One of the most exciting parts of my job as a bookseller is getting to open new packages. The easy slide of the boxcutter through tape leading to the visceral rush of prying open the box with my bare hands, often followed by the satisfying crack! of the cardboard,...

We live in a time period filled to the brim with apocalyptic narratives and didactic eco-fiction. Patrick Lawler’s Conversations with Extinct Animals disrupts your preconceptions of the genres and thrusts you into an inventive alternative. Lawler reveals a fascinating...

TinHouse April 2025256 pp9781963108064 Horror, science fiction, folktale, and fantasy converge in the genre-bending short story collection Hellions by Julia Elliott, which takes readers into the forests, bogs, and suburbs of the American South, and reveals the...

The cover of My Love is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate looks fairly unassuming at first glance. A depiction of someone’s pointer finger being grabbed by a smaller hand drawn upon some sort of unfilled document. But should the reader take the time to realize it’s a blank...

Milkweed EditionsSeptember 2025232 pp9781639550517 As an aspiring young poet and writer of color myself, reading the work of the 24th poet laureate (who is also the first Latina woman to ever hold that title) left me with a buzz that I can’t quite explain. After a...

I have always been fascinated by the Matryoshka doll. A wooden figure of a woman, wrapped in a painted sarafan. Her body is round, and there’s a seam running around her midsection. When you turn her top and bottom half in opposite directions, they separate, revealing...

Saad Omar Khan’s debut novel Drinking the Ocean is a breathtaking exploration of what it means to love, to grapple with heartbreak, and to continue to love despite it all. Drinking the Ocean follows Murad, a young man who cannot seem to forget Sofi, the woman he once...

Mortar, Christopher Shipman's upcoming poetry collection, invites us to sit alongside him as he grapples with the trauma that haunts his family after the murder of his grandmother. Mortar is the cement-like mixture that lays between bricks in construction. As the...