A bookseller embarks on a surreal ontological quest in poet Mimosa Montes’s brilliant debut novella (after the collection Thresholes). Upon waking in the two-bedroom apartment she’s just started renting for the summer, the unnamed narrator is momentarily confused as to where she is and when... Continue reading »

Brynolf’s witty and original debut centers on the fallout from a 2019 murder. Influencer Kylie May is livestreaming from the English countryside in hopes of convincing her followers that she cares about nature when she stumbles on the nude corpse of a woman named Lana Cottrell. Det. Sgt. Mona Hendri... Continue reading »

Combining dark fairy tale aesthetics with a medical mystery plot, this utterly delightful Snow White riff from Hugo and Nebula Award winner Kingfisher (A Sorceress Comes to Call) transports readers to a New Mexicoesque kingdom of deserts, mesa houses, and saints with the heads of venomous s... Continue reading »

Hammett makes an effervescent debut with this enemies-to-lovers sports romance. Lucas, a cox for the Cambridge crew team, has always had issues with George, the club president, an underwear model from Wisconsin. After losing a big race against their rival, Oxford, the teammates hate each other more ... Continue reading »

Boyd’s understated yet deeply moving second graphic memoir (after Chicken Rising) recounts her experience as a shy girl entering junior high in late 1970s Canada. Dawn’s mom, a bridge- and bingo-playing paragon of small-town decency, thunders against sex in movies, declares that the Legion ... Continue reading »

The joyfully inventive debut by Colgate honors the disabled community. Complete with an access guide and legend denoting options for the reader to interact with the poems on their own terms, Colgate radically reenvisions how a text might support its reader. A poem about the speaker’s partner finding... Continue reading »

In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »

College applicants should stop obsessing over brand-name institutions and search for a school that can help them determine “who [they] want to become” and develop the “mindset, relationships, and skills” to get there, according to this insightful guide. Drawing from interviews with students, parents... Continue reading »

“What ultimately matters is that we think like an herbalist,” contends Robinett, an herbalist herself, in her standout debut. Framing her treatment of the topic as a “why-to” more than a “how-to,” Robinett covers such categories as nervines (which target one’s nervous system), sedatives (fo... Continue reading »

Historian Fletcher (Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century) incisively explores the dark underbelly of American evangelical missionary work via the experiences of missionaries’ children. Drawing on her own childhood in Kenya and interviews with 80 others who w... Continue reading »

Twining the fantasy of an unfettered childhood adventure with the majestic reality of an ancient redwood forest, Fleming (Rock That Vote) and Groenink (Whales in the City) offer an outdoors variation on a classic children’s rhyme: “This is the forest./ This is the steeple./ Giants ... Continue reading »