The OF Blog: Upcoming Releases That I Want to Read in 2014

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

Upcoming Releases That I Want to Read in 2014

If December was a time for various and sundry "best of year" lists, then perhaps January is the time to list the forthcoming releases that intrigue, if not excite, particular readers/reviewers.  Below are a list of books, mostly culled from a recent post on The Millions, that I plan to read before the year is done:

Edit:  Titles I've since purchased/received will be bold if read, italics if not yet read.  Links to reviews provided.  Also will add certain titles as applicable.


January:

Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

Ishmael Beah, Radiance of Tomorrow

Ben Marcus, Leaving the Sea

Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun

Okey Ndibe, Foreign Gods, Inc. 

Daša Drndić, Trieste (also read the Croatian edition, Sonnenschein)

Simon Ings, Wolves

Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Autumn

Adam Sternbergh, Shovel Ready

Joyce Carol Oates, Carthage

Richard Powers, Orfeo

J.M. McDermott, Maze

Laurie Halse Anderson, The Impossible Knife of Memory

Marco Magini, Come fossi solo (Italian)


February:

Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk

Kofi Awoonor, The Promise of Hope:  New and Selected Poems 1964-2013

Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans

Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

Adam Wilson, What's Important is Feeling

Anna Hope, Wake

Lorrie Moore, Bark

Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Bella Mia (Italian)

Véronique Bizot, Âme qui vive (French)


March:

Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

David James Poissant, The Heaven of Animals

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names

David Grossman, Falling out of Time

Karen Russell, Sleep Donation

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), The Time Traveler's Almanac (US release; UK release was in 2013)

Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

D. Foy, Made to Break

Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls

Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

Margaret Killjoy, A Country of Ghosts

Linda Bierds, Roget's Illusion

Phil Klay, Redeployment

Elisa Ruotolo, Ovunque, proteggici (Italian)

Dorothy Tse, Snow and Shadow


April:

Emma Donoghue, Frog Music

Hilda Hilst, With My Dog Eyes

Andrés Neuman, Talking to Ourselves (also read in the original Spanish)

Carlos Labbé, Navidad & Matanza

Max Brooks, The Harlem Hellfighters (graphic novel)

Felix Gilman, The Revolutions

Cara Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor

Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't:  Stories

Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories


May:

Jeff VanderMeer, Authority 

Porochista Khakpour, The Last Illusion

Rivka Galchen, American Innovations

J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf:  A Translation and a Commentary

Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek 

Sean Ennis, Catch Us

Mary Rickert, The Memory Garden

Edmundo Paz Soldán, Iris (Spanish)

Cristovão Tezza, O professor (Portuguese)

Roxane Gay, An Untamed State

Richard Thomas (ed.), The New Black:  A Neo-Noir Anthology

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Rose Fox and Daniel José Older (eds.), Long Hidden:  Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History 

Paula Bomer, Inside Madeleine

Frances Hardinge, Cuckoo Song

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

Gail Giles, Girls Like Us

Antonya Nelson, Funny Once


June:

Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

Kyung-Sook Shin, I'll be Right There

Jorge Franco, El mundo de afuera (2014 Premio Alfaguara winner) (Spanish)

Lily King, Euphoria

Kalyan Ray, No Country

Thomas Ligotti, The Spectral Link

Johanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year (memoir)

Corinne Duyvis, Otherbound

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others


July:

Edan Lepucki, California

William T. Vollmann, Last Stories and Other Stories

Lucius Shepard, Beautiful Blood

Can Xue, The Last Lover

Scott Cheshire, High as the Horses' Bridles

Catherine Lacey, Nobody is Ever Missing

Christopher Beha, Arts & Entertainment

Rachel Pollack, The Child Eater

Shane Jones, Crystal Eaters

Josh Weil, The Great Glass Sea

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Seconds (graphic novel)

Spencer Reese, The Road to Emmaus


August:

Haruki Murakami,
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (read it first in Spanish translation, then later in English)

Richard House, The Kills (US release; UK release was in 2013 and longlisted for the Booker Prize)

Ian Cameron Esslemont, Assail

Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

Justin Taylor, Flings


Neil Clarke (ed.), Upgraded: A Cyborg Anthology

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Matthew Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves

Terry Goodkind, Severed Souls

Howard Jacobson, J

Nina Allan, The Race

Adam Roberts, Sibilant Fricative:  Essays & Reviews

Pierre Demarty, En face (French)

Claudie Hunzinger, La langue des oiseaux (French) 

Hedwige Jeanmart, Blanès (French)

Nathalie Kuperman, La Loi Sauvage (French)

Christine Montalbetti, Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (French)

Antoine Volodine, Terminus radieux (French)

Valérie Zenatti, Jacob, Jacob (French)

Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

Lydie Salvayre, Pas pleurer (French; won 2014 Prix Goncourt)


September:

Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher:  Stories

David Cronenberg, Consumed

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Brian Francis Slattery, The Family Hightower

Robert Jackon Bennett, City of Stairs

Kelly Barnhill, The Witch's Boy

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Ben Lerner, 10:04


Joseph O'Neill, The Dog

Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

Haikasoru (Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington) (eds.), Phantasm Japan

Ali Smith, How to be Both

Lin Enger, The High Divide

Dylan Landis, Rainey Royal

Michael Pitre, Fives and Twenty-Fives

Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress

Jay Lake, Last Plane to Heaven

Robert Darnton, Censors at Work:  How States Shaped Literature


October:

Keith Donohue, The Boy Who Drew Monsters

Blake Butler, 300,000,000

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

Frankétienne, Ready to Burst

Jac Jemc, A Different Bed Every Time

Nuruddin Farah, Hiding in Plain Sight

Julia Elliott, The Wilds

David Nicholls, Us

Angélica Gorodischer, Palito de naranjo (Spanish)

Marilynne Robinson, Lila

Jane Smiley, Some Luck

Johanna Sinisalo, The Blood of Angels 

Fábio Fernandes and Romeu Martins (eds.), Vaporpunk:  Novos Documentos de uma Pitoresca Época (Portuguese)

David Soares and André Coelho, Sepulturas dos Pais (Portuguese; graphic novel) 


November: 

Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days

Denis Johnson, The Laughing Monsters

Steven Erikson, Willful Child

Ismail Kadare, Twilight of the Eastern Gods

Ron Rash, Something Rich and Strange

Will Self, Shark

Paul Theroux, Mr. Bones

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem 

Mariano Villarreal (ed.), Terra Nova 3 (Spanish)


December:

S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh

Jennifer Marie Brissett, Elysium


This is the list so far.  And before some of you start to complain about a perceived paucity of SF/speculative fiction, look up these titles.  You might be surprised.  Oh, and I didn't list a few titles that don't yet have a confirmed release date from either the publisher or Amazon, thus no listing of Steven Erikson's Fall of Light, which is indeed a book that I will buy whenever it is available in some part of the world.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Silence Once Begun is amazing. Praying Drunk is also quite excellent. Im excited about Boy, Snow, Bird and, of course, the Murakami.

Larry Nolen said...

Great to hear, as I enjoyed his previous work. Only read one of Minor's short stories, but it was good enough to get me to want to read Praying Drunk as well. Lots to look forward to this year, no? :D

Mary said...

You might want to add The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton - an atmospheric work set in 1686 Amsterdam. Amazing writing, great imagery, and a slightly surreal aspect made for an incredible read.

 
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