Nude Barre Talks · Oct 22, 2015

5 Books and Your October Reading List

Reading suggestions for every fall goal, from making a strong one to working well with others.

City on Fire: A novel, by Garth Risk Hallberg (Knopf) The pitch: New York City in the gritty 1970s; a "boundary-vaulting" story about every human emotion imaginable. Why we're reading: To quote The Times, it's "the 900-page novel that took the publishing industry by storm."

Dispatches From Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, by Richard Grant (Simon & Schuster) The pitch: Man trades his dingy New York apartment for swamp-to-table dining in the Delta, then writes about it. Why we're reading: In a year of unspeakable acts, we need to talk about racial segregation in the South.

Works Well with Others, by Ross McCammon (Dutton) The pitch: A plucky story about workplace anxiety interspersed with witty insights on how to get over it. Why we're reading: Because if a senior editor at Esquire magazine can't tell us how to behave, who can?

The Dead Rabbit Drinks Manual, by Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) The pitch: Secret recipes, barroom tales. Plenty of Irishness. Why we're reading: We're dying to make a Lion's Tail, a tropical bourbon drink.

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, by John Seabrook (W.W. Norton & Company) The pitch: Seabrook explores a new type of hit song, one that is engineered like a highly processed snack and contains nearly as many hooks. Why we're reading: Seabrook's New Yorker feature of the same name blew us away—and exposed candy-coated performers for what they are.

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