Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and VCU Cabell First Novel awards, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and named a best book of the year by Esquire, GQ, and Cosmopolitan. His short stories and other work have appeared in The Southern Review, Guernica, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. He lives in New York City.
We Are Gathered Here Today (2026) Bobby Finger "With the exquisitely wonderful We Are Gathered Here Today, Bobby Finger layers a trademark wit atop a disastrous wedding weekend, populated with a cast of wayward young people pretending to be much more fine than they really are. The result is pure love: mess and joy and raucous humor all at once. This is a novel so bursting full of life that the only thing you'll want to do after finishing it is to call your loved ones, get outside, breathe the fresh air, and live."
Sister Creatures (2025) Laura Venita Green "Captivating and sublime, Sister Creatures weaves together a series of hauntings: of the past, of the home and family, of the secrets kept inside that threaten an ever-delicate peace."
Oxford Soju Club (2025) Jinwoo Park "Wildly inventive, fast-paced, and glowing with heart, Oxford Soju Club is an unforgettable debut. A spy thriller interlacing the paths of three individuals embroiled in what threatens to become an international incident, with a breakneck plot and a poignant way of describing trying to exist between worlds and to carve a place of your own in between."
My Other Heart (2025) Emma Nanami Strenner "I've never read anything quite like Emma Nanami Strenner's My Other Heart: gorgeous, devastating, equally joyous and heartbreaking. Weaving three disparate lives across years and thousands of miles, it recounts the ripple effect expanding from a single, fateful day in the past, spinning an ecosystem of pain and memory around it. Reaching the end of Sabrina, Kit, and Mimi's story was like taking in a gasp of air after spending a minute underwater."
The Ephemera Collector (2025) Stacy Nathaniel Jackson "Both a masterful formal experiment and an exhilarating science fiction epic, The Ephemera Collector is a fractal of a novel-folding endlessly and effortlessly into itself in perfect synchronization with its parts: the journey of an archivist searching for meaning in the near future, a vision of humanity's reckoning with its complex history and its ultimate fate, and a meditation on the complexity of memory, both human and cultural, that survives us in the objects left behind."
Two Truths and a Lie (2025) Cory O'Brien "Boldly inventive, peppered with breakneck action and a blend of speculative wonder and humor, Cory O'Brien's Two Truths and a Lie packs an unforgettable punch. Utilizing the vehicle of a thrilling, emotional, often hilarious cyberpunk detective story, it pokes at the delicate line between memory and truth, ultimately wondering whether there is even a difference. The result is ambitious, masterful, and hugely entertaining."
Masquerade (2024) Mike Fu "Stylistically daring, with jigsaw plotting, lush sensuality, and a tender emotional core, Mike Fu's Masquerade is a subtle and self-assured debut. A book that is as much about the brittle threads of reality that bind us as it is about how easily they are shattered."
The Blanket Cats (2024) Kiyoshi Shigematsu "Moving between tender sentimentality to deft, often cutting insightfulness through a series of artfully arranged vignettes, The Blanket Cats is a triumph. Seven cats go home with seven new owners for a strict period of three days and two nights, upending seven lives rife with complexity and consequence. Resulting from these unexpected, often messy encounters is a profound image: a kind of knowledge about our human need to be needed that one can't fully understand without having owned a pet, whether for three days or for a lifetime."
Five-Star Stranger (2024) Kat Tang "Five-Star Stranger is smart and slick, a lampoon of the late-stage capitalist tech-ification of modern society, at turns realist and speculative, intimate and engrossing. A novel about a for-hire stranger who cycles through a carousel of identities for paying clients with myriad intentions, it asks an important question: who are you--truly, deeply inside--and if nobody cares to know it, does it even matter?"
