50 (+ more) Books 2023 (January – June)

One week into the new year and I am happy to know that despite everything there is one thing we can be sure about in 2023: Some fantastic books will be published. Like every year I have my little calender in which I write down whenever I come across a title a find personally interesting – be it because I have read and loved books by these authors before, the book’s synopsis speaks to me, I trust the specific publisher, or may be because I read a good interview with the author. I only included books published in English (including several translations) in my Top 50 – but in the last part where I list even more books I highlighted (written in bold script) a few German books in particular.

The book descriptions are mostly taken directly from the respecitive publishers’ websites. Also as of the moment that I am publishing this, HarperCollins is still not willing to sit down with its union and instead tries to cover work via temps. So if you want to buy a HarperCollins book, buy it via the Union Store. For monthly updates on new releases, follow me on Instagram where I share new publications in my stories (and save in a highlight over the year).

Leila Aboulela: River Spirit

When Akuany and her brother Bol are orphaned in a village raid in South Sudan, they’re taken in by a young merchant Yaseen who promises to care for them, a vow that tethers him to Akuany through their adulthood. As a revolutionary leader rises to power – the self-proclaimed Mahdi, prophesied redeemer of Islam – Sudan begins to slip from the grasp of Ottoman rule, and everyone must choose a side. A scholar of the Qur’an, Yaseen feels beholden to stand against this false Mahdi, even as his choice splinters his family. Meanwhile, Akuany moves through her young adulthood and across the country alone, sold and traded from house to house, with Yaseen as her inconsistent lifeline. Everything each of them is striving for – love, freedom, safety – is all on the line in the fight for Sudan.

Through the voices of seven men and women whose fates grow inextricably linked, Aboulela’s latest novel illuminates a fraught and bloody reckoning with thehistory of a people caught in the crosshairs of imperialism. River Spirit is a powerful tale of corruption, coming of age, and unshakeable devotion – to a cause, to one’s faith, and to the people who become family.

Ayòbámi Adébáyò: A Spell of Good Things

Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man. His father has lost his job, so Eniola spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers and begging, dreaming of a big future.

Wuraola is a golden girl, the perfect child of a wealthy family. Now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practice, she is beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of family friends.

When a local politician takes an interest in Eniola and sudden violence shatters a family party, Wuraola and Eniola’s lives become intertwined. In this breathtaking novel, Ayòbámi Adébáyò shines her light on Nigeria, on the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots, and the shared humanity that lives in between.

Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro (eds.): Letters to a Writer of Color

Filled with empathy and wisdom, instruction and inspiration, this book encourages us to reevaluate the codes and conventions that have shaped our assumptions about how fiction should be written, and also challenges us to apply its lessons to both what we read and how we read. Featuring:
 
• Taymour Soomro on resisting rigid stories about who you are
• Madeleine Thien on how writing builds the room in which it can exist
• Amitava Kumar on why authenticity isn’t a license we carry in our wallets
• Tahmima Anam on giving herself permission to be funny
• Ingrid Rojas Contreras on the bodily challenge of writing about trauma
• Zeyn Joukhadar on queering English and the power of refusing to translate ourselves
• Myriam Gurba on the empowering circle of Latina writers she works within
• Kiese Laymon on hearing that no one wants to read the story that you want to write
• Mohammed Hanif on the censorship he experienced at the hands of political authorities
• Deepa Anappara on writing even through conditions that impede the creation of art
• Plus essays from Tiphanie Yanique, Xiaolu Guo, Jamil Jan Kochai, Vida Cruz-Borja, Femi Kayode, Nadifa Mohamed in conversation with Leila Aboulela, and Sharlene Teo

Asja Baki´c (transl. by Jennifer Zoble): Sweetlust

In a dystopian world with no men, women are “rehabilitated” at an erotic amusement park. Climate change has caused massive flooding and warming in the Balkans, where one programmer builds a time machine. And a devious reimagining of The Sorrows of Young Werther refocuses to center a sexually adventurous Charlotte.

Asja Bakić deploys the speculative and weird to playfully interrogate conversations around artificial intelligence, gender fluidity, and environmental degradation. Once again Bakić upends her characters’ convictions and identities—as she did in her acclaimed debut Mars—and infuses each disorienting universe with sly humor and off-kilter eroticism. Both visceral and otherworldly, Sweetlust takes apart human desire and fragility, repeatedly framing pleasure as both inviting and perilous.

Archie Bongiovanni: Mimosa

Best friends and chosen family Chris, Elise, Jo, and Alex work hard to keep themselves afloat. Their regular brunches hold them together even as the rest of their lives threaten to fall apart. In an effort to avoid being the oldest gays at the party, the crew decides to put on a new queer event called Grind–specifically for homos in their dirty thirties.

Grind is a welcome distraction from their real problems: after a messy divorce, Chris adjusts to being a single parent while struggling to reconnect to their queer community. Elise is caught between feelings for her boss and the career of her dreams. Jo tries to navigate the murky boundaries of being a supportive friend and taking care of her own needs. And Alex is guarding a secret that might change his friendships forever.

While navigating exes at work, physical and mental exhaustion, and drinking way, way too much on weekdays, this chosen family proves that being messy doesn’t always go away with age.

Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond: Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices

Relations punctures the human illusion of separation. New and established storytellers reshape the narratives that divide and subjugate, revealing the truth of our shared humanity despite differences in language, identity, class, gender, and beyond. This vital anthology is Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond’s striking vision of a meeting place of perspectives, centered in the African and diaspora experience.

In a post-Black Panther world, it is an urgent and welcome embrace of the diversity of Blackness. A refreshing collection of genre-spanning literature, it offers a vibrant meditation on being—inviting connection across real and imagined borders, and celebration of the most profound relations.

Eliane Brum (transl. by Diane Whitty): Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World

In lyrical, impassioned prose, Eliane Brum recounts her move from São Paulo to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. In community with the human and more-than-human world of the Amazon, Brum seeks to “reforest” herself while building relationships with forest peoples who carry both the scars and the resistance of the forest in their bodies. Weaving together the lived stories of the region and its history of violent corruption and destruction, Banzeiro Òkòtó is a call for radical change, for the creation of a new kind of human being capable of facing the potential extinction of our species. In it, Brum reveals the direct links between structural inequities rooted in gender, race, class, and even species, and the suffering that capitalism and climate breakdown wreak on those who are least responsible for them.
 
The title Banzeiro Òkòtó features words from two cultural and linguistic traditions: banzeiro is what the Amazon people call the place where the river turns into a fearsome vortex, and òkòtó is the Yoruba word for a shell that spirals outward into infinity. Like the Xingu River, turning as it flows, this book is a fierce document of transformation arguing for the centrality of the Amazon to all our lives.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: The Sleep Watcher

When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of peculiar sleeplessness. Her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their fracturing relationship. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single choice soon changes everything.

Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.

Kalyani Thakur Charal (transl. by Mrinmoy Pramanick and Sipra Mukherjee): I belong to nowhere: Poems of Hope and Resistance

Militant, satirical, and biting, Kalyani Charal pulls no punches in eviscerating paternalistic – and patriarchal – bourgeois socialists who speak on behalf of others. Writing from lived experience, Charal delineates the bourgeois values that fuel the social machinery of caste oppression, while drawing parallels with social and racial marginalisation around the world. Thus, in her poetry, the specificity of Dalit lives in Bengal, a region which prides itself on its Leftist history and enlightened culture, and whose partition into India and Bangladesh has left a legacy of communal tension, refugees, and statelessness, is at the same time the universality of precarity, marginality and dispossession. Finally, there is space for love – wistful and full-throated, with an attentiveness to the natural world that speaks to her claim that “all Dalit woman writers are eco feminists”.

Sara Cheikh: Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah: How The Journey Back To My Roots Became An Adventurous Escape From the Sahara

At the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak, what was supposed to be a long-awaited homecoming becomes a desperate adventure escaping border guards and surviving on candy bars, all the while trying to avoid losing her cool with unwanted and unlikely traveling companions. On her odyssey back home through a changing world, she faces starvation, the possibility of arrest, and kidnapping, as she attempts to cross the border into Algeria by any means possible. Alternating between tense, poignant, and funny, this heartfelt first-hand account explores life and lessons from the plight of the Saharawi people. Sara’s story questions the meaning of cultural heritage and the universal desire to have a homeland.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah is Sara’s first book and is the first memoir published in English by a Saharawi woman writer. The book includes historical and personal black & white images, color image insert, and maps of the Saharawi territory and Sara’s journey. 

Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, Julie Avril Minich (eds.): Crip Genealogies

The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism. The contributors examine how disability justice activists work in concert with other social justice projects, explore crip environments, create alternate disciplinary genealogies, and reject notions of the model minority. Throughout, they demonstrate how the mandate for a single genealogy of the discipline whitewashes disability and continues forms of violence. By cripping disability studies, the contributors allow for divergent histories, the coexistence of anti-ableist and antiracist theorizing, and a radically just and capacious understanding of disability.

Sony Coráñez Bolton: Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability.

Jacqueline Crooks: Fire Rush

Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she can go raving with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club in the industrial town on the outskirts of London where she was born and raised. A young woman unsure of her future, the sound is her guide – a chance to discover who she really is in the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights. In the dance-hall darkness, dub is the music of her soul, her friendships, her ancestry.

But everything changes when she meets Moose, the man she falls deeply in love with, and who offers her the chance of freedom and escape.

When their relationship is brutally cut short, Yamaye goes on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her first to Bristol – where she is caught up in a criminal gang and the police riots sweeping the country – and then to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.

Max Czollek (transl. by Jon Cho-Polizzi): De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century

Max Czollek’s De-Integrate! is a polemical, often humorous examination of Jewish life in contemporary Germany that speaks to the position of minorities the world over. Rooted in sociological theory, the book offers an engaging and approachable critique of Germany’s much-lauded traditions of memory culture and Vergangenheitsbewältigung—its “successful” negotiation of its Nazi past. 

Although modern Reunified Germany presents itself as having overcome historical trauma and integrated its now diverse, multicultural society, Czollek argues that this public image is merely a “Theater of Integration”: showcasing those minoritized stories to bolster Germany’s positive self-image, while sidelining the true potential of the country’s radical diversity. Czollek posits that today’s German minorities must embrace their differences and “de-integrate” from mainstream society in order to counter the rise of rightwing nationalism.

On the one hand a stirring look at integration, belonging, and cultural diversity, and on the other a passionate denunciation of bigotry and virulent nationalism, De-Integrate! speaks across cultural, racial, and national divisions and points to a livelier future for all of us.  

Jenny Fran Davis: Dykette

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians—prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda—invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple—Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy—whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.

As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.

Unfolding over ten heady days, Dykette is an unforgettable love story at the crossroads of queer nonconformity and seductive normativity. With propulsive plotting and sexy, wickedly entertaining prose, Jenny Fran Davis captures the vagaries of desire and the many devastating places in which we seek recognition.

Transmogrify!: 14 Fantastical Tales of Trans Magic

Perfect for fans of All Out and Cemetery Boys, this anthology claims a seat at the table of fantasy literature for trans and gender nonconforming stories.

Transness is as varied and colorful as magic can be. In Transmogrify!, you’ll embark on fourteen different adventures alongside unforgettable characters who embody many different genders and expressions and experiences—because magic is for everyone, and that is cause for celebration.

Cherie Dimaline: VenCo

Lucky St. James, a Métis millennial living with her cantankerous but loving grandmother Stella, is barely hanging on when she discovers she will be evicted from their tiny Toronto apartment. Then, one night, something strange and irresistible calls out to Lucky. Burrowing through a wall, she finds a silver spoon etched with a crooked-nosed witch and the word SALEM, humming with otherworldly energy.

Hundreds of miles away in Salem, Myrna Good has been looking for Lucky. Myrna works for VenCo, a front company fueled by vast resources of dark money.

Lucky is familiar with the magic of her indigenous ancestors, but she has no idea that the spoon links her to VenCo’s network of witches throughout North America. Generations of witches have been waiting for centuries for the seven spoons to come together, igniting a new era, and restoring women to their rightful power.

Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ: Dazzling

Soon you will become the thing all other beasts fear.

Treasure and her mother lost everything when Treasure’s daddy died. Haggling for scraps in the market, Treasure meets a spirit who promises to bring her father back – but she has to do something for him first.

Ozoemena has an itch in the middle of her back that can’t be scratched. An itch that speaks to her patrilineal destiny, to defend her people by becoming a leopard. Her father impressed upon her what an honour this was before he vanished, but it’s one she couldn’t want less – she has enough to worry about as she tries to fit in at a new school.

But as the two girls reckon with their burgeoning wildness and the legacy of decisions made by their fathers, Ozoemena’s fellow students start to vanish. Treasure and Ozoemena will face terrible choices as each must ask herself: in a world that always says ‘no’ to women, what must two young girls sacrifice to get what is theirs?

Claire Forrest: Where You See Yourself

By the time Effie Galanos starts her senior year, it feels like she’s already been thinking about college applications for an eternity—after all, finding a college that will be the perfect fit and be accessible enough for Effie to navigate in her wheelchair presents a ton of considerations that her friends don’t have to worry about.

What Effie hasn’t told anyone is that she already knows exactly what school she has her heart set on: a college in NYC with a major in Mass Media & Society that will set her up perfectly for her dream job in digital media. She’s never been to New York, but paging through the brochure, she can picture the person she’ll be there, far from the Minneapolis neighborhood where she’s lived her entire life. When she finds out that Wilder (her longtime crush) is applying there too, it seems like one more sign from the universe that it’s the right place for her.

Stacy Jane Grover: Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In “Dead Furrows,” a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. “Homeplace” threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover’s coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association’s guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

Priya Guns : Your Driver is Waiting

Damani is tired. Her father just died on the job at a fast-food joint, and now she lives paycheck to paycheck in a basement, caring for her mom and driving for an app that is constantly cutting her take. The city is roiling in protests–everybody’s in solidarity with somebody–but while she keeps hearing that they’re fighting for change on behalf of people like her, she literally can’t afford to pay attention.    

Then she gives a ride to Jolene (five stars, obviously). Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend–attentive, attractive, an ally–and their chemistry is off the charts. Jolene’s done the reading, she goes to every protest, and she says all the right things. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that’s holding her back: she’s never dated anyone with money before, not to mention a white girl with money. But just as their romance intensifies and Damani finally lets her guard down, Jolene does something unforgivable, setting off an explosive chain of events.

A wild, one-sitting read brimming with dark comedy, and piercing social commentary and announcing Priya Guns’s feverishly original voice, Your Driver Is Waiting is a crackling send-up of our culture of modern alienation.

Lamya H.: Hijab Buth Blues: A Memoir

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don’t matter, and it’s easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?
 
From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own—ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.
 
This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya’s childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one’s own life.

Gulchehra Hoja: A Stone Is Most Precious Where it Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival

In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja’s family disappeared overnight. Her crime – and thus that of her family – was her award-winning investigations on the plight of her people, the Uyghurs, whose existence and culture is being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government.

A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs is Gulchehra’s stunning memoir, taking us into the everyday world of life under Chinese rule in East Turkestan (more formally as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China), from her idyllic childhood to its modern nightmare. The grandchild of a renowned musician and the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, Gulchehra grew up with her people’s culture and history running through her veins. She showed her gifts early on as a dancer, actress, and storyteller, putting her on a path to success as a major television star. Slowly though, she began to understand what China was doing to her people, as well as her own complicity as a journalist. As her rising fame and growing political awakening coincided, she made it her mission to expose the crimes Beijing is committing in the far reaches of its nation, no matter the cost.

Reveling in the beauty of East Turkestan and its people – its music, its culture, its heritage, and above all its emphasis on community and family – this groundbreaking memoir gives us a glimpse beyond what the Chinese state wants us to see, showcasing a woman who was willing to risk not just her own life, but also that of everyone she loves, to expose her people’s story to the world.

Emmanuel Iduma: I’m Still With You: A Reckoning With Silence, Inheritance, And History

In inimitable, rhythmic prose, the author and winner of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize Emmanuel Iduma tells the story of his return to Nigeria, where he grew up, after years of living in New York. He traveled home with an elusive mission: to learn the fate of his uncle Emmanuel, his namesake, who disappeared in the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. A conflict that left so many families broken, the war remains at the margins of the history books, almost taboo to discuss. To find answers, Iduma stopped in city after city throughout the former Biafra region, reconnecting with relatives dear and distant to probe their memories, prowling university libraries to furtively photocopy illicit books, and visiting half-abandoned monuments along the highway. Perhaps, he realized, if he could understand how his father grieved the loss of a brother in the war, he might learn how to grieve his late father in turn.
 
His is also the story of countless families across the country and across the world who will never have answers or proper funerals for their loved ones. It’s a story about the birth of an artist, about writing itself as an act both healing and political, even dangerous. And it’s a story about family history and legacy, and all the questions the dead leave unanswered. How much of the author’s identity is wrapped up in this inheritance? And what does it mean to return home, when the people who define it are gone?
 
Equal parts memoir, national history, and political reckoning, I Am Still With You is a profoundly personal story of collective loss and making peace with the unknowable.

Haji Jabir (transl. by Sawad Hussain and Marcia Lynx Qualey): Black Foam

Dawoud is on the run from his murky past, aiming to discover where he belongs. He tries to assimilate into different groups along his journey through North Africa and Israel, changing his clothes, his religious affiliations, and even his name to fit in, but the safety and peace he seeks remain elusive. It seems prejudice is everywhere, holding him back, when all he really wants is to create a simple life he can call his own. A chameleon, Dawoud—or David, Adal, or Dawit, depending on where and when you meet him—is not lost in this whirl of identities. In fact, he is defined by it.

Dawoud’s journey is circuitous and specific, but the desire to belong is universal. Spellbinding to the final page, Black Foam is both intimate and grand in scale, much like the experiences of the millions of people migrating to find peace and safety in the twenty-first century.

Kapka Kassabova: Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time

In Elixir, in a wild river valley and amid the three mountains that define it, Kapka Kassabova seeks out the deep connection between people, plants, and place. The Mesta is one of the oldest rivers in Europe and the surrounding forests and mountains of the southern Balkans are an extraordinarily rich nexus for plant gatherers.
 
Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers, and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism that makes use of them, and she experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. And Kassabova reflects on what being disconnected from place can do to our souls and our bodies. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing.

Keorapetse Kgositsile (Edited and with an introduction by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers and Uhuru Portia Phalafala): Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems, 1969–2018

Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa’s second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile’s new and collected works spans almost fifty years.

During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an “undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz.” Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile’s prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world—and did.

R.F. Kuang: Yellowface

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song–complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

Kirsty Logan: Now She is Witch

From the snowy winter woods to the bright midnight sun; from lost and powerless to finding your path, Now She is Witch conjures a world of violence and beauty – a world where women grasp at power through witchcraft, sexuality and performance, and most of all through throwing each other to the wolves.

Lux has lost everything when Else finds her, alone in the woods. Her family, her lover, her home – all burned. The world is suspicious of women like her. But Lux is cunning; she knows how to exploit people’s expectations, how to blend into the background. And she knows a lot about poisons.

Else has not found Lux by accident. She needs her help to seek revenge against the man who wronged her, and together they pursue him north. But on their hunt they will uncover dark secrets that entangle them with dangerous adversaries.

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene: Innards

Imbued with the thrilling texture of township language and life, and uncompromising in its depiction of Black South Africa, Innards tells the intimate stories of everyday folks processing the savagery of apartheid with grit, wit, and their own distinctive, bewildering humor.

Magogodi oa Mphela Makhene—who was born in apartheid-era South Africa—plunges readers into an electrifying first collection filled with indelible characters. Meet a fake PhD and ex–freedom fighter who remains unbothered by his own duplicity, a girl who goes mute after stumbling on a burning body, and twin siblings nursing a scorching feud. Like many Americans today, Innards’ characters mirror the difficulty of navigating the shadows of a living past alongside the uncertain opportunities of the promised land.

A work of intelligence and vision—flush with forgiveness, rage, ugliness, and wild beauty—Innards heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Bree McIvor: The God of Good Looks

Bianca Bridge has always dreamt of becoming a writer. But Trinidadian society can be unforgiving, and having an affair with a married government official is a sure-fire way to ruin your prospects. So when Obadiah Cortland, a notoriously tyrannical entrepreneur in the island’s beauty scene, offers her a job, Bianca accepts, realizing that working on his magazine is the closest to her dreams she’ll get.

 As Bianca begins to embrace her power and creative voice, she starts to suspect Obadiah is not the elite tyrant he seems. She’s right. Born in one of the poorest parts of Trinidad, Obadiah has clawed partway up society’s ladder and built his company around his meticulously crafted persona. Now, he’s not about to let anyone, especially Bianca, see past his façade.

 When Bianca’s ex-lover threatens everything she’s rebuilt, jeopardizing all she’s come to love about her new life, she’s surprised to find support from the most unlikely ally and, finally, draws the strength to fight back like her mother taught her.

 Sharp-witted and fiercely fun, The God of Good Looks alternates between Bianca’s diary entries and Obadiah’s first-person narrative to portray modern Trinidad’s rigid class barriers and the fraught impact of beauty commodification in a patriarchal society. Boisterous, moving, and full of meaty, universally relatable questions, Mc Ivor’s sparkling debut is an open-hearted, awakening tale about prejudice and pride, the masks we wear, and what we can become if we dare to take them off.

Miss Major and Toshio Meronek: Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, New York’s jail system, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Miss Major Speaks is both a document of her brilliant life—told with intimacy, warmth, and an undeniable levity—and a roadmap for the challenges black, brown, queer and trans youth will face on the path of liberation today.

Gothataone Moeng: Call and Response

A young widow adheres to the expectations of wearing mourning clothes for nearly a year, though she’s unsure what the traditions mean or whether she is ready to meet the world without their protection. An older sister returns home from a confusing time in America, only to explain at every turn why she’s left the land of opportunity. A younger sister hides her sexual exploits from her family, while her older brother openly flaunts his infidelity.

The stories collected in Call and Response are strongly anchored in place – in the village of Serowe, where the author is from, and in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana – charting the emotional journeys of women seeking love and opportunity beyond the barriers of custom and circumstance.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: Drinking from Graveyard Wells

Questions like this lurk between the lines of this stunning collection of stories that engage with African women’s histories, both personal and generational. Their history is not just one thing: there is heartbreak and pain, and joy, and flying and magic, so much magic. An avenging spirit takes on the patriarchy from beyond the grave. An immigrant woman undergoes a naturalization ceremony in an imagined American state that demands that immigrants pay a toll of the thing they love the most. A first-generation Zimbabwean-American woman haunted by generational trauma is willing to pay the ultimate price to take her pain away—giving up her memories. A neighborhood gossip wakes up to find that houses are mysteriously vanishing in the night. A shapeshifting freedom fighter leaves a legacy of resistance to her granddaughter.

In Drinking from Graveyard Wells, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu assembles poignantly reflective stories that center the voices of African women charting their own Black history through the ages. Ndlovu’s stories play with genre, from softly surreal to deeply fantastical. Each narrative is wrapped in the literary eloquence and tradition of southern African mythology, transporting readers into the lives of African women who have fought across space and time to be seen.

Drawing on her own early experiences as a Zimbabwean living under the Mugabe dictatorship, Ndlovu’s stories are grounded in truth and empathy. Ndlovu boldly offers up alternative interpretations of a past and a present that speculates upon the everyday lives of a people disregarded. Her words explore the erasure of African women while highlighting their beauty and limitless magic. Immersed in worlds both fantastical and familiar, readers find themselves walking alongside these women, grieving their pain, and celebrating their joy, all against the textured backdrop of Zimbabwe.

Harry Nicholas: A Trans Man Walks Into A Gay Bar: A Journey of Self (And Sexual) Discovery

After his relationship with his girlfriend of 5 years ended, Harry realised he was a single adult for the first time – not only that, but a single, transmasculine and newly out gay man.

Despite knowing it was the right decision, the reality of his new situation was terrifying. How could he be a gay man, when he was still learning what it was to be a man? Would the gay community embrace him or reject him? What would gay sex be like? And most importantly, would finding love again be possible?

In this raw, intimate and unflinchingly honest book, we follow Harry as he navigates the sometimes fraught and contradictory worlds of contemporary gay culture as a trans gay man, from Grindr, dating and gay bars, to saunas, sex and ultimately, falling in love. Harry’s brave and uplifting journey will show you there is joy in finding who you are.

DK Nnuro: What Napoleon Could Not Do

When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle.
 
Jacob, an awkward computer programmer who still lives with his father, wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife—a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father put it, “what Napoleon could not do”: she went to college and law school in the United States and even managed to marry Wilder, a wealthy Black businessman from Texas. Wilder’s view of America differs markedly from his wife’s, as he’s spent his life railing against the racism and marginalization that are part of life for every African American living here.
 
For these three, their desires and ambitions highlight the promise and the disappointment that life in a new country offers. How each character comes to understand this and how each learns from both their dashed hopes and their fulfilled dreams lie at the heart of what makes What Napoleon Could Not Do such a compelling, insightful read.

Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall: Tauhou

An inventive exploration of Indigenous families, womanhood, and alternate post-colonial realities by a writer of Māori and Coast Salish descent. 

Dear grandmother, I am writing this song for you. I am a stranger in this place, he tauhou ahau, reintroducing myself to your land.

Tauhou envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa, two lands that now sit side by side in the ocean. Each chapter in this innovative hybrid novel is a fable, an autobiographical memory, a poem. A monster guards the cultural objects in a museum, a woman uncovers her own grave, another woman remembers her estranged father. On the rainforest beaches or the grassy dunes, sisters and cousins contend with the ghosts of the past—all the way back to when the first foreign ships arrived on their shores. In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism. Tauhou is an ardent search for answers, for ways to live with truth. It is a longing for home, to return to the land and sea.

Sharon Dodua Otoo: Ada’s Room/ Ada’s Realm

WHERE IS ADA?
In a small village in West Africa, in what will one day become Ghana, Ada gives birth again, and again the baby does not live. As she grieves the loss of her child, Portuguese traders become the first white men to arrive in the village, an event that will bear terrible repercussions for Ada and her kin.

WHEN IS ADA?
Centuries later, Ada will become the mathematical genius Ada Lovelace; Ada, a prisoner forced into prostitution in a Nazi concentration camp; and Ada, a young, pregnant Ghanaian woman with a new British passport who arrives in Berlin in 2019 for a fresh start.

WHO IS ADA?
Ada is not one woman, but many, and she is all women – she revolves in orbits, looping from one century and from one place to the next. And so, she experiences the hardship but also the joy of womanhood: she is a victim, she offers resistance, and she fights for her independence.

This long-awaited debut from Sharon Dodua Otoo paints an astonishing picture of femininity, resilience and struggle with deep empathy and humour, with vivid language and infinite imagination.

Uhuru Portia Phalafala: Mine Mine Mine

Mine Mine Mine is a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s family’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners.

Phalafala ties the catastrophic effects of gold mining on the miners and the environment in Johannesburg to the destruction of Black lives, the institution of the Black family, and Black sociality. Her epic poem addresses racial capitalism, bringing together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes. As inheritor of the migrant labor lineage, she uses her experience to explore how Black women carry intergenerational trauma of racial capitalism in their bodies and intersects the personal and national, continental and diasporic narration of this history within a critical race framework.

Geoffrey Philp: Archipelagos

This is poetry written in the time of onrushing global disaster, of a racist and still imperial USA and of Black lives matter. It is a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean.  No natural world was more changed than the West Indian islands by sugar monoculture – and, as the title poem begins: “At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise/ and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean”.  Historically, “the debris of empire that crowd our shores” connects to the “sands of our beaches / littered with masks and plastic bottles.” Philp’s powerful and elegant poems span past and present and make it very clear that there cannot be a moral response to the climate crisis that is not also embedded in the struggle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and the power of global capitalism – the missions of the West that always had and still have at their heart the ideology of white supremacy and a capitalism endlessly voracious for the world’s human and natural resources. These are poems of wit and anger, but also of personal intimacy – dealing with the vexed relationship with a violent father – and give us line after line of the shapeliest poetry – in sound, in rhythm and the exact choice of word.   

Hazel Jane Plante: Any Other City

Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.

Side B finds Tracy in 2019, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.

Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex – a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.

Amelia Possanza: Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives

When Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn to build a life of her own, she found herself surrounded by queer stories: she read them on landmark placards, overheard them on the pool deck when she joined the world’s largest LGBTQ swim team, and even watched them on TV in her cockroach-infested apartment. These stories inspired her to seek out lesbians throughout history who could become her role models, in romance and in life.

Centered around seven love stories for the ages, this is Possanza’s journey into the archives to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the twentieth century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed, and where their memories echo and live on. Possanza’s hunt takes readers from a drag king show in Bushwick to the home of activists in Harlem and then across the ocean to Hadrian’s Library, where she searches for traces of Sappho in the ruins. Along the way, she discovers her own love—for swimming, for community, for New York City—and adds her record to the archive.

At the heart of this riveting, inventive history, Possanza asks: How could lesbian love help us reimagine care and community? What would our world look like if we replaced its foundation of misogyny with something new, with something distinctly lesbian?

Astrid Roemer (transl. Lucy Scott): On a Woman’s Madness

A classic of queer literature that’s as electrifying today as it was when it originally appeared in 1982, On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by the passionate romances of the present but haunted by society’s expectations and her ancestral past.

Translated into sensuous English for the first time by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer’s intimate novel—with its tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers—is a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. “I’m Noenka,” she responds resolutely, “which means Never Again.”

Francesca T Royster: Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance

As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca Royster and her family’s world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who’s white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties. Choosing Family chronicles this journey to motherhood while examining the messiness and complexity of adoption and parenthood from a Black, queer, and feminist perspective. Royster also explores her memories of the matriarchs of her childhood and the homes these women created in Chicago’s South Side—itself a dynamic character in the memoir—where “family” was fluid, inclusive, and not necessarily defined by marriage or other socially recognized contracts.
     
Calling upon the work of some of her favorite queer thinkers, including José Esteban Muñoz and Audre Lorde, Royster interweaves her experiences and memories with queer and gender theory to argue that many Black families, certainly her own, have historically had a “queer” attitude toward family: configurations that sit outside the white normative experience and are the richer for their flexibility and generosity of spirit. A powerful, genre-bending memoir of family, identity, and acceptance, Choosing Family, ultimately, is about joy—about claiming the joy that society did not intend to assign to you, or to those like you.

Emma Rutherford and Ellie Smith (eds.): Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin

Accompanying an exhibition at Philip Mould & Company, Without Hands presents the art of Sarah Biffin. Biffin (1784–1850) was born with phocomelia, a condition described on her baptism record as “born without arms and legs.” After learning to sew and write as a child, Biffin joined a traveling sideshow where she painted in front of an audience. Eventually, she rose to fame as a talented miniaturist, signing many of her works “without hands.”

Despite her prolific output, including commissions from royalty and exquisitely detailed self-portraits, Biffin’s work has been overlooked by art historians. Beautifully illustrated and including original research, Without Hands celebrates Biffin as an artist who challenged contemporary attitudes to disability.

Mihret Sibhat: The History of a Difficult Child

Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime. In the Small Town where they live, nosy women convene around coffee ceremonies multiple times a day, the gossip spreading like wildfire.

As Selam’s mother, the powerful and relentlessly dignified Degitu, grows ill, she embraces a persecuted, Pentecostal God and insists her family convert alongside her. The Asmelashes stand solidly in opposition to the times, and Selam grows up seeking revenge on despotic comrades, neighborhood bullies, and a ruthless God. Wise beyond her years yet thoroughly naive, she contends with an inner fury, a profound sadness, and a throbbing, unstoppable pursuit of education, freedom, and love. 

Told through the perspective of its charming and irresistible narrator, The History of a Difficult Child is about what happens when mother, God, and country are at odds, and how one difficult child finds her voice.

Jade Song: Chlorine

Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life.

But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep, of the oceans and the rivers. Ones that called sailors to their doom. Ones that dragged them down and drowned them. Ones that feasted on their flesh. Ones of the creature that she’s always longed to become: mermaid.

Ren aches to be in the water. She dreams of the scent of chlorine—the feel of it on her skin. And she will do anything she can to make a life for herself where she can be free. No matter the pain. No matter what anyone else thinks. No matter how much blood she has to spill. 

Tlotlo Tsamaase: Womb City

WOMB CITY imagines a dark and deadly future Botswana, rich with culture and true folklore, which begs the question: how far must one go to destroy the structures of inequality upon which a society was founded? How far must a mother go to save the life of her child? Nelah seems to have it all: wealth, fame, a husband, and a child on the way. But in a body her husband controls via microchip and the tailspin of a loveless marriage, her hopes and dreams come to a devastating halt. A drug-fueled night of celebration ends in a hit-and-run. To dodge a sentencing in a society that favors men, Nelah and her side-piece, Janith Koshal, finish the victim off and bury the body.

But the secret claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave. As her victim’s vengeful ghost begins exacting a bloody revenge on everyone Nelah holds dear, she’ll have to unravel her society’s terrible secrets to stop those in power, and become a monster unlike any other to quench the ghost’s violent thirst.

Various authors (transl. by various translators): No Edges

The first collection of Swahili fiction in English translation, No Edges introduces eight East African writers from Tanzania and Kenya as they share tales of sorcerers, Nairobi junkyards, cross-country bus rides, and spaceships that blast prisoners into eternity. Here we’re encouraged to explore the chaos of life on a crowded Earth, as well as the otherworldly realms lying just beyond our reach. Through language bursting with rhythm and vivid Africanfuturist visions, these writers summon the boundless future into being.

Stories by: Fatma Shafii, Lusajo Mwaikenda Israel, Mwas Mahugu, Clara Momanyi, Fadhy Mtanga, Katama G. C. Mkangi, Lilian Mbaga and Euphrase Kezilahabi.

Translated by: Hassan Kassim, Richard Prins, Idza Luhumyo, Enock Matundura, Jay Boss Rubin, Uta Reuster-Jahn, Duncan Ian Tarrant

Taleen Voskuni: Sorry, Bro

When Nareh Bedrossian’s non-Armenian boyfriend gets down on one knee and proposes to her in front of a room full of drunk San Francisco tech boys, she realizes it’s time to find someone who shares her idea of romance.
 
Enter her mother: armed with plenty of mom-guilt and a spreadsheet of Facebook-stalked Armenian men, she convinces Nar to attend Explore Armenia, a month-long series of events in the city. But it’s not the mom-approved playboy doctor or the wealthy engineer who catch Nar’s eye—it’s Erebuni, a woman as immersed in the witchy arts as she is in preserving Armenian identity. Suddenly, with Erebuni as her wingwoman, the events feel like far less of a chore, and much more of an adventure. Who knew cooking up kuftes together could be so . . . sexy?
 
Erebuni helps Nar see the beauty of their shared culture and makes her feel understood in a way she never has before. But there’s one teeny problem: Nar’s not exactly out as bisexual. The clock is ticking on her double life—the Explore Armenia closing banquet is coming up, and her entire extended family will be there, along with Erebuni. Her worlds will inevitably collide, but Nar is determined to be brave and to claim her happiness: proudly Armenian, proudly bisexual, and proudly herself for the first time in her life.

And many more books…

Nana Kwami Adjei-Brenyah: Chain Gang All Stars, TJ Alexander: Chef’s Choice: A Novel, Rosanna Amaka: Rose and the Burma Sky, Alexandria Bellefleur: The Fiancee Farce, Moniquill Blackgoose: To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Rachel E. Cargle: A Renaissance of Our Own: a Memoir and Manifesto on Reimagining, Kaitlin Chan: Homecoming, J K Chukwu: The Unfortunates, Marisa Crane: I keep my exoskelletons to myself, Nicole Cuffy: Dances, Sarah Cypher: The Skin and Its Girl, Max Czollek: Versöhnungstheater, Miriam Darlington : The Wise Hours: A Journey into the Wild and Secret World of Owls, JR Dawson: The First Bright Thing, Eliot Duncan: Ponyboy, Sarah Eagle Heart and Emma Eagle Heart-White: Warrior Princesses Strike Back, Jeffrey Escoffier and Andrew R. Spieldenner (eds.): A Pill for Promiscuity: Gay Sex in an Age of Pharmaceuticals, Benno Gammerl: Queer: Eine Deutsche Geschichte vom Kaiserreich bis heute, Stênio Gardel (transl. by Bruna Dantas Lobato): The Words That Remain, Jessica George: Maame, Aubrey Gordon: “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Guy Gunaratne: Mister, Mister, John Hendrickson: Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, Camille Hernández-Ramdwar: Suite as Sugar: and Other Stories, Moshtari Hilal: Hässlichkeit, Katie Holten: The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape, S.L. Huang: The Water Outlaws, Jessica Johns: Bad Cree, Janine Joseph: Decade of the Brain: Poems, Han Kang (transl. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won): Greek Lessons, Camille Kellogg: Just as You Are, Clarkisha Kent: Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto, Chiang-sheng Kuo (transl. by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Li): The Piano Tuner, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe: Rose Quartz: Poems, Liv Little: Rosewater, Mattie Lunchansky: Boys Weekend, Jennifer Maritza McCauley: When Trying to Return Home, Greg Marshall: Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It, Aurora Mattia: The Fifth Wound, Lauren Milici: Sad Sexy Catholic, Klancy Miller: For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food: Interviews, Inspiration, and Recipes, Yu Miri (transl. Morgan Giles): The End of August, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai: Dust Child, Jenny Odell: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond The Clock, Ben Okri: Dangerous Love, Malka Older: The Mimicking of Known Successes, Ukamaka Olisakwe: Don’t Answer When They Call Your Name, Soraya Palmer: The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, Nii Ayikwei Parkes: Azúcar, Matthew Salesses: The Sense of Wonder, Jennifer Savran Kelly: Endpapers, Lisa See: Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, Nadia Shehadeh: Anti-Girlboss: Den Kapitalismus vom Sofa bekämpfen, Ani Kayode Somtochukwu: And Then He Sang A Lullaby, Brandon Taylor: The Late Americans, Tegan & Sara, Tillie Walden: Junior High, Eva Tepest: Power Bottom, Emily Tesh: Some Desperate Glory, Thao Thai: Banyan Moon, Alejandro Varela: The People Who Report More Stress, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (ed.): Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, Tyriek White: We Are a Haunting, Patrick Wilmot: Glass, Jane Wong: Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah: Habibitus, Esther Yi: Y/N, Light Zachary: More Sure: Poems and Interruptions