How are you? I’m pretty sure we’re all so paralyzed with anxiety, we haven’t fully processed the cancellations and lost opportunities that the coronavirus pandemic is inflicting upon our careers and lives. Everything from lost teaching gigs, freelancing opportunities, or even potentially whole book deals: We’re all feeling it. It’s an arduous task, promoting and marketing a book; there’s so much that you can’t control, so much that is beyond your control. So please, take a look at the books below and keep them in mind. Add them to your shopping carts, your Goodreads lists. Don’t let these new books end up stillborn or forgotten.
NOTE: This list is will be continuously updated. I gathered as much as I could from the initial reaction to my tweet, but I quickly got overwhelmed and anxious. To those authors that reached out, I’m sorry if your book didn’t end up on the list. Please, contact me and I’ll do my best to add it.
Updated: 4/16/2020 – powered by Bookshop.org
The Depression by Mathias Svalina (The Accomplices)
“I went on a state-sponsored summer exchange trip to Germany when I was 16. I arrived in Munich with 49 other kids from all across the US and was picked up by my very excited host family, who screamed like they won the lottery when they saw me. I was then spirited to their home for lunch, a short walk in a fragrant wood, introductions to the giant family dog Oskar, dinner with the punk older sister and her staring boyfriend, then back home to unpack and crawl into bed. I hardly slept on the flight and had never felt so tired nor so discombobulated, being newly arrived among kind and strange strangers. The floor seemed to undulate, my bones felt like they were made of acid. Everything shone with brilliant unfamiliarity. I was alive in a different way–more fragile, unnerved, a sense of absurdity like a veil over my face… And that’s what this book feels like in me. Hugs.
–Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise
Be/trouble by Bridgette Bianca (The Accomplices)
“Bridgette bianca moves beyond witness and holds us accountable in the harsh-tender way we do when we love someone, but love ourselves more. White and institutional nonsense, beware. This collection is essential to understanding what it means to be alive in the United States of America in 2019.
–Sara Borjas, author Heart Like a Window Mouth Like a Cliff
The Worst Kind of Want by Liska Jacobs (MCD/FSG)
“Dark, seductive . . . Noirish and sexy, this provocative novel explores what it’s like to be a woman on the edge, and what happens when dreams are deferred for too long.”
―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Hachette)
“I blazed through this book, which is a true crime page-turner, a moving coming-of-age memoir, an ode to Appalachia, and a scintillating investigation into the human psyche’s astounding and sometimes chilling instinct for narrative. A beautiful debut that will stay with me for a long time, whose story mesmerizes even as it convinces you to find all mesmerizing stories suspect.”
―Melissa Febos, Lambda Literary Award winner and author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata (Hanover Square Press)
“Hypnotizing…Zapata reinterprets the extent and toll of exile on Earth, the gulf between universes of human experience.”
—The New York Times Book Review
And I Don’t Forgive You by Amber Sparks (Liveright)
“Amber Sparks’ stories are, precisely, like her name: precious things delivered in a burst of fire and light.”
– Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body & Other Parties
If She Had Stayed by Diane Byington (Red Adept)
If She had Stayed was such a joy to read I whizzed through it in one sitting. Ms. Byington successfully blends women’s fiction with time travel while fan-girling Nikola Tesla. – Suanne Shafer, Midwest Book Review
No Bad Deed by Heather Chavez (William Morrow)
“An extraordinary thriller… that may well become the book everyone is talking about…In a mesmerizing first-person narrative, [Cassie’s] fear is palpable, then vanquished by an astonishing ferocity she finds within herself. Where does that come from? Wait until you find out. This one glows in dark.” —Booklist (starred review)
The Wanting Life by Mark Rader (Unnamed Press)
“Through the intertwined stories of a dying priest full of regrets, his caretaker sister still mourning her late husband, and her adult daughter torn between her family and a new man in her life, Rader’s poignant debut novel explores the emotional costs of seeking and sacrificing romantic love… An insightful and compassionate family drama about desire, love, and the courage it takes to live a full life.”
―Kirkus Reviews
Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me by Erin Khar (Park Row)
“This is a story she needed to tell; and the rest of the country needs to listen.”
— New York Times Book Review
Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark (Birds LLC)
“The body of poetry needs a new script, and Jessica Q. Stark is more than happy to oblige. At the height of her multi-tasking, birthing simultaneously son and book, she holds you captive with her carnival performance of ingenious gestures, where language and motherhood play informal games of anatomic brilliance and take you through her sanitary mayhem of pandemoniac beauty and birth.”
–Vi Khai Nao
The Uncertainty of Light by Alana Saltz (Blanket Sea)
“The Uncertainty of Light is a seamless blend of rawness and craft. Alana Saltz has written a majestic battle cry; a desperately needed glimpse into the world of chronic illness. One cannot help but be humbled to venture between these pages and walk alongside her on her fight for answers and understanding.” —Morgan Nikola-Wren, author of Magic with Skin On
The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers (ACRE Books)
“The poems in The Tilt Torn Away From the Seasons imagine a future where humans are trying to recreate an environment to live in on Mars because they’ve messed up Earth’s beyond repair. . . . Rogers posits a not-too-distant future, and one where the question of whether we can avoid the mistakes we’ve made in the past takes on even greater importance. Rogers’s answer is no.”
–The Rumpus, 2020 Poetry Book Club Pick
Ways We Vanish by Todd Dilliard (Okay Donkey)
“Todd Dillard’s debut poetry collection navigates the grief following the loss of a parent, while also starting a new life and becoming a parent yourself. It peels back the layers of everyday living to reveal the impossible landscape flourishing underneath—one fraught with sorrow, want, and pain, but also filled with hope, joy, and flight.”
Fantasy by Kim-Anh Schreiber (Sidebrow)
“‘Every seam I encountered in the fabric of my reality was like a disfigurement that someone had smoothed over and left silent,’ writes Kim-Anh Schreiber in this remarkable investigation of female anger and resilience, intergenerational trauma, and what might be called the development of literacy in the subject of pain. Schreiber, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a German immigrant, combines recognizable modes — memoir, criticism, dramatic play script — into something as uncategorizable as the film she deploys throughout the book as muse and foil: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 post-Hiroshima ‘horror-comedy’ House, in which generations of women are trapped together in a haunted house. Beginning with extended considerations of the instability of memory (‘an evocative curator’), of the ‘impossible problem of drawing a picture,’ and of the pull to use projection and doubling as bridges across gaps in experience and understanding, Fantasy finally resolves into a flickering, unstable but vivid portrait of a mother and daughter both separated and bonded by history, violence, human fallibility, and love.” —Anna Moschovakis
The Bending Genres Anthology 2018 – 2019 (Bending Genres)
“The Bending Genres Anthology is a collection of some of the amazing writing that has appeared at bendinggenres.com in its first two years of existence. The book is 250 pages of genre bending microfiction. The book anthologizes over 100 authors, including the best of the hybrid CNF, Fiction, and Poetry that we’ve published since our first issue in January, 2018.”
Don’t Touch the Bones by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (Lost Horse Press)
“Don’t Touch the Bones, this remarkable second collection by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, shows its author hard at work to transform the experience of cultural losses—of lands, language, and legacy—into a poetry of remembrance, homage, and power. She inherited generations of memories and found an uncommon resolve to record the emotional life of her people, Jews only recently emigrated from Ukraine. Though she might be seen as a documentarian of loss, her voice is not hectoring but elegiac, bringing a ferocious lyricism to what might otherwise be the repressed microhistories, lost narratives of exile, and heirlooms of desperation and diaspora. Her poems rake the oracle bones of her family’s flight from persecution, reading in their fissures a dialogic language both of sorrow and determination.”—Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road
My Heart but Not My Heart by Stephanie M. Cawley (Slope Editions)
“Stephanie Cawley’s My Heart But Not My Heart, I want to say, is a book of refusals. The losses and grief that refuse language, the poet’s own refusal of certain performances, the poem’s refusal of expected forms, the speaker’s refusal to slap a manicure on and understand it as self-care, despite the therapist’s best intentions. It is in part about the ways in which our refusals, and our passivity, brought about often by external forces and pressures are then pathologized, medicated, explained away in the dismal language of diagnosis.” – Solmaz Sharif
Sundaey by Kirsten Ihns (Propeller Books)
“Kirsten Ihns’s Sundaey weaves philosophical engagement into poetic performance. In the pages of this book, words are made pictures of the ideas they reflect, introducing a break in the reflection in which we can see ourselves reflecting. In this interruption, which is a kind of broken mirror for the intensity of the gaze we give to language, is the most brilliantly convincing self-portrait and study of the demonstrating voice.” —Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography
Communicatingroups by Stu Watson (Mastodon Publishing)
“In his ruminations on fame, violence, family, death, and aspiration, Stu Watson’s deployment of some of history’s best-known figures lends this book an essayistic plausibility that resonates now. Against all odds, the verve of his poetic style summons new suspense to Watson’s embellishments on well-known tales. Communicatingroups builds a weird romance with a spine-tingling fascination all its own.”—Chris Hosea, author of Put Your Hands In and Double Zero, winner of the Walt Whitman Award
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager (Apocalypse Party)
“Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black Rainbow, absorbing the energy of mind control, reincarnation, parallel universes, altered states, school shootings, obsession, suicidal ideation, and so much else, B.R. Yeager’s multi-valent voicing of drugged up, occult youth reveals fresh tunnels into the gray space between the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, providing a well-aimed shot in the arm for the world of conceptual contemporary horror.”
—Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million
The Loneliest Band in France by Dylan Fisher (Texas Review Press)
“Dylan Fisher’s The Loneliest Band in France is a feverish, terrifying gem of a novella. The existential doom of an earth careening into chaos pervades these pages, though it is filtered through the endearing, funny voice of a bewildered Sri Lankan law student abroad in France, whose simple quest for knowledge is interrupted by a homicidal rock band, overbearing host parents, and the desolate desire to feel something in a world that has stopped making sense. In fact, if Bolaño and Camus had teamed up in a parallel universe to write the liner notes of a lost Talking Heads album, they might produce a brilliant, wild work much like this one.”
—Dean Bakopoulos
Temporary by Hilary Leichter (Coffee House Press)
“Leichter’s funny, absurdist debut cleverly explores a capitalist society taken to a dreamlike extreme . . . her cutting, hilarious critique of the American dream will appeal to fans of Italo Calvino.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan (Restless Books)
“Grace Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us. Equal parts compassion and confession, The Body Papers is a stunning work by a powerful new writer who—like the best memoirists—transcends the personal to speak on a universal level.”
—Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere
Beautiful & Full of Monsters by Courtney LeBlanc (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press)
“Love isn’t always pretty, yet most of us choose to remain constant in its pursuit. These poems unwrap the mythos of romance with the clairvoyance of a writer who knows the best and worst of relationships inside and out. LeBlanc dares to honestly show us how even when the best of intentions fail, we can always find beauty if we stay true to the monsters in ourselves.”
The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida by Clarissa Goenawan (Soho Press)
“Tender and tragic . . . Goenawan’s luminous prose captures the deep emotions of her characters as they grapple with questions about family history, gender, and sexuality. The tug of Miwako’s strange, troubled spirit will wrench readers from the beginning.”
—Publishers Weekly
You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South (FSG Originals)
“Mary South couldn’t have predicted our current moment, but her stories could not feel timelier . . . Each of South’s self-contained, bleak and tightly wrought chapters centers on themes of isolation, loneliness and how screens aren’t just a constant presence in our daily interactions, they’re directing them . . . Her depictions of pregnancy and childbirth bring to mind a Margaret Atwood-esque darkness.” ―Julie Bloom, The New York Times Book Review
Read Me, Los Angeles: Exploring L.A.’s Book Culture by Katie Orphan (Prospect Park Books)
“The book is a chatty guide to literary tourism in the city but it has surprising depth…While Read Me is a light romp, it has the potential to open new doors to familiar territory.” — Alta Magazine
Between the Records by Julian Tepper (Rare Bird Books)
“Julian Tepper has written an autobiographical slice of late 90s/early 00’s rock n roll life reflecting a period both he and I lived thru (and, happily, survived) with such ease that I recognized this world immediately, intimately. Within chapters sequenced like the tracks on a vinyl LP two brothers work to get their band off the ground as well as trying to understand the fractured relationship with their shambling, estranged father. Kindred ‘workers in song’, as Leonard Cohen termed it, both father and sons are involved in the elusive game of chasing a hit record―or even a modicum of recognition―while also trying to see if there are any ties left holding them all together. This is a book about family, about rock n roll aspirations and about a few of the many avenues such lives might take.”
―Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth
Lost Boy Found by Kirsten Alexander (Grand Central Publishing)
“Perfect for fans of the NYT bestseller Sold on a Monday, this Southern historical novel based on the true story of a boy’s mysterious disappearance examines despair, loyalty, and the nature of truth.”
Mustard, Milk, and Gin by Megan Denton Ray (Hub City Press)
“Tension builds throughout, but Ray isn’t showing off her wounds. She lets her writing, not her subject, do the work, and she slides into her observations as if she were sliding smoothly into water. Skilled, plangent writing, and the tragedy of addiction in the family adds currency.” —Library Journal
Awkword Moments by Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras (Ten Speed Press)
A compendium of 100 words and phrases smart people use–even if they only kinda sorta (secretly don’t) know what they mean–with pithy definitions and fascinating etymologies to solidify their meanings.
More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett (Sibling Rivalry Press)
“‘What is hunger … but the carving out of emptiness.’ And so in their defiant poetry collection, More Than Organs, Kay Ulanday Barrett excavates and hollows out a queer, trans, brown body to expose, examine, and interrogate the difficulties and heartaches of such existence. What is discovered is forged out of anger, injustice, defiance and love. These shapeshifting poems are insistent and persistent in their brazen attempts at making flesh and whole the undefinable nature of gender, race and physical/social being. I admire their direct honesty, how they rage! And how ultimately ‘the body is a letter/folded backward, all strange angles, confessions.'”-Joseph O. Legaspi, author of Threshold and Imago
My Morningless Mornings by Stefany Anne Golberg (Unnamed Press)
“My Morningless Mornings” is a brilliant book, an exploratory meditation on the significance of day and night, waking and sleeping, light and shadow. It moves fluidly from one object of contemplation to another, giving each a gentle, deft attention that makes it at once familiar and strange. This is a book that works on the reader’s mind so that after you finish it, the world around you seems changed, revealed to be more mysterious, fascinating, illuminated and alive than you had realized before.”
—Emily Mitchell, Author of ‘The Last Summer of the World and Viral: Stories’
Lakewood by Megan Giddings (Amistad)
“Chilling…Giddings is a writer with a vivid imagination and a fresh eye both of the body and of society. This eerie debut provides a deep character study spiked with a dose of horror.”
— Publishers Weekly
Edie on the Green Screen by Beth Lisick (7.13 Books)
In late ’90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city’s alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn’t changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium’s end are long gone. When her mother dies, leaving her Silicon Valley home to Edie, she finds herself mourning her loss in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech monoculture, and embarks on a last-ditch quest to hold on to her rebel heart. New York Times bestseller Beth Lisick’s first novel EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN chronicles Silicon Valley’s rapidly changing culture with biting observational humor, an insider’s wisdom, and disarming pathos, while asking, “What comes after It?”
The Fish & The Dove by Mary-Kim Arnold (Noemi Press)
Incredible writing for our times. The Fish and the Dove is powerful, raw, and honest in its attestations questioning the answers provided by those who decide the fate of another. Mary-Kim Arnold shares the lineage of strong voices like Ai Ogawa and Marosa Di Giorgio yet adds her own exquisite language. The Fish and the Dove is new wind for our literary landscape. – Sam Roxas-Chua
Alone by Thomas Moore (Amphetamine Sulphate)
Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi (Arsenal Pulp Press)
The real pleasure of reading John Elizabeth Stintzi’s book is to see a sensitive mind work through an internal landscape, and to watch them do it with such patience and generosity. –Sara Majka, author of Cities I’ve Never Lived In
Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger (BOA Editions)
“Rue is a brilliant meditation on corporeality, history, and what it means to move through the natural and material world—be it a field of pennyroyal or the Dollar General—in a female body. Kathryn Nuernberger’s astonishing poems present an urgent and devastating discourse, via many-layered gut-punch narratives, of the complex ways in which we are connected to one another that together become a powerful reckoning on female strength and desire in the #MeToo era.”
—Erika Meitner, author of Holy Moly, Carry Me
I Have the Answer by Kelly Fordon (Wayne State University Press)
With this surprising collection of stories set mostly in Michigan, Kelly Fordon takes her place among our most compassionate, insightful, and wry observers of contemporary American life. These are stories of mothers and daughters, wives and widows, rendered in prose that is at once poetic and plainspoken, with genuine heart and a connoisseur’s eye for the absurd. – Will Allison, contributing editor at One Story Magazine
The Elvis Machine by Kim Vodicka (CLASH Books)
The Elvis Machine is a book of poems inspired by living, loving, and hate-fucking in Memphis, Tennessee—a city still kissed with the 1950s. Forged in a dumpster fire of toxic Elvises, these poems are pornographic bad romances, psychedelic love dirges, and threnodies for sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. They’ll make you laugh off the pain as much as you’ll cry, cringe, and feel exposed in this ‘No Boys Allowed’ clubhouse of feminine rage and healing.
Dreams of Being by Michael J Seidlinger (Maudlin House)
“Dreams of Being is a fever dream, a religious text, a writer’s notebook, a case of mistaken identity, a love letter. Jiro is one of the most fascinating characters you will ever read, and this is Michael Seidlinger at his very best, his sentences full of his particular energy and verve. Start here. Open this book and get lost in Seidlinger’s dream. You will be drawn in by the complexity and wonder of Jiro’s story and the mystery of how to tell it and what it takes to make meaning.”
—Matthew Salesses, author of Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear
Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes (Coffee House Press)
“Thresholes is a training manual for grief and desire, for which no remedies exist except this one: running towards what will burn you up anyway, like a star. ‘How do you come back from that for which there are no words?’ Lara Mimosa Montes asks us, producing a new form of silence that does not, as even the most provisional form of sound must, decay. Instead, in this powerful and beautiful work, absence becomes an artifact, the only thing we get to touch. ‘I was there,’ as Montes writes, ‘and yet I have no memory of that performance.’ This is a line that moved rapidly through my own organism, like pink lightning, changing and charging my own cells. It turns out that this is the only thing I want from poetry, but I didn’t remember it until I read this book.” —Bhanu Kapil
Stages: On dying, working, and feeling by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff (Thick Press)
“STAGES is one of a very few recent books I have read that feels truly revolutionary, in both form and in content. It consists of documentary materials assembled, in a style somewhere between Svetlana Alexievich and André Breton, by a young writer, while staging a theater production in a nursing home. In a series of eye-opening interviews, she talks to housekeepers and nurses from Jamaica and Ghana about ghosts and family structure; to a clinical nutritionist, who explains how she helps people stop eating food, after a lifetime of eating food. Basically we’re on a tour of a parallel institutionalized world of aging and dying which has been zealously cordoned off from the rest of American life, and which is not without its Kafkaesque elements, but our guide, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, is so humane, curious and visionary that the overall effect is energizing and uplifting. Reading STAGES gave me the revelatory feeling of looking at something I’d been dreading, and seeing that it was actually OK, and vital, and a major part of life. STAGES brings humanity, humor, and a strong visual sensibility to a taboo subject, with exhilarating results. It expanded the way I think about family, theater, and a ‘good life.'”—Elif Batuman
True Love by Sarah Gerard (Harper Books)
“An unapologetic drama about a woman’s insistence on living at the apex of desire and self-destruction—what a rush!”– Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers and Nobody Is Ever Missing
Born to Be Public by Greg Mania (CLASH Books)
“In this unique and hilarious debut memoir, writer and comedian Greg Mania chronicles life as a “pariah prodigy.” From inadvertently coming out to his Polish immigrant parents, to immersing himself in the world of New York City nightlife, and finding himself and his voice in comedy. Born to Be Public is a vulnerable and poignant exploration of identity (and the rediscovery of it), mental health, sex and relationships, all while pursuing a passion with victories and tragicomic blunders. At once raw and relatable, Mania’s one-of-a-kind voice will make you shed tears from laughter and find its way into your heart.
The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams (Doubleday)
“Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections.”
–New York Times Book Review
The Return by Rachel Harrison (Berkley)
“Hair-raising horror and pure entertainment…The tension and nuance of Harrison’s complicated female friendships add depth to an already delicious, chilling debut.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Deleted Scenes by Kevin Catalano (Texas A&M University Press)
Kevin Catalano’s collection of stories, Deleted Scenes delights because, as an editor might cut scenes from a film, those cuts assembled into a montage become far more enthralling than the film. The “deleted scenes” become the bonus, as in “Ghost in the Womb” when the expected gothic horror of blood bubbling up from the shower drain seems normal because the plumber says it is so: “Son, you know what I’ve found in people’s pipes?” So, we get coffee. In such a montage, it is possible to lose virginity twice, to become royalty, despite “eczema and constant smell of fried chicken and sausage gravy,” and the “measure of man” was his ability to “take it.” The stories are wild, innovative and unabashed.
The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner (Flatiron Books)
“Rosner challenges the Holocaust with a touch of magic (the yellow bird appears throughout), clarifying a dangerous time and place even as she offers a vibrant, affecting portrait of the mother-daughter relationship.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers by Jessica Pearce Rotondi (Unnamed Press)
“Jessica Pearce Rotondi brilliantly probes the mysteries of a secret war while simultaneously exploring the secrets of her own family, to give us a book about coming to terms with many kinds of loss. Exceptional.”
—Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children
History of an Executioner by Clancy McGilligan (Miami University Press)
“In powerful prose, McGilligan tells a fully inventive and engaging story. You’ll want to linger with the sentences and turn the pages. This is a haunting and hauntingly atmospheric novella.”–Olivia Clare
The Great American Deception by Scott Stein (Tiny Fox)
“Stein keeps the stakes high and the laughs coming, juxtaposing the gritty mystery and dystopian setting with Arjay’s perky narration to excellent effect. Sure to appeal to fans of Douglas Adams, this zany, uproarious mystery is a constant delight.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Wyoming by J.P. Gritton (Tin House)
“From its first assured sentence to its last, Wyoming marks the debut of a gifted storyteller. This is a compassionate novel, for all its violence and despair, an authentic, pitch-perfect portrait of an America too often caricatured or ignored. There are hard truths here, grit and cruelty, but JP Gritton’s fine prose is nuanced enough, generous enough, to keep his troubled narrator’s humanity, his beating heart, apparent at every turn.”- Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour
We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning (Arsenal Pulp Press)
“With elegant precision and understated glee, We Had No Rules opens up the ache between heartbreak and self-actualization — between theory and practice, intimacy and belonging, community and loss. By confronting the regimentation in queer lives and loves, Manning explores the push and pull of intergenerational yearning in surprising ways. Tidy in structure yet emotionally unresolved, We Had No Rules rejects false closure, daring us to come up with our own answers.
–Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Sketchtasy
The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (Algonquin Books)
“An epic account of Việt Nam’s painful 20th century history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling . . . Moving and riveting.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Romances by Lisa Ampleman (LSU Press)
“In these wry, warm, learned, and formally dexterous poems, we find ourselves caught up in love―its twists, its turns, its fickleness, its fevers, its griefs, its unexpected happy endings. There’s a shock of pleasure on every page of this delightful book; as Ampleman asks, ‘[W]hat else do you expect from Love?’ –(Melissa Range, author of Scriptorium, winner of the National Poetry Series competition)
Trust Me by Richard Z. Santos (Arte Publico Press)
“Trust Me pulses with intrigue, thrills and distinctive humor, all while remaining vividly rooted in the landscapes, cultures and complexities of the American Southwest. Santos writing is as bright as the New Mexico sunshine.”
–Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River
Ceremonials by Katharine Coldiron (Kernpunkt Press)
“Ceremonials is a dreamy punch of a book, a haunting, poetic aria. These pages ache with the far reach of love, hum with the slow blossoming of self, crackle with the power of myth. Katharine Coldiron has created something very special here, as fierce and tender as girls, as ghosts.
–Gayle Brandeis, author of The Art of Misdiagnosis
The Gringa by Andrew Altschul (Melville House)
“Challenges the boundaries between activism and insurrection, fiction and reality … Altschul’s ambitious and culturally aware novel is a captivating depiction of passion, disenchantment, and hope gone violently awry.”
–Booklist (starred review)
Deluge by Leila Chatti (Copper Canyon Press)
“To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge… Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma.” ―Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times
Star 67 by Gina Tron (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press)
Crank calls, cat calls, call outs, and close calls are just part of the makeup of this brave and surreal collection that examines the enactment and denial of American violence. Gina will drag you through the dirt and you’ll thank her for the enlightenment.
Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar (MCD Books)
“What a clever, visceral thriller. A raw, unfiltered twist on gaslighting that challenges how society treats women. It made me sad, angry, and fired up.”
—Araminta Hall, author of Our Kind of Cruelty
The Minister of Disturbances by Zeeshan Khan Pathan (Diode Editions)
“When a poet threatens to walk in my galaxy, I wait with expectation! Zeeshan Khan Pathan’s The Minister of Disturbances is one of the truly great books of poetry today. Zeeshan has no fear of relaying the truth about the way we murder and love, sometimes in the same day.
—CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death
Mimi Lee Gets a Clue by Jennifer J. Chow (Berkley)
““Mix an intrepid dog groomer with a sarcastic cat, add a generous dose of Southern California, sprinkle with murder, and you get a cozy mystery that’s bound to please.”—Laurie Cass, author of the Bookmobile Cat Mysteries
Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui (Algonquin Books)
“A fascinating and beautifully written love letter to water. I was enchanted by this book.” —Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Tomboyland by Melissa Faliveno (Topple Books)
“Tomboyland is everything I want an essay collection to be: beautiful, smart, difficult, honest, hopeful, and haunting, just like the experiences it depicts. It is a book that charts the history of a body against the land that defines it. It is a song for anyone who felt at once estranged and inextricably bound to a place. Melissa Faliveno has written a gorgeously complex ode to the Midwest that is destined to be passed urgently from hand to hand, an anthem sung by all the misfits in those vast places who have not yet seen themselves written.”
—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
Braver Than You Think by Maggie Downs (Counterpoint Press)
“”Downs has a fluid, conversational writing style, zooming in to particular anecdotes that illuminate her experience rather than trying to cover the entire year … The travel sections are compelling and lively. A poignant tale of connection and disconnection through travel.” –Kirkus Reviews
Little Feasts by Jules Archer (Thirty West)
“There are writers who have the gift of immediately engaging their readers with the sure knowledge that what will follow will be unlike anything else they’ve read. Jules Archer is one such writer. In Little Feasts we are invited to a table overflowing with bold, sometimes bizarre, often tender, and deliciously original stories. This work is reminiscent of Miranda July with a dash of Aimee Bender, but make no mistake, it’s 100% Jules Archer, a writer of rare verve, compassion, and wit. Indulge, lucky readers!
—Kathy Fish, author of Together We Can Bury It & Wild Life
The Bear by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press)
“Lyrical. . . Gorgeous. . . Krivak’s serene and contemplative novel invites us to consider a vision of time as circular, of existence as grand and eternal beyond the grasp of individuals―and of a world able to outlive human destructiveness.” ―Washington Post
Pain Studies by Lisa Olstein (Bellevue Literary Press)
“Lisa Olstein’s luminous meditation on pain winds around a beautifully curated series of artifacts. Bits of poetry, ancient medicine, brain science, television episodes, excerpts from the trial of Joan of Arc, and works of art support the spiderweb on which her insights hang like condensed mist. A fascinating, totally seductive read!”— Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays and On Immunity: An Inoculation on Pain Studies
The Ancestor by Danielle Trussoni (William Morrow)
“Danielle Trussoni’s THE ANCESTOR is a lushly written, dream-like modern gothic with as many dark turns and twists as the Montebianco family tree has branches. Welcome to the family.” –Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World
What Shines From It by Sara Rauch (Alternating Current Press)
“Complex, tender, and deeply human.”
—Eric Shonkwiler, author of 8th Street Water & Light
What You Become in Flight by Ellen O’Connell Whittet (Melville House)
“Revelatory, honest, and wondrous. This is a story of constant becoming. Ellen O’Connell Whittet shows us how to confront heartbreaking realities while remaining open. She teaches us the importance of paying homage to our past selves while growing. What You Become In Flight is about the power we harness when we let our losses inform us. I come away in celebration of life’s nonlinear path and the ways we struggle and learn to occupy our bodies.” —Chanel Miller, author of Know My Name
Immortals of Tehran by Ali Araghi (Melville House)
“A highly recommended literary page-turner worth a second reading; fans of Gabriel García Márquez will delight in this fantastical—and fantastic novel.”—Library Journal, starred review
All Must Go by Kevin Sterne (House of Vlad)
“Kevin Sterne delivers the kind of Americana that invites you into a living room with matching La-Z-Boys and offers you an ashtray.” –Amanda Rozmer, author of A Few Tall Drinks of Water
Wallop by Nathaniel Kennon Perkins (House of Vlad)
“Perkins does what classic literature does. He invites you to witness an accident, and like the desert, it is beautiful.” –Noah Cicero, author of Give it to the Grand Canyon
Hot Young Stars by Sophie Jennis (House of Vlad)
“I love Sophie Jennis’s work. It leaves you wishing so deeply that each poem was about you in some small way.” –Rebekah Morgan, author of Hotel Alexander
Bad Poet by Brian Alan Ellis (House of Vlad)
“The beauty of [Ellis’s] work is that it possesses an economy of language that allows him to deliver satisfying narratives in very few words. [He] invites readers to take an honest look at the diversity of humanity and its wide range of imperfections.” – Electric Literature
Object Permanence by Michelle Gil-Montero (Ornithopter Press)
“Gil-Montero is without doubt one of the rare, gifted and fierce poet-translators working today.”
— Don Mee Choi
A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn (Burrow Press)
“It’s when Sawchyn plays with form that her narrative voice is strongest; an index of mental illness–related terms seesaws in tone between playful and weighty, while, in a series of fragments, Sawchyn recounts drug use in language verging on, but never succumbing to, addiction clichés… a refreshingly open-ended collection that provides a model of how essay writing can be used for self-exploration.”
—Publishers Weekly
Home Baked by Alia Volz (HMH)
“In Home Baked, Alia Volz manages not only to write about her parents with clear-eyed compassion and empathy, she also gives us a rich history of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s. As I read, her family and the city came alive for me: every person and street were vivid, complicated, tragic, and beautiful. I loved this engrossing, informative, funny, and heartbreaking book. Volz is a true talent.”
—Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of Woman No. 17, California, and others
Accidentals by Susan M. Gaines (Torrey House Press)
“Gorgeous, smart, and surprising, Gaines’ family saga takes us into the large world of nations and politics, but also the microscopic world of mud and microbes. Tender and powerful. Also with birds!”
– Karen Joy Fowler
American Harvest by Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Graywolf Press)
“A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.”—Kirkus Reviews
Home Making by Lee Matalone (HarperCollins)
“An intricate exploration of family and home, of mother and child, of friends, of women and written with both precision and style.”—Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel by Julian K. Jarboe (Lethe)
“Jarboe melds tenderness, humor, and righteous anger into insightful tales of characters navigating the margins of society. Readers are sure to be blown away.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Beheld by TaraShea Nesbit (Bloomsbury)
“[Beheld] is most successful where it allows itself to stray from historical fact and plot—to invent and to play with language, to give itself imaginative time and space. Nesbit is brilliant in those moments, and captures a paradox of historical writing—that it’s in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real.” –The New York Times Book Review
–Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise
Naomi & The Reckoning by Christine Sloan Stoddard (Finishing Line Press)
“Christine Sloan Stoddard‘s Naomi & The Reckoning is a tiny but fierce resistance. At once brutal and beautiful, this short collection captures the visceral echoes of pain thrust upon the female gender. Stoddard dives into the deep end of rape, trauma, religion, and relationship with a keen voice and potent message.”–Holly Lyn Walrath, author of Glimmerglass Girl
The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories by Sam Pink (Soft Skull Press)
“Pink is a keen observer of the culture of minimum-wage jobs and low-rent studio apartments that is the reality of life for all those who don’t find a cog space in today’s hyper-capitalist economy.” —The Guardian
Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Ecco)
“Winter Counts is a hell of a gripping debut, perfectly plotted, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden is a major new voice in crime fiction, indigenous fiction, and American literature.” – Benjamin Percy, author of Suicide Woods and The Dark Net
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Riverhead)
“[An] extraordinary debut. . . Gorgeously written and fearlessly imagined, Zhang’s awe-inspiring novel introduces two indelible characters whose odyssey is as good as the gold they seek.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang (Ecco)
“Startlingly original and deeply moving…. Chang here establishes herself as one of the most important of the new generation of American writers.” — George Saunders
These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card (Simon & Schuster)
“Through Maisy Card’s immersive storytelling, These Ghosts Are Family explores the intersections of generational trauma, love, and long-held family secrets, showing what it means to build a life in the face of history. I was hooked from page one.” —Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes (Oneworld Publications)
“Extraordinary… A book of wicked intelligence and tender heart.” – Max Porter, author of Lanny
Alice Knott by Blake Butler (Riverhead)
“Alice Knott is a thrilling, subversive novel, part fever dream, part high-culture acid trip, part dystopian masterpiece. A dazzling, dangerous book.” —Christopher Bollen, author of A Beautiful Crime
Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted by Dennis James Sweeney (Ricochet Editions)
“A tender embrace, this text will haunt you and heal you. A remarkable work; I couldn’t recommend this more.”– Janice Lee
Before the Fevered Snow by Megan Merchant (Still House Press)
“Megan Merchant’s poetry has the sudden fall into dream, tenderness, awakenings and delicate and crystalline images–the tone and lines are just right and seem to be in the language of a forest at night and the unseen eye in the wave.”
– Juan Felipe Herrera, 2017 U.S. Poet Laureate & author of Everyday We Get More Illegal
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (Europa Editions)
“Breasts and Eggs took my breath away.” – Haruki Murakami
Silt by Chris Geier (Alternating Current)
“Singing prose, gripping story. A rich evocation of 19th-century Ohio and what it means to be American.”
—Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln
20, Erasure Poems on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea by Jennifer Roche (Alternating Current)
“Like an oracle, Roche commands the words of Verne to float to the surface to cast prophetic warnings about the darkness we face today. But In her deft care, these poems molt the crusted shell of the past and emerge in our times shiny and wondrous.”
—Armin Tolentino, author of We Meant to Bring It Home Alive
Wyatt Earp by Larry Beckett (Alternating Current)
“Beckett has reinvented the American West. Whoever said that the long poem is dead, was dead wrong. Beckett’s elegant, hefty Wyatt Earp proves that the extended poetical narrative is still kicking up its heels, spurs and all.”—Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation
Helen or My Hunger by Gale Marie Thompson (YesYes Books)
“In Helen or My Hunger, Gale Marie Thompson explores notions of beauty and the body in ways that illuminate—and damn—both the personal and historical. How do we become fully human in a world that conspires to reduce us both figuratively and literally? Thompson digs into these difficult questions and their tough answers, and the results are nimble, inventive, beautiful poems, as pleasurable to read as they are important to digest.” —Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence
We Know This Will All Disappear by Melissa Ragsly (PANK)
“We Know This Will All Disappear burrows under your skin looking for answers to questions you didn’t know you’d asked. These stories are dirty, brilliant, painfully human, fast, and strangely sensual. They were pulled from somewhere between a drunken phone call and a half-forgotten childhood dream. Read them.” – Gabino Iglesias
You Might Die Tomorrow – So Live Today by Kate Manser (Highline House)
“An intelligent, funny, and motivating book. I recommend it to my patients and use it for my own growth.“ -Jessica Cooper, Psy. D., trauma psychologist
Too Much by Rachel Vorona Cote (Grand Central Publishing)
“Readers whose tastes run from George Eliot to Lorde will embrace the book’s feminist message.”–Publishers Weekly
You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here by Frances Macken (Oneworld)
“Frances Macken’s You Have To Make Your Own Fun Around Here charts the friendship of three small-town girls from their childhoods through to their early careers, exploring envy and self-belief with consistent, natural humour and spot-on observations.”-Caoilinn Hughes, author of Orchid & the Wasp
Godshot by Chelsea Bieker (Catapult)
“Drawn in brilliant, bizarre detail–baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance novels–Lacey’s twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. A-.”–Entertainment Weekly
The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan (MCD Books)
“Scanlan craftily makes the stuff of everyday life seem strange and rare in this collection . . . Scanlan has a knack for subtly bending the ordinary into the uncanny . . . Reading Scanlan is akin to looking at two “spot the difference” images, but not knowing what, exactly, is off. This is a delightful, mischievous, and mysterious collection that’s perfect for fans of Lydia Davis and Mary Ruefle. –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The Book of Anna by Carmen Boullosa (Coffee House Press)
“This superb translation from Spanish by Samantha Schnee, founding editor of Words Without Borders, is a book of nimble prose that deftly plays with the boundaries between fiction and history. Drawing together servants, diplomats, anarchists, seamstresses and aristocrats at the eve of the Russian Revolution, Boullosa brings heightened eroticism, feminism, and liberation to Tolstoy’s imagined world.”–The Observer
Voice in the Headphones by David Grubbs (Duke University Press)
“David Grubbs’s books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.”–Ben Lerner
Both Sides: Stories From the Border edited by Gabino Iglesias (Agora)
“In this timely volume, readers will find rage as well as hope and, occasionally, a dash of spirit-lifting poetry.” Publishers Weekly “Sometimes-sad, sometimes-infuriating, but always-illuminating…This gratifying and sometimes wryly funny read stands on its own, but it’s also worth recommending as an #ownvoices alternative to Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt.” –Booklist
The Magical Writing Grimoire by Lisa Marie Basile (Fair Winds Press)
“Lisa Marie Basile leads readers into the limitless possibility of their own magick and healing, through one of the most powerful modalities we have; the written word. This is a book you do not want to miss.”– Gabriela Herstik, author of Inner Witch and Bewitching the Elements
Don’t You Know I Love You by Laura Bogart (Dzanc Books)
“Bogart manages to thread the ghost of past violence into every scene. … Bogart’s prose is exceedingly thoughtful, and the cycle of abuse is deftly explored … a well-crafted tale of domestic abuse and recovery.”–Kirkus Reviews
Uncomfortably Numb by Meredith O’Brien (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing)
“In Uncomfortably Numb, Meredith O’Brien writes unflinchingly about her life before and after her MS diagnosis. Detailing her treatment, her struggles to be taken seriously by doctors, and the effects of it all on her family, career and sense of self, she writes in a clear-eyed and courageous voice, bringing the reader along with her as she navigates this profound, life-altering experience.” — Sarai Walker, author of Dietland
The Companions by Katie M Flynn (Gallery Books)
“Beautifully atmospheric and emotionally intense, The Companions is an unnerving and engrossing story. The radiant, somber voice of this near-future speculative novel ratchets the suspense while also illuminating what makes us human and how we endure beyond death. This is a spellbinding novel that will linger with you.” –Kassandra Montag, author of After the Flood
The Lightness by Emily Temple (William Morrow)
“Emily Temple’s debut The Lightness grants us a bold, smart, hilarious new voice. She tells a page-turning story that’s also a detective story–psychologically wise and totally wiseassed, all while being both cynical and spiritual. A classic must read!”–Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of Lit
Want by Lynn Steger Strong (Henry Holt)
“Lynn Steger Strong’s Want is a reader’s novel, which is to say that it is rife with mentions of other novelists (Jean Rhys, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Anita Brookner) and both indebted to and an homage to their work.”
–Vulture
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press)
“The way Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting carved a permanent place in our heads and hearts for the junkies of late-1980s Edinburgh, the language, imagery, and story of fashion designer Stuart’s debut novel apotheosizes the life of the Bain family of Glasgow . . . The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open. You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.”–Kirkus Review (starred review)
The Swan Suit by Katherine Fawcett (Douglas McIntyre)
“Fairytales and folktales collide with 21st-century feminism in Katherine Fawcett’s deviously imagined Swan Suit. With hilarity and heart she lays bare what it means to be human (or witch or devil or cat or wolf or entrepreneurial pig) in a world both ancient and evolving.” -Zsuzsi Gartner
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier (Doubleday)
“Sharp and surprising, Pizza Girl shows us how obsession can fill the empty spaces in a young woman’s life. Jean Kyoung Frazier will make you laugh with one sentence and break your heart with the next. A delicious debut.”–Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
Stay Up with Hugo Best by Erin Somers (Scribner)
“Funny, sharp, and very fun. A contemporary story that follows a complex set of characters so self-aware that they become even more vibrant on the page.”–Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
Shiner by Amy Jo Burns (Riverhead)
“A compelling fever-dream of a novel crafted out of moonshine and jagged miracles, Shiner is simply perfect. I loved every moment spent in the world Amy Jo Burns so thoroughly evokes; I already know I will return to it again and again. Do not miss this exceptional debut.” – Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times-bestselling author of Never Have I Ever
The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio (Ecco)
“Living with this extraordinarily human undocumented family will make you laugh, weep, and think, sometimes all at once. Tenorio brilliantly makes these characters so original that they’re nearly tangible.”–James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods
The Magician by Christopher Zeischegg (Amphetamine Sulphate)
“California brings out the fucking worst in people. Makes them junkies, whores, killers – failed saints, predatory sinners. Must be something in the land or maybe the water. Something old and evil. Waiting. The Magician is an incantatory trip to this cursed heart of darkness. A modern horror tale of sexual violence and deep psychological harm. Unflinchingly narrated in spare, economic prose climaxing in hallucinatory brutality, Christopher Zeischegg has conjured a dark fable of the American dream as it slides into unending nightmare.”
Trans(re)lating House One by Poupeh Missaghi (Coffee House Press)
“Missaghi’s lyrical, meditative debut merges fiction, poetry, and critical study to explore Iran’s history and volatile present. . . . a bravura exhibition of writing as performance art.” —Publisher’s Weekly
Brown Album by Porochista Khakpour (Vintage)
“Incisive… About which stories we chose to tell about ourselves, and about being brown in a country more blindingly white under Donald Trump…. Provocative pieces that detonate many notions of identity.” –Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*
Later: My Life at the Edge of the World by Paul Lisicky (Graywolf Press)
“Later: My Life at the Edge of the World intimately and extensively recounts the time [Lisicky] spent [in Provincetown] in the early 1990s, growing into his own, sexually and emotionally, in a community grappling with the AIDS epidemic.”–The New York Times
Taylor Before and After by Jennie Englund (Imprint)
“Powerful… A resonant look at coming-of-age.” –Kirkus Reviews
That’s Not a Thing by Jacqueline Friedland (SparkPress)
“Exploring the messy concept of closure, this is a charmingly witty novel that fans of Emily Belden’s Hot Mess (2019) and J. Ryan Stradal’s The Lager Queen of Minnesota (2019) will eat up.”―Booklist
Members Only by Sameer Pandya (HMH)
“An intense, funny, and absolutely necessary novel about our current times. Accomplished storyteller Pandya has given all of us teachers a compulsive read for the days, the weeks, when we feel unmoored and even a slightly bit crazy.”
–Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
Exile Music by Jennifer Steil (Viking)
“A beautiful coming-of-age tale… Moving, evocative, and well-researched, this is sure to linger in readers’ minds long after the last page has been turned.” –Booklist, *starred review*
Things You Knew If You Grew Up Around Here by Nancy Wayson Dinan (Bloomsbury)
“This strange brew of a book nods to the picaresque novel, is shot through with magical realism, and undergirded by a naturalist’s concern for Mother Earth-and it’s all wrapped in lovely sentences. Book groups will have field days discussing this.” –Booklist
Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey (Riverhead)
“Celia Laskey’s Under the Rainbow is a timely look into what it means to be queer in spaces that aggressively refuse you. Smart and compulsively readable, Laskey has woven together narratives that seek to embrace each other through the hurt. There is love and loss alike sandwiched in its pages; pain and pleasure. Laskey is a talented, sharp writer and her debut novel has its fingers on the pulse of the human condition.” -Kristen Arnett, author of the New York Times-bestseller Mostly Dead Things
The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress by Jennifer Steinhauer (Algonquin)
“With a journalist’s eye for the telling detail, and valuable experience covering Congress for The New York Times, Steinhauer is often a few steps ahead of the newcomers. She conveys throughout admiration, sympathy and compassion for her subjects while they learn the hard way that hidebound traditions, a rigid seniority system and encrusted modes of governance do not yield readily to even the strongest convictions. The Firsts is an intimately told story, with detailed and thought-provoking portraits spliced in along the way. Steinhauer makes herself a character in her account, sharing with readers some witty and at times acerbic observations that keep the narrative moving along.”
–The New York Times Book Review
A Small Thing to Want by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood (Press 53)
“Despite the book’s title, the desires of the characters in Shuly Cawood’s collection, A Small Thing to Want, are anything but small. These twelve stories are grounded in domestic detail, but in the vein of Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout, each gesture reveals a world of longing: for self-knowledge, for connection, for clarity. At times sad, often wryly funny, always deeply empathetic, Cawood’s prose elevates her subjects beyond their everyday circumstances.” –Kate Geiselman, editor of Flights literary magazine
