NEW YORK (AP) — Brandon Sanderson, whose epic “Wind and Truth” is a highlight of the coming publishing season, sees nothing wrong with the idea of “escapism.”
“It’s just the ability to go into another world and empathize with other people’s problems, problems that aren’t our problems. It’s a really valuable tool in our lives,” the fantasy author said recently in a telephone interview with the Associated Press. Sanderson’s fans have waited four years for “Wind and Truth,” the 1,300-page fifth volume in his fantasy series “Stormlight Archive.”
He admits with mixed feelings that some will need relatively little time to finish it.
“They’ll definitely read it in two days, which is both satisfying and a little terrifying,” he says. “You put your heart and soul into something for so long, knowing that in a few days the fans will be done and say, ‘When’s the next one coming?'”
The presidential election is expected to dominate headlines this fall, but booksellers are hoping Sanderson and others will keep the wave of fantasy and hybrid romances that have sold well in recent years. “Wind and Truth” is one of several highly anticipated works, including “Absolution” by Jeff VanderMeer, “The Great When” by Alan Moore, “Bloodguard” by Cecy Robson and “Throne of Secrets” by Kerri Maniscalco, the second installment in her “Prince of Sin” series.
According to Circana, which tracks about 85% of the retail market, fantasy sales have increased over the past five years and have jumped nearly 75% since last summer, thanks in part to million-dollar sales by romance authors Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.
“Fantasy themes are the fastest-growing segment of the entire U.S. book market,” says Brenna Conner, an analyst at Circana, citing reader-driven sales from #BookTok as a robust factor. “I also believe escapism is a component, as more and more readers are looking for stories with escapist elements to counteract daily stress and news cycle fatigue.”
At Barnes & Noble, senior director of books Shannon DeVito notes that fantasy has expanded and become more diverse, mixing horror, romance and mystery. She cites Maas and Yarros, as well as upcoming releases like Frances White’s gay-themed “Voyage of the Damned,” John Gwynn’s Norse-inspired “The Fury of the Gods” and Ann Liang’s mythic “A Song to Drown Rivers.”
“It’s event-proof,” says DeVito of fantasy and its spin-offs. “It doesn’t depend on the news of the day.”
Consequences of the election
President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election may have little impact on the fantasy market, but it has upended the fall election campaign and left a gap in the publishing schedule: No one has had time to write in-depth books about the recent Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. The best revelations are likely to come from Bob Woodward’s War, which focuses on Biden’s handling of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East but also promises insights into Harris and the presidential campaign.
Anti-Biden book publishers are working on recent releases planned for the fall, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “The Biden Crime Family.” Harris’ Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is releasing a photo book called “Save America,” featuring the AP photo of him bloodied and raising his fist after the July assassination attempt. His wife, former first lady Melania Trump, is releasing a memoir, “Melania.” Donald Trump’s estranged niece and bestselling author Mary Trump returns with more family (horror) stories in “Who Could Ever Love You.”
HR McMaster, who briefly served as national security adviser during the Trump administration, has written “At War With Ourselves.” Onetime Trump foe Hillary Clinton reflects on marriage, faith and politics in the essay collection “Something Lost, Something Gained.” “Dawn’s Early Light,” by the architect of Project 2025, for which Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance wrote the foreword, has been delayed until shortly after the election as Republicans seek to distance themselves from the controversial plan for a second Trump term. But readers ahead of the election can consider recommendations from Joel B. Pollak’s “The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 50 Days,” with a foreword by Trump ally Steve Bannon.
Prose and poetry
Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is a story of grief and sibling rivalry from the author known for the bestsellers Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Spa Horror Story is the Polish author’s version of the Thomas Mann classic The Magic Mountain. French Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux combines memoir and imagery in The Use of Photography, and perennial Nobel nominee Haruki Murakami expands an early tiny story for The City and Its Uncertain Walls, which his Japanese publisher calls a “soul-stirring, 100% pure Murakami world.”
Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Powers’ “Playground” touches on everything from climate change to artificial intelligence, while “The Mighty Red,” by another Pulitzer Prize winner, Louise Erdrich, is set on a North Dakota sugar beet farm during the 2008 economic crisis. In “Tell Me Everything,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout as the elderly title character and scribe Lucy Barton return to fictional Crosby, Maine, and her friends from “Olive Kitteridge” and “Olive, Again.”
“I never intended to write about them again. I think I keep coming back to them because they’re so familiar to me,” Strout says. “They feel almost as real as real people. I know they’re not real people, but they feel like real people.”
John Edgar Wideman mixes fiction, history and memoir in Slaveroad, and Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a fictional tale of heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, completed by Leslie Jamison after Godfrey’s death in 2022. Also forthcoming are recent novels by Richard Price, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Kate Atkinson, Janet Evanovich, Rachel Kushner, Richard Osman, Tova Reich, Paula Hawkins, Jami Attenberg and Rumaan Alam.
Margaret Atwood began her career as a poet and her poems are collected in Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023, while Blues in Stereo includes early works by the behind schedule Langston Hughes. Laureates Paul Muldoon, Kimiko Hahn and Matthew Zapruder all have collections of their own coming out soon, along with recent books by Billy Collins, Ben Okri, Frank X Walker and E. Hughes.
“Dear Yusef” is a tribute to the acclaimed poet Yusef Komunyakaa and includes contributions from Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, and Sharon Olds. “Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology” includes verse from the 17th century to the present.
Taylor-ed
Like all pop culture phenomena, from the Beatles to Star Wars, Taylor Swift’s appeal isn’t narrow to a single art form. Her songs and her life have inspired juvenile adult novels, children’s books and biographies, and the wave continues.
Katie Cotugno’s “Heavy Hitter” is a love story between an athlete and a pop star, based in part on Swift and NFL star Travis Kelce, while “The 13 Days of Swiftness” is a picture story for holiday shoppers who can recite lines like “12 strings to strum” and “11 bracelets with beads.”
The anthology Poems for Tortured Souls includes verse from Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay and other alleged soulmates of Swift. Biographies/critical studies include the picture book Taylor Swift: Wildest Dreams by Erica Wainer and Joanie Stone and Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield.
The renowned and almost renowned
Lisa Marie Presley’s From Here to the Great Unknown was nearly finished before her death in 2023 and was completed by her daughter Riley Keough. In Didion and Babitz, Lili Anolik draws on newly discovered letters to juxtapose Californian bards Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who died within days of each other in 2021 and whose lives, as Anolik documents, were more intertwined than previously known.
Other celebrity books include Cher’s “The Memoir, Part One,” Al Pacino’s “Sonny Boy,” Josh Brolin’s “From Under the Truck,” Kelly Bishop’s “The Third Gilmore Girl” and Connie Chung’s “Connie.” Pedro Almodóvar tells stories, allegories and reflections in “The Last Dream,” and Neneh Cherry looks back on her life and music in “A Thousand Threads.”
Past and present
“Patriot” is a posthumous autobiography of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has written “Lovely One: A Memoir,” Malcolm Gladwell returns to renowned territory in “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” and Ta-Nehisi Coates examines the power of stories and misinformation in “The Message.”
Numerous books deal with racism in US history and those who fought against it. David Greenberg’s “John Lewis” is a biography of the behind schedule civil rights activist and congressman, while Wright Thompson’s “The Barn” promises recent insights into the murder of Emmett Till. Russell Cobb’s “Ghosts of Crook County”, like David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”, tells the story of a white oilman in Oklahoma who tries to steal indigenous property. In “The Black Utopians”, Aaron Robertson traces a century of planned settlements and asks: “What does utopia look like in black?”
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In this story, the author of “The Black Utopians” has been corrected from Aaron Robinson to Aaron Robertson.
