The year is more than halfway through, and it’s easy to feel lost in a sea of new book recommendations. While some readers have been diving headfirst into trendy divorce memoirs — or the latest dragon smut (no judgment!) — a wave of deeply personal and thought-provoking releases has made it to bookshelves. The best new nonfiction we’ve read this year explores trauma, the color blue, the devastating shortcomings of western media, and a lifetime’s worth of love and sex. Meanwhile, a previously published South Korean novel from last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature winner has finally been translated into English, and the author of 2021’s buzziest fiction debut hasn’t missed a step with her follow-up, a confident and imaginative collection. Oh, and March gave us a vampire story we’re describing as “the closest thing we have to horror’s Moby-Dick.” Narrowing down where to start isn’t easy, but we have some suggestions.
Books are listed by U.S. publishing date with the newest titles up top.
Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski
For those who know Danielewski as the author of House of Leaves, the promise of a new 1,200-page novel may come with a spoonful of trepidation. How many structural tricks and tics can the arch-postmodernist pack into such a hefty volume? The answer, surprisingly, is almost none, or at least none that are so aggressively apparent on the page. Tom’s Crossing is an authentic western epic, as far removed from House of Leaves’ ergodic labyrinth as one could imagine. But that isn’t to say there aren’t still ghosts, monsters, and trickery aplenty in this story of a teen boy and girl fleeing into the Utah mountains to save a pair of horses pegged for slaughter. What follows is a picaresque sprawl, a maximalist canvas of intricate, intimate detail. It fills the contemporary western vacuum left behind by Cormac McCarthy, but it’s informed by every era of the Great American Novel, from Melville and Faulkner to Pynchon and, looking further afield, Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Danielewski’s metafictional tendencies may emerge later in the novel, but Tom’s Crossing is an unexpectedly earnest trove of story within story within story within … —Neil McRobert
Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski
For those who know Danielewski as the author of House of Leaves, the promise of a new 1200-page novel may come with a spoonful of trepidation. How many structural tricks and tics can the arch-postmodernist pack into such a hefty volume? The answer, surprisingly, is almost none, or at least none that are so aggressively apparent on the page. Tom’s Crossing is an authentic western epic, as far removed from House of Leaves’ ergodic labyrinth as one could imagine. But that isn’t to say there aren’t still ghosts, monsters and trickery aplenty in this story of a teen boy and girl, fleeing into the Utah mountains to save a pair of horses pegged for slaughter. What follows is a picaresque sprawl, a maximalist canvas of intricate, intimate detail. It fills the contemporary western vacuum left behind by Cormac McCarthy, but it’s informed by every era of the Great American Novel, from Melville and Faulkner to Pyncheon and, looking further afield, Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Danielewski’s metafictional tendencies may emerge later in the novel, but Tom’s Crossing is an unexpectedly earnest trove of story within story within story within… —Neil McRobert
Crawl, by Max Delsohn
Crawl, the debut story collection from Max Delsohn, is a funny, lusty portrait of transmasculinity and queerness set in 2010s Seattle. The stories in the collection span bathhouses, dive bars, and underground music venues, and Delsohn is especially adept at capturing the spirited intention-setting of youthful adulthood: “There in the bright, near-empty sports bar, Jack decided that this would be the year he loved men.” Delsohn’s characters want to be better, they want to love and be loved, to succeed in relationships and friendships — but throughout these stories, they’re forced to confront the hurdles that delay the pursuit of self-actualization. Sex is often a hurdle, especially as these characters come to terms with their queerness or date people who refuse to come out. Delsohn is a very funny writer, and he has an ear for insightful ironies. “You’re like obsessed with being unhappy,” one character chastises another. “That’s why your music taste is so good.” Crawl is a smart, restless, and sexy debut collection. —I.M.
Crawl, by Max Delsohn
King Sorrow, by Joe Hill
For genre readers, King Sorrow is the most anticipated book of 2025. A thousand-page epic ten years in the making, it promises much yet still overdelivers. The Faustian bargain six desperate young friends forge with an ageless dragon (with a cockney accent) is the spawning root of a plot that reaches through dark academia, political intrigue, techno-anxiety, psychedelic ritual, and esoteric lore. Joe Hill has never given such full vent to his imagination before, and there’s a thrill in the unfettered, almost chaotic ricochet of the narrative, bouncing from the austere halls of a New England college to the depths of a fairy-tale cave in the British countryside via a bravura set piece aboard a dragon-beset transatlantic flight. The real success of King Sorrow, however, is its balancing of stunt and spectacle with the characters’ bristling imperfections. Across decades, Hill traces their corruption (and resistance) with refreshing honesty, blending the cynicism of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History with Terry Pratchett’s level-headed whimsy and infusing them with the humanistic horror perfected by his own father. Simply put, King Sorrow is the fullest and most satisfying speculative novel of the year. —N.M.
King Sorrow, by Joe Hill
Nebraska, by George Whitmore
The poet, playwright, and activist George Whitmore died in 1987 from AIDS, two years after the publication of his novel Nebraska. This year, the novel was reissued by the Song Cave. Nebraska follows a young boy in 1950s Nebraska named Craig. After a car accident, Craig’s leg is amputated, leaving him bed-ridden and lonely at home with only his family and a neighbor boy for company. Craig is a blunt, idiosyncratic narrator. “When I was in the hospital, I was like the lady in the magician’s box, who must smile and smile as the blades get slipped into her,” he says early in the book, shortly after expressing sympathy for the man who hit him. Whitmore’s depiction of rural, working-class life is strange but never surreal or exploitative. He brings attention and care to the Mullen family, creating a nuanced portrait that never withholds the humanity of his characters. Nebraska is a complicated, gripping, and honest depiction of rural gay life in mid-century America. —I.M.
Nebraska, by George Whitmore
The Wax Child, by Olga Ravn
Part experimental-historical fiction and part incantation, the Danish author’s short novel (which follows her previous books The Employees and My Work) concerns a witch trial in 17th-century Denmark’s northern Jutland region. The story is told by a doll carved from beeswax, “the size of a human forearm,” made by an unmarried woman named Christenze Kruckow for purposes that shift in and out of focus. Fiercely protective of her mistress, the wax child watches as Christenze is forced to leave home in southern Funan for Aalborg, trailed by accusations after a series of miscarriages in her town. Aalborg is a “city of hate,” and Denmark’s king is waging a campaign against witchcraft, but it isn’t long before Christenze finds a community — or is it a coven? — of women. The wax child’s strange, object-based way of knowing lets her travel into the king’s kidneys, see all the town’s fleas “in a single vision,” and drink in the pulse of the people who hold her. It’s a fascinating and totally inhuman consciousness, one of many startling feats in this book. —Emma Alpern
The Wax Child, by Olga Ravn
Coffin Moon, by Keith Rosson
Vampires are back with a bite in 2025 (this is the third bloodsucking novel I’ve put on this list), but Coffin Moon bares its teeth and froths at the mouth. Keith Rosson’s ’70s-set novel frames the vampire as outsider, not sequestered in some castle or Hollywood mansion but roaming the dive bars, truck stops, and lonely highways of America. There is as much of Easy Rider or The Deer Hunter as there is Nosferatu in the blue-collar, countercultural world the characters move through, hell-bent on revenge at all costs. Unabashedly masculine and reveling in (un)righteous violence, it reads like a Tom Waits song written for Halloween, or Nick Cave at his most bloody-minded. And in Varley, the hulking undead biker at the black heart of the story, Rosson has created one of the great vampires — maybe one of the great villains — of recent fiction. —N.M.
Coffin Moon, by Keith Rosson
Play Nice, by Rachel Harrison
Haunted houses are making a long-overdue comeback in horror fiction. After years of personal-trauma metaphors, it’s nice to see old-fashioned bricks and mortar getting their ghost on again. Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice manages to balance the traditional and the hypercontemporary in a story about an Instagram influencer navigating family intrigue and demonic influence during the renovation of her childhood home. All the Amityville allusions are present (and very much intended), but as ever with Harrison, the entire project is elevated by her facility with character and endearing snark. In six years of writing, she has already created more defiantly lovable, eye-rolling protagonists than most writers manage in a lifetime; she reaches new heights with Clio. Like its hero, Play Nice is funny and sexy when it wants to be, but it’s also Harrison’s most unsettling novel since her debut, The Return. It’s both a book for the horror initiated and the perfect Halloween gift for the horror curious. —N.M.
Play Nice, by Rachel Harrison
The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene
At over 1,100 pages, you might think that there couldn’t possibly be anything left to explore in Stephen King’s apocalyptic opus. Chris Golden and Brian Keene have proved that is not the case. This landmark anthology draws upon the imagination of 36 of horror’s brightest contemporary names to map the further reaches of the original 1978 novel — and go beyond. There are too many good stories to mention; some highlights include Catriona Ward’s “The African Painted Dogs,” which depicts the fall of civilization from the titular animal’s perspective. It’s tragic and triumphant in equal measure. Tim Lebbon’s “Grace” takes The Stand’s Manichean showdown to outer space, in a story that feels like a wrongly excised chapter from King’s original. There are visions of the far future, such as Sarah Langan’s dispiriting “The Devil’s Children,” and necessary excursions to other parts of the global crisis, as in Usman T. Malik’s microcosmic epic, “The Mosque at the End of the World.” The End of the World As We Know It is more than a massive homage to a classic text, but a vital anthology and an invaluable time-capsule of horror in this golden era. —N.M.
The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene
Ruth, by Kate Riley
For a debut novel, Kate Riley’s Ruth feels curiously realized, a subtle achievement that unfolds over vignettes spanning decades of daily life. It begins in 1963 Michigan with the birth of Ruth Scholl, whose family lives in a Christian community that pools its possessions and leaves major decisions to a group of elders. The world she lives in is designed to blunt its members’ egos; again and again, Ruth and the people around her are gently urged to think of others, not themselves. Filled with small details — like descriptions of hated chores, curious visitors, and community-wide rules that come and go as the years pass — and capacious in its questions about human connection and what it means to live well, Ruth surprises on nearly every page. —E.A.
Ruth, by Kate Riley
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions, by John Langan
A new John Langan story collection is always something to be excited about, and Langan’s sixth may be his best and most cohesive yet. Water flows through many of these stories, both a thematic thread and a very literal source of otherworldly terror. “The Deep Sea Swell” features horrific visitation aboard a North Sea ferry. The consuming flood of “Breakwater” provides an elemental backdrop to a brutal noir. In “Haak,” a numinous Alpine Lake is the stage for a homicidal twist on Peter Pan. Water also laps at the edges of the two standout tales, both bravura examples of Langan’s professorial, experimental inclinations. “Snakebit, Or Why I Continue to Love Horror,” begins as a critical essay on the construction of a horror tale, before morphing into something stranger and mythological. The title story may be the best thing Langan has ever written: a metafictional blend of media, in which a cult horror movie about a Hudson Valley urban legend is revealed to have disquieting roots in reality. No one has done more to keep the short horror story alive, well, and vibrant over the last decade. Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions is just further proof of his value. —N.M.
Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions, by John Langan
Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus
Daniel Kraus has never met a high concept he can’t conquer. In The Living Dead, he philosophized George Romero’s zombies into entirely new shapes, and his hit Whalefall was told in real time from inside the stomach of a whale. But Angel Down is somehow another step up. In the muck and gore of the First World War, a dysfunctional group of soldiers is sent into no-man’s land to recover the body of a fallen angel. What follows is a sensory overload of image, language, and morality told in one single 280-page sentence. It may sound like a gimmick, but Angel Down’s structure is essential to its impact, that one sentence undulating through peaks of terror and brief, quiet lulls, mirroring the experience of war that Kraus describes so vividly. It’s not only a strikingly original horror novel; it’s a piece of perfectly executed literary gymnastics. A stunner. —N.M.
Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus
Lonely Crowds, by Stephanie Wambugu
Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, follows two women, Ruth and Maria, across their decadeslong friendship. Ruth, a taciturn child of immigrants, is enamored of Maria’s tragic charisma and talent, and she’s as much Maria’s best friend as she is a trusted disciple. When she follows Maria to college and into the art scene of New York, their shared history offers both support and ongoing tension. Wambugu has an excellent eye for the small disturbing details that shape childhood intimacy, from the missing poster Ruth prematurely draws for Maria to the excitement Ruth shows when she learns a relative has died and she can now relate to Maria’s feelings about her own mother’s death. There is something disconcertingly strange but honest about the ways these characters move through their lives. After learning about childhood trauma, a father directly questions his daughter about whether his parenting style will traumatize her. Maria’s paranoid aunt grills Ruth whenever she calls to talk to her friend. Impressively, Wambugu treats all these characters with tenderness and curiosity. —I.M.
Lonely Crowds, by Stephanie Wambugu
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, by John Gregory Dunne
At age 37, John Gregory Dunne left his wife, Joan Didion, and child to move to the Las Vegas Strip to work on a new book. Vegas, originally published in 1974 and reissued by McNally Editions this year, is Dunne’s account of his time in the city. He’d been panicked by a sense of impending mortality — his “nervous breakdown” — and Vegas offered a respite from life in L.A. The book is a glancing, kaleidoscopic portrait of the people who reside full time in a city for tourists, revolving around conversations with a sex worker, a private eye, and a resentful comic with strong opinions about the best way to pee. The friendships Dunne builds are genuine and complicated, and one of the greatest aspects of this book is watching the author try to keep up with the locals. This is not a book of personal growth or character insight; you get the sense, by the end, that Dunne is still very much in the midst of a breakdown. But the world he captures feels engrossing and fleeting, a snapshot of Sin City at its most lascivious and self-important. —I.M.
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, by John Gregory Dunne
Long Distance, by Aysegül Savas
In the Turkish-born novelist’s first collection of short stories, the characters aren’t bad people, exactly. It’s just that they harbor resentments that they act out, almost unknowingly, in small acts of interpersonal aggression. In “The Guest,” a man joins his new fiancée at the small-town home of her family, whose way of living, so different from their cosmopolitan lifestyle, leads to a tense parting; in “We Are Here,” maybe the book’s standout, a foreign-exchange student in Russia does everything she can to rebuff her host mother’s kindness. “Future Selves” sees the same characters as in last summer’s novel The Anthropologists, two expats in an unnamed foreign city, in a story that recasts their search for a home to buy as something more grimly acquisitive. Savaş describes disconnection and discord so well that you can feel all the unsettled emotions in the pit of your stomach. —E.A.
Long Distance, by Aysegül Savas
No Sense in Wishing, by Lawrence Burney
What purpose does a cultural critic even serve these days? Algorithms promise to do the same work — introduction, selection, curation — more quickly with a precision calibrated to our individual tastes. Lawrence Burley’s debut essay collection, No Sense in Wishing, offers a necessary and startling rebuttal: We need cultural critics precisely because they are human, and because we can still learn so much by observing our world through the eyes of someone who is doing the slow, demanding work of paying attention. Burley, a longtime critic and astute chronicler of Baltimore’s cultural byways, has written a book that demonstrates how disorienting, thrilling, and ultimately redemptive it can be to inhabit another consciousness. His essays — on music, literature, television, stand-up comedy, and the absurdities of bureaucratic life (including a hilarious account of his stint as a federal employee) — are illuminating on their own terms. But what lingers is the voice: fluid yet grounded, colloquial yet exacting, suffused with wit and warmth. In other words: unmistakably human. —T.F.
No Sense in Wishing, by Lawrence Burney
Oddbody, by Rose Keating
A waitress births an egg during her busy morning shift; a patient desperate for inner cleanliness turns to increasingly bizarre wellness treatments; a young woman cares for her bath-bound father, who has metamorphosed into a man-size tapeworm: These are just a scattering of Oddbody’s absurd horrors. Rose Keating’s debut collection can be read as an exemplar of “femgore” — a newly pigeonholed strand of fiction focused on cathartic rage and the horrific potentiality and vulnerability of the female body. But Oddbody pushes back against every trope and lazy assumption typically made about femme experience in fiction. These mad, swing-for-the-Surrealist-fences stories cross lines of logic, taste, and standardized opinion, and they take such joy in the unlimited boundaries of story. Lots of books are given the “daring” badge. Oddbody deserves it more than most. —N.M.
Oddbody, by Rose Keating
Toni at Random, by Dana A. Williams
Toni Morrison passed away six years ago, yet she remains a vital cultural force, her writing as fresh and incisive today as ever, perhaps even more so given our troubling times. In Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, Dana A. Williams investigates an underexamined aspect of Morrison’s literary career: her nearly 20-year tenure as an editor at Random House. Drawing on archival documents, Williams reconstructs Morrison’s audacious efforts to carve a space for herself in the publishing world while cultivating a new generation of Black writers. Morrison navigated this role as nimbly as she produced memorable fiction; Williams surfaces correspondence between Morrison and writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Barbara Chase-Riboud in which she gently prods and firmly persuades. Williams’s book is a quiet revelation, a searching portrait of an artist who elevated editing to an art form. —Tope Folarin
King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby
S.A. Cosby has enjoyed meteoric success in the past five years, writing stories about brutal men in broken worlds. None has been as unflinching as King of Ashes. When Roman’s father is left comatose following a suspicious accident, he puts his life as a financial rainmaker on hold to return home to the violent Virginian town of his youth. Finding his family under threat from a pair of psychotic local gangsters, Roman must use both his stock-market smarts and his family’s crematorium to curry favor with, and finally overcome, his enemies. It’s a miniature crime epic — with clear nods to The Godfather — and a willingness to go to the very brink of horrific excess. Cosby’s good guys do things that outpace the rankest villainy in the work of other crime writers. Over the course of four novels, he has taken the concept of the anti-hero to the edge, and in King of Ashes he may have finally pushed through into an outer darkness. —N.M.
King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, by V.E. Schwab
Readers’ appetite for vampires seems to reawaken roughly every ten years. Sometimes it’s satiated by irony, social commentary, or reconfiguration (as in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter), but sometimes only the vintage will do. In Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, V.E. Schwab applies her cross-genre clout to the tale of three women, born centuries apart but yoked together by endless life and unappeasable hunger. All of the vampiric elements are present: savagery, eroticism, lust, and ennui, and though Schwab makes no attempt to reinvent the bloodsucker, she does use her trio to map the shifting social attitudes to queerness and femininity across half a millennia. And if the vampirism is of a classic stripe, Schwab’s individual vampires are satisfyingly singular with neat shifts in narrative voice to represent their character and historical period. Their three arcs form a sweeping epic of sapphic immortality — resolutely old-fashioned in detail but thrillingly contemporary in the telling. —N.M.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, by V.E. Schwab
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, by Hala Alyan
In her new memoir, poet and Dayton Literary Peace Prize–winning novelist Hala Alyan tells a story of telling stories. Moving from interrogations of Scheherazade’s myth to reflections of family lineage and to the frustrations of conceiving with a surrogate, Alyan charts the complications of building a life in the midst of personal transformation. “The thing about reinvention is it has, as its precondition, erasure,” Alyan writes. “Something needs to be erased to be replaced with a shinier, reinvented version.” Though a deeply personal act, reinvention is not entirely dictated by personal choice. It emerges through questioning the past, through the effort to hold on to fading relationships, through the construction of a family, through political impositions. Alyan confronts the countless ways we hide and expose ourselves, both as writers and people, in an effort to make sense of our lives. —I.M.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, by Hala Alyan
Clam Down, by Anelise Chen
Anelise Chen’s Clam Down begins with an innocuous typo: a text from her mother insisting that the author “clam down” in the aftermath of her divorce. The memoir takes this directive seriously, however. Chen uses the metaphor of the clam to explore her adolescence and the dissolution of her marriage, building a narrative of personal introspection equal parts Mary Karr and Franz Kafka. The clam as metaphor offers her insight into her own tendencies toward rigid self-protection and the impact it has on those closest to her. The latter is best understood through passages told through the perspective of her father, which provides an engrossing, critical view of Chen as a daughter. These passages aren’t mean — they are honest in a manner that expands the lives of both the daughter and parents. Chen’s skillful restraint prevents the conceit from ever taking over the book. Even when writing about love, grief, childhood, isolation, and mollusks, among other themes, Clam Down always maintains its focus on Chen and her compelling vision of the world. —I.M.
Clam Down, by Anelise Chen
Flashlight, by Susan Choi
In 1978, in a beachside town in Japan bordered by an ugly cement breakwater, 10-year-old Louisa is walking by the water with her father, Serk, as her mother, Anne, waits at home. But only Louisa makes it back: Without explanation, Serk drowns or is whisked away, and Louisa, who’s found unconscious hours later, can’t clearly remember what happened to him. Choi’s novel opens in the aftermath of this unnerving scene, then takes several deep steps backward into Anne and Serk’s childhood lives, before most of his family disappears into North Korea and before she loses herself in an unhappy marriage. Choi’s first novel since 2019’s Trust Exercise is tense, moody, and shifting with an intimate narrative voice that’s passed from character to character even as, because of fear or anger or some combination of the two, they keep their distance from one another. —E.A.
Flashlight, by Susan Choi
The Dry Season, by Melissa Febos
The Dry Season tells the story of Melissa Febos’s yearlong stretch of celibacy following the end of a tumultuous affair. Though largely absent of sex, the memoir is highly erotic, showing the many ways life can become more pleasurable and profound when a person shifts attention from romance to friendships, art, and the natural world. Febos deftly balances three competing threads: an inventory of past partners, the arc of her personal celibacy journey, and the role celibacy has played throughout history. Her reflections on former lovers, part of an attempt to “make different mistakes,” are delivered with characteristic honesty and meticulous self-examination. Few writers are so skilled at studying themselves with such care and purpose — and without guilt or recrimination. Febos makes this kind of self-examination universal. This book — which focuses on the difficult work of unstitching yourself from the behaviors that previously defined you — isn’t about sex; it’s a study of how sex can, like anything pleasurable, shape a person’s whole identity. —I.M.
The Dry Season, by Melissa Febos
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser
In the second half of the 20th century, America was plagued by a particular kind of sexually sadistic murderer. A disproportionate number of them hailed from, or spent significant time in, the Pacific Northwest. In her exhaustive nonfiction study, Caroline Fraser asks why. What about this region of the country catalyzed the bloodlust of Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, Kenneth Bianchi, and others? The answer, she suggests, is both grimly mundane and terrifyingly ubiquitous: pollution. By overlaying a history of reckless industrialization and serial-killing, Fraser traces a narrative of intertwined crises — a grand poisoning of the air, land, waters, and human souls of the nation. Murderland reads like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring meets Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, told through the hypnotic, unwavering gaze that is entirely Fraser’s own. —N.M.
Murderland, by Caroline Fraser
The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien’s fourth novel, The Book of Records, is a rare thing: an ideas-driven historical novel deeply grounded in its characters’ humanity. The novel follows 7-year-old Lina and her father when they arrive at the Sea, a way station where many have gathered in the aftermath of political and climate exile. The Sea is a mysterious place where time and space willingly bend. Lina, an avid reader, has three books with her, each telling the story of a historical figure: Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, and Hannah Arendt. She meets three travelers so intimately acquainted with these figures’ lives that they appear to be reciting from memory. The Book of Records is a smart, ethically rigorous novel exploring what it means to live through moments of historical crisis, like a sly retelling of The Magic Mountain, another novel of isolation and loneliness set in the midst of major social and political upheaval. Even at its most intellectual, the novel maintains a strong emotional core, capturing the tenderness of Lina’s commitment to her ailing father, the man who taught her to tell — and, more important, to listen to — stories. —I.M.
The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien
Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li’s new memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow is a meditative, unflinching exploration of loss. It was written in the immediate aftermath of her son James’s suicide, six years after the suicide of his older brother Vincent. Li wrote abstractly about Vincent in her novel Where Reasons End, which took the form of a conversation between a mother and her dead son. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a more analytical study of personal catastrophe. “Facts are the harshest and hardest part of life,” Li writes. “And yet facts, unalterable, bring with them some order and logic.” Throughout the book, Li confronts the reality of living with her husband in “the abyss.” Loss forces us into tautologies: the hard part about living with loss is living with loss. Li writes beautifully and honestly about this very thing, about how a person continues through the “now and now and now and now” of life after tragedy. —I.M.
Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li
The Devils, by Joe Abercrombie
Online, Joe Abercrombie is @LordGrimdark. It’s a fitting handle for a writer who has taken the gritty fantasy baton from George R.R. Martin and sprinted with it. He writes about brutal, broken people, in a world where the magic may be fantastical, but the morality is begrimed. The Devils is his first stand-alone book for adults apart from his First Law series and, though it maintains a veneer of the cynicism (and much of the bloodshed), it’s a much more sentimental read. The episodic, picaresque plot flows across an alternative mediaeval Europe, where Carthage remains a powerhouse and the Vatican is matriarchal. We follow a group comprising a deceitful princess, an immortal knight, a conceited necromancer, an invisible elf, and, most memorable of all, a horny female Viking werewolf. It’s as madcap as it sounds, bouncing between bone-jarring battle and campfire banter, always building to the next truly epic set piece. It reads like Terry Pratchett reimagining The Dirty Dozen, and it’s an absolute delight. —N.M.
The Devils, by Joe Abercrombie
Love in Exile, by Shon Faye
Shon Faye’s Love in Exile is a graceful, rigorous antidote to the many trials and humiliations of contemporary dating culture. Why do so many people — especially women — find it so hard to find love? Why is it so difficult to feel okay being loved? The eight essays in Love in Exile explore a range of topics, from heartbreak to sobriety to community, as Faye effortlessly draws connections between her life and the broader issues many women and queer people face in the pursuit of romance. She is especially honest in writing about her resistance to self-love and the life circumstances that made her see its importance. “To begin to practice self-love, I first needed to accept that the way I had been living my life until this point was characteristic of someone who hated herself.” Faye is an astute but generous critic of herself and of others; she creates the sort of intimacy that makes reading this book feel like talking to a trustworthy friend. Love in Exile is the millennial answer to bell hooks’s All About Love. —I.M.
Love in Exile, by Shon Faye
To Smithereens, by Rosalyn Drexler
There aren’t many things Rosalyn Drexler can’t do. She’s an acclaimed playwright, visual artist, novelist, and a former professional wrestler. Her 1972 novel, To Smithereens, reissued this year by Hagfish, is an art-world satire inspired by the author’s time in the ring. The novel centers on Rosa Rubinsky, broke and unemployed, who spends her free time taking tours of NBC and going to movies. In the theater one afternoon, a mediocre art critic named Paul invites her back to his place. He has a thing for being dominated by women. Eventually, Paul convinces Rosa to pursue a wrestling career; she doesn’t have anything better to do. Drexler’s writing is sly and inventive, the prose leaping unexpectedly through Rosa’s head with arresting specificity. To Smithereens fizzes with a weird, morbid energy, full of surprises and surprising humanity, as Drexler mocks the hapless characters she can’t help but love. —I.M.
To Smithereens, by Rosalyn Drexler
Better, by Arianna Rebolini
The subtitle of Arianna Rebolini’s Better makes no attempts to hide what the book is about: A Memoir About Wanting to Die. The book follows Rebolini through the her attempted suicide and its aftermath — and the many close calls that have followed — offering an nuanced look into the personal and sociological factors that contribute to suicidal ideation. Rebolini is especially adept at looking outside of her story, exploring the lives of other artists who died by suicide or considered it often, from Spalding Gray to Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. She treats these feelings with the kind of dignity that is often left out of conversation about suicide. Rather than focus solely on the role of mental health in suicide, Rebolini questions the impact of predatory capitalism on the ability to live a good life. How might a country that strips its citizens of health care, employment, and housing play a role in wanting to die? What responsibility should society have in making life better for its most marginalized people? Better offers an insightful, vital portrait of suicide that makes no attempt to euphemize or diminish its subject. —I.M.
Better, by Arianna Rebolini
The Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig
According to urban legend, the woods of North America are littered with strange staircases. Lore suggests that something ominous waits at the top for those foolish enough to ascend these out-of-place structures, and in Chuck Wendig’s latest novel, he details exactly what. Hint: It’s awful! Five teenagers find their staircase; one of them climbs it only to disappear. Two decades later, the adult survivors regroup to unravel the mystery. This bifurcated narrative structure will forever bring to mind Stephen King’s It. However, Wendig’s vision is entirely his own, and The Staircase in the Woods impresses in two distinct ways. First, the haunted other-place beyond the staircase’s last step is a truly hideous proposition, making this Wendig’s darkest novel to date. Second, he writes about the adult resumption of childhood bonds with a messy honesty that sets the book apart from other nostalgia-fests. Friendship may wane, but trauma lasts forever. —N.M.
The Staircase in the Woods, by Chuck Wendig
The Hollow Half, by Sarah Aziza
Sarah Aziza’s new memoir is a remarkable achievement, formally inventive, refreshingly honest, and politically sharp. The Hollow Half follows Aziza in the aftermath of an eating disorder that nearly kills her — her doctors must literally bring her back to life. In the hospital, she hears the voice of her long-deceased Palestinian grandmother, which spurs Aziza to further explore her family’s lineage in Gaza and the ongoing destruction of Palestine. Aziza expands her focus beyond Emmeline Cline’s Dead Weight — another essential book about eating disorders — to create a complicated portrait of selfhood, illness, family history, and political violence. The Hollow Half deftly draws connections between personal and global atrocities while remaining attached to Aziza’s captivating story of healing. —I.M.
The Hollow Half, by Sarah Aziza
When the Wolf Comes Home, by Nat Cassidy
There comes a time in every horror author’s career when they turn to the grand subject of fear itself. For Nat Cassidy, that moment has arrived with his third novel. Thankfully, rather than delivering some sprawling, ponderous meditation, he’s packaged his treatise in a lean, mean, roaring machine of a story. When the Wolf Comes Home is essentially one big chase sequence. It begins when Jess, a young, struggling actress, discovers a frightened boy hiding in her garden. Minutes later, the boy’s father arrives, with a distinctly lupine appearance. At this point, you’d be forgiven for expecting a straightforward werewolf story, but Cassidy’s novel stretches and contorts into something far stranger, more audacious, and ultimately, both heartbreaking and triumphant. There’s a big appetite for earnest, retro-horror right now, and — mixing the heart and characterization of ’80s Stephen King with the propulsive energy of Dean Koontz at his best — When the Wolf Comes Home is proof that they can still write ’em like that, but with a contemporary flair all of its own. —N.M.
When the Wolf Comes Home, by Nat Cassidy
Fugitive Tilts, by Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson is widely acclaimed as a poet — he has earned a fistful of awards for his three collections of poetry, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize. Yet over the past few years, he has begun to establish a reputation as a formidable essayist, with recent work published in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, among other places. In Fugitive Tilt, his robust talent is in full view. Across 26 essays, Hutchinson foregrounds and dissects a variety of themes, including “the trauma of joy” and “the concept of dread,” and he appraises the work of a number of poets who have inspired him, including Les Murray, George Seferis, and Philip Levine. Throughout these pages, Hutchinson expresses a deep love of prose, of its grand possibilities and subtle confinements. This collection represents his earnest and thrilling mission to efface the line between poetry and prose, to introduce us to the possibility that each is affirmed and made complete by the other. —T.F.
Fugitive Tilts by Ishion Hutchinson
Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet
In 1557, toward the end of the Italian Renaissance, a fresco painter named Jacopo da Pontormo is stabbed to death with a chisel in the chapel he has been painting for over a decade. The reason for his murder is unknown, though it may have to do with his paintings (obscene, according to some), a rivalry with a fellow artist, or one of his put-upon assistants. This novel in letters from the French author Binet, who writes artfully skewed historical fiction like 2010’s HHhH and 2019’s Civilizations, is full of characters who gossip, flatter, and scheme wildly, whether they are a disgruntled color-grinder, an uncomfortably pious nun, a Medici, or Michelangelo himself. The volatile political scene and the nature of art are discussed; so are all the mundane parts of daily life, like stomachaches and badly thought out teenage love affairs. It’s all extremely fun. —E.A.
Perspective(s), by Laurent Binet
Sky Daddy, by Kate Folk
One of several pieces of plane-crash-related media this year (see also: The Rehearsal, The Phoenician Scheme), this novel follows Linda, a 20-something who’s been sexually attracted to airplanes ever since an abrupt 50-foot drop in her first love, “a 737-800 named N92823,” when she was 13 years old: “I was filled with a warm liquid sensation, a feeling of inevitability, along with wave upon wave of pleasure, what I would later understand had been my first orgasm.” Now, she’s a content moderator for a tech company, reviewing online comments for signs of hate and harassment and saving whatever extra money she has to spend on airfare. The goal is to someday consummate her relationship with a plane, which, according to her logic, would mean a fatal crash. As a narrator, Linda is totally deadpan and surprisingly endearing; it’s hard not to hope she gets her fiery wish. — E.A.
Sky Daddy, by Kate Folk
A/S/L, by Jeanne Thornton
A/S/L answers a question I didn’t know I should ask: What if Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow were written like The Savage Detectives? The novel follows three teenagers, who come together on the internet of the late ’90s to create a video game called Saga of the Sorceress. Nearly 20 years later, the three are living wildly different lives in close proximity — two in New York, one in New Jersey — and still have never met in person. A/S/L captures the pulse of desire that spurs any genuine act of creation: “Sneak back to the computer your father brought home from work at the post office and never brought back. Its fans grind … and you feel your body disappear. False things fall away, and you know where your soul will go. And you know you will find what you need.” The internet gets a great deal of hate these days, but Thornton’s novel is a gripping, emotional reminder of the almost whimsical joy of being online in the ’90s. —I.M.
A/S/L, by Jeanne Thornton
Worthy of the Event, Vivian Blaxell
It’s hard to say what exactly this book is. Part memoir, part reportage, part gossip, part philosophical treatise on Spinoza’s notion of God, Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event is more than anything a moving and brilliant exploration of trans life since the ’60s, when Blaxell transitioned. The book is carried forward on Blaxell’s electrified, searching prose. Blaxell displays a kind of flexible intelligence throughout the book — her sentences dart forward and double back on themselves. Worthy of the Event reads like a conversation with one of your smartest, most self-aware friends. What a pleasure to discover the world through Blaxell’s eyes. —I.M.
Worthy of the Event, by Vivian Blaxell
Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer
Neige Sinno’s memoir opens with a disarming chapter about her stepfather, titled “Portrait of my rapist.” Sinno’s intention, here and throughout the book, is to center her experience while attempting to make sense of what doesn’t make sense: the longstanding abuse perpetrated by her stepfather when she was a child. “With victims it’s easy,” she writes. “We can all put ourselves in their shoes.” The book does not attempt to exonerate through understanding; rather, she’s curious how predators like her stepfather become figures of fascination and sympathy. “They are on the other side of a border that we will never cross,” she writes. But our fascination is rarely rewarded. More often, predators are monotonous or downright boring, she insists. This is a profoundly refreshing conclusion, and Sinno’s insights on personhood and literature are equally compelling throughout the book. Sad Tiger is an impressive accomplishment, as much a memoir as it is literary scholarship. This is a smart interrogation of the self and of abuse that expands beyond Sinno’s life to major literary figures — like Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Vladimir Nabokov — who have also reckoned with these ideas in their work. —I.M.
Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno
Trauma Plot, by Jamie Hood
Already one of the most rigorous and astute critics working today, Jamie Hood follows up her debut, How to Be a Good Girl, with Trauma Plot, a hybrid of memoir and criticism that deftly excavates how we talk about trauma. She writes about her personal life from an evocative remove, detailing “Jamie’s” experience of trauma, rather than relying entirely on the first person, to reimagine archetypes of sexual violence. At one moment, she articulates her intensifying boredom with an older fling in ruthless, unflappable clarity; the next, she brings the reader inside the lonely humiliation of screaming in public after a groping. Her work recalls other great writers of the self, like Annie Ernaux and Sylvia Plath, and the critical eye Hood brings to the stories we tell about trauma reveals the power and limits of personal narrative. —I.M.
Trauma Plot, by Jamie Hood
Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In 1960s Tanzania, a young woman named Raya escapes an unhappy marriage, leaving a son, Karim, with her parents. This early act of betrayal resonates through Karim’s life even as he finds success in the metropolitan Dar es Salaam. Later, he and his wife, Fauzia, take in a servant after he was fired by Raya, helping him find his footing in the city. As the characters strain against their roles — and the story moves forward to the ’90s, during a destabilizing influx of western tourism — they find it harder and harder to exist with each other. Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021; this is his first novel since then. It’s tightly constructed, with a narrative voice that’s invariably serene even as he describes his characters’ unfolding drama. —E.A.
Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
“I am America’s worst nightmare: the Indian who wouldn’t die.” Thus speaks Good Stab, the Blackfeet narrator at the heart of Stephen Graham Jones’s epic novel of blood, vengeance, and genocide. It’s no spoiler to say Good Stab is no ordinary mortal; Jones has written his Interview With the Indigenous Vampire, but The Buffalo Hunter Hunter transcends genre. It may be 1912 when Good Stab tells his life story to a Lutheran minister stationed at a Montana trading post, but the novel roams across centuries, casting a cold eye over the many atrocities of Manifest Destiny. Jones’s askew, hyperconversational prose has never been better suited to its story, and over the first two-thirds of the book he builds the fire that fuels the sheer audacity of the climax. It’s a landmark of horror and historical fiction alike, perhaps the closest thing we have to horror’s Moby-Dick. —N.M.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters
Torrey Peters’s second book, Stag Dance, is at once a return to earlier forms and a massive step forward. The book contains three short stories and the titular novel. Peters self-published two of the stories, “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” and “The Masker,” years ago, but they’ve lost none of their power or urgency. In the former, a collective of trans women unleashes a virus that puts the entire world in the position of choosing their gender — to make the same choice those in the collective have made. In “The Chaser,” a young man at a boarding school must confront the redoubling consequences of refusing to confess his love for another student. The title novel, Stag Dance, is an engrossing historical tale about turn-of-the-century lumberjacks who hold an annual dance where some of the men choose to attend as women. The protagonist, Babe, never explains or defends his desire to go as a woman — it is simply is what he wants — and this refusal to clarify is a sly, confident vindication of desire and selfhood. Stag Dance is funny, brilliant, and effortlessly original. —I.M.
➼ Read Grace Byron’s review of Stag Dance and Andrea Long Chu’s chat with author Torrey Peters.
Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters
Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro; translated by Eve Hill-Agnes
French playwright Mariette Navarro’s debut novel, Ultramarine, follows the female captain of a cargo ship, the only woman onboard. After allowing her crew to go swimming without her, they return with one more crew member. Though the book makes good use of its claustrophobic, paranoid setting, it is far more than a simple thriller. The novel offers a strange, compelling exploration of how loneliness shapes a person — and might drive them to pursue the comfort of isolation. Navarro is an expert at navigating the surreal, fatalistic way the captain thinks of herself. She always believed she was destined for the sea and accepted this life with a detached self-assurance, but as the novel continues, her sense of identity begins to break down. The self, Navarro reminds us, is often constructed within the meticulously defined routines of our lives, and any change to those is liable to reveal parts one would rather not see. This is a haunting, unpredictable novel that’s hard to shake after reading. —I.M.
Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnes
The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica
Agustina Bazterrica is not afraid of an extreme dystopia. Her breakout hit, Tender Is the Flesh, posited a world in which cannibalism has become industrialized and meat is quite literally murder. Her follow up novel is both a quieter and more elaborate affair. The Unworthy takes place an indeterminate amount of time after an unspecified global catastrophe. There are hints of nuclear incident, climate collapse, AI run amok — all filtered through the narrow perspective of a survivor’s diary written in a convent where evil nuns hold sway over the worthy and unworthy alike. Bazterrica nods to other texts — the apocalyptic horror of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the entrenched misogyny of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the violent erotic charge of Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus — but she synthesizes it all into something wholly strange, timeless yet frighteningly timely. —N.M.
The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica
No Fault, by Haley Mlotek
Books about divorce are having a minor moment, and Mlotek’s braided memoir — part personal history, part sociological and aesthetic investigation — is especially good. It’s a remarkably private account of a wrenching personal experience, one she approaches by looking at the ways our culture understands, resists, and processes the inevitable dissolution of some marriages. The author’s own no-fault divorce, from a man she’d met when they were just 16 years old and stayed with for more than a decade, is described with many details omitted, but that doesn’t take away from the weight of it; instead, her restraint ends up feeling more intimate than you’d expect, like a confession from someone who values her privacy but chooses to reveal a telling glimpse of her inner life. —E.A.
No Fault, by Haley Mlotek
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad’s “breakup letter with the West,” One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, charts the author’s gradual recognition of the many lies and hypocrisies at the core of western ideals. Though the book largely revolves around spurious media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, El Akkad’s great talent is in showing how, over the past few decades, corporate journalism and western powers have undermined our ability to confront global atrocities. He identifies this in near-daily instances of false political engagement, in which newspapers endorse mass-deportation campaigns and U.S. spokespersons express sympathy for the innocent people being slaughtered by American weapons. We live in a time, according to El Akkad, when “ethical double-jointedness [is] a necessary requirement for the daily debasement of modern political life.” One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an angry, uncompromising book full of exasperated wisdom and virtue. Its honesty is invigorating. —I.M.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad
Immemorial, by Lauren Markham
Lauren Markham’s Immemorial is an attempt to name a phenomenon most of us know very well: anticipatory grief for the impending collapse of the natural world. The book reckons honestly with this preemptive loss and the guilt any thinking person may feel for having contributed to the planet’s destruction. Complicity, she writes, “had paradoxically become something of a linguistic escape hatch: simply admit your complicity and then you’d subvert it.” But Markham has no interest in subverting this feeling. Instead, she faces it head-on, writing about the impact of collective memory in both decimating and protecting our ecosystem. The desire to memorialize through statues and buildings is often paired with the impulse to alter the truth, to construct the memories that won’t fracture a community’s sense of its implicit goodness. Markham tries to use her grief as the “raw material for creation.” What results is a vital, moving portrait of how to live in a world we may never get back. —I.M.
Immemorial, by Lauren Markham
The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, by Osita Nwanevu
The market is saturated with books about the status of our democracy and how to reclaim it. In order to be credible, such books must accomplish many things at once: accurately describe our current moment, offer a convincing argument about how we got here, and provide a set of ideas that will help us move from our blighted present to a more hopeful and inclusive future. A recent entry in this relatively new canon, Osita Nwanevu’s The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, convincingly clears these bars. His book centers around an audacious concept: that we cannot escape our malaise until we collectively decide to overhaul our democracy and “work as hard as we can in the decades ahead to ‘institute new Government’ for the benefit of all and not just the few.” It is a grand challenge, bold and immense, but by the time you finish reading, you will likely be onboard too. —T.F.
The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, by Osita Nwanevu
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, by Imani Perry
The latest by Imani Perry, a professor at Harvard and a MacArthur fellow, is as alluring as it is provocative — she traces the relationship between the color blue and the Black experience in America and throughout the world. Her reach is expansive: In brief, pithy chapters she discusses various intersections between Blackness — as a racial classification and a manner of engaging with the world — and assorted manifestations of blue in geography, music, literature, clothing, and many other categories. She also draws from her own life and her knowledge of history, art, and contemporary culture to create a quilt (an analogy she invokes) in which distinct patterns and sections brush up against and interact with one another. Together, they constitute an entirely new creation, a piece that will prompt you to evaluate Blackness afresh via the color blue and to consider how that color has been a through-line, an inspiration, and a harbinger of oppression for Black people across space and time. —T.F.
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, by Imani Perry
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, by Neko Case
Indie-rock idol Neko Case, singer of “I Wish I Was the Moon” and front woman of the New Pornographers, has hinted in songs at the turmoil she experienced in her childhood, but her lyrics are far more oblique than this memoir. Born to teenage parents who were “poor as empty acorns,” Neko was largely left to her own devices — especially after her mother seemingly faked her own death only to reappear a year later with barely an explanation. The book is full of fairy-tale details: Adults are mostly threatening or absent, children are in perpetual danger, and nature offers moments of transcendence and almost mythological meaning, as when a pair of horses walks past Neko’s house as though she’d summoned them. Later, the Pacific Northwest punk scene and a necessary break from her mother open up a true escape route. You can feel her elation on the page. —E.A.
➼ Read Emma Alpern’s review of The Harder I Fight the More I Love You.
The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, by Neko Case
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White
A few months before his death in June at age 85, novelist Edmund White published this memoir recounting his legendary sex life. “A practicing gay since age 13,” White lived through the furtive 1950s, when homosexuality was a crime; the brief, exuberant post-Stonewall years; and the decade when AIDS tore through his community of friends and lovers. But this outline is far more serious than White’s joking and explicit memoir, in which pleasure is always the goal. “I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them,” he writes. “For me it would be thousands of sex partners.” They range from acquaintances to roommates to husbands; there are hookups with dads in station wagons, paid-for sex in rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms, and “nocturnal encounters” in the Colosseum back when Rome kept it open to the public. It’s all sexy, funny, and romantic, too: “Sex was always linked to love, even during so-called anonymous sex. I fell in love ten times a day.” —E.A.
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, by Edmund White
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang; translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
In a small apartment in Seoul, a historian named Kyungha lives in near-total isolation, wracked by chronic pain. A friend asks her to travel to Jeju Island to rescue a pet bird, and her snowy journey puts her into mysterious contact with the past. The island was the site of an uprising in the late 1940s, one that was brutally suppressed by the anticommunist Korean government with the apparent support of occupying American forces; tens of thousands of people were killed. Han, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, has written about the Jeju uprising before in the brutal and lucid 2014 novel Human Acts. Published in South Korea in 2021, We Do Not Part is both an elaboration on that book’s ideas and something wholly its own, a chilling look at generational memory and the lifespan of atrocity. —E.A.
➼ Read Robert Rubsam’s review of We Do Not Part.
We Do Not Part, by Han Kang
My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, by Andrée Blouin
In their foreword to this book, writers Adom Getachew and Thomas Meaney list a few sobriquets by which Andrée Blouin was known during her life, including “Africa’s Woman of Mystery” and “the Most Dangerous Woman in Africa.” While these monikers may capture her notoriety, they don’t come close to conveying the impact of her work and presence. Throughout her astutely observed and utterly captivating autobiography, which was originally published in 1983, Blouin charts her harrowing youth and extensive engagement with various African leaders and independence movements during the mid-20th century. Among other activities, she advised major postcolonial leaders in Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, and was present for several key moments in African political history. One is tempted to invoke the typical cultural emblems of ubiquity in describing her influence and accomplishments — she could be characterized as the Zelig or Forrest Gump of Africa — but considering she was a real person who participated in real events, perhaps we should replace their names with hers. —T.F.
My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, by Andrée Blouin
Playworld, by Adam Ross
Ross’s last novel, Mr. Peanut, was also his first; it came out all the way back in 2010. Since then, he published a book of short stories, became the editor of the Sewanee Review, and worked on Playworld, a coming-of-age tale with a laconic rhythm all its own. It will take time for its protagonist, a child actor named Griffin Hurt whose career is based in part on the author’s, to actually mature, though that’s hard for him to understand. The book begins in the early ’80s, when a 36-year-old woman, a friend of his parents, seems to fall in love with him — though he’s just 14 at the time. The New York City that Ross describes is rougher, and its teenage characters are largely unmonitored by the adults in their lives. In fact, they sometimes seem like they’re part adult themselves, especially Griffin, with his grown-up career and his strange affair (though high-school wrestling and Dungeons & Dragons also come into play). His essential innocence is what makes this story so affecting. —E.A.
Playworld, by Adam Ross
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman
Clay McLeod Chapman has written some of the most ballsy, go-for-the-throat horror of recent years, but in Wake Up and Open Your Eyes he digs a scalpel point into the exposed nerves of Trump’s America. The nation falls to a mass epidemic of demonic possession spread through the viral messaging of right-wing media. Worried about his parents’ well-being, Noah ventures out of his liberal Brooklyn echo chamber to travel home to Virginia. What he finds there is vicious, disgusting, and tinted with void-black humor, but Chapman is as adept at the slow burn as he is at the Grand Guignol. The book’s long middle section detailing the incremental corruption of Noah’s family is as chilling and oppressive as contemporary horror comes. Chapman pulls not a single punch in taboo, nor does he soften his blows in an attempt at moral relativism. The result is an apocalyptic allegory for our digitally siloed reality. —N.M.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman
