Something I have been thinking about a lot—and talking to other industry peers with—is what has happened to media, and specifically books coverage. This is why even if you have just five dollars, you should consider donating to Electric Literature, who is one of the few remaining outlets specifically devoted to literature.
Many of the books on this list reflect that same ethos: doing the work when it seems like the larger world might not care. From Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s harrowing novel of a pregnancy journey to Erica Kent’s haunting novel of addiction, or even Drew Buxton’s protagonist Teddy trying to make it as a strongman, the thread running through many of these books is people—or in the case of Open the Floodgates, a sentient river—who keep trying. They keep trying when the odds are against them; they keep trying when there is refugee-camp-level disaster as in Yñiga, Salt in the Snow, and Those Who Vanish; they keep trying when it’s family disasters, like a teen boy finding his caretaker aunt dead on the floor in The Vivaldi Church or Katherine in Morocco being disinherited for loving the wrong kind of man.
People keep going on, and small presses keep offering space for these stories.
Dzanc Books: Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet
Book of Hours follows parts of the protagonist’s life, from childhood through fertility treatment and becoming a mother. The unnamed narrator had visions of saints when she was a girl in Catholic school, and as she experiences her changing body during pregnancies, the visions return. All the while, she is translating a medieval French poem about a miraculous birth, and looking for answers in the text. The novel takes on both the beauty and violence of giving birth alongside the challenges and heartbreak that led up to the protagonist delivering her own child. Whittet has created a novel that allows readers to experience the sacred, both in the religious meaning of the word and the biological inference when new life arrives in the world. Singular.
SFWP: Black Dog by Erica Kent
Eleven-year-old Jessica Ryder is a smart kid, excels in her English classes, and she has a promising friendship with a neighborhood kid, Dean, as well as a strong pull toward Dean’s chaotic younger brother. When she learns John Lennon has been shot, she’s rocked by the news, and her mostly functional alcoholic father offers what he knows will help: a beer. Jess spirals into addiction while trying to maintain friendships and her relationship to her parents. Set between 1980 and 1989 and marked with historical moments of Gen X childhood, Kent captures both a formative time for a generation alongside Jess’ personal disasters and triumphs. Redemptive and readable.
Catalyst Press: Salt in the Snow by Sahra Noor
After the death of her mother, a young Sahra Noor has already experienced an incalculable grief when the seeds of the ongoing Somali civil war are planted. She and her family are driven first from Mogadishu and then into a refugee camp. It is in the camp that Sahra takes the first steps in what will become a successful career in public health, but she has a long road to get there. When her immediate family is finally relocated to Minneapolis in the mid-90s, Sahra finds herself on a journey that will test her even harder than fleeing political violence. Riveting.
Forest Avenue Press: The Sea-Glass Shore by Julie Salmon Kelleher
Rona and Jack are raising their twin son and daughter along a cove in the Pacific Northwest and wrestling with all of the concerns of parenting. Rona—and thus her children—are selkies, or, shapeshifters who can transform from seal to human and back by donning or doffing their sealskin. Living mostly on land in the house Jack built, Rona has a complicated relationship to how her human life has changed her and influenced her children. The Sea-Glass Shore explores cycles of family dynamics, intergenerational conflict, our relationship to the natural world, and ideas of possession and agency from multiple perspectives. Kelleher makes the mythical relatable, as you don’t have to be a selkie to sometimes wonder if you’re in the wrong skin. A charming novel.
Melville House: Morocco by Norah Labiner
The unnamed narrator of Morocco is an observer who is always at a bit of a distance. This suits her well as a summer intern reader for a horror-focused literary magazine. Concurrently, her friendship with Katherine, an heiress who is the daughter of a renowned psychoanalyst, begins to resemble the same gothic qualities as the stories she’s picked from the slush pile. As the narrator and Katherine move out of their teen years and to adulthood, Katherine’s engagement to a man her father finds unsuitable becomes central. Morocco looks back on a friendship and examines the fallibility of memory. It is immersive and richly textured, deftly layered with literary allusions, and Labiner has written it with exceptional style.
Hub City Press: Daytona Teddy Riggs by Drew Buxton
It’s 1996, and Teddy Riggs, known as “Daytona” by his friends, is a Corpus Christie high school football star—but high school is over and Daytona is unemployed, on the outs with his parents, living with his elderly grandmother, and consuming an unholy amount of Whataburger on the daily. His dream is to compete in a strong man competition he’s training for, but Buxton’s sardonic novel is about more than a (mostly) loveable meathead: It’s about the intersection of masculinity and vulnerability, power-lifting and powerful social dynamics. Daytona is far from perfect, but his heart is (mostly) as big as his home state of Texas, and it’s easy to root for him.
Reverberation Books: Open the Floodgates by Nina Schuyler
In a small California town that is grappling with a changing climate and the fallout of prioritizing industry over conservation, Judge Larry Skolnik presides over a courtroom where the plaintiff is the town river. In this imaginative work, The River has been granted the legal right to personhood and is determined to use it. At the same, Skolnik and the other residents of the town find themselves with opposing feelings about what The River deserves, and as they debate outside of the courtroom, fissures in their relationship begin to crack open. Open the Floodgates is a thoughtful and nuanced novel of speculative climate fiction layered with messy human relationships and an overtone of dire environmental consequences.
Arte Público Press: They Hold Grudges by Diana Rojas
The Costa Rican diaspora where Rob lives in Rhode Island is composed mostly of his family, but they are close—Rob and his wife, for example, live on the same block as his parents—and the family loves chisme, or to gossip. Yet when Rob dreams of a terrible crime allegedly committed by his cousin, and his sister has corroborating dreams, the chisme begins to spiral, and Rob is accused of his own terrible crime. He wants to clear his name, but having grown up with his Abuelito’s story of his warring brothers, he also wants to maintain family harmony. In They Hold Grudges, Diana Rojas picks at the threads that weave a close-knit family together, exploring how families negotiate and test loyalties, growing either closer together or farther apart in the process. Complicated and compelling.
Nightboat Books: Tricyclist by Joon Oluchi Lee
It’s the early aughts in San Francisco, and Howie Song is a ballet dancer who has consistent work in a dance company but no starring roles, and his cadre of lesbian friends are welcoming but sometimes leave him wondering. Through a series of nights out, a funeral for a cat, and Howie’s own distance to his emotional life, Tricyclist has Howie often positioned as a third wheel. Yet, while Howie is emotionally ambivalent, with lovers and hookups he is physically present: His rich sexual life, often described in refreshingly non-euphemistic detail, is a kind of anchor; it is also a reclamation of a past partner who weaponized intimacy. Joon Oluchi Lee offers a portrait of a youngish gay man who is unabashedly comfortable with his body and sexuality, and delightfully devoted to fashion, art, his dog, and his friends. Frank, fun, and thoughtful.
Coffeehouse Press: Yñiga by Glenn Diaz
Yñiga Calinauan has recently been through a breakup and is living in Manila with her beloved cat. After leaving academia, she’s started a successful business completing term papers and writing assignments for wealthy but lazy international students. When her neighborhood is razed by fire, likely in retaliation for the arrest of an army official who had been in hiding nearby, Yñiga’s world is shattered. Upon her return to her family home in the countryside, she is haunted by images from Manila and from her childhood, and she does not slip easily back into living with her sister and mother. Diaz’s novel is steeped in the terror of endemic political violence, the unrelenting grief of sibling and parent loss, and the persistence of trauma; still, it remains lyrical and even wryly funny. A complex portrait of an unforgettable character.
Flexible Press: The Vivaldi Church by Gregory Spatz
In this novel that stretches back to the late 1700s, the Venice system for orphans—where boys were taught a trade and girls were trained in music—emerges as a chorus with one voice clearer than the rest: Chiara, a talented violinist. Woven into this novel is Peter, a young teenager who finds his caretaker-aunt dead in the home they share, and Rose, whose complicated romantic relationships have followed her on a study-abroad to Italy. Peter and Rose play violin, just like Chiara, but the three exist in different times. Chiara, contemporary to Vivaldi; Peter, in the early 1990s; and Rose in the late 2010s. With music at its core, The Vivaldi Church is a meditation on what matters in life, and the choices we make to survive. In prose that is just as resonant as any solo, Spatz hits all of the high notes.
Regal House Press: The Volcano Keeper by Bradley Sides
Charlie Melvin is a country kid; it’s a toss-up if his best friend is his first cousin Rhett or his Granddaddy. As his grandfather nears the end of his life, he has a prediction for Charlie: The world has something in store for him, and that something turns out to be a volcano that pops up in the middle of an Alabama hayfield. The Volcano Keeper is a meditation on family, land, and acceptance of things we can’t quite explain. Charlie becomes a kindhearted adult man, and Sides laces the book with the small moments that don’t seem like much—grandma passing gas, shelling a bucket of peas, helping a neighbor with a calf—until the people those moments were shared with are gone. Tender, thoughtful, and filled with the wonder of everyday life.
University of Pittsburgh Press: Those Who Vanish by Patricia Grace King
A naïve aid worker is concerned about the stray dogs in Guatemala City, while activists keep a Rottweiler in their foyer for protection; a young man lives with the grandmother who carried him to safety after their family was murdered and village burned to the ground by government soldiers, only to leave her for a flighty American; a woman flees North Carolina and her fledgling marriage to work with orphans in Guate, and decades later, her husband is still aware of how close she was to leaving for good. In Patricia Grace King’s linked stories, Guatemala and the ongoing impact of war puts the concerns of her characters in an environment that always has high or dangerous stakes. Yet King shows us that this is why a love affair, or a commitment to a cause is even more important. Stunning.
Read an excerpt from Those Who Vanish in Recommended Reading!
Regal House Press: Call It Madness by Brett Ann Stanciu
Twenty-five-year-old Avah is buoyed by the memory of her opa, the grandfather she visited just once, when she was four and living on the other side of the country with her parents. Just after the visit, her parents’ marriage disintegrated and her mother’s drinking escalated, and Avah had a precarious life. Now, romantically involved with a childhood friend and living in Maine, Avah’s estranged mother surfaces with new information about her opa. Call It Madness is a novel that digs into family secrets and old hurts, and Stanciu writes about addiction and parent-child schisms with a wry wit that offers levity in challenging dynamics. An engrossing excavation of family trauma and small-town life.
Type Eighteen Books: A Bad Deal in Mormon Land by T I M Wirkus
Madame Ilsa von Hoffmann is a down on her luck spiritual medium in early 1900s Salt Lake City. Ilsa is what we would call a transwoman today, but in her time she shaves as often as twice a day and had past work as a “female impersonator” on the Vaudeville circuit. Isla knows she is destined for bigger things, and while decamped to Salt Lake, a Mormon fundamentalist taps her with an impossible task: bring back the spirit of Joseph Smith so he can speak to his disciples about the divines of plural marriage. Needing the money, Isla enlists the help of a plucky journalist to help her with an impossible task, but the whole job is risky and prone to violence from the start. T I M Wirkus’ novel is a rollercoaster ride through the expectations of religion and gender, peppered with henchmen and defected sister-wives. A wildly entertaining read.
