September is the best month. It's Virgo season. It's still pleasant to go outside, with just a hint of a fall breeze in the air in the evenings. The children are out of the way and back in school. And the book releases are abundant. Below we cover seven new books coming out this month that we're excited about.

Literary award season continues, with the Booker judges set to reveal the shortlist on September 22. We are working our way through some of the longlist books and can thus far recommend Makenna Goodman's Helen of Nowhere and of course The Renovation by our friend Kenan Orhan. Finalists for the Kirkus Prize have also been announced, with the prize winners to be revealed October 7. The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced October 8. Lock your bets in now on FanDuel.

Under the circumstances, we're hoping for a big win for Dolly Parton's 1994 memoir My Life and Other Unfinished Business this award season, despite the fact that it's been out of print for at least twenty years.

Okay, grab a crookie and let's like the looks of some books.

Good-Looking Books Coming Out This September

Survivor by Octavia Butler

Sept 1 | Grand Central Publishing | 400 pages

I'm a sucker for a previously unreleased or long out of print novel by a famous author. Yes, we should consider the ethical implications of releasing work an author deemed “lesser,” or that they didn’t want published for whatever reason. BUT. I’m a completionist. If you are too, you’ll be delighted to know you can now get your hands on Survivor, the fourth volume of Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, which was previously out of print for fifty years at the author’s request. But authors aren’t always the best judges of their own work, and Butler was far too critical of this excellent novel. We follow Earthling Alanna and her missionary crew as she finds herself on a planet torn apart by a war between two alien species—the Garkohn and the Tehkon. The missionaries align themselves with the Garkohn, but Alanna realizes they are being exploited. Her romantic relationship with a Tehkon leader further tests her allegiances. The new edition from Grand Central Publishing also comes with a short story from the Patternist universe and commentary by Butler scholar Alyssa Collins. As an added bonus, the cover art for the GCP Patternist books is top tier. —Lisa

Staying Still by Hieu Minh Nguyen

Sept 1 | Tin House | 112 pages

I loved Hieu Minh Nguyen's Not Here (2018), a sparsely, artfully written collection of poems that twists the stories about queerness, race, and identity that are told by white supremacy, heteronormativity, abusers, and colonialism into new and powerful shapes. Reading Nguyen's poems is like moving through a series of rooms that are representations of a history but also experiences in themselves. Danez Smith writes of this latest collection, "Though place and travel are still very much part of this master poet’s obsessions, here the soul is the location, and Nguyen, the poet laureate of movements both spiritual and physical, invites us into the depths of his own to show us ... the depths and heights of loneliness, love, desire, kinship, and all the things that for this writer make up the living of life." —Elisabeth

Desperate Bodies by Lydia Mathis

Sept 15 | Roxane Gay Books | 288 pages

I’ve been dying to read this since I saw it on Debutiful’s excellent list of upcoming debuts for the second half of 2026. It has a blurb by Deesha Philyaw (see below), and Mathis thanks former instructors Brandon Taylor, Hari Kunzru, and Joyce Carol Oates in her acknowledgments (this list may tell you something of what to expect here). The stories vary wildly in tone and to some extent genre. I’m halfway through this now and my favorites so far have been the opener, “Girlhood Lessons,” and “How to Lose a Friend,” both of which deal with the challenges of female adolescence. The latter is a particularly incisive take on the characteristic cruelty teenage girls show to their peers to maintain a place in the social hierarchy. Another stunner, “Let the Church Say,” is available online from the Southeast Review. —Lisa

Terrestrial by Cristina Rivera Garza

Sept 15 | Hogarth | 160 pages

I recently listened to an archival episode of David Naimon's podcast Between the Covers from 2019 featuring Cristina Rivera Garza, and remembered reading her strange, surreal novel The Iliac Crest (the 2017 English translation by Sarah Booker) years ago. I felt captured by a desire to explore more of her fiction, which from what I know of it sounds simply weird when you try to describe it but up close is intricately political and existential and reads like the best suspense. Story collections are often difficult to describe anyway, and Garza's latest in English, Terrestrial, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney and following Autobiography of Cotton from earlier this year, certainly needs more than a handful of short summaries to do it justice, as is apparent from the mysterious, off-kilter beginning of the first story, "The Meaning of Rain," which opens with a character experiencing meandering thoughts on the streets of Belfast, thrust into musings on someone from the past. You can read a short sample on the publisher's page. —Elisabeth

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm

Sept 22 | Tor Nightfire | 288 pages

Deena Helm’s razor-sharp debut novel makes the existential horrors of genocide, diaspora, and the resulting generational trauma literal via the trope of the haunted house. A young Palestinian American woman named Marina travels to her grandmother Nuhad’s hometown of Haifa and uncovers the hidden truth of her family’s traumatic past during the Nakba in 1948. The central image of the family home, which has been occupied by Israeli or American settlers since the displacement, is a powerful representation of what has been lost by Palestinians over three-quarters of a century. The breathless plot juxtaposes flashbacks to Nuhad’s idyllic-turned-nightmarish girlhood in Haifa with scenes from the present, where Marina, her mother, and Nuhad’s former best friend struggle to lay the past to rest before the house (quite literally) consumes them. —Lisa

Female Life on Planet Earth by Laleh Khadivi

Sept 22 | Ecco | 240 pages

I loved this book. Khadivi’s fourth novel centers on Heti, an Iranian American woman who is grieving the loss of her mother, Ana. While preparing for a party to honor Ana on the one-year anniversary of her death, Heti receives a mysterious package containing photographs of her mother as a young woman in Iran, brandishing a machine gun. What follows is an intentionally meandering and winsomely charming narration of the months leading up to the party as Heti goes about her life contemplating the things she may never know about her mother. Female Life on Planet Earth is so poignant, and so funny; Khadivi interrogates womanhood and the limitations placed on those socialized as female with almost academic rigor, while still crafting a compulsively readable novel. A 10/10. —Lisa

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw

Sept 29 | Mariner | 432 pages

Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020) remains one of my favorite short story collections, in large part because of how it builds unexpectedly upon itself. The characters within, Black women and girls who are all to some extent dealing with the pressures put upon them by religion and family, reflect one another in their situations, but they also radically differ in their choices, refusing to form a cohesive common ground or to share a moral universe. Philyaw's first novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, which follows the wife of a megachurch pastor, a bombastic and alluring narrator, begins with a bang. What makes Philyaw's storytelling so good is that she knows how to give you exactly what you want on the surface, the thing that sparkles and beckons, with more dimensions underneath than you know to anticipate. I'm really looking forward to continuing this one. —Elisabeth

Who Even Reads is an independent publication run by two hardworking editorial professionals. We write about books from a liberation perspective, with a socially conscious focus that's both fun and serious, covering mostly new releases. Your donations subsidize what we do. Learn about us.