The Most Anticipated Fall 2012 Books

by Emily Temple.  Aug 15, 2012 - Flavorpill

No matter what some may say, this year has already been a great one for literature — and from where we’re sitting, it’s only getting better. This fall promises to be a doozy, with September in particular filled with some serious literary heavy hitters, and enough great reads piled up through the autumn months to get you fat and happy just in time for winter. There’s a little something for everyone: essays, memoir, novels, short story collections, and one beyond-the-borders graphic novel. After the jump, read through our list of the fifteen books we’re most excited about this fall, and then be sure to let us know which reads you’re most excited about tackling in the comments.


NW, Zadie Smith (September 4)
We’ve waited a whole impatient seven years since Smith’s last novel, the Orange Prize-winning On Beauty, and luckily, her newest effort, a story of the intertwined lives of four Londoners, linked by their childhood, all trying to negotiate life and adulthood in the modern world, somehow makes us feel like it was all worth it. Rendered in Smith’s playful, engaging prose, the novel is as good as a weekend away, as mercurial and lush as any city.
Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon (September 11)
In another sweeping-but-specific American epic (think High Fidelity mixed with Middlemarch), Chabon tells the story of two families in Oakland — Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are clinging to a failing record store, and their wives, Gwen and Aviva, scrambling to keep their midwifery practice together. Enter ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, and Luther Stallings, one-time blaxploitation action star, and a pair of teenagers variously in love and not in love, and blood, inevitably, begins to boil.
This is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz (September 11)
We told you September was going to be a month of heavy hitters. Díaz blew the literary world away with his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and his newest collection of short stories is packed with the same visceral, tender, pumping heart. The love he writes about in each of these stories may not always be clean, may not always be romantic, but each complex situation and unforgettable character (Yunior!) shines with truth.

Full list at Flavorpill