For this week’s newsletter, we asked author Karan Mahajan to tell us about the books he read in preparation for his sprawling novel, The Complex, about immigration and Indian politics and centered on an Indian American woman whose family dismisses her claim that an in-law sexual assaulted her.

We also spoke with Judy Blume biographer Mark Oppenheimer on Blume’s legacy of writing about divorce and puberty, while author Will Self candidly discussed his ongoing health issues in relation to his latest novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality, which concerns a group of aging literati in London, and Hache Pueyo told us about her neo-noir horror novel, Cabaret in Flames, which follows a woman who lost all four of her limbs in a vampire attack.

Lastly, my colleagues and I enthuse over the books hitting shelves next week that we’re the most excited about.

—David Varno