March is here, the third month of a year that continues to feel like many years compressed into a few months. Still, with March comes a new season, new chances for hope (one hopes), new horrors (one hopes less fervently for those) and, as aways, new things to read, new things to keep at our sides as literary companions in the strangedark of the world.
And there are so many books to be excited about. I’ve selected no less than twenty-five for you to consider checking out in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, many highly anticipated, some dazzling debuts, all intriguing in their own ways, spanning an extraordinary array of themes and topics, from Alanis Morissette to a literary history of abortion in American writing to queer selfhood and much, much more.
No matter the terror of the world, let us keep reading. These books deserve our consideration, and I hope you’ll find something—or many a thing—to add to your ever-growing towers of tomes to be read. Stay safe, Dear Readers.
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Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel
(Pantheon)
“The Dream Hotel offers a stark vision of the future—in which America is a surveillance state, ruled by the intertwined forces of capital and government, powered by all-too-fallible algorithm that determines criminality based on citizen’s dreams….Laila Lalami’s extraordinary new novel is more than just a political warning; the book is an exploration of the psyche itself, the strange ungovernable forces of fate and emotion that make us human.”
–Rumaan Alam
Emily St. James, Woodworking
(Zando/Crooked Media Reads)
“A new milestone in trans letters, Woodworking proves Emily St. James can craft stories just as brilliant as the ones she has written so beautifully about for over a decade. Sparkling, intimate, and life-affirming, this debut novel lands with all the quiet force of a secret spoken in a parked car. Not to be missed.”
–Samantha Allen
Natasha Brown, Universality
(Random House)
“Ambitious and stimulating…Brown’s narrative…astutely portray[s] the thorny, complex ways that class and race seep into news, information, and language itself—and how they can be utilized for personal gain. As in Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, part of the fun is in seeing where the story will jump to next, and the ways in which each new perspective changes the reader’s understanding. The result is a dizzying and fascinating tale.”
–Publishers Weekly
Sophie Strand, The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human
(Running Press)
“Sophie Strand is a poetic thinker, dreamer, and visionary whose words bridge the false divides between the ecological, the political, and the spiritual to present us with a re-membering of the collective body that connects all life….Strand inhabits the lyric memoir with seemingly effortless grace…[and] delicate prose and shimmering intellect….Readers will leave this book with a deeper connection to the numinosity of life, death, and everything in between.”
–Kai Cheng Thom
Bernice L. McFadden, Firstborn Girls: A Memoir
(Dutton)
“In her remarkable memoir, Bernice McFadden revisits the chaos of girlhood and her journeys as a mother, daughter, and writer, all beneath the specter of white supremacy, patriarchy, and domestic violence….Fueled by compassion and anger, resilience and curiosity, McFadden reveals family secrets, strivings, and struggles, against the backdrop of our country’s long legacy of racial injustice. Revelatory and enthralling, Firstborn Girls is an absolute treasure.”
–Deesha Philyaw
Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare: A Memoir
(Pantheon Books)
“Raising Hare is more than just a charming wildlife-rescue story. It’s more even than a lively cultural and natural history of a gentle creature that is too often regarded as a nuisance. Perhaps most of all Raising Hare is a perfect testimony to the transformative power of love. In learning to love an orphaned hare, Chloe Dalton learned to love the whole wild world. The great gift of this remarkable book is the way it teaches us to do the same.”
–Margaret Renkl
Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth
(Washington Square Press)
“To read Scorched Earth is to touch the electric fire of Tiana Clark’s mind—crackling with visceral, wonderfully dangerous poems exploring the feminine erotic, she writes unapologetically about Black womanhood, sexuality, desire, and its mirror world of grief, doubt, and unbelonging…a celebration of the expanse of Black femininity as its own cosmos of possibility. What a joy to see a poet write so deliciously toward longing, yearning, and ultimately, her own incendiary self.”
–Safiya Sinclair
Mai Der Vang, Primordial: Poems
(Graywolf)
“A testament to the interconnectedness of life across species and generations, and to the power of spirit, Mai Der Vang’s Primordial adapts the lyricism of her first book, Afterland, and the documentarian gaze of her previous book, Yellow Rain, to poetically present that which binds. Relational, vulnerable, and elegantly woven, Vang’s poems animate the endangered saola alongside the resilience of the Hmong people, juxtaposing the origins of life with the legacies we leave behind.”
–Hoa Nguyen
Marianne Boruch, The Figure Going Imaginary: Life Drawing, Poetry, the Cadaver Lab: A Year in Pieces
(Copper Canyon Press)
“Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things—but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler’s sense of facet and flaw.”
–Poetry
Colum McCann, Twist
(Random House)
“Colum McCann gives us a powerfully realist novel of men at sea, literally, emotionally, and metaphorically. It speaks of the brokenness of our time, the successful and unsuccessful attempts at repairs, and the vulnerability of our world. The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.”
–Salman Rushdie
Jinwoo Chong, I Leave It Up to You
(Ballantine Books)
“Funny and wickedly observant with a cast of characters so endearing I laughed out loud and was moved to tears, Jinwoo Chong’s I Leave It Up to You is a delicious meal of a book, with courses of drama, tragedy, and comedy. Jack Jr.’s efforts to separate himself from his raucous, loving, over-reaching Korean American immigrant family are rendered with brilliant finesse and beauty.”
–Jimin Han
Jeremy Gordon, See Friendship
(Harper Perennial)
“Jeremy Gordon has written The Savage Detectives for the post-Facebook era. Wonderfully funny and astonishingly intelligent, See Friendship explores that painful impact of shame and secrecy as well as the slipperiness of memory. Gordon is a brilliant observer of a media industry, and with tremendous subtlety, he traces the effects of that industry from broad social currents down into the granularity of a single human life. A stunning first novel.”
–Brandon Taylor
A. Kendra Greene, No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity
(Tin House)
“No Less Strange or Wonderful doesn’t so much live up to its title as explode out of it. What the amazing A. Kendra Greene makes of the world, what she makes with the world, is unfailingly wondrous and revelatory, whether her subject is the Santa Barbara Zoo giraffe, balloon-twisting royalty, the dog that became a speck, Ebenezer Scrooge, or the manifold metaphor of Senator Ted Cruz as a sentient bag of wasps. Prepare yourself to be dazzled by this most original of writers.”
–Ben Fountain
Bridgett M. Davis, Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy
(Harper)
“Davis painted a portrait of her mother in The World according to Fannie Davis (2019); here, she memorializes her older sister Rita, a vibrant, protective storyteller who made an outsize impact on those around her during her forty-four-year life…her heartfelt writing honors her sister’s legacy and the many lives she touched.”
–Booklist
Karen Weingarten (editor), Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade
(Penguin Classics)
“Editor Weingarten gathers an anthology of fiction, memoir, poetry and testimony surrounding abortion, highlighting in her introduction how both anti-abortion laws and eugenics have been employed to uphold sexist, racist, classist, and xenophobic orders. First-person accounts dat[e] to 1699….Weingarten’s selections ably reflect…complex realities…[and] provid[e] vital context for readers unfamiliar with the long, circuitous road toward reproductive justice.”
–Library Journal
Jared Lemus, Guatemalan Rhapsody: Stories
(Ecco)
“Jared’s kaleidoscopic debut is a glimpse into Guatemala through stories that hit deep emotional notes. Heavy in some places, buoyant in others, Lemus’ writing is never without tenderness, even in the most gutting moments. The characters throughout leap off the page, challenging our emotions at every turn, while illuminating everyday struggles through a powerful lens. This captivating short story collection will leave you feeling all the feels. It’s not to be missed.”
–Cebo Campbell
Shubha Sunder, Optional Practice Training
(Graywolf)
“Optional Practical Training is a knockout wonder. Shubha Sunder has created a rich and blazingly layered portrait of a young woman named Pavitra, who is fighting to not only be an artist, but fighting to discover a true sense of herself in a world that has so many ideas about how her life should be. This is a beautiful, and beautifully intimate, quest of a book….I loved every page of it.”
–Paul Yoon
Colwill Brown, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
(Holt)
“Following Kel, Shaz and Rach’s lives from childhood to adulthood is a bit like watching King Lear being acted out every day. The stakes are so high, the passions so deep, the triumphs so vivid, but happily, in the face of many missed buses and betrayals, they have each other and another voddy and kebab. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is one of the most remarkable portraits I’ve ever read of friendship.”
–Margot Livesy
Megan Volpert, Why Alanis Morissette Matters
(University of Texas Press)
“Megan Volpert has written a lively and affectionate ode to the ‘raging sage’….Volpert listens to Morissette’s groundbreaking Jagged Little Pill through a clutch of filters, from Greek philosophy and lit theory to parodies, covers, and tribute bands; from the album’s Broadway adaptation to Morissette’s own personal writing about spirituality, sensitivity, and healing. Volpert is a lifer fan and a smart critic.”
–Joe Bonomo
Joshua A. Miele, Wendell Jamieson, Connecting Dots: A Blind Life
(Grand Central Publishing)
“An instant classic. Like its author, Connecting Dots is brilliant but approachable; irreverent without losing touch with the seriousness of his subject; and accessible in every sense of the word. Miele’s funny, moving, and absorbing account of his life and work demonstrate the truth behind the proverb about innovation and necessity: disabled people are the true mothers of invention.”
–Andrew Leland
Vaclav Smil, How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food
(Viking)
“Smil takes readers on a scholarly and accessible exploration of the history, key concepts, and important questions about what we eat….[How to Feed the World] is a necessary book for readers seeking authoritative information on the future of successfully nourishing the world’s growing population.”
–Booklist
Vijay Khurana, The Passenger Seat
(Biblioasis)
“Vijay Khurana’s profound and propulsive The Passenger Seat is a thrilling, terrifying, devastating ride. This perfectly pitched tale of masculinity gone wrong exposes the ways that intimacy can so quickly veer into violence—yet it evades easy moral pronouncements at every turn. Khurana is a brilliant stylist who drives straight toward the heart. I would follow him down any road.”
–Elvia Wilk
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
(Flatiron Books0
“Sub-Antarctic noir meets a love letter to the rapidly disappearing wild world in McConaghy’s latest….As lush as it is taut with tension, this novel is filled with both the joys and ravages of nature.”
–Library Journal
Anthony Giardina, Remember This
(FSG)
“Through [his] characters, Giardina explores noblesse oblige, suppressed emotions, and the ways that money tends to muck with true art….Fitting for a story rooted in upscale New York City with an eye on the past, Giardina writes with a genteel, Cheever-esque grace and charm….A clear-eyed study of how a scruffier Manhattan and clearer ethics gave way to a more compromised and machined world.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Nathaniel Ian Miller, Red Dog Farm
(Little Brown)
“A cold-winded, gorgeous gust of a book, Red Dog Farm solidifies Nathaniel Ian Miller as one of my favorite writers….At once raw and exquisite, the book examines the endless complexities of family, the line between contentment and longing, and what happens when you pull a thread of history only to find your future. Its rural Icelandic setting, as wildly beautiful as it is severe, is the perfect framework for a story whose characters simmer with love…a book to cherish.”
–David Arnold
