Idle Grounds (2025) Krystelle Bamford "To read Krystelle Bamford's astonishing debut is to be perpetually conflicted, like the child cousins it follows, between tearing at breakneck speed through the forest of its gorgeous pages to find out what will happen next, and deliberating with delirious languor, stopping to pick up, turn over, and marvel at each wryly glorious description, each exquisite joke. Idle Grounds left me like a kid with a dreadful yet delicious secret who tells everyone, I know something you don't know! - but I can't tell; you'll have to find out for yourself."
Sweet Fury (2025) Sash Bischoff "A whirlwind of a debut, Sweet Fury is arch yet artful - an ecstatic, ekphrastic, high/low re-examination of F. Scott Fitzgerald's darkest romance, set in the roaring 2020s."
The Magnificent Ruins (2024) Nayantara Roy "Shakespearean in scope and cinematic in vision, The Magnificent Ruins is a rare feast of a novel about the power, burden, and gift of inheritances both concrete and intangible. I read it with hunger - absorbed by Lila De's story, invested in her family's dynamics, and craving complete immersion in the colors, flavors, and politics of the complex Kolkata they call home - and finished it utterly satisfied. Nayantara Roy writes as her heroine lives: with courage and devotion, intelligence and skill."
City of Night Birds (2024) Juhea Kim "An ecstatic kunstlerroman - meticulously researched, brutally frank, and deliciously glamorous, City of Night Birds enraptures as thoroughly as the ballerina at its beating heart. The artistry possessed by this novel's sublimely gifted heroine is rivaled only by that of her author. Brava, Juhea Kim!"
Mystery Lights (2024) Lena Valencia "B movie aesthetics meet the cinematic splendor of the desert in these ten clever, neatly crafted, wryly stylized short stories. Against the backdrop of their desolate and often haunted landscapes, Lena Valencia's characters vividly come to life."
The Light Pirate (2022) Lily Brooks-Dalton "I read this book in a whirlwind, voracious as the hurricanes at its heart. Lily Brooks-Dalton writes with the kind of intricate sensitivity that leaves one grateful to be - faultily, flimsily, adaptably, temporarily - human. Harrowing, tender, and urgent, The Light Pirate is a novel of global scope and exquisite intimacy."
Summer Fun (2021) Jeanne Thornton "Jeanne Thornton is a sorceress of a writer and, like the ritual at the heart of this book, Summer Fun is a singular and compassionate act of imaginative magic. A feast of contradictions at once funny and painful, tender and scathing, patriotic and radical, Summer Fun contains generations; our country; a world."
Restoration Heights (2019) Wil Medearis "Restoration Heights is many things: a thrilling whodunit, an unsentimental ode, and a nuanced portrait of a diverse cast of characters who live, breathe, play, and—most importantly—talk on the page with vitality. In Reddick, his painter protagonist, Wil Medearis has given us an unlikely Philip Marlowe of gentrifying Brooklyn. He navigates the city's labyrinthine power structures of class, race, and real estate with an artist's obsession for meaning-making. Restoration Heights is a contemporary story about a New York City so fresh you could leave a handprint in its concrete."
