Two-Step Devil (2024) Jamie Quatro "Jamie Quatro's Two-Step Devil compelled me with almost supernatural force. I could not turn away. It's a book that wrestles with the biggest questions about sin and salvation, violation and agency--striding fearlessly into narrative and political terrain almost always treated with knee-jerk, agenda-driven simplicity--but the pulse at the core of this breathtaking novel is unequivocally human, tender and alive--formally daring and utterly riveting."
Peggy (2024) Rebecca Godfrey and Leslie Jamison "Peggy had often been misunderstood and disrespected, seen as a slutty dilettante who threw her money around. But Rebecca [Godfrey] took Peggy seriously, as a woman full of wit, savvy, and passion, hungry for experience and purpose and with an eye for art, and for people, that others couldn't yet appreciate."
Women and Children First (2024) Alina Grabowski "Alina Grabowski is a writer of startling wisdom and deep humanity, and Women and Children First reads like a shimmering kaleidoscope of grief and longing, a magic lantern casting spectral illumination across dark surfaces of loss. Its pages smell like watermelon body lotion and low tide and fresh snow; they sing with moments of insight that took my breath away. Every voice is so compelling that I never wanted to leave it, but each new voice immediately seduced me-brought me into its own powerful portrait of intimacy and yearning, the cruelties and compassions that compose an adolescence, or a marriage. Together, these voices collectively summon the chorus of a ruptured community, gesturing toward those spiderwebs of attachment and betrayal that unmake us, and those moments of grace that ambush and rearrange us all."
Loneliness & Company (2024) Charlee Dyroff "Charlee Dyroff's Loneliness & Company is a sharply etched and strangely propulsive story about artificial intelligence and authentic feeling: a canny, tender exploration of the stories we tell about our bonds with each other, and the realities we'd rather not face about our bonds with the technologies that shape our days."
The Sky Was Ours (2024) Joe Fassler "The Sky Was Ours is an immersive fever dream of a novel, beautifully written and boldly imagined. It's a dark fairy tale with a gripping human pulse; attuned to global crisis but also rooted deeply in the psyches of its characters, animated by their grief and most of all by their longing - longing for wonder, escape, transcendence, hope for our profit-rotted world; a longing that soars through these pages with an energy and tenderness utterly its own."
The Hearing Test (2024) Eliza Barry Callahan "Eerie and tender and utterly consuming, The Hearing Test has built an entirely new world from the materials of the one we know. It takes you to a restaurant called the void, Il Vuoto, and serves you its primal, beguiling sustenance: a nourishment of pauses, estrangement, and bewilderment. The voice here is wise and wry and wondering; in its fresh and faltering silences are frequencies I've never heard before. From the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to keep reading Eliza Barry Callahan forever."
Martyr! (2024) Kaveh Akbar "I disappeared into Martyr! - utterly consumed by it - and then it returned me to the world with wider eyes, a swollen heart, and sharpened nerve endings. This is a book that understands the strangeness and grief and ecstasy of being alive; that understands the strange envelope of a body, the proximate sublime on the bare chest of a beloved; the baffled wonderment of sobriety, the grief that spans every scale of the human project - and, more than anything, the impossible salvation of love persisting not despite but through these materials. Kaveh Akbar writes with the staggering entirety of his mind and heart, and Martyr! will stay in my soul for good - a fever dream, a reckoning, a heartbreak, a shattering and mending, a delight - its double-helix of dreams and conversation now part of my own DNA for good."
Thirst for Salt (2023) Madelaine Lucas "Madelaine Lucas's Thirst for Salt gripped me immediately, with the tender acuity of its voice and the propulsive electricity of the relationship at its core: a love affair so richly and attentively imagined it carries the grace and gravity of memory itself. It's a novel whose momentum emerges not from melodrama but from the primal mysteries of human intimacy: How do people come together and come apart? Every once in a while, a novel enters my life that I know is destined to become part of my bloodstream. Thirst for Salt is one of those novels and I'm so excited to think of it finding its way to readers who will be changed by it."
Flight (2022) Lynn Steger Strong "Breathtakingly propulsive and insightful, Flight gripped me from the very first page and didn't let go. Strong is a writer who makes me feel reconfigured, more sharply attuned to the business of being alive; as if I have nerve endings that didn't exist before reading her. Flight is a story about how we lose and find each other again - and how this finding is never done, because we are, all of us, many selves at once."
Virtue (2021) Hermione Hoby "Hermione Hoby's Virtue kept me rapt from the very first page, intoxicated by the richness and surprise of its language, its wit, its keen attention to the layers of friction and attachment lurking beneath the surface of every conversation. Hoby’s gaze is both cutting and generous: razor-sharp about social pieties without ever stooping to caricature. More than anything, Virtue illuminates the messiness of being human and trying to be good."
Fierce Little Thing (2021) Miranda Beverly-Whittemore "With its propulsive momentum and its lush world, Fierce Little Thing kept me up late at night and splintered into my dreams. I experienced this novel with my whole body--tasted its sourdough, smelled its hand-dug latrines, heard its crackling pine needles and whispered secrets--and felt charged and changed by its explorations of the ways our adult lives keep circling the wounds and betrayals of childhood--as well as its sharp, tender insistence on the ways darkness and beauty sit side by side."
Objects of Desire (2021) Clare Sestanovich "Clare Sestanovich’s stories compelled me like gravity, and offered sharp, surprising, singular bursts of grace."
Mother Daughter Widow Wife (2020) Robin Wasserman "Mother Daughter Widow Wife is an utterly enthralling piece of music, sharp and soulful and ferociously insightful all at once, uncompromising in its willingness to look at the dark pulse lurking inside every love. This singular, spellbinding novel is not only an investigation of how female intimacy plays out across landscapes shaped by male power and desire, but an exploration of identity itself—the complicated alchemies of narrative, memory, desire, enthrallment and betrayal that compose us all."
Fraternity (2020) Benjamin Nugent "Reading Benjamin Nugent’s stories doesn’t resemble any other experience I can think of?the paragraphs of Fraternity pivot easily from mantra to gut punch to slapstick to heartbreak, sometimes swelling into tenderness so acute it makes me avert my eyes, it feels so private and human and true."
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You (2020) Kyle McCarthy "Everyone Knows How Much I Love You is breathless and precise at once, utterly gripping, animated by the propulsive unfolding of hungers that can't be controlled or fully fathomed. It aches with insight and longing. It seduced me from the very first page with the pull of its own fierce gravity, like a darkly turning planet--its atmosphere swirling with mysterious, combustible desires; its truths merciless and bone-deep."
The Book of V. (2020) Anna Solomon "Anna Solomon’s The Book of V. is a novel as fierce as its heroines, traversing centuries to explore the tentacles of desire and despair that can anchor the psyche or explode it. It’s a book that understands how many different women live in every woman: the lover, the mother, the artist, the rebel, the friend, the caregiver, the beast, the survivor. Solomon’s imagination is as thrilling as it is nuanced - gripping the senses and the heart at once, telling a story that vibrates with urgency and truth."
Where Reasons End (2019) Yiyun Li "This book finds singular language for inexpressible grief, while admitting the limits of that language at every turn...it's a book about infinite sadness and desperate imagination, it charts the strange landscape of their overlap; it's humble about the mystery of others, and the edges of what we can ever know about them... It's one of the most moving books I've ever read."
A Separation (2017) Katie Kitamura "I read it quickly, but didn't stop thinking about it for a long time once I was done."
In Every Way (2015) Nic Brown ""In Every Way" is breathtaking. It's full of love and mistakes. Its intimacies resist categories and caution. It surges with a strange, stubborn hope. This book has a pulse as close and insistent as the sound of your own heart in your ears."
