From Catskills endurance quests and intimate memoirs to rock biographies, wartime histories, and experimental poetry, these five new Hudson Valley books reflect both the grit and grace of their authors. Whether you’re seeking a trail companion, a meditation on family, a music-scene deep dive, or a luminous tangle of verse, here are five books to cozy up to in October.
Chasing the Grid
Kenneth Posner
VeloPress, 2025, $14.99
Chasing the Grid documents Posner’s quixotic quest to summit all 35 Catskill High Peaks in every month of the year—420 climbs in total. It’s an endurance feat that reads part training manual, part spiritual memoir, and part Catskills field guide. Barefoot much of the way, Posner mines the terrain for lessons in energy, perseverance, and paradox: chasing transcendence while tallying records, seeking ego’s quiet while savoring accomplishment. The mountains emerge as both crucible and companion, reminding us that meaning often lies not in escape from contradiction, but in learning to walk with it—one blistered step at a time.
Boy from the North Country
Sam Sussman
Penguin Press, 2025, $29
Boy from the North Country orbits a charged uncertainty: Evan, the narrator may be Bob Dylan’s son, but the book’s gravity is the mother who raised him. Rather than chase proof, the novel lingers at the bedside and in memory, turning a tabloid-ready mystery into a reckoning with love, loss, and storytelling itself. Sussman grew up in Goshen, and the Hudson Valley’s hush and fields haunt these pages, grounding a story that keeps its question mark while clarifying a life. The paternity rumor hums in the background (the curly haired Sussman is a dead ringer for a young Dylan) but the heart belongs to mama.
Moving in Stereo: Ric Ocasek, the Driving Force of the Cars
Peter Aaron
Backbeat, 2025, $29
Ric Ocasek emerges here as more than the shades-clad frontman of the Cars. Peter Aaron, Chronogram’s arts editor, traces Ocasek’s arc from Beat-obsessed Cleveland teen to reluctant pop star and master producer, balancing his icy mystique with flashes of wit and vulnerability. Along the way, we see Ocasek’s hand in shaping MTV’s early soundscape and mentoring the next wave of bands from Weezer to No Doubt. The book doesn’t sand down contradictions—Ocasek could be both aloof and generous, rigid and visionary—but instead revels in them, delivering a portrait as layered and off-kilter as the music that made him unforgettable.
The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto
Elizabeth R. Hyman
Harper Perennial, 2025, $19.99
Historian Elizabeth R. Hyman, who lives in New Paltz, delivers a riveting narrative in The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising. She rescues from obscurity five young Polish-Jewish women—couriers, smugglers, leaders—known by the resistance as “the girls” and by their oppressors as “bandits.” These women risked everything to fight back: Smuggling dynamite, carrying messages, aiding Jews in hiding, even taking up arms. Hyman’s account is meticulously sourced and emotionally urgent, reminding us that resistance is rarely the stuff of myth—but, rather, the wrenching, courageous choices made in the shadows of oppression.
The Glass Eye
David Appelbaum
Epigraph, 2025, $18
Retired SUNY New Paltz philosophy professor David Appelbaum’s latest collection, The Glass Eye, is a book-length poem—luminous, somber, tangled—where reflection meets fracture. Appelbaum binds ecstatic utterances with loss and renewal, weaving the everyday’s sharp edges (decay, grief, philosophical longing) into passages of unexpected hope. The title image—the glass eye—both sees and does not, suggesting a way of perceiving that’s at once attentive and distant, lucid and mystified. For readers who dwell in shadow and light alike, The Glass Eye offers lines that echo: things once broken still cast reflection.
This article appears in October 2025.
