Richard Mirabella’s debut novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, is the tale of Willa and Justin’s attempt to mend their sibling relationship as they revisit their childhood trauma and grief.
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Lilly Dancyger’s searing and poignant essay collection, First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024), explores female companionship, care, and survival. Beginning with her close childhood bond with her cousin, Sabina, Dancyger understood the love of friendship as a revelation.
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The night I saw KB Brookins read an excerpt from their debut memoir Pretty at a small brewery in Kansas City, I knew I had to get my hands on the book. A hybrid memoir of transmasculinity, Blackness, belonging and unbelonging in Texas, reckoning with sexual violence and adoptee identity, cultural criticism, and joy, Pretty is an essential addition to the contemporary trans memoir canon.
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Josh Denslow isn’t just a writer. He’s a musician, a screenwriter, and a father. A lot of us hold multiple roles in our lives, of course, and the characters in Denslow’s novel, Super Normal, do too.
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Suzan Palumbo’s Skin Thief is a collection that is both luscious and terrifying, full of shapeshifting women, Trinidadian ghosts, and gothic horror. Skin becomes a startling and often gruesome metaphor for identity as queer women transform into deer, snakes, and douens. They are made monstrous, but they glory in that monstrosity.
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I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times (Soft Skull Press, 2023) by Dr. Taylor Byas is the debut full-length poetry collection inspired and shaped by the 1978 classic The Wiz.
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Should You Lose All Reason(s) by Justine Chan is a debut collection of poetry from Chin Music Press that centers around a Southern Paiute legend about the Coyote. In this legend, a father tells his family to burn his body on a pyre when he dies, to run and not look back.
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When Kate Doyle’s story, “The Goldfish in the Pond at the Community Garden,” arrived to Split Lip Magazine’s submissions queue last year, it was like a revelation: I instantly wanted to publish it.
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The adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” frequently gets ignored by book lovers, and for good reason: You often can tell whether or not you’ll enjoy a book by its cover, and good publishers know that.
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Making art that communicates internal truths when you don’t know who you are or who you want to become is routine for most artists at some point.
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It might seem reckless of me to deem National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela’s forthcoming The People Who Report More Stress one of the best story collections of the year when it’s the first I’ve read. But here’s the thing: Varela’s collection does everything right.
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Keely Shinners’s How to Build a Home at the End of the World (Perennial Press, 2022) occupies a near-future landscape of drought and isolation, in which the U.S. population has been collectively abandoned by the state in ways not (quite) yet manifest.
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No contemporary writer leaves me quite as terrified yet delighted as Kate McIntyre. As a fan of her wickedly witty and imaginative fiction, I’m in good company.
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There’s nothing more American than baseball, the healthcare crisis, and gawking at high profile murders—unless you find a way to make money off all three.
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Every writer has their obsessions, and the best short story collections lay out these obsessions like treasures for the reader. Kate Folk’s debut collection, Out There, is full of treasures that invite close examination.
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In Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Frida Liu leaves her baby, Harriet, alone at home for a few hours while she runs into work. This lapse in judgment changes her life.
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David Nelson’s debut narrative nonfiction book Boys Enter the House pays literary homage to the victims of John Wayne Gacy. Over the past four decades, Gacy has become a household name in the arsenal of serial killers, but little attention has been made in relation to the victims—who they were, what they loved.
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A memoir is interesting either because of the story or how it’s told—Victoria Buitron’s A Body Across Two Hemispheres is both. It’s little wonder this debut memoir-in-essays won the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize.
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Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut novel, How High We Go in the Dark, is everything I love about speculative fiction. It’s sweeping in scope, yet profoundly personal in its concerns; its explorations cast light on intimate aspects of the human condition even as it casts shadows on the wall that thrill us, frighten us, make us question what we know.
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A debut collection of short stories from a Pakistani writer who is writing in English is a rare thing. And to see the city of Karachi, for instance, through the eyes of a writer who weighs each sentence with deliberation and kindness is a revelation.
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