James McBride's latest novel starts with a shooting: A broken down preacher shoots the local drug dealer, who dodges at the last minute, losing an ear — and kicking off a chain of consequences.
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Poet Natalie Diaz returns, interrogating the lasting effects of colonization asking: If a colonizer's influence can't be eradicated from a culture, how can you push back against violence and erasure?
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Lily King's latest novel — about a young woman choosing between two loves while trying to live a creative life — proves literature doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be absolutely compelling.
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Laura Zigman's compassionate, occasionally cringey and ultimately comforting new novel follows a middle-aged woman as she comes to terms with the ways her life hasn't turned out the way she'd hoped.
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In Quan Barry's charming novel, a team's luck changes when its members pledge themselves to the forces of eternal darkness by signing a spiral notebook with Emilio Estevez's face on it.
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Elizabeth Tallent's profound memoir explores writer's block and the allure of perfectionism. After her third short story collection came out in 1993, she didn't publish another book for 22 years.
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Katie Roiphe's journal-like entries are a series of brief-but-potent meditations on women, autonomy, independence, and power — on "women strong in public, weak in private" — including herself.
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In this new novel, Hilary Mantel brings her award-winning trilogy on the life of Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell to an end. And even though readers know how this story will end, it's still gripping.
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Elizabeth Tallent writes: "For the sake of perfection, I took a voice, my own, and twisted until mischance and error and experiment were wrung from it, and with them any chance of aliveness."
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Nino Cipri's magical multiworld adventure is set in a Swedish big box furniture store — no, not that one — where the showroom floor is prone to interdimensional wormholes that swallow shoppers.
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Erin Khar's son, at 12, asked her if she'd ever used drugs; this book is her answer: "When we write the truth, when we write about our experiences, we reflect back what it means to be a human being."
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Gish Jen weaves baseball into her inspired vision of how Americans bought into the fantasy of less stress and more free time. As speculative fiction goes, The Resisters hits close to the bone.
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Ken Liu is an acclaimed author, translator and poet who's won multiple awards for his short fiction. But his new collection doesn't come together — some stories are gorgeous, while others fall flat.
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Cathy Park Hong's essays serve as a major reckoning, pulling no punches as the author uses her life's flashpoints to give voice to a wider Asian American experience, one with cascading consequences.
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Teddy Wayne's new novel is a portrait of loneliness and male insecurity set against the backdrop of academia in the mid-1990s — and a precious, rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan.
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Mikki Kendall reveals how feminism has failed to consider populations too often excluded from the movement's banner — and forgotten to weigh the breadth of issues affecting the daily lives of many.
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Journalist Steven Levy's rich history of the social network traces Facebook's cascading crises to the worldview and early decisions of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
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Lawyer and journalist Adam Cohen explores five decades of Supreme Court opinions and comes to a rueful conclusion: These decisions have greatly exacerbated the space between rich and poor.
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Hannah Capin's new young adult novel is a modern-day retelling of Macbeth — centered on Lady Macbeth, now a high-schooler taking bloody revenge on the prep school boys who assaulted her at a party.
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Anna Burns gained fame in 2018 when her third novel, Milkman, won the Man Booker Prize. Little Constructions is her second novel, about a woman's vendetta against her violent, abusive brother-in-law.
(Image credit: Graywolf Press)
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