10 new books you should read in March

It’s genuinely surprising that Ione Skye hasn’t released a memoir yet, because she has a lot to say. Skye, an actor whose role opposite John Cusack in Say Anything made her an overnight Gen X icon, grew up on the outskirts of fame, with an absent musician for a father (the folk singer Donovan) and a famous model for a mother (Enid Karl). In Say Everything, Skye digs deep into her past, writing honestly about the difficulties she faced while growing up and the overwhelming public scrutiny she was subjected to after her breakout film role.

Almost 15 years after the release of Swamplandia!, Karen Russell returns with a new novel. The Antidote takes place in the small town of Uz, Nebraska, as five residents grapple with the aftereffects of a severe Dust Bowl storm. Russell brings her signature magical realism to the story in the form of a “Prairie Witch,” a scarecrow who won’t stop talking, and a photographer with a time-traveling camera. Throughout the novel, Russell questions the nature of memory and the stories we tell ourselves so we can sleep a little easier at night.

Journalist Steve Oney spent 14 years reporting his latest book, On Air: The Triumph And Tumult Of NPR. In it, Oney meticulously traces the history of National Public Radio from its inception in 1970 to the present day. Oney goes behind the scenes to paint a portrait of how NPR weathered numerous controversies to become one of our country’s most vital public resources.

Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby was a breakout success when it was released in 2021, and her follow-up is earning similar early raves. Peters’ latest is actually composed of four separate stories: Stag Dance, the main novel, follows a group of lumberjacks who organize a dance that some of them agree to attend as women, while the three short stories deal with a gender apocalypse, an illicit romance at a Quaker boarding school, and a party weekend in Las Vegas. Peters has been vocal about catering her work to an explicitly transgender audience rather than writing trans stories aimed at a cisgender reader base, and Stag Dance further establishes her as an essential voice in queer literature.

After releasing two novels in 2024 alone (The Angel Of Indian Lake and I Was A Teenage Slasher), the wildly prolific Stephen Graham Jones is already gearing up for his next release. Jones draws on his Blackfeet Native American heritage in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, crafting a haunting tale of revenge told through a priest’s interviews with a vampire named Good Stab. The novel is set in 1912 in the American West and chronicles the events that led to the deaths of 217 Blackfeet.

John Green pivots from his usual young adult fare with Everything Is Tuberculosis, a nonfiction book that weaves together medical journalism and the story of Henry, a young boy with tuberculosis whom Green met in 2019. Green interrogates how a curable disease kills 1.5 million people every year, turning a critical eye toward healthcare systems that prevent access to life-saving medicine. He also addresses the social and cultural history of tuberculosis, documenting how the disease has shaped our world.

If you’ve read Kathryn Schulz’s harrowing New Yorker article “The Really Big One” a few too many times, perhaps Emma Pattee’s upcoming novel Tilt will also spark your interest. Pattee’s fiction debut follows Annie, a woman who is nine months pregnant and has just survived a massive, devastating earthquake in Portland, Oregon. She’s on the other side of the city from her home, though, and the quake has knocked out local electricity and cell phone service, which means she has no choice but to walk across a ravaged Portland if she wants to get back to her husband and find some semblance of safety.

Trauma Plot: A Life, Jamie Hood’s second book, is part memoir and part criticism, an experimental narrative told in four parts. Hood recounts three times in her life when she was raped and critiques the cultural archetype of the rape survivor, covering everything from Ovid to #MeToo. Hood’s writing in Trauma Plot is often devastating and difficult to reckon with, but it’s also deeply vital.