follows her debut Lessons in Chemistry with Peck & Peck (Scribner). Oprah Daily calls it "a love story, a workplace romp, a satire with a soft heart for fonts, and an ode to poetry." Joy Harjo's Cloud Runner: Poems comes from W. W. Norton, and Library Journal describes it as potentially "her most stunning work to date."

M. John Harrison returns with The End of Everything (Riverhead). The Telegraph judges: "Harrison isn't weirder than most other writers, just better. Reading The End of Everything, you feel you're not so much reading as dreaming." Adam Grant's Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World arrives at Viking with this from Reese Witherspoon: "A deep dive into the science of friendship, companionship, and love. Every page is an illumination! The world needs this book now more than ever."

Who else is releasing?

The nonfiction contingent:

• Lauren Michele Jackson, Back: Essays on the Soul and Spine of America (Amistad)
• Wendy S. Walters, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint (Scribner)
• Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia (W. W. Norton)
• Saul Justin Newman, Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science (MIT Press)
• Amanda FitzSimons, American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Girlhood Forever (Atria)
• Kim Ghattas, The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America's Undoing in the Middle East (Holt)

Walters's A Dead White stands out for its polemical premise. Meghan O'Rourke calls it "the rare work of criticism that will change how you see the world around you."

What is missing from the roundup?

No prize-winners, no first novels from previously unpublished writers, and no translated literary fiction beyond Lieke Marsman's On Another Planet They Can Save Me, translated from Dutch by Sophie Collins (Catapult). Sasha Dugdale calls Marsman's book "a brilliant shock of a book: poetical, philosophical, and so fervently on the side of flux, nuance, imagination, and delight."

Genre work also appears: Kat Dunn's Rottenheart (Zando) is billed as "a darkly intoxicating and fierce sapphic retelling of Hamlet." Elizabeth Hand's Unspeakable Things arrives at Little Brown; The New Yorker notes Hand's "sensuous, evocative detail." Julie Orringer's Luna, Phoenix, Queen lands at Knopf, with Katie Kitamura writing: "Julie Orringer is one of our wisest and most open-hearted writers; this novel filled me with joy and wonder."

The remaining titles include Elizabeth Kostova's Mystery Play (Ballantine), Will Maclean's Solace House (Grove), Erica Lust's Lust: Pleasure, Performance, Power (Metropolitan), Bonnie Jo Campbell's The Spirits (W. W. Norton), and Nneoma Ike-Njoku's The Water House (Summit).

What does this change for readers?

Whether the slate produces a single awards-season contender, once critics publish their own reviews in October and November, is the open question.