Small Rain (2024) Garth Greenwell "Greenwell writes tenderly about what it is to be subject to the crises of the body. Small Rain is a document of searching, an interrogation of love, care, and time, daring in its refusal to be abstract about the concrete facts of life and death."
Rejection (2024) Tony Tulathimutte "Tulathimutte is utterly inimitable. Rejection is fast and funny, a delirious convergence of the haptic and uncanny."
Colored Television (2024) Danzy Senna "Hilarious. Senna writes with tenderness about the debasement of aspiration, and she renders with acuity the mad place in the mind where fixation meets avoidance."
The Coin (2024) Yasmin Zaher "The Coin is a filthy, elegant book, keen on the fixations that overtake the body and upend a life."
The Anthropologists (2024) Ayşegül Savaş "Savas' prose is an X-ray-an acute portrait of the tender frequencies that make a life."
Great Expectations (2024) Vinson Cunningham "In Great Expectations, gospel is both a formative rhythm and a means of seduction. Cunningham writes thoughtfully about aspiration, fatalism, and the complexity of bearing witness to the creation of a mythology. I always look forward to reading his work."
Martyr! (2024) Kaveh Akbar "Kaveh Akbar renders the full spectrum of life, and death, with great beauty and care."
The New Naturals (2023) Gabriel Bump "The New Naturals explores how grief can become aspiration, how aspiration can become wildness. Bump writes so tenderly about the human error endemic to man-made things---community, partnership, love."
People Collide (2023) Isle McElroy "McElroy is sharp on the collaborative failures endemic to love, and the kind of oneness that creates separation. In People Collide, that separation is explored through the body with wonder and frankness."
Land of Milk and Honey (2023) C Pam Zhang "A sharp, sensual piece of art... This is an incredible exploration of whether it is possible to preserve one's art when answering to a master that is not yourself. When I read I'm always searching for pleasure, for the want, and this book helped me feel something."
Daughter (2023) Claudia Dey "In Daughter, Claudia Dey writes beautifully about the special claustrophobia of family and how it can rearrange both art and life."
Witness (2023) Jamel Brinkley "Brinkley's sentences are daggers. He writes about the shifting intimacies of community and love with wit and warmth."
Tomb Sweeping (2023) Alexandra Chang "Chang writes deftly about the wonder and volatility of becoming. In Tomb Sweeping, family (or lineage) is a matter of both predestiny and aberration."
The Lookback Window (2023) Kyle Dillon Hertz "The Lookback Window is a beautiful and heartbreaking tour de force. Hertz writes vengeance as salvation, refusal as a reclamation of humanity."
Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go (2023) Cleo Qian "LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO is sharp and unprecious about the sticky aspects of having flesh. This collection is riddled with outsiders of different shades, of people who stand back from their realities with secret and burning questions. There are really tender portraits of yearning, of the unsteady but precious entanglements of both platonic and romantic love. It's careful and soberly rendered, and it was a pleasure to read."
Small Worlds (2023) Caleb Azumah Nelson "The rhythms of Small Worlds are a feature of Nelson's quiet, particular ear and of a profound engagement with music. Nelson writes about closeness, with family, with lovers, with art, as careful, essential labour."
The Late Americans (2023) Brandon Taylor "Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body. In The Late Americans, the body is an instrument and an archive, vulnerable to the complicated violence of pleasure and work."
Gone to the Wolves (2023) John Wray "Gone To The Wolves is a love letter to metal that captures both its brutal kinetics and its nearness to the sublime."
Dances (2023) Nicole Cuffy "Dances is a compelling novel about the spiritual and bodily costs of the dogged pursuit of art."
Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah "Makes explicit how the spirit erodes as the body becomes currency. Adjei-Brenyah writes sharply about the economy of spectacle and the fickle alchemy between futility and hope."
A House for Alice (2023) Diana Evans "A House For Alice is a sharp appraisal of loss. Evans writes deftly about the shifting intimacies between family."
Take What You Need (2023) Idra Novey "Novey fully renders the inarticulable parts of artmaking - the antagonism of an artist's material, the pleasure in that difficulty, the way it troubles tidy ideas of legacy."
Central Places (2023) Delia Cai "Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home."
The Women Could Fly (2022) Megan Giddings "Megan Giddings' prose is brimming with wonder. The Women Could Fly is a candid appraisal of grief, inheritance, and the merits of unruliness."
The Furrows (2022) Namwali Serpell "In Namwali Serpell's hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss."
All This Could Be Different (2022) Sarah Thankam Mathews "Sarah Thankam Mathews' prose is undeniable and hyper attuned to the terrible privacy of the mind. In All This Could Be Different, she captures the sneaky, unsayable parts of longing and writes sharply about the long shadow of family."
The Rabbit Hutch (2022) Tess Gunty "'In The Rabbit Hutch, Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies - the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations."
Not Safe For Work (2022) Isabel Kaplan "A frank account of the inherent filthiness of leaning in. A study of the psychological and at times, literal, gymnastics that are required of striving women."
Dele Weds Destiny (2022) Tomi Obaro "Obaro writes beautifully about the complicated labor of friendship and parentage. Dele Weds Destiny explores caregiving as a kind of deferment, but also as discovery, of desire, of fury, of home."
Cult Classic (2022) Sloane Crosley "Cult Classic makes an uproarious time of romantic carnage. Crosley captures the brutal mirror of past love, the slow creep of ambivalence into dread, and the sense that a detour can easily become a life."
Half-Blown Rose (2022) Leesa Cross-Smith "This Close to Okay hits the ground running. Cross-Smith writes tenderly about the trial and error of intimacy and draws you in with enormous warmth and control."
Acts of Service (2022) Lillian Fishman "Acts of Service doesn't kiss you first; it gets right to it-depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye."
A Novel Obsession (2022) Caitlin Barasch "This book is a ride. An unruly study of fixation, performance, and the exquisite agony of anonymity."
Disorientation (2022) Elaine Hsieh Chou "Chou's pen is a scalpel. Disorientation addresses the private absurdities the soul must endure to get free, from tokenism, the quiet exploitation of well-meaning institutions, and the bondage that is self-imposed. Chou does it with wit and verve, and no one is spared."
The Colony (2022) Audrey Magee "A careful interrogation, The Colony expertly explores the mutability of language and art, the triumphs and failures inherent to the process of creation and preservation."
Brown Girls (2022) Daphne Palasi Andreades "An acute study of those tender moments of becoming. An ode to girlhood, inheritance, and the good trouble the body yields."
Objects of Desire (2021) Clare Sestanovich "Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life, and makes room for the pleasure and discovery that can be found in that ruin."
Milk Blood Heat (2021) Dantiel W Moniz "Milk Blood Heat is a seething excavation of want and human error. Moniz writes about the hard incongruities of intimacy with great urgency and tenderness."
