Happy new year! This month brings a bevy of great reads, a little something for everyone: novels, short stories, poetry, works of nonfiction. We had a hard time narrowing the list to ten, but we somehow managed. Here’s to books in 2020!
Cleanness
By Garth Greenwell
FSG Books
“Cleanness revisits and expands the world of Garth Greenwell’s beloved debut, What Belongs to You, declared “an instant classic” by The New York Times Book Review. In exacting, elegant prose, he transcribes the strange dialects of desire, cementing his stature as one of our most vital living writers.”
The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
By Keith Cooper
Bloomsbury
“In The Contact Paradox, author Keith Cooper looks at how far SETI has come since its modest beginnings, and where it is going, by speaking to the leading names in the field and beyond. SETI forces us to confront our nature in a way that we seldom have before – where did we come from, where are we going, and who are we in the cosmic context of things?”
The Seep
By Chana Porter
Soho Press
“Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.”
Witches: The Transformative Power of Women Working Together
By Sam George-Allen
Melville House
“Covens. Girl bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of vocation, of necessity, of support. And wherever women gather, magic happens.”
Prosper’s Demon
By K.J. Parker
Tor.com
“In the pitch dark, witty fantasy novella Prosper’s Demon, K. J. Parker deftly creates a world with vivid, unbending rules, seething with demons, broken faith, and worse men.”
Saltwater
By Jessica Andrews
FSG
“From that first salty, viscous connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in northern England, the one constant in Lucy’s life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin.”
Little Gods
By Meng Jin
Custom House
“On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time.”
Little Envelope of Earth Conditions
By Cori A. Winrock
Alice James Books
“This collection charts a voyage of mourning―from the woods of a motherless fairytale to the vastness of space. Following the loss of a mother and baby, these poems explore the impossible distance a griever must travel in order to return back to earth. Part elegy, part love song, these poems teach us how to tend to the dead while carrying on living.”
The End of the Ocean
By Maja Lunde
HarperVia
“An evocative tale of the search for love and connection, The End of the Ocean is a profoundly moving father daughter story of survival and a clarion call for climate action.”
Show Them a Good Time
By Nicole Flattery
Bloomsbury
“Show Them a Good Time tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity’s girlfriend, the widower’s second wife, the lecherous professor’s student, the corporate employee. And yet, the genius of Flattery’s characters is to blithely demolish the boundaries of these limited and limiting social types with immense complexity and caustic intelligence.”
I want to read Prosper’s Demons and Witches SO BADLY! I can’t wait for them to come out!