What Did You Hear? The Music Of Bob Dylan by Steven Rings (October 6)
I am both a casual Bob Dylan listener and a casual musician—I played violin, serviceably, for four years—so I was intrigued by the prospect of Steven Rings’ new book. Rings, a music theorist and an associate professor in the University Of Chicago’s Department Of Music, explores the “imperfections” that make up the backbone of Dylan’s music, holding down the oeuvre even as the multihyphenate took bigger creative swings. There’s basic music theory throughout, but nothing that should put off readers who have never looked at sheet music—that is, it’s not like a booklength version of the “Understanding Poetry” scene in Dead Poets Society. In his quest to find a new appreciation for Dylan’s work, Rings is helping me set up my first. [Danette Chavez]
Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff
I began 2025 by reading Helen DeWitt’s 2001 novel The Last Samurai, which immediately became one of my favorite books. So imagine my delight when, halfway through the year, I found out she was finally putting out her third novel, Your Name Here, which she wrote in collaboration with Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. DeWitt’s style is literary and requires your commitment, but without being unapproachable or unrewarding. (A committed reader of The Last Samurai could come away with at least a rudimentary knowledge of how to phonetically read Japanese.) A skim through Your Name Here reveals Arabic characters, a variety of fonts and sizes, chapters formatted as email correspondence, diagrams, images of East Asian art, knives, Paul Newman. The back cover for this September release describes this adventure as “a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books,” and it sounds like just the kind of thing I’m ready to curl up and commit to as the weather picks up a chill. [Drew Gillis]
Herculine by Grace Byron (October 7)
It’s always exciting when a writer you’ve been aware of for a while gears up to release their first novel, so color me excited for Grace Byron’s Herculine. The info shared ahead of the release sounds a bit like what you’d expect from the young-writer-in-New York novel before it takes a horrifying turn. The story follows a so-far unnamed narrator who decamps from the city—and all the bad jobs and bad boyfriends that come with it—when a “malevolent force” sends her to a trans girl commune in the woods of rural Indiana, one that sounds even more horrifying than what she knew in New York. Byron’s work on her Substack and in outlets has been clear-eyed and incisive, like a New Yorker article from this past spring that described the “Kafkaesque problems that the Trump Administration is creating” for trans people trying to travel. Although the world Byron writes about is already horrifying enough, I’m looking forward to seeing what her wholesale embrace of the horror genre looks like. [DG]
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (October 28)
Alix E. Harrow is one of my favorite fantasy writers to emerge in the last few years. Her work is ambitious, inventive, and usually touches on resonant feminist or otherwise political themes. The Everlasting is Harrow’s most ambitious and most political yet. Both timeless and timely, the novel tells the story of a nation trapped in perpetual war and the historian tasked with shaping that story for the ages, toeing the line between mythmaking and propaganda.
As a device, the time loop has always been a way to thematically communicate that “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”—whether that’s a character’s personal history or history at large. Here the two merge cleverly; the historian’s life and love are inextricably tied to his homeland. The text and subtext intertwine as he becomes trapped in an endless cycle of oppression, violence, and death. Is it noble to obfuscate the truth if it’s in service for the greater good? Is it futile for one person to try to change the tide of history? How far do you have to go back to break the cycle, and what does it take to do so?
There’s a lot going on in this book, and it can sometimes get bogged down by the details (sometimes I felt confused by the mechanics of the time loop, and other times I felt the magic was being over-explained). But there’s a lot worthwhile beyond the broad strokes and big ideas, including tender character work and unusual but compelling perspective shifts. The Everlasting builds upon Harrow’s ongoing interest in storytelling itself, the tangible and intangible power of it, its inherent romance and magic. In The Everlasting, the right story, told the right way at the right time, can change a life or even the world. [MKC]
