January 31, 2026
We are delighted to launch two of the books below at The Center—one about a freelancing poet questioning his life, the other a Mexican writer’s reimagining of her grandparents’ journey. Also this week: a portrait of ’80s Harlem by a returning novelist; a desert gathering of five women supporting each other through a time of transition; and a Gothic story about an Irish family with troubles of their own.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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The Copywriter
By DANIEL POPPICK
Published by SCRIBNER
Like its inspiration, Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, this is the kind of book you want to read in one sitting. D. is a poet working as a copywriter in a start-up office (“teetering on the edge of ruin”) selling mediocre retail products. He has a small group of friends and a girlfriend, all poets, who find themselves in soul-killing day jobs. They quote John Ashbery and try to balance the challenge of work versus art. Poppick captures the drudgery of office work and the quandary that young people find themselves in when they long for the life of the mind. The novel, made up of journal entries, is smart and entertaining—a terrific debut.
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Autobiography of Cotton
By CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA
Published by GRAYWOLF
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
Set on the U.S./Mexico borderlands in the 1930s, Garza’s beautifully written latest begins with a strike by cotton workers at Estación Camarón in the north of Mexico. Efforts to create a modern cotton community face overwhelming odds and the workers’ hopes seem unlikely to come to pass. The novel is written as an homage to Garza’s grandparents who were laborers taking part in the strike. An accomplished poet, she has transformed real events to create a lyrical hybrid work of fiction and biography. As in her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about the murder of her sister, she is a dogged researcher, constantly in search of the truth about her family and the country of her birth.
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Heap Earth Upon It
By CHLOE MICHELLE HOWARTH
Published by MELVILLE HOUSE
It is just the beginning of the Troubles in a small but burgeoning rural Irish town called Ballycrea. The year is 1965. A new family of four siblings, Tom, Jack, Anna, and little Peggy O’Leary, arrive having apparently escaped some secretive checkered past. What could they be fleeing? They are taken in by a local childless couple who might not realize what they are getting into. Each sibling offers their own perspective. Howarth is the author of the surprise hit Sunburn, also a tale of obsession. In the author’s own words, if you like “spooky, gothic vibes, intense sapphic yearning, and complicated family relationships…” this is the book for you.
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The Shape of Dreams
By APRIL REYNOLDS
Published by KNOPF
Harlem in the ’80s provides the backdrop for both a portrait of a tightly knit Black community in the Reagan years and a mystery surrounding the death of Tyrone, a 12-year-old boy. It is a dangerous time. Six-foot-tall Mathilda, whose uncle is a drug dealer, discovers the boy’s body and reports it to the police. The boy’s mother, Anita, is a widow, distraught and determined to find out what happened. Her friend (‘crazy’) Wanda supports her as does the pastor of their local church, which is destroyed in a fire. These richly drawn denizens come together to seek justice for Tyrone’s murder in Reynolds’s vibrant fiction.
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Clutch
By EMILY NEMENS
Published by ZANDO/TIN HOUSE
Nemens perfectly captures the nature of female friends: in loyalty and love, dissonance and imperfection. In her new novel, five women who met twenty years ago in college (a ‘clutch’) meet up in Palm Springs. “One subjective thing that had become, through duration, objectively true and nonfungible, was their friendship.” Each is facing challenges (career, marriage, aging parents, infertility—the whole works). What ensues is an insightful look at the way one’s forties manifest both pleasure and pain. Nemens, a gifted writer and CFF workshop instructor who was formerly the editor of the Paris Review, is sure to hit a nerve with readers who value the safety and comfort of these long-term relationships.
