Lucas Stoffel

Carve the Mark is Veronica Roth's first post-Divergent novel, and you can feel her stretching into a bigger canvas. Where Divergent was one city, one system, one test — this is an entire galaxy of planets connected by a sentient energy field called the current, and every person in it is born with a currentgift that shapes who they become. It's ambitious, messy, and more interesting than it has any right to be. The story follows two characters from opposite sides of a confl

The Fates Divide picks up where Carve the Mark left off and does what good sequels do — it expands the scope while deepening the personal stakes. Where the first book was about Akos and Cyra surviving, this one is about them choosing. And the choices are terrible. Cyra and Akos are separated for much of the novel, and Roth uses that distance to give each character their own arc rather than tethering them to the romance. Cyra is drawn into the political upheaval of the...

The Impossible Fortress is set in 1987, and it absolutely nails it. Jason Rekulak wrote a coming-of-age novel about a fourteen-year-old boy named Billy Marvin whose initial goal — stealing a copy of Playboy from the local convenience store — accidentally leads him into a friendship with the store owner's daughter, Mary, who is the best computer programmer he's ever met. What follows is a novel about first love, betrayal, and the Commodore 64 that is far better than it has any

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books that gets classified as a children's novel because the protagonists are children, but Madeleine L'Engle was writing about the nature of evil, the structure of the universe, and the terrifying power of conformity, and she wasn't simplifying any of it. Meg Murry is thirteen, angry, brilliant at math, and terrible at fitting in. Her father, a physicist, has been missing for over a year. Her mother — also a scientist, also beautiful, whi

If you've seen anyone screaming about Jacks the Prince of Hearts on BookTok or bookish Twitter, this is where the damage starts. Once Upon a Broken Heart is the first book in Stephanie Garber's series that leads to The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, and it's the doorway into one of the most addictive romantasy ships in recent memory. Evangeline Fox is desperate. The love of her life is about to marry someone else, and in her desperation she does the one t

Book two of the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, and the tension between Evangeline Fox and Jacks the Prince of Hearts just keeps building until you want to physically shake the book and scream at both of them. Evangeline is trying to break a curse — one of several that keep stacking up in this series like the worst kind of fairy-tale compound interest — while Jacks is doing that infuriating thing where an immortal Fate who has murdered people with a kiss tries very hard to p

Jerry Saltz has been the art critic at New York Magazine and its offshoot Vulture for years, and before that he spent over a decade at the Village Voice. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018. The man has spent his entire adult life looking at art, arguing about art, and thinking about what makes art matter. So when he sits down to write

Let me tell you something about Stephanie Garber: she understands that the best fairy tales are the ones where love might actually kill you. Not metaphorically. Not in a "love hurts" pop song kind of way. In a "the person you're falling for might literally be cursed to destroy you" kind of way. A Curse for True Love is the finale of the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, and it delivers on that promise with theatrical flair. If you haven't read the first two books, stop here

R.F. Kuang is, at this point, operating on a level that should be illegal. After the Poppy War trilogy proved she could write epic military fantasy that would make your soul hurt, she pivoted to contemporary literary satire and somehow got even sharper. Yellowface is a book about the publishing industry written like a thriller, and it cuts so deep that everyone who reads it feels personally attacked. That's the point. Here's the setup, and it's brilliantly simple: June Haywar

Justinian Huang's debut spans 2,000 years of queer love and obsession across three timelines. Lush, explicit, and unforgettable. Justinian Huang's debut novel asks a question that sounds like it belongs on a late-night conversation with someone you're falling for: What if love isn't chance? What if your soul has been finding the same person across lifetimes, again and again, unable to stop, unable to look away? And what if that love keeps ending in tragedy?

M.L. Wang's self-published fantasy about a warrior-turned-mother is devastating, cinematic, and criminally underrated. Every once in a while, a book shows up with no hype, no big publisher backing, no marketing machine—and it just quietly destroys everyone who reads it. The Sword of Kaigen is that book. M.L. Wang originally self-published it, and it spread the old-fashioned way: one wrecked reader telling the next person "you need to read this, I can't explain why, just trust

Here is the pitch: aliens show up, flatten every building on Earth, and kill everyone who was outside. The survivors get dropped into a massive underground dungeon — a multi-floor death game broadcast live to the entire galaxy for entertainment. Carl, our guy, was outside in a bathrobe walking his ex-girlfriend's cat when the world ended. The cat, Princess Donut, gains the ability to talk. She immediately becomes the most famous celebrity in the known universe and demands to

Let me just say it: I was nervous about this one. Prequels to beloved series have a lousy track record, and even The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had its skeptics. But Suzanne Collins walking back into the Hunger Games arena to give us Haymitch Abernathy's story? That's either going to be brilliant or it's going to break something sacred. It's brilliant. It might also break you, but that's a different problem. Sunrise on the Reaping is set during the fiftieth Hunger Game

The pitch for this one is The Office meets Six Feet Under meets About a Boy, and honestly? That's pretty accurate. It's about a middle-aged guy whose life has basically fallen apart. Job's gone, marriage is gone, he's lost the plot. And he gets this unexpected second chance to figure out who he actually wants to be. John Kenney was a copywriter for years before he started writing fiction, and you can feel that background in the prose. He's economical. He knows how to land

This book won the Pulitzer and honestly it deserved all of it. Percival Everett takes Huckleberry Finn, a book most of us read in school, and retells it from Jim's perspective. Except here, his name is James, and he's been code-switching his entire life. Speaking one way around white people, another way when they're not listening. That device, that simple idea, completely transforms the story. Twain wrote Jim as a sidekick. Everett writes him as the smartest person in ever

Alright, this one is just a blast. Rikki Thunder is a twenty-two-year-old drummer in a fictional eighties metal band called Whyte Python. Big hair, tight pants, sold-out arenas. You know the vibe. Except then he accidentally becomes an international spy, and suddenly this ridiculous rock-and-roll fantasy turns into a full-on thriller. Travis Kennedy knows exactly what kind of book he's writing. This isn't trying to be literature. It's trying to be the most fun you've had w

Different book, different rules. This one is not a memoir and it is not part of The Warboy Chronicles. The Stardust Pirates is a queer YA horror novel loosely inspired by Peter Pan, set on a Philippine island where the magic is ancient and the grief is fresh. I wrote it. Early readers on Goodreads and NetGalley had things to say. Here is what they said. The Stardust Pirates follows Jack, a teenager who has taken on far too much responsibility far too young, and his best fr

Publishers Weekly gave it 9.50 out of 10. Kirkus called it exuberant. A picaresque memoir about daring to live an unlikely life in a society that punishes those who try.

The Third Person is a memoir written entirely in third person. Yes, that sounds like a contradiction. It follows a version of me after a devastating breakup with the person I call Warboy, the end of a fifteen-year relationship that left me suspended somewhere between grief and motion. I rent out my New York apartment, lose my job, go home to Iowa for Christmas, and eventually do the thing heartbroken people do when standing still becomes unbearable: I leave. Vietnam. Thailand

Dustin Thao's When Haru Was Here is his sophomore novel after You've Reached Sam, which was already proof that this author understands loneliness the way some writers understand plot or dialogue. It's his native language. And in When Haru Was Here, he's become even more fluent in it.