This season’s authors take on pop culture, the canon, and two tortured American dramatists.

Literary essays were our big story for spring, too, but one could argue that they can never get too much attention. Consider the numerous anthologies on our longlist, from n+1, the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Vanity Fair, and BOMB. Consider the success of The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. According to Graywolf, this debut collection, which spent four weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and which we highlighted as a top 10 pick last season, has sold approximately 20,000 copies and is now in its sixth printing.

One hotly anticipated collection is Salon columnist Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist: Essays. Gay, who is having a very good year with the May 2014 publication of her novel, An Untamed State, writes eloquently about everything from Sweet Valley High and The Help to abortion. Meanwhile, in her first collection in 15 years, critic Daphne Merkin also tackles a mix of pop and literary subject matter in The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, with selections on Marilyn Monroe, W.G. Sebald, and Betty Friedan. Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth, returns with The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Now writing from early middle age, Daum meditates on a parent’s death, cultural nostalgia, and the decision not to have children.

The posthumous collection, Maeve’s Times: In Her Own Words by Maeve Binchy, who died in 2012, has already hit the bestseller list of the Sunday Times, and has an announced first printing of 100,000 copies. Featuring five decades of writing from the Irish Times, this is the closest fans will get to an autobiography.

Three titles urge us to reconsider novels that we perhaps did not appreciate the first time around in high school English class. In The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, Azar Nafisi blends memoir and polemic with analysis of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and other titles. Nafisi, author of the bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran, pays tribute to the importance of fiction in any society. In Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and His Moment, biographer Andrew Levy argues that readers have been misunderstanding Twain’s masterpiece for decades. Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, explores the hidden depths of an American classic in So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be and Why It Endures.

Fans and scholars would do well to seek out two landmark biographies of American dramatists. Robert M. Dowling’s Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is the first to discuss the lost play Exorcism, and connects O’Neill’s plays with his political and philosophical worldview, among other revelations. In PW’s starred review for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, we wrote that the achievement of John Lahr, the award-winning longtime New Yorker drama critic, “is not likely to be surpassed.” Lahr takes readers into Williams’s mind, backstage life, tumultuous love affairs, and tortured family, while astutely studying his plays.

Neither essay collection, biography, nor criticism, but still very worthy of attention is The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. In this witty and practical book on the art of writing, Pinker applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the crafting of clear, elegant prose: #requiredreading.

PW’s Top 10: Literary Biographies, Essays & Criticism

Bad Feminist: Essays. Roxane Gay. Harper, Aug. 5

Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts. Robert M. Dowling. Yale Univ., Oct. 28

The Fame Lunches: On Wounded. Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags. Daphne Merkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 2

Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and His Moment. Andrew Levy. Simon & Schuster, Jan. 6

Maeve’s Times: In Her Own Words. Maeve Binchy. Knopf, Oct. 28

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books. Azar Nafisi. Viking, Oct. 21

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Steven Pinker. Viking, Sept. 30

So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be and Why It Endures. Maureen Corrigan. Little, Brown, Sept. 9

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. John Lahr. Norton, Sept. 22

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Meghan Daum. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov. 18

Literary Biographies, Essays & Criticism Listings

Bloomsbury

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth (Nov. 4, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-1-62040-781-3). A revelatory, sympathetic study of the poet and frequently misunderstood man offers fresh understanding of the interplay between his life and work.

Cambridge Univ.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Vol. 3, 1957–1965 by Samuel Beckett, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (Sept. 30, hardcover, $50, ISBN 978-0-521-86795-5) shows the author striving to find a balance between the demands put upon him by his growing international fame, and his need for the peace and silence from which new writing might emerge.

Coffee House

(dist. by Consortium)

The Deep Zoo by Rikki Ducornet (Jan. 13, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-56689-376-3) presents Ducornet’s reading of the world, a gathering of alchemies where the unknown has become visible through the medium of art, be it Borges’s tigers and Cortazar’s lions, desire, mystery, or the grotesque. Her essays explore eros, violence, dreams, fairy tales, and art as alchemy.

Columbia Univ.

The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Minae Mizumura, trans. by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter (Jan. 6, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-231-16302-6). Incorporating her experiences as a writer and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomenon of individual and national expression.

Da Capo

Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians by Justin Martin (Sept. 2, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-306-82226-1). In the shadow of the Civil War, a circle of radicals in a rowdy saloon changed American society and helped set Walt Whitman on the path to poetic immortality. Martin shows how this first bohemian culture—imported from Paris to a dingy Broadway saloon—seeded and nurtured an American tradition of art. 25,000-copy announced first printing.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions by Ian S. MacNiven (Nov. 18, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-374-29939-2). A thoughtful and playful biography of the man who founded New Directions and transformed American publishing.

The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags by Daphne Merkin (Sept. 2, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-374-14037-3). A wide-ranging collection of essays by one of America’s most perceptive critics of popular and literary culture.

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum (Nov. 18, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-374-28044-4). A master of the personal essay candidly explores love, death, and the counterfeit rituals of American life.

Where Have You Been? Selected Essays by Michael Hofmann (Dec. 2, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-374-25996-9). An adventure with a roving genius of literary criticism.

Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia by Emmanuel Carrère, trans. by John Lambert (Oct. 21, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-19201-3) is a page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia’s most controversial figures, Eduard Limonov.

FSG/Faber & Faber

Happiness: Ten Years of ‘n+1’ by n+1 Foundation Inc. (Sept. 9, paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-86547-822-0) selects from the first decade of what Mary Karr calls “the best goddamn literary magazine in America.”

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl (Sept. 2, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-86547-814-5) presents incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright.

Graywolf

Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays by Tony Hoagland (Nov. 4, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-55597-694-1). A fearless book on the state of poetry and American literary culture by the author of What Narcissism Means to Me.

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra (Sept. 2, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-55597-685-9). The nonfiction debut by the author of Sacred Games examines the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding.

Grove

Havel: A Life by Michael Zantovsky (Nov. 4, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-8021-2315-2). Written by his former press secretary and longtime friend, this biography chronicles Havel’s journey from a privileged upbringing in Prague, to a career as a playwright and essayist, to the Velvet Revolution and becoming the first president of what was still Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic.

Harper

Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America, edited by Franklin Foer (Sept. 16, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-234040-5). To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the New Republic, an anthology of essays culled from the archives of the influential magazine.

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay (Aug. 5, paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-0-06-228271-2). From one of the best young cultural critics writing today comes a collection spanning politics, criticism, and feminism. 30,000-copy announced first printing.

The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life by Andy Miller. (Dec. 9, paper, $14.99, ISBN 978-0-06-144618-4). An editor and writer chronicles his yearlong adventure with 52 books, reminding us why we should all make time in our lives for books.

Harvard Univ.

The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel by Jerome McGann (Oct. 13, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-674-41666-6) takes readers on a spirited tour through Poe’s verse and critical and theoretical writing, arguing that Poe belongs alongside Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.

Holt

By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review, edited by Pamela Paul, foreword by Scott Turow (Oct. 28, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-62779-145-8). Sixty-five leading writers open up about the books and authors that have meant the most to them.

Why Homer Matters by Adam Nicolson (Nov. 18, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-62779-179-3). In this passionate, deeply personal book, Nicolson explains why Homer matters—to him, to you, to the world—in a text full of twists, turns, and surprises.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall (Dec. 2, hardcover, $22, ISBN 978-0-544-28704-4). A former poet laureate gathers a new collection of essays, delivering a gloriously unexpected view from the vantage point of very old age.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014, edited by Daniel Handler (Oct. 7, paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-0-544-12966-5). Handler and Lemony Snicket compile the year’s best new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and category-defying gems. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

The Best American Essays 2014, edited by John Jeremiah Sullivan, series edited by Robert Atwan (Oct. 7, paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-0-544-30990-6). Pulphead author Sullivan picks the year’s best essays, selected from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. 40,000-copy announced first printing.

Johns Hopkins Univ.

Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing by Anthony Reed (Nov. 22, hardcover, $44.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-1520-8) analyzes works by African-American and Afro-Caribbean writers (including Suzan-Lori Parks, Claudia Rankine, Douglas Kearney, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey) to develop a new sense of the literary politics of formally innovative writing and the connections between literature and politics since the 1960s.

Knopf

Maeve’s Times: In Her Own Words by Maeve Binchy (Oct. 28, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-385-35345-8). Five decades of Binchy’s selected writings from the Irish Times are filled with her hallmark humor, candor, and wisdom. 100,000-copy announced first printing.

I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel by David Shields and Caleb Powell (Jan. 6, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-385-35194-2). An impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate about life and art—cocktails included.

Little, Brown

The David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace (Nov. 11, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-316-18239-3). A selection of Wallace’s work introduces readers to his humor, kindness, sweeping intellect, and versatility as a writer. 50,000-copy announced first printing.

So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be and Why It Endures by Maureen Corrigan (Sept. 9, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-316-23007-0). The Fresh Air book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby—“The Great American Novel we all think we’ve read, but really haven’t.” 20,000-copy announced first printing.

McSweeney’s

Read Harder, edited by Ed Park and Heidi Julavits (Sept. 16, paper, $18, ISBN 978-1-940450-18-6) collects the finest essays from the second half of the Believer’s decadelong (and counting) run.

New York Review Books

Lives of the New York Intellectuals: A Group Portrait by Edward Mendelson (Jan. 13, hardcover, $20, ISBN 978-1-59017-776-1). Biographical portraits explore the works of Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, W.H. Auden, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, and Frank O’Hara through the lens of their personal lives.

Norton

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr (Sept. 22, hardcover, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-393-02124-0). The definitive biography of America’s greatest playwright comes from the celebrated drama critic of the New Yorker.

Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas by Adam Kirsch (Nov. 17, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-393-24346-8) collects essays from a writer the Daily Beast calls a “great poet-critic-intellectual.”

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Celebrity by David M. Friedman (Oct. 6, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-393-06317-2). The story of Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this literary eminence became famous for being famous.

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature by Robert Darnton (Sept. 22, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-393-24229-4). This absorbing history by a brilliant scholar and writer deepens our understanding of how censorship works.

Oxford Univ.

Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. II—The Epic Years, 1921–1939 by A. David Moody (Nov. 25, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-19-921558-4) is the long-awaited second volume of Moody’s acclaimed three-part biography.

Pegasus

(dist. by Norton)

The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters by Andrew McConnell Stott (Sept. 15, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-60598-614-2). Love affairs, literary rivalries, and the supernatural collide in an inspired journey to Lake Geneva, where Byron, the Shelleys, and John Polidori come together to create literature’s best-known monsters. 12,500-copy announced first printing.

Tolstoy’s False Disciple: The Untold Story of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov by Alexandra Popoff (Nov. 15, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-60598-640-1) sheds light on one of the strangest and most unusual relationships in literary history, which has been steeped in secrecy for more than a century.

The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock by Lucy Worsley (Oct. 15, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-60598-634-0). From 19th-century real and fictional crimes to the cozy crimes of the golden age, Worsley explores the evolution of the traditional English murder and reveals why we are so fascinated by this sinister subject.

Penguin/Blue Rider

Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton, and 639 others (Sept. 4, paper, $30, ISBN 978-0-399-16656-3). A beautifully illustrated ode to self-expression and style features more than 600 contributors, and is edited by three critically acclaimed authors.

Penguin Press

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair, edited by Graydon Carter (Oct. 30, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-159420-598-9). An anthology of articles from the early years of Vanity Fair celebrates the magazine’s centenary.

Princeton Univ.

F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature by William J. Maxwell (Jan. 18, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-13020-0) exposes the FBI’s intimate policing of five decades of African-American poems, plays, essays, and novels, illuminating both the harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it.

American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (Oct. 5, hardcover, $29.95 ISBN 978-0-691-15060-4) tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how it democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped fashion new identities by introducing readers to books by and about marginalized groups.

Random House

The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer by Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon (Dec. 2, hardcover, $40, ISBN 978-1-4000-6623-0). Mailer wrote almost 50,000 letters over the course of his life, keeping a copy of almost every one of them. The collection includes correspondences with presidents and politicians, artists and athletes, writers and editors, students, antagonists, fans, friends, children, and his loves—including his sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer.

Simon & Schuster

Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War and God by Will Durant (Dec. 9, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-4767-7154-0). The final and most personal work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian—discovered 32 years after Durant’s death—is a message for everyone who has sought meaning in life or the counsel of a wise friend.

Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and His Moment by Andrew Levy (Jan. 6, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-4391-8696-1) offers a groundbreaking re-examination of Huckleberry Finn, proving that for more than 100 years we have misunderstood Twain’s message on race and childhood—and the uncomfortable truths it still holds for modern America.

Soho

‘BOMB’: The Author Interviews, edited by Betsy Sussler (Nov. 4, hardcover, $40, ISBN 978-1-61695-379-9). Drawing on 30 years of BOMB magazine, this anthology gathers works by some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of author conversations.

Tin House

(dist. by PGW)

Loitering: New and Collected Essays by Charles D’Ambrosio (Nov. 11, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-935639-87-9) presents 11 essays from his previous collection, Orphans, along with new and previously uncollected work. D’Ambrosio writes on a Pentecostal “hell house,” Mary Kay Letourneau, the work of J.D. Salinger, and his family.

Touchstone

Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakeable Love for New York, edited by Sari Botton (Oct. 14, paper, $16, ISBN 978-1-4767-8440-3). From the editor of the celebrated anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York comes a new essay collection on what keeps writers tethered to New York City.

Univ. of Chicago

The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany by Donald E. Westlake, edited by Levi Stahl (Sept. 24, paper, $18, ISBN 978-0-226-12181-9). The first collection of Westlake’s nonfiction includes essays, reviews, introductions, and interviews, along with previously unpublished material, including letters and portions of an autobiography.

Mayakovsky: A Biography by Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. by Harry D. Watson (Dec. 7, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-226-05697-5). The first non-Soviet biography of the most important poet of Soviet Russia, this book is built on Jangfeldt’s unprecedented access to the people who knew and worked with Mayakovsky and to their archives.

Univ. of Washington

Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature by Xiaojing Zhou (Nov. 15, paper, $30, ISBN 978-0-295-994031) examines literary works that depict Asian-American culture across urban spaces.

Verso

(dist. by Random)

The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose by Alain Badiou (Nov. 4, paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-78168-569-3) This essay collection revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments.

Viking

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books by Azar Nafisi (Oct. 21, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-670-02606-7). A passionate hymn to the power of fiction to change people’s lives, by the bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury by Paul Strohm (Nov. 13, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-670-02643-2) is a lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury Tales.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker (Sept. 30, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-670-02585-5) shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.

Vintage

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund (Aug. 5, paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-8041-71632). This phenomenology of reading reminds readers that the connection they establish with books goes beyond what is simply on the page. 20,000-copy announced first printing.

Yale Univ.

Why the Romantics Matter by Peter Gay (Jan. 13, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-0-300-14429-1). A renowned scholar’s reflections on the Romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them.

A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe by Irving Howe, edited by Nina Howe (Oct. 28, hardcover, $40, ISBN 978-0-300-20366-0). An indispensable collection from one of America’s most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the 20th century.

Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts by Robert M. Dowling (Oct. 28, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-300-17033-7) fully captures the intimacies of O’Neill’s tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama. Dowling highlights how the stories he told for the stage interweave with his actual life stories.