Tommy Orange was born and raised in Oakland, California. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He currently lives in Angels Camp, California.
Tommy is a recent graduate from the MFA programme at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow.
Hole in the Sky (2025) Daniel H Wilson "Incredible... Hole in the Sky is not only a thrilling, brilliant page-turner, its pages also turned me into the kind of reader I always want to be--deeply involved and curious about the world and the story unfolding before me, as if by magic--the kind of reader who can't stop reading, who dreads the book coming to an end even while I can't stop making my way toward it, who goes back and starts all over to figure out how it was done. Here we have a highly original premise about alien contact--no small feat unto itself--which also manages to seamlessly fold in Indigenous lives and knowledge. Every character here is alive, and there are so many stunning sentences I had to stop underlining. The story is killer. I love it. Run don't walk to read this book."
The Antidote (2025) Karen Russell "This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn't know I needed to know. As with all of Russell's work, heaviness and levity are always kept in balance, and so I was lifted even while being devastated by the book's many brutal truths and stark beauty. I'd already considered Russell's vivid and inventive imagination to be endless, but here exploring a history of Nebraska we get an unearthing of this country's still relatively untold origin story, the part about its original people, and the cost paid in order that this country might be formed. Finishing the book I felt completely covered in the forgotten dust of what too few look back on, with rare clarity, not to mention the intricate braid of narratives masterfully woven here. The Antidote is one, for an all too poisoned American narrative about land and family and belonging."
Fire Exit (2024) Morgan Talty "Utterly consuming... spellbinding and quietly devastating... a sober reckoning with what love can and cannot do, what healing is and is not possible in our families. The novel absolutely smoulders."
Martyr! (2024) Kaveh Akbar "An absolute jewel of a novel. A diamond. I haven't loved a book this much in years. Kaveh's writing is so thoroughly powerful and gorgeous you can feel it from where dreams come, and in all over your brain, and straight from the bottom of your heart. This book does everything. It is so entirely funny and sad and true and beautiful. Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever."
Beautyland (2024) Marie-Helene Bertino "This book is endlessly surprising on the sentence level, but also as a story, and also in its tenderness. We might all need the unexpected love and perspective of a child alien at this point in human history. Beautyland is beautiful and hilarious and transcendent. It honestly feels like a message from another planet. Marie-Helene Bertino is an otherworldly talent."
Aednan (2024) Linnea Axelsson "Crystalline prose that reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I've never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old."
Fire in the Canyon (2023) Daniel Gumbiner "There's some golden hue or quality that tinges these pages. I have felt for a long time like we need more California novels, and since reading his first novel, more writers like Daniel Gumbiner."
Swim Home to the Vanished (2023) Brendan Shay Basham "Swim Home to the Vanished is a lush and fantastic journey through strange lands and minds from an incandescent new voice full of my kind of melancholic brilliance and unromantic magic."
Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah "Given how incredible his debut collection was and is, it is no surprise to me that Adjei-Brenyah's debut novel is this extraordinary! Told with bold, muscular prose, this book is filled with surprising tenderness. Some of the best and most beautiful descriptions of action and violence I have ever read, which is not to say the book celebrates violence so much as it uses violence to explore American incarceration by imagining it as spectacle. As big as it is dazzling. Just wild how good and original this book is. A revelation!"
Shutter (2022) (Rita Todacheene, book 1) Ramona Emerson "Shutter is utterly unputdownable. It is a haunting thriller, written with exquisite suspense, and filled to the brim with beautiful writing, through the lens of cameras and memory--an ode to photography, written across the landscapes of the Navajo Nation and cityscapes of New Mexico, about what it means to witness and capture death, be captured by it, told unflinchingly by an author who knows what she is doing on every page. It is fun, and funny, and chilling. This is a story that won't let you go long after you finish, and you won't want it to end even as you can't stop reading to find out how it does."
Nightcrawling (2022) Leila Mottley "The writing in Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling erupts and flows like lava, makes hot bright an Oakland that runs the city's uncontrollable brilliance, its destructive and generative veins the same, Mottley's energetic writing here too, bursts at the seams of every page, pushing you deeper into a story you can't help but continue swallowing, stay thirsty for, while it swallows you whole."
Fuccboi (2022) Sean Thor Conroe "Terse and intense and new and sort of fucked up but knowingly so. I loved it."
The President and the Frog (2021) Carolina De Robertis "The President and the Frog is a story about stories, and how to remember the seeds we can be even in the bleakest times. There is such lucid tenderness in the book, but it is also wild, and funny. As we move through time, we return again and again to love, to growth, but through struggle, and madness, and yes, magnanimous conversations with a frog. This book and Carolina De Robertis’s vision are a beautiful, shattered dance."
Leave Society (2021) Tao Lin "No one writes like Tao Lin. He is so quietly funny, and surprising, and strange, in the way he writes sentences, in the way that he thinks. Leave Society is transcendent in its honesty and is even transcendent in its transcendency, by which I mean Tao Lin remains transparent even while delving into subject matter difficult to render on the page, like drug experiences and ponderings into the origins of philosophical systems in human societies since time immemorial. He makes the mysterious mundane and the mundane mysterious. But the book is so very readable and accessible and fun, even while exploring pain and family relationships, and yes the question about remaining a part of a society that can and will bring you harm in countless invisible ways, that has been designed to exploit the earth’s natural resources including its people. I love this novel."
What Strange Paradise (2021) Omar El Akkad "What Strange Paradise is by turns tender and brutal in its truths. It is tremendously written, propulsive as it is expansive as it is granular in its specificities. Omar El Akkad writes with such emotional precision, power, and grace. Here we get the wondrousness of children set in sharp relief against a backdrop of the all too common dehumanization then dismissal of refugees everywhere. The book devastates and uplifts, somehow, and we are not left with hope—that isn’t the point—but asked to witness, to see what is here, with clarity, and with fullness of heart."
The Committed (2021) (Sympathizer, book 2) Viet Thanh Nguyen "The Committed is nothing short of revelatory . . . This book is fierce, and unrelentingly good. Hilarious and subversive, philosophical and hallucinatory, it is much more than a sequel, more like a necessary appendage in a brilliant and expansive anti-colonial body of work. Bravo."
The Removed (2021) Brandon Hobson "Brandon Hobson has given us a haunted work, full of voices old and new. It is about a family’s reckoning with loss and injustice, and it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family’s way home is full—in equal measure—of melancholy and love. The Removed is spirited, droll, and as quietly devastating as rain lifting from earth to sky."
Memorial (2020) Bryan Washington "Bryan Washington’s Memorial is stunning. Everything happening in this book is so intimate, sensual, and wise. It is a funny book with much sadness and love. It is a story about relationships, and family, and what it means to have and not have home, in Houston, Texas, and in Osaka, Japan. It is also a surprising page-turner. The scenes and characters here couldn’t be more alive and vivid. I love this book."
A Burning (2020) Megha Majumdar "A Burning by Megha Majumdar is quietly beautiful and devastating. Its tone and pacing are measured perfectly. It is as funny as it is sad. This book won't let you go, and you won't want it to end."
This Town Sleeps (2020) Dennis E Staples "Elegant and gritty, angry and funny. Staples’s work is emotional without being sentimental. Dennis unmakes something in us, then remakes it, a quilt of characters that embody this town, this place, which sleeps but doesn’t dream, or it is all a dream we want to wake up from with its characters."
Kawai Strong Washburn "Sharks in the Time of Saviours bursts with life. It is bright and beautifully noisy. It's so good it hurts and hurts to where it heals. It is revelatory and unputdownable. Washburn is an extraordinarily brilliant new talent. This family saga is shark tooth sharp. Its pages shoot off crackles and sparks, and you come out of it changed. It is sublime."
New Waves (2020) Kevin Nguyen "A brilliant meditation on death and grief in the age of the internet. New Waves is full of modern noise and complicated love. Its prismatic, futuristic take on race and identity are a thrill to read. The book is funny and sad in equal measure, inventive, self-aware, full of insight, but also entirely enjoyable."
The Only Good Indians (2019) (Only Good Indians, book 1) Stephen Graham Jones "The Only Good Indians is scary good. Stephen Graham Jones is one of our most talented and prolific living writers. The book is full of humor and bone chilling images. It’s got love and revenge, blood and basketball. More than I could have asked for in a novel. It also both reveals and subverts ideas about contemporary Native life and identity. Novels can do some much to render actual and possible lives lived. Stephen Graham Jones truly knows how to do this, and how to move us through a story at breakneck (literally) speed. I’ll never see an elk or hunting, or what a horror novel can do the same way again."
