There’s a Disco Ball Between Us – Jafari S. Allen
Lyrical, genre-bending writing, which undoes, unstitches, and shakes off normative ideas about how Black/gay life is conceived and lived
Jemisin understands what works about superhero books and then uses it to move the readers through a narrative so subjective that they are forced to deal with some of the most profound political crises we have just lived through.
Warning to the Crocodiles – António Lobo Antunes
With his use of pitch black humor and his precise attention to humanity (and the ways humans can be humiliated) against a broader historical backdrop — this supposedly impossible fusion of aestheticism and social reference — Lobo Atunes’s fictive worlds seem inexhaustible.
Prosopagnosia – Sònia Hernández
Prosopagnosia is a metaphysical novella, a fictional vision of a permanent problem in human experience, rather than a dramatization of social tensions.
Insignificance – James Clammer
By portraying a seemingly insignificant but accurate world, Clammer has managed to produce a novel that in its own charming, offbeat, blue collar way, feels highly significant indeed.
ELADATL – Sesshu Foster & Arturo Romo
Experimentation like this can sometimes lead to cold, hollow results, but ELADATL also contains a heart, as well as beautiful passages befitting a scenic balloon ride through a shared dream.
Vormorgen: The Collected Poems – Ernst Toller
Mathilda Cullen’s translation of Ernst Toller’s poetry is a labor of love, recovering the all-but-forgotten literary legacy of an enigmatic figure
The Dog of Tithwal – Saadat Hasan Manto
Manto is an outlier, a freakish occurrence at a freakish time in South Asia.
Spring and Autumn Annals – Diane di Prima
Di Prima’s efforts yield an ethnography of the “Beats,” of New York’s mid-century bohemia, but an ethnography that somehow eschews mythologizing, shorn of mystique, and self-aggrandizement.
Songs to Come for the Salamander – Mark Young
Since an early age, Young’s “roots” have been embedded in the history, practice, philosophy, figures, and creative outputs of the Surrealist movement.