Kelly Link
[isbn]
Kelly Link's debut novel is as expansive, funny, human, and strange as I could've possibly hoped. The Book of Love reads like it has a heart, beating so strongly and desperately, it strains at its container. The story is full of grief and friendship and acrimony, teenagers trying to sort through impossible feelings and circumstances, memories that erode and rewrite themselves and turn inside out. It's such a phenomenal feat; I'm so... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Julie Myerson
[isbn]
Oh man, this book broke me — in the best way. A beautiful, blistering autofiction about a woman doing what she can to, without being able to do very much, to look after a daughter, while also working to reconcile her own history with her mother, her art, and the world. Fans of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti will love this one.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Maria Judite de Carvalho
[isbn]
A short, powerful novel about the lives of four Portuguese women and the ways that a man's whims can tumble apart everything they've carefully constructed. An excellent translation from Margaret Jull Costa; I blew through this one.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Eliza Barry Callahan
[isbn]
As soon as I picked up this book, I couldn’t put it down. The writing is fresh and sharp and quietly devastating. After the narrator, a woman who makes money by scoring short films, is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, her relationship to the world and people around her shifts. As she attempts to understand what her new circumstances mean and how to reconstruct a meaningful life for herself within these freshly drawn limits, she thinks about music... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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E.J. Koh
[isbn]
E. J. Koh’s debut novel, The Liberators is her follow-up to the stunning memoir, The Magical Language of Others. I was so excited to read the novel; I started as soon as I got the galley, and couldn’t put it down. The story covers decades and contents, and follows one family as its members try to figure out what it means to choose a lover, a life, a home. The relationships between the characters are so lovingly and beautifully... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Lorrie Moore
[isbn]
Lorrie Moore has always been a writer whose words root into my veins, setting up camp for months after I think I’m done with them. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home — a book about love and death and passion and grief and how all of it can be messy and muddy and bad but also sometimes, somehow, occasionally good and worthwhile — has already found a home in my bones. This book is so beautifully written and filled with such wild pathos... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Sigrid Nunez
[isbn]
Another stunner from the inimitable Sigrid Nunez. The Vulnerables is a meditative, wry book that picks apart what it means to live in a world as unnerving as ours currently is, and what it means to create art (or at least, try to create art) in the midst of everything. The narrator is stuck in New York City during the height of the pandemic, caring for a friend of a friend’s parrot, trying to make meaning even as her brain feels like... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter
[isbn]
This book absolutely delivers on the promise of its simple title: it is a bruising, beautiful book that I couldn’t put down, even as each page pulsed with the heartache of existing in an unforgiving world. The narrator, Oksana, is a queer, Russian poet whose mother has recently passed. As she travels to their former home of Siberia, she thinks about her past with her mom and her mom’s tumultuous relationships; Oksana’s own complicated romantic... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Cleo Qian
[isbn]
I feel like I read this debut collection in one, fast, maniacal gulp. Filled with displacement and redemption, video games and karaoke, Cleo Qian’s writing is unnerving, strange, delicious — all of the things you might want out of a collection with this title and this cover. I promise, once you’ve read the first story (called “Chicken. Film. Youth.” — a title that’s a short story in and of itself), you’ll be all in. For fans of Ling Ma and... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Rebekah Bergman
[isbn]
Rebekah Bergman’s astounding debut, The Museum of Human History, breaks open questions of what you’re willing to accept in order to preserve what you might, eventually, lose; how to live in the face of dying and how to die in the face of living; what it means to be awake, and what that wakefulness requires; storytelling as an act of conservation; and the slippery connection between an imagined future and a distorted past. The Museum... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Sarah Rose Etter
[isbn]
This book is such a wonderful heartache. I felt that hovering, winking black hole as I read — felt it grow like a pit in my stomach, even though I wasn't the one being buffeted around by the whims of Silicon Valley and selfish men, corporate greed and bodily needs. Sarah Rose Etter has written an astounding, sharp, deeply intimate book. I've already started recommending it to everyone I know.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Imogen Binnie
[isbn]
A hilarious and often achingly uncomfortable book about a trans woman who decides to go on an ill-advised road trip after her life in New York falls apart. Incisive and smart and only occasionally wise — a great book.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Hilary Leichter
[isbn]
I was late to the party with Leichter’s debut, Temporary, but now I’m devastatingly early to the party with Terrace Story, a book I am obsessed with and want to discuss with everyone, ASAP. It’s the story of a couple living in a small apartment with their baby and their sort-of friend who somehow opens a portal to a terrace outside their apartment whenever she visits — and only when she visits. The magic in this story... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Victor LaValle
[isbn]
Victor LaValle is so good! Just — so good. His new book blends horror with the myth of the American West, in a story about Adelaide, a woman who will go to extraordinary lengths to protect both herself and the secret of her family's curse. This book is so inventive, so startling, so pleasantly strange, and has one of the most satisfying endings I've read in a long time. Already, I know it's one of the books that's going to get better the more I... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Samantha Hunt
[isbn]
I am a Samantha Hunt stan — have been ever since I read The Seas years ago, and each subsequent book (The Dark Dark! Mr. Splitfoot!) has just managed to make me an even bigger fan. I didn't know what I was getting into when I started this book, but found it absolutely staggering. She points her wildly empathetic and expansive eye toward an unfinished book project of her father's, the life her father led, her own role as... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Dizz Tate
[isbn]
An incredible debut novel that swirls around the sinister, mesmerizing undertow of girlhood. The story is mythic and startling; the writing is lush and moving and strange. I loved every second of this book. (Also: check out that cover!!)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Meghan Gilliss
[isbn]
God, the language in this book is worth luxuriating in. Lungfish is the debut novel from Meghan Gilliss, a promising author who’s also worked as a bookseller and a librarian, something that feels reflected in the deeply considered way she layers words and stories. The novel’s protagonist, Tuck, is a mother who finds herself essentially squatting in an old family home on an island in Maine, left with little-to-no money to feed herself,... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Kelly Link
[isbn]
Kelly Link is hands-down, no-questions-asked, one of my favorite working authors today. I remember when a friend gave me her collection, Magic for Beginners, my freshman year in college, like Link’s writing was a secret she only wanted to share with a select few. But I’m so lucky she shared with me, because her stories have become a constant for me. I’m obsessed with these stories: as twisted and weird and hilarious as I’ve come to... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Tess Gunty
[isbn]
This book is an incredible, kaleidoscopic, strange, intense, hilarious book, told in a series of stories that swirl around a young woman named Blandine and the semi-rundown building where she lives. The characters are so incredibly, intimately rendered, I've been thinking about them ever since I finished the book, wondering what they might be up to now.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Tillie Walden
[isbn]
When I first read On a Sunbeam, a graphic novel about a girl who travels across the universe to find lost love and a space crew that restores crumbling, alien architecture, it was with that wide-eyed, hungry wonder you always chase as a reader. It’s an expansive, beautiful book, with carefully rendered characters that are as intricate and lovely as Tillie Walden’s illustrations of distant planets and cathedral-like ruins. On a... (read more)
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Shelby Van Pelt
[isbn]
This is such a sweet, fun, empathetic book about found family and our relationship to the world around us. If you (like me) wish you could be friends with an octopus, you'll love Remarkably Bright Creatures.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Peter Rock
[isbn]
Passersthrough is a gripping, slippery, spooky book about fragile family bonds, loneliness, and what we choose to remember. A welcome return from Peter Rock, this is a thoroughly Oregon book — filled with mountains, forests, lakes, and creatures.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Emily St. John Mandel
[isbn]
It is so nice to be back in the capable hands of Emily St. John Mandel. This book is a wonder — compelling and charged, musical and shattered. It jumps through time and space, asking questions about art and desire and love and loss. I cannot recommend it enough.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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Gwen E. Kirby
[isbn]
If you support women's rights *and* women's wrongs, this is the book for you. This collection is as funny as it is furious.
Recommended by Kelsey F.
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