“I can never forget the sense of pure astonishment I felt when I first read Mieko Kawakami’s novella Breasts and Eggs . . . Kawakami is always ceaselessly growing and evolving.”

Haruki Murakami

“Jillian in the Borderlands is an ambitious work that straddles geographical, metaphysical, and literary borders, marrying the social-justice novel with magical realism to render a disquieting portrait of the humanitarian toll of our immigration policies.”

Alice Stephens

“Sharp, swift, witty, perverse: the stories in 48 Blitz are strikingly original, and somehow spare and rich at the same time. The collection is an exciting exercise in contrasts, stories of legend and mythology by way of rural backroads, of a gritty realism that verges on the surreal.”

Timothy Schaffert

“In A Girl is a Body of Water Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi takes the classic male quest for identity and turns it spectacularly on its head. Kirabo’s journey toward self-possession is a beautiful, wise, and exhilarating read.”

Lily King

 

“On every page the intimacies of mind and body, myth and memory are simultaneously sung and said. It’s not quite enough to salute the literary ties and tangles, the range and urgency of subjects, the layered lyric linguistics. The Malevolent Volume is roundly astounding. Reed is making a new and wholly irreducible line through the waters of American poetry.”

Terrance Hayes

“The Clearing is a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively. Out of dry farming soil come these wise, mineral-like poems about young motherhood, mining disasters, miscarriages, memory, and much more. Allison Adair’s poems are haunting and dirt caked, but there is also a tense beauty everywhere. I found The Clearing devastating.”

Henri Cole

“With The Century, Éireann Lorsung braces us for―and against―the tectonic ‘crush of history.’ . . . Lorsung activates the past, the future and the ‘even now,’ challenging us to trust that ‘There is no excuse for not learning / to see. No excuse for not learning to / listen. No excuse not to work.’”

R. A. Villanueva

“Daye’s big-hearted Cardinal probes and lilts in its questioning around whose movements are free in this country, and whose are not… A ruminative, defiant collection that honors lineages while resisting confinement, declaring: ‘I still watch / what I sing, but I sing.’”

Books Are Magic

“These are the praise songs of a poet working brilliantly in prose. Each essay compresses a great deal of art and truth into a small space, whether about fireflies or flamingos, monkeys or monsoons, childhood or motherhood, or the trials and triumphs of living with a brown skin in a dominant white world. You will not find a more elegant, exuberant braiding of natural and personal history.”

Scott Russell Sanders

“A propulsive, heart-rending memoir of love and war and peace. . . . The Dragons, The Giant, the Women is a major contribution to the new literature of African immigration.”

Namwali Serpell

“Ben Ehrenreich’s stunning Desert Notebooks combs through history, literature, myth, physics, and ecology to understand how we got here, and how we might find our way out, into forms of time that are made not of our thralldom to capital and petroleum but of our relationships to each other, to our fellow creatures, to plants and rocks and landscapes, and to the stars and sun and moon overhead. Ben Ehrenreich wants you to join him here, on earth. The thrill of Desert Notebooks is that in its lucid pages such a miracle seems almost possible.”

Anthony McCann

“Vanasco gets at so many of the gray areas in our conversations about rape and the rehabilitation of its perpetrators. If some traumas don’t fit into neat little narratives, then the pleasure of reading Vanasco is in knowing that messiness is OK, that there’s no right way to handle such betrayals.”

Maris Kreizman