Scoundrel

Sarah Weinman

One of our finest true crime writers returns with the chilling story of Edgar Smith, a convicted murderer freed from Death Row by virtue of his connections with various powerful people, including National Review founder William F. Buckley. Smith’s deceptions set him free and catapulted him to literary fame, but ultimately, he nearly took another innocent woman’s life, leaving blood on the hands of Buckley and his other champions.

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The Invisible Kingdom

Meghan O'Rourke

In the late nineties, O’Rourke began suffering symptoms ranging from rashes to crushing fatigue; when she sought treatment, she became an unwilling citizen of a shadow world, where chronic illness sufferers are dismissed by doctors and alienated from their lives. In this elegant fusion of memoir, reporting, and cultural history, O’Rourke traces the development of modern Western medicine and takes aim at its limitations, advocating for a community-centric healthcare model that treats patients as people, not parts.

At once a rigorous work of scholarship and a radical act of empathy, The Invisible Kingdom has the power to move mountains.

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True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us

Danielle J. Lindemann

Have you ever been bashed for watching Survivor or The Bachelor? Pick up this definitive sociological guide to reality television, and next time someone mocks your “guilty pleasure,” you’ll know exactly what to say. In compulsively readable chapters on everything from COPS to Honey Boo Boo, Lindemann illuminates how reality television both reflects and creates us, while also codifying our deep conservatism and fragile hierarchies of power.

“Reality television teaches us how the categories and meanings we use to organize our worlds are built on unsteady ground,” Lindemann argues. Reading True Story is like seeing the matrix—you’ll never watch Bravo the same way again.

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Anthem

Noah Hawley

In Anthem, it's the end of the world as we know it, and only teenagers can see the big picture. This epic literary thriller is set in a not-too-distant future, where the nation is hopelessly divided, the political system is broken, and the climate is barreling toward irrevocable disaster. (Familiar, right?) Crippled with anxiety about the sorrowed world they stand to inherit, high schoolers respond with a disturbing protest movement: mass suicide, “an act of collective surrender.”

Three unlikely young heroes resist the movement and journey into the American West, where wildfires rage through the redwoods and homegrown terrorists stoke lethal violence. Together they embark on an epic quest to save a friend from the Wizard, a Jeffrey Epstein-like monster; ultimately, they may just save the world.

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Olga Dies Dreaming

Xochitl Gonzalez

In this Technicolor novel from an astounding new voice, we meet Olga and Prieto Acevedo, two Brooklyn-born children of Puerto Rican revolutionaries who now live successful but precarious lives in their gentrifying borough. Olga, a wedding planner working with well-heeled Manhattan clientele, wonders if she’ll ever find a love story to call her own; meanwhile, popular Congressman Prieto fights for the siblings' Latinx neighborhood while concealing his sexuality.

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To Paradise

Hanya Yanagihara

In this grand and sweeping novel, her first since 2015’s much-lauded A Little Life, Yanagihara crafts a symphony from three disparate stories, each one set in an alternate America. In 1893, the scion of a wealthy family resists an arranged marriage as he falls for a penniless music teacher; in 1993, a young Hawaiian paralegal hides his past from his much-older lover; finally, in 2093, a woman in totalitarian, pandemic-ridden New York uncovers the mysteries of the men she’s loved.

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How Civil Wars Start

Barbara F. Walter

In the past twenty years, the number of active civil wars around the globe has doubled—and now, a leading political scientist insists that we’re on the verge of one of our own. In this urgent guide to how countries come apart at their seams, Walter reveals the warning signs of civil unrest, arguing that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

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How High We Go in the Dark

Sequoia Nagamatsu

This pyrotechnic novel opens in 2030, when an archeological dig in the Arctic Circle unleashes an ancient plague destined to reorganize life on Earth for generations to come. Through a formally dazzling novel-in-stories structure, Nagamatsu envisions how life goes on. Each story is a marvel of imagination: this plague-riddled world contains euthanasia theme parks for terminally ill children, talking pigs raised for organ farming, and robo-dogs programmed with the memories of the dead.

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Notes on an Execution

Danya Kukafka

“Average men become interesting when they start hurting women,” Kukafka writes in the preface to this mesmerizing novel, sure to be one of the year’s most lauded. “I am tired of seeing Ted Bundy’s face. This is a book for the women who survive.” As serial killer Ansel Packer awaits his execution on Death Row, Notes on an Execution counts down his final twelve hours through remembrances from the women who survived knowing and loving him—as well as those who didn’t.

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South to America

Imani Perry

The American South is often cast as a backwater cousin out of step with American ideals. In this vital cultural history, Perry argues otherwise, insisting the South is, in fact, the foundational heartland of America, an undeniable fulcrum around which our wealth and politics have always turned.

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Vladimir

Julia May Jonas

“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.” With this suggestive salvo, so begins Vladimir, a deliciously dark fable of sex and power set amid the contemporary minefields of academia. 

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The Employees

Olga Ravn

On a ship hurtling through deep space, humans and humanoids work together under a rigid hierarchy, pitted against one another by a nameless corporation. On a planet called New Discovery, crew members retrieve mysterious objects that exert a strange power over man and machine alike, awakening dreams, memories, and longing.

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Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Gish Jen

One of our finest practitioners of the short story form returns with Thank You, Mr. Nixon, a spiky collection distilling five decades of Chinese-American life into eleven remarkable short stories. In the title story, a Chinese girl in heaven pens a cheerful thank you note to “poor Mr. Nixon,” postmarked to his address in the ninth circle of hell.

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Moon Witch, Spider King

Marlon James

In the second volume of his epic Dark Star Trilogy, James masterfully flips the first installment on its head. Sogolon the Moon Witch, the legendary adversary who tangled with Tracker during his search for a vanished child in Black Leopard, Red Wolf, now takes center stage in Moon Witch, Spider King.

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Groundskeeping

Lee Cole

Who doesn’t love a campus novel? Groundskeeping, a stellar addition to the canon, is a tender novel of precise pleasures. At Kentucky’s Ashby College, two young writers collide: Owen, a local ne’er-do-well working as a groundskeeper in exchange for free creative writing classes, and Alma, a prestigious writer in residence. Alma, the devoted daughter of Bosnian immigrants seeking her own American Dream, struggles to understand Owen’s ambivalence about his Trump-loving family. When a secret romance blossoms between them, Owen and Alma must navigate both the vicissitudes of love and the growing pains of their own becomings.

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Trust the Plan

Will Sommer

Want to learn more about QAnon, but don’t know where to start? In Trust the Plan, a journalist who’s reported on the group for years (and come into its crosshairs) explains all you could ever want to know about this radical far-right movement, from its origins as a fringe online conspiracy to the fateful day its supporters ransacked the Capitol. Through sobering and studied reportage, Sommer unpacks the past and looks ahead to the threatening future, arguing that the growing danger of Q must be stopped, before it’s too late.

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How to Take Over the World

Ryan North

Comic book fans will fall hard for this delightfully daffy guidebook to supervillainy from an award-winning Marvel Comics writer. After a career spent dreaming up “increasingly credible world-domination schemes,” no one is better prepared than North to write this practical guide to designing death rays, constructing a secret underground base, and hiring dependable henchmen, among other musts.

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Ancestor Trouble

Maud Newton

Who are our ancestors to us, and what can they tell us about ourselves? In this riveting memoir, Newton goes in search of the answers to these questions, spelunking exhaustively through her frustrating and fascinating family tree. From an accused witch to a thirteen times-married man, her family tree abounds with stories that absorb and appall, but taxonomizing her family history doesn’t satisfy Newton’s hunger for meaning.

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