The pipeline the publishing world manages quite reliably to maintain flowing is pumping along as predictably as usual, but three works nearing publication in the next several weeks may well strike the equivalent of literary black gold. Chief among them—and the only one I can personally vouch for, being two-thirds into it already on an advance copy—is the next novel from the prolific and brilliant Brit Ian McEwan, author of 19 novels and two short-story collections to date. At the outset, I was more than a little doubtful that “What We Can Know” (Knopf, $27, 320 pages), which publishes on Sept. 23, could long hold my attention, let alone captivate me. Its narrator, after all, is a middle-aged, somewhat dweeby academic at a middling English university whose specialty is the literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and his passionate obsession is searching for a famous but lost poem written more than 100 years before he was born. Well, that’s a ticket to Dullsville, methought. But I was not even 10 percent into the story when I had to wryly (and gratefully) conclude, that, as McEwan’s title implies, what we think we might know and what is true could be two different things entirely. Protagonist Thomas Metcalfe, it turns out, is not a denizen of the 21st century of his professed expertise. He is living in 2122 and looking rather longingly backward. Meanwhile, two catastrophic developments for humankind have transpired in the elapsed time. One is referred to as the “Inundation,” which has rendered island living not a chosen luxury but an inevitability, and the other is remembered as the “Derangement,” which McEwan wisely lets us come to our own conclusions about. What unfolds over the next 250 pages is a multi-genre tale completely relevant to our own times. It’s part speculative fiction, part love story, part detective story and eventually, even a sort of crime narrative, all buoyed by McEwan’s literary stock-in-trade arsenal: his keen eye for human behavior and foibles, his thought-provoking observations on the effects of human decisions and indecisions, and his crisp and dry trademark wit, which often had me laughing aloud over a brief single sentence. As a case in point on that sudden-attack sly humor, consider this apt summing up of an over ardent suitor totally unaware that his love is unrequited: “He is the willing prisoner of an ecstatic solipsism.” McEwan, who won the Booker Prize for his 1998 novel “Amsterdam,” is the author of “Atonement,” “On Chesil Beach,” “Saturday,” “Nutshell,” “Machines Like Me” and many others.
Oakland-based writer Mary Roach, the irrepressible and often hilarious author of “Grunt,” “Bonk,“ “Stiff” and “Fuzz,” has turned once again to matters biological for her next science-based nonfiction investigations. “Replaceable You” (W.W. Norton, $28.99, 288 pages), publishing Sept. 16, is subtitled “Adventures in Human Anatomy” and plows deep into the exploration of the myriad ways humans have tried to extend life by borrowing, manufacturing or transplanting substitutes for their own malfunctioning body parts. Nothing seems off limits to her bright-eyed curiosity — limbs, hearts, kidneys, noses, vaginas and more are all subject to her search for the hard facts. Amusingly enough, the as-yet unreleased book is, at this writing, the No. 1 seller in the “Transplant Surgery” category on Amazon.
In June 1989, a solitary, singularly determined protester stood defiantly in front of a column of military tanks leaving Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in China, shifting his position to block its attempts to go around him and even climbing atop one tank to talk with the soldiers. Eventually pulled aside by bystanders, he remains unidentified to this day, but images of him went viral, sending shock waves around the world, and are still censored in China today. On Oct. 21, mainland China-born Ha Jin, a professor at Boston University and the National Book Award-winning author of “Waiting,” publishes his new novel “Looking for Tank Man” (Other Press, $19.99 softcover, 368 pages). Its protagonist is Pei Lulu, an international student at Harvard who learns of those tumultuous events in her home country when a different solo protester shows up on campus to defy the visiting Chinese premier.
Authors in the stream: Washington D.C. is gearing up for the Sept. 6 National Book Festival, its 25th annual iteration since First Lady Laura Bush co-founded it in 2001. While not that many West Coasters likely will attend in person, all events, featuring more than 90 authors, will be videotaped for viewing online afterward. Even better, some of the most popular will be livestreamed. For instance, recent past U.S. poets laureate Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith will be joined onstage at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center by the current officeholder, Ada Limón, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time to talk with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles. Other livestream events include actress Geena Davis presenting her new children’s book, “The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page”; Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, on “Mark Twain”; and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, discussing her new novel, “Dream Count.” For more info and the complete schedule, go to www.loc.gov/events/.
Meanwhile, mere days before the festival, the sponsoring Library of Congress announced that Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “March,” has been named its 2025 winner of the Prize for American Fiction. She’ll appear at the festival at 9:30 a.m. to talk about her new work “Memorial Days” in which she recounts her efforts to recover from the sudden loss of her husband. Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen, in announcing the prize, remarked that Brooks, author of the novels “People of the Book,” “Caleb’s Crossing” and “Year of Wonders,” “invites us into her narratives with such grace and energy and helps us understand the lives of characters who might have lived in other times and other places.” Established in 2013, the Prize for American Fiction has been awarded to George Saunders, Louise Erdrich, Marilynne Robinson and E.L. Doctorow, among others.
Page to the stage: Author Louisa May Alcott as a character joins her creations Meg, Beth, Jo, Amy and their beloved Marmee March onstage at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in playwright Lauren Gunderson’s “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.” The play, co-commissioned by TheatreWorks and three other companies, is told from the point of view of Jo, as she re-creates her version of the story for her sisters. The show runs Sept. 24-Oct. 12 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, and tickets, $49-$89 are on sale at theatreworks.org.
Page to the screen: Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro and Regina Hall appear in director-screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” a new movie loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s darkly comic novel “Vineland,” published in 1990 after a long dry spell for the famed but almost paranoically reclusive author of 1973’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Generally described as Pynchon’s most politically charged novel, “Vineland” was summed up by fellow satirist Salman Rushdie in a review for the New York Times as “free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with.” Anderson’s film adaptation, which hits theaters on Sept. 26, is set in the 1980s in Northern California and revolves around ex-revolutionaries from the Nixon-Reagan era trying to rescue the daughter of one of them. It’s an action thriller with a thick satirical edge. Check out the trailer here.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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