The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman (2026) Deesha Philyaw "Deesha Philyaw has already established herself as one of the greatest short story writers, but in The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman she cements herself as the most soulfully entertaining writer of her era. Philyaw loves these characters and place as much as characters and place can be fictively loved, but it is her care for, and ability to thwart, readerly expectations that feel wholly innovative... This one is special. Like, forever special."
Dominion (2025) Addie E Citchens "This is the rarest and finest kind of storytelling, where both the tradition and innovation get plucked by the most audacious artistry I've experienced in a long, long time. You read this and see there's literally nothing narratively Addie E. Citchens can't do with her skill, her will. We have never in our reading lives experienced such an imagination, a gumption, a breathing Mississippi, and a craftsperson this locked in at this stage of her career. My god, we are lucky."
Wandering Stars (2024) Tommy Orange "In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange finds different pockets, not just to flex, but to really get to beyond the marrow of this wonderfully blistered world. The work is so varied and textured but also ruthlessly clear in what it's costing and what it's destroying."
Family Lore (2023) Elizabeth Acevedo "Only Elizabeth Acevedo could make an epic feel so intimate, so perfectly crafted and tightly drawn. FAMILY LORE is a devastating exploration of the liveliness of the Marte women. No writer on earth transforms a page into a home with distinct emotional chambers like Acevedo, and her she does it with language that is equally lush and lacerating. This is how stories should be made."
Trinity (2023) Zelda Lockhart "Trinity pulses with the very best in Southern spirit-writing. The characters have this way of floating beneath the plot, right above the dirt in a place that is equally rich as it is terrifying. I am forever changed by what Zelda Lockhart has made."
Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah "In a narrative world where the real is growingly more unbelievable than the make believe, Chain-Gang All-Stars is an uncanny, singular feat for literature. I've never read satire so bruising, so brolic, so tender and, really, so pitch-perfect. It's nuts brilliant. Just read it!"
Two Nurses, Smoking (2022) David Means "David Means taught many in my generation how to make the painfully idiosyncratic wonder of his short stories feel weighted like novels. In Two Nurse, Smoking, Means has offered us his most finely crafted, soulfully achy collection. No writer writes better about the gory gaps between folks who claim to love each other. Shockingly well written."
Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (2022) Laura Warrell "The most memorable novels of my life are boiling over with insatiably written secondary characters that crave their own books. The same can be said about our most jamming jazz quartets. This peculiar cacophony is exactly what we see in at least five characters in Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm. Koko, for example, is a once in lifetime, once in a galaxy character. Laura Warrell has crafted a world within the world with the achy mystery, wonder and subtexual bounce of the greatest jazz. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is a soulful, fleshy and absolutely stunning debut. Warrell will re-teach us how to wail, pause and reckon. I am thankful."
Big Girl (2022) Mecca Jamilah Sullivan "There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the suns burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books. The sound, the expansiveness of the whispers, the critical, brilliant, sometimes bruising, beautiful Black girlness explored in this novel is literally second to none... I know I have just read and reread a new American classic that we as a culture and country desperately need. Believe that."
Nightcrawling (2022) Leila Mottley "Nightcrawling is a scorching, incredibly readable book that takes seriously the task of readerly provocation on every page. Get ready. Or don't. It doesn't matter. Leila Mottley is here."
The Other Mother (2022) Rachel M Harper "The Other Mother breaks every rule of traditional world-building and creates the kind of full-hearted literary saga we are lucky to get once every generation. Dazzling."
Where I Can't Follow (2022) Ashley Blooms "The kind of books we need to need to set literary expectations for a new decade...so wonderfully terrifying, intimate and magical."
Don't Cry for Me (2022) Daniel Black "In Daniel Black's Don't Cry for Me, we're reminded that consequential movement is always happening whether we like it or not. Black manages to capture, and really free characters, scenes, and so much subtext we've felt, but rarely seen or heard in American literature. The book is unafraid of the pungent slivers of joy and those dazzling shards of horror that accompany loneliness and progress. Don't Cry for Me is literally the book my favorite books needed to read. It is an unparalleled literary achievement that already feels like it will, of all things, endure."
All Day Is a Long Time (2022) David Sanchez "All Day is a Long Time is the most terrifying and beautiful exploration of how addiction is made. David Sanchez has written a gulf coast classic."
Reprieve (2021) James Han Mattson "Reprieve is an eventual American classic that is unrelenting in its beauty and incisive cultural critique. But it is James Han Mattson's treatment of his fully flawed characters that clutches my heart and head. Every room in this book has a secret room. Every character has a shadow trying to swallow them whole. I'm not sure there is 'fearless' American writing, but a few times a generation, there is innovative writing that appears to confront, shred, and accept the fears of its author and its readers with a wicked joy. Reprieve is that book. It really is."
Hell of a Book (2021) Jason Mott "Hell of a Book teetertotters real life and fiction in a dizzying yet dazzling exploration of exploration itself. Jason Mott brings much of what he's known for and a lot of what we do not expect to this inventive offering."
The Man Who Lived Underground (2021) Richard Wright "The Man Who Lived Underground reminds us that any ‘greatest writers of the 20th century’ list that doesn’t start and end with Richard Wright is laughable. It might very well be Wright’s most brilliantly crafted, and ominously foretelling, book."
Libertie (2021) Kaitlyn Greenidge "I want to say that Kaitlyn Greenidge's Libertie is a glorious diasporic literary song, but the novel is so much more than that. A book so deeply invested in the politics and place of silence is one of the most melodious books I've read in decades. The ambition in Libertie is only exceeded by Greenidge's skill. This is it."
The Prophets (2021) Robert Jones Jr "The Prophets is easily the most superb tutorial in writing and loving I have ever read. I’m convinced Morrison, Baldwin, and Bambara sat around sipping wine one night, talking about the day we’d read an offering like The Prophets. Robert Jones, Jr., is a once-in-a-generation cultural worker whose art thankfully will be imitated for generations."
Black Bottom Saints (2020) Alice Randall "Black Bottom Saints is easily the most inventive and musical novel I've read in a decade. Alice Randall has rewritten and re-energized the rules of the American novel!"
These Ghosts Are Family (2020) Maisy Card "I suspect many readers will talk about the consequences of unspoken generational trauma in These Ghosts Are Family, but I'm most amazed by the deft use of characterization, place and embodiment here. This book is a master class in writing home as a collection of odd spirits and a mobile metaphor."
The Atlas of Reds and Blues (2019) Devi S Laskar "Devi S. Laskar's The Atlas of Reds and Blues is as narratively beautiful as it is brutal. In prose that moves between cushioning characters' falls and ushering our understandings of characters' utopias, Laskar creates a world where the consequences of American terror never stop reverberating. I've never read a novel that does nearly as much in so few pages. Laskar has changed how we will all write about state-sanctioned terror in this nation."
We Cast a Shadow (2019) Maurice Carlos Ruffin "A literary classic that will outlive us all, We Cast a Shadow is the finely crafted quake the American novel needed."
Vengeance (2018) Zachary Lazar "More than any book I’ve read in the twenty-first century, Zachary Lazar’s Vengeance makes the reader reckon with the questions of what’s real, what’s imagined, and why those questions matter more in 2017 than at any other time in our nation. . . . Vengeance reminds me of what is possible through deft, imaginative, ‘real’ storytelling."
(b.1974)
