The eNotes Blog Top Ten Most Anticipated Releases of2013

Top Ten Most Anticipated Releases of2013 Though Im still reeling to catch up on the great new releases of 2012, and though I already have a set list of books to tackle as my New Years resolution, Im already salivating over the following sneak previews that come courtesy of The Millions. Apparently the first stage of overcoming literature fatigue is admitting that you will never catch up to all the amazing books out there. Maybe Ill get around to these promising reads in 2016 or so. Til then, well hello Booker Prize winner of 2010 What new releases are you looking forward to this year? Umbrella  by  Will Self: Shortly before  Umbrella  came out in the UK last September, Will Self published  an essay in  The Guardian  about how he’d gone modernist. â€Å"As I’ve grown older, and realised that there aren’t that many books left for me to write, so I’ve become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.†Ã‚  Umbrella  is the result of Self’s surge in ambition, and it won him some of the best reviews of his career, as well as his first  Booker shortlisting. He lost out to Hilary Mantel in the end, but he won the moral victory in the group photo round  by doing this. Scenes from Early Life  by  Philip Hensher: In his eighth novel,  Scenes from Early Life, Philip Hensher â€Å"shows for the first time what [he] has largely concealed in the past: his heart,† writes  Amanda Craig  in  The Independent.   Written in the form of a memoir, narrated in the voice of Hensher’s real-life husband  Zaved Mahmood, the novel invites comparison with  Gertrude Stein’sThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.   Described as a hybrid of fiction, history, and biography- and as both â€Å"clever† and â€Å"loving†- the inventive project here is distinctly intriguing. My Brother’s Book  by  Maurice Sendak: When Maurice Sendak died last May he left one, final, unpublished book behind.   It is, according to a  starred review  in  Publisher’s Weekly, a beautiful, intensely serious elegy for Sendak’s beloved older brother Jack, who died in 1995.   The story, illustrated in watercolors, has Guy (a stand-in for Sendak), journeying down the gullet of a massive polar bear named Death- â€Å"Diving through time so vast- sweeping past paradise†- into an underworld where he and Jack have one last reunion. â€Å"To read this intensely private work,† writes  Publisher’s Weekly, â€Å"is to look over the artist’s shoulder as he crafts his own afterworld, a place where he lies in silent  embrace with those he loves forever.† See Now Then  by  Jamaica Kincaid: For  See Now Then, her first novel in a decade, Jamaica Kincaid settles into a small town in Vermont, where she dissects the past, present and future of the crumbling marriage of Mrs. Sweet, mother of two children named Heracles and Persephone, a woman whose composer husband leaves her for a younger musician.   Kincaid is known as a writer who can see clean through the surface of things – and people – and this novel assures us that â€Å"Mrs. Sweet could see Mrs. Sweet very well.† Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked  by  James Lasdun: English poet, novelist and short story writer James Lasdun’s new book is a short memoir about a long and harrowing experience at the hands of a former student who set out to destroy him and through online accusations of sexual harassment and theft.  J.M. Coetzee  has called it â€Å"a reminder, as if any were needed, of how easily, since the arrival of the Internet, our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched.† All That Is  by  James Salter: Upon return from service as a naval officer in Okinawa, Philip Bowman becomes a book editor during the â€Å"golden age† of publishing.   The publisher’s blurb promises â€Å"Salter’s signature economy of prose† and a story about the â€Å"dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition.† In  our interview  with Salter in September, he told us it was â€Å"an intimate story about a life in New York publishing,† some 10 years in the making.   From  John Irving: â€Å"A beautiful novel, with sufficient love, heartbreak, vengeance, identity confusion, longing, and euphoria of language to have satisfied Shakespeare.†Ã‚  Tim O’Brien: â€Å"Salter’s vivid, lucid prose does exquisite justice to his subject- the relentless struggle to make good on our own humanity.† April will not come soon enough. You Are One of Them  by  Elliott Holt:  You Are One of Them  is Pushcart Prize-winner Elliott Holt’s debut novel. You might be forgiven for thinking she’d already published a few books, as Holt has been  a fixture  of the literary Twittersphere for years. Holt’s debut is a literary suspense novel spanning years, as a young woman, raised in politically charged Washington D.C. of the 1980s, goes to Moscow to investigate the decades-old death of her childhood friend. A Guide to Being Born  by  Ramona Ausubel:  A short story collection that includes the author’s  New Yorker  debut, â€Å"Atria†. If that piece is any indication, the book is more than a bit fabulist – the plot involves a girl who finds herself pregnant and worries she’ll give birth to an animal. The specter of parenthood, as the title suggests, appears in numerous guises, as does the reinvention that marked the protagonists of her novel (the genesis of which she wrote about  in our own pages). His Wife Leaves Him  by  Stephen Dixon: Stephen Dixon, a writer known for rendering unbearable experiences, has built his 15th novel around a premise that is almost unbearably simple: A man named Martin is thinking about the loss of his wife, Gwen.   Dixon’s long and fruitful career includes more than 500 shorts stories, three O. Henry Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and a pair of nominations for the National Book Award.  Ã‚  His Wife Leaves Him, according to its author, â€Å"is about a bunch of nouns: love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscence, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving.† Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish  by  David Rakoff: Rakoff passed away last summer at the age of 47, shortly after completing this slender novel â€Å"written entirely in verse.† His previous books have been largely satirical, so this final work is a departure: stretching across the country and the twentieth century, the novel’s stories are linked by â€Å"acts of generosity or cruelty.†Ã‚  Ira Glass, who brought Rakoff to the airwaves for more than a decade, has described the book as â€Å"very funny and very sad, which is my favorite combination† (a fair descriptor of much of Rakoff’s radio work, likethis heartbreaking performance  from the live episode of â€Å"This American Life† staged just a few months before his death.) Blast, this Top Ten only made it halfway through the year! Theres just too much brewing to be able to discern what will be the true standouts. For the full list, arranged by release date, head over to The Millions  immediately.