Lisa Butts is a book critic and an editor in academic publishing. She studied poetry and creative nonfiction at the New School and Sarah Lawrence College.
Monthly Book Lists
This month, in the midst of deodorant-testing heat and confused displays of patriotism, we bring you an all-fiction batch of July books, including Colson Whitehead's appealingly named Cool Machine.
Reading Lists
This June, we celebrate Pride with contemporary books by QTBIPOC, including those with identities beyond Western conceptions of queerness. They are transformative, culture-shifting forces, capable of making and unmaking worlds.
Reviews
Every detail and plot turn in Sublimation is clearly part of a meticulously well-considered arc. I’m very curious what the adaptation will be like. Whitewashing would be a disaster in this scenario, given the significance of instancing as metaphor for diaspora.
Monthly Book Lists
This month's upcoming books include several debuts, including an enticing fable that draws from Minnesota's racial history, a nonlinear story of queer rural Florida, and a television-ready immigration narrative (at least one).
Reviews
Earth 7 really sings in small moments that show deep respect for life, for its remarkable diversity, its endurance and durability. Unferth’s admiration for the inhabitants of Earth, its many creatures large and small, is infectious, at times exhilarating—a shot of urgent hope.
Features
The trajectory of Covid awareness may not go exactly as many expect, and in the meantime, bookstores are one of the community spaces that can offer a transition point to a different possible future.
Monthly Book Lists
Our monthly book list for May includes nonfiction from Jesmyn Ward, a speculative novel by Tom Lin following Chinese immigrants in South Dakota who encounter a secret government program, and more.
Reviews
No God But Us vividly illuminates what life is like for the many queer refugees who live in liminal space for years, whose only home is the state of uncertainty.
Stories in the World
Given that many of the stories in Kim Samek’s debut story collection I Am the Ghost Here feature surreal elements, borrowing tropes from science fiction and fantasy, I was surprised to find honest, genuine explorations of the pandemic as a mass disabling event in its fourth and fifth stories.
Features
What wave of feminism is it where we tell a woman she is too clueless to understand what is going on in her own marriage?
Interviews
"Exile is such a strange and absurd situation. I think there are going to be things you miss so much. You start to wonder whether or not it really was worth it. And what you're willing to give up to get some of those things back."
Monthly Book Lists
See what April books we're excited about. This month's selection includes an International Booker Prize nominee, a novel that features Monica Lewinsky as a patron saint, and more.