Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a National Book Award finalist. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Tin House, among others. His new novel, The Unnamed, was published in January 2010. He lives in New York.
The Second Coming (2024) Garth Risk Hallberg "Garth Risk Hallberg's The Second Coming is a sprawling, aching, ultimately hopeful account of a father's love for a daughter and a daughter's defiance of that love when all too often it manifests as dysfunction. Hallberg deals with the dilemma of parental inheritance with a light touch, and the grace that finally descends on the Aspern clan is not only transformative but triumphant."
Help Wanted (2024) Adelle Waldman "In Help Wanted, the tragic heroes of the gig economy, full of dreams and sob stories and what-if scenarios, concoct a plot to better their lives. Yet even as frustrations mount and their plot goes sideways, hope never dies. Adelle Waldman delivers both a brilliant diagnosis and a moving account of retail workers hidden in plain sight all around us, whose full humanity has never been so richly displayed or touchingly rendered."
Wellness (2023) Nathan Hill "Nathan Hill has synthesized about a hundred years of that distinctly American delusion called self-improvement, and Wellness is the whip smart and gently comic result. Epic in scope, domestic in scale, it's a book that defies anyone to read it and willingly pick up a dumbbell or worry about counting steps ever again. Hill has released you, America, and his book will leave you not only fortified but amazed."
Whalefall (2023) Daniel Kraus "Brave, bold, epic, propulsive. Whalefall is a deeply moving thriller that holds a planet's worth of hope in the pit of its stomach."
Return to Valetto (2023) Dominic Smith "The revelations of Return to Valetto--those of history, and those of the heart--unfold with meticulous grace in Dominic Smith's stately and majestic novel. With fascists breathing down our necks anew, Return to Valetto could not be more timely, but it is the fine writing and high drama that make it so memorable, and so moving."
The Weight (2023) Jeff Boyd "Like Binx Bolling, the hero of Walker Percy's classic The Moviegoer, Jeff Boyd is on a search. And like Binx's, the object of that search is too essential and nebulous and all-encompassing to name. It has to do with love, of course, and human connection, and ultimate truths, but in Boyd's case it extends past the final limits of racism to touch upon the universal existential terrors of an Everyman. Boyd has August Wilson's scope and James Alan McPherson's human heart, but his literary touchstones are wide and catholic, and his passion and intelligence inform every page of his novel The Weight. I think of this book as the announcement of a big new talent and the start of a long and meaningful career."
Sugar Street (2022) Jonathan Dee "This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing. Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number."
Last Resort (2022) Andrew Lipstein "Last Resort is a strange and beguiling book about the contrivances, connivances and mysteries of creation, with an especially visceral depiction of male anxiety and an absolutely blistering end. A terrific debut."
Joan is Okay (2022) Weike Wang "Weike Wang takes us into the heart of the matter: death, dysfunction, xenophobia, misogyny, and the chronic misapprehension that passes between people of good intentions. The miracle that emerges, then, is just how funny this book is, how compassionate and visionary."
White Ivy (2020) Susie Yang "White Ivy is magic and a necessary corrective both to the stereotypes and the pieties that too easily characterize the immigrant experience. Most pleasing of all is the story of Ivy Lin, a daring young woman in search of herself, and not soon to be forgotten."
Homeland Elegies (2020) Ayad Akhtar "A triumph. Akhtar rages, he sings, he indicts, he falls in love, he sorrows, he dreams, he mourns, he transcribes! - and finally he transmutes injustice into the sublimest art."
Before You Go (2020) Tommy Butler "Hats off to that brave soul daring to write what might be called speculative literary fiction, and willing to venture answers to questions beyond even those of life & death. Tommy Butler’s debut novel Before You Go has a big beating heart and a mind all its own."
Kings County (2020) David Goodwillie "Goodwillie captures the rapturous soul of a bygone Brooklyn: the songs, the sex, the bars, the youth! And then the churn of relentless change, the broken hearts, the crushing realities. But it is the searing burn of discovery that makes Kings County a true and continual delight."
Antkind (2020) Charlie Kaufman "A full-throttled absurdist revolt against the constraints of the audience-tested mass entertainment, Antkind is unbridled Kaufman energy and wit coming up against the limits of the imagination itself: discursive, subversive, and genuinely funny."
Enter the Aardvark (2020) Jessica Anthony "Enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable."
The Wall (2018) John Lanchester "A dystopian distillation of our troubled times, and an allegorical glimpse at a still-grimmer future, The Wall reminds us that even as politics corrupts and destroys and presses on undiminished, the soul erupts in surprising places to act as counterpoint and resistance. This patient, direct, suspenseful novel is one such eruption, and a civilizing comfort amid the simmering bloodlust."
Rough Animals (2018) Rae DelBianco "A wild and alive debut, full of grit, gunfire, blood, and bad news. Rough Animals is as phantasmagoric as McCarthy and as pitiless as Jim Thompson. A rare treat."
Vengeance (2018) Zachary Lazar "Zachary Lazar's Vengeance is an elegant act of imagination and empathy that shows just how easily these can curdle, sometimes irretrievably, into skepticism and self-doubt. It's the story of a writer with a haunted past who meets, on a visit to Angola, a prisoner currently serving a life sentence for murder. Does he belong in prison, or is he, as he credibly claims, an innocent man? Or is the truth only ever a matter of speculation and the stories we choose to tell?"
This Could Hurt (2018) Jillian Medoff "All too often, characters in novels live in that rarified novel-world where real-life concerns like jobs and bills and the sudden vital need for a flowchart simply don’t exist. Jillian Medoff remedies this with a refreshingly authentic portrait of corporate America and the varied souls that dream, conspire, flounder and triumph there, and this she does with a great deal of affection and charm. A very enjoyable book."
Pretend I'm Dead (2015) Jen Beagin "Pretend I'm Dead by Jen Beagin is like one of those old-fashioned classics by Charles Bukowski or John Fante or, more recently, Denis Johnson, a shambling, lyrical dispatch from the dive bars and the flop houses where the downtrodden, divested of hope, livelihood, good health, and any number of other markers of respectability, nevertheless retain full possession of their hearts and minds, their integrity, their souls, too, perhaps--and no one nearly as triumphantly as Mona Boyle, Beagin's heart-breaking hero & alter-ego. Rare is the encounter with such a frank and unflinching voice reporting from life on the edge, and rarer still the humor and compassion that Beagin manages to locate in some of the country's, and the psyche's, darkest corners. This book invaded my dreams, took over my conversation, and otherwise seduced me totally."
(b.1975)
