Year 2020

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark (Knopf) Before reading Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath 

Home Baked: Marijuana, My Mother and the Stoning of San Francisco by Alia Volz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Ample, skillfully researched, and cleanly narrated, Volz’s debut is really five books in

Obit by Victoria Chang (Copper Canyon) Very few books are straightforwardly about death, but Obit, by the poet Victoria Chang, is one of them. Except that death turns out to

The Dragons, The Giant, The Women by Wayétu Moore (Graywolf) Moore opens her unconventional, deftly crafted debut memoir — it follows her 2018 fiction debut, She Would Be King —

Imperial Liquor by Amaud Jamaul Johnson (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press) Johnson’s themes—black masculinity, parenthood, shared struggle against injustice and antiblackness—now belong at the very center of 21st century American poetry.

She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who LivedHer Songs by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner) Dolly Parton might be the only person who can have it all. She

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf) We know a great deal about William Shakespeare’s literary works, but next to nothing about his personal life. Maggie O’Farrell embraces that blank canvas and

Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer (One World) Visual artist Riva Lehrer comes to memoir writing in her seventh decade after an illustrious career as a painter best known for grappling

here is the sweet hand by francine j. harris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) francine j. harris’ gorgeous and profound here is the sweet hand is a gentle caress, a gut

If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan (W.W. Norton) In Randall Kenan’s radiant story collection, If I Had Two Wings, residents in the fictional town of Tims Creek, North