Six titles centered around art that doesn’t actually exist

Melissa Albert is the New York Times and indie bestselling author of The Bad Ones, Our Crooked Hearts, and the Hazel Wood series.

Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and included in the New York Times list of Notable Children’s Books.

The Children is her first adult novel.

At Lit Hub Albert tagged "six books I’ve loved that have made-up art inside them." One title on the list:

Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

A slender, riveting oral history about the disappearance of Julian Blake, lead singer of an invented 1970s acid-folk band. In order to finish their second album, the band takes up residence in a creaky old house in the British countryside. Decades after Julian’s vanishing there, the band and various hangers-on recall eerie incidents both in and out of the house—rooms full of occult literature; pub full of haunting photographs—as well as the glimmering stranger circling the Orpheus-esque Julian. As an appreciator of freak folk and tolerator of mandolins, I want to hear the album made in this pressure cooker.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

Wylding Hall is among Sam Reader's nine top modern SFF rock mythologies, Robert Brockway's five weird books for the jaded reader, and Meghan Ball's eleven top fictional bands in sci-fi & fantasy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six romance reads for book lovers

At Book Riot Nikki DeMarco tagged six "romance reads for book lovers, featuring librarians, booksellers, and writers." One title on the list:

Kiss Me, Maybe by Gabriella Gamez

Angela Gutierrez is a librarian who has never been kissed—and after accidentally going viral for coming out as an asexual lesbian, she decides to do something about it. Her plan: a scavenger hunt where the winner earns her first kiss. Her problem: pulling it off requires the help of Krystal Ramirez, the bartender she’s had a crush on for five years and who is absolutely, definitely not interested in love. Except, the more time they spend together planning Angela’s romantic future, the harder it gets to pretend there’s nothing between them. This book has the very specific joy of watching someone who has spent years organizing other people’s stories finally get to star in her own.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles about African Americans reclaiming the South

Kortney Morrow is a poet and writer creating from her studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has received support from 68to05, The Academy of American Poets, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Transition Magazine.

Her debut poetry collection, Run It Back, was the winner of the 2024 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.

At Electric Lit Morrow tagged ten books that "guided my thinking around place-based liberation, the hopes we put into geography, and the complexities of reclaiming an ever-changing place in search of freedom." One title on the list:

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

Broom’s debut memoir, The Yellow House, recounts the post-Katrina transformation of New Orleans East through the material history of her titular family house. On and off again, Broom returns to, journeys away, against, from, and towards the mythology of her city, her family, and the South. When Hurricane Katrina displaces Broom’s family—going from 24 family members in New Orleans to two brothers in all of Louisiana—her family’s house receives a letter from the city government announcing its demolition. Broom is forced to come to a new understanding of home beyond materiality. The Yellow House ends with the line “the story of our house was the only thing left.” In doing so, it becomes clear that the stories we hold and share can act as an embodiment and a transference of memory, of foundation, and shelter.

Read about the other books on Morrow's list at Electric Lit.

The Yellow House is among Juliet Patterson's eight titles that tackle the subject of ancestral legacy, J.R. Ramakrishnan's seven New Orleans books that go beyond Mardi Gras, and Lit Hub's ten best memoirs of the decade.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six mysteries featuring miniatures, effigies, and tiny scenes

Diane Josefowicz is the author of Guardians & Saints: Stories, L’Air du Temps (1985), and Ready, Set, Oh: A Novel. She is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology: The Zodiac of Paris and The Riddle of the Rosetta. She serves as managing editor of the Victorian Web, the internet’s oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana. A graduate of Brown University, she holds a PhD in History of Science from MIT and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Josefowicz's new novel is The Great Houses of Pill Hill.

[Q&A with Diane Josefowicz]

At CrimeReads the author tagged six favorite mysteries featuring miniatures, effigies, and tiny scenes. One title on the list:

Elise Hooper, The Library of Lost Dollhouses

The Belva Curtis Lafarge Library is a landmark Beaux Arts building that conceals many secrets about its founder and her collections of books and art. One morning Tildy Barrows, the head curator, stumbles into one of these secrets: a hidden room where she discovers a collection of spectacular and perfectly preserved dollhouses—in which Tildy is shocked to find a miniature framed portrait of her own mysterious mother.

As Tildy unravels the connection between the artist who made the dollhouses, the wealthy benefactress who tucked them away, and her own family’s history, Hooper takes the reader on a whirlwind tour from fin-de-siècle Paris to the hospital wards of shellshocked soldiers returning from World War I. Through it all, author Elise Hooper shows women quietly keeping explosive secrets, shunning the limelight while holding everything together.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six can’t-miss thrillers for fans of "Black Mirror"

At Book Riot Addison Rizer tagged six top thrillers for fans of Black Mirror, including:

The Warehouse by Rob Hart

Cloud is an all-encompassing, all-seeing company that delivers packages via drone to customers around the world. Its employees live at the company, work at the company, and do everything there. Everyone is happy and taken care of, and nothing is ever wrong at Cloud. But when Zinnia goes undercover as an employee to ferret out the company’s sinister secrets, the visage of this grand empire threatens to reveal a dark underbelly.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Warehouse is among Preety Sidhu's eleven novels featuring essential workers.

The Page 69 Test: The Warehouse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books about the American Dream and social striving

Heather Eng is a third-generation Chinese American who grew up in Queens, New York. A lifelong writer, she graduated from Boston University with a journalism degree, and worked as a newspaper journalist, web editor, and senior marketing leader in the tech industry.

Eng lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.

Double Happiness is her first novel.

At Lit Hub the author tagged six titles about the American Dream and social striving, including:

Susie Yang, White Ivy

People assume Ivy Lin is a quiet, obedient, young Chinese American woman. But that’s the problem with conflating stereotypes with reality: the truth is much more complex. In White Ivy, Ivy Lin is actually a dogged social climber who becomes infatuated with Gideon Speyer, a wealthy former classmate from an old-moneyed Boston family. Over fancy brunches and Cape Cod vacations, Ivy gradually integrates herself into the Speyer clan. But just when Ivy is on the brink of becoming Mrs. Gideon Speyer, an old flame from her working-class past threatens to dismantle the new life she’s created.I tore through this novel. Yang smashes the model minority stereotype by creating a deeply flawed antihero and deliciously twisty tale.

Read about the other entries on the list at Lit Hub.

White Ivy is among Robyn Harding's seven top unlikely friendships in crime fiction and Rebecca Kelley's nine titles featuring female villains who lean into their wickedness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles in which obsession is the plot

Emily Haworth-Booth teaches at the Royal Drawing School and is an illustrator, graphic novelist, and the author of three children's books: The King Who Banned the Dark (short-listed for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Illustration, and the Klaus Flugge Prize), The Last Tree, and Protest.

Mare is her debut adult novel. She lives in Devon with her husband, dog, and several horses.

At Electric Lit Haworth-Booth tagged seven books, written by women, in which obsession is the plot. One title on the list:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

When Keiko begins her job at the convenience store she becomes what she most wants to be: “a normal cog in society.” Not only has the store supplied her with a personality, a purpose, and a behavioural code in the form of the store manual, it is literally the stuff she is made of: “When I think that my whole body is made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” She thinks of the store on her days off; she even dreams of it at night. When the novel begins, Keiko has been working at the convenience store for 18 years. What follows, as the events of the novel threaten to dismantle her obsession, is not the whimsical comedy we might expect from a story set in a supermarket, but a provocative investigation into societal pressure.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

Convenience Store Woman is among Sarah Maria Griffin's seven titles that turn the workplace into a nightmare, Eliza Browning's ten novels about resisting productivity culture and Anne Heltzel's seven books about women who refuse to fit in.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six horror titles where the setting itself is evil

Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, where she was a Graduate Excellence Fellow, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University.

Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere.

Until Death is Berman's debut novel.

At CrimeReads the author tagged "six horror novels where the place is the problem." One title on the list:

Giorgio de Maria, The Twenty Days of Turin

This 1977 Italian novel, detailing a “phenomenon of collective psychosis” in the gothic city of Turin, is packed to the gills with ambitious, weird, bizarre imagery that chills the bones. A mysterious Library that eerily foreshadows social media; mass insomnia; people killed by someone picking them up by the ankles and smashing them into trees; anonymous letters from a man whose stairwell is filling with human excrement and trash; a man with a dried-up lake inside of him, and he can see bas-reliefs on the bottom, and they fills him with terror and dread.

De Maria’s Turin is the truest kind of horror setting there is, both haunted and doing the haunting. And the mass psychosis of the citizenry underscores a fact that we—thanks, Internet—now know only too well. De Maria knew it too. “What is shared can never be unshared.” In fact, it can haunt you.

Read about the other entries on Berman's list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top novels of sisterhood

Rachel Mills is Director and literary agent at Rachel Mills Literary.

She is a regular contributor across UK media, including The Telegraph, Front Row, The Times and as a columnist for the Bookseller.

Her new novel is The Players Club.

At Lit Hub Mills tagged seven novels featuring some of her favorite fictional sisters. One title on the list:

White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht

This is the most powerful story about two Korean sisters separated during Japanese occupation in WW2—Hana is taken to Japan and forced to become a comfort woman, meanwhile Emi left behind grows up and spends her life searching for her lost sister. The sisters are bonded not only by blood—they are haenyeo, the remarkable free diving women who can hold their breath and reach incredible depths in the ocean to catch fish. Alongside the heartbreaking testament to what many Korean women faced in the war, I read it as a story of how sisters need each other to keep their family’s sacred wisdom alive—the skill of diving, like so many skills, is passed down only through the female line.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels about dysfunctional (but charming) families

Jessika Bouvier is a queer Cajun writer. Her work appears in The Rumpus, Waxwing, HAD, Split Lip, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a novel about a friendship that falls apart in the Alaskan wilderness. She is also a founding editor of Chatterbox!, a journal dedicated to longform fiction.

At Electric Lit Bouvier tagged seven "family portraits [that] are full of chaos and sometimes sadness, but also deep love." One title on the list:

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

For some friends, I am the only writer they know, which generally means I am also the only reader they know. That means I’m called upon as Book Recommender often, and Girl, Woman, Other is one of my staple suggestions. It’s an immersive book with equal parts seriousness and levity. There is something for everyone here. A novel-in-stories, it offers a window into the lives of 12 Black British women, ages spanning from their teens to well into their nineties. Though not all of the main cast meet on the page, they are almost all interconnected in some way—as mothers, daughters, aunts, mentors, friends, lovers. (For the curious, search engine results will reveal maps hand-drawn by readers who’ve gone through the trouble of sorting all the links.) The novel tackles several thorny topics through an intersectional lens: feminism, immigration, racism, sexuality, class, and gender identity, though these hardly scratch the surface. But the characters are not always victims. In an interview about the novel, Evaristo explained that the inclusion of “Other” in the title refers, yes, to how they’re othered by society, but also sometimes by one another. For me, this book encapsulates the full meaning of family, because it includes community as part of its working definition.

Read about the other novels on the list at Electric Lit.

Girl, Woman, Other is among Erin O. White's five novels that showcase queer domesticity, Emma Specter's thirteen notable feminist books, Sarah Davis-Goff's six top books about women working together, Ore Agbaje-Williams's seven books featuring very, very complicated friendships, Cecile Pin's seven novels featuring displacement in multicultural London, and Kasim Ali's nine top books about interracial relationships.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven bad mom books

Tracy Lynne Oliver is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has been published online at a variety of places such as Medium, Fanzine, and Occulum. She co-authored the graphic novel, The Sacrifice of Darkness, with Roxane Gay. Her story, “This Weekend” was included in Best Microfiction 2019.

Her new book, Magician, is "dark magic debut novel featuring the Boy who becomes the Magician and the villainous Mother whose sadism might end it all."

At The Nerd Daily Oliver tagged seven notable bad mom books, including:

Carrie by Stephen King

I would like to think (or hope) that most everyone has seen the 1976 movie, “Carrie” based on the debut novel by Stephen King. (Or perhaps it’s just my SK fanaticism that leads me to assume this.) Even though I was only eight years old when the movie was released, I know I must have watched it as–having no knowledge of menstruation–I’ll never forget being thoroughly confused by the shower scene. With the blood, flying tampons and pads along with the teenage girl chants of “Plug it up! Plug it up!” it all felt very puzzling and a bit scary.

The movie’s impact on my juvenile self, eventually led me to pick up the novel hoping to get some insight into why Margaret White, Carrie White’s mother, was so cruel to her. Her abuse going as far as wanting to (spoiler alert!) murder her. The novel drops plenty of traumatic tidbits about Margaret’s childhood that sow the seeds of how she grew into the religious fanatic that would come to regularly lock Carrie in the “prayer closet” to atone for whatever manufactured “sin” she assumed her daughter had made. The disturbing depiction of a mother laying her own issues on the mind and body of her daughter obviously made an impact on my young psyche.

Read about the other books on the list.

Carrie is on Amy Engel's list of five top titles in the complicated literature of daughters & mothers, Lizzy Barber's list of five of the most chilling extreme religion believers in fiction, Katie Lowe's top ten list of books about angry women, Jo Jakeman's list of the ten best revenge novels, Ania Ahlborn's list of ten of the scariest books of all time, Jeff Somers's list of the five worst mothers in literary history, Becky Ferreira's list of six of the most memorable bullies in literature, Julie Buntin's list of favorite literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads, Gregg Olsen's top ten list of deadly YA books, and James Dawson's top ten list of books to get you through high school.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight top dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels

Matt Harry's novels include Sorcery for Beginners, which was optioned for television by Boatrocker Media (Palm Royale). He has edited over 25 novels, created two immersive plays, and taught hundreds of students in creative fields. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons, all of whom (thankfully) like to read.

Harry's new novel is Ash Land.

At CrimeReads the author tagged his eight favorite end-of-the-world stories. One title on the list:

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

This is the loveliest, most hopeful novel on the list. Like The Stand, most of humanity dies from a virus. Unlike The Stand, the survivors don’t form marauding gangs or murder each other. They put on plays. The main characters travel the Michigan countryside, performing Shakespeare for small farming villages. Their motto is “Survival Is Insufficient,” which should be a clarion call for all of humanity.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

Station Eleven is among Alice Martin's six thrillers that feature contagions & pandemics, Rebecca Fallon's five top Shakespeare-inspired novels, Lauren Wilson's eight top books featuring cults, Barnaby Martin's seven titles featuring parents & children at the end of the world, Brittany K. Allen's ten books that get the theatre world right, Jeanette Horn's nine twisted novels about theatrical performers, Isabelle McConville's fifteen books for fans of the post-apocalyptic TV-drama Fallout, Joanna Quinn's six best books set in & around the theatrical world, Carolyn Quimby's 38 best dystopian novels, Tara Sonin's seven books for fans of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, Maggie Stiefvater's five fantasy books about artists & the magic of creativity, Mark Skinner's five top literary dystopias, Claudia Gray's five essential books about plagues and pandemics, K Chess's five top fictional books inside of real books, Rebecca Kauffman's ten top musical novels, Nathan Englander’s ten favorite books, M.L. Rio’s five top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

--Marshal Zeringue