Christine Schutt is the author of a short-story collection, Nightwork, chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her first Novel, Florida, was a National Book Award Finalist for fiction in 2004. She is also the author of the story collection A Night, A Day, Another Night, Summer. Her new novel, All Souls, is out now from Harcourt.
Great Disasters (2025) Grady Chambers "Grady Chambers, poet, has written a tender, beautifully observed debut novel, an empathic recollection of becoming, of love and what it is made of. In Chambers' kind voice is wonder at it all. Great Disasters is great fiction."
Crown (2025) Evanthia Bromiley "Beautifully written and quietly forceful, Evanthia Bromiley's debut novel, Crown, shines with compassion for all of its characters in their perilous conditions. They fashion from the landscape what is missing. They dream homes and wear small crowns 'woven of juniper and wild oak and the spare things of the desert.' Bromiley's book is concise and musical, and she has the heart of a poet."
A Flaw in the Design (2023) Nathan Oates "This suspenseful debut novel keeps the reader on tenterhooks in a fearful family drama. Oh, this demands a sequel!"
Cat Brushing (2022) Jane Campbell "In thirteen revivifying stories, thirteen candid, empathic portraits of aging women for whom desire yet smolders, Campbell proves aging is a complex sport. Some mental agility is required, some wit and wisdom. Befuddlement and remorse are a part of play, too, but the stories offer the solace of shared experience and company."
Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry "Snow, politics, orchards, love, death, and guilt figure in the experience of best friends in their coming-of-age in the Russia of perestroika. The Orchard is a great pleasure, a novel that reminds us of that intense time of life when it all mattered."
Tides (2022) Sara Freeman "An irresistible debut novel about one woman's several loves. Sara Freeman writes wonderful sentences, wavy and surprising and full of sensations."
Shit Cassandra Saw (2022) Gwen E Kirby "Radiant truths are arrived at raucously in Shit Cassandra Saw, Gwen E. Kirby's spirited debut story collection. Kirby writes with deadpan humor about louts and witches and cross-dressing pirates, gods and ghosts and whores in wildly entertaining stories that swerve into wisdom and deeply satisfy."
Disappearing Earth (2019) Julia Phillips "Julia Phillips’s novel is vividly real, but it reads at times like a suspenseful fairy tale. Here are portraits of different women with a shared yearning for autonomy, in a land inhospitable to it. Here, too, is a story in which, against all odds, they do not give up hope. Disappearing Earth is a brave, affecting accomplishment."
Wait Till You See Me Dance (2017) Deb Olin Unferth "Wait Till You See Me Dance delivers on the promise of surprise in its title: Thirty-nine tap-dance sharp, hilarious stories take up people with hearts askew and right them. Disgruntled mothers, daughters, adjunct professors, speak in a voice 'with a tarp of sad earnestness' so as to win over the reader every time."