It's November! Time to take down your Halloween decorations and put up your Christmas lights. But if you're like us, you never took them down!

It's a slow month for book releases but we looked far and wide to find the most exciting new books coming out anyway because we made a commitment to you that we would do this and we take our commitments seriously (less so our obligations to remove holiday decor). Fortunately, the ones we found look really, really good.

While you're adding the books below to your preorder list or library queue, mark your calendar for the big award ceremonies this month. The Booker Prize will be awarded on November 9 (if you haven't already, check out our interview with Booker judge Patricia Lockwood) and the National Book Awards are presented November 18. The latter will be hosted by Kyle MacLachlan with musical guest Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast and the memoir Crying in H Mart (2021), which is excellent.

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Good-Looking Books Coming Out This November

Beyond the Baths of Stars by Schneider K. Rancy

Nov 3 | Amistad | 288 pages

"The unique dilemma of the autodidact, emblematic of the circumstances into which they had all been born. None of them were stupid—just poor. Or even worse: working-class. And they could only work with what they had." At the beginning of Schneider K. Rancy's debut, Eurick and his friends Willard and Lucy are on their way to Fort Lauderdale Beach in a rainstorm, in what feels like a vague, desperate attempt to escape the everyday dreariness of their lives. Eurick, the child of Haitian immigrants, has worked a string of dead-end jobs and foresees nothing more exciting in his future than a retail career. "His teachers had once called him intellectually gifted, and yet he had somehow managed to waste his potential in seeking to fulfill it." But Rancy's roiling, kinetic prose, tumbling forward like the ocean waves, promises an adventure. A reimagining of The Odyssey, Beyond the Baths of Stars takes Eurick and his friends on a journey that begins when they arrive at the beach and rescue a drowning girl named Ana María Cortez. Leila Renee, author of Soft Spots, writes, "Schneider K. Rancy captures the suffocating impact of systemic oppression, the intoxicating danger of surmounting it, and the hunger for rebellion with ethereal prose that blurs the line between our world and the next." —Elisabeth

Shut Up I Love You I’ll Call You Tomorrow by Sloane Murphy

Nov 10 | Little Puss Press | 120 pages

The next release from one of our favorite small presses, Little Puss, is Sloane Murphy’s debut story collection Shut Up I Love You I’ll Call You Tomorrow. This one checks pretty much every box for me, being set in Chicago and centered around a friend group of dirtbag queer women, almost all of whom are trans. The stories are interconnected and revolve around the women's relationships (friendships, situationships, marriages, rivalries, polyamorous triads, etc.), their dreams, and the gig work and alcoholism that carry them through each day. Main characters include Joan (stage name “Open Wound”), who is learning how scary success can be as her tight five at the local comedy club lands her the opening spot on tour with a national act, and Carolina, who tries to be mother to all the girls when she really needs some nurturing herself. Little Puss demonstrates its trademark ingenuity publishing this one in a darling pocket-sized paperback edition. Laugh-out-loud funny and profoundly of-the-moment, Murphy captures the hilarities, inanities, ecstasies, seventh-inning doldroms, bar accidents, and lucky cigarettes saved for the walk home that make up a young trans woman’s life in the city. Every detail sings. —Lisa

Uprising by Tahmima Anam

Nov 17 | Scribner | 192 pages

A finalist for the Orwellian Prize for Political Fiction, Uprising by Tahmima Anam, author of The Startup Wife (2021) and winner of an O. Henry Prize, takes place on an island off the coast of Bangladesh in a brothel where women have been forced to perform sexual labor under the iron fist of Amma, the madam. When a woman named Kusum Khan is trafficked to the island and rebels against Amma’s rules, it sparks something in the other women—and their children, from whose collective perspective the novel is narrated. In a starred review, Kirkus says Anam “delivers a powerful and unflinching indictment of archaic systems of female repression still operating in the ‘modern’ world of cellphones and electronic bank transfers.” The novel is based on the author’s experience visiting a government sponsored brothel on the island of Banishanta and offers an urgent political message about trafficking and the ongoing commodification of women’s bodies, where those most vulnerable to poverty are most likely to be exploited. —Lisa

Between the River and the Railroad Tracks by Nicole R. Fleetwood

Nov 17 | Little, Brown and Company | 320 pages

Referred to by Kirkus as “[a] brilliant counternarrative to the ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ version of southwestern Ohio,” Fleetwood’s memoir recounts her experiences growing up in Hamilton, Ohio, 20 miles north of Cincinnati, in a working class neighborhood full of Great Migration families. It was the 1970s and the once thriving Second Ward had been greatly diminished by the loss of steel and paper mills. Fleetwood’s childhood brought profound understanding of what men can become when robbed of the dignity provided by work and providing for one’s family—the goal they’ve been socialized to achieve. She learned how to avoid the wrath of both of her grandfather and father, as well as the perils others in the neighborhood succumbed to, including drug addiction and mass incarceration. It’s a portrait of a particular moment in the Midwest that will resonate with many, particularly other Great Migration descendants, but also anyone from this part of Ohio (Fleetwood recounts how her uncles formed the funk band Zapp, whose album was produced by George Clinton and Cincinnati legend Bootsy Collins from Parliament Funkadelic). Fleetwood’s exceptional academic performance whisked her away to a career as a curator, award-winning author, and professor at NYU, but this is not a “made it out of the hood” narrative so much as a lovingly rendered archive of a complex and evolving place and the complex and evolving people in it. —Lisa

Fieldwork as a Sex Object by Meena Kandasamy

Nov 24 | Soft Skull Press | 240 pages

Meena Kandasamy has had an impressive and award-winning career as a poet, translator, activist, and prose writer. Her fourth novel focuses on a young Indian woman living in London who is the victim of online harassment when a deepfake porn video featuring her likeness goes viral—“shared over and over by thousands of WhatsApp aunties everywhere,” as the jacket description puts it. She recognizes the criticism she faces in the aftermath of the video’s dissemination as the deeply misogynist reflection of society’s disgust toward any woman with perceived sexual agency. She decides to enact her revenge. If you want to know how, you will have to read the book. Publishers Weekly references a “Kafkaesque court case” but the jacket copy mentions AK-47s so it’s anybody’s guess. This one has a starred review from Shelf Awareness and shimmers with the allure of feminist retribution. —Lisa

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