McSweeney’s Publishing is proud to announce the Believer Books series. The series will publish works of fiction and nonfiction by a wide range of writers — everyone from regular Believer contributors to first-time novelists. Believer Books will seek to introduce readers to titles from around the non-English-speaking world — places like Sweden, Portugal, and Madagascar — translated and published in English for the first time. These jacketed paperbacks will feature a recognizable and cohesive style, and will be affordably priced.

Voyage Along the Horizon is an affectionate (if slightly sardonic) homage to the great adventure tales of the late nineteenth century. Like those stories, this one revolves around an intrepid expedition: The eccentric, wealthy Captain Kerrigan, an attractive man with a shadowy past, organizes a trip to Antarctica for a select group of writers, artists, and scientists.

Only twenty-one when Marías wrote it, his second novel is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story about an adventure—and a tragic misadventure—peppered with characters and digressions that deliberately harkens back to the masters of the genre: Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Amid sudden kidnappings, torrid manuscripts, Edwardian spinsters, and lethal duels, this seafaring tale is also a narrative of psychology, obsession, the writer’s craft, and human nature, all of which Marías has wrapped up in an evocative, nostalgic novel that is both witty and dark. Fascinated by the question of uncertainty, Marías eschews the solution and prefers to revel in the narrative process itself, and asks the reader to consider the possibility that the truth as we know it isn’t nearly as interesting as its own shadow.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Songbook, a collection of his music writing, Nick Hornby now turns his unerring gaze to books. Here, in his monthly accounts of what he’s read—along with what he bought and may one day read—Nick Hornby ably explores everything from the classic to the graphic novel, as well as poems, plays, and sports-related exposés. If he occasionally implores a biographer for brevity, or abandons a literary work in favor of an Arsenal soccer match, then all is not lost. His warm and riotous writing, full of all the joy and surprise and despair that books bring him, reveals why we still read, even when there’s soccer on TV, a pram in the hall, and a good band playing at our local bar.

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”

In this prescient work, Michel Houellebecq, the author of the novels Platform and Elementary Particles, focuses his considerable analytical skills on H.P. Lovecraft, the seminal, enigmatic horror writer of the early 20th century. Houellebecq’s insights into the craft of writing illuminate both Lovecraft and Houellebecq’s own work. The two are kindred spirits, sharing a uniquely dark worldview. But even as he outlines Lovecraft’s rejection of this loathsome world, it is Houellebecq’s adulation for the author that drives this work and makes it a love song, infusing the writing with an energy and passion not seen in Houellebecq’s novels to date. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in Lovecraft, Houellebecq, or the past and future of horror.

“[Houellebecq] is fearless, vivid, and astringently honest.”
— Los Angeles Times

Believer Books has collected, in alphabetical order, twenty-three conversations and correspondences between much admired writers and the writers they admire. The interviews include favorites gleaned from the pages of the Believer magazine along with previously unpublished conversations. The book is rife with astonishing insights and profound quips. To wit:

George Saunders: “I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent.”

Ian McEwan: “The dream, surely, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer.”

Jamaica Kincaid: “All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself— though, thank god I had never committed them to paper—I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn’t hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don’t believe in that at all anymore.”

Janet Malcolm: “The narrator of my nonfiction pieces is not the same person I am—she is a lot more articulate and thinks of much cleverer things to say than I usually do.”

Paul Auster: “In my own case, I certainly don’t walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don’t burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I’d probably shoot myself in the foot.”

Tobias Wolff: “Each time out should be a swing for the fences. Don’t do base-running drills. You can do those on your own time.”

In his latest collection of essays, critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering funny, intelligent, and unblinkered accounts of the stuff he’s been reading. Ranging far and wide from the middlebrow, Hornby’s dispatches from his nightstand serve as invaluable guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on the intellectual scene and English football in equal measure.

Printed monthly in the Believer, Hornby’s book reviews are suffused with wit, ire, and loving insight, and his choices often strike into the deeper, odder reaches of the literary world. He is as adamant about the experience of reading a book as he is about the importance of the book itself, and can be trusted to point out which books are ridiculously unfunny, which books can be read incognito for their naughtiness, and, most urgently, which books can bring themselves “all the way through the long march to your soul.”

“Dean Young’s work will delight only two kinds of people: those who generally read poetry and those who generally don’t.”

—The Threepenny Review

In this follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize‒finalist collection Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young—one of the most individual poets of the past several decades, and with one of the most iconic voices in poetry today—once again sets about taking some cracks at the piñata of commonplace reality. No one is unsure if they’ve read a poem by Dean Young. The power and sheer curiosity of the poems in this book leave a mark:

Dean Young has published seven previous collections of poetry, most recently Elegy on Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Skid, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.