40 Great New Books You May Have Missed

It feels like JD Vance has been everywhere in the last few weeks, and haven’t we suffered enough? As much as I’m enjoying the universal disdain he’s receiving from a diverse array of publications, I have no intention of reading his new book. In fact, every time I see new book coverage for this fascist couch fucker I think about all the great writers being passed over so he can take all the oxygen in the room.

So I decided to do something about it. I asked a bunch of my favorite authors to recommend a few recent books they love that didn’t get as much press as they should have. These are books for people who like to actually read rather than simply purchase books via political PAC to display or simply keep in a box and never crack open.

I’m so pleased to present you with this list of underrated titles, many of which I can’t wait to check out myself. The recommendations are wonderful, as are the recommenders (all of whom have books linked below that you should absolutely look into). It’s time to celebrate great writers and great thinkers and great writing, rather than politicians and bigots and blowhards. After all, the only book titled Communion that deserves our attention this week and any week is the one by bell hooks.

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Without Consent by Sarah Weinman

“While it received much critical praise, I would love even more people to get their hands on Without Consent, a deeply researched, well-told and perilously timely book about the case that made marital rape a crime.”

, Megan Abbott, author of El Dorado Drive

Woodworking by Emily St. James

“I thought Woodworking was just fantastic; I read it last summer and have recommended to many people since.”

, Sandy Ernest Allen, author of A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

New Skin by Sarah Wang

“Deeply funny and simultaneously dark and heartbreaking, this is a book that’s firing on all goddamn cylinders. Mother-daughter mess? Check! Freaky plastic surgery body horror? Double check. Truly dug into me like a scalpel. More people need to read this!”

, Kristen Arnett, author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Happy Bad by Delaney Nolan

“Climate fiction at its funniest, sharpest, and most bittersweet.”

, Jami Attenberg, author of 1000 Words and the forthcoming The Amnesiac

The Great Mann by Kyra Davis Lurie

“Yeah, it’s a great Gatsby retelling set in 1940’s LA, but the affairs feel more scandalous than the original, and the backdrop of will everyone be able to keep their homes or will racially restrictive covenants force all the Black people to leave adds a deeper layer of conflict.”

, Kashana Cauley, author of The Payback and The Survivalists

My Dear You by Rachel Khong

“These short stories are vibrant, deeply weird and thoroughly delightful. Perfect for a dopamine-seeking, splintered attention span.”

, Mary H.K. Choi, author of Pool House

All This Want and I Can’t Get None by T Clark

“T Clark’s short story collection is so deeply funny while somehow managing to always be incisive about the complicated Black women and girls in their stories.”

, Megan Giddings, author of Meet Me at the Crossroads and Black Arts

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad

“Floodlines is the best contemporary novel I’ve read in years: a complicated love story about three generations of an Iraqi-British family and their attempts to live in a world where the people and places you love most are the ones with the greatest power to betray you.

, Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

Poking The Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex by Perrin Ireland

“Perrin Ireland’s book should be taking up the whole damn couch if you ask me. An illustrated, thoroughly researched tome, it shows over and over and over again just how kinky nature gets, dispelling puritanical notions about what is “natural.” Fuck, yes.”

, Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

“What a gorgeous exploration of what it takes, magic or not, to repair a broken mother-daughter relationship.”

, Kelly Jones, author of Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer

Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy by Chris Duffy

“If laughter (combined with medical care) is the best medicine, then Humor Me (combined with medical care) is the cure for the world!”

, Bess Kalb, author of Buffalo Fluffalo and Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

The Shape of Monsters by Tessa Gratton

“Book Two in The Moon Heresies series. It’s hard not to read this lush, queer fantasy through the lens of the lasting impacts of imperialism and colonialism. But also, there’s sex magic! (No couches involved.)”

, Adib Khorram, award-winning author of One Word, Six Letters

The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon

“A book I’ve particularly admired is a recent edition of poetry by Kim Hyesoon, a wonderfully feminist and preeminent poet: The Hell of That Star, translated from the Korean by Cindy Juyoung Ok

, R.O. Kwon, author of Exhibit and The Incendiaries

Demons of Eminence by Joshua Escobar

“I really enjoyed Demons of Eminence, which came out from Publication Studio last year. It’s a diary of a travel nurse who hosts a lot of parties outside of San Bernardino during the pandemic. I’ve noticed people often say, with a mixture of fear and defensiveness, that they never want to read literature about the pandemic; I think when they say so what they mean is that they are afraid of being bored, which I can appreciate. And drug literature can be a hard sell for some, especially if the reader feels anxious about their own coolness, and develops a sort of you-won’t-impress-me-so-there carapace in advance as a form of self-protection. But I found it charming and funny. It really held my interest, and I think it’s worth reading.”

, Daniel M. Lavery, author of Meeting New People and Women’s Hotel

One Moment by Luis Muñoz

“An exquisite book of poems translated by Idra Novey and Garth Greenwell, with the original Spanish appearing alongside the English translation. Each poem is a gift, tender, surprising, musical, and often playful.”

, Sanäe Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair

Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro

“Everyone should be reading Giada Scodellaro, especially her debut novel. It’s challenging, form-defying, erudite, playful, and profound. In other words, it’s everything about art that has been recently devalued, and the only things about art that really matter.”

, Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story and Temporary

The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up, And Then Pushes Them Down by Stefanie O’Connell

“O’Connell’s book is an insightful look into why the glass ceiling still exists, and no, it’s not because you aren’t trying hard enough. This book both explains the system and offers a way through.”

, Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife

Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America by Lauren Hough

“Oh my god, I love the beautiful beating heart of this funny, earnest book that grapples with America, and its horrible and wonderful land and people, one pit stop at a time.”

, Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife

The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America by Justin Ellis

“This is an emotional, cultural, historical, and racial history of a city that cuts through what it wants to be and reveals it for what it truly is.  It’s devastating, but also so smart, insightful, and absolutely brilliant. I can’t recommend it enough.

, Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis

“Funny and incisive and moving, often simultaneously. Niko avoids every treacly ‘transition memoir’ pitfall and manages to create something new and beautiful.”

, Mattie Lubchansky, author of Simplicity

Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia

“A collection of short stories that are beautiful and eerie and thoughtful and full of strangeness that folds into the mundane in ways both soothing and uncomfortable, depending on the story. I loved it so much.”

, Ilana Masad, Lambda Award-winning author of Beings

Bloodfire, Baby by Eirinie Carson

“An utterly original work of post-colonial haunting, motherhood, spiritual and psychological rupture, Carson has written something fresh, terrifying, cautionary, and wonderfully stylish; I can’t imagine a better time to read the debut novel of Jamaican-British author Eirinie Carson.”

, T Kira Māhealani Madden, author of the novel Whidbey and the memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas

“A quiet, intimate novel full of reflective, tunnelling wisdom about how to survive and love in a world that increasingly threatens queer life. There’s nothing like it.”

, Isle McElroy, author of People Collide and Satellite

No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed

“Love this queer picaresque debut, it’s funny and tender and biting and brilliant and driven by a vital, and rare, sense of political clarity.”

, Isle McElroy, author of People Collide and Satellite

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell

“I have been mad from the minute I finished Bad Company. It tells deeply reported stories about people whose lives have been capsized by private equity and is a scathing indictment of an industry that’s controlling more and more of our lives every year.”

, Kelsey McKinney, co-owner of Defector.com and author of the book You Didn’t Hear This from Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip

The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain

“A beautiful, reflective look at a brief slice of Sylvia Plath’s life through the eyes of roughly a dozen of her loved ones and acquaintances. Not much happens in it, but the prose is lovely and so is the sustained concentration on the ripples of one person’s presence in a community.”

, Lily Meyer, Atlantic staff writer and author of Short War and The End of Romance

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong

“I’ve enjoyed Jinwoo Chong’s short fiction and was thrilled to see this novel, a portrait of family members trying hard to reconnect with each other, it is wryly funny and unexpectedly heartwarming and (dare I say) expands the conception of what Asian American literature gets to be.”

, Celeste Ng, author of Our Missing Hearts and Little Fires Everywhere

Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive

“A recent novel that I believe deserves more attention is Palm Meridian. It’s set in a retirement resort for queer women, in a future version of climate-ravaged Florida, and is focused on the last day of one resident’s life, and it is the funniest, most entertaining book about death you’ll ever read.”

, Camille Perri, author of Social Animals

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori)

and

State Champ by Hilary Plum

“We could fill many books with everything JD Vance wilfully misunderstands about reproductive justice; two novels that get it right include Sayaka Murata’s bonkers Vanishing World, a speculative fiction masterpiece that lampoons demographic panic, and Hilary Plum’s State Champ, a darkly funny Clarice Lispectorian tale of an abortion rights protestor.”

, Sanjena Sathian, author of Goddess Complex

Stalker by Paula Bomer

“If you really want to get in the head of a misogynistic sociopath, I’d recommend this blistering psychothriller although be warned, it’s not for the queasy.”

, Dana Schwartz, author of The Arcane Arts, as S.D. Coverly

Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky

“Simplicity is so endlessly funny, charming, dark, horny, and vibrantly alive that I want to tell you everything about it, but I would much rather leave its secrets to be devoured and cherished forever.

, Niko Stratis, author of The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg

“Night Night Fawn is the funniest book about death I think I’ve ever read. It’s not only funny, of course, but I think the subject matter (old lady, Upper East Side, death) would not make you expect the tone you get, which is surprising at every turn, sharp, painful, and the epitome of THIS IS WHAT A NOVEL CAN DO, by which I mean, this is not a screenplay in disguise, it’s not a short story stretched out to its maximum page count, it’s a fucking novel, and a great one.”

, Emma Straub, author of American Fantasy

Whites by Mark Doten

“Doten, a mad scientist of language and style, is a trueborn heir to Dennis Cooper, William Burroughs, and Wallace Shawn. Any future worth surviving for will look back on him as the major satirist of this cursed cultural moment. If you liked Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection or Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic, Whites is your next great read.”

, Justin Taylor, author of Reboot

My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond by Hugh Ryan

“My Bad is a gem of a memoir, a treasure trove of essays, and a necessary lens for looking back on the 1990s, an era which has been, unfortunately, recently suffering from a glut of uncritical nostalgia lately.”

, Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Overseer Class and The Viral Underclass

The Fight Of Our Lives: AIDS in America by David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels

“An essential history for teens (but also adults, frankly) of the AIDs crisis, told in Levithan’s signature elegant prose, but with the added bonus of Duckels’s extensive research and interviews. As queer history is being erased, books like this are going to be more and more essential.”

, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Children and YA author of books like Squad, The Worst Ronin and Love in the Library

Conversion Therapy Dropout by Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez

“I feel like this would be a great rebuke to the couch fucker’s memoir.”

, Edward Underhill, This Day Changes Everything

A Short Introduction to Anneliese by James Elkins

“Part of Elkins’s Five Strange Languages series, this hilarious, quirky, and profound novel follows the inspired ramblings of a biologist in a tour de force evoking Sebald and Nabokov.”

, Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy

Unreasonable Women: Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival by Justine van der Leun

“This is a wrenching book on a critically important subject, criminalized survival, that is rigorously reported and beautifully written.”

, Sarah Weinman, author of Without Consent

The Good Eye by Jess Gibson

“In a year of excellent short story collections, Gibson’s debut is a wry and sparkling delight that truly stands out.”

, Sarah Weinman, author of Without Consent