Lucas Stoffel

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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...

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