It’s the first day of September, which means it’s time for us to present you, dear reader, with a sneak preview of the books that are worth reading this fine month, when summer quickly turns to fall. We have stories from the prairies and stories from the circus, as well as memoirs about death, adolescence, and what is what like being the grunge band in Seattle in the ’90s. So click through and tell us what you’re excited about reading in the comments section below.

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Charles Burns’ X’ed Out is not something to curl up in your back pocket for a quick read on the subway. Each panel weaves abstract concepts into the story of an aspiring teen poet/artist whose growing pill dependency can’t numb certain uninvited images of alien-eating slugs, fetal pigs, and large incubating eggs. Reminiscent of a David Cronenberg film in its lurid dreamscapes that simultaneously confuse and enhance, this book demands time for well-paced consumption.

Unlike Burns’ Black Hole, which was put out as a series of traditional comics before complete publication by Pantheon Press, X’ed Out is the first installment of what will fittingly be a longer series of three. Sure, this method of serialized storytelling is most often associated with its 19th century heyday, but, as the following eight stories illustrate, the format has had its share of enticingly bizarre ups and downs since the days of Dickens.

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It may not be the Nobel Prize, but the competition for this year’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award is just as stiff (cringe — pun intended). Philip Roth is on the Literary Review’s shortlist, and he’s in good company — current nominees include Amos Oz, Nick Cave, and John Banville, while past candidates include such literary giants as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe. Now in its 17th year, fiction’s most notorious honor was dreamed up by Auberon Waugh (Evelyn’s son) “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”

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