While pulling together our first Book Preview of 2023, I started to notice a number of commonalities — themes that seemed to echo throughout the list. I love these synchronicities and the idea of a collective stew that we're all pulling out of — a stew filled with our shared anxieties and obsessions, intersecting vibes and interests. It’s endlessly fascinating to see the seed of something similar sprout into multiple complementary but wildly divergent projects. So I thought I'd pull a few together, for your perusing pleasure.
DYSTOPIC: THE DIGITALLY DISILLUSIONED
Maybe it’s because of how much we relied on our devices to connect us to the rest of the world over the last few years. Maybe it's because some of the people in charge of these tech companies that have sunk their teeth into our daily lives have proven themselves to be idiots, which begs the question: why did we let their "inventions" infiltrate our homes?
Users by Colin Winnette is set at a VR company that introduces a product called The Ghost Lover, where users are haunted by their past lovers. In
Please Report Your Bug Here by Josh Riedel, a dating app employee takes advantage of a glitch in his company’s software that can transport him to other worlds. In both: lives and worlds (and jobs) are threatened; stakes are high; controversies erupt; and the tech industry is both ubiquitous and insidious. But the fact that the covers for
Users and
Please Report Your Bug Here go together so well? Truly *chef’s kiss*
COVERS: YELLOW, YELLOW, YELLOW
There is so much yellow on the covers coming out this year. When I googled “yellow color meaning” (for research!), I got back notes about sunshine, stimulation, energy, and optimism. But it’s also a warning color, a color that tells you to be careful before you cross, and I think it’s that tone these covers are evoking — a tone that perfectly matches the books’ contents, whether those contents are sinister (
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell), nostalgic (
Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren, translated by Agnes Broomé), transgressive (
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin), or time-bendingly surreal (
Flux by Jinwoo Chong).
WOMEN: STILL DISENFRANCHISED
We noticed this trend last year and featured many of the books in our
Literary Friction sale (my personal favorite was
New Animal by Ella Baxter); it doesn’t seem like authors have tired of writing women who are aimless and angry, confused and abrasive — essentially, every combination of every contradictory adjective there is. This year, we’ll meet a gender-swapped
Taxi Driver (
Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns); an acerbic and unsettling woman telling her story to a bar full of strangers (
Island City by Laura Adamczyk); a woman who uses stalking as a coping mechanism (
Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong); and a woman who will drag her mysterious, extremely heavy trunk filled with secrets however far she needs to, so long as she gets the life and freedom she so desires (
Lone Women by Victor LaValle). This is by no means an exhaustive list. It doesn’t look like (literary, fictional) women are going to be enfranchised anytime time soon, and as a reader who eats these stories up like candy, can I just say: thank god.
FAIRY TALES (REDUX)
There are
a lot of fairy-tale-related books coming out this year. I can’t help but think they’re a counterpoint to the Digitally Disillusioned books we’re seeing: a way of accessing our stories and our confusing world from another direction. There are books that reevaluate fairy tales through the lens of the authors' lives (
Happily by Sabrina Orah Markly); books that dissect, unmake, and rebraid the fairy tales we thought we knew so well (
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link and
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill); and books that drop us into the middle of a fairy tale that looks a lot more like a nightmare when viewed up-close (
First Comes Summer by Maria Hesselager, translated by Martin Aitken). All promise to be twisty, unsettling fun.
COVERS: STICKY-SWEET FRUIT
These covers are just so fun — so juicy! I couldn’t help myself. The one-two punch of seeing the cover of
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter (her follow-up after
The Book of X; I cannot wait to read it) and
The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter was just so satisfying. The books promise to be unnerving, engrossing, and probably pretty sickly sweet (but in a good way) (like pomegranates!!).
A DEEPER DIVE INTO: QUESTIONS OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND ABUSE
This one isn’t super surprising, considering everything that’s happened over the last few years. I imagine we’ll be seeing books that spend time working through the complicated feelings and messy gray zones of consent and power in relationships for a while yet. Following the success of the wild and wildly good
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas this last year, a book that asked a similar range of questions, we’ve got
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai and
Lucky Dogs by Helen Schulman coming out in 2023. All great, timely, and deeply nuanced — appropriate for such a complicated topic.
DYSTOPIC: PREPPING FOR DOOMSDAY
I feel like this particular trend is relatively self-explanatory. Who hasn’t at least considered prepping for the worst-case scenario? (Especially if you live in the PNW and are worried about the
Big One.) I’m pretty obsessed with the synchronicity between these two titles, though:
The Survivalists by Kashana Cauley, about a Black lawyer whose success-forward life is upended when she moves in her with boyfriend and his doomsday-prepping-obsessed roommates; and
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, her long-awaited return after the success of
The Luminaries, about a woman leading a group of guerilla gardeners (the titular Birnam Wood) who meets a billionaire trying to buy a nearby farm for his doomsday bunker. Both books also dig into climate change and the tyranny of capitalism — among many other themes; the topic is fertile! But maybe there’s a lesson to take away from both of these too: that (maybe!) it’s worth trying to prepare for the future? That (maybe!) there might be a future worth fighting for? Maybe!
HORROR: COMING OF AGE IS TERRIFYING
I consider every stage of life a terrifying stage of life, but coming of age really takes the cake — your body is changing (horrifying), you want to be looked at but also dread being looked at (horrifying), you have ideas for how you want to live your life but no clue how to make those ideas happen (also horrifying), and you probably have acne (
scream). So I was super excited when I saw that there were multiple books this year that take on coming of age as the horror it rightfully is, including
She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran and
Chlorine by Jade Song.
RECONSIDERING: BEAUTY STANDARDS
This theme isn’t new to this year, but one I’m glad to see that’s ongoing and often complicating itself. Last year,
Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones and
Body Grammar by Jules Ohman were staff favorites; both interrogated our hyper-image-conscious world. This coming year, we’ve got two books that turn the “optimizing of one’s self” into the horror that it is:
Natural Beauty by (local author!) Ling Ling Huang and
The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter. In the former, a concert musician finds employment at a high-end beauty boutique, which brings with it horrific and revelatory expectations; the latter takes apart society’s stereotypes, regulations, and derision around women’s appetites. Capitalism, body politics, identity, self-worth — being a woman in a society is bad, but these books are good.
POPSTARS: PARASOCIAL OR PARAMOUR
Imagining oneself in a relationship with a popstar isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s certainly become easier with TikTok and Instagram making it seem like we have easy access to these celebrities' lives. Two books this coming year explore those types of relationships: in
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, a comedy writer at an SNL-like show, starts to fall for that week’s charming, attractive featured musician; in
Y/N by Esther Yi, a fan lets her obsession with a K-Pop star pull her in a Kafka-esque journey across the world. In one: a will-they-won’t-they social satire that looks at fame, love, and gender roles; in the other: an acerbic and exacting look at parasocial relationships and the solipsism of obsession. Both promise to be delicious.
For more recommendations, check out our staff's
Top Fives, as well as our
Best Books of 2022.