A Korean teenage runaway tries to reinvent herself during the 2008 recession in Yeun’s remarkable debut. At 17, the unnamed narrator flees her family’s cramped Seoul apartment, where her frustrated and underemployed father, a former financial manager, physically assaults her kindhearted mother. She ... Continue reading »

Some of the most powerful stories in the brilliant, genre-spanning debut collection from Nebula Award winner Mills (The Wings upon Her Back) focus on the contentious relationships between generations. The stunning title entry, for instance, toggles between the past and the future to track t... Continue reading »

Chen (A Quantum Love Story) shows off his worldbuilding chops in this ingenious 24th-century space opera. Humanity is now in contact with multiple intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms, including the Lumersians, whose bodies are comprised of “planes of pink light” and who have shared thei... Continue reading »

Rai follows Partners in Crime with another wildly entertaining rom-com/caper mash-up. Brooklynite Sejal Chaudhary makes a living by taking bar bets on her impressive card tricks. It’s not the most stable life, but Sejal never plans for more than the short term. She feels like she can’t, giv... Continue reading »

Nothing comes easy for the denizens of Hamilton, Ontario, in these wry, bruising, and mordantly funny stories from Ollmann (Fictional Father). In “Nestled All Snug,” a toppled pile of boxes traps a bookstore employee in a dingy staff bathroom. In “Meat,” a security guard at a meat-packing f... Continue reading »

This monumental volume of Levis’s collected works is a study in the development and deepening of his gifts, from his debut in 1972 to poems published following his death in 1996. Levis’s bruised, engrossing voice suggests the “long, volleying/ Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where/ I spent it ... 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 »

Novelist Haddon (The Porpoise) pieces together family photographs, illustrations, and vivid biographical snippets for this panoramic memoir. Moving nonsequentially, Haddon mines his memories of growing up in Northampton with self-involved parents (“You have to remember... that he only wante... Continue reading »

Council devotes her warmhearted debut to the culinary heritage passed down by her mother, Mildred Council, the restaurateur behind North Carolina’s Mama Dip’s Kitchen, which closed in 2025 after a 50-year run. Drawing on food traditions from Chapel Hill’s Northside Black community, these 100 recipes... Continue reading »

In her penetrating debut, physician Lee uses the Japanese art of kintsugi, the practice of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer, to illustrate how she repaired a faith fractured by a childhood steeped in Western theology. Lee grew up in an immigrant church in Iowa that practiced Chinese customs ... Continue reading »

Frankel’s starry-eyed portrait of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) places curiosity at the heart of the musical theater virtuoso’s success. Staccato introductory lines establish Sondheim as an expert puzzle solver (“Choosing notes/ Choosing words/ Putting it all together”), and inq... Continue reading »