Nov '20 Notable Books: Charles Baxter, David Hopen, Toshikazu Kawaguchi & More

A monthly series on the most interesting upcoming book releases...

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind - Peter Godfrey-Smith (Nov. 10) - Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies.

The Sun Collective - Charles Baxter (Nov. 17) - A vision of modern American society and the spectres of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.

The Orchard - David Hopen (Nov. 17) - A commanding debut and a poignant coming-of-age story about a devout Jewish high school student whose plunge into the secularized world threatens everything he knows of himself.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Nov. 17) - If you could go back, who would you want to meet? In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee — the chance to travel back in time.

Stillicide - Cynan Jones (Nov. 17) - New Yorker fiction writer Cynan Jones returns with a powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage.

The Freezer Door - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Nov. 24) - Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

(Blurbs reproduced verbatim from Goodreads.)

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