Andrea Innocenti September 2026 isn't just a month of major fiction releases. It's also the perfect time to delve into essays that offer profound reflections on historical, social, and personal issues. This month's new releases include works exploring the love of new generations, 20th-century Italian history, and a memoir that addresses the loss of children through a radical reflection on language and memory.
These five books, though very different from each other, share the ability to use nonfiction and autobiographical writing to challenge what we think we know. Here's an overview of the most anticipated works.
The Year of Davis: 1976 and the Changing Italy
Coming out September 11th, The Year of Davis.
Eliana Di Caro's 1976 and the Changing Italy begins with one of the most famous episodes in Italian sport to tell a much broader story. The book focuses on the 1976 Davis Cup final, when Adriano Panatta, Paolo Bertolucci, Corrado Barazzutti, and Tonino Zugarelli led Italy to victory over Chile, earning Italy's only victory in the men's competition before the successes of the modern era.
That trip to Santiago was also a national political event. Chile was governed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and in Italy there was heated debate over whether to play the final. Participation would have legitimized the regime, or handing the field to the opposition would have given Pinochet an even greater propaganda victory. The team was the focus of some of the tensions that gripped Italy in 1976, marked by terrorism, economic and political crisis, feminist protests, and increasingly evident social conflict.
Fifty years later, Di Caro reconstructs that story by intertwining sport and history, also drawing on the testimonies of Giuliano Amato and Paolo Bertolucci. The Davis Cup thus becomes a lens through which to observe an entire society. This is precisely what makes the book interesting even for those who don't normally read sports books: the focus isn't just on tennis, but on the relationship between sport, politics, public opinion, and individual responsibility.
The Rise of Fascism in Italy and Other German Writings (1919-1928)
On September 18, Mimesis published Robert Michels's The Rise of Fascism in Italy and Other German Writings (1919-1928) , translated and edited by Giovanni De Ghantuz Cubbe and with an afterword by Carlo Mongardini. The volume brings together some of Michels's most significant German-language writings on post-World War I Italy, the rise of fascism, and its progressive consolidation.
The book's value also lies in its author's problematic stance. Michels, a sociologist best known for his studies of elites and what is called the iron law of oligarchy, observed the political transformations of his time, gradually drawing closer to fascism. His writings thus allow us to follow from within the tensions of a thought in which political and sociological analysis ultimately coexisted with the author's hope for a new fascist order.
Reading it today means, above all, having access to a document that helps us understand how a segment of European culture interpreted the weakening of liberal democracies after the First World War and the rise of authoritarian movements. The relationship between elites, masses, democracy, and power runs throughout the collection, making the volume useful for questioning the functioning of contemporary political systems. This book, therefore, is not one that offers simple answers, but rather a historical and intellectual source through which to observe the contradictions of an era that would definitively change European history.
Things in nature simply grow
Among the most poignant releases of the month is Things in Nature Simply Grow by Yiyun Li, published by NN Editore on September 22nd and preceded by a foreword by Andrea Bajani. The book arrives in Italy after winning the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category and was born from the writer's most painful experience: the deaths of her two sons, Vincent in 2017 at age sixteen, and James in 2024 at age nineteen, both of whom died by suicide.
Yiyun Li, however, chooses not to transform grief into a consoling narrative. The focus of the memoir is rather the very difficulty of finding words capable of containing such a loss. Writing means confronting what language cannot express and, at the same time, continuing to use it because it is one of the remaining tools for maintaining a relationship with those no longer physically present. Even verb tenses become important: Vincent and James do not simply belong to a closed past, because a mother's bond with her children continues to exist.
This gives rise to a radical reflection on language, memory, and the possibility of continuing to live. The book is an emotional and intellectual journey that invites the reader to reflect on the fragility of life and the power of language as a tool of resilience.