Laird Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories. He and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.
Life Cycle of a Moth (2025) Rowe Irvin "Epic and intimate, brimming with fierce love and jagged wonder, Life Cycle of a Moth is the kind of book whose pages you can't stop turning even as you don't want them to end. There are echoes here of visionary wordsmiths like Eimear McBride, Ursula K. Le Guin and Marlen Haushofer, but the accomplishment - as singular as it is striking - is all Irvin's own."
Library for the War-Wounded (2024) Monika Helfer "A masterclass in literary compression. In just a short span of pages, Helfer brings a whole world of wonder, loss and deep, deep longing to indelible life. How lucky we are that her work is finally available in English."
Prophet Song (2023) Paul Lynch "Paul Lynch is a writer of great vision and power and Prophet Song is his best novel yet."
Lost Believers (2023) Irina Zhorov "This hard, beautiful, highly moving novel seems carved straight out of the Siberian landscape it so vividly describes. Whether she is evoking the mountains and woods of the legendary taiga or Moscow in the 1970s, Zhorov writes with vision and clarity. Galina and Agafia and the whole lost world they inhabit come wonderfully alive."
The Vegan (2023) Andrew Lipstein "I tore through Andrew Lipstein's second novel. Smart, fresh, funny, strangely moving, wonderfully weird and beautifully written, The Vegan is just a terrific book."
The Weeds (2023) Katy Simpson Smith "What a terrific novel! Strange, moving, and marvelously alive, The Weeds works-like the eponymous flora that fills its pages-with subtle insistence and exuberant power to unfurl its ingeniously twinned stories of injustice, heartbreak, desire, and hope. I couldn't put it down."
Salvage This World (2023) Michael Farris Smith "With a cast of fierce, masterfully drawn characters set loose in gorgeous, hurricane-blasted landscapes, Salvage this World by Michael Farris Smith is riveting: I couldn't put it down."
A Cowardly Woman No More (2023) Ellen Cooney "I have been a fan of Ellen Cooney's for years, and she is in undeniably brilliant form once again here. Masterfully told, full of surprise, built from unforgettable sentences that sing, whisper, or shout, A Cowardly Woman No More is utterly compelling from its first fiery comet of a page to its last."
Always Crashing in the Same Car (2023) Lance Olsen "As he takes us on a moving, multinodal journey through the stunning kaleidoscope that was David Bowie's life, Olsen offers up a generous vision of the indispensable role of art, love and friendship as - with old mortality in the offing - we prosecute the wonders of our days and the challenges of our nights."
Motherthing (2022) Ainslie Hogarth "Ainslie Hogarth's new novel is a stunner. Like Mona Awad's Bunny or Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen, Motherthing is a fabulous, frightening story built from fine, fine prose."
Saint Sebastian's Abyss (2022) Mark Haber "Evocative of the work of Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Gilbert Sorrentino, and other great literary obsessives of a satirical stripe, Saint Sebastian's Abyss by Mark Haber is whip smart, scalpel sharp, wicked funny, and, ultimately, genuinely moving. Fans of Haber's excellent Reinhardt's Garden are in for a serious treat with this one. I loved it and can't wait to see what comes next."
Tides (2022) Sara Freeman "Sara Freeman goes about her business in Tides with such cool composure that I didn't fully register the serious heat of the thing until my eyebrows had started to sizzle. I'm amazed that this is a first novel. There is something very large to be found in this wonderfully compressed work."
Rovers (2021) Richard Lange "The gone world of the 1970s goes beautifully, terrifyingly and oh so satisfyingly bad in this new one by Richard Lange. Propulsive, intense, smart and stylish, Rovers is high-octane, full-throttle, keep-your-hands-off-that-lightswitch stuff."
Dead Souls (2021) Sam Riviere "Dead Souls is a whip smart, razor sharp, wise-funny, highly readable animal of a first novel, and I can't recommend it enthusiastically enough."
It Will Just Be Us (2020) Jo Kaplan "Marvelously atmospheric, emphatically suspenseful and beautifully written, Jo Kaplan's It Will Just Be Us had my full attention from its deliciously creepy first page and kept frightening me straight through to the end."
The Anthill (2020) Julianne Pachico "Julianne Pachico's brilliant and scary new novel sneaks up on you. Its whisperings grow slowly, surely more insistent, its phantoms pop out unpredictably from under beds and tables, its bevy of buried memories surge, recede, swell and roar, and the all of it harries the heart and unmoors the mind. At once a powerfully imagined reckoning with national trauma and one young woman's confrontation with considerable privilege and terrible loss, The Anthill is fiercely original. International in scope, profoundly human in its concerns, it feels like just the kind of novel we need in unsettling times."
Beheld (2020) TaraShea Nesbit "Beheld breathes fresh life into a world grown still and murky beneath the scrim of legend--rife with intrigue, fractured by difference, marked by violence, and full of haunting images. With gorgeous, period-inflected prose, Nesbit takes us back to the earliest days of New England to look through the eyes and over the shoulders of historical characters both remembered and not. I read it at a gallop. What a marvel this novel is."
Treeborne (2018) Caleb Johnson "What a marvel of a novel this is. Treeborne’s sentences are taut, its situations engrossing, its characters absolutely and indelibly engaging. Caleb Johnson’s debut is a deep-dig, history-rich, story-soaked beauty."
The Sorrow Proper (2015) Lindsey Drager "The exact opposite of the seemingly endless novels published today that have so little stake...I read it with wonder, and not a little fear, and emerged from the experience feeling exhilarated."
How They Were Found (2010) Matt Bell "Fierce, unflinching, funny, How They Were Found is just the book we need right now."
