Carmen Maria Machado's work has appeared in Granta, TheNew Yorker, NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She lives in Philadelphia.
Crawl (2025) Max Delsohn "A horny, hilarious, bittersweet romp through millennial transmasc malaise-Crawl aches and charms in turn. Max Delsohn is a writer to watch."
Songs of No Provenance (2025) Lydi Conklin "Lydi Conklin has gathered up slippery ideas about art-making and desire and mentorship and gender and plunged an antihero for the ages through the heart of them all. Songs of No Provenance is a raw, empathetic novel of exceptional power."
Stag Dance (2025) Torrey Peters "The stories in Stag Dance are potent and surprising and take no prisoners. How exquisitely Peters writes about the way we move towards ourselves - with the clarity of desire and the agony of resistance."
Rejection (2024) Tony Tulathimutte "Rejection is unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one - not you, not me. Tulathimutte is a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius."
Cuckoo (2024) Gretchen Felker-Martin "Cuckoo is a cry of grief and rage and, at its heart, a tribute to the queers who cup their hands around the guttering flame of hope and refuse to let it die. Brutal, relentless, terrifying, startlingly beautiful--I dare you to put this novel down."
Ripe (2023) Sarah Rose Etter "Sarah Rose Etter is a wonder, and this novel is a knife to the heart."
Saturnalia (2022) Stephanie Feldman "A heady mix of the most terrifying elements of our troubled past and inevitable future; an eerie, propulsive novel."
The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022) Rebecca Rukeyser "I didn't realize how much I needed this lusty, funny, heartbreaking book until I devoured it in a single sitting. The Seaplane on Final Approach is a novel set at the edge of the world, about people who belong everywhere and nowhere and the vast, unknowable wilderness of desire. A sharp, flawless debut. Sexy and dark and strange and absolutely perfect."
The School for Good Mothers (2021) Jessamine Chan "A terrifying novel about mass surveillance, loneliness, and the impossible measurements of motherhood - The School for Good Mothers is a timely and remarkable debut."
The Ghost Variations (2021) Kevin Brockmeier "The Ghost Variations is pure Kevin Brockmeier--lush and playful and devastating and brilliant; a haunted hotel with a hundred rooms and a hundred doors, behind which lie a hundred perfect and terrifying dioramas. It's been ages since I've been this profoundly sated by a story collection, and I loved every minute of it."
Leave the World Behind (2020) Rumaan Alam "Leave the World Behind is so many things—funny, sharp, insightful about modernity and race and parenthood and home—but at its core it’s a story of our shared apocalypse; a steady look at humanity in the moment it tumbles from a great height. I have not been this profoundly unnerved by a science fiction novel since Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go."
A Cosmology of Monsters (2019) Shaun Hamill "A monster stalks a family across generations; a hidden city beckons from beyond perception; trauma and human frailty and loss bear their terrible fangs. . . . A Cosmology of Monsters is as weird and compelling and ambitious a horror novel as you could possibly want."
The Lonesome Bodybuilder (2018) Yukiko Motoya "Charming, bizarre, and uncanny, The Lonesome Bodybuilder is Etgar Keret by way of Yoko Ogawa. I'd follow Yukiko Motoya anywhere she wanted to take me."
The Mere Wife (2018) Maria Dahvana Headley "Maria Dahvana Headley is a gift, a genius, and an absolute wonder; I would follow her anywhere."
Everything Under (2018) Daisy Johnson "Surprising, gorgeously written, and profoundly unsettling, this genderfluid retelling of Oedipus Rex will sink into your bones and stay there."
Blackfish City (2018) Sam J Miller "A floating Arctic city; nano-bonded orcas and polar bears; an Earth violently reshaped by the mistakes we’re making right now… I haven’t been this swept away by imagination and worldbuilding since Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. A gorgeous, queer, muscular novel."
The Merry Spinster (2018) Daniel M Lavery and Mallory Ortberg "Dear Reader: It would, truthfully, be simplest to call the stories in THE MERRY SPINSTER 'retellings, ' but that word does not adequately capture their dark alchemy. Mallory Ortberg has created a Frankenstein's monster of familiar narratives. . .[that swings] between Terry Pratchett's satirical jocularity and Angela Carter's sinister, shrewd storytelling, and the result is gorgeous, unsettling, splenic, cruel, and wickedly smart. I've never read anything quite like them, and I bet, Dear Reader, that you haven't either."
