7 New Books to Read This October

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.

New nonfiction from David Byrne

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Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, by David Byrne
$23
$23

October 6

The paintings of Caravaggio, Moby-Dick, the submarine, hand-washing — all are “sleeping beauties,” as David Byrne puts it, borrowing a term from the scientific researcher Anthony van Raan: After some initial success (or none at all), they fell out of fashion for a number of years until somebody reintroduced them to the world when the moment was right. Byrne’s new book is a delightfully interdisciplinary compendium of these reanimated ideas. —Emma Alpern

An experimental work about police violence

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The Occidental Book of the Dead, by T. Geronimo Johnson
$29
$29

October 6

In 1992 Atlantis — seemingly a stand-in for Atlanta, Georgia — George Washington Jonson becomes a police officer patrolling near the projects where he grew up. Years later, with a new rookie partner, a shooting upends his respectable life. Coming more than a decade after the award-winning Welcome to Braggsville, T. Geronimo Johnson’s new novel looks to be an audacious work that picks apart its central story. —E.A.

A Pulitzer-winning novelist on class and first love

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Partita, by Barbara Kingsolver
$22
$22

October 6

Livia, a Bach-adoring pianist who has settled into a comfortable marriage to a farmer, receives an unprompted call from her ex-lover, Sigurd, after 25 years apart. While she wrestles with the decision of whether or not to see him, Livia recalls everything from their impassioned first encounters when she was a late-blooming music student at the conservatory to her brother’s suicide when she was just 11. In two parallel timelines, the author of the lauded Demon Copperhead reflects beautifully on loss, love, and time. —Jasmine Vojdani

A maximalist historical novel

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Music Against the Night, by Yiyun Li
$26
$26

October 13

The prolific Yiyun Li follows her 2026 Pulitzer-winning memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, with a historical fiction set in the Romantic era. Pleasurably maximalist, playful, and carefully constructed, the time- and continent-spanning novel traces the love story of two piano prodigies, Adelaide Percheron and John Field, inventor of the nocturne, and the ways ambition and circumstance drive them apart. —J.V.

An aesthetic investigation

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A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, by Wendy S. Walters
$30
$30

October 13

Only gradually did Walters come to see white paint as her opponent, but once she did, she couldn’t unsee it. Understanding why was another story. In this personal and historical exploration on the uses and abuses of white paint — longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction — Walters (disclosure: She is a former professor of mine) constructs a vivid and vital argument about the unconscious noxious effects of a design choice so ubiquitous that it hardly registers as one. —J.V.

A character-driven campus novel

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The Brightness, by Chad Harbach
$32
$32

October 27

It’s been 15 years since Harbach’s best seller The Art of Fielding came out, but time passed slower at Westish College, where most of the characters are still in their 20s: Pella Affenlicht, the college president’s daughter; Mike Schwartz, her moody fiancé; and onetime star baseball player Owen Dunne, who’s about to get married himself, are all anxiously coming of age for a second time. —E.A.

A filmmaker’s intrepid debut

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Public Access Afterworld, by Jane Schoenbrun
$29
$29

October 27

After coming “tantalizingly close” to landing a series at HBO, the filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, whose Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma came out this summer, decided to rework what they had into their first novel. Unfolding over decades, it’s a suburban sci-fi about a strange TV channel hidden in the static, taking their cinematic preoccupations and chasing them down over 600 pages. —E.A.