Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, a collection of fiction from Keyhole Press. His fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. He is also the editor of The Collagist.
Hemlock (2026) Melissa Faliveno "Gorgeous and surprising, Hemlock's propulsive plot is fueled by equal parts Midwestern dread and Midwestern love, a combination my own Midwestern heart recognizes as home. Faliveno sets her exploration of the complicated, compelling legacies of family and place amid a great and beautiful landscape I've loved all my life, but that I've maybe never seen as vividly as I do right now, after having been shown it anew through Faliveno's evocative prose. A spectacular debut."
Happy People Don't Live Here (2025) Amber Sparks "With the fantastical inventiveness of Karen Russell and the cutting social wit of Shirley Jackson, Amber Sparks spins a moving tale of a mother and daughter finding their way amid a community of (mostly) loveable weirdos. A smart, funny, and unforgettable debut from one of my favorite writers!"
Metallic Realms (2025) Lincoln Michel "A brilliant, inventive satire of writers and super fans, even better for its obvious affection towards both. Lincoln Michel is one of the most surprising speculative writers working today, and this witty planet-hopping love letter to pulp science fiction is the most fun I've had reading all year."
Immaculate Conception (2025) Ling Ling Huang "In Ling Ling Huang's Immaculate Conception, all-too-plausible exploitative, extractive technologies force new questions about who is allowed to make great art and who gets denied the same shot - and about what price some might pay to reclaim what they've been denied. A gorgeous and frequently shocking novel, whose dark, envy-driven obsessions will quickly become your own."
We Lived on the Horizon (2025) Erika Swyler "Erika Swyler's We Lived on the Horizon delivers everything I crave from great science fiction: a pulse-quickening plot, an endless stream of imaginative wonders, and the kind of moral clarity that brings to mind the grand ethical visions of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks. This is an unforgettable novel of ideas, keen to the complex interplays between love and sacrifice, complicity and community."
Bunyan and Henry (2024) Mark Cecil "With Bunyan and Henry, Mark Cecil has reinvented and reinvigorated two of America's greatest mythic heroes, setting them loose in a thrilling romp through the pressing concerns of their time and of ours. There's so much heartfelt joy and wonder here, so much true wisdom and pleasure too. A fantastic read."
City of Laughter (2024) Temim Fruchter "An absolute pleasure, a thrilling journey that endlessly finds new ways to surprise and delight, challenge, and enthrall. Very few debut novels are as ambitious as this; even fewer deliver on even their biggest promises so assuredly."
How to Make a Bomb (2023) Rupert Thomson "Masterfully ambiguous ... How to Make a Bomb raises complicated questions ... but doesn't neatly wrap them up. Rather, it allows the ideological inquiries at the center of the book to linger and bloom for continued consideration .... How to Make a Bomb provides a powerfully evocative catalyst for thought and feeling."
The Great Transition (2023) Nick Fuller Googins "Nick Fuller Googins demonstrates exactly the kind of clear-eyed utopian thinking we'll need more of as we work together to solve our climate crisis, wrapping a call to action, accountability, and mutual aid in a story that's as thrilling as it is moving. Every worthwhile novel sets out to change its reader - this one sets out to change the world. I hope it does."
Cleaner (2023) Brandi Wells "Brandi Wells's Cleaner is a fantastic office novel, a keen evocation of our deep desire for dignity in the workplace and for recognition of a job well done. It's also a smart thriller about what the essential workers you choose not to see might right now be thinking about you-and a sharp reminder that you ignore the people upon whom your good life depends at your own peril."
At the End of Every Day (2023) Arianna Reiche "Arianna Reiche's At the End of Every Day is a smart and surprising escape room of a novel, transforming America's theme park urban legends and pop culture mythologies into something darker, stranger, weirder - or else only making clear what dark and strange and weird holds such amusements have always had on us."
Elsewhere (2023) Yan Ge "Yan Ge is one of the most surprising writers I've read in recent years, a fantastic storyteller who never fails to thrill me. In Elsewhere, her stories are both expansive and precise, their range of subjects and approaches suggesting few bounds to the subversive pleasures her stories might deliver. I suspect that even now Yan Ge is racing ahead of us lucky readers, off to explore the outer limits of possibility."
Take What You Need (2023) Idra Novey "An extraordinarily moving novel. Take What You Need is a masterful depiction of the radical, transformative power of outsider art. I'll never forget Jean and her scavenged metal towers, or the hard-earned beauty and truth waiting at the heart of this stunning new American fairy tale."
The Last Beekeeper (2023) Julie Carrick Dalton "The Last Beekeeper is a moving novel about how radical hope can be kept alive in the face of personal grief and global loss."
Desert Creatures (2022) Kay Chronister "Kay Chronister has crafted an incredible setting, pushing the wild weirdness of the Sonoran Desert toward the furthest extremes of possibility. I will never forget this uncanny world, nor brave Magdala's quest across it, contending with holy saints and hellish killers in a landscape whose every inch and inhabitant is as dangerous as they are in dire need of healing."
Singer Distance (2022) Ethan Chatagnier "Ethan Chatagnier's Singer Distance is one of the rarest and best kinds of novels: a truly thrilling story driven by big ideas and bold writing, whose gripping mysteries only deepen as the plot thickens. You won't see the stars and the planets above the same way once you've experienced this unforgettable book. You won't look at our Earth the same way either."
Valleyesque (2022) Fernando A Flores "Fernando A. Flores is a masterful stylist, ferrying language across back and forth across landscape, border, and social class to invent a literary voice like no other. Reading Flores always reminds me of no one but Flores: he's one of the rare truly singular fiction writers of our time, and his stories are endlessly innovative, surprising, and fun. Valleyesque is not to be missed."
Saint Sebastian's Abyss (2022) Mark Haber "I loved everything about Saint Sebastian's Abyss. A fantastic tale of the glories and tribulations of chasing an ecstatic relationship to art."
Child Zero (2022) Chris Holm "CHILD ZERO moves like no other novel I've read lately, with Chris Holm's gripping writing delivering a story whose thrills come as much from its plausibility as from its twists and surprises. A deeply moral cautionary tale, set in a credible future we should be afraid to let happen."
Drowning Practice (2022) Mike Meginnis "Drowning Practice is the best new novel I've read in ages. Its heroines Mott and Lyd are surprising and compelling, a daughter and mother not merely surviving the end of their world but determined to make something new before it comes. So many apocalypses diminish the world, robbing it of its glories: here Mike Meginnis sets out to restore its wonder. In doing so, he's gifted us a novel of haunting grace and deep, difficult love, a story I don't believe I'll ever forget."
How High We Go in the Dark (2022) Sequoia Nagamatsu "How High We Go in the Dark is a book of incredible scope and ambition, a polyphonic elegy for the possible, for all that might be won and lost in the many worlds we make together: the world of our families, our civilization and our planet, the planets beyond. Every tale in Sequoia Nagamatsu's debut generates fresh wonder at all we are, plus hope for all we might become, in these unforgettable futures yet to be."
On Fragile Waves (2021) E Lily Yu "An incredibly accomplished debut novel, a necessary and important tale of empathy and imagination and hope."
Boys of Alabama (2020) Genevieve Hudson "Genevieve Hudson creates a new American erotics of longing and belonging, flush with want and desire, hope and home, translation and transformation."
Amatka (2017) Karin Tidbeck "Karin Tidbeck is a brilliant conjurer of worlds, a fabulist armed with an imagination as fiercely strange as any I have ever encountered. Her fiction is built on a foundation of improbabilities and even outright impossibilities, and if you surrender to its increasingly bold claims on reality you will walk away surprised, thrilled, and in all likelihood changed forever."
Annihilation (2014) (Southern Reach, book 1) Jeff VanderMeer "It's been a long time since a book filled me with this kind of palpable, wondrous disquiet, a feeling that started on the first page and that I'm not sure I've yet shaken."
