6 New Books to Read This November

Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here.

A Classic of Food Writing

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Consider the Oyster, by M.F.K. Fisher
$15
$15

November 3

The writer’s canonical work from 1941 is about “the dreadful but exciting life” of the oyster — and even more so its afterlife, when it is eaten, discussed, feared, and fantasized about by humans. It’s one of five books by Fisher that Picador is reissuing this fall and comes with an introduction by Anne Fadiman (author of February’s Frog: And Other Essays). —Emma Alpern

A Searching Novel About Parents and Children

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Don’t Stop Snowing, by Gabriel Bump
$29
$29

November 10

Raised by two academics — a white modernist scholar father who is an alcoholic dreamer and a Black mother, a historian who’s far more grounded — David is in a driftless period of his 20s. As a remedy, he drives to Buffalo to stay with his cousin Flip, who ends up taking him along on a bender of his own. Bump’s work is consistently interesting (his last book was 2023’s The New Naturals), and this one, a meditation on parental inheritance set in a frozen world, feels especially engaging. —E.A.

A Personal and Essayistic Nonfiction Work

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Vocal Break: On Women, Music, and Power, by Lauren Elkin
$20
$20

November 10

Elkin’s previous book, 2023’s Art Monsters, examined modern womanhood and art-making. Here, the writer and translator tunes into the female voice, starting with her own experiences as a trained singer and the music she was drawn to growing up. Describing herself as “a musician who got into writing,” Elkin explores the spectrum of valences of the female voice, from Édith Piaf to Billie Eilish, and how singing can be ecstatic, defiant, revolutionary. —Jasmine Vojdani

Collected Stories From an American Great

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Anne Proulx Stories: New and Selected, by Annie Proulx
$27
$27

November 10

You can now find the greatest of Proulx’s transporting stories all in one place — “a book filled with mismatched couples and calamitous love affairs,” as Colm Tóibín puts it in his introduction — including, of course, the epic-in-miniature “Brokeback Mountain.” In her sharp, signature prose, Proulx builds out the farms and wilderness of Wyoming, ruin and rust always on the horizon. The collection also includes three new stories. —J.V.

A Satire About American Derangement

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Humpty Dumpty, by Harold Rogers
$27
$27

November 10

In Steubenville, Ohio, an utterly boring but demented place, a possible sexual assault at a high-school party accelerates the darkest elements of the town and its people. The narrative moves between teenage football players, police officers, and clueless parents, with diary entries, footnotes, photographs, and archival materials at play; you might be reminded of Rejection or Lost Lambs, but with odder grammar. This is Harold Rogers’s second book, after Tropicália, which he wrote about in a memorable Substack post titled “MY DEBUT NOVEL WAS A FLOP.” —E.A.

Intertwined Fictional Histories

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Two Women, by Jacqueline Rose
$19
$19

November 24

In alternating sections, the feminist critic and psychoanalytic thinker weaves together the stories of her sister, the philosopher and Anglican convert Gillian Rose — who died of cancer at 48 — and the philosopher Edith Stein, who converted to Catholicism and was killed at Auschwitz. Twenty years in the making, the novel, a century-spanning meditation on loss and empathy, is both deeply felt and deeply imagined. —J.V.