Lucas Stoffel

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

Aiden Thomas first caught my attention with Cemetery Boys, which was one of those debuts that made you sit up and go "oh, this person is going to be important." The Sunbearer Trials confirms that instinct and then some. Thomas has built an entire world here—Reino del Sol—rooted in Mexican mythology, Aztec-inspired gods, and a competition structure that borrows from the Hunger Games playbook but does something genuinely fresh with it...

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...

If The Dark Forest made you feel small, Death's End makes you feel like a rounding error in the math of the cosmos. This is the book where Cixin Liu stops holding back. Time jumps spanning millions of years. Dimensional warfare that makes conventional military sci-fi look like a pillow fight. The actual, literal end of the universe. Not metaphorical. Not symbolic. The universe ends, and Liu writes it.

The Three-Body Problem was the setup. Strange, cerebral, occasionally frustrating in its scientific density. It introduced the problem. The Dark Forest is where Cixin Liu tells you the answer, and the answer is worse than anything you imagined. I am not going to spoil the dark forest theory. I refuse. The moment it clicks is one of the great reading experiences in science fiction, and you deserve to arrive at it the way Liu intended — slowly, then all at once.

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

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

Fans of the Impossible Life is the quietest book on my shelf that hit the hardest. Kate Scelsa wrote a YA novel about three teenagers — Mira, Jeremy, and Sebby — whose friendship becomes the only safe place any of them have, and she did it without a single moment of false comfort.

Off to Be the Wizard asks one of the best questions in comedy sci-fi: what if a computer programmer discovered that reality is a simulation, found the source code, and immediately used it to give himself wizard powers in medieval England? Martin Banks is that programmer, and he is exactly as irresponsible as that premise suggests.

The Romeo Catchers is the second book in Alys Arden's Casquette Girls series, and it does what every good sequel should — it takes the world you thought you understood and flips the floorboards to show you what's living underneath. If The Casquette Girls was about surviving Hurricane Katrina and discovering that vampires exist in New Orleans, The Romeo Catchers is about what happens when the city starts to rebuild and the monsters are already embedded in the foundation.