New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

In his first novel in more than a decade, the 88-year-old author drops a down-on-his-luck private eye into a missing person case that spirals from Depression-era Milwaukee to prewar Europe, unfolding into a cross-continental tangle of spies, mystics, double agents, and political paranoia. Critics have been enthusiastic; The New Yorker calls Pynchon “still panoptic, exciting, abstruse, distractible, and, for good or ill, unrestrained.”

With the release of Taylor Swift’s new album and concert film, the cultural spotlight is squarely on her—and this book shows why. In Taylor’s Version, Harvard poet and scholar Stephanie Burt unpacks the artistry and community behind Swift’s music, tracing her evolution from country prodigy to global icon.

This is Jon Fosse’s first novel since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the quiet beginning of a new trilogy. Set on Norway’s rugged coast, it traces how one unexpected reunion at the harbor reshapes three lives. Told in spare, meditative prose, this story of loneliness, love, and death was called “unforgettable” by Publishers Weekly.

These previously unpublished stories written across Dunn’s career follow women confronting desire, power, and survival. Set in small towns, classrooms, and farms, they reveal the rough edges of class and control. “Sharp-edged, disturbing, often black-humored and unabashedly nasty” (Kirkus Reviews).

Set between Los Angeles and Minnesota’s Iron Range, Kraus’s new novel follows an artist consumed by a local murder and the troubled teens accused of it. “Chris Kraus reinvents the true-crime novel,” claims The New Yorker, in a work that blends investigation with moral inquiry and piercing social insight.

Beth Macy returns to the Ohio town where she once delivered newspapers to understand how a working-class community became disillusioned and divided. In this searching memoir, the author of Dopesick turns her lens inward, tracing the collapse of local journalism, public trust, and civic life while holding onto the complicated love she still feels for home.

The bestselling author of The Psychology of Money turns from saving and investing to the overlooked question of how to spend. Drawing on behavioral insight and everyday examples, he shows that financial well-being depends less on wealth than on awareness — understanding what truly matters, what enough looks like, and how money can serve a life rather than consume it..

Coined by Doctorow himself, 'enshittification" was named 'Word of the Year' by the American Dialect Association and has become one of the most useful words to describe the process by which digital service reduce in quality over time. In this new book, the popular science fiction author dives deeper into the term and exposes how the internet became exploitative and broken, then offers a roadmap to reverse enshittification and reclaim a digital world that works for users, businesses, and society—before it’s too late.

First published in 1928, Kracauer’s novel follows a pacifist architecture student trying to avoid the frontlines of World War I while navigating a society built on obedience and fear. Publishers Weekly praises its “caustic power” and “gallows humor,” calling it a tour de force of satire and language.

The creator of Humans of New York gathers hundreds of new photographs and stories from across all five boroughs. Together they form a collective self-portrait of New York that, as Publishers Weekly notes in its starred review, is “a vibrant love letter to the metropolis… heartbreaking, bizarre, and humorous.”