Kevin Brockmeier is the author of The Truth About Celia and a children's book, City of Names. He has published stories in The Georgia Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and McSweeney's, and his story "Space" from Things That Fall from the Sky has been selected for The Best American Short Stories. He has received the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, two O'Henry Awards (one, a first prize), and most recently, a NEA grant. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Naming Song (2024) Jedediah Berry "With The Naming Song, Jedediah Berry offers a Genesis wrapped up in a Revelation-a mysterious, poetic, and invigorating post-apocalyptic adventure saga about how things can be reborn, and in some cases remade, after they have been undone. It's rare that a novel this substantial is also this strange and this fun."
Sacrificial Animals (2024) Kailee Pedersen "Sacrificial Animals is distinctly observant, and distinctly unsettling. It begins with one sort of menace and ends with another entirely, so that while the book barely leaves its little patch of acres, and the souls who occupy it hardly move an inch from the traumas that shaped them long ago, it leaves you with a feeling of immense distances traveled."
This Impossible Brightness (2024) Jessica Bryant Klagmann "In the eyes of This Impossible Brightness, humans bear a particular mark of distinction, one that's spiritual or psychological rather than physical. We are the species that tries to change direction in midair; we attempt, impossibly, to take our fall and transform it into an ascent. Jessica Bryant Klagmann's writing seems motivated by this same desire. Everywhere in her novel's pages, you sense some force yearning to turn the future into the past - to forestall the autumn of the world, spin it around, and allow it to burst into spring. Through her focus on this effort, she produces a feeling that's sustained and powerful, a clear-eyed grief leavened by a mad hope."
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart (2024) GennaRose Nethercott "GennaRose Nethercott's imagination is boundless, her writing emerging from a rich personal folklore of which Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart suggests only the edge. Everything in this book is alive and ready to love you or to wound you."
The Deluge (2023) Stephen Markley "A major achievement, bountifully imagined. Unquestionably one of the best novels to grapple with the climate crisis. I am haunted by it."
Singer Distance (2022) Ethan Chatagnier "Singer Distance is a surprising, captivating, surpassingly intelligent novel, and I mean it as a great compliment when I say that I'm not quite sure where it came from. The narrator who leads us through its pages insists that he is one of the world's carpenters rather than one of its architects, but the reality that surrounds him is extraordinary, and so too, therefore, is his story. On the macroscale, it's a story about the interpersonal pathways that connect one planet to another and the interplanetary gaps that separate one heart from another; on the microscale, about what it feels like to occupy a single life, and how difficult it is to tell, when you're in the middle of it, whether that life is being wasted or fulfilled."
The Damage Done (2022) Michael Landweber "The Damage Done takes a fascinating premise and weds it to equally fascinating characters. More than that, though, in depicting a world without violence, it brings into focus how difficult it is to strip violence from our own imaginations and from the stories we tell. There are characters in this book's nonviolent world who cannot stop seeking to impose violence on others, and instinctively, as a reader, I found myself wishing to see those characters come to violent ends. This might be the book's most surprising achievement: the way it compels us not only to reconceptualize violence but implicates us in it."
This Weightless World (2021) Adam Soto "This Weightless World filters its alien encounters and deep-space expeditions, its dreams and anxieties about the centuries to come, through the beating hearts of a few struggling, yearning, fumbling, desperate, modern-day human beings. It's not so much a novel of ideas, asking, 'What does the future hold for us?, ' as a novel populated by characters who can't stop asking themselves that same question. Reading it, I was reminded that caring about the fate of the planet is really a matter of caring about the fates of its billions of distinct and individual inhabitants, with their billions of distinct and individual futures."
Damnation Spring (2021) Ash Davidson "So absorbing is Damnation Spring, so rich with the atmosphere of a time and a place, that when I laid the book down it was hard not to look around my living room and wonder where the redwoods had gone. What impresses me the most about Ash Davidson and her writing is how deeply she understands her characters, and how sharply she has observed their world, yet how little fuss she makes about it. There's not an ounce of ego on display here, which means that it's never the singer you hear, always the song. And the song, in this case, is magnificent."
The Party Upstairs (2020) Lee Conell "The Party Upstairs made my pulse race. It builds its tensions expertly, like a thriller, unearthing suspense from the daily struggle to earn and keep a paycheck, the never-ending threat of job-loss and destitution. Lee Conell perceives everyone she writes about, rich and poor alike, with perfect clarity: on the one side those who gaze out on poverty as a kind of spectacle, on the other those who endure it as a kind of bombardment, and in the middle Martin and Ruby, the superintendent of an Upper West Side apartment building and his debt-ridden daughter, who pretend—but only pretend—that they're able to watch the bombs fall from afar."
Lake Life (2020) David James Poissant "When you find yourself thinking about a novel's characters well after you've finished reading it, wondering about them and how they're doing as though they were friends of yours, family, it means that you've found something truly special: one of those books that's not just about life but somehow contains it. Poissant's characters linger just that hauntingly, and his novel breathes with just that kind of life."
Crossings (2020) Alex Landragin "Crossings is playful, obsessive, romantic, intelligent, and wholly absorbing, with fascinations enough for a whole shelf of novels. I followed its alternate sequence rather than its conventional one, and reading it I had the unusual - for me maybe even unprecedented - sense, no matter where I was in the page count, that I was always occupying its exact center. Like its characters, I was never sure how close I was to the beginning of the story, how close to the end, which gave it an aura of inexhaustibility. It's a book that feels not endless but endlessly replenishable."
The Unicorn Anthology (2019) Peter S Beagle and Jacob Weisman "Between these pages you'll find tales that are as mysterious and arresting as any creature of myth and legend. The Unicorn Anthology returned me to the stories of writers I already loved and introduced me to the stories of writers I know I will come to love."
The Study of Animal Languages (2019) Lindsay Stern "The rare novel of academia that has as much in its heart as it does on its mind. Remarkably lucid and eloquent, it highlights the difficulty of communication not only between species but between individuals. Reading it, you wonder whether, like the birds, we're all just whistling tunes at each other, but also the opposite--whether, like us, the birds are sharing disquisitions of the soul."
The Ensemble (2018) Aja Gabel "I often admire novels that are platforms for their writers' own stories, upon which their own singular character, with its own singular history, is carefully incised. This, however, is a novel of a different, more expansive, and altogether more electrifying kind. Aja Gabel contains at least four complete human beings inside her, and I'm guessing countless others. She knows these people down to their cells, and she gives all of herself to them."
Wonderblood (2018) Julia Whicker "A richly imagined broken world, one whose land, customs, history, and people are so sharply conveyed that they seem almost to have been incised into the page. I admire Wonderblood for its absorbing and unsettling story, for the uncanny beauty of its prose, but above all else for the daring of its tone, which begins in pitch darkness and brightens not to white but to a more lustrous black."
The Infinite Future (2018) Tim Wirkus "The Infinite Future is uniquely pleasurable. Again and again it changes the terms of its telling--wrapping stories within stories and narrators within narrators, enclosing the mystical in the earthly and the fantastic in the realistic....Wirkus has a gift for maintaining a story's equilibrium, and with each new narrative layer he explores, I found myself instantly reinvested in the proceedings."
Tornado Weather (2017) Deborah E Kennedy "Deborah Kennedy's vision is as clear as her embrace is wide. With Tornado Weather, she has given us a novel that startles and surprises from the first page to the last, turning our heads again and again."
In the Mean Time (2010) Paul Tremblay "In the Mean Time is a formidable collection, as disquieting as it is beautiful."
