Hilary Leichter's writing has appeared in n 1, the New Yorker, the Cut, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. She has taught fiction at Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Nymph (2026) Sofia Montrone "Nymph is stunning, sunbaked, full of longing, desire, and wisdom. Montrone perfectly captures the Homeric, mythic power of childhood's edge, the paradox of days that feel like they last forever, while somehow always being much too short. Every sentence is a heartbreak in this remarkable debut."
Dwelling (2025) Emily Hunt Kivel "A gorgeous novel of real estate, real emotions, and real warmth, with original hardware, original prose, and bursting with natural light. These pages are home to all things audacious and inventive, a dream house for the limits of your imagination--Dwelling is a daring, charming miracle."
Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (2025) Katie Yee "This book is a lump in the throat, a punchline that hurts, a catalogue of life's curveballs. Maggie is miraculously funny, a tender and wisecracking missive from the midst of catastrophe. Katie Yee knows that at the center of every joke, and every person, there is a broken heart."
The Coin (2024) Yasmin Zaher "The Coin is a taut, caustic wonder. Like Jean Rhys, Yasmin Zaher captures the outrageous loneliness of contemporary life, the gradual and total displacement of the human heart. This is a novel of wealth, filth, beauty, and grief told in clarion prose and with unbearable suspense. I was in its clutches from the first page."
Housemates (2024) Emma Copley Eisenberg "A perfect novel about making art, making a life, and how to do those things at the same time, with other people."
Worry (2024) Alexandra Tanner "Alexandra Tanner's Worry is a furiously funny, delirious anxiety spiral of a book - a novel of ideas with a bad case of insomnia, written in a voice that is brilliant and electric. Poppy and Jules are a modern-day Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for the endless scroll of life to make sense. And what wonderful company they are: the detritus of their tangents and distractions coalesces into blistering prose that barrels through the narcissism of daily life, landing somewhere startling, original, and true."
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (2023) Molly McGhee "Welcome to the somnambulatory prose of Molly McGhee, where vivid nightmares and lucid tender dreams live side by side. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is a revelation told with the honesty and delicacy of a drowsy oracle. There's nothing like it, awake or asleep or anywhere in between."
Death Valley (2023) Melissa Broder "Death Valley is a glorious mirage of a book. This is a mischievous and moving novel of prickly wonders, where the indignities of life are monumental, and the inanimate world only comes alive in the lonely glow of loss. Broder's writing is a brilliant, zany compass, leading us from the sorrow of existence toward the hilarity of someday having to die."
Thistlefoot (2022) GennaRose Nethercott "The house of fiction might have a million windows, but GennaRose Nethercott gives it legs. She is half yente, half soothsayer, her sentences bubbling over with magic and commiseration. Thistlefoot is a brave bubbe-meise and a wily campfire tale, told with compassion, hope, and endless heart."
Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World (2022) Sasha Fletcher "Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World is exuberant, torrential, a carnival and a funeral and a chorus to a song you remember never hearing. Sasha Fletcher's sentences leap off the page like a heart out of a chest. Prepare yourself for the most love-swept and soul-throttling prose this side of the apocalypse. Fletcher is the ecstatic, wild troubadour for our perpetual hope, our national grief."
Several People Are Typing (2021) Calvin Kasulke "Calvin Kasulke's debut novel is a Greek chorus of modern strife, a workplace of woebegone souls. It asks the important questions, like what it means to be a person, but also, what it means to be a gif... a dirge for bureaucracy told by one of the funniest new writers @here."
The Very Nice Box (2021) Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman "What kind of box is this book? Is it a giftbox, or a memory box, or a coffin? It’s all of the above, a deftly packaged story that hinges on the way we organize our days, our work, and our love. I relished living in its perfect compartments. Gleichman and Blackett have engineered a narrative not only very nice, but exceptional."
The Woman in the Purple Skirt (2021) Natsuko Imamura "The Woman in the Purple Skirt is like a love story overheard on a park bench. It’s a thriller about commutes, work schedules, and unemployment. It’s a bottle of hotel shampoo that makes its way into your shower, and you can’t seem to remember how it got there. What profound and giddy prose; I could not put this book down. Imamura is a glorious architect of perspective, surprising and breaking this reader’s heart at every turn."
