Francisco Goldman is the author of The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, The Divine Husband, and The Art of Political Murder. He has been the recipient of Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.
Every Story Is a Love Story (2026) Imbolo Mbue "Mbue understands better than any writer I know how people can hurt, fear, find and help to heal each other across cultures, races and genders. This novel is so intimately smart and tender, emotionally-wrenching, charming, funny, romantic, jaw-dropping, elating. I feel so grateful to have read it."
New Skin (2026) Sarah Wang "If this terrifying era is going to produce a new canon of American immigration novels - and it should! - Sarah Wang's New Skin will be one of its indisputable masterpieces, a novel of unique brilliance, so beautiful, hilarious, heartbreaking, teeming with a gloriously searing rage but also tenderness."
Catalina (2024) Karla Cornejo Villavicencio "Smart, charming, funny, ambitious . . . By so enthrallingly and perceptively giving unprecedented individual voice to a defining issue of our time, Catalina seems destined to be a contemporary American classic."
Toby Lloyd "Both a provocative work of Jewish horror and a modern biblical tale, Fervour is the tightly coiled story of an idiosyncratic family whose unlikely survival skills also spell its doom."
1,000 Coils of Fear (2022) Olivia Wenzel "This novel's mixed-race young narrator interrogates her own painful past and confusion of selves - German Angolan, child of an East Germany erased by unification, boy lovers girl lovers, badass and vulnerable, cowering and defiant - in a voice so exuberant, inventive, brainy, sensitive, and hilarious that it's like a pyrotechnic flare illuminating the whole woman, past and present, radiant, unique, a voice and a novel to take with us into the future."
Witches (2022) Brenda Lozano "I've always wanted to encounter a voice like this in literature, a contemporary bruja oaxaquena, without folklore or cliche, with true feeling, complexity, and poetry. It feels like discovering that Juan Rulfo has transformed into a twenty-first century woman, or better yet, that he has returned as one of the many voices that live in Brenda Lozano. A beautiful, painful, funny, and tender novel."
The Days of Afrekete (2021) Asali Solomon "This profoundly intelligent and moving novel explores and dramatizes the sometimes mysterious sources and adult consequences of choices made in youth. These characters are damaged but talented, seemingly well-positioned to succeed but unsure of what they want for themselves, or of where they or their loyalties really belong. Their intimate ensemble of voices engages and converses with perfect pitch across races, sexualities, and social classes, seeking love and happiness and losing these. I know that some of these complex, haunting characters, especially Liselle and Selena, now feel permanently alive in me. Asali Solomon is extraordinarily gifted, and I feel so grateful to have read this novel."
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (2021) Rivka Galchen "On every page of this brilliant, transporting novel are sentences of surreal poetry, of profound insight and enchanting observation, of Monty Python-like sublime nonsense and delightful fragments of fairy tale and lore. Tragic Katharina Kepler, so eccentric and misunderstood, so honest, loyal, brave, and funny, is surely one of literature’s great mothers. This is a novel to keep alongside your favorite Calvino or Ishiguro, though its special genius is pure Rivka Galchen."
Mona (2021) Pola Oloixarac "International literary gatherings are ripe for sharp satire, but they're never as hilariously funny, weird, and adorable as the one portrayed in Mona. Brainy, cheerfully dirty, and caught in a fine mess, Mona herself, like this novel, is exhilarating company."
Vengeance (2018) Zachary Lazar "I am stunned by the daring, meticulous, and unsentimental intelligence of this riveting book . . . Vengeance is a masterwork, the most important American book I've read this year, and the most moving and mesmerizing."
The Convalescent (2009) Jessica Anthony "A blissfully nutty, brainy, ribald, brilliantly imaginative ode to human loneliness, oddity, and persistence."
