Rachel Cochran’s The Gulf (2023) is set in the fictional town of Parson, Texas, a small town ravaged by a devastating hurricane and the Vietnam War. Murders, Vietnam vets, the long-estranged returning to town and a big dollop of Gulf Coast atmosphere.Read about the other books on the list.
Brandi Wells is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fullerton. They have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. They’ve published a novella, This Boring Apocalypse, and a chapbook of stories, Please Don’t Be Upset.
The Wall by Marlen HaushoferRead about the other entries on the list.
The Wall features the last surviving human on earth, or it might as well, because she certainly feels alone. With her cow, bull calf, cat, dog, and a series of kittens, she undertakes the labor of keeping them and herself alive. It’s work that no other human sees or appreciates. She’s responsible for herself and frequently wonders at how well made she is for this kind of work. Perhaps it’s what she was meant for. In these harsh moments of fantasy, it’s easy to understand what it might mean to a woman in the 1960’s, or now, to do things in her own way and own time with no one to oversee or threaten her. Still, it’s lonely work and the book is full of quiet and perfectly rendered heartbreak.
Hester Musson studied at Bristol University and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She worked as an actress and autocue operator in London before writing full time and now lives in Scotland.
Beloved by Toni MorrisonRead about the other entries on the list.
Beloved has haunted me since I first read it as a teenager, both for its depiction of slavery and the startling use of the supernatural. It was inspired by the true story of a mother who, desperate for her children to escape the horrorsshe endured when enslaved, does the unthinkable. Giving shape to such waking nightmares is perhaps Gothic’s greatest power, allowing us to cross a line imaginatively which we would ordinarily shrink from approaching.
Sethe is struggling with the furious and spiteful spirit of her baby, dead for eighteen years, which has turned her modest house in Ohio into a gothic setting to rival the most chilling castle. When friends finally exorcise the spirit, the daughter returns (possibly) as a mysterious and beautiful young woman who gradually takes over Sethe’s physical and psychological space. The intrusion of a terrible past into the present is a hallmark of Gothic fiction, and I can’t think of another story that does it so powerfully or eerily as Beloved.
Katie Nolan // A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty SmithRead about the other entries on the list.
In Betty Smith’s 1943 coming of age novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, protagonist Francie’s favorite parent, the parent who seems to get her, isn’t her mother, Katie; it’s her creative, sentimental father, Johnny. But after Johnny’s alcoholism consumes him, making it virtually impossible for him to hold a job, it’s Katie who keeps the family afloat. Katie’s grit and determination that her children should have a better life than she had is the kind of tough love that gives Francie the tools she’ll need to survive.
Vitae Una Marson Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, DC. Born in Jamaica, she lives in Maryland, and received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.
The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine SealyRead about the other entries on the list.
Spanning four generations, this novel begins in 1962 with Iapetus, driven mad by the memory of watching his brother, Cronus, murder their father. Cronus encourages Iapetus to forget and later takes in Iapetus’ son, Atlas. But Iapetus and each generation of his descendants remain tied to Cronus even after Cronus dies. Atlas shelves his dream to leave Barbados to study and instead takes on a role helping his cousin manage the hotel Cronus owned. We also meet Atlas’s teenage daughter, Calypso who falls for and has a child with a much older Canadian real estate developer, who is in business with her uncle. And Calypso’s son, also raised at the hotel, battles with his own sense of identity and his mother’s movement in and out of his life. With echoes of Greek mythology, this novel explores the sometimes impossible task of shedding family legacy and forging one’s own path.
Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan FowlerRead about the other entries on the list.
Susan Fowler was only 26 when she brought down Uber CEO Travis Kalanick – but her impact was even larger than that. What began as a 3,000-word blog post on the culture of misogyny and harassment within Uber helped fuel the #MeToo reckoning, and Fowler was one of the people pictured as Time’s Person of the Year in 2017. This is her telling of that story.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (2021) and The Bullet Swallower (f2024), as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (2023).
Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You HomeRead about the other entries on the list.
Being a fairly new reader of horror, I was very excited for Iglesias’s latest. Mario has recently lost his young daughter tocancer, and his wife to grief, and so with nothing to live for he becomes a hitman. When a friend offers him the chance to make a huge sum of money doing a job for a narco-cartel, he agrees, and is launched into a nightmare world of violence and cruelty. Fair warning: This book is dark. DARK. But as someone who grew up on the border amid the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, where, it turns out, cults were actually sacrificing people to the devil, I found Iglesias’s descent into the grim world of drug-fueled violence chillingly rendered and all too real.
Pedro Páramo by Juan RulfoRead about the other entries on the list.
First published in 1955, the slim translated novel is often hailed as a timeless literary masterpiece. Jorge Luis Borges called it one of the best works of Hispanic literature, Susan Sontag described it as one of the 20th century’s most influential books and Gabriel García Márquez described the pages as being as enduring as those of Sophocles.
Jumping between past and present, there’s uncertainty on where the line between the living and dead is drawn as the novel’s central character travels to the fictional ghost town of Comala to find his father upon his dying mother’s wish.
Possession by A.S. ByattRead about the other entries on the list.
Novelist and literary critic A.S. Byatt died last year, and if you haven’t read her Booker-winning Possession yet, now is the time. In the novel, Roland Michell is an American scholar unhappy with his position researching the fictional Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and unsure whether he will commit to his girlfriend, his academic career, and his life in London. When he finds a stray document in the archive that suggests a relationship between the subject of his research and another fictional Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte, he steals it from the London Library. Roland approaches Dr. Maud Bailey, an expert on LaMotte, and together they search libraries, texts, archives, and even closed-up rooms in a cold, drafty old country house to get to the bottom of the literary mystery. Even better, they fall in love while doing so.
front porch with a good book and a glass of iced tea. She has a love for small towns, ghost stories, and pie. During her childhood, she grew up in a town suspiciously resembling the fictional Pine Bluff, Oregon where she trailed behind her grandmother in the family's hardware store until her grandmother would get fed up and put her to work counting nails. She is a member of Sisters in Crime. Charles lives on a small farm in Southwestern Washington with her husband, two furry dogs, two naughty goats, a handful of cackling chickens, a teeny tiny bunny rabbit, and one adventurous kitty cat.
Hidden Pieces, Mary KeliikoaRead about the other entries on the list.
Let’s take a detour over to the northern Oregon coast in Mary Keliikoa’s Hidden Pieces. Sheriff Jax Turner is at the end of his rope when a call comes in that a fourteen-year-old girl left for the school bus stop one morning, but never made it onto the bus. Her backpack is found in an unregistered sex offender’s car, and as the case begins to echo a cold case from Jax’s early career, he’s bound and determined to rescue the girl and not repeat the mistakes of the past. The setting is impeccable and moody with towering trees and sideways rain. The fact that it transports the reader to my beloved northern Oregon coast doesn’t hurt one little bit.
in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The Silent Patient was his first novel, debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. The rights have been sold in a record-breaking 51 countries, and the book has been optioned for film by Plan B. His second novel, The Maidens, was an instant New York Times bestseller and has been optioned for television by Miramax Television and Stone Village.
Read about the other entries on his list.Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
I love this book. It contains the kind of twist that is a visceral, physical punch in the gut, spinning the entire story upside down, forcing you to re-evaluate everything you have taken for granted until that point. Ostensibly it’s about a US Marshall who investigates the disappearance of a psychiatric patient in a prison asylum on a small island. But as his investigation proceeds, something doesn’t feel right – until the twist confirms our suspicion in a way you never anticipate. The imagination and ingenuity in the plotting of this book are simply astonishing.
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity.
about ordinary human beings trying—whether through travel, religion, or political experiment—to transcend the seemingly mundane world they’re living in, and to seek enchantment outside their everyday lives.One of Burton's inspirations:
Read about the other entries on the list.R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries
Equal parts campus novel and cult story, R.O. Kwon’s 2018 The Incendiaries follows Phoebe Lin, a failed piano prodigy coping with the loss of her mother, as she falls under the influence of John Leal, a mysterious half-Korean activist whose equally shadowy organization, Jejah, may in fact be more cult-like than he lets on.
A novel about the close connection between love and violence, and how those who prey upon the world’s lost and loneliest souls use that connection to their advantage, The Incendiaries is currently in development as a limited series.
Amy Avery is a graphic designer and a lifelong lover of fantasy living in Wichita, Kansas. In her spare time, she co-hosts the writing craft podcast And It's Writing. She can also be found watching cooking shows with her husband, crafting cocktails, or catering to the whims of a rather demanding tuxedo cat.
Voyage of the Damned by Frances WhiteRead about the other entries on the list.
This fantasy novel releasing January 2024 features twelve magical heirs of a kingdom–one from each province–embarking on a luxury ship for a pilgrimage to their sacred mountain. On the first night, one of their number is murdered. As the unwelcome, low-class pariah of the group, suspicion falls on Ganymedes Piscero. He searches for the true killer while guarding a secret of his own. He’s the only one on the ship without magic. It’s a page-turner of a book that’s equal parts humor, heart, and mystery.
As Alexene Farol Follmuth, she is also the author of the young adult rom-coms My Mechanical Romance and Twelfth Knight. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, goblin prince/toddler, and rescue pit bull.
Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey DyachenkoRead about the other entries on the list.
Vita Nostra proves that being recruited by a strange man to a mysterious, isolated academy for magic doesn’t always go down like butterbeer. This book is a fever dream, actively nauseating with its crescendoing surreality, and to Sasha’s credit, she is less invited to join the Institute of Special Technologies cult (okay sure, “school”) than she is forced. Still, Sasha’s ongoing pursuit of her own inherent value and worthiness of companionship and/or achievement means that despite the complicated academic system and the beautiful, empathetic things the series as a whole has to say about life, it predominantly feels like when you’re studying to set the curve or die trying.
to write as a way of exploring the complexities of her own identity and to tell stories about society’s transgressors.
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a GeishaRead about the other entries on the list.
Another much-loved and frequently read favorite of mine. A detailed and gorgeously painted work of historical fiction thatrecounts the life story of Nitta Sayuri, who is sold by her family from a poor fishing village to a Geisha House in Kyoto where she learns the intricate customs of the competitive world of the Geishas, going on to become the most celebrated of them all. Sayuri experiences loss, friendship, fear, and love along her transformative journey which spans World War II.
The poignant images of the novel leave a mark on the reader as Sayuri learns the trade of feminine allure, of dance and music, of eroticism and ultimately how to hide her true feelings beneath the Geisha mask in order to become successful, though through it all, hope remains. A must-read!
Just My Luck is currently in development to be made into a movie.
The Missing Place by Sophie LittlefieldRead about the other entries on the list.
The oil business is booming in small-town North Dakota. With all the workers coming and going from the “man camps” set up to process the overflow of new town residents, it’s easy for people to disappear. Colleen and Shay couldn’t be more different, but they are united by the same mission: to find their missing sons. But the oil company that is at the heart of the town’s prosperity might also be at the center of these disappearances—or at the very least helping to cover them up.
Famous Father Girl: The Intimate Memoir of Leonard Bernstein and His Family That Helped Inspire the New Movie Maestro by Jamie BernsteinRead about the other entries on the list.
This memoir of Leonard Bernstein, written by his daughter Jamie, partly inspired [Bradley] Cooper's Maestro. "There was simply no moment when Leonard Bernstein wasn't being a teacher," she writes. "It was words, above all, that he shared with us in all their glorious incarnations."
Maria Hummel is a novelist and poet. Her books include Goldenseal, Lesson in Red, a follow-up to Still Lives, a Reese Witherspoon x Hello Sunshine pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, and BBC Culture Best Book of 2018; Motherland, a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year; and House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman Poetry Prize.
Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of EnglandRead about the other entries on the list.
A cult favorite of many writers, this wonderful picaresque novel follows Ditie, who starts as a “tiny busboy’ and evolves,adventure by adventure, into a waiter and then the owner of a hotel. Hrabal’s humor-laced chapters blend satiric commentary on the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia with an adoring interest in the novel’s women and the meals Ditie serves to royalty. When the hotel kitchen produces a camel stuffed with two antelopes, twenty turkeys, fish, and hundreds of hard-boiled eggs, the turducken gets a memorable twist.
Despite the comic tone, the fact that Ditie never actually serves the King of England underscores the novel’s poignant depiction of a dreamer in a time of painful social change.
constantly on the lookout for killer inspiration--as in who will be the next killer in her books? She has a master's degree in humanities and enjoys learning all the things. And she's been published by many other names.
Fourth Wing, by Rebecca YarrosRead about the other entries on the list.
In Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros, the heroine, Violet Sorrengail, has a family. Her mother and sister are strong dragonriders. But the friends she makes in the Rider’s Quadrant become her true family, which is why it hurts when some of them die while trying to succeed at the treacherous school. Violet is considered fragile and a target through most of the first book, but her friends help her become stronger by training her. And even though she comes up with clever ways around specific problems, her friends are always there for her, even if some of them are frenemies like Xaden Riorson. The twist is that although some friends are protective of her, they may not be doing what is best for Violet’s personal growth. Sometimes, those frenemies do far more for her than she could have ever imagined. But she needs her friends if she is to survive.
İnci Atrek is a writer living in Istanbul by way of London, San Francisco, Dublin, Singapore, and two tiny towns in France.
novels, memoirs, and collections in which Turkey is thrown into high relief. In other words, books reflecting the experiences of those getting to know Turkey—or a new Turkey—inch by inch. Everything to them is peculiar, fascinating, worthy of exploration. It’s that time when all the senses are on high alert. Before everything fades into the background, and becomes once again, the setting for life as usual.One title on the list:
Portrait of a Turkish Family by İrfan OrgaLearn about the other entries on the list.
Orga’s memoirs from childhood begin while he’s living in the lap of luxury, with house staff in a konak in the heart of Ottoman Istanbul. In the summer of 1914, his bourgeois world grinds to a halt with the onset of WWI. This book chronicles Istanbul’s transformation as the Ottoman Empire transitions to the Turkish Republic through the lens of a single family. Perhaps most aptly symbolized by Orga’s grandmother, who refuses to abandon her aristocratic airs as life falls apart around her, it’s a tale of pride and survival, and of how to rebuild life again and again without losing hope.
staff for the On Fire!! literary journal. They then pursued a career in fashion and spent five years in NYC working their way up, eventually managing their own popular fashion and lifestyle blog. Amber is also a screenwriter, so they live in LA, which works out perfectly so Danielle can spoil her plant babies with copious amount of sunshine. Perfect Little Lives is their latest novel.
When No One Is Watching by Alyssa ColeRead about the other entries on the list.
Alyssa Cole’s debut thriller set in gentrified Brooklyn is brilliant because it takes something that a lot of us don’t think aboutoften even though we see it happening before our eyes and makes it extremely ominous. When No One Is Watching is an entire vibe, an insidious, chilling ride with a twist that’s shocking but not far from the realm of possibility, which makes it even more menacing. Cole’s exploration of the horror of gentrification for the longtime black residents in this neighborhood is complex and cutting. There’s also a subplot involving a supporting character with a reveal you won’t see coming that deepens and grounds the story in the best way.
The Snow Child by Eowyn IveyRead about the other entries on the list.
In 1920 Alaska, recent arrivals Jack and Mabel arrive to create a homestead. During the first snowfall of the season, they make a child out of snow—the next morning, their creation is gone, but a blonde-haired girl named Faina appears in the woods. Author Eowyn Ivey was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this book.
University in 2015. She worked in foreign policy before becoming an itinerant writer.
Burundi: Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah ArdizzoneRead about the other entries on the list.
“To live somewhere,” Faye writes, “is to melt carnally into the topography of a place.” In the musician’s debut novel, we meet 10 year-old Gaby, a French-Rwandan boy living in 1990s Bujumbura, Burundi, in a bougainvillea-filled cul-de-sac of the Kinanira neighborhood. He attends the French school, steals and gorges on the neighbor’s mangoes with his band of mostly mixed-race friends, picnics by the glittering lake with his family. Due to inflation, everyone in Bujumbura is a millionaire; democratic elections are on the horizon, neighborhood bars called cabarets brim with colorful opinions and artisanal liquor.
Gaby’s innocent childhood cracks open when his Rwandan mother and French father split up—on their last outing as a family, following a muddy forest trek and avisit to the palm oil factory where his father supervises a colonial enterprise, Gaby notes that the palm oil came to spoil the happiness of his childhood, mixing into the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. In neighboring Rwanda, ethnic tensions are coming to a boiling point, and Gaby’s visit to Kigali with his mother for an uncle’s wedding is full of chilling precursors of the genocide to come. Soon, the unthinkable happens, and Gaby’s once innocent band of boys—who’d smoked cigarettes at his 11th birthday party by a crocodile carcass, who’d picked idle fights over small neighborhood squabbles—are buying grenades off the black market and arming to guard the neighborhood as violence spills across the border. Years later, the cul-de-sac once teeming with great trees is now bare, barricaded with tall walled compounds and barbed wires. But the cabaret— the ubiquitous neighborhood bars where obscurity reigns and tongue are set loose, where the real country, this “small country where everyone knows everyone,”—still stands, and Gaby returns to see if he can still find memories of home and the ghosts who haunt him.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo IshiguroRead about the other entries on the list.
In typical Ishiguro fashion, prepare to have your heart ripped out and then put back in again, even better than it was before. It’s the twisting tale of reassessing the past and what makes us who we are, and it will linger long after the last page. Also, it won the Nobel Prize.
Emily Temple is the author of The Lightness and the Managing Editor at Literary Hub. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was the recipient of a Henfield Prize. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthyRead about the other entries on the list.
It’s not the length of this novel that keeps some people pushing it to the bottom of their to-read pile, but rather the sheer, unrelenting bleak-and-bloody of it. We don’t have much to say to you on that score — it’s bleak, and it’s bloody, andit stays that way all the way through, with very little let up. That said, even if descriptions of scalping are not your thing, the book is worth reading for McCarthy’s masterful use of language, his perfect, terrifyingly evocative sentences that leave you feeling the dust in your mouth. Then again, if descriptions of scalping are your thing, boy do we have the book for you.
dream, it wasn’t until she moved back to Coventry thirteen years later that the second finally came true. She has a degree in History & Politics, and when she’s not agonizing over snappy dialogue or incisive prose, she can be found shouting at Arsenal football matches or holding court in the pub on topics she knows nothing about.
Read about the other entries on the list.Kill Show – Daniel Sweren-Becker
A very recent read. This story centres on the disappearance of teenager, Sara Parcell, who disappears one morning on her way to school – so far, so standard. However, this book is anything but conventional, told as it is in interview format, with key players from the investigation – the police, the journalists, the family, the friends, the armchair detectives – all having their say about what happened to Sara and the part they played. Documentary-style narratives can be divisive, but I challenge anyone not to be drawn into this twisty, propulsive tale.
Little Threats, was named an Apple Books Best of 2020 pick. Her novel, The Blondes, was named a Best Book of 2015 by NPR and Kirkus. The Blondes was produced as a scripted podcast starring Madeline Zima (Twin Peaks), and created by Schultz and Brian J Davis. Translated into French, German, and Spanish it had over one million listeners worldwide.
Read about the other entries on the list.In the Woods by Tana French
Gripping from the first word, Tana French has become known as a mystery maven for a reason. In this first book of her Dublin Murder Squad series, we begin by being taken into the narrator’s confidence about what he cannot trust of memory. We’re then launched into a precise police-report style recounting of a crime from 1984 of missing children in the woods near Knocknaree. It turns out our detective, Rob Ryan, is actually one of the victims—the one left alive. Trauma has taken his memories of that event. Rob now works as an investigator, so this is a double-case narrative. A 12-year-old girl has gone missing from the same woods, and he has to solve it—while also combing through his own traumatic past.
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