Mel Brooks’ memoir, an in-depth history of HBO, and more books to read in November

Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. So every month, The A.V. Club narrows down the endless options to five of the books we’re most excited about.

Natashia Deón’s debut novel, Grace—in which the spirit of a dead slave watches over her biracial daughter as she tries to make a life for herself—was incredibly vivid in its imagery, and Deón’s second novel promises no less. The Perishing, also a historical work with metaphysical elements, begins with a young Black woman waking up in an alley in 1930s Los Angeles, unaware of who she is or how she got there. The woman, Lou, is taken in by a foster family and educated, and later becomes a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. When she crosses paths with a stranger, she experiences an uncanny sense of recognition, prompting her to believe she’s immortal and has been sent to L.A. for a particular purpose she’s determined to uncover.

In Adam Soto’s debut novel, inhabitants of a planet 75 light-years away send a signal to Earth on New Year’s Eve 2012, only to end the signal soon after. First seen as a sign of hope, this contact from another planet, and its subsequent withdrawal, is interpreted as the extraterrestrials deciding that humans aren’t worth reaching out to, given all the poverty, war, and inequality on their home planet. Soto’s story focuses on the aftermath of the event through the eyes of three characters: Sevi, a disillusioned music teacher; his on-and-off-again girlfriend, Ramona, a Google programmer; and Eason, Sevi’s cello student who is grieving the death of his friend. Set in Silicon Valley and Chicago, This Weightless World considers questions of morality in a world where people feel powerless in the face of formidable systemic forces.

This new collection from Lambda Award-winning writer Charlie Jane Anders is full of speculative short stories with intriguing premises: In one, the woman “who can see all possible futures” dates “the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.” In another, a failed playwright who has been holed up in a panic room for two years since the apocalypse, anesthetizing herself with reruns of The Facts Of Life, is offered the proverbial three wishes from a genie in a bottle. In Even Greater Mistakes, Anders enlivens bold conceits with verve and often dry wit: “Marisol was an award-winning playwright, but that hadn’t saved her from the end of the world.”

It’s not television; it’s the book about HBO. In Tinderbox, journalist James Andrew Miller presents an in-depth history of the nearly 50-year-old cable network that sparked the new golden age of television. For this 1,000-page book, Miller spoke with dozens of sources, including some of the major players at HBO who took chances on projects that broke the mold for serialized storytelling. Miller has written books on the Senate, ESPN, Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency, and Saturday Night Live, the latter of which was a national bestseller. If , covering James Gandolfini’s star-making turn in The Sopranos and his off-set struggles with the resulting fame, is any indication of the book as a whole, this one could be just as popular.