Year 2021

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) Whitehead has proven himself a master many times over in a variety of genres, recently earning back-to-back Pulitzers.  It’s Harlem Shuffle, his take on

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper) Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is a voluminous ancestral story, vast in scope,

Burntcoat by Sarah Hall (Custom House) As we enter the seemingly endless third year of our global pandemic, the idea that great art can come from unspeakable loss eases the

Second Place by Rachel Cusk (FSG) Amid an ongoing pandemic and an unrelentingly polarized citizenry, basing a novel on a residency gone awry might seem an odd choice as a

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen (NYRB) I know the moment I fell

frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss (Graywolf) When Diane Seuss’s latest book, frank: sonnets, dropped, it quickly became one of the most talked-about collections of the year, proving that the continually-reinvented

The Rinehart Frames by Cheswayo Mphanza (University of Nebraska) Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, this encyclopedic debut collection intertwines two central themes: the doppelganger character

Cutlish by Rajiv Mohabir (Four Way) Our need to belong is fundamental, and we find ways to make space for ourselves in society.Queer Indo-Caribbean poet Rajiv Mohabir’s poetry blends language,

The Renunciations by Donika Kelly (Graywolf) Though Donika Kelly’s second collection, The Renunciations, contains poems as taut and carefully controlled by the poet as any composed by the talented peers

Ceive by B.K. Fischer (BOA) Ceive is first-rate science fiction. Ceive is a book-length story, a novella in verse. Ceive is absolutely contemporary, a way of thinking about the near future and the far future,