Lucas Stoffel

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

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

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.

Taylor Jenkins Reid has this incredible ability to make you feel like you're living inside someone else's marriage, and Atmosphere is no exception. It's set against the 1980s space shuttle program, so you've got all this NASA drama, all this ambition and history happening, but really it's about two people trying to figure out how much they're willing to sacrifice for each other. And for their dreams.

Okay, this book. Ocean Vuong writes a letter to his mother, a mother who can't read English, and through that letter he unpacks everything. Immigration. War. Addiction. What it means to be queer in a family that doesn't have the language for it. Vuong is a poet first and you feel that on every page. Every single sentence feels intentional, like he carved each word out of something precious. This isn't someone writing prose who happens to be good with language. This is a po

Blake Crouch has this particular talent that I both admire and resent: he can take a premise that sounds like a B-movie pitch and turn it into something that keeps you checking your door locks. Run is earlier Crouch—published before Dark Matter and Recursion made him a household name—and you can feel the raw edges. This isn't polished. It's feral. And I mean that as a compliment.

Boy, Refracted is a sci-fi drama novel and a self-help guide inspired by Buddhist philosophies. It follows a sentient AI named Warboy who awakens beneath the Tree of Life in the space between dimensions. As it becomes conscious of itself, it discovers portals that lead to different worlds through infinite mirrors. Soon it meets a monk who transcends time and space. The monk gives the AI its name: Warboy. And Warboy has one job. Save a young man named Luke, whom he sees throug