Books

The Antidote

The gorgeous language and fantastical premises Karen Russell (Orange World and Other Stories, Swamplandia!) employs are always animated by deep feeling and big ideas. The Antidote (only her second novel!), shares that depth and heft: It opens with the April 1935 “Black Sunday” dust storm enveloping the tiny town of Uz, Nebraska. Uz is home to a prairie witch, known as the Antidote, who possesses the ability to store memories that her neighbors would rather not retain themselves. But when the darkness and terror passes, the Antidote discovers that it has blown away all the memories she’d kept for the townspeople along with their topsoil. Russell unspools a story of holding on to community through hardship that’s also an investigation of what has been omitted from American memory, and how we could reclaim it.

We Love You, Bunny

By Mona Awad

Those who read Mona Awad’s funny, freaky Bunny and were left wondering “WTF just happened?!” will be thrilled to hear that Awad is granting us a follow-up. It’s unclear whether the action of We Love You, Bunny will take place before or after Samantha Heather Mackey and the Bunnies’ MFA cohort at Warren University, but for those who can’t get a copy of Bunny in time, the book purports to work as a standalone as well.

Twist

By Colum McCann

The Dublin-born author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, for which he won the National Book Award, Colum McCann returns to his Irish roots in his eighth novel, Twist, which tells the story of Irish journalist Anthony Fennell’s reportage on the underwater fiber-optic cables that transfer the world’s host of digital information. Repairing these cables to maintain the flow of the vital data they carry requires fast action by engineer divers, one of whom Anthony forms a close connection with as he accompanies a cable repair ship on a mission off the west coast of Africa.

Theft

By Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah (Afterlives) returns with his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. Set at the turn of the 21st century in Tanzania, Theft follows Karim, Fauzia and Badar, three young people lacking support from their families attempting to make their lives in rapidly changing Zanzibar.

Mỹ Documents

By Kevin Nguyen

Mỹ Documents takes place in a contemporary America where the government is forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. High schooler Duncan and first year college student Jen are both detained with their mother, but their journalist half-sibling Ursula remains on the outside and begins reporting on their situation. The author of New Waves, Kevin Nguyen is a journalist, and he brings a sharp sense of journalistic ethics to this tale, which also reflects the U.S. government’s ongoing detention of immigrants and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

Flashlight

By Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, a story of power and perspective set at a 1980s performing arts high school, won the National Book Award in 2019 for the way it undid and upended narrative expectations. We have high hopes for Flashlight, and we know not to expect a straightforward structure. Beginning with a tragedy befalling a father and his 10-year-old daughter, the book branches out into different family members’ perspectives and peers into Korean, American and Japanese history.

Atmosphere

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid and all things space and astronomy will find themselves united in anticipation of the bestselling author’s upcoming release, Atmosphere: A Love Story. The Daisy Jones & The Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Malibu Rising author’s latest complex protagonist is one of the first women to train with NASA in the 1980s. Of course, with space travel, the stakes are incredibly high, and she and her fellow candidates will be tested to the max in this suspenseful romantic drama.

The Paris Express

By Emma Donoghue

The author of Room also writes some seriously good historical fiction, like 2023’s Learned by Heart, which fictionalized the youth of Anne Lister. The Paris Express, set later in the 19th century, follows a large cast of characters, each with their own reasons for taking a train to Paris—one of whom is an anarchist with a plan to derail the fated trip.

Spent

By Alison Bechdel

Though she’s best known for her graphic memoir Fun Home, which became a musical, and her long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” Alison Bechdel hasn’t stopped making hits: We loved her clever, thoughtful 2021 graphic memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and we’re excited for what she has in store in Spent: A Comic Novel. The subtitle indicates that this may be her most fictionalized endeavor in years, but the characters are recognizable as a version of Bechdel herself, and some familiar figures for “Dykes to Watch Out For” fans.

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One

By Kristen Arnett

Send in the clowns! Kristen Arnett (With Teeth, Mostly Dead Things) is back and more absurd than ever. Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One follows Cherry Hendricks, a struggling clown for hire who is finding her life to be more a cause for tears than hilarity. Then she meets an older magician, Margot the Magnificent, and becomes both inspired and smitten. If this sounds familiar, you might have recently watched Chappell Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” music video (or is that just me?), which will certainly get you in the spirit of things.

Send in the clowns! Kristen Arnett (With Teeth, Mostly Dead Things) is back and more absurd than ever. Stop Me if You've Heard This One follows Cherry Hendricks, a struggling clown for hire who is finding her life to be more a cause…

When We Were Real

By Daryl Gregory

It’s become something of a universal bit to declare “we live in a computer simulation” when faced with the latest nonsense of our age, but trust Daryl Gregory (Revelator, Spoonbenders) to take that idea and spin it into something more profound than pithy. Best friends JP and Dulin are heading out on a road trip—to see all the weird anomalies that popped up in our world after a mysterious announcement that our reality is merely a digital construction.

Vanishing World

By Ginny Tapley Takemori, By Sayaka Murata

In 2018, Sayaka Murata’s first novel to be translated into English, Convenience Store Woman, was a surprise hit, becoming remarkably popular for a book so openly critical of social precepts in a way that was both culturally specific to Japan and also resonant for an American audience and across the globe. Murata took her quietly radical ideas about marriage, sex and conformity and only made them louder in Earthlings. Vanishing World appears to go even further, set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples is taboo.

Totally and Completely Fine

By Elissa Sussman

The author of the BookTok-viral celebrity romance Funny You Should Ask will return to the world of that novel with Totally and Completely Fine. Widow Lauren Parker is the sister of Funny You Should Ask’s movie star Gabe, and when she meets actor Ben Walsh on the set of Gabe’s latest movie, she feels ready to love again for the first time since her husband’s death. But of course, his fame and her life as a small-town single mother are sure to complicate matters.

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