For always, Kalki – with his matching blue skin – has been told he’s a god, the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu. His godliness supports the family’s Tamil Nadu ashram, where he lives with his controlling father, loving mother, uncle and his wife, and...
Just as only Akwaeke Emezi could have narrated their Freshwater debut, no other voice could have manifested their first nonfiction title. Presented as an epistolary mosaic addressed to family, friends, lovers, betrayers, and heroes, Emezi’s raw voice lays bare their unadorned writing. Although the vulnerability, arrogance, and...
In the “big city” of Seoul, love isn’t easy to find – even tougher to secure is love that lasts. Young and Jaehee are best friends from university, bonded in their “boundless energy of [being] poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds.” Young is a gay man, Jaehee a straight...
In 1993, 3-year-old Ly Tran arrived in Queens with her parents and three older brothers from South Vietnam. Their new apartment was not the nhà là – “a house made of sticks and dried leaves” – that had been their former home; stability, however, was...
That Jo Koy has created a sold-out, standing-ovation-earning stand-up career making people laugh while mining intimate family stories means no one else could possibly narrate his memoir. His hard-earned superstardom translates seamlessly into an audiobook, giving him a double-debut credit as author and narrator, presenting...
*STARRED REVIEW Thanks to veteran narrator JD Jackson and newbie Ronald Peet, Mott’s fourth novel is also a “hell of an audiobook.” An unnamed writer (impeccably embodied by Jackson) embarks on his inaugural book tour because he’s written Hell of a Book. He’s been coached, trained,...
Kong Deok-geun is an “average administrative worker,” a position for which he surpassed 137 applicants for “a job that has no work.” His boredom, so severe that he’s named it “I-would-rather-eat-dog-treats-than-suffer-this-boredom,” sends him to the fourth floor, where he discovers Cabinet 13, then spends an...
Mesha Maren: 'Fear and Unease Can Be a Writer's Best Friend' Mesha Maren's 2019 debut, Sugar Run, took almost a decade to hit shelves. In the meantime, she published short stories in various prestigious journals (the Oxford American, the Southern Review) and won numerous prizes and fellowships (2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize,...
To compress Mesha Maren's exhilarating second novel, Perpetual West, into a quick description would be an injustice to her intricately plotted, unsettling narrative about two 21-year-olds unsure of who they really are. Whereas her debut, Sugar Run, had its characters return to Maren's home landscape of rural...
Kei Miller: Many Different Writers Kei Miller commands genres – poetry, fiction, essays – as adroitly as he navigates identities as a Jamaican native son, a British academic, a global award-winning writer, and, most recently, a Miami professor. As poet, he's been shortlisted for the Costa...
Literary chameleon Kei Miller (The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion) has produced award-winning short stories, novels, poetry, and essays. Things I Have Withheld is arguably his most stupendous title to date. These 14 exquisitely vulnerable essays explore his Jamaican heritage, his British...
As a visual artist and performer, Jaime Cortez has always been telling stories. He gets literal in his debut, Gordo, an impressive collection featuring the titular Gordo, a preteen middle child of Mexican American farm workers in California's 1970s Central Coast. Gordo is one of...
Oscar Alvarado is a multi-generational Angeleno Mexican American; his wife Keila was a high-school exchange student from Mexico City. They lovingly raised three daughters. Thirty-nine years later, their three-year-old twin granddaughters almost drown in their neglected pool. The accident fuels Keila’s marital discontent and emboldens...
As in her lauded debut short story collection, A House Is a Body (2020), Shruti Swamy examines women’s ownership of their very selves in her first novel, which is set in a disappeared Bombay. Swamy divides Vidya’s young life into five distinct sections, focusing on pivotal...
Korean Canadian June Hur’s enthralling debut, The Silence of Bones, vividly captured 19th-century fatal court intrigue during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. Her follow-up is another tautly plotted thriller, set in 15th-century Joseon, and helmed by relative audiobook newbie Sue Jean Kim, who adroitly controls a sprawling...
Debut novelist Ray Stoeve’s first chapter has three short sentences: “I think I might be trans. I mean, I know I am. I think.” Seattle high-school senior Dean already came out as lesbian, is lovingly partnered with Zoe, and has supportive friends (quality over quantity)....
“If I could put it into words, I wouldn’t be drawing it,” the cartoonist insists. In mostly black-and-white panels laden with exquisite details, Zuo Ma intertwines autobiography with fantasy, their relationship revealed some 200 pages into the unpredictable narrative. A young man returns home from city...
*STARRED REVIEW Imbolo Mbue’s PEN/Faulkner-winning Behold the Dreamers unveiled immigrants chasing the American Dream; her searing sophomore title exposes U.S. destruction beyond its borders. In an unnamed African nation, oil giant Pexton has been poisoning the farming village of Kosawa – water, land, air, and people....
Peyton Thomas's auspicious YA debut, Both Sides Now, invites readers into the complicated transition year between parental reliance and university independence. Seniors Finch and Jonah are their Olympia, Wash., debate team headliners. Although they lose the state competition to their private school archnemeses, the pair still...
*STARRED REVIEW Bilingual Chinese American writer, poet, and translator Ye Chun showcases her linguistic prowess in a prodigious debut collection featuring women on both sides of the globe, many defined and confined by and reliant on motherhood. The titular “hao” recurs, meaning “Good, yes, okay. The most...
