CJ HAUSER teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. She is the author of the novel The From-Aways and her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, and The Kenyon Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in Creative Writing from The Florida State University. She lives in Hamilton, New York.
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C J Hauser recommends
Some Strange Music Draws Me in (2024) Griffin Hansbury "God damn I loved this book. It's tough and sweet and smart about the places we come from and how we fight and flail to discover ourselves inside them. Griffin Hansbury has achingly captured the miracle of queer generations seeing and saving each other, without hiding the real struggle to connect across generations, our different times and traumas. A gorgeous novel readers will absolutely live inside of. I will be thinking about Max and Sylvia for a long time, they are now so dear to me."
Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife (2024) Eric Schlich "Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife is a hilarious sendup of the spaces where capitalism meets Christianity. But more than that, Eli Harpo is a character to root for as he tries to figure out which parts of his childhood were real, and which are a story that's been told for so long, and so famously, that no one seems to know where the family faith ends and the truth of Eli begins. Schlich is hilarious, compassionate, and cinematic on the page. His readers will gleefully follow Eli Harpo to the afterlife, or anywhere his search for the truth of himself takes him."
People Collide (2023) Isle McElroy "People Collide asks how the ambition, power, sweetness, and deep-feeling of our bodies gets policed by those who perceive us, and how we sometimes wind up hurting each other as a result. McElroy writes their characters with compassion for human pain and bumbling, but makes room for all our complexity and occasional grace too. This is the queer novel I didn't know I so badly needed."
The Invisible World (2023) Nora Fussner "Uncanny, moving, and gripping, The Invisible World has all the pleasures of a suspenseful thriller and all the art of a novel that asks: who has the ability to see beyond the everyday, and who has the privilege of ignoring those dimensions? It is at once a loving warm story about sensitive oddballs and a critique of the ways our complex human lives get collapsed in the name of legibility and, sometimes, entertainment. If UNReal and Twin Peaks had a baby, this novel would be it! I couldn't put it down."
Glassworks (2023) Olivia Wolfgang-Smith "A page turner, a work of gorgeous prose, a rollicking good story full of brilliant observations about the human experience and characters I sometimes forget I do not know in real life. ... If Elizabeth McCracken and David Mitchell had a love child, it might look a bit like this era-spanning, family and chosen-family following, marvel of a debut."
Dykette (2023) Jenny Fran Davis "Dykette turned me on and freaked me out in the best possible way! Imagine if Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were recast with two generations of very-online queer folks. Tense, smart, and thrilling . . . with a charismatic pug named Vivienne to boot."
How to Fall Out of Love Madly (2022) Jana Casale "Jana Casale so intimately captures how these smart, capable characters talk themselves into living lives that they don't enjoy. This book is funny and heartfelt--readers will root for all three of these women as they shake themselves off and start asking what might actually make them happy."
Fruiting Bodies (2022) Kathryn Harlan "Fruiting Bodies is abundant with dark and tender wonders. In the spirit of Shirley Jackson, Kathryn Harlan coaxes their characters' secret feelings into the open, where they bloom into compelling dramas. A book as loving as it is eerie, full of queer love and queer longing, I so enjoyed my stay in the deep woods of Harlan's imagination."
The Rock Eaters (2021) Brenda Peynado "The Rock Eaters is a book of wonders-- of aliens and floating children and sorrows as heavy as stones, yes. But more than that, Peynado is a mischievous trickster, an elegant conjurer, and an unflinching surgeon of the human heart as she speaks to us of longing, and rage, and loss, and wanting with freshness and fervor. A tremendously smart book full of art, and full of playfulness too."
Lake Life (2020) David James Poissant "Poissant has written us a book that reveals the danger and the pain, the humor and the love affairs of our everyday lives as a thrilling high stakes adventure. Every moment in Lake Life is so full of tension that I could never find a good place to stop reading...so I stayed up late to finish instead. Here is a dysfunctional family I was rooting for even as I clapped my hands over my face and watched them choose wrong again and again. A humane and wise book about a family getting into all sorts of trouble. I am obsessed with the Starlings."
