New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

This collection distills more than three decades of McCracken’s teaching and practice, offering reflections on facing the blank page, navigating character, handling time, and revising with honesty. Blending memoir and craft insight, it examines the unpredictable, often stubborn process of making fiction—and argues that writing endures through consistency, improvisation, and the willingness to forgive one’s own imperfect methods.

Set in a small village near the Polish-Czech border, this genre-blending novel moves between past and present through a series of loosely connected stories, dreams, and memories. First published in 1998, it’s an early example of the inventive style that later earned Tokarczuk the Nobel Prize in Literature. (

Actor and filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson draws on his Marvel work and the wider world of superhero filmmaking to craft a story set on a production edging toward collapse, where ego, ambition, and the weight of a tentpole budget press in from every side. Amanda Seyfried calls it “uniquely nuanced… unbiased, at times ridiculous, and wonderfully, uncomfortably accurate.”

This hybrid work of criticism pairs Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath as twinned figures of creative drive—artists whose autobiographical intensity and prolific output have long drawn both fascination and patriarchal scrutiny.

In this lively exploration of the crossword’s past and future, a longtime New Yorker puzzle maker traces how a once selective pastime became both a cultural flashpoint and a daily refuge for millions. He follows the puzzle’s shifting politics, the rise of more inclusive constructors, and the growing community reshaping what solving can be.

In Washington, DC’s cutthroat market, a woman’s eleventh failed bid pushes her into increasingly unhinged attempts to secure the perfect home before it’s listed. What begins as light and comedic spirals into obsession, trespass, and moral slippage as aspiration curdles under pressure. A GMA Book Club pick praised by Taylor Jenkins Reid: “You have no idea where this story is going.”

Christine Kuehn uncovers the stunning truth behind her family’s role in the attack on Pearl Harbor, tracing their path from Berlin society circles to a covert spy operation in Hawaii. Moving between present-day discovery and wartime intrigue, she pieces together betrayal, coercion, and the violent consequences of allegiance. “An amazing and gripping tale, full of suspenseful twists and cinematic details.” —The New York Times Book Review

A seven-volume septology about a single day repeating without end, Balle’s project expands in Book III, recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. By this point in the cycle, Tara is no longer alone: she meets another person who remembers. As the world remains suspended in perpetual fall, a new, tentative sense of companionship begins to shape her understanding of the loop and her place within it.

This edition brings together five decades of work by a writer whose career moved from early poems grounded in the rural life of Northern Ireland to later collections shaped by translation, classical literature, and the political tensions of the late twentieth century.

In eleven new stories, Williams turns her unsparing eye to a world marked by cruelty, confusion, and fleeting moments of grace. Twin sisters seek penance for their family’s industrial fortune, a grown man drifts through memories of boarding-school innocence, and a “pelican child” lives with the irritable Baba Yaga in a hut on chicken legs. Kirkus, in a starred review, called the collection “superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature.”