Karen Russell born in Miami, Florida is an American novelist. Her debut novel, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. No prize for fiction was awarded that year.
Vera, or Faith (2025) Gary Shteyngart "Vera, or Faith is a novel that you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever. Gary Shteyngart's sentences are works of art, and his humor feels medicinal at this turbulent hour in our fractured America. Vera instantly became one of my favorite child narrators, and her lucid bewilderment is by turns poignant, funny, and wise. Vera's story is at once signature Shteyngart-laugh-out-loud funny and stylistically daring-while also breaking new ground. I loved this heartfelt and vulnerable exploration of the secret cargo that Vera must carry, the detective work that she must do to piece together her social reality and family history, and the howl of grief and love at this novel's heart."
Godwin (2024) Joseph O'Neill "No one will exit this pinwheeling novel unmoved by its tender and terrible surprises. Reading Godwin, I laughed out loud many times, I felt sick with grief and outrage, and I was shaken by 'an intensification of reality so strong that I had a touch of vertigo.' Every sentence is suffused with O'Neill's capacious intelligence, humor, and care."
The Morningside (2024) Téa Obreht "Obreht is such an expert and generous storyteller, infusing The Morningside with the pleasures of folklore and fairy tale while simultaneously diving deep into the silences and irreconcilable contradictions in the stories we inherit about the past."
Roxy and Coco (2024) Terese Svoboda "There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you've read - Terese Svoboda's harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors. Who but Svoboda with her talons descending from the clouds could wrest so much humor, poetry, and beauty from the abyss?"
Toad (2022) Katherine Dunn "Toad is a gift to those of us who have been dreaming for decades of a new novel from Katherine Dunn, and a book that will bring her many devoted new fans. Nobody's sentences heave and breathe like Dunn's do. Her language scintillates and sheds its scales, revealing truths that nobody else dares to utter, or can. She is Portland's bard of 'the genuine wound, ' exploring the deep world within the body and the human animal's capacities for savagery, tenderness, loneliness, friendship, loathing, and love."
The Revivalists (2022) Christopher M Hood "The Revivalists is a thrilling, terrifying, surprising, and tender debut, written in such exquisitely precise prose that I felt singed by its imaginary fires and warmed by its beating heart."
Natural History (2022) Andrea Barrett "A genius-enchantress. Who but Andrea Barrett can take on the inscrutable elegance of the cosmos and the messy complexity of the human heart in a single story?"
Nobody Gets Out Alive (2022) Leigh Newman "Nobody Gets Out Alive is a stunning debut collection, with the most generous ratio of wickedly funny details to devastating plot lines. It's a joy to travel through these characters' overlapping Alaskas, where violent longings go thrashing under the frozen stillness of the everyday, and the hard, hot work of navigating the wilderness of family can give way at any moment to 'a dazzle of ice and blue and light."
All Day Is a Long Time (2022) David Sanchez "David Sanchez has poured all of himself into this debut, a terrifying, moving, and profound exploration of the liminal space between addiction and connection. He evokes the minute-to-minute suspense of early sobriety unlike anyone I've ever read, with an extraordinary honesty and poetry. Sanchez is a literary cartographer, mapping an intricate overlay of his young narrator's psychological states and Florida's real beaches and swamps, those coastlines in continuous revision."
Appleseed (2021) Matt Bell "Appleseed is a work of incandescent imagination, at once an eco-horror story about human greed and a regenerative new myth. I loved the soaring possibilities seeded throughout this wild novel, which pushes its readers to imagine 'new ways of dwelling' in and with non-human nature. Bell's book is a chrysalis inside of which I could feel my mind changing, preparing for new flights."
Filthy Animals (2021) Brandon Taylor "Brandon Taylor writes with unsparing precision about the blurry territories of fear, longing, violence, and desire. An extraordinary book that rewards, and deserves, keen attention."
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (2021) Rivka Galchen "Imagine a story set in 1620 that speaks directly to your own scalded, twenty-first century heart. By Rivka Galchen's magic, Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch instantly became one of my favorite books. I need no witchcraft to predict it will astonish, beguile, and transform you, too."
Phase Six (2021) Jim Shepard "If you’ve been waiting for the great novel of the COVID-19 era, it’s in your hands. I read Phase Six with a galloping heart. With heroic humor and a poet’s ear and eye for what makes humanity worth saving, Shepard’s polyphonic novel of contagion and collapse is also the story of love’s unlikely survival in the most hostile conditions."
The Ghost Variations (2021) Kevin Brockmeier "The Ghost Variations is a haunted jukebox sparkling in the shadows, built to house a hundred voices, a hundred gorgeous songs. Each one is a masterpiece in miniature from one of our greatest writers, by turns funny and philosophical, chilling and warm. Like a palmful of smelling salts, these very short stories will wake you up. Only Kevin Brockmeier could write ghost stories that make a reader feel so alive."
The Five Wounds (2021) Kirstin Valdez Quade "Kirstin Valdez Quade writes with exquisite precision about the fragility and resilience of the Padilla family…I loved The Five Wounds, which reminded me that growing pains are not confined to adolescence and that people can be newborn at any age. Even its most excruciating moments are charged with a luminous compassion."
The Queen of Tuesday (2020) Darin Strauss "Darin Strauss has resurrected a lost world--the grand movie that never aired, the truncated epic of what might have been between Lucille Ball and his grandfather. Part elegy, part mystery, part speculative memoir, here is a love story unlike any you've read before--spiked with Hollywood scandal and the secrets families keep across generations. Strauss is a beautiful and funny and piercing writer, and this book is a gift."
The Great Offshore Grounds (2020) Vanessa Veselka "The Great Offshore Grounds reminded me of what a great novel can do--Veselka's seafaring epic has the forward momentum of a grand adventure and the spiraling depth of a new myth. All the pleasure of eighteenth century storytelling renewed for our newborn millennium. I love this textured, tonally complex wonder of a book, a quest for Melville's 'unimaginable sublimity' that never shies away from the messy flux of the body, or the oceanic scope of our shared global history. It's also a blast to read--darkly hilarious, astral, cerebral, suspenseful, warm-blooded, divine."
The Body Double (2020) Emily Beyda "Emily Beyda spins gorgeous prose around the black hole at the center of The Body Double. An existential thriller that vibrates at the uncanny pitch where screaming might be laughter, and a haunting portrait of a young woman as she disappears into the sinkhole of the camera. The Narcissus-funhouse of Hollywood, the moonlit windows of Los Angeles, the two-way mirror of consciousness—Beyda arrows directly for the crack in the glass."
Where the Wild Ladies Are (2020) Aoko Matsuda "Where the Wild Ladies Are immediately became one of my favorite story collections. The ghosts have got the numbers on us, as Matsuda knows, and it's a joy to see the living and the dead by the light of her radiant imagination. At once playful, joyful, and radically subversive."
The Dreamers (2019) Karen Thompson Walker "Frighteningly powerful, beautiful, and uncanny, The Dreamers is a love story and also a horror story - a symphonic achievement, alternating intimate moments with a panoramic capture of a crisis in progress."
Ohio (2018) Stephen Markley "Stephen Markley is an expert cartographer of the American Rust Belt and the haunted landscapes of his characters' interiors. A fast-moving and devastating debut."
A Place for Us (2018) Fatima Farheen Mirza "A Place for Us is a triumph and an inspiration. I wish everyone would read this novel. A chronicle of the shattered expectations and irreconcilable desires within an American-Muslim family, A Place for Us hums with a deep faith in an unknown future, reminding its readers that when we are lost, love gives us a map home."
The Wild Birds (2018) Emily Strelow "A love song to the living world, this shimmering, intricate web of a book is going to capture hearts."
The Prague Sonata (2017) Bradford Morrow "What a gorgeous novel this is. I thought often of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves - the fragmentation and ephemeral unity, its power to absorb us fully into a moving music. Bradford Morrow’s writing is as haunting and as beautiful as the fabled sonata it describes."
Gravity Changes (2017) Zach Powers "Goofy and profound, lyrical and exhilarating...a thrilling, rocket-fueled debut."
Our Short History (2017) Lauren Grodstein "Funny and fast-paced and extraordinarily insightful on every page . . . Anyone lucky enough to get roughed-up by Grodstein's devastating, fearlessly honest, often hilarious, gorgeously written novel will exit it changed."
Thrill Me (2016) Benjamin Percy "Thrill Me practices what it preaches-it's a craft book that is also a thrilling read."
The Last Flight of Poxl West (2015) Daniel Torday "A profound and timely meditation on the desire for justice, retribution, and redemption. This book is unputdownable, wise, and unbelievably generous."
Bright Before Us (2011) Katie Arnold-Ratliff "Katie Arnold-Ratliff writes sentences that have the luminous candor of X-rays, laser-traceries of the human heart."
(b.1981)
