We have great taste and you should subscribe to Who Even Reads to discover the Next Big Thing before the Booker people get their grubby hands all over everything. Here are the Books We Like the Looks Of coming out this August.
How can one live like this, Triage asks, at the same time it declares the question beside the point. What is the alternative?
Balasingamchow’s novel speaks to realities of queerness, marginalization, criminality and criminalization, of what not being able to live openly or straightforwardly does to a person and perhaps can’t be—or doesn’t need to be—undone.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The other reviews and accounts of this novel I read before reading the book itself, which rightly suggested a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the proceedings, did nothing to prepare me for the several gut-punch revelations that occur near the end, revelations that hinge on specificity.
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.
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.
If A Splintering is in some ways a morality tale, it isn’t one that suggests Tara is wrong for wanting more than life has given her. Rather, it shows that by defining her happiness only through the oppression of others, only through ascending from oppressed to oppressor, she remains oppressed.
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?
Reviews
Felix stresses that real, substantial change isn’t instant, nor does it happen without us—without people. But real change is happening, will happen, must happen despite the liberal cynicism and fear that will tell you it isn’t, won’t, can’t.
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.
Reviews
Lewinsky is Virgil, capably leading Jean through the inferno of predatory male sexual behavior, demonstrating to her that the power she wields—wielded even when she was being taken advantage of—is a force to be reckoned with.
Features
There is a pervasive idea that serious fiction is purely a pursuit of the mind, meaning it is not of the body, of desire, of pleasure, of satisfaction and relief. It is not meant to be therapeutic or healing.
Stories in the World
Stories in the World is a series in which we explore a particular element of a piece of writing in a broader context. Here, Lisa looks at the phenomenon of women who become involved in relationships with queer women while self-identifying as straight, as featured in Max Delsohn's "All Time Low."
Reviews
While we might be living through what is commonly referred to as late-stage capitalism, we are not at the end of anything—we are always in the middle of an unfolding story.
Monthly Book Lists
Check out five books we're looking forward to that are coming out in March, including new releases from Rebecca Solnit and Louise Erdrich.
Reviews
Persona’s title and premise of two women who seem to share some aspects of their identities is evocative of the Bergman film of the same name, but it is also a rich exploration of technological isolation that centers on what one character calls the Default Persona.