It’s April 1st, the first of the month in a year that has felt like living out political headlines better suited to April Fool’s Day, but I fool you not when I say that today is a special day, indeed, for any day that there are new books, new bits of art to get lost in when the world is too much, is a special day. And we need art more now than ever. Below, you’ll find twenty-six new books out today to consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
In fiction, you’ll find highly anticipated novels and story collections from Jeanne Thornton, Anton Solomonik, Jane Flett, Rav Grewal-Kök, Ray Nayler, Nancy Kricorian, and many others. Lovers of poetry will find more offerings than normal today, with new work from Arthur Sze, Amy Gerstler, Sarah Kay, Martin Espada, Alex Dimitrov, and Robin Walter. And in nonfiction, you’ve got Michèle Gerber Klein on the surreal life of Gala Dali, Salvador’s wife and muse and an intriguing figure in her own right; Mike Drucker with a memoir on life and the special art (for those who know) of videogames; David Narrett with the most comprehensive history of the Cherokee nation to date; and more.
Stay safe, Dear Reader, and as you wander through this famously cruelest of months, let some of these literary lights offer companionship and comfort. It’ll be worth it.
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Jeanne Thornton, A/S/L
(Soho Press)
“Beyond astonishing, imbued with witchery, lust, the isolation and connection of a game, devastating heartbreak, and the ageless, aching wrap of friendship and time. I can’t remember the last time a trans novel affected me this deeply. I can’t remember the last time any novel affected me this deeply. Jeanne Thornton is like a literary sorceress becoming more and more powerful with every new volume.”
–Casey Plett
Jane Flett, Freakslaw
(Zando)
“Holy hell, I loved this book. A carnivalesque tale spun in luscious, crackling prose, Freakslaw is the glittery punk offspring of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. You know those books you want to roll around in, rub on your skin, and clasp to your heart? Freakslaw is one, and I can’t wait to see what Jane Flett does next.”
–Chelsea G. Summers
Ken Kalfus, A Hole in the Story
(Milkweed Editions)
“An edgy, discomfiting look at the alpha males of journalism in the age of #MeToo. [A Hole in the Story is] a taut, uncomfortable look at a man forced into a reckoning that’s much more personal than he’d like.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Michèle Gerber Klein, Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dali
(Harper)
“[G]ives Gala Dalí the close-up she deserves. When Gala met Salvador, they met their destinies. The more she erased herself in marrying the soon-to-be world-famous Surrealist, the more she recreated herself as muse, fan wife, money manager, life coach, artistic collaborator, and model for some of the most sensuous portraits of a mature woman ever painted. Surreal takes us backstage at the endless performance piece that was the couple’s life’s work and life’s play…and reshuffles art history along the way.”
–Brad Gooch
Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir
(Flatiron Books)
“Kendzior is an absolutely terrific writer—a preeminent voice of her generation—and her love for this troubled country flows like a kind of lifeblood through her work. I tore through The Last American Road Trip like it was a great novel—except that the sadness and wisdom it imparted stayed with me far longer than most fiction. Every American, whatever their politics, will recognize a country that they love, that they miss—and that they might be able to reclaim.”
–Sebastian Junger
Mike Drucker, Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games
(Hanover Square Press)
“Mike Drucker is charming and hilarious, so it’s not a huge shock that his memoir is also charming and hilarious. Like all the best memoirs, it’s got love, heartbreak, daddy issues, bad wedding decisions, and the real story behind how one of The Legend of Zelda‘s most iconic characters got his name. (Seriously, Mike, why isn’t that on the cover?) I had a lot of fun reading about Drucker’s adventures through life and video games and you will too.”
–Jason Schreier
Sarah Kay, A Little Daylight Left: Poems
(The Dial Press)
“Within the pages of A Little Daylight Left, Sarah Kay carries the poetic tradition of discovery and recovery. She is a prized memory keeper, offering readers a compass at the intersection of who you are and who you are brave enough to become. These poems are the homecoming you didn’t realize you needed.”
–Mahogany L. Browne
Amy Gerstler, Is This My Final Form?
(Penguin Books)
“In her follow up to 2021’s Index of Women, award-winning Gerstler takes on aging, death, metamorphosis, and the mystery of sound and music in her signature voice, both accessible and keenly observant….A must for any contemporary poetry collection, reflecting the dizzying confusion of aging and avoiding plague in the modern era.”
–Library Journal
Arthur Sze, Into the Hush
(Copper Canyon Press)
“The observant and electric Into the Hush by Arthur Sze views any environment, natural or made, as dynamic. A work that acknowledges all the poems that came before to make it possible, the accomplished poet indicates how a narrow field of poetry may offer a wider and deeper view.”
–Poetry Northwest
Anton Solomonik, Realistic Fiction
(Littlepuss Press)
“What does it mean to be understood? My heart overflows at this long-awaited story collection, which blends Sonic the Hedgehog aesthetics with the exacting interior investigations of a trans Thomas Mann, and which answers that question through unforgettable narrators who passionately strive to become less than they are, and who fail.”
–Jeanne Thornton
Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried
(MCD)
“Roll over, George Orwell: This post-apocalyptic dystopia makes Airstrip One look like a summer camp. Nayler’s sophomore novel is set in a familiar future world in which totalitarian orders rule, with recognizably Putinesque touches….All Nayler’s characters are well rounded….A richly detailed evocation of a grim future that is, sadly, absolutely believable.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Rav Grewal-Kök, The Snares
(Random House)
“Here is, at long last, our immigrant John le Carré. The Snares is a propulsive thriller that dives into our technological chaos, political deceptions, and transnational identities with fierce intelligence and wit. Rav Grewal-Kök is a fearless and visionary writer.”
–Xuan Juliana Wang
David Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670 – 1840
(Belknap Press)
“With a deep dive into previously unpublished sources, Narrett has written the most comprehensive history of the eighteenth-century Cherokee people to date. He investigates their complicated geopolitical environment, their relations with other tribal people, and their strategic maneuvers on the chessboard of the European colonial powers…offers insight into Cherokee values, the role women played in war and peace, and the forces that transitioned the Cherokees from autonomous towns that shared values, history, and a sense of the sacred to the beginnings of [a] unified nation.”
–Margaret Verble
Richard Kreitner, Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews The Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery
(FSG)
“Not just brilliant—which it is—Fear No Pharaoh eloquently recounts how Jewish Americans, haunted by enslavement, variously responded to America’s besetting sin. Timely, superb, heartrending, not to be missed.”
–Brenda Wineapple
John Ferling, Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War
(Bloomsbury)
“John Ferling has long been a master historian of the Revolutionary era in America. Here he broadens the view to encompass the larger war of which the American Revolution was a part…a sweeping tale engagingly told.”
–H. W. Brands
Robin Walter, Little Mercy: Poems
(Graywolf)
“Each poem of Robin Walter’s Little Mercy is a precise act of close attention to what more often goes unseen or gets taken for granted in the natural world….Attention is one definition for prayer, and Little Mercy does indeed seem a breviary of sorts, or perhaps one extended, secular prayer offered up against the damage we humans are capable of—against nature, against each other and ourselves….[a] tender, exciting spell of a debut.”
–Carl Phillips
Martín Espada, Jailbreak of Sparrows
(Knopf)
“Martín Espada is a captivating storyteller and memoirist. His great subject is the drama of the Puerto Rican diaspora; his method is meticulously crafted portraiture of lives that intertwine with history, among them his own, radiantly defiant and fearless. One of our most important contemporary poets.”
–Joyce Carol Oates
Alex Dimitrov, Ecstasy: Poems
(Knopf)
“Honest depictions of hookups, partying, and drug use, plus undertones of heartbreak….[We] are transported through the streets and local haunts of New York, Miami and Paris….Dimitrov’s collection is fast paced, in-the-moment, and reflective…sure to make connections with readers.”
–Library Journal
Stacy Nathaniel Jackson, The Ephemera Collector
(Liveright)
“The Ephemera Collector is page-turning, wildly creative, and smart as hell. This impressive debut novel reads in part like ‘if Octavia Butler lived through COVID,’ while also being something boldly original in its voice, vision, and genius. Remember the name Stacy Nathaniel Jackson—this is an author to watch.”
–Matt Johnson
Kyle Edwards, Small Ceremonies
(Pantheon)
“Heartfelt, funny, and stirring, Small Ceremonies is an astonishing debut. Luminous enough to thaw a Manitoba hockey rink, this supple, sparkling novel follows an extended Indigenous family attempting to navigate Winnipeg’s difficult urban terrain. Resurrecting hope from a world of inequity and disruption, Kyle Edwards fills these pages with soulful revelation. The result is a profound meditation on longing: for what was, what might’ve been and what’s still possible.”
–Adam Johnson
Nancy Kricorian, The Burning Heart of the World
(Red Hen Press)
“Like colorful miniatures—from a childhood of elders haunted by the Armenian genocide, to girlhood and adolescence amidst war in Beirut, to marriage and children in New York at the time of 9/11—Nancy Kricorian finds just the right scale to bring her heroine’s passage to vivid, reverberating life.”
–Aram Saroyan
Yves Citton, Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds
(Verso)
“Our lives are scripted, and we continually re-script them in our communicational activities. But for at least four decades, the right has controlled the narrative. Mythocracy explains…the formative power of narrative….He shows how it both reductively formats our lives and, in hands by a renascent left, might offer expansive openings for progressive change. An essential text for our ‘post-truth’ troubled times.”
–Brian Massumi
Dwight Thompson, My Own Dear People
(Akashic)
“Manhood, masculinity, what it means to grow up in a world where who you are and who you are expected to be exist in powerful, soul-deep struggle….Dwight Thompson’s My Own Dear People tackles all these issues and more, in an important, beautifully written novel about a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the actions (and inactions) of his own past. This is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time.”
–Jerry Stahl
Elise Hooper, The Library of Lost Dollhouses
(William Morrow)
“A straight-laced San Francisco librarian is surrounded by a dazzling cast of characters in Hooper’s latest, which jumps from modern day to Belle Époque Paris before taking off like a rocket through the twentieth century. An exploration of the link between art and artist, the secrets women must maintain in order to survive in a man’s world, as well as the caustic effects of withholding the truth from those we love most. This one’s an absolute gem.”
–Fiona Davis
Ariel Courage, Bad Nature
(Holt)
“Wicked and wickedly funny, Ariel Courage’s debut Bad Nature is a dark romp of a book, a road-trip novel propelled by a revenge plot. Nihilism and optimism collide in this story featuring a woman who is simultaneously confronting her childhood and her death. Hester is a caustic yet irresistible narrator, and this evocation of her journey across America reads as both hate mail and love letter to a complex country. Bad Nature is raw, intense, and absolutely mesmerizing.”
–Helen Phillips
Claire Anderson Wheeler, The Gatsby Gambit
(Viking)
“Claire Anderson-Wheeler brilliantly intertwines the allure of the Jazz Age with a gripping murder mystery in ‘The Gatsby Gambit.’ A dazzling homage to Fitzgerald’s world, this novel captivates from the first page to the last.”
–Joanna Wallace
