Books to Watch Out For: January

Notes from the book closet on forthcoming titles that caught our eye.

“The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great” (Basic Books), by Alec Foege, out January 1st. In “The Tinkerers,” Alec Foege argues that the key to America’s historic prosperity is a “tinkering spirit”—an attitude of curiosity, optimism, and competence that is integral to our culture and feeds innovation. Foege surveys the pivotal inventions and inventors that have emerged throughout American history, from Benjamin Franklin to the creators of Angry Birds. At a time when domestic manufacturing is in decline and the national mood is somewhat grim, Foege makes a case that a return to tinkering might show us the way forward.

“Tenth of December” (Random House), by George Saunders, out January 8th. George Saunders’s latest collection of short stories (several of which were first published in this magazine) has been called his most accessible work to date, but it contains plenty of the author’s off-kilter sensibility. The opening story, “Victory Lap,” about a kidnapping, is at once deeply disturbing and laugh-out-loud funny. Another, “Sticks,” starts with the striking sentence: “Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he’d built out of a metal pole in the yard,” and is more moving and memorable than a two-page-long story should be allowed to be. The collection promises the virtuoso imagination that Saunders’s readers have come to expect.

“Umbrella” (Grove Press), by Will Self, out January 8th. The ninth novel by Will Self, the Booker-shortlisted “Umbrella” is a hefty, challenging stream-of-consciousness story whose engagement with modernist themes and techniques is announced in its epigraph from Joyce’s “Ulysses” (“A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.”). In suburban London, 1971, the psychiatrist Zachary Busner begins work in a mental institution, where, as in Oliver Sacks’s non-fiction “Awakenings,” he introduces experimental treatment on patients he suspects may be suffering from the sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica. One of his patients, Audrey Dearth, is an elderly woman who came of age in London a half century earlier, during the First World War, and for decades has been rendered catatonic from the illness. Self weaves between Zachary’s perspective, Audrey’s, and that of her two brothers, between nineteen-seventies London, the Edwardian London of Audrey’s youth, and modern-day north London where Busner, now an old man, revisits the site of the now-shuttered hospital and attempts to make sense of what took place there four decades earlier.

“Spectacle: Stories” (Graywolf Press), by Susan Steinberg, out January 8th. “Spectacle” is a slim volume of twelve linked stories by Susan Steinberg, author of the short-story collections “Hydroplane” and “The End of Free Love.” In pithy, rhythmic sentences that sound like biting poetry, Steinberg’s all-female narrators tell stories of loss, abandonment, failure to love, and failure to “perform” in the ways the people in their lives expect them to. In the Pushcart Prize-winning “Cowboys,” a woman shares a set of wrenching memories about making the decision to take her father off life support. In the title story, a woman deals with the death of her friend in a plane crash. In “Superstar,” the narrator steals a stereo from the car of a man whom she loved and who hurt her: “I’m backing out ass first from the car. / My friends are screaming, Run. / To say I shouldn’t have stolen. But I’d fallen hard for the guy whose stereo it was. / And when I fall hard, I fall like the proverbial ton of whatever, and by fall I mean splinter everything around me.”

“Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti” (Simon & Schuster), by Amy Wilentz, out January 8th. Amy Wilentz, author of the acclaimed book “The Rainy Season,” from 1989, has been writing about Haiti for over a quarter century (including in the pages of The New Yorker). In “Farewell, Fred Voodoo,” she combines history, cultural study, memoir, and travelogue to analyze Haiti’s relationship to the rest of the world and illuminate a country that is often misunderstood. She weaves together stories of Haiti’s slave plantations, its revolutionary history, its troubled leadership and guerilla movements, and its relationship with the United States and the aid workers who arrived in the wake of the deadly 2010 earthquake. The book takes its title from the Haitian phrase for John Doe, the everyman, and sums up Haiti’s allure and impenetrability to outsiders, and its frequent objectification by the press. “That’s something I always wanted not to participate in,” she writes, “the uses of Fred, the abuses of Fred.”

“Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative” (Northwestern University Press), by Hershel Parker, out January 15th. “When I started to work on Melville,” writes Parker, who won two Pulitzers for his landmark biography of the author, “I assumed most of the work had been done.” But he quickly found the existing scholarship to be full of holes and half-answered questions. In his new book, Parker recalls the years he spent delving into archives to piece together the life and literature of his subject. This wide-ranging new book is a recollection of Parker’s own intellectual project, woven together with a history of Melville scholarship and reflections on the state of literary criticism and the nature of the biographer’s project. Parker writes with a rare combination of humor and passion that hooks the reader into this potentially arcane subject.

“Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief” (Knopf), by Lawrence Wright, out January 17th. “Going Clear” is an in-depth examination of the ever-confounding, ever-fascinating Church of Scientology by the New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 book, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” about a different clandestine group. Wright has interviewed two hundred current and former Scientologists, beginning with the filmmaker Paul Haggis (“Million Dollar Baby,” “Crash”), a former member of the church, whom Wright Profiled for the magazine in 2011. He tells the history of the organization through the stories of the its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, its current leader, David Miscavige, and celebrity members like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, and along the way his meticulous reporting brings to light disturbing details about the group’s practices.

“The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers” (Palgrave Macmillan), by Adam Lankford, out January 22nd. In the last several years, suicide bombers and school shooters have become all-too-familiar avatars of senseless violence. We have come to think of terrorists as ideologically committed martyrs and school shooters as disturbed loners, but Adam Lankford, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama, argues that these two figures have more in common than we assume. Drawing from a range of sources including suicide notes and martyrdom videos, Lankford concludes that terrorists often exhibit typical symptoms of suicidal tendencies, and even disaffected teen-age shooters fantasize about the symbolic and theatrical impact of their rampages. “The Myth of Martyrdom” takes a close look at the psychology of the individuals involved.

“The Last Girlfriend on Earth, And Other Love Stories” (Reagan Arthur Books), by Simon Rich, out January 22nd. “The Last Girlfriend on Earth” is a collection of humorous essays by the former “S.N.L.” staff writer and New Yorker contributor Simon Rich. In “Center of the Universe,” which appeared in The New Yorker last January, God struggles to balance the demands of creating the universe with the needs of his girlfriend (“He smiled at her, but she did not smile back. And God saw that it was not good.”). “Unprotected,” which appeared in the magazine in July, is an oddly touching story of an unused condom’s years spent inside a teen-age boy’s wallet: “When I first get to wallet, I am ‘new guy.’ But time passes. I stay for so long, I become veteran. When I first arrive, Jamba Juice has just two stamps. Next thing I know, he has five stamps—then six, then seven. When he gets ten stamps, he is gone.”