Kaveh Akbar is the author of the novel Martyr! and two books of poetry, Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and, with Paige Lewis, co-editor of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh teaches at the University of Iowa. His writing appears in the New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Since 2020, Kaveh has served as poetry editor for The Nation.
Nerve Damage (2026) Annakeara Stinson "It's impossible for a book so chilling, so uncanny, so urgent to also be this funny. Nerve Damage is a major debut."
The Hill (2026) Harriet Clark "Harriet Clark's The Hill orbits the endurance that attends faith and the daily, hourly, micro resiliencies which compose and conduct grace. Suzanna's visionary constancy-despite a phalanx of actors, human and institutional, conspiring against it-felt to me as morally urgent as anything in Dostoevsky. How is it possible for a book with such manifest stakes to also be this funny? This propulsive? I don't know how Clark wrote The Hill, but I'm glad she did. I'll be re-reading it for the rest of my life."
An Oral History of Atlantis (2025) Ed Park "To speak of Park's creativity is also to speak of his humanity - empathy is a function of the imagination, of course, and it makes sense that a mind capable of dreaming these worlds and sister verses would also be able to endow them with spirits as vivid and complex as our own. It's dazzling, this steady carousel of delight and stunned awe. Park is one of the funniest writers working today, and among the most humane."
Necessary Fiction (2025) Eloghosa Osunde "I can't believe how alive Eloghosa Osunde's Necessary Fiction is, how supersaturated and smart. Osunde writes with the cataclysmic dazzle and sneaky spiritual ache of Denis Johnson but pitches it toward us here in the digital age. I love their prose, their characters. Hustle, heart, privacy, sex, yearning so strong it buckles you - it's all here. The ink practically hovers off the page."
The Tiny Things Are Heavier (2025) Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo "The brilliant, unpretentious music of Okonkwo's prose delights the ear, her twisty, page-turning narrative delights the mind, and the wincing, bighearted bumble of her characters delights the soul. A profound, lasting debut, and a sincere blast to read."
The Original Daughter (2025) Jemimah Wei "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. The Original Daughter is so much the real deal."
Open, Heaven (2025) Seán Hewitt "Sean Hewitt's Open, Heaven blisses with the bright verdure of youth - blackbirds and blossoming hedges, wet hands held tight under buttery starlight. But Open, Heaven also courses with youth's great agony, the cruelty that learning to love should be inexorably followed by learning to grieve its undoing. Hewitt's is a searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it's a novel about time. Which is to say it's a novel about us."
The Antidote (2025) Karen Russell "In The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo'd righteousness, motion over despair. She presents for inspection America's most persistent chorus of moral self-defense, 'Better them than us,' and shows how it rots the minds, hearts, and land of all who sing it. Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio - The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes, with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world's most lovable sentient scarecrow. It's magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. If irony bypasses the difficulty of describing things, then the vivid sincerity on display here marks a virtuosic artist at the height of her lucidity. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude."
Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) Anna DeForest "Anna DeForest's Our Long Marvelous Dying gives us a novelist fully in command of their instrument, staring searchingly at death without the dubious veils of euphemism or willed obliviousness. We see dying in the macro - a young doctor navigating a global death event exacerbated by myriad social and political pathologies - set against more quotidian deaths: passion crumbling within a relationship, personal agency eroding as a child is unexpectedly taken in. But what elevates Our Long Marvelous Dying into the realm of the rapturously readable is DeForest's uncanny gift for lyric language. One can almost pick out voices - Patacara, Lorca, Durkheim, Kahlo - with whom Our Long Marvelous Dying speaks. A true artist brings an impossible thing into utter clarity; with this novel, DeForest enters with singular vision into a species-old conversation about what happens - to the dead and to the living - when we die."
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (2024) Joseph Earl Thomas "What's thrilling to me about God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is the faith Joseph Earl Thomas places in his readers. There's a supersaturation here that reminds me of Denis Johnson's vertiginous moral questing, and a topography of mind and place that kept making me think of Teju Cole's poet-doctor of the modern metropolis. Thomas gives us a fully peopled world, not by speaking in grand oracular exposition, but by getting granular - we see the Reebok slides on a romantic rival, the crinkled cookie wrappers out of which grow a friendship. It's such a deftly choreographed dance - intoxicating, propulsive - and the result is utterly mesmerizing: here is a whole cosmos, as vivid and unprecedented as our own."
Wandering Stars (2024) Tommy Orange "In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange opens us up to these big lives full of hope and triumph and love and freedom - but then the world comes in, history comes in, drugs and nation and bullets and the big and small lonelinesses come in. Richard Pryor said he wanted to get you laughing so your mouth would be open when he poured the poison down, and that's what Orange is doing here. Anyone can say a complicated thing in a complicated way, but Tommy says the hardest things plain - beyond artifice, beyond confection. That clarity, that radical lucidity, that's the mark of true genius, a word I use here without hyperbole. Think Kafka, Lispector, Borges. Wandering Stars is the kind of book that saves lives, that makes remaining in the world feel a little more possible. It's art of the highest order, written by one of our language's most significant and urgent practitioners."
Beautyland (2024) Marie-Helene Bertino "Marie-Helene Bertino's delicious, uncanny vision throughout Beautyland makes everything feel brand-new-a roller coaster is 'a series of problems on a steel track,' chardonnay smells like 'pee and flowers,' death is 'merely a diminishment of one perspective.' Bertino's strangering prose delights with baffle and surprise, and the chapters are so propulsive one doesn't even fully notice the way she's subtly deconstructing the world. One page swiftly returns ubiquity to wonder, while the next reminds us that cruelty is a choice, that nothing is inevitable but death. It's impossible for a book to feel this fun and this urgent. Beautyland is a miracle. I'll be re-reading it forever."
