8 Books to Read This Autumn

The Woman in the Portrait (July 2024) | by Juliet Jacques  

Juliet Jacques’s accomplished collection of short fiction, The Woman in the Portrait (2024), is drenched in art and cultural references, from mysterious conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader to exhausting actor and singer Lady Gaga. Jacques’s writing is characterized by a delicate and accessible balance between her exceptional knowledge, sharp and articulate contemporary politics and easy humour. It’s the ideal book to carry in your bag and dip into while travelling between tube stations; chances are you will encounter familiar places and people. – SEAN BURNS, Associate Editor

Overstaying trans. Damion Searls (September 2024) | by Ariane Koch

In Swiss writer and artist Ariane Koch’s debut novel, Die Aufdrängung (Overstaying, 2021), the protagonist asserts: ‘What I say needs no translation and cannot be translated by anyone.’ Luckily for us, Dorothy, a publishing project thought otherwise. Newly translated to English, this marvellously surreal story features an unnamed narrator who lives in her sprawling childhood home, alone, until she is joined by a visitor. Something, she says, is not quite right about the visitor, who has cobbled-together limbs, reads prop books and alternates between communicating in howls and clearly stating his movie preferences. As she becomes increasingly obsessed with monitoring, controlling and writing about her houseguest, his presence shrinks her home, erodes her other relationships and makes even her sleep feel like it doesn’t belong to her. Koch’s astutely absurd text underscores just how permeable a self is, and how rife with little deaths and rebirths it is.  – CASSIE PACKARD, Assistant Editor

Suzanne and Louise (October 2024) | by Hervé Guibert

Originally published in 1980, this ‘photo novel’ by the author of the landmark To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), combines his unsparing prose with photographs of his two elderly aunts, who lived together in Paris. One controls the money, the other the household chores: a power dynamic which proves especially fruitful for an artist and writer like Guibert, who obsessed over the ways familial and romantic obligations contort us. As a bonus here, one of Guibert’s greatest readers, the artist Moyra Davey, has penned a new introduction to this reissue, illuminating this lesser-known masterpiece by an author famous for his revelatory fiction and sumptuous photographs. – ANDREW DURBIN, Editor-in-Chief

Small Rain (September 2024) | by Garth Greenwell 

I first came across Garth Greenwell after he released his debut novel What Belongs to You (2016) which was followed, with much anticipation, by Cleanness (2020), where an unnamed narrator – a thinly veiled stand-in for the author – documents his tumultuous experience as a queer English teacher in Sofia. Greenwell zeroes in on the personal: his narratives are often consciously moulded by memory’s subjective, superlative nature, imbuing his characters with a refreshing vulnerability. His latest book, Small Rain (2024), is no exception: it tells the story of a poet, struck by unexpected illness and forced to navigate the dysfunctional American healthcare system during the early stages of the pandemic. With its deeply reflective and intimate tone, this medical chronicle recognizes our inherent fragility without veering into despair, championing community and compassion instead. – IVANA CHOLAKOVA, Assistant Editor

 Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture (August 2024) | by Stuart Hall 

In August, Duke University Press continued their near decade-long project of publishing the complete works of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Newest to this essential series are his Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture (2024), which includes essays and conversations on figures like Frantz Fanon, Isaac Julien and Homi K. Bhabha. It’s a rich group of texts, addressing global capitalism, race and diaspora and how ‘the language of the imaginary’ can be a framework for developing new insights into political and economic relationships of power. – MARKO GLUHAICH, Associate Editor

The Message (October 2024) | by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am particularly excited about Ta-Nehisi Coates The Message, available in the US from October and the UK from February 2025. Originally intended to be a book about writing itself, Coates found himself exploring bigger questions on how narratives shape our understanding of history and place. The book comprises three interconnected essays, taking readers on a journey from Senegal to South Carolina and finally Palestine. If Coates’s previous non-fiction work testifies to his lucid and biting prose, The Message will surely prove to be an illuminating investigation into how national myths and personal stories can both distort and illuminate our perceptions of the world. – TERENCE TROUILLOT, Senior Editor

Poor Artists (October 2024) | by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad

In their highly anticipated debut full-length publication, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (aka The White Pube) tell of the perils of trying to pursue a career in the creative industry in a time when it’s never felt harder to do so. Told through the lens of struggling working-class artist Quest Talukdar, Poor Artists (2024) is the result of anonymous interviews with real people – including a couple of Turner Prize winners – but reads like a page-turning novel. There is a lot to satirize in the art world, but what I love about this book so far is that it doesn’t descend into cynicism and despair, instead balancing the more challenging aspects of living a creative life (including, but not limited to, crippling student debt, predatory gallerists and dealing with rejection) with a full-throated defence of the inherent value of making, experiencing and talking about art. – CHLOE STEAD, Associate Editor

If Only trans. Charlotte Barslund (September 2024) | by Vigdis Hjorth

Vigdis Hjorth’s novels have often explored the strain and unease of relationships, whether in a familial sense, as in her 2016 novel Will and Testament, where inheritance and memory are entangled with trauma, or in a romantic sense, as with her latest novel to be translated into English, If Only (2024). Here, in a similar register to Annie Ernaux's writing on desire, we follow Ida, a married woman in her thirties, as she ruptures her steady family life by embarking on a tumultuous affair with an older (also married) academic she meets at a Bertolt Brecht conference. For over a decade, we follow the sacrifices Ida makes to be with her lover, and with it, reckon with the limits of desire and its capacity to humiliate and embarrass. In rapturous sentences, Hjorth describes how a letter sent to Ida by her paramour ‘transforms her unbearable, destructive longing into dizzy joy, which lasts a day or two before it slowly morphs into unease.’ There is no neat, tidy resolution to be found here, as is often the way with tumultuous affairs where one party clearly feels more deeply than the other, but it is in this space of psychological rumination and the excavation of what many would prefer hidden from view that Hjorth’s writing is at its best. – VANESSA PETERSON, Associate Editor