110 Stories (2002) New York Writes After September 11 edited by Ulrich Baer
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Sam Lipsyte recommends
Five-Star Stranger (2024) Kat Tang "Five-Star Stranger carries its comic premise to surprising and intriguing places. This is a wise, funny and affecting novel, and a memorable debut."
Ways and Means (2024) Daniel Lefferts "Ways and Means is wise, funny, ribald, and suspenseful. Daniel Lefferts moves beautifully through narrative modes, including lavish, obscenely hilarious description, nuanced psychological portraiture, and, when the time is right, propulsive thrillerdom. A love story, a satire, a noir, and a cautionary tale, this novel is a terrific debut."
Radiant Heat (2024) Sarah-Jane Collins "Radiant Heat is sharp, intense and propulsive. Sarah-Jane Collins weaves a story of environmental catastrophe and its aftermath with a compelling mystery that raises meaningful questions about the world and the self. An impressive debut."
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (2023) Molly McGhee "The fiction of Molly McGhee is funny, freaky, intellectually bold and always from the heart. McGhee has seen enough of the world to know that you've got to start some trouble in it. She also knows that seeing the humor in our personal foibles and social absurdities (cruel as the latter often are), will always be a powerful way to commiserate with your fellow humans. Here is a writer who is keenly aware of what we've all got coming, but in the meantime is never afraid to laugh and live and fight on the page."
A Quitter's Paradise (2023) Elysha Chang "This is a deep, propulsive, poignant, and unflinching portrayal of a family in all of its mystery. Elysha Chang writes with remarkable precision, humor, and grace, while knowing full well there are no easy answers when it comes to love and grief."
Flux (2023) Jinwoo Chong "Flux is a powerful debut - deft and fluid, sharp and dreamy. Employing the vehicle of a breakneck sci-fi thriller, Jinwoo Chong explores interstitial spaces of ethnicity, sexuality, trauma, pop cultural memory and, finally, time itself, with wit, tenderness and alacrity. The result is provocative and deeply moving."
Mount Chicago (2022) Adam Levin "Mount Chicago is a bawdy, mournful, deeply funny, metafictionally ingenious, psychotic, ridiculous and majestic shaggy dog joy. When Levin leads the way, every rabbit hole is a glory hole for the mind, and a secret tunnel to provisional bliss and permanent wisdom. Also recommended for parrot lovers."
Shmutz (2022) Felicia Berliner "Shmutz is a provocative and propulsive debut. Felicia Berliner comes to this story with a deep tenderness for her characters and a keen feel for the pain that arises when desire collides with custom. Shmutz probes the desperation of being caught in systems, both religious and secular, bent on telling everybody, but especially women, who they should be and what they should want."
Golden Age (2022) Wang Xiaobo "Golden Age, long admired in many circles, may prove a revelation to readers outside China. Wang Xiaobo steeped himself in the literatures of East and West, and the blending of influences - including Proust and Twain - makes for a searingly funny and fearless narration full of brilliant head-long riffs on sex, time, history, and the terrifying absurdities of the Cultural Revolution. Bawdy, earthy, cerebral, outrageous, bleakly hilarious and off-handedly brave, this novel is like nothing else."
Last Resort (2022) Andrew Lipstein "Last Resort is a witty, propulsive and often mesmerizing novel, a kind of creative-class thriller, full of wry social observation and subtle emotional textures, and it builds beautifully toward a bracing showdown between knowingness and self-knowledge. With its insular milieu and quality lit namechecks, not to mention its quasi-satirical anxiety of auto-fictional influence, Andrew Lipstein plays a risky game, and he plays it superbly, with feeling."
Fuccboi (2022) Sean Thor Conroe "Blazes a sonic trail through the tangles of experience. A contemporary kunstleroman - a coming of age of an artist. So much about the struggle to find a nourishing and communally beneficial but still honest and not self-suppressing way to be a man."
Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit (2021) Mark Leyner "With Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, Mark Leyner -- comic virtuoso, avant-garde literary tummler, trope-exploder extraordinaire -- has outdone himself. After more than three decades, he remains the funniest and bravest of writers, not to mention the one least interested in stale conventions of fiction. We are lucky to have Leyner. Without his books to read, I probably would have enucleated my eyes with a melon-baller a long time ago."
Fraternity (2020) Benjamin Nugent "From the already legendary opening story, Fraternity only deepens on every front: humor, compassion, syntactical intensity, observational brilliance, and satirical vision. Benjamin Nugent has bided his time, and the wait was worth it. This moving, daring and frequently astonishing debut will be remembered - and emulated - for many years to come."
Pizza Girl (2020) Jean Kyoung Frazier "Pizza Girl is a funny and moving debut, full of wry observation and deep humanity. Jean Kyoung Frazier’s incredibly winning protagonist delivers laughter and grief with all the toppings. A wonderful novel from a new writer with talent and heart."
The Municipalists (2019) Seth Fried "A thinking person's comic thriller, The Municipalists is a joy ride and a meditation both. Seth Fried is the consummate urban planner of a novelist, providing us with exciting thoroughfares of action as well as quiet gardens of feeling. And the story stars, among other characters, a drunk and vain (but ultimately loveable) computer. What else could a fiction dweller ask for? A wonderful debut novel."
We Can Save Us All (2018) Adam Nemett "Adam Nemett is the kind of smart and the kind of funny we need right now. We Can Save Us All has the savvy, dangerous feel of early Don DeLillo."
Early Work (2018) Andrew Martin "What a debut! Early Work is one of the wittiest, wisest (sometimes silliest, in the best sense), and bravest novels about wrestling with the early stages of life and love, of creative and destructive urges, I’ve read in a while. The angst of the young and reasonably comfortable isn’t always pretty, but Andrew Martin possesses the prose magic to make it hilarious, illuminating, moving."
Darker with the Lights on (2017) David Hayden "Here are stories to read again and again. Here is language to live in. David Hayden is a serious force."
Perennials (2017) Mandy Berman "Perennials is a sharp, crushingly observant, and empathetic debut, full of wit and tragedy, and good for all seasons."
A Little More Human (2017) Fiona Maazel "Listen, skip the blurbs and just buy the damn book. Fiona Maazel is one of the funniest and finest we've got."
Spaceman of Bohemia (2017) Jaroslav Kalfař "Spaceman of Bohemia represents the fiery, funny launch of an exciting new voice. Jaroslav Kalfar, like a good literary astronaut, finds levity in gravity, and vice versa."
All Back Full (2017) Robert Lopez "[Lopez'f fiction] bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but [his]powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own."
Dept. of Speculation (2014) Jenny Offill "Gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways."
Middle Men (2013) Jim Gavin "Jim Gavin's stories are wise and funny and not at all afraid of the dark, or the light. Middle Men is a very powerful debut."
Baby & Other Stories (2010) Paula Bomer "These stories bleed, yes, but that's because they brawl. The real houswives of Bomerworld break themselves and break your heart and yet never completely lose their soulful dignity."
Firework (2010) Eugene Marten "There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten's prose."
Buffalo Lockjaw (2009) Greg Ames "Buffalo Lockjaw, like its charming, bitter screw-up of a narrator, reaches finally for larger meaning, and succeeds. . . . A brazen and tender book about a city and a scene, a mother and a son, and the beauty and pain of several kinds of love."
Trance (2005) Christopher Sorrentino "...scathing, gripping and profound, this book is a meditation and a provocation..."
Us (2005) Michael Kimball "Michael Kimball never ceases to astonish. He is a hero of contemporary fiction."
(b.1968)
