The 11 best books to read in September

In late July, a former major in the Air Force appeared before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security to testify about aliens. And as he shared his cryptic anecdotes about nonhuman activity in our skies and nonhuman “biologics” recovered at crash sites, all I kept thinking was: I wish Art Bell was around to see this.

In the ‘90s and ‘00s, Art was the king of overnight radio, broadcasting live from his double-wide trailer in the Nevada desert to AM stations nationwide. All night long, to an audience of truckers, insomniacs, and weirdos, Art talked about aliens. Also: ghosts, the Antichrist, the apocalypse, Bigfoot, etc. Real X-Files-type stuff.

But in addition to his usual rogues’ gallery of eccentric guests and callers — exorcists, abductees, doomsday mathematicians, and off-brand Mulders — a few “respectable” voices sometimes slipped through: a learned Egyptologist, a decorated veteran, a renowned theoretical physicist.

Art faded from the airwaves long ago and died in 2018, but if he still had a show today, I figure he’d eat up all this modern “nonhuman activity” talk on Capitol Hill. Maybe give his old guests some I-told-you-so airtime. It would be a rare quasi-victory, or at least a taste of legitimacy, in a career full of blurry photos, sketchy documents, and shaggy Sasquatch stories.

And I bet he’d invite Avi Loeb on the show to talk shop into the wee hours. Because Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist and controversial author, also really likes to talk about aliens.

The New York Times calls him the “world’s leading alien hunter,” thanks in no small part to his theorizing confidently and constantly about the extreme likelihood of otherworldly life existing somehow.

In his latest book — Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars (Mariner Books, $28.99), published last week — Loeb argues that the oddly shaped Oumuamua object that zipped past Earth in 2017 could maybe, possibly, perhaps have been an “extraterrestrial-manufactured artifact.”

Despite all the caveats, Loeb’s peers are not on board. They call for caution and calm. Snooze. I think Loeb’s brand of data-based speculation is useful. And fun. Why not imagine the possibilities? Nobody knows what Oumuamua was. What’s the harm in dreaming?

Like Art Bell, Avi Loeb believes in searching the stars for answers to the big mysteries. He says we shouldn’t wait for the government to declassify radar screenshots and mangled saucer parts. If there are aliens out there (or down here) scientists need to do the research and find the evidence. Testify.

And now, some more earthly delights:

The strict, cold confines of a boarding school in 19th-century Britain is an ideal setting for a dystopia. Maybe that’s why the mind wanders to Winston and Julia of 1984 (Orwell was himself a survivor of a similar institution) while reading about the precarious relationship between the mousey Eliza Raine and the fiery Anne Lister in Donoghue’s striking and passionate new novel. That these characters are lifted from the pages of history does little to lift the sinking feeling that their blooming romance, if that’s what it is, can be something other than fleeting, awkward, and doomed. In fiction, these two have a fighting chance. (Little, Brown and Co., $28, out now)

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It’s the ‘90s. Salt-N-Pepa and “Freedom ‘90″ on the radio. ACT-UP protests and Zipperhead on South Street. And Philly high schooler Danielle has just been informed that her dad has HIV. He’d been out of the closet for years, but this new revelation hits hard at a time when she’d rather be concentrating on getting into art school, dating, and finding herself. This Terrible True Thing is billed as a Young Adult novel — and its many line drawings read like (impressive) doodles in the margins of a notebook — but the complexity of Danielle’s relationship with her father as they wrestle with the grief and ignorance of the era allows this story to transcend the YA/lit-fic divide. Laden will be at the William Way LGBT Community Center on Sept. 6. (Blackstone Publishing, $19.99, Sept. 5)

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Until now, Smith (author of White Teeth, NW, etc.) has resisted the lure of the full-on historical novel, but those Victorian aristocrats, man, they are hard to resist: all that pomp and perversity, always pining in their diaries and kissing their cousins and tightening their corsets while the empire expands. Employing nimble dialogue and sly humor, Smith moves The Fraud along swiftly and mysteriously, challenging you to keep up with competing plot lines. One of these concerns the Tichborne affair — the wild, real-life court case in which a gruff butcher claimed to be a long lost nobleman and heir to a sizable fortune. Smith’s retelling of this “trial of the century” alone is worth the price of admission for The Fraud, though I could have spent an entire novel in the company of prosaic novelist William Ainsworth and Eliza Touchet, his witty abolitionist housekeeper, muse, lover, and, of course, cousin. Smith will appear at the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia on Sept. 17, with tickets at $39. (Penguin Press, $29, Sept. 5)

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If that name rings a bell, maybe you read Gurba’s 2017 “true crime memoir” Mean. Or perhaps you caught her famously scathing (and wildly viral) review of a gringa’s immigration novel and the “white gaze” of the publishing industry in general. Witty, confident, and effortlessly provocative, Gurba writes about the things that piss her off with poison and precision, sometimes daring readers to look for themselves in the tangled complicity flowchart. In this new collection of personal essays, the queer Mexican American author blends the autobiographical with the historical and the sociological while recalling the misdeeds of bad actors — from abusive boyfriends and sketchy relatives to William S. Burroughs, Richard Ramirez, and Joan Didion — while speaking with overdue care about those swept up in their wakes. Creep goes to some dark places, but there’s something joyous about Gurba’s righteous and ravenous worldview. Gurba will be at the Wooden Shoe on September 8. (Avid Reader Press, $27, Sept. 5)

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While alarmist conservatives and their terrified constituents still struggle to understand the word “woke,” authors like Harriot have long since moved on. You’ll struggle to find more than a passing reference to the concept in Black AF History. However, its prevailing message — that there’s more to history than what you were taught in school — drives this illuminating, likely divisive, and frequently funny new book. “The best historians,” he writes, “try to approximate the truth by unbending the collection of funhouse mirrors through which the past has been viewed.” Homeschooled in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois before becoming an award-winning journalist (for the Grio, Washington Post, CNN, etc.), Harriot makes for a wise and charming guide through the American funhouse of horrors: slavery, erasure, white supremacy — it’s a long list. (Dey Street Books, $32.50, Sept. 19)

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Modernity and mythology collide in this haunting and entrancing story collection by an exciting new voice in fiction. Kakimoto is of Hawaiian and Japanese descent and her home state is hurting right now. (Bloomsbury, $27.99, out now)

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The author of last year’s Dark Ages drama Matrix here delivers a thrilling story of escape and survival in colonial Virginia. An amazing book to get lost in. (Riverhead, $28, Sept. 12)

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Sometimes the prose by this New Yorker regular is so elegant and thoughtful you don’t immediately notice it when she pulls the rug out from under you in this collection of dreamy, devastating stories. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, Sept. 5)

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The author of L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid, and a dozen other gritty noir novels leads you through the dirty, doped-up streets of ‘60s Hollywood in the wake of Marilyn Monroe’s overdose. (Knopf, $30, Sept. 12)

In a lateral career move, a substitute teacher inherits his uncle’s supervillain operation and squares off against a rogues’ gallery of Bond-worthy baddies. (Tor Books, $28.99, Sept. 19)

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