The Maidenheads (2026) Benny B Peterson "Benny B. Peterson's The Maidenheads is so much more than a music novel. This is an audacious and tender debut about the many long arcs that make up a life: the arc of self-discovery, of love, of art-making, of losing and forgiving your friends. Is it ever possible, Peterson asks, to recapture a life you abandoned? And why does nostalgia always turn into a trap? The Maidenheads is a smart, intoxicating bop of a novel."
Still Life (2024) Katherine Packert Burke "Katherine Packert Burke's Still Life is everything you want from a Kunstlerroman: smart, sexy, funny, sly, and exceptionally queer. With biting insights and heartbreaking attention, this debut captures the daunting thrill of becoming an artist while becoming yourself."
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (2024) Joseph Earl Thomas "Joseph Earl Thomas's God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a brilliant novel of hunger and work and care and grief that deftly captures the maddening mess of everything that makes life worth living. Thomas is a skilled, surgical prose stylist; his sentences are magnificent scalpels. There isn't a single dull line in the book. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is unpredictable, unsentimental, and impressively tender."
A Good Happy Girl (2024) Marissa Higgins "In A Good Happy Girl, Marissa Higgins writes beautifully about the painful responsibilities that warp our relationships. This novel is equal parts erotic and grotesque and humane. Higgins writes gracefully about queerness and contradiction, bringing tenderness to the regrets that shape a young life."
Radiant Heat (2024) Sarah-Jane Collins "Sarah Jane-Collins's Radiant Heat is a smart, gripping thriller that deftly draws a connection between violences both personal and ecological. Radiant Heat is a scorching page-turner."
Cleaner (2023) Brandi Wells "A sharp and toothy portrait of a life devoted to the convenience of others . . . Cleaner skilfully satirizes the work-place novel, offering cutting insights on the hypocrisy and empty ambitions of grind culture."
Sucker (2023) Daniel Hornsby "Daniel Hornsby's Sucker grapples with the ever-widening rot at the core of American capitalism with an illuminating sense of intelligence, humor, and moral clarity. Hornsby's characters are flawed, all the worse for their greed and ambition, but their story serves as a cautionary parable for anyone looking to withstand the worst instincts of American life. A biting, wicked satire."
Old Enough (2023) Haley Jakobson "Haley Jakobson's OLD ENOUGH is a campus novel as astute, funny, and loving as your best friend from college. A story of transformation and reckoning, this debut portrays the difficulty of becoming your true self when you haven't fully recovered from the past. It is a testament to the power, and the weight, of friendship, in all its messiness and its necessity."
Maddalena and the Dark (2023) Julia Fine "Maddalena and the Dark is a tense, slow-burning portrait of how desire too easily tangles with envy and the price we pay when we get what we want . . . Maddalena and the Dark is a book to be savored, felt, and reread."
A Manual for How to Love Us (2023) Erin Slaughter "Erin Slaughter's debut collection, A Manual for How to Love Us, is an evocative mix of strange realism and Bachelardian obsession. Slaughter is a gifted stylist who can instill the most mundane objects with profound meaning and depth. In her world, a tongue is never only a tongue, a thorn far more than a thorn, and even a fly - buzzing alone in a bedroom - harbors the impact of a father."
