Adeline Dieudonne, Roland Glasser
[isbn]
Adeline Dieudonné's debut novel is a dimly shimmering diorama that frames adolescence as a crucible of intimidation, tumult, survivalism, and rage. Equipped with a serrated sense of humor, Real Life captures a young girl's tooth-and-nail emancipation from the noxious, male-dominated bubble into which she was born, ratcheting up the urgency on every page. A gutsy, glorious sidewinder of a book.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Roy Jacobsen, Don Shaw, Don Bartlett
[isbn]
A weather-beaten record of resilience, The Unseen ebbs and flows with a rustic elegance that is matched only by its capacity for continual hardship. From the vicissitudes of the sea to the erosive passage of time, the occupants of the scruffy islet that serves as the novel's focal point endure everything with granite-like resolve, all the while harboring minor jubilation and fleeting desire. What Roy Jacobsen, alongside translators... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Luis Sagasti, Fionn Petch
[isbn]
A veritable primer for the poetry of the world, this Argentinian critic's curious novel is a bits-and-bobs potpourri of anecdotes featuring an ever-changing cast — artists, poets, soldiers, priests, and at least one space dog among them — interspersed with fanciful and figurative musings. Fireflies reads like a sacred scroll on the celestial and the earthbound, a floating reference text charting the unnameable interconnectedness of the... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Daša Drndic and Celia Hawkesworth
[isbn]
An exhaustive repudiation, EEG piles high the remembrances and ramifications of a century marred by fascism's violent toll. Drndic again dons the guise of Andreas Ban, a dwindling and dyspeptic intellectual, as he trains his gaze on misdeeds large and small, from the systemic eradication of dissent to the scourge of cellular telephones, while remaining ever vigilant to the task at hand — naming the dead. Unparalleled, uncompromising, and... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Olga Tokarczuk
[isbn]
Flights is a majestic argosy of compassion for those who are driven by the impulse to flee, vanish, or escape in defiance of our shared and fallible vessel, the human body. Tokarczuk links motion with mortality throughout, taking sprightly turns between evaluations of airport psychology and grisly depictions of preserved limbs suspended in jars of formaldehyde. What remains is an unmistakable admiration for a kind of ambulatory... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Rodrigo Marquez Tizano, Thomas Bunstead
[isbn]
Rampant destitution, unchecked avarice, vermin ferrying sickness from one host to the next as mangy carrion canines scavenge the remains. This is Rodrigo Márquez Tizano's Jakarta, a bile-and-brimstone grotesquerie that deserves to be sold with a surgeon general's warning attached. The rare ultra-bleak vision worthy of being called a dystopia's dystopia.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Vigdis Hjorth
[isbn]
An unblinking exposé wrapped in a familial thriller, Will and Testament details a delicate latticework of unacknowledged wrongdoing and razor-wire resentment. It's like Clouzot's The Wages of Fear with "cabin valuations" in place of the nitroglycerin.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Selva Almada and Chris Andrews
[isbn]
Selva Almada has written a dust-blown parable as lean and affecting as anything this side of Flannery O'Connor. Steeped in the competing ideologies of two headstrong fathers, The Wind That Lays Waste offers insightful meditations on faith, compassion, autonomy, and loss. A spare novel that hits with all the penetrating force of a lightning strike.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Bjorn Rasmussen, Martin Aitken
[isbn]
Pocked with unnerving tableaux, distinctly sensory depictions, and a heady admixture of shame-fueled desire, Bjørn Rasmussen's The Skin Is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body is no less than an innocence-obliterating maelstrom of illicit eroticism. A jumbled reckoning with abuse that's as otherworldly as it is intensely corporeal.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Dorota Maslowska, Benjamin Paloff
[isbn]
Maslowska's latest is a sucrose-loaded simulacrum for the American monoculture, recklessly scrambling barbed sarcasm with irreverent sight gags to stupendous effect. A knives-out dissection of aesthetic vulgarity that refuses to be calmed, corralled, or otherwise contained. Honey, I Killed the Cats is delightfully demented fun.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Stephane Larue, Pablo Strauss
[isbn]
The Dishwasher is a gruff-yet-affable working class lament, seasoned with hangdog determination and bleary verisimilitude. From the slop sinks to the shooting galleries of a painstakingly rendered Montreal, Larue proves himself a more than adept raconteur of blackout debauchery and wage labor drudgery. Think Nelson Algren by way of Bud Smith, such is the hardscrabble exactitude on offer in this wincing grin of a novel.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Juan Jose Millas, Thomas Bunstead, Daniel Hahn
[isbn]
With an outlandish premise that is equal parts discomforting and absurd, From the Shadows probes the psyche of a middle-aged man who, after having been unceremoniously laid-off, decides to dabble in a bit of domestic hermitism. That is, he surreptitiously occupies the negative space, both literal and figurative, in a nuclear family's suburban abode, tidying up and doing odd jobs when no one is looking. As privacy violations go, it's on... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Ma Jian, Flora Drew
[isbn]
China Dream depicts the episodic efforts of Ma Daode, an aging apparatchik in the Chinese government intent on wallpapering over the violence of the Cultural Revolution with a REM-hijacking microchip that replaces dreams with nationalistic propaganda. While juggling a full schedule of political jockeying and wanton philandering, the beleaguered pencil pusher dodges his own visions of the past while becoming increasingly detached from... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Lucy Ellmann
[isbn]
Ducks, Newburyport resembles a Dewey Decimal card catalog dedicated to post-9/11 Americana being rifled through at warp speed or the collected stories of Diane Williams algorithmically rewritten with a Great Lakes accent. Superlatives fall short, especially when we're talking about a book that flouts the fusty conventions of the canon so wildly. Simply put, this mile-a-moment internal monologue is indisputably a landmark work of... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Yukiko Motoya and Asa Yoneda
[isbn]
Yukiko Motoya takes the mundane and brilliantly spikes it with the fantastical, the aberrant, and the all-out unexpected. These stories tilt the axis of reality by degrees, deftly inverting scenes of both solitude and cohabitation, pitting the personal against the domestic. Amid increasingly splashy motifs, The Lonesome Bodybuilder asks how we define ourselves through our relationships to others and whether our true identities can ever... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Maria Gainza, Thomas Bunstead
[isbn]
In Optic Nerve, Argentinian art critic Maria Gainza gracefully dives through the eye of needle upon needle, threading depictions of life in miniature alongside transfixing scenes focusing on artists in flux— Foujita, Rothko, and Picasso among them — in this lithe English language debut. An unnamed narrator reminisces on bygone days spent in a fading aristocracy while intermittently slipping through the looking glass, inhabiting painters'... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Lynne Tillman
[isbn]
Men and Apparitions is a magnum opus of ekphrastic genealogy as seen through a spurned anthropologist's loupe, an optics-saturated examination of the heteronormative male psyche circa fourth-wave feminism, and a mordant monologue on objectivity. No American novelist is better suited to this task than Lynne Tillman. Her singular, engrossing narrator — a card-carrying member of the liberally educated, media-consuming cohort — zips from tic... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Dubravka Ugresic, Ellen Elias Bursac, David Williams
[isbn]
An ever-changing witches' wheel festooned with anecdote and critique, fact and fabrication, and enough cantankerous wisdom to out-bluster even the most devout cynic. Fox is a showcase for Ugrešić's polymathic indignation, covering everything from back pain to minesweeping to the membership rolls of avant-garde art sects with assured antagonism, letting no one — least of all the reader — off the hook. This is a masterpiece plaited with... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Esther Kinsky, Iain Galbraith
[isbn]
Esther Kinsky has carved out a narrative hidey-hole littered with recurring figments and a studious, magpie-like curiosity. In River, an enigmatic expat on a self-imposed sabbatical to scruffy East London strolls the fluvial tracts of past and present encountering a vagrant king, a circus equestrian, mischievous wind, and a labyrinthine broadcasting station along the way. Placid, reflective, and wholly harmonious, River is a... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Alicia Kopf, Mara Faye Lethem
[isbn]
A shadow text for the hypermasculine exploration epic, Brother in Ice constructs a narrative from collected data and journal entries, traipsing across the elasticity of metaphor and the deadening implications of negative space in the process. Kopf shifts the paradigms around reputed men of noble ambitions and refocuses on undertakings of a different sort — digging inward, staying put, and creating in isolation. Both an antidote and a... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Roque Larraquy, Heather Cleary
[isbn]
A grade Z creep show with a shock art chaser, Roque Larraquy's debut is a maniacal riff in the Grand Guignol tradition. Amorous doctors run amok in a Buenos Aires sanatorium at the turn of the 20th century, where they brood, indulge their cigarette habits, and conspire to inflict gruesome experiments on unsuspecting patients with nauseating results. Comemadre is an unscrupulous, farcical, and gleefully confounding experience at every... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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David Hayden
[isbn]
David Hayden's doomsaying fictions are grim bordering on the eschatological, austere glimpses into madness and ruin at the outer reaches of perception. Endless plunges, charred remains, patricidal offspring — a veritable smorgasbord of unpleasantness rendered in blackly alchemized prose awaits. These are distress signals sent from a dying planet, steeped in Beckett and Barthelme, and we'd all do well to heed their calls.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Noemi Lefebvre, Sophie Lewis
[isbn]
Packed with charmingly scatterbrained soliloquies on courtship, composition, art, and fascism, Lefebvre's mile-a-minute novel — her first to be translated into English — yokes the long shadow of the Third Reich to our protagonist's myriad neuroses and mating rituals. Notes collide and multiply, scatter and reappear, coalescing in a madcap amalgam of indelible refrains and crescendos. Blue Self-Portrait is a dizzying work at the vanguard... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Julian Herbert
[isbn]
Tomb Song is a grief-stricken fib, a taffy enfolded with adoration and resentment both — for a mother, for a country, for literature — then stretched to its very limits. Herbert's requiem darts between brothels and hospitals, from opium-binges in Cuba to a poetry conference in Berlin, yet never loses its sense of dogged inquiry and damaged musicality. Translated here by the great Christina MacSweeney, Tomb Song is a gift in any... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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D. Foy
[isbn]
A sun-dappled California sex comedy lit up with pinball machine prose, Absolutely Golden doesn't skimp on the details. Full of chatterbox nudists spouting groovy-isms at warp speed, flitting from one dalliance to the next, D. Foy's frolic through the 1970s is sheer candy-coated delirium. An unadulterated pleasure just begging to be ogled.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Mary Robison
[isbn]
Mary Robison's manic, choppy novel in snippets is nothing short of revelatory. With skittish humor and herky-jerky rhythms, Why Did I Ever weasels its way into your cerebral cortex and bites down with rabid delight, gnawing a riddle-shaped hole right where it counts. Clever, cranky, and impossible to shake.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Ottessa Moshfegh
[isbn]
No quarter is given in Moshfegh's derelict America, an amorphous sprawl inhabited by drain-circling agnostics and jaundiced creeps, forming a fetid sort of reflecting pool for our current national predicament. It sure ain't pretty but Homesick for Another World already feels like a classic of despondent, grayscale skepticism.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Leyna Krow
[isbn]
Leyna Krow's debut collection of interlocking stories is a many-sided gambit that flares and glimmers with a prismatic light all its own. Beguiling and uncommonly immersive, I'm Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking is infused with desertion, abandonment, seclusion, and absence — the disquieting distances that slowly tear us apart. A wild, winsome objet d'art worth marveling over again and again.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Scott McClanahan
[isbn]
The Sarah Book careens roughshod over marriage, addiction, parenthood, and pet ownership en route to a stomach-churning portrayal of intersecting lives. McClanahan's prose is a downhill blur throughout, radical candor mingling with attempted penance, recounted in tear-streaked terms of estrangement. A close-to-the-bone ode to dissolution and self-destruction in West Virginia.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker
[isbn]
A rowdy, beaten-to-a-pulp bit of myth-making that pits lust and bloodshed against the specter of male impotence — what more could you want in a book? Eka Kurniawan blasts with both barrels, ricocheting between warrior koans and madman philosophy to arrive at a disarmingly intimate portrait of honor, passion, and deflated virility. Folkloric and appropriately subversive, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is an action-packed screwball... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Gabe Habash
[isbn]
Stephen Florida lurks between primordial instinct and youthful indiscretion, producing a volatile protagonist equal parts single-minded misanthrope, budding romantic, and utterly tragic lost boy. A sardonic sidewinder of a novel, all gristle, sinew, and grit, until you hit the gooey innards of the book to find a warm vulnerability and a broken beating heart. Gabe Habash has crafted a brash, hallucinatory treatise that should be held onto... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Samantha Hunt
[isbn]
Squinting, slinky dread permeates the stories of The Dark Dark, each addressing a common violation, each one warped, curdled, and imbued with plausible menace. Samantha Hunt brilliantly performs the holistic sort of sorcery we need to survive the demons at the door, wielding razor wit and a withering gaze. A prowling, incandescent seance in book form.
Recommended by Justin W.
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J. Robert Lennon
[isbn]
Broken River begs to be devoured in ecstatic gulps, compulsively barreled through in a blur of prestige-worthy pathos and meta-fictional tomfoolery. At once a family drama and a crime caper, a haunted house story and a coming-of-age tale, a fantasy and a farce — in essence, a novel possessed of the ability to juggle chainsaws and chew gum at the same time. J. Robert Lennon is a nothing short of a consummate, multifarious storyteller with... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Eugene Lim
[isbn]
Eugene Lim jabs and feints, nesting polemic and dissent within the dueling downtime monologues of comic book heroine and hero alike. These super-powered tools of extrajudicial force ponder the mortal concerns du jour: protest and activism, occupation and opposition, authenticity and art. Urgent and uncanny, Dear Cyborgs rightly recognizes the present itself as a speculative endeavor.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Patricia Lockwood
[isbn]
Patricia Lockwood is incapable of nothing but the expected, and this spit-take-inducing memoir of familial eccentricity proves it on every page. The peculiarities of clannish ritual, dialect, gastronomy, and especially faith are dissected with compassion and an impish charm that is irreducibly Lockwoodian. Flagrantly imaginative and heck-bent on hilarity, Priestdaddy is a wonder.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Greg Jackson
[isbn]
Imposing and sordidly cerebral, Jackson sets the bar high from the opening pages of his maiden collection. A veritable laundry list of decadent consumption, debauchery, and bored privilege kicks things off, and Jackson consistently delivers cleverly-wrought, cardiovascular fiction throughout. Prodigals heralds the arrival of a master craftsman, replete with filigree, capable of producing major work for years to come.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Max Winter
[isbn]
Winter's discursive debut, set against a warts-and-more-warts New England backdrop, is the kind of delirious moon-drunk yowl of a novel that is destined for cult classic status. With reminiscences and commentaries, Narragansett-fueled elegies, and beautiful losers pining for youths ill-spent, disparate elements intertwine to form a snarl of missed connections that are by turns raucous, ballsy, and inconsolably mournful. A crackerjack performance.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Amelia Gray
[isbn]
A rigorously mannered intrusion, elegant and appalling and indulgent with sorrow. Gray casts the iconoclastic art monster as the center of a roiling vortex, swirling with brutality and desire, then infuses the whole mess with a sense of slow-burning mania. Isadora is novel as supercollider, sustained balance amidst staggering entropy.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Diane Williams
[isbn]
The founder and editor of celebrated avant-garde literary annual NOON has crafted an array of opalescent flecks that glimmer in the periphery, dazzling when you least expect it. Williams exhibits fine-tuned precision and lapidary restraint to produce a work that is both timeless and an undeniable product of the current moment. She is an artist operating at the peak of her powers.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Danielle McLaughlin
[isbn]
Dinosaurs on Other Planets is an almost nauseatingly perfect debut collection — full of portent, haunted at the edges, amply reverent of the unspoken. What would be no less a jewel in the crown of even the most decorated practitioner of the form is, in fact, the opening salvo of a preternaturally attuned new voice. How McLaughlin manages this act of legerdemain is not important; that these stories exist at all is cause for celebration.... (read more)
Recommended by Justin W.
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Tony Tulathimutte
[isbn]
The post-graduate pawns of Private Citizens are shunted, sullen, and variously inebriated around a NorCal game board checkered with ruinous intent: porn addiction, corporate seminars, sudden physical disfigurement. Tulathimutte tempers the proceedings with giddy-making reams of confectionery maximalism and garrulous patter, evading the solipsistic slog implied by the "millennial novel" tag. Sleek and pliable, brimming with dexterity.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Kaitlyn Greenidge
[isbn]
History writ large is a shambling, cumbersome thing — it being larded with the biases of its profiteers. In We Love You, Charlie Freeman, Greenidge demonstrates that language, and how we use it, can corrode a culture through the lithe, seemingly anodyne tools of euphemism and insinuation. A pulsating debut rich with perspective on faith, family, and the burden of lineage.
Recommended by Justin W.
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Stephen Oconnor
[isbn]
In a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes, O'Connor breathes life into a contentious and largely unknown slice of American history. This is bold, generous writing that eschews convenient narrative expectations, instead depicting a world full of complication, full of contradiction — a world a lot like our own.
Recommended by Justin W.
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