Books to read in September e lWith a focus on new releases
This month of new beginnings, I’ve gathered some of what I believe to be the most interesting literary releases of the month. What’s in store? An unusual friendship amidst the unraveling of the American dream—if it ever really existed—brilliant young women whose lives were forever changed after encountering a serial killer, two twenty-year-olds in a remote Mexican village, a couple in a nameless city, and interconnected stories of people living very online. If you’re in need of some literary inspiration.
Books to Read in September 2025
Ocean Vuong - The Emperor of Joy (Guanda, September 2)
In an interview, Ocean Vuong shared that he rented a small cabin during a confused historical moment, when no one could have imagined who would become the next president of the United States, and began writing page after page by hand about the small town where he grew up. In The Emperor of Joy, out on September 2 with Guanda, which has already published his poetry collection Time Is a Mother, Vuong started from an apparently simple question: “What was my America? What is America?” To try to answer, he traced the solitude of two very different characters who build an oblique friendship: a young man on the verge of suicide and an elderly Lithuanian woman who emigrated to the United States after World War II.
Jessica Knoll - Bright Young Women (Ubagu Press, September 5)
Very often, true crime narratives tend to focus on the perpetrator: what was their childhood like? What could have driven them to commit the act? In Bright Young Women, published by Ubagu Press, author Jessica Knoll overturns the rhetoric we’re used to by overshadowing one of America’s most prolific serial killers: Ted Bundy. The novel is a hybrid of fact and fiction that works through subtraction—stripping Bundy of his notoriety, never naming him directly, nor placing him at the center of the story. The real protagonists are Pamela and Ruth, young women whose lives intersected with his. Through this lens, Knoll rewrites the true crime narrative, shifting both focus and perspective.
Neige Sinno - La Realidad (Neri Pozza, September 16)
Last year, French author Neige Sinno won the European Strega Prize for Triste Tigre, a work halfway between essay and memoir, in which she recounts the abuse suffered at the hands of her stepfather during her childhood and adolescence, intertwined with analyses of works like Lolita and reflections from writers such as Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux, and David Foster Wallace. The book received several prestigious awards and was praised for its stark clarity, resembling a three-way dialogue between the reader, Sinno, and her younger self. With La Realidad, Sinno explores the “first free territory of Mexico,” specifically the community of La Realidad, a symbol of Zapatista resistance. The journey, which took place in 2003, reshaped her outlook, leading to encounters with feminist groups that provided an ending from which to begin: to speak of herself, and therefore, of the world.
Ayşegül Savaş - The Anthropologists (Gramma Feltrinelli, September 16)
The Anthropologists is the first book published in Italy by Turkish writer Ayşegül Savaş, already the author of two novels not yet translated. What do our rituals, the banal details of our lives, reveal? Does going to an organic food market on a Sunday morning automatically grant us access to a new identity? Or is my new identity tied to the new apartment I move into? The novel, written in short chapters, tells of such cultural constructions through the lives of two characters, a couple with intentionally ambiguous names—Asya and Manu—in a nameless city. By avoiding anchoring them in a specific place—say, a European capital—the novel allows us to focus on the sense of estrangement felt both individually and collectively, and on how the construction of contemporary identity is bound to cultural choices.
Tony Tulathimutte - Rejection (Edizioni E/O, September 24)
“People who spend too much time online” could be the subtitle of Tony Tulathimutte’s second novel, Rejection, out on September 24 with Edizioni E/O. Critically acclaimed, the collection of stories stages people who are abject, grotesque, and who spend far too much time online—and therefore inside their own heads. The protagonists are ordinary men and women, preoccupied—like almost everyone else in 2025—with self-representation and the identity markers that are supposed to define them. Tulathimutte has said he spent a lot of time reading Philip Roth, an experience that changed his perception of how literature works—not as something that makes people more sensitive and empathetic, but rather as something else entirely: the staging of morally ambiguous characters, which is far more complex and compelling.
