This short novel will offend some readers. Strange, because anyone who reads past the dedication should know what they’ve picked up: “For all the hot queer sluts. You know who you are.” Still, pearls will be clutched. If it were up to Rebekah, the book’s emotional-vampire protagonist, those pearls would also be twisted around an…

Adolescence is pervaded by a sense of waiting, its long days and longer nights blanketed in the lethargy of teenage time. In her debut novel, Alice Chadwick captures this sensation vividly and compassionately with a story set on a single sultry day near the end of the school year.  Two events erupt in the book’s…

Set somewhere between the undifferentiated everywhere of girlhood and the specificity of contemporary New York’s art world, Lonesome Ballroom is a delightfully ambitious satire of the cultural legacy of femininity. Starting with a scene that’s a caricature of domestic discontent—upended plates of duck à l’orange, accusations of infidelity—the book balloons into an exploration of one…

In The Summer House, Masashi Matsuie depicts a young architect’s coming-of-age. The novel follows Tōru Sakanishi at his first job out of architecture school, as he joins a Tokyo-based firm, Murai Office, on their annual summer retreat to a mountain town. While at the Summer House, the team enters a highly-selective competition to construct a…

An ode to language and memory, Child of Light is an experimental historical novel that is nominally about the arrival, in the nineteenth century, of widespread electrification in the United States but is also, and more deeply, about the competing claims of science and spirituality as ways of understanding reality.  After being apart from her…

In Audition, Pip Adam interested in finding ways to address the harms that people do to one another, and how society makes the people it doesn’t value disappear.   The first third of this ambitious novel is taken up by a single conversation. Three giants, each more than eighteen feet tall, live on a spaceship where…

Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere is a comedic indictment of male entitlement. Its middle-aged protagonist, known only as “Man,” is a professor grappling with his own irrelevance. His wife has left him, and he’s lost his job at his university, thanks to new female colleagues who critiqued his scholarship and confronted him about his laziness.…

Make Your Way Home, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection, is a poetic, bittersweet blending of past and present that delivers a smart moral jolt. Permeating these eleven expertly told stories of contemporary Black life in the American Deep South is a cautious optimism that acknowledges the damages of the past. An overture to the whole…

In Happy New Years by Maya Arad, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, the narrator, Leah Moskovich, writes an annual Rosh Hashanah letter to her college classmates. These letters cover fifty years from 1966 to 2016, most of which Leah spends in the United States after she moves there from Israel to take a…

William Luvaas’s Three Devils is a collection of five stories set against the backdrop of a Southern California landscape ravaged by climate disaster, where every shared resource has been exhausted or destroyed. As human as it is haunting, the collection offers a vision of a future that many readers may feel is already upon us.…

Toward the end of Blowfish, the unnamed thirty-something female protagonist hears a harsh truth from a friend. “You should know something,” the friend says. “­You’re always thinking about yourself.” She’s right: The sculptor has spent the entirety of the novel planning, attempting, or moving on from trying to die. But apart from this preoccupation, nothing…

Miriam Gershow’s latest novel, Closer, begins with the death of a high school student named Livvy in the college town of Horace, Oregon. Woody, the school’s guidance counselor, delivers news of this tragedy to Lark, another student. “I wanted you to hear it from me,” he tells her.  ‘Livvy,’ he said, and Woody would misremember…