Jonathan Dee is the author of six novels, most recently A THOUSAND PARDONS. He is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a frequent contributor to Harper's, and a former senior editor of The Paris Review. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the New School.
Last House (2024) Jessica Shattuck "A family is a pledge that the world isn't ending, at least not yet. Jessica Shattuck shows us, in a saga as epic and sweeping as it is domestic and intimate, how one generation's best intentions cast shadows in the lives of the next."
On the Tobacco Coast (2024) (Chesapeake Bay , book 4) Christopher Tilghman "Tilghman's four-volume chronicle of the Mason family, having spanned centuries and continents, ends, as it must, around a dinner table-a domestic idyll at which the ghosts of a brutal history, both national and familial, keep trying to pull up a chair. A moving capstone to one of the epic projects in recent American literature."
Last Acts (2024) Alexander Sammartino "A sad, hilarious father-son redemption story that touches every American third rail: guns, drugs, religion . . . Sammartino is heir to the 20th century American masters: DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, Wallace. He's as smart and as funny and as electric a stylist and as spot-on about the dark societal carnival we're all doing our best to survive."
House of Cotton (2023) Monica Brashears "Mystical, carnal, and written in fire. House of Cotton ushers Monica Brashears straight onto American lit's mainstage, which she should grace for a long time."
Hammer (2022) Joe Mungo Reed "Reed's great gift is to write about the contemporary art market, about the relationship between beauty and rapacious wealth, without cynicism or easy satire. By the time you finish Hammer, you'll feel like it all makes a kind of sense. Not to mention that - as one of Reed's characters observes, and as Hammer amply demonstrates - there are way more destructive things the super-rich could be doing with their money."
Tides (2022) Sara Freeman "A tale of internal exile, of a woman on the lam from her own loved ones and from the memories that cage her. Tides is a marvel -- lyrical and suspenseful at the same time."
Crazy Sorrow (2021) Vince Passaro "A series of intoxicating flings, against the backdrop of a grand romance: That’s the tagline not only for George and Anna but for fin du millennium New York as well, in the epic Crazy Sorrow. Vince Passaro has a cartographer’s eye, an elephant’s memory, and a poet’s heart."
Afterparties (2021) Anthony Veasna So "Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah — you can count on one hand the authors of this century whose debut short-story collections are as prodigious and career-making as Afterparties. This lovingly specific, history-haunted comedy of Cambodian-American manners should put Anthony Veasna So on smart readers' radar to stay."
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020) Christopher Beha "Beha is a sneaky-great plot-maker and thinker; by the time he wraps up this compassionate 21st-century tale of ambitious people looking for somewhere to place their faith?religion, statistics, love, money, country?you can see the clouds starting to gather into the moral Category 5 we’re currently enduring."
If I Had Your Face (2020) Frances Cha "A provoking, ultimately inspiring tale of women pushing back against oppressive customs both traditional and new . . . Frances Cha, like her quartet of narrators, has a rebel’s heart."
Weather (2020) Jenny Offill "Novelists don't need to dream the end of the world anymore they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today's few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it's as if they are all cut from one diamond."
American Pop (2019) Snowden Wright "The House of Forster is built on bubbles; watching each wealth-addled generation try not to blow the family fortune and/or disgrace its name provides not only excellent Southern Gothic fun but a panoramic tour of the American Century."
Lost Empress (2018) Sergio de la Pava "De la Pava himself can seem like an avenging angel, at least for those with a certain view of what ails contemporary American literature."
The Little Clan (2018) Iris Martin Cohen "Iris Martin Cohen's The Little Clan nails 21st-century New York: the antic collision of old and new money, old and new art, old and new pretensions. Funny and sharp-eyed and just as fond as it is satiric."
Song of a Captive Bird (2018) Jasmin Darznik "Farrokhzad’s determination to live freely and authentically, and to express that determination in her art, proved unbearable to the fundamentalist state. Darznik brings her own poetic sensibility to bear on this tragic, but ultimately inspiring, act of creative remembrance."
