New Arrivals: The Best Recent Book Releases

In her first essay collection since Feel Free, Smith brings her critical eye to politics art memory and public life. She writes on artists like Kara Walker and Toyin Ojih Odutola reflects on the loss of writers such as Hilary Mantel and Joan Didion and considers films like Tár and cities like New York and London. Whether walking through Kilburn or watching a performance unfold she remains both precise and expansive.

Rocky is back—still funny, still spiraling, and now dealing with a grown daughter at home, an elderly father who’s moved in, and a local train crash she can’t stop fixating on. Set in Western Massachusett and packed with Newman’s signature warmth and wit, this standalone follow-up delivers big feelings in domestic doses. People calls it “honest, hilarious and heartbreaking… You’ll savor the prose from the very first line.”

The cult author of House of Leaves returns with a genre-defying epic about two friends on a blood-soaked mission to save a pair of doomed horses. Set in 1982 Utah and steeped in frontier myth and surreal horror, Tom’s Crossing is a kaleidoscopic fever dream. Stephen King called it: “Amazing… I’ve never read anything like it.”

More than two decades after her cult debut The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt teams up with journalist Ilya Gridneff for a bold, multi-layered novel built from emails, footnotes, charts, and shifting voices. It moves across languages, politics, and stories within stories. “At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words,” wrote Kirkus Reviews.

This expansive collection gathers Bourdain’s most memorable work alongside lesser-known pieces that reveal the full range of his voice. Edited by his longtime agent Kimberly Witherspoon and introduced by Patrick Radden Keefe, it includes essays on travel and restaurant life, early diary entries from his first trip to France, short fiction, and excerpts from his unfinished novel. From the restless energy of Kitchen Confidential to later reflections on food culture and mortality, this is a carefully assembled portrait of a writer who never stopped trying to get it right on the page.

National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson returns with a haunting novel set in a juvenile detention center in the late 1980s, where two gifted boys navigate violence, art, and survival. “Hobson vividly portrays Oklahoma’s furious storms and scores of screeching grackles, and shows how both protagonists find solace in art,” noted Publishers Weekly.

This collector’s edition divides Yanagihara’s acclaimed novel into four volumes, each with new cover art and design. Marking a decade since its release, A Little Life remains one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of the 21st century.

From the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Arrival comes a phenomenal speculative thriller about a federal agent and a therapist who team up to stop an otherworldly killer. “Fast-paced and inventive… a speculative crime novel with heart,” writes Capes and Tights.

An Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Grammy Award winner, who also started writing for Rolling Stone as a teenager, it would be hard to argue that Cameron Crowe has had anything besides an extremely cool life. In this long awaited memoir, the iconic multi hyphenate provides an inside look at the golden age of rock music and the formative years that shaped his career. The memoir is part coming-of-age story, part love letter to the artists and scenes that defined an era.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian examines the moral paradox at the nation’s birth—the coexistence of liberty and slavery, independence and conquest. Publishers Weekly calls it "incisive and unsparing."