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Blistering satire, bromance in Brazil, and short stories about women on the brink are among the selection of buzzy fall reads written or set in Philly.

History plays a particularly important role in these Philly-centric books. They shine a light on little known facts, examine the city historic block by historic block, or tell stories of nature discoveries in faraway lands.

As the days shorten and the winds cool, snuggle up with a mug of hot chocolate and one of these picks.

‘A Very Special Episode’ by Camille Acker

Random House, $28

Within the first few pages of Camille Acker’s satirical debut novel, A Very Special Episode, it’s clear D.C.’s high-profile Black elite are under interrogation. But West Philly-based Acker doesn’t forget to pay reverence to the legacy of the city’s Black institutions and its people.

At the center of the 285-page novel is the Tenth, a fictional private club and reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth theory. Nina, the protagonist, shares a name with Du Bois’ daughter, Nina Yolande Du Bois. Her boyfriend is Booker T. Bruce — whose name is a nod to formerly enslaved 19th-century leaders Booker T. Washington and Blanche K. Bruce. These homages and juxtapositions are doubly interesting, considering Du Bois’ and Washington’s philosophy were at odds.

Acker is a Temple University writer-in-residence known for the biting short stories in Training School for Negro Girls. However, much like those works, A Very Special Episode is grounded in the present. We are with Nina as she tries to keep the Tenth relevant, a darn near impossible job in today’s world in which Jim Crow manifests as gentrification and police brutality. And affluent African Americans willingly don the shackles of material wealth.

A Very Special Episode was released Aug. 18.

‘Historic Maps of Philadelphia: A History of the City of Brotherly Love in Rare Maps’ by Natalie Pompilio

Reedy Press, $42

Former Inquirer journalist Natalie Pompilio combines her affinity for Old City and walking tours in this 176-page hardcover exploring Philadelphia’s past through historical maps.

Historic Maps of Philadelphia: A History of the City of Brotherly Love in Rare Maps is an illustrated topographical study co-written with Christopher W. Lane, cofounder of the Philadelphia Print Shop and PBS’s Antiques Roadshow’s print and map expert.

The maps in this book date to the 16th century when Philadelphia was home to the Indigenous Lenape tribe. They weave through colonial, antebellum, and early 20th-century Philadelphia and ends in the mid-20th century with highways that eased drivers’ trips and decimated historic neighborhoods.

Historic Maps of Philadelphia was released Sept. 1.

‘The Loneliness of Glass: Stories’ by Kathleen Furin

Cornerstone Press, $24.95

West Mount Airy-based book coach, equity and inclusion consultant for Germantown’s Just Strategies Hub, and award-winning short story writer Kathleen Furin will release her first bound collection, The Loneliness of Glass, in November.

On Furin’s website, she describes her work as stories about strong, resilient, complex women who, through overcoming odds, learn to love themselves.

The narratives in this 220-page paperback reflect that and include a piece about a young woman who loses her half sister in a tragic murder, and a woman in an interracial marriage who is forced to confront her preconceived notions about race when she visits her hometown.

The Loneliness of Glass releases Nov. 3.

‘Dance in a Madhouse’ by Jess Wright

Montague Books, $19.99

Owen Townsend is a promising young medical school intern in 1905 Philadelphia when he gets locked up in the fictional Fairmount Lodge Asylum. Did he really lose his mind? Or, was he set up? Those questions are at the center of noted Louisville, Ky.-based psychiatrist Jess Wright’s mystery Dance in a Madhouse.

Wright, a native of Hollidaysburg, earned his medical degree at Jefferson Medical College in 1969 and interned at Lankenau Medical Center in the early 1970s. This 288-page thriller is set against the backdrop of the Museum of Art when it was located in Memorial Hall and Boathouse Row, the library of the College of Physicians, and Jefferson Medical College. Dance in a Madhouse is the first book in a trilogy of Owen Townsend mysteries.

Dance in a Madhouse was released Sept. 8.

‘The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America’ by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Simon & Schuster, $31

Poet, historian, New York Times best-selling author, and Central High School graduate (Class 255) Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s latest work, The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker, is the true story of a self-emancipated formerly enslaved man’s fight to remain free in early 19th-century Pennsylvania.

Her 2014 steeped-in-Philly-history nonfiction book Dr. Mutter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine spent three months on the New York Times’ bestsellers list.

Shortly after her mother died, Aptowicz began exploring her mother’s side of the family tree. She discovered her maternal ancestors were seamstresses for the Underground Railroad, sometimes sewing new outfits for entire groups of freedom seekers in a single night. In her research, she kept coming across the names “William Parker” and “Christiana Riot,” names she, a lifelong Philadelphian, had never heard of before.

The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is Aptowicz’s “best attempt to resurrect this important and necessary story and bring it back into the national spotlight where it belongs.”

The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker was released Sept. 8.

‘Winterset Hollow’ by Jonathan Edward Durham

Union Square & Co., $19.99

When Diana Gabaldon — author of the Outlander novels that inspired Starz’s popular time-traveling series of the same name — refers to your book as “astonishingly powerful and multilayered” declaring it among the most interesting books she’s read in years, you might have written a literary winner.

Such is the case for Allentown writer and social media content creator John Edward Durham, or @thisoneoverhere on Instagram, where he has 419,000 followers.

Durham’s Winterset Hollow follows four fictional friends visiting the island that inspired their favorite fantasy novel, also named Winterset Hollow. But when they break into the writer’s abandoned estate, they discover that the truth behind their favorite adored book is dark, dangerous, and terrifying.

First published in 2021 by Credo House Publishers, Union Square and Co. — a subsidiary of the New York’s Hachette Book Group — will release the new edition in October featuring the fictional book Winterset Hollow within Durham’s book.

Winterset Hollow releases Oct. 6.

‘Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist’s Notes from the Back of Beyond’ by Robert McCracken Peck

American Philosophical Society Press, $29.95

Retired senior fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, author, and Chestnut Hiller Robert McCracken Peck spent close to 50 years traveling the world as the official photographer, historian, and chronicler of scientific exhibitions for the academy.

He discovered three new frogs in the Andes, collected several previously unknown species of fish on the Orinoco River, and studied rare insects in Africa and the Caribbean. He’s been on expeditions to Mongolia to study wildlife, witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and traveled the Gobi Desert.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist’s Notes from the Back of Beyond is the scholar and adventurer’s collection of essays accompanied with lavish illustrations and Peck’s original photographs. In 240 pages, readers are transported to the most remote parts of the world to witness the joys (and challenges) of scientific research.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalists Notes from the Back of Beyond was released Sept. 15.

‘Runner’ by Ashton Lattimore

Penguin Random House, $31

Shortly after Ashton Lattimore completed the 2024 award-winning novel All We Were Promised, centering an enslaved women in antebellum Philadelphia searching for her freedom, she began writing Runner from her Bryn Mawr home.

Lattimore has since moved to northern New Jersey, but her ties to Philadelphia’s historic organizations run deep.

Runner follows lady rumrunners from Martha’s Vineyard into Boston, and down through New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. Will the protagonist Lena Jameson discover who killed her father? Will she be able to skirt the authorities on her tail during Prohibition? Or, will she lose it all simply because she’s a woman?

Runner was released July 28.

‘Touchdown in Brazil’ by Omar Tyree

Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp., $37.99

West Philadelphia native and veteran author Omar Tyree’s latest novel Touchdown in Brazil centers a Philadelphia Eagles fan who travels to Brazil in 2024 to watch his beloved Birds play the Green Bay Packers in the NFL’s first game played in South America.

The protagonist, named Tony Costa, is an amateur sports better looking for a break from his wife and hoping for a win with the Birds. The Eagles win. But whether Costa — who befriends other husbands and fathers including a Packers devotee and the owner of a local sports bar during his trip — will learn to appreciate his family and take home the ultimate win, is up in the air.

Touchdown in Brazil releases Sept. 29.

‘Har Mar’ by Hilal Isler

Curbstone Books, Northwestern University Press, $24

Author Hilal Isler set “Khadijah Number Two,” the introductory yarn in her debut collection of short stories Har Mar, among the rowhouses of West Philadelphia and the luxe lofts, expensive gastropubs, and overpriced yoga pants on Rittenhouse Square.

The story centers 25-year-old Turkish server and borderline alcoholic Ayla Erdoğdu. The devout 50-year-old Muslim woman Khadijah picks Ayla because she’s young, pretty, and flaky — just the energy she needs to sell her book. And she’s right. Khadijah’s novel is a hit and Ayla gets lost, becoming a second edition of Khadijah.

Many of the selections in Isler’s 16-story debut work feature women of color. Some of are Muslim, some are not. But all of them are complicated and have a salty vibe.

Isler attended the University of Pennsylvania and currently is an associate professor at the University of Austin.

Har Mar was released July 15.

An earlier version of this story listed an incorrect publisher for Robert McCracken Peck’s new book. It is the American Philosophical Society Press.

When the Philadelphia Museum of Art debuts its expanded Marcel Duchamp exhibit in October, it will be part of the first major U.S. retrospective of the mysterious forefather of modern art in more than a half century.

Exploring the arc and range of the pioneering French American artist, who died in 1968, the show features 300 of Duchamp’s paintings, sculpture, film, photography, printed matter, design, and his unclassifiable works known as “readymades.”

After showing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the PMA show will run from Oct. 10 through Jan. 31, 2027. It includes Duchamp’s most celebrated creations, including his 1912 painting, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), and his avant-garde masterpiece created between 1915 and 1923, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. On hand will be Duchamp’s last major art piece, Étant donnés, a 1966 experiential assemblage he had been working on in secret and intended for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“This is a once-in-a-50-years project,” said Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Matthew Affron.

‘Greatest collections’

The monumental show also marks an opportunity to celebrate the museum’s preeminent relationship with Duchamp — and its lasting legacy and impact on the modern art world. No other art institution in the world has deeper Duchamp roots than the PMA, where the artist first helped install his works in 1954.

Questioning the very definition of what art could be — he believed any ordinary object could be recontextualized as art — Duchamp broke the rules. But the artistic anarchist also maintained a decidedly rigid belief that his work should remain together on permanent display — in a monumental museum.

Duchamp played a critical role in making Philadelphia that home.

After leaving Paris and its WWI-era artistic repression and moving to New York in 1915, the artist befriended patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg. With Duchamp’s careful guidance, the couple would amass the most fulsome collection of his works, and those of his contemporaries, anywhere.

By the 1950s, Duchamp and his patrons had negotiated with museums, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the National Gallery in Washington, before being wooed by the PMA’s forward-looking director, Sidney Fiske Kimball.

Recognizing Duchamp’s boundary-busting potential, Kimball offered what Duchamp wanted: space and control. Lots of it.

“By the 1950s, Duchamp was becoming a forefather for modern artists,” said Affron. “Fiske was determined to be able to place a major section of modern art within the building.”

Kimball displayed the Arensbergs’ gifted collection in a wing of the still-unfinished museum building on the Parkway, which he helped open in 1928.

Along with other abstract and cubist works, the Arensberg collection helped form the foundation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 75 years.

“It’s one of the greatest collections of modern art in an art museum,” Affron said.

Legacy shaping pairing

The unusually intimate relationship between artist and institution — the museum’s permanent display includes 200 Duchamp works and extensive archives — helped shape the artist’s legacy and established the Philadelphia Museum of Art as an essential destination for modern art pilgrims.

Under Duchamp’s direction, the museum initially displayed his works alongside those of contemporaries, like Picasso, Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, Georges Braque, and Francis Picabia. Many of those works, also amassed by the Arensbergs, were on display at the museum’s temporary show, “Marcel Duchamp, Curator,” which ran through July 12.

Curating the forthcoming retrospective with MoMA collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Affron said he strove to present a faithful chronology of Duchamp’s work, including replica versions of his own art that he produced later in life.

“One of the game-changing things Duchamp did was put into the question the value of original works of art,” Affron said. “He found a way of working between the originals and copies and when you lay his work out, you start to get a very interesting echo effect.”

It only makes sense for it all to be back at Duchamp’s spiritual home — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he said.

“We are doing our job of taking care of his legacy,” the curator said.

“Marcel Duchamp” runs Oct. 10 through Jan. 31, 2027, at Main Building, Dorrance Galleries and Galleries 281-283, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, philamuseum.org

Like a lot of great art, the sculptor Donna Dodson’s latest work was born of childhood trauma.

Growing up in the Midwest, Dodson would play chess with her older brother on a beautiful, hand-carved onyx chess set gifted to them by their grandparents — the siblings engaging in long, heated battles, again and again.

And again and again, Dodson would inevitably fall short.

“The humiliation of always losing created kind of a fire in me,” the 58-year-old, Massachusetts-based artist joked recently in a phone interview. “I think me making this chess set is somehow reclaiming my agency and dignity,” she said, referring to her art Match of the Matriarchs, which is a 24-by-24-foot chess set.

The set, which appears in an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Art in Wood, has the artist turning her attention to one of the world’s oldest games, examining — through the lens of chess — power, matriarchy, and the role of women in society.

The exhibition is centered on a life-size, 32-piece chess set — all the pieces are women and range from roughly four feet to six feet in height. Dodson handcrafted them from salvaged wood.

The pieces sit atop a massive board that will involve some kind of interactive element — the details of which are still being finalized before the show opens in November.

Including what is believed to be the world’s only life-size chess set featuring all women pieces, the show aims to “transform the traditionally hierarchical game into a speculative arena of matriarchal power and ecological symbolism,” according to the museum’s program notes.

“By placing the feminine at the forefront of a game so deeply associated with power, conflict, and hierarchy, Dodson asks us to reconsider its origins — and to wonder what may have been lost as the game evolved over time,” said Jennifer-Navva Milliken, executive director and chief curator at the Museum for Art in Wood.

A second, smaller chess set — on a board roughly 12 feet by 12 feet — will be fully interactive, with visitors encouraged to stage their own matches, moving the pieces as their strategies demand.

“By playing a game, or inviting viewers to come in and rearrange [the] art work, it creates a new art work every time,” Dodson said.

In addition to Dodson’s work, the show will include about nine other artistic chess sets — including one designed by famed Pennsylvania artist Wharton Esherick, as well as a micro-set with pieces that can only be moved using tweezers.

Prior to its debut at the Museum for Art in Wood, Dodson’s piece was on display at the Boston Sculptors Gallery and, most recently, at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis — though the Philadelphia version will include expanded programming.

From candy striper to artist

Dodson was never the artsy kid in school, she says. She attended Wellesley College in New England with plans of becoming a doctor, even working as a candy striper for a time. Her medical ambitions dwindled as she began to take to art in her mid-20s, along with her childhood love for chess.

It wasn’t until she met Joseph Wheelwright, the noted Boston sculptor who would go on to become her mentor and teach her woodworking, that she returned to the game.

Wheelwright, who died in 2016, would ask her to play during lunch breaks, and though he, too, would “clobber” Dodson — even while handicapping himself by taking several of his pieces off the board — the matches no doubt served as inspiration for Match of the Matriarch, she said.

In Philadelphia, Dodson has found a fitting setting for her exhibit.

The city is home to Jennifer Shahade, an author and three-time national chess champion, whose artwork will also be featured in the exhibit.

“She has created a number of conceptual works and videos that recontextualize chess and chess sets as art,” Dodson said.

The exhibition also coincides with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s presentation from Marcel Duchamp — an artist famously infatuated with the game of chess who also occasionally incorporated the game into his work.

The Museum for Art in Wood exhibit comes on the heels, meanwhile, of a worldwide resurgence in the game spurred by both the pandemic and the 2020 release of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, which starred Anya Taylor-Joy and drove a wave of new interest in chess, particularly among girls and women.

Dodson partakes in some form of chess daily, playing a weekly game in Maynard, Mass., where she now lives, as well as online.

“I’ve become much more knowledgeable about the current chess community, what’s going on in the chess world, and have met some of the real-life champions in chess, which is all super exciting,” she said.

Dodson, who will be present Nov. 7 for an artist talk at the museum, said she hopes the game’s universal charm will make the exhibit accessible to a wide audience.

“I think a lot of people don’t feel comfortable going into art museums — they don’t feel that they know enough [about art] or whatever,” she said. “So I think the whole chess theme is very accessible — there’s a whole worldwide chess community of people who play for fun, play as a hobby, their kids play, their grandfather plays.”

“Donna Dodson: Match of the Matriarchs” runs Nov. 6 through March 21, 2027, at Museum for Art in Wood, 141 N. 3rd St., Philadelphia. museumforartinwood.org