Andy Warhol! James Joyce! Josephine Baker! 27 new books out today.
May is here, a new month of a year in which all too many days have felt like political Maydays, and yet there’s something reassuring about the weather warming and flowers blooming and days lengthening. For some readers, these are the perfect conditions for reading outside, when the weather, on certain days, is just, just right. And, to accompany you on those days, here are twenty-seven new ones to consider picking up in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
It’s a bounteous day for new literature, and I unfortunately couldn’t include every exciting new title here without this list becoming too long, but I hope you’ll find some joy, curiosity, humor, twists, and bold takes to marvel at below. There are so, so many fascinating themes, topics, and even techniques outlined below, from beloved names and debut authors to watch alike.
We still live in chaos and horror, yes, but in the sacred moments where we get to just be for a bit, let’s cherish that and uncurl for a few with one (or many!) of these brilliant new books below.
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Aaron John Curtis, Old School Indian
(Zando)
“With its profound exploration of identity, language, and cultural survival, Old School Indian commands attention. Through the vivid and deeply human lives of a Mohawk family, Curtis weaves a narrative that insists we listen closely and engage deeply….Curtis strikingly balances humor and gravity….Old School Indian joins the ranks of the finest fiction written by Indigenous peoples, past and present. This is a novel of pure heart and mastery.”
–Morgan Talty
Karen E. Bender, The Words of Dr. L and Other Stories
(Counterpoint)
“A collection of stories that artfully reframe issues including parenting, aging, illness, and life during the Covid-19 pandemic…As if turning a shirt inside-out and finding a beautiful new pattern, Bender…does a brilliant job of discovering novel metaphors and creating futuristic plots to re-examine some of life’s most taken-for-granted relationships and situations….Highly original stories that speak to the challenges of being human in the twenty-first century.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Jemimah Wei, The Original Daughter
(Doubleday)
“Jemimah Wei’s debut The Original Daughter goes for all the big stuff: ambition, time, family, forgiveness, constructing the self. Thrilling, to find a new author with an appetite for the whole spectrum of living, and the skill to get it down true. A contract of sisterhood is signed, then life, then ambition, then disappointment and heartbreak and and and. Wei’s prose is delicious, propulsively hurdling us through the lives of Gen and Arin, who will live in my marrow forever.”
–Kaveh Akbar
Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
(Tin House)
“Foreign Fruit is an encounter not only with the orange, but with the reality of diasporic life in hostile environments. Goh patiently and skilfully reinvents the orange as a means of inventing her identity, finding ways to grow and claim a story beyond which she’d first thought was hers to take. And what we’re given is a story more surprising, potent, and various than we could ever have imagined.”
–Amy Key
Jennifer Hope Choi, The Wanderer’s Curse
(Norton)
“A memoir written for the wanderer within us all, Jennifer Hope Choi travels her reader from the stinkiest street of New York City, through the megachurches of the South, to the Saju fortune tellers of Seoul, exploring the haunted, the folkloric, and the achingly human. Spectacular, suspenseful, enlightening, and moving, The Wanderer’s Curse cements Choi as not only an artist and story keeper, but a peerless visionary.”
–T. Kira Mahealani Madden
Martha Park, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After
(Hub City Press)
“A gorgeous exercise in open theology, Martha Park’s essay collection World Without End ponders climate change, social inequities, family, and religion. Her collection places generosity, curiosity, and the desire to make the world better at its fore. The collection is illuminating throughout [and] excavates ultimate meaning from care shown toward the earth and other people.”
–Michelle Anne Singler
Rosie Stockton, Fuel
(Nightboat)
“After their first poetry collection, Permanent Volta, sang of revolution and intimacy, Rosie Stockton returns with a transporting second that communes with nature, longs for connection, and massages the edges of identity.”
–New York Magazine
Isabel Allende, My Name Is Emilia Del Valle
(Ballantine Books)
“Allende is a literary treasure. Her latest novel is a beautifully written portrait of a woman coming of age and finding her voice. In this tale of love, war, betrayal, and redemption, Allende transports the reader wholeheartedly to the nineteenth century, a time when women’s choices were limited and their ambitions thwarted…Emilia del Valle dares to forge her own path and break the rules set for women, and in doing so finds herself on a dangerous journey of self-discovery.”
–Kristin Hannah
Tennessee Hill, Girls with Long Shadows
(Harper)
“Hill’s first novel, Girls with Long Shadows, is a dreamy, atmospheric tale of sisterhood and coming-of-age….A tautly plotted Southern gothic….Encompassing a single summer in the dripping, humid South, Hill’s haunting debut deals in lyricism and tragedy as it considers the harm done to young women by the outside gaze. Shelf Talker: Identical triplet girls are linked to tragedies across generations in this evocative first novel set along the swampy Texas Gulf Coast.”
–Shelf Awareness
André Alexis, Other Worlds: Stories
(FSG)
“Pure storytelling magic. André Alexis is alchemically, necromantically, spell-castingly talented…makes the world feel so much bigger that it really is…by always allowing for the possibility of transformation. His stories fuse perception and discovery, exploring the many forms of secrets and inheritance, and the many ways knowledge can pass between the living and the dead. In Other Worlds, impossible things are treated with so much gentleness and respect that they become possible.”
–Eleanor Catton
Philip Hoare, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love
(Pegasus)
“This wild, dreaming leviathan of a book is undoubtedly Hoare’s masterpiece. Who but the leading visionary of English letters could take on Blake, and find in him such riches? It is a mesmerising tapestry, intricate, strange and very queer, that ranges through time and space to create both a loving, wonderstruck portrait of the artist and a map of the universe of enchantment, terror and revolt that he opened for us all.”
–Olivia Laing
Zachary Leader, Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker
(Belknap Press)
“A biography of a biographer by a biographer is, for a biographer like myself, a welcome, exciting, and above all rare event. Though the story is hardly ever told, Zachary Leader knows that what goes into the making of a great biography is often as much of a story as the story itself. With Ellmann’s Joyce, Leader shows how biographers think and work, and how their thinking and working shapes the posthumous destinies of those they write about.”
–Benjamin Moser
Laurence Leamer, Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine
(Putnam)
“Warhol loved to surround himself with intriguing women and drama in equal measure, and Laurence Leamer artfully reveals how these two obsessions often crashed into one another with brutal force in this new tour-de-force book. From Baby Jane Holzer and Ultra Violet who rode the Warhol wave to even greater levels of fame, to Edie Sedgwick and Valerie Solanas who emerged from the Factory broken or worse, the women in Warhol’s life were forever changed.”
–Eric Shiner
Domenica Ruta, All the Mothers
(Random House)
“A perfectly charming and complex ode to mothers and found families….The real marvel is the beautifully drawn characters, who are realized with tremendous depth. Ruta skillfully sketches the complexities and struggles of single motherhood, especially as it relates to financial precarity and the importance of cultivating joy and community.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Natalie Jenner, Austen at Sea
(St. Martin’s Press)
“[A] fascinating literary treasure hunt and a transporting ride through one of the most pivotal periods of American and British history. When two daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice begin a correspondence with Jane Austen’s brother, lives are upended, court cases ensue, and a mystery unfolds…vivid historical detail and a wild and wonderful cast of characters from Louisa May Alcott to theatre impresarios, suffragists, and fortune tellers…dazzling.”
–Patti Callahan Henry
Florence Knapp, The Names
(Pamela Dorman Books)
“Magnificent. A stunning, hopeful, bitterly beautiful novel. The Names is a story of decisions, both grand and miniature, of how each is sewn into the tapestry of what makes us uniquely us. And how a single change can be our making and unraveling. Read it. It’s very special.”
–Chris Whitaker
Hanna Diamond, Josephine Baker’s Secret War
(Yale University Press)
“A gripping account of Josephine Baker, the formidable spy who used her celebrity to operate in plain sight. Based on extensive new research, Diamond brings to life Baker’s legacy on clandestine operations in France, North Africa and the Middle East. An inspirational heroine for our time
–Helen Fry
J.M. Coetzee, Mariana Dimópulos, Speaking in Tongues
(Liveright)
“An evocative conversation between the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and his translator…[Speaking in Tongues] will compel many American readers to reassess the politics of translation and their own literary and linguistic imperialism. Fans of Coetzee will also find a refreshing colloquialism to this book and a respite from his recent judgmentalism about animal rights, Western power, and public institutions.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Michele Filgate (editor), What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence
(Simon & Schuster)
“Moving and deeply relatable, this collection explores the many faces of fathers, from the loving and the humorous to the absent and the terrifying. Each essay invites us into a different world and a different childhood, yet finds unexpected throughlines of tenderness and vulnerability. What My Father and I Don’t Talk About will have readers seeing in powerful new light the relationship that has shaped their lives and sense of self.”
–Qian Julie Wang
Amanda Hess, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
(Doubleday)
“The story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new mother’s descent into and re-emergence from the internet’s ‘pregnant underworld’ with clarity, rigor, and tremendous wit. That such a deft a vivisector of our digital age should find herself lost in its churn of data-brokerage, commerce, and myth is a reminder of what we’re all up against…[a] bracing and eloquent memoir.”
–Michelle Orange
Alan Govenar, Come Round Right
(Deep Vellum)
“Alan Govenar masterfully juxtaposes small moments and individual stories against the panorama of 1970s American culture. As the relationship between Aaron and Adriana takes its romantic, difficult course, we become immersed in a story where menace, violence, and trauma take center stage. Written with wit, grace, and transcendent compassion, this novel places Alan Govenar squarely in the tradition of Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and Saul Bellow.”
–Jaina Sanga
Sarah Yahm, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
(Dzanc Books)
“This sweeping family saga gripped me from the very first sentence. Narrated with restless intelligence and cast with thorny intellectuals, Yahm’s timely debut beautifully interrogates the way illness can dictate the confines of our lives, down to the smallest, most intimate moments.”
–Joanna Rakoff
Carla Sosenko, I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin: and Other Things I Used to Think About My Body
(The Dial Press)
“Carla Sosenko’s wickedly funny memoir gave me the ultimate gift: It made me feel seen. The writer was born with a rare deformity, but her experience with body shame and judgment, from herself and others, is universal. Sosenko shows us her journey from self-hatred to joy so that we may follow her lead.”
–Jo Piazza
Eunji Kim, The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy
(Princeton University Press)
“Eye-opening…Kim astutely compares reality shows’ persuasive power to that of Gilded Age dime novels, notably Horatio Alger’s ‘tales of personal triumph, ‘ in which protagonists rose ‘from obscurity to prosperity’ by doing good deeds. She also takes aim at her field, asserting that political science’s ‘echo chambers of scholarly assumptions’ have led it to ignore how political belief is affected by supposedly ‘apolitical’ media…a troubling assessment of propaganda in pop culture.”
–Publishers Weekly
Lizzie Wade, Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures
(Harper)
“Lizzie Wade is an exceptional journalist and a master storyteller. In Apocalypse, she peels back the many myths of the present to reveal the true stories of past apocalypses and, perhaps more important, what happened afterward. She reminds us that survival always has been, and still is, possible, and that our world always has been, and still is, a choice.”
–Ed Yong
Mariah Blake, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals
(Crown)
“They Poisoned the World is a brilliant and damning investigation of the global chemical industry and the devious methods it employed to promote its risky products. While it is often an enraging book, it is not a despairing one. People in this story stand up, fight, and make a difference. In this troubled moment in our environmental history that makes this book something exceptional—not just insightful but inspiring.”
–Deborah Blum
Augustín Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limit of the Binary
(Princeton University Press)
“Reproductive anatomy is more variable than commonly understood, according to this eye-opening study…The raft of research convincingly debunks the idea that sex anatomy has much consequence on behavior, character, or cognitive ability…and the illuminating discussions of animal biology demonstrate the profound diversity of sex expression in nature….[Sex is a Spectrum is] a resounding refutation of the idea that there’s anything natural about the gender binary.”
–Publishers Weekly
