Lynn Steger Strong’s first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in 2016. Her nonfiction has been published by Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and others. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute.
When We Grow Up (2025) Angelica Baker "Sharply observed, sardonic, engaging, intimate, and evocative, When We Grow Up delves into the ways we try and fail to form and foster friendships, both before and after we know how to love well or thoughtfully. It confronts the damage that we cause, the violences we miss, as we bumble through discovering who we are. An exploration of how impossible it can feel, in the face of a world that seems so often invested in our imminent destruction, to want and know how to be good."
Nothing Serious (2025) Emily J Smith "Sharp, funny, engrossing and deeply felt, Emily Smith's Nothing Serious seduces with its yearning in a world that so often feels as if it has no space for yearning, compels and entrances with its questions and its mysteries, and satisfies with its humor and its honesty."
Dream State (2025) Eric Puchner "Lush, immersive, devastating, and stunningly alive, Dream State did the thing the very best novels do: pulled me relentlessly into its characters, its setting, concerns, losses, and triumphs, only to let me loose again with a sharper, clearer vision of the world outside."
Penitence (2025) Kristin Koval "Deeply humane, spiky, yearning, heartfelt, rendered in brisk and often stunning prose, Kristin Koval's Penitence poses so many rich and complicated questions about where and how guilt lives."
What Was Lost (2024) Melissa Connelly "Stunningly written, unerringly human, and deeply felt, Melissa Connelly's What Was Lost is everything I yearn for in a novel, a story about people that I love in all of their flawed messiness, trying to make sense of and move through the murk and ache of their pasts, to discover and assert who and what else they might be."
Love Can't Feed You (2024) Cherry Lou Sy "Love Can't Feed You is a stunningly written, devastating book about all manners of suspension, between countries, between parents, between identities, between what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a girl. Cherry Lou Sy is a brilliant and exacting observer of human uncertainty and desire and this book is an utter thrill."
How to Care for a Human Girl (2023) Ashley Wurzbacher "I loved this novel and its twisty, complicated, deeply loving and deeply alive characters. Come to be seduced by - and infuriated and moved and worried for - the Battle sisters and stay to re-consider all the various pressures, complexities, and powers that inhabiting a female body so often necessitates."
I Meant It Once (2023) Kate Doyle "Crystalline, funny, and richly alive, the stories in I Meant It Once thrilled me with their emotional acuity, their delicately nuanced portrayals of desire and intimacy, and their formal and syntactical dexterity and play."
The Absolutes (2023) Molly Dektar "The Absolutes is a mesmerizing, deeply felt portrait of one woman testing the moral limits of intimacy and obsession. In continually stunning prose, Dektar brings to life a thrilling exploration of love and sexual desire."
Old Enough (2023) Haley Jakobson "A deeply immersive, thought provoking and engaging exploration of identity and how and when we get the courage to be fully ourselves, Haley Jakobson's OLD ENOUGH is a novel about growing up, letting go, and learning to love and be loved on our own terms."
Maddalena and the Dark (2023) Julia Fine "Maddalena and the Dark is an ecstatic, immersive, layered and astonishingly rendered depiction of girlhood, ambition, violence, art, and desire."
Lucky Red (2023) Claudia Cravens "A thrilling and surprising story of deep human hunger and desire, of the ache that lives in all of us, and the sometimes violent lengths that we will go to feel seen and loved and understood."
Really Good, Actually (2023) Monica Heisey "Impossibly funny, endearingly felt, alive and rich and ultimately a story of trying not only to find one's self but to figure out how best to care for the people we love. I woke up both my husband and my dog laugh-crying while reading this book."
Shmutz (2022) Felicia Berliner "An engrossing, irreverent, deeply felt, and often funny story of a woman finding her place in her body, in her language, in her family, and in the wider world, Shmutz is perhaps the one thing I always want a book to be but seldom find: like nothing else I've ever read."
All the Things We Don't Talk About (2022) Amy Feltman "As contemporary and surprising as it is acutely felt, Amy Feltman's All The Things We Don't Talk About explores all the ways we get in our own way as we try and fail and try again to care for one another, how love that's flawed can still be fierce and true, worth fighting for."
End of the World House (2022) Adrienne Celt "A phantasmagoric thrill ride, Adrienne Celt's End of The World House is a story of apocalypse and art, but also of friendship and love and fighting for a sense of one's self in the face of modern day alienation and precarity. I love this book for the way it reconsiders how time and space function within novels, how it made me think about memory and art-making, and also, for its acuity and its heart."
Wildcat (2022) Amelia Morris "Wildcat is a sharp, funny, richly wrought take on trying to be both mother and whatever else one sets out to be. Immensely readable and deeply felt, Morris takes readers through the particularly wild and prickly world of a certain type of female friendship in all its complicated, shameful, and sometimes deeply satisfying forms."
The Second Season (2021) Emily Adrian "Sport and bodies and ambition, motherhood and womanhood and obsession: Emily Adrian's The Second Season masterfully gets you inside the particular thrill of sport whether it was ever capable of thrilling you before, and, deftly and warmly, pulls off the extraordinary feat of forcing you to root for a complicated, unapologetically ambitious fortysomething woman who also happens to be a mom. I loved this novel for its alacrity and its humanity and its humor, its attention to the body, and its willingness to let its characters pursue impossible-seeming dreams."
God Spare the Girls (2021) Kelsey McKinney "A story of sisters, family, faith, power, performance, secrets, and betrayal . . . a gorgeously written exploration of what it means to attempt to love and trust when the foundations upon which we’ve built those words have been torn down."
Highway Blue (2021) Ailsa McFarlane "If one of America’s many complicated attributes is its ability to let whole lives pass without being seen, Ailsa McFarlane reminds us that language can bring these same lives into stark and penetrating relief."
The Little Clan (2018) Iris Martin Cohen "Beautifully and intelligently written, The Little Clan explores what it is to try to make art as a woman, what it is to love, and what it is to want. It's about the seductions of reading and of other people and about what is left when life turns out other than we thought."
