Xochitl Gonzalez recommends
God's Children Are Little Broken Things (2022)
Arinze Ifeakandu
"This collection is the very meaning of exquisite; even the heartbreaking moments come with the great beauty of being alive. Delicate, raw in its honesty and viscerally alive, God's Children Are Little Broken Things, is the kind of collection that steals your breath and fills your heart."
A Map for the Missing (2022)
Belinda Huijuan Tang
"A stunning debut full of vivid writing, A Map for the Missing reminds you of exactly why we read in the first place. Through the expertly drawn and utterly original characters of Yitian and Hanwen, Belinda Huijuan Tang confronts how history, mobility, memory, and desire all intertwine in our perpetual search for peace. From the campus of an elite American university to the countryside of Cultural Revolutionary China, Tang confidently and artfully paints a complex and vast world that is both ethereal and familiar, characters concurrently exacting and reckless. The result is a novel that explores the bittersweetness of returns and the ultimate healing behind coming home."
My Government Means to Kill Me (2022)
Rasheed Newson
"Fresh, vibrant and utterly unapologetic. Rasheed Newson has written an unforgettable, take-no-prisoners novel alive with humor and full of urgency. Newson's Trey and his determination to live life on his own terms, even in the face of death all around him, brings into three dimension an era of New York Queer life that, too often, has been flattened and whitewashed by history."
A Country You Can Leave (2023)
Asale Angel-Ajani
"From page one, A Country You Can Leave is a riveting, exasperating, and deeply heartbreaking tale of mother-daughter strife and resilience. Asale Angel-Ajani is an explosive talent and her story of Afro-Cuban Lara coming of age in a ruthless headlock with her survivalist Russian mother, Yevgenia, will disintegrate your strong-held emotional walls, down to her very last act of resistance."
Carmen and Grace (2023)
Melissa Coss Aquino
"I was crying like I lost my best friend as I finished. . . . This book is an act of love . . . It will break you apart and remind you that we can all be put back together again, stronger, and wiser than before."
Rosewater (2023)
Liv Little
"Rosewater is sensuous, urgent and pulsating with youth -- embracing all of its messiness, discovery and boundless capacity for love."
The Weight (2023)
Jeff Boyd
"As a reader, Jeff Boyd's writing is the kind you love: he builds a world and inhabits it with round, flawed, real people. His astute observations and wry humor pull you in but his characters make you stay. As a writer, Jeff's writing is the kind of thing that makes you bang your head against the wall wondering, 'How the F did he do that!? How did he make this insane, complicated, thing feel as easy as the riff of a jazz bass line.' In The Weight, Boyd somehow skewers liberal Portland while implicating all of us and, in a truly pertinent way, ask what it means to really be 'accepting of self.'"
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