Here are some fascinating new books to check out this week!

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Rafael Frumkin, Confidence
(Simon and Schuster)

“Theranos but make it gay.”
Electric Literature

Leila Aboulela, River Spirit
(Grove)

“Aboulela reveals the thin lines that can
demarcate religious zeal and patriotic fervor, social crusade and personal recklessness,
as she creates a finely wrought and compellingly in-depth drama about a land and its
people.”
Booklist

The Hive - Cela, Camilo José

Camilio Jose Cela, The Hive
(NYRB)

“The scatological documentary of
everyday life in Madrid in 1942 is unpleasant, sensual and violent… this is a below
street level report of greed, ugliness, frustration and small satisfactions, and it has
a certain gamy realism and stark brilliance. Cela has had a distinguished press in
his own country and in England. Libraries beware.”
Kirkus

The Fifth Wound - Mattia, Aurora

Aurora Mattia, The Fifth Wound
(Nightboat)

“Chocked full of winding, brilliant
sentences sure to turn readers’ minds inside out, this is a tale of trans love and fantasy
that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound.”
Vulture

Door - Lauterbach, Ann

Ann Lauterbach, Door
(Penguin Books)

““[Door] encapsulates a wonderful line
of [Lauterbach’s] from a past interview: ‘In order to endure the loss, and not to let it
utterly overwhelm you and utterly take you away from the life, you have to find some
way to let it be the thing that animates your attachment to things, and the animated
attachment is the present. It’s molecular—it’s just a piece of the life’….She later writes:
‘Let’s explore what words cannot.’ This book does just that, masterfully.”
The Millions

Letters to a Writer of Color
(Random House)

“Electric essays that speak to the experience of writing from the periphery…a guide, a comfort, and a call
all at once.”
–Laila Lalami

Gabrielle Bellot

Gabrielle Bellot

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Cut, Tin House, The Guardian, Guernica, The Normal School, The Poetry Foundation, Lambda Literary, and many other places. She is working on her first collection of essays and a novel.