They Will Know Our Names is a sprawling music-biopic novel about two genius musicians, Hal Jansen and Rudy Amos, whose friendship is meant to become a myth of art, race, grief, addiction, fame, and spiritual brotherhood. It wants to be a grand American epic of blues, folk, country, rock, Civil Rights-era violence, dead children, bad […]
psychodrama is an overstuffed social-media apocalypse novel that begins as satire about surveillance culture, mutates into a cult novel, then into a nuclear-war road novel, then into a prison-camp horror story, then into alien-cosmic motherhood. It wants to be funny, obscene, philosophical, queer, apocalyptic, horny, spiritual, anti-internet, anti-capitalist, and formally wild. Mostly, it is a […]
Always One More Time is a YA romance built almost entirely out of already exhausted machinery: a sick-girl countdown, a missed-connection quest, a grumpy British boy, a sunny American girl, a tragic dead mother, an abandoned son, a cute dog, a spreadsheet, a rom-com chase, a hospital scare, a temporary separation, and a final reunion […]
Miss Archer is a derivative dystopian literary-sci-fi novel that tries to combine The Handmaid’s Tale, Westworld, Never Let Me Go, Jane Eyre, The Truman Show, and a prestige-TV clone experiment, then expects the reader to treat the mixture as more original than it is. The book’s big idea is that a future artificial/intelligence ruling class […]
Kinfolk Island is a satirical horror novel about Black nostalgia, ancestry, creative hunger, family legacy, and the danger of mistaking belonging for freedom. It begins like a restorative retreat story and turns into a cult-island nightmare: an exclusive Black “ancestral retreat” off the North Carolina coast is not simply a safe haven, but a feeding […]
This is a medical romance about two emergency physicians who know how to function during catastrophe but barely know how to live when nobody is bleeding in front of them. The title comes from Amara Neelan’s drunken confession after a breakup: “I don’t know who I am outside of a clinical setting.” The whole novel […]
Adult Situations is a Covid-era literary/domestic novel about admiration, power, adultery, surrogate families, artistic prestige, and the damage adults do while insisting they are merely being complicated. Its central triangle is not only sexual but generational: Teddy Low wants Ilya Kravitsky as a father and mentor; Ilya wants admiration, forgiveness, and control; Ada, Ilya’s daughter, […]
Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do All Day is not a single linear novel but a linked story collection about women, marriages, desire, motherhood, affairs, resentment, domestic performance, and the strange humiliations of being known too well or not known at all. The stories overlap through characters, families, exes, neighbors, and second marriages. Together […]
This is a literary novel about an affair, but its real subject is not adultery so much as hunger: hunger for love, for witness, for artistic credit, for freedom, for stability, for another life. The story follows Nico Brazil, a forty-eight-year-old editor newly arrived in Los Angeles; Scarlett Henry, the beautiful wife of Nico’s lover; […]
This is a sprawling campus novel about friendship, feminism, sex, performance, internet fame, institutional power, grief, and the unstable boundary between political action and personal desire. It returns to Westish College, the small Wisconsin liberal-arts school that formed the setting of The Art of Fielding, but the emotional center is now a group of women […]