Debut Books

Socialist Realism – Trisha Low

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Maybe this is, more than anything else, about a series of starting points. We have not started fighting yet.

Mostly Dead Things – Kristen Arnett

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What Arnett’s debut aspires to is the act of holding, tightly and gently all at once, to the mostly dead things, and not letting go.

Exquisite Mariposa – Fiona Alison Duncan

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Its first bites taste like mainstream contemporary fiction; they go down easy, like candy, or like a Sally Rooney novel. But as you continue to chew — because this novel is chewy — you encounter something quite different.

Autobiography of Horse – Jenifer Sang Eun Park

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Maybe the horse is fucking with her.

Arkady – Patrick Langley

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When the ranks of climate refugees grow steadily, new ways of structuring our lives will have to be tested.

Crosslight for Youngbird – Asiya Wadud

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Wadud’s poems of witness are far less remote than one might expect of an often commemorative tradition, underwritten by a deep physical sympathy.

I’m Open to Anything – William E. Jones

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The book, both in its physicality and content, poses a challenge not to conservative forces who would immediately shut it down, but rather to progressive and “open-minded” people who support queer writing — but only if it’s “literary” and respectable.

Fade Into You – Nikki Darling

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In every trip to get punk t-shirts on Melrose or listen to Pink Floyd at Griffith Observatory she is not merely coming of age; she is coming of culture, of heritage, of community.

The Naked Woman – Armonía Somers

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THE NAKED WOMAN continues to speak to us nowadays as fiercely and urgently as seventy years ago: more than ever, women’s bodies are the place of political battles that seek to change the way we understand desire, consent, and autonomy.

Minor Monuments – Ian Maleney

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Recording for Maleney is the fold in time that bends toward the unrecoverable past.