Winter Newsletter 2023 Fiction

This is a book you can taste, an exploration of flavor, a sensuous story of hunger, desire, and longing. A tale set in a future when only the wealthy thrive, high above the bland gray food consumed by the masses below. C. Pam Zhang’s writing is beautiful and creative and the ideas she explores are complex, disturbing, and provocative. This is an amazing novel, a reading experience that is immediate and visceral.  

—Trey

Ntozake Shange, author of the seminal for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, was one of our greatest writers, and this collection, curated by editor Imani Perry, is a feast for those who have loved her work and love the literary word. Sing a Black Girl’s Song collects essays, poetry, and plays taken from handwritten manuscripts throughout her life. Her essays are poetry, her poems songs, and all read with immediate, beautiful power, marking her loss but celebrating the wealth we can still enjoy.  

—Jocelyn

Nathan Hill’s deliciously satirical novel is smart, wide ranging, and fun. College sweethearts Jack and Elizabeth are now 20 years into their marriage and find themselves in midlife malaise as they strive to parent their child, better themselves, and rediscover each other. It is at once catastrophic and the status quo, but Wellness never becomes either—the narratives of love and humanity are threaded through time with great mirth and care. I feel so seen, but in ways that lighten the load and lift us all.  

—Melinda

Mason (Winter Soldier) brilliantly captures hundreds of years of personal and ecological history through intertwining stories of the inhabitants of one home deep in New England’s North Woods. For everyone from an apple farmer to a seance reader, from a true crime historian to a beetle, the cabin acts as a refuge and a convergence point for the personal desires of its occupants and as a place where the push and pull over the identity of a country plays out. An epic accomplishment.  

—Casey

Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward lends her lyrical and powerful voice to the harrowing reality of a girl living in slavery in the pre–Civil War South. As we follow Annis through the violent landscapes and hands of multiple slavers, we witness her fight to survive and her connection to lines of women heirs, both living and spirits, who languished, fought, and loved within the bonds of slavery. I have long said that Jesmyn Ward is among the best living writers of our time. Bear witness and be moved by this heartrending journey toward resilience.  

—Casey

Amanda Peters’s The Berry Pickers delivers an emotional punch. A Mi’kmaq family migrates to Maine every summer to harvest blueberries, but one summer tragedy strikes: The young daughter, Ruthie, vanishes without a trace. Her brother is torn by guilt, which leads him down a path of self-destruction; all the while Ruthie is growing up with an overprotective, unstable mother who is hiding secrets. The novel beautifully portrays childhood trauma’s lasting impact on our lives and on the many reactions we have to trauma. Gripping, poignant, and unforgettable.  

—Kristina

The first novel in nearly 10 years by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Cunningham is worth the wait. Centered on an extended family in Brooklyn before, during, and after the pandemic, in Day, Cunningham gives voice to the quiet but powerful push and pull between family members as they try to understand their individual and collective place in the world. Moments of marriage, parenthood, and friendship are all rendered with such tenderness, insight, and empathy that this one family’s story serves as an affecting glimpse into the human experience.  

—Casey

Lauren Groff’s every literary creation is exquisitely crafted, calculated, and audacious, each finding new ways to explore universal topics. Here she dives deep into the survival story as set in 1610 Jamestown, where a young woman flees the harrowing fort, entering a wilderness both philosophical and real, one that forces her to reconsider her beliefs, asking what it means to live, and from whom or what one is seeking to survive. The Vaster Wilds is urgent, visceral, teeming with unbound nature, and gorgeous in its rendering.  

—Melinda

If you’re looking for your next squeeze-my-heart-so-I-know-I’m-alive book, look no further than Family Meal. Fall in love with a cast of wounded but worthy characters as they confront grief, addiction, disordered eating, and each other. Exploring queer love, families found and made, and above all, beautiful, messy friendship, Bryan Washington writes with such care and humanity that you jump right into the novel’s emotional trenches, having found your people.  

—Melinda
 

Prepare yourself for a reading experience unlike any other! Ed Park’s sly but magisterial novel surveys Korean history through the far-ranging lens of three different interconnected stories, one of which imagines the covert Korean Provisional Government that formed in 1919 still operating today. Bending history, genre, form, and brain space, it is deliciously smart and funny—you’ll be glad to spend your time within this expertly crafted, satisfying adventure.  

—Melinda