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Raven Leilani
Raven Leilani Baptiste is an American writer who publishes under the name Raven Leilani. She published her debut novel Luster in 2020.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Raven Leilani recommends
Milk Blood Heat (2021)
Dantiel W Moniz
"Milk Blood Heat is a seething excavation of want and human error. Moniz writes about the hard incongruities of intimacy with great urgency and tenderness."
Objects of Desire (2021)
Clare Sestanovich
"Sestanovich’s elegant prose takes seriously the quiet unrest that can ravage a life, and makes room for the pleasure and discovery that can be found in that ruin."
Brown Girls (2022)
Daphne Palasi Andreades
"An acute study of those tender moments of becoming. An ode to girlhood, inheritance, and the good trouble the body yields."
The Colony (2022)
Audrey Magee
"A careful interrogation, The Colony expertly explores the mutability of language and art, the triumphs and failures inherent to the process of creation and preservation."
Disorientation (2022)
Elaine Hsieh Chou
"Chou's pen is a scalpel. Disorientation addresses the private absurdities the soul must endure to get free, from tokenism, the quiet exploitation of well-meaning institutions, and the bondage that is self-imposed. Chou does it with wit and verve, and no one is spared."
A Novel Obsession (2022)
Caitlin Barasch
"This book is a ride. An unruly study of fixation, performance, and the exquisite agony of anonymity."
Acts of Service (2022)
Lillian Fishman
"Acts of Service doesn't kiss you first; it gets right to it-depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye."
Half-Blown Rose (2022)
Leesa Cross-Smith
"This Close to Okay hits the ground running. Cross-Smith writes tenderly about the trial and error of intimacy and draws you in with enormous warmth and control."
Cult Classic (2022)
Sloane Crosley
"Cult Classic makes an uproarious time of romantic carnage. Crosley captures the brutal mirror of past love, the slow creep of ambivalence into dread, and the sense that a detour can easily become a life."
Dele Weds Destiny (2022)
Tomi Obaro
"Obaro writes beautifully about the complicated labor of friendship and parentage. Dele Weds Destiny explores caregiving as a kind of deferment, but also as discovery, of desire, of fury, of home."
Not Safe For Work (2022)
Isabel Kaplan
"A frank account of the inherent filthiness of leaning in. A study of the psychological and at times, literal, gymnastics that are required of striving women."
The Rabbit Hutch (2022)
Tess Gunty
"'In The Rabbit Hutch, Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies - the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations."
All This Could Be Different (2022)
Sarah Thankam Mathews
"Sarah Thankam Mathews' prose is undeniable and hyper attuned to the terrible privacy of the mind. In All This Could Be Different, she captures the sneaky, unsayable parts of longing and writes sharply about the long shadow of family."
The Furrows (2022)
Namwali Serpell
"In Namwali Serpell's hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss."
The Women Could Fly (2022)
Megan Giddings
"Megan Giddings' prose is brimming with wonder. The Women Could Fly is a candid appraisal of grief, inheritance, and the merits of unruliness."
Central Places (2023)
Delia Cai
"Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home."
Take What You Need (2023)
Idra Novey
"Novey fully renders the inarticulable parts of artmaking - the antagonism of an artist's material, the pleasure in that difficulty, the way it troubles tidy ideas of legacy."
A House for Alice (2023)
Diana Evans
"A House For Alice is a sharp appraisal of loss. Evans writes deftly about the shifting intimacies between family."
Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023)
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
"Makes explicit how the spirit erodes as the body becomes currency. Adjei-Brenyah writes sharply about the economy of spectacle and the fickle alchemy between futility and hope."
Dances (2023)
Nicole Cuffy
"Dances is a compelling novel about the spiritual and bodily costs of the dogged pursuit of art."
Gone to the Wolves (2023)
John Wray
"Gone To The Wolves is a love letter to metal that captures both its brutal kinetics and its nearness to the sublime."
The Late Americans (2023)
Brandon Taylor
"Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body. In The Late Americans, the body is an instrument and an archive, vulnerable to the complicated violence of pleasure and work."
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