A.M. Homes is the author of several novels and a collection of stories. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, she also writes for Art Forum, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Among her many awards are Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships. She lives in New York.
We Carry the Sea in Our Hands (2024) Janie Kim "Janie Kim's We Carry the Sea in our Hands is a brilliant, poetic dance between the worlds of art and science that explores a young woman's coming of age/coming to consciousness. In this deftly articulate first novel, Kim explores intimate and essential questions about family, identity, biological imperative, and the mythology of the self. A braided narrative that brings together science, nature, and grief, We Carry the Sea in Our Hands is a haunting celebration of the preciousness of life and our relationships to both what is known and what remains mysterious within us and within the world around us."
Choice (2024) Neel Mukherjee "Choice is perhaps the most brilliant novel I've read this year. It is the reminder of why we need fiction. Profound and devastating, Choice is as dark and hauntingly beautiful as it gets. A masterpiece of the highest order."
Victory City (2023) Salman Rushdie "Salman Rushdie is a genius and I wish he could read me a story - or a chapter of his book - every night before bed. The scale and scope of his intellect and his imagination is googolplex."
The Means (2022) Amy Fusselman "Location, location, location: that is the real estate chant. In Amy Fusselman's The Means those words are intermingled with laugh, laugh, laugh. Fusselman is a prescient observer chronicling one couple's desire to live near where the other half live. She deftly captures the absurdity of the everyday and the American quest for more. The Means is funny, playful and at times painfully accurate."
The Deceptions (2022) Jill Bialosky "In The Deceptions Jill Bialosky captures the gutted hollow of the empty nest, the weight of marriage, and the ember of desire that is desperate for air. Bialosky explores the female artist's need to take risks, to be seen and known, against her need for comfort, safety, and home. In stunning, finely tuned prose, Bialosky captures the music of marriage, the complexity of female ambition, sexual hunger, and rage. This story unfurls in a beautiful weave among objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Myth, archetype, and history come to life and in the end we are returned to the present - this moment - and the question of what it is to be human, to risk, to fail, to suffer the pain of love."
Homeland Elegies (2020) Ayad Akhtar "An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, HOMELAND ELEGIES thrusts us into the heart of a father-son relationship and in the process - improbably - does nothing short of laying bear the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare... Stunning."
What Happens at Night (2020) Peter Cameron "I don't think I've ever read a book by an American or by a living person that's as exquisitely rendered as What Happens at Night. Every word is exactly as it should be; there is not a single extra word out of place. The novel feels as though it traveled through time to arrive here. Cameron's prose creates an effect that is literally like a fugue (or cinematic fog): intense, beautiful, inescapable, and so much about grief that has been and grief that is to come, heartbreaking and tender. The story is so intense, such a fine reduction of the enormity of the dreams of marriage, the responsibilities of marriage, of life, of love, and the ways in which - unintentionally or not - we inevitably fail each other and ourselves."
The Child Finder (2017) (Naomi Cottle, book 1) Rene Denfeld "A darkly luminous story of resilience and the deeply human instinct for survival, for love. Blending the magical thinking of childhood, of fairy tales, dreams, memories and nightmares, The Child Finder is a terrifying and ultimately uplifting novel that demands to be consumed and then once inside you - lingers…"
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby (2017) Cherise Wolas "The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a stunning debut - because there is nothing debut about it. It arrives so fully realized that it stuns as it entertains, as it twirls the reader on the sharp point of a #2 pencil."
Happy Family (2016) Tracy Barone "Filled with intimate poignancy, deft humor and pitch-perfect dialogue."
The Color of Night (2011) Madison Smartt Bell "A truly unnerving mythical novel that asks us to piece together what is left of a shattered collective unconscious. Bell's devastated, traumatized characters surf the debris of who we are and where we've been."
Alice Fantastic (2009) Maggie Estep "There is about Maggie Estep's work a directness, a clear determination - a drive to cut through, to break through, to claw through - that is impressive."
Beautiful Children (2008) Charles Bock "Charles Bock has delivered an anxious, angry, honest first novel filled with compassion and clarity. Beautiful Children is fast, violent, sexy and - like a potentially dangerous ride - it could crash at any moment but never does. The language has a rhythm wholly its own - at moments it is stunning, near genius. This book is big and wild - it is as though Bock saved up everything for this moment. A major new talent."
Here They Come (2006) Yannick Murphy "Yannick Murphy's long-awaited Here They Come is a unique combination of rare linguistic lyricism with brutal and brilliant prose. It is an unrelenting portrait of family, terrifying for its honesty, its willingness to be ugly and elegant. Haunting."
Beware Of God (2005) Shalom Auslander "The stories in "Beware of God" mark the debut of the freshest voice in Jewish literature since Philip Roth arrived on the scene. Youthful, energetic, wholly original - never has Orthodox Judaism been so appealing ... In these stories not only does God speak - he does it in Dolby Surround sound."
