October is here, and, with it, the thrills and chills of Spooky Season, a month of masks, madness, merriment, magic, and, of course, marvelous things to read (whether they be spooky or not). It has been a year of almost indescribable horrors, and yet there is something comforting, at times, in turning from the all-too-immediate terrors of the world to horror in art. Sometimes, encountering darkness in fiction or in a history or in another’s life becomes an unexpected opportunity for release, for catharsis, for focusing one’s energy elsewhere. And, of course, the same is true for art that seeks to comfort rather than frighten.

Below, you’ll find twenty books to consider reading this October, each in a wonderful new paperback edition out this month. You’ll find moving novels, long-awaited story collections, biographies and memoirs, new histories, genre-blurring nonfiction, and more.

I hope you’ll add these to your to-be-read lists, Dear Readers, and stay safe.

“[ Palaver ] is permeated by a deep affection for the city of Tokyo, its cuisine, its mass transit, its look and feel….The unpretentious way Washington writes about food is a throughline in his work, from Lot to Memorial to Family Meal . Somehow his simple menu descriptions are enough to incite ravenous hunger….Enough for the reader who appreciates texture and delicacy, queer authenticity, and a well-placed crisped oyster.” – The Boston Globe

Oyinkan Braithwaite, Cursed Daughters (Vintage)

“A virtuosic tour de force….Enchanting, sparkling with wit and tactfully straddling reality and the supernatural….A haunting meditation on moral ambiguity, the bonds of cousinhood, and the constraints of gender….Once I became immersed in ‘Cursed Daughters,’ I hardly wanted to leave Lagos.” –Hudson Warm

Katherine Dunn, Near Flesh: Stories (Picador)

“[The stories] feature all the hallmarks of Dunn’s oeuvre: the body as site of both fascination and repulsion; a natural sympathy with misanthropes and the marginalized; dark comedy and outrageous violence; an openness to genres such as sci-fi, horror, and magical realism; and an attitude toward romance that anticipates what we’ve lately taken to calling heteropessimism…. Near Flesh sheds welcome new light on Dunn’s work and working methods, but the book’s greatest value may be to remind us that she wasn’t a one-book wonder—that an oeuvre does, in fact, exist.” –Justin Taylor