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 grateful for this book and can't wait to reread it.
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Another instant classic from an author whose career I’m so excited to continue following in the decades to come. Wandering Stars is exactly the book its title promises: a constellation of stories, all orbiting around the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the lives and legacies that unravel in its aftermath through the 20th and 21st centuries. Through Orange’s deeply felt characters, written in language that cuts to the quick, we feel the violence of assimilation and the ways that grief and trauma are passed down through generations. Wandering Stars is a masterpiece.
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
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 and everyday existence, relationships and solitude. Every detail is deliberate; every observation is precise.
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
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.
Nonfiction: A Novel by Julie Myerson
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 and heartbreak. Reading it might break you, but it might heal you too.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
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 it’s flattening beneath the weight of a scary world whose scariness becomes more banal the longer it persists. This story may sound heavy, but somehow Nunez makes sure it isn’t. The project is leavened with her signature humor, sharp insights, and crisp writing.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
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 history; the act of writing and the power of language; inheritance, work, survival, identity… The list goes on. Vasyakina is such an exciting, fresh voice, and Elina Alter has done an incredible job translating this novel. Everyone should read Wound.
Wound by Osaka Vasyakina (tr. Elina Alter)
I really, really believe that Our Share of Night is a masterpiece. It’s such a lush book with vividly rendered, complicated characters; a world that is dangerous and slippery; and language that is so precise, you won’t be able to help being sucked into the depths of this book’s horror. I thought a lot about 2666 while reading this — the structure, the section told from a journalist’s perspective — which is a really high compliment. And the eyelids. The eyelids! Absolute masterpiece.
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (tr. Megan McDowell)
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 Samantha Hunt.
LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO by Cleo Qian
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 of Human History is a novel that aches with grief and humanity and the beauty it’s possible to find in the world, even if you vision has become crowded with loss.