C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel, but there is outrageous beauty.
Readers will savor this shrewdly trenchant take on the higher-ed experience.
If you’re going to narrate your novel from the point of view of a poet, you must be able to think like one, and this is where Do You Remember Being Born? achieves its greatest success.
Brendan Basham binds together myth and history in Swim Home to the Vanished, drawing inspiration from the Diné creation tale as well as what is known as the Long Walk—the U.S. government’s forced removal of the Navajo people from their ancestral lands.
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma writes beautifully about the stars and the people who watch them in her second novel, Digging Stars.
Even as it probes the author’s own family legacy, Undiscovered reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.”
Bryan Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion.
With blacked-out passages and beautiful, surreal images woven throughout the narrative, Justin Torres delivers a feverish, thrilling and envelope-pushing novel, bringing together several strands of both Latin American and queer literature.
Lethem unwinds his story through small vignettes: You can smell the urban petrichor of a fire hydrant’s spray on a blistering asphalt street and you can taste that first drop of cheesy grease dripping from a folded slice.
People Collide is an inventive and atmospheric body-swapping novel that raises questions about gender, desire, marriage and family dynamics.
Death Valley is an exhilarating meditation on death, life, survival and how we use stories to get us through it all.
In An Yu’s ethereal Ghost Music, a woman’s grip on her suffocating life loosens as she is drawn into a surreal world of unspoken secrets and ghostly experiences.
The Dream Builders is an elegant, intimate story about people adrift in a chaotic city, an unpredictable economy and a rapidly changing world. These characters long for home, belonging, stability and comfort, struggling to root themselves even as the ground shifts beneath them.
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