I have a certain type of book that epitomizes a winter read to me. A dense but approachable text that promises not only to challenge me, but to last for a while. A quiet but urgent literary mystery that makes me want to read carefully and pick the book up again and again. A slow, steady pace with a historical timeline that begs to be read closely over long afternoon stretches, with time and attention, when the only thing to do is stay inside.

The settings of these books are primarily inside, too, but they’re still escapist. Big, drafty houses. Warm, dusty libraries. The action of the novels happens here, in these indoor settings, with university archives or local historical records or personal art collections. The protagonists who piece together revelations or unearth new artifacts are graduate students distracted by personal upheaval, historians nearing an unsatisfying retirement, disenfranchised writers concerned for their family’s wellbeing. They are deep thinkers with astute attention to detail as well as personal blind spots that unravel throughout the course of the novel. 

The books below fit this category perfectly, and many of them follow an academic calendar. After beginning in fall, they ease into thick, knit sweaters and snow packed into place underfoot. Not every book follows this calendar, and not every one features an academic protagonist tracking down a discovery. But every novel includes a library or an archive where action takes place, literary mysteries that drive the story, and searching for a hidden truth with lots and lots of close reading. Perfect fodder for slow, satisfying winter reading to last you through the final stretch before spring. 

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Novelist and literary critic A.S. Byatt died last year, and if you haven’t read her Booker-winning Possession yet, now is the time. In the novel, Roland Michell is an American scholar unhappy with his position researching the fictional Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and unsure whether he will commit to his girlfriend, his academic career, and his life in London. When he finds a stray document in the archive that suggests a relationship between the subject of his research and another fictional Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte, he steals it from the London Library. Roland approaches Dr. Maud Bailey, an expert on LaMotte, and together they search libraries, texts, archives, and even closed-up rooms in a cold, drafty old country house to get to the bottom of the literary mystery. Even better, they fall in love while doing so. 

Landscapes by Christine Lai

Christine Lai’s recent debut Landscapes is a beautiful exploration of art, memory, and preservation against the backdrop of ecological disaster in the near future. Told primarily in first-person journal entries, the novel follows art historian and archivist Penelope as she catalogs the collection of art, books, and ephemera at Morningside, the great English country house where her partner Aiden grew up and where she has lived and worked since graduate school. The house will be sold in April, and just before the property changes hands, Aiden’s brother Julian will return for one last visit, his first in decades after leaving abruptly after a violent altercation with Penelope. Penelope’s journal entries begin in September and continue through spring, as she spends the winter working through the contents of the library, hosting climate refugees in the halls of the great house, and bracing herself to face Julian after all these years. 

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Like Possession, this novel begins with a fictional discovery. In her final year before retirement, historian Helen Watt receives a call from a former student who found seventeenth-century documents in his home. The documents include household accounts as well as correspondence of a rabbi who lived in the house, written by the rabbi’s scribe, a young woman named Ester. Helen, who is ill, begrudgingly enlists the support of American graduate student Aaron Levy. Together, Helen and Aaron work quickly to translate the documents, search for the identity of the scribe, and uncover connections to prominent historical figures before Helen’s retirement—and before the documents become available to other, more prominent scholars. In the novel’s 1660s storyline, the stakes are even higher, particularly with the plague looming. While the stakes are high, the pacing is measured and Kadish’s writing is beautiful, dense with detailed descriptions. Including plenty of cold winter drafts and thick knit sweaters.

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravetz

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is structured like Michael Cunningham’s Day, with a similar blurring of fact and fiction. In the novel, Estee is a curator for the small, Boston-based St. Ambrose Auction House. While cataloging the contents of an estate, she discovers a handwritten draft of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and embarks on the process of verifying its authenticity ahead of a sale. The other two threads take place during Plath’s life: Dr. Ruth Barnhouse is a psychiatrist who treats Plath while she is institutionalized, and Boston Rhoades, based on Anne Sexton, is a competitive classmate in Robert Lowell’s famed poetry seminar. Throughout the novel, as Estee spends months focused on the newly discovered handwritten notebook, it becomes clear how these storylines, and these women, connect. 

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

In Unsheltered, Willia Knox and her family move into an old home that has fallen into disrepair. The house lacks a foundation and threatens to fall over, according to a local, and the stability of the Knox family is similarly tenuous. Willa has recently lost her job when her magazine folded, and her husband Iano has a one-year appointment that may not be renewed at the local college, after the university where he taught for his career abruptly closed. Their adrift daughter Tig moves back in with them, and so does their son, Zeke, after his wife dies by suicide. Zeke brings his newborn baby with him The final member of their household is Iano’s father, who is ill. The novel follows Willa as she tries to save the house, keep her family together during this time of upheaval, and searches the local archive and more for a historical connection to Mary Treat, an accomplished an undervalued scientist who collaborated with Charles Darwin. The novel includes a 19th century storyline that explores Treat’s work and her life, particularly this correspondence. The scientist is a real historical figure, but the cold, drafty house where the Knox family lives for this transformative year, is fictional. 

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones

This is another thick book with two timelines. In the first, modern-day narrative, history professor Verity Frazier is feeling unsettled and unmotivated when she finds a clue that the illustrator of Christine de Pizan’s illuminated manuscript is a woman named Anastasia, and she heads to London during her sabbatical to prove this theory. The second timeline, my favorite, follows Anastasia’s journey in the 14th century—who she is, how she began illustrating, and how she became connected with Christine de Pizan. 

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Unlike any of the others on the list, this book is fantasy. But the magical elements of R.F. Kuang’s Babel exist so seamlessly in a real historical world that it fits the same winter mood: close, slow reading, cozy atmosphere, and an archive-driven literary mystery. The novel takes place in an alternative 19th-century England, where the nation’s global power is backed by magic, which is derived from capturing the meaning of words that is inevitably lost in translation between languages. Because of this, Oxford houses the Royal Institute of Translation, which is nicknamed Babel. Our main character, an orphan from Canton, assumes the name Robin Swift when he is adopted by professor Richard Lovell as a boy. Lovell quickly begins tutoring the boy in Latin, Greek, and more to prepare him for Oxford and Babel. The book follows Robin through this preparation, his entry to Babel, and as he and the other translators realize the value of their work—and begin to question their contribution to Britain’s colonial power.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Many of the books on this list blend fact and fiction, but Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book is explicitly inspired by true events. In the more recent storyline, in 1996, famed rare book expert Hanna Heath is invited by the UN to analyze the Sarajevo Haggadah, a real document that is one of the earliest illustrated Jewish documents. In its fragile binding, she finds tiny preserved objects, including a piece of an insect wing, stain from wine, and crystals of salt, which she uses to explore the book’s creation and its use since. The other timelines provide a background to the ancient text’s past, bringing the reader through Hanna’s discoveries in a wonderfully atmospheric read.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

This one doesn’t exactly include a library, but the literary mystery does include unearthed ephemera and ultimately hinge on a document. Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries takes place during the gold rush in 1860s New Zealand and reads like a Victorian novel. In 1866, Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika from Edinburgh intent on making a fortune. His first night, he overhears a meeting of twelve local men. A complicated, convoluted, mystery unfolds. The novel demands close reading over long, uninterrupted stretches of time—and, in some cases, goads you into playing the role of researcher, grabbing a pen and paper to keep track of information or to sketch out the zodiac reference, if you’re so inclined . Even more than other wonderful books on this list, The Luminaries has a slow, steady pace that builds into a propulsive literary mystery.

The post 9 Literary Mysteries With a Big Winter Mood appeared first on Electric Literature.

Empire State Editions: Colorful Palate by Raj Tawney

Food is an anchor in this coming of age story which explores Tawney’s relationship with his family from childhood to adulthood. Interspersed with the recipes that were staples of growing up with Indian, Puerto Rican, and Italian heritages, the memoir always comes back to the kitchen. Even when teenage Raj is trying to be cool and throws a party so his band can perform, his mother and grandmother cook food from their respective cultures—and the party-goers love it, even though Raj was worried. Later, he bonds with an elderly woman over her grocery-store purchased rainbow cookies. When he actually finds some success as a musician, he’s sent off on tour with Arroz Negro. On the first date with the woman who becomes his wife, they have Korean hot pot, a food Raj has never before tried. This is a book that shows food as emotional, cultural, and sometimes just caloric sustenance—but always centers what it means to share these experiences with the people who make us who we are.

McSweeney’s: Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji, translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls 

When a chapter of his forthcoming novel is excerpted in a popular Cairo-based magazine, what for many writers is a nice piece of pre-publication publicity becomes a nightmare for Ahmed Naji. After a trial with a dubiously reasoned verdict, Naji is sent to prison for “offending public morality” and eventually serves 10 months of a 2 year sentence in an Egyptian prison. Even against the backdrop of corrupt politics and the chilling consequences for artistic expression, this memoir focuses mostly on connection: the relationships he builds on the cellblock, the support he receives from family and friends, and his own continued engagement with his writing. While Cairo’s Tora prison is a dangerous and dirty place that retains the social hierarchies of the outside world, the inmates also care for one another. The light touch Naji takes with his narrative—he jokes, he earnestly recounts his dreams—buttresses the power of his account rather than diminishes it. He is, along with everyone else, trying to survive. A beautifully written account that also serves as a deep reminder of the importance of a free press.

Unnamed Press: Upcountry by Chin-Sun Lee

In Caliban, a small town in the Catskills, worlds collide. Claire and her husband Sebastian are Manhattan transplants, April and her children are locals, and pregnant Anna is a member of a strict religious order that supports themselves through carpentry and running café. The women see themselves as very different from one another, but they are linked by circumstance, by geography, and by the ways that every person in a small town is only one degree of separation from another. It is the local, April, who forms an uneasy alliance with Anna, after she is shunned; and it is April who finds a kind of tentative truce with Claire, who has purchased her family home after April can no longer afford it. Throughout the novel, there is class anxiety, tension around race and religion, but it ultimately is a novel about women trying to find their way. With Upcountry, Chin-Sun Lee establishes herself as a writer to watch.

Ig Publishing: Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed: Notes From Periracial America by Kim McLarin

In this incredible collection of essays, Kim McLarin details everything from earning her motorcycle license at age fifty, to getting a gun permit as violent white nationalism escalates. In many scenarios, she is the only Black person in the room. She also writes of her divorce, of the passing of her dog, and the rejection of travel as a luxury—positing that it is a necessity for people, whether going across town or across the world. Deftly, she both in no uncertain terms underscores how the fight for racial justice is imperative and writes compellingly about hosting dinner parties. The title is after the seminal Lucille Clifton poem won’t you celebrate with me and the book is laced with the legacy of other influential Black writers, in particular Baldwin. The real power of Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed is the concise clarity of McLarin’s voice. She is a writer who knows not just what she wants to say, but exactly how and why to say it. Every single page of this book is necessary and should be required reading.

Two Dollar Radio: Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims 

In this collection of a dozen stories, ekphrastic flash fiction is interspersed with longer narratives where the characters find themselves in eerie and unnerving situations. A private detective takes a case that leads him to a nearly abandoned seaside hotel where he and the subject of in investigation are the only guests, but never physically see one another; a locavore tries to kill his chickens humanely, but instead engages in cruelty; a man loans his phone to a woman he does not know, only to receive a series of increasingly alarming messages from an unknown number. There is a deep current of paranoia in these stories, and it’s often like a rip tide. In Other Minds, things usually start off with reasonable calm, until an unseen—or unforeseen—event pulls a character under. Richly imagined and skillfully executed. 

Haunted Doll House: Barely Half in an Awkward Line by Jay Halsey 

In this mixed-media, multi-genre work, the author’s compelling and austere photographs are interspersed with deeply emotionally prose and verse. In a work that does not have a clear categorization, there is a clear thread that runs through it: the world is a hard and sometimes unforgiving place, full of addiction and poverty and violence, despite some moments of mercy. A young man of color confronts his racist step-father, another man is razzed by his friends for living in a shelter. A boy who is young enough to have a He-Man action figure is taken to a sex worker’s house by his biological father. What Halsey captures in a starkly effective way, through both the images and the writing, is the sometimes tiny space between being almost okay and everything falling apart, and the deeply complicated ways that blood and found family love one another. A stunningly original book that defies genre.

Braddock Avenue Books: Heading North by Holly M. Wendt

Viktor Myrnikov wants nothing more than to play in the National Hockey League. In his native Russia, he’s skating at the top of his game—and he’s falling in love. Yet, in a sport that both in the novel and in real life has no openly gay players, Viktor knows that if anyone finds out about him and Nikolai, it could threaten more than just their ice time. When a catastrophic plane crash kills the entire team that Viktor has just been traded from, Nikolai is among the dead, and Viktor is devastated and guilt ridden: he should have been on that plane. Later, playing in San Francisco, a world of LGBTQ acceptance is illuminated for Viktor, and he can’t share it with Nikolai. He also can’t escape Nikolai’s family, who are powerful in the ecosystem of hockey. Viktor has long accepted himself, but will his teammates and the league do the same? A thoughtful debut with a complex and satisfying plot. 

Clash Books: All Things Edible, Random & Odd: Essays on Grief, Love & Food by Sheila Squillante

This collection of short essays form a strong narrative arc of the reckoning Sheila Squillante has with the loss of her father, a divorce, an ill child. However, while there are challenging experiences and a full spectrum of grief, it is largely a reclamation. In an essay that stands out for braiding many of the themes of the book together, Mother-Out-Law, she tells of visiting her former-mother in law with her new husband, the anxiety about her ex-husband being at the Thanksgiving table, and to top it all off Squillante is newly pregnant and her ex publicly demonstrates he’s found Jesus in an unusual way. Food is central—whether that is exploring what it means to claim the title of “foodie”, giving up dairy for medical reasons, trying new flavors, cooking as care—and offers a tangible, sensory grounding in a collection that often explores unreconciled feelings. All Things Edible is as clear-eyed as it is poetic and impressionistic. 

Black Lawrence Press: Dressing the Saints by Aracelis González Asendorf 

A collection of linked stories, Dressing the Saints tells of the Cuban exile diaspora living in Florida. In many of the stories, the characters are well beyond middle age. The plots are refreshing in the exploration of not only the history of counter-revolutionary Cubans, but also the vibrant lives of women in assisted living, the sex appeal of both long marriages or relationships that come later in life, and the way in which aging and all of the loss—and wisdom—that may come with it can either open up the heart or clamp it down tight. As families handle past traumas and recent ones, and as social norms change, the characters in Dressing the Saints embody the complexity of what it means to exist in a changing world. Asendorf gorgeously offers a lament for what is lost, and a hope for what is to come. 

Tin House: Nonfiction by Julie Myerson 

The speaker of Nonfiction—a novel—is a writer who watches her daughter slip into addiction. She and her husband work to navigate the complicated terrain of wanting to help their only child, but also not enable her. None of the characters have names, but names aren’t needed: readers already know the disapproving mother, the old flame who is heady in one moment and non-committal in the next, the husband who can’t take it anymore, the daughter who is bent on destroying herself, and the woman who is trying to tie all of the threads of her life together. There are no answers in Nonfiction. The situations are bleak at best and the outcomes inevitably disastrous. Yet in this beautifully written book, Myserson speaks to the most unspeakable pains, addressing terrifying grief and deep regret. A masterful novel.  

Rare Bird Books: The Dirt in Our Skin by J.J. Anselmi 

Ryan and Jason are best friends and dedicated BMX bikers. As high schoolers, they spend hours hand digging complicated tracks and building jumps, and they are both skilled enough riders to start getting some attention outside of their small Connecticut town. Yet, as high school ends, they find themselves on different paths—and trying to navigate their friendship. Written like non-fiction, with journal entries and photographs, The Dirt in Our Skin is a novel about young men figuring out what it means to love, and how to express it. There are intense parties and sexual dynamics in the BMX scene, and both Ryan and Jason have to figure out their relationship to the culture of the sport they love, and understand their relationship to one another. This voice-driven novel lands big leaps and twisting curves with the same skill and execution of the riders Ryan and Jason admire.

West Virginia University Press: Roxy and Coco by Terese Svoboda

Roxy and Coco are sisters and harpies—mythical bird-women who appear in both Greek and Roman mythology—living in contemporary America and working for Child Protective Services. Over centuries, even though they can still fly at supersonic speeds, they’ve learned to blend in with humans. In their exceptionally long lives, both have become dedicated to guarding children. Yet, when Roxy becomes enamored with their new supervisor at the agency, Coco is suspicious. At the same time, Interpol is investigating Coco for a series of murders that have one strange thing in common: predators of children who seem to have fallen to their deaths from great heights, even when there is no structure nearby. Roxy and Coco is trademark Svoboda, where outsiders are the stars. As action-packed as the novel is, at the core is the deep love for a sibling, and in this case the love has grown for a millennium. A dazzling story that is compulsively readable and deeply relatable. 

Black Rose Writing: The Last Bird of Paradise by Clifford Garstang 

Aislinn Givens has worked hard to get on the partner track at a NYC law firm. Her husband, Liam, has his own lucrative job in finance. On the surface, Aislinn and Liam are a classic Manhattan power couple. Yet, when Liam accepts a position in Singapore—without consulting Aislinn—the first of many fissures surface. Their union started from an affair, so Aislinn knows her husband can be deceptive, just as she can be. Yet, when they move to Southeast Asia, the cracks widen. Aislinn becomes obsessed with a British colonial-era painter who lived in Singapore nearly a century earlier, and with the shopkeeper who has sold her some of the paintings. Though she does not know it, the painter has lived a parallel life to Aislinn’s, and though many decades separate them, the grip of powerful men has not loosened. The Last Bird of Paradise asks what we will sacrifice for power, for money, and, most importantly, for love. 

Moonstruck Books: The Rain Artist by Claire Rudy Foster

In a not-so-distant future, Celine, Yochanna, and Paul are an unlikely trio. Celine is the last umbrella maker in a world so ravaged by climate change that rain is a manufactured luxury enjoyed only by the upper class; Yochanna is an office worker saddled with such debilitating student debt she is forced to steal; and Paul is an ex-convict who was sentenced for a brutal crime and now runs flower shop as a front. Yet, what the three have in common is living under the regime of the ultra-rich, with no visible future. When Celine is ensnared in a murder plot, Paul and Yochanna are her allies. They make their way through a constantly surveilled, crumbling, and chemically poisoned New York City, only to have another dangerous encounter in the underworld. C. R. Foster’s The Rain Artist is strikingly written and artfully imagined with characters who are beautifully flawed. There is no other book this season that makes speculative horror feel so close to our everyday lives. Unforgettable.

Santa Fe Writers Project: Horse Show by Jess Bowers

The voices of carnival barkers, old time radio, early Hollywood, and 1970s-era television meet literary fiction in this equine-inspired collection from debut author Jess Bowers. An old mare drowns in a homemade country swimming pool, a young one dies on a film set when a director does not have enough imagination to get his shot without catapulting her into a reservoir. A woman rides a mechanical horse, a poet says goodbye to his saddle mule. Each story is punctuated by vivid imagery and a unique voice, and in the final story, an abandoned gelding is a harbinger of doom for a young couple’s marriage. Horse Show has a sweeping, cinematic quality to it, and a thematic cohesion that tightly ties the stories together. A distinctive accomplishment.

The post 15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Winter appeared first on Electric Literature.

As a writer, I’m often thinking about new ways to tell stories. I’m also a podcaster, so I include audio in my thoughts. And as I considered a new project, I wanted to create something I’d found to be rare: literary fiction that only works in audio form. 

My resulting show, Wyrd Woman, is one of just a few audio dramas in this niche. There are many excellent fiction podcasts out there, modern radio dramas that are often based in the genres of mystery, science fiction and more. But it takes a bit of work to find fiction podcasts that bring the lyrical writing, the conceptual nuance, and the complexity and satisfaction of literary fiction into audio drama form. 

Wyrd Woman only works as an audio drama. The limited series features an isolated woman recording her dreams of strangers, women across time who become increasingly persistent and desperate through sound. Over nine nights, each woman—old, broken, unnatural, mad, and ugly—becomes a stronger voice and presence through audio production and sound design. And as these women come together, connecting across time and space as worlds die, reality becomes fantasy, past and future meld, and fate binds and beckons. 

These seven podcasts also use audio and sound to create stories that are rich, compelling, utterly disquieting, and thoroughly enjoyable. Just like literary novels, these shows use different formats and structures, question the lines between reality and fiction, and push us to think and engage. Some are one-person shows, like mine. Some are slightly bigger. Some use full casts and extensive production. All can be your new favorite stories. 

Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature by Alexander Kemp and Winnie Kemp

A renowned professor leads a class exploring the culture of a newly-discovered ancient civilization. The only issue: there is no proof of the discovery, or the civilization itself. Has the professor, who disappeared for some time before teaching this class, broken with reality? Or is there really a lost civilization with a rich literary history known only by a few? The show is structured as recordings of each lecture, with occasional interjections from confused or suspicious students and grad assistants. Each episode dives deep into a particular aspect of Anterran literature, with a slowly-advancing plot behind the story. Listeners get deeply erudite lectures on this world, so complete that we stop caring if Anterra is real— because what is real? This feels like a wild literary novel to which you must just submit. There are four short seasons, for a total of about 30 episodes so far.

Mabel by Becca De La Rosa and Maybell Marten

It starts relatively simple. Ana, a home health nurse, is taking care of a ninety-year-old woman in an old, isolated house. She calls the woman’s granddaughter, Mabel, to ask about some letters Ana has found. But Mabel doesn’t answer. Even as Ana keeps calling. Even as Ana leaves longer and longer messages, describing strange happenings and discoveries in and around the house. Even as Ana becomes increasingly desperate, and increasingly detached from the world. For the first few episodes, we think we’re witnessing an isolated woman’s descent. But then—we finally hear from Mabel. And things get so much weirder and darker. The show is thoughtful and beautiful, painting the picture of a gothic, fantastical place that may be very real. The use of music and sound is crucial to the story, with each installment ratcheting up the goosebumps and dread.

Beef and Dairy Network Podcast by Benjamin Partridge

This is brilliant, ferociously funny satire that’s just bonkers. The show purports to be the online news engine for the Beef and Dairy Network in the UK. In each episode the host talks to a supposed expert in the field, with an interview that goes delightfully off the rails. One episode features a cow wrangler on film sets that contends all major acting is actually done by cows; another includes a former child actress from yoghurt commercials who claims trauma from standing in butter too long; another is a recurring character of a slaughterhouse owner who believes safety guidelines are rubbish, because his employees learn their safety lessons by losing fingers and hands. Each episode skewers the corporate culture behind food, along with the painfully cheerful marketing rah-rah energy demanded by companies today. I don’t know if the creator is vegan like me, but it feels right to say he is.

Gone by Sunny Moraine

A woman wakes one morning to find her wife gone, along with all her neighbors. The light and the air feels different. The power starts blinking in and out. She’s cut off from the world, if it still exists. And soon even the sun starts to disappear. She records her experience, and her changes—because as much as she fears for and misses her wife, her anger grows. Why did her wife keep so many secrets? Why did she work such long hours at her research lab? What exactly did she do? And who are the voices and shadows that start to people the narrator’s world? Beyond the fearful concept, the show really drills down into relationships—how we cede ourselves, how we diminish one another. It’s an exploration of our needs for companionship, for safety, for light.

Silt Verses by John Ware and Muna Hussen

Carpenter and Faulkner are two apostles of an outlawed religion, one that offers sacrifices to their river god. In this world, there are accepted religions and gods—those of commerce, of coffee, of the electric company. And there is illegal worship—those deep rural gods of the poor, displaced by rising waters and religious wars, gods of dirt and land and water. The two apostles are traveling their river to suss out other devotees, and to look for miracles. In their journey they find other dangerous gods (and their even more dangerous acolytes), an investigator looking into illegal deaths for rural religions, and a refugee fleeing her corporate job, which just sacrificed non-performers to their new deity.

The episodes are structured with lyrical narration and violent dialogue, with different characters taking the lead. It’s a remarkably dark, rich, fascinating and weird story with exceptional writing and acting. Note: there are many intense elements of horror.

Midnight Burger by Joe Fisher and Finlay Stevenson

Gloria opened her dream restaurant in Phoenix just before the pandemic. That restaurant failed. So one day she answers an ad for a job at a diner called Midnight Burger. Except this diner is just visiting Phoenix —at the end of the shift, it will travel again, across time, across dimensions, across space.

Gloria joins a bizarre team at the diner, including a couple of old-timey pastors on a radio, a former smuggler who can always MacGuyer a problem’s solution, a physicist who just wants to drink and write in her booth, and a guy named Caspar who’s just… there? And each time they stop, there’s something weird going on, and someone who probably needs help. Trust me—that description barely covers the surface of this show. It is wild, with a fantastic concept, lines that make me cry from laughing, and amazingly deep philosophical and empathetic discussions of humanity. Over their three seasons and 50 episodes so far, the writers create wonderfully rich story lines, hilarious villains (like a space species of capitalists called the Teds), and characters that have me beyond invested.

Tanis by Nic Silver and Terry Miles

All of these shows are hard to describe, but this one may be the hardest. Nic is the host of a podcast, a docudrama called Tanis. He is exploring a concept (or place? or person?) called Tanis—chasing it through the historical circles and myths of Alastair Crowley, the pages of a science fiction magazine and a never-published manuscript, the buried classifieds of Craigslist, the hoarded cassette recordings of numbers stations, the conspiracies around the deaths of Eliot Smith and Kurt Cobain, and so much more. Along the way, Nic relies increasingly on a secretive deep web expert named Meercatnip, and a growing list of people who alternately encourage and warn him from his quest. We want to believe in conspiracy and mystery, Nic says, especially in this age of instant info that masquerades as the answers to everything. Tanis, he believes, may be the ultimate and only remaining internet mystery.

Each episode nails the format of a investigative series, one which threatens to fall apart under the weight of all the threads being pulled. Nic himself plays a version of a reporter and enthusiast who may be in over his head. But just as he says—we are fascinated by mystery, and may not really care how everything fits together. The search is all.

The post 7 Fiction Podcasts as Rich as Literary Novels appeared first on Electric Literature.

Lifelong residents may write confidently of their homeland, but among the travelogs and novels and poems and memoirs that give shape to a city, I’m partial to books written from the perspective of those still calibrating their relationship to a place. These include children, wide-eyed visitors, and locals caught in the midst of historic transformations. 

My debut novel Holiday Country follows a young Turkish American woman who spends her summers on the Turkish Aegean. Not yet all that comfortable with the country’s culture and customs, she’s hyper-aware of her surroundings, interactions, and the linguistic nuances she spends an inordinate amount of time picking apart. All this, she hopes, will give her the answers she’s seeking about herself. 

Below, I’ve gathered a list of novels, memoirs, and collections in which Turkey is thrown into high relief. In other words, books reflecting the experiences of those getting to know Turkey—or a new Turkey—inch by inch. Everything to them is peculiar, fascinating, worthy of exploration. It’s that time when all the senses are on high alert. Before everything fades into the background, and becomes once again, the setting for life as usual.

Dare to Disappoint by Özge Samancı

Samancı grew up along the Aegean, and her graphic memoir chronicles her burgeoning understanding of her country through an inquisitive child’s eyes. She recalls crushes on teachers, her admiration of Turkey’s first president, and the difficulty of navigating religious differences as a student. There’s a lot packed into this story from girlhood to university graduate, but approaching convoluted topics with a strong dose of innocence offers an entertaining glimpse into the life of a young woman making sense of a convoluted and evolving country—and her place in it. 

The Lovers by Vendela Vida

Yvonne travels from Vermont to Datça, a peninsula in southwestern Turkey, where she and her late husband once honeymooned. Though the area is surrounded by gorgeous beaches and happy vacationers, her experience is more of a harsh and deteriorating environment. Yvonne finds herself often feeling misplaced, on the wrong side of power dynamics, and second-guessing her interactions with various tourists and locals. As an unlikely friendship leads to devastating consequences, Yvonne has to come to terms with her actions—and her past—to escape the heavy sense of loneliness that violently clings to her. 

Portrait of a Turkish Family by İrfan Orga

Orga’s memoirs from childhood begin while he’s living in the lap of luxury, with house staff in a konak in the heart of Ottoman Istanbul. In the summer of 1914, his bourgeois world grinds to a halt with the onset of WWI. This book chronicles Istanbul’s transformation as the Ottoman Empire transitions to the Turkish Republic through the lens of a single family. Perhaps most aptly symbolized by Orga’s grandmother, who refuses to abandon her aristocratic airs as life falls apart around her, it’s a tale of pride and survival, and of how to rebuild life again and again without losing hope. 

An Island in Istanbul: At Home on Heybeliada by M.A. Whitten

Northern California native and world-traveling diplomat Whitten and her husband become enamored by a trip to Turkey, and eventually make their way once again to Istanbul where they settle on one of the Princes’ Islands, Heybeliada. Whitten’s chronicle of island life is divided into two sections: the first detailing the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of procuring and remodeling an old island home, and the second, an in-depth exploration of life in Istanbul. Written with the friendliness and accessibility of a travel guide, it’s a great read for those unfamiliar with Turkish culture, fans of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, and who love to live vicariously through those building their dream lives abroad. 

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières

An expansive and gorgeously detailed novel told through the perspectives of an eclectic cast of characters in a Turkish village. Neighbors of various ethnic and religious backgrounds live lives deeply integrated with one another, until war strikes and brings everyone a jarring new perspective on nationality and religion. As developments in war and legislation shape allies and enemies, the villagers find themselves pulled apart from each other in the most shocking of ways. Brimming with witty proverbs, historical anecdotes, heartfelt love stories, and, ultimately, unimaginable grief. 

The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin

Turkish-American college student Sibel brings along her American boyfriend for a summer in Istanbul, where she mostly watches soap operas all day. While she juggles taking care of her ailing grandmother, tending to her sister’s eating disorder, and self-diagnosing her own mysterious headaches, she simultaneously avoids and desperately seeks connection with her dead father. As a family secret as complicated as Turkey’s chaotic history begins to unravel, Sibel starts to finally find an end to her grief, and a better understanding of her relationships. 

Turkish Coast Through Writers’ Eyes by Rupert Scott

A collection of writing about Turkey’s southwestern coast that includes excerpts from authors and travelers both ancient and contemporary. Perfect to dip in and out of while vacationing on the Turquoise coast, the selections range from explorations of  the finer points of Turkish cuisine to underwater discoveries, from chronicles of the plants and animals of the region to the stories behind its archeological ruins. The book also includes excerpts from other writers mentioned in this list, including İrfan Orga and Louis de Bernières.

The post 7 Books Set In Turkey appeared first on Electric Literature.

Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding new names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually start writing the blurbs for each book a few months before the list is due. Let me also add that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very hard to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I try and read at least a little of each book featured. And here’s an incredible truth that’s both deeply satisfying and makes my job surprisingly difficult: there are more and more queer books published every year. There was a time when I could complete a list like this in an afternoon; I was lucky to find a dozen explicitly queer titles. Now there’s a pretty solid chance I miss a good number of them. 

In mid-December—at the half-way point, and a couple days after my birthday—I looked at the list, halfway done then, and thought, “There’s no way I can do this. There’s no way I can finish putting together this list in a way that does each book justice.” Partly it was the volume, yes, and partly it was the ambient dread of being alive in 2023. Partly it was also because of the lingering emotional hangover from publishing my debut novel and the approaching completion of my second—experiences that have left me excited, enervated, vulnerable, and protective of my own mental health. Partly I’ve become wary—weary?—of continuing to delineate LGBTQ stories from cis-straight ones, as if our identity is a genre, as if I’m daring hetero readers to overlook these books because of who the protagonists and authors choose to fuck. Partly—maybe superficially—I felt a crippling nihilism at the idea of putting so much time into this list only to have to promote it on the hollowed-out shell of an app whose home screen now serves as a violent reminder of how much we’ve lost at the whims of idiotic wannabe despots. 

Here’s how I finally finished this list: I read all the other ones. I went through most of the “best of” lists from last year, the “anticipated” lists for this one. And while we’re thrown a couple bones every now and then, given some gestures at progressive appeasement, our stories are still routinely passed over. Queer culture—our fashion, our humor, our art—has always moved everyone forward, toward a better, freer, more-fun world; we are and have been the tide that lifts, so our stories deserve not only to be included but centered. 

Here are 42 works of literature that will lift us all this year—bold new books by Judith Butler, Carlos Maurice Ruffin, Brontez Purnell, Lucas Rijneveld, Garrard Conley, R.O. Kwon, and Miranda July; and auspicious debuts from Daniel Lefferts, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Ursula Villarreal-Moura.

You Only Call When You’re In Trouble by Stephen McCauley (Jan. 9)

Tom is an architect in his sixties, constructing what he hopes will be his “masterpiece.” But his longtime boyfriend has recently broken up with him, and both his sister and his niece—the latter of whom is the center of his life—are soliciting his help in solving crises of their own. Less author Andrew Sean Greer says McCauley’s “poignant, joyous, explosive” latest is one to cherish: “A book that loves you back. What more could you want, my gosh? Read it!”

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter (Jan. 16)

Grieving the dual losses of both her father and the end of her first queer relationship, Shiva Margolin, a student of Jewish folklore, embarks on a sojourn to Poland, her family’s ancestral homeland. Danielle Evans calls Fruchter’s debut “a gorgeous and full-hearted exploration of inheritance, grief, desire, and connection, at once a story about what it means to go looking for the ghosts we always knew were there and what it means to be in the right place to encounter the unexpected things we didn’t know we were waiting for.” 

Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte (Jan. 16)

The newest from French-Canadian cartoonist Delporte is a beautiful, moving look at coming out later in life, a diary-style graphic memoir about the queer liberation of both the body and mind. 

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn (Jan. 23)

How To Wrestle a Girl, Blackburn’s 2021 story collection, was a revelation, barbed and bold. She writes so well about the weirdness of grief and the grief of being weird. Her new novel centers on a successful speculative fiction author who discovers her brother dead by suicide and carries on pretending he’s still alive, a reality-shattering charade with far-reaching consequences. 

How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica (Jan. 30)

Ordorica, a poet, weaves a tapestry of love in loss in his fiction debut, a tenderhearted coming-of-age story about a closeted college student who falls in love with his also-closeted roommate. Fellow poet Eduardo C. Corral calls the novel “majestic.”

Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin (Jan. 30)

The bestselling author of BookTok fave Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead returns with a novel about a partially deaf lesbian obsessed with black holes and true crime podcasts struggling to balance new connections—both with her formerly estranged half-sisters and her first serious relationship. 

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, trans. by Kira Josefsson (Feb. 6)

Imagine a female-fronted version of Call Me by Your Name told from Oliver’s point of view and set on a Greek island and you’ll get something like Johansson’s award-winning novel. Translated from the Swedish, it follows a thirtysomething woman to Ermoupoli as she becomes entangled in a complex relationship between an elegant older artist and her teenage daughter. 

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner (Feb. 6)

Waidner’s last novel, the Kafkaesque Sterling Karat Gold, won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, and their latest surreal romp is about an author who wins a prestigious book prize. The catch? The trophy and monetary award are difficult to obtain, possibly impossible, and the quest for it sends the author back and forth through time. 

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Feb. 6)

The titular siblings of Reilly’s charming debut are lovelorn flatmates in New Zealand, navigating their own queer heartbreaks and learning what their place in the world is—both as individuals and as members of a multiracial family. 

Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts (Feb. 6)

Alistair McCabe, a young gay college student from the Rust Belt, dreams of a career in high finance, a fantasy turned nightmare when he finds himself entangled with an enigmatic billionaire whose nefarious ambition puts Alistair’s life at risk. Lefferts’s debut, an astute examination the complex intersection of money and intimacy, traces Alistair’s descent alongside the dissolution of the relationship between his paramours, an artistic couple with their own financial and existential woes.

Bugsy & Other Stories by Rafael Frumkin (Feb. 13)

The author of last year’s Highsmithian heist dramedy, Confidence, returns with a delirious, thrilling short fiction collection, including one story about a lonely college dropout who reinvents herself as a boom operator for porn shoots, and another about a Twitch streamer whose life is upended by the odd behavior of her best friend and the reply guy fan who’s come to declare his love. 

I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante (Feb. 13)

Often it’s easier to think and write about others’ lives, easier to dig for the truth in someone else’s story than it is to search for one’s own. Such as it had been for Sante, an acclaimed chronicler of iconoclastic queer life who found it difficult to confront her own identity, a confrontation made even more difficult by society’s discouragement of gender fluidity. Sante’s achingly poignant memoir charts her late-in-life transition, the shock and euphoria of self-recognition. 

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell (Feb. 13)

100 Boyfriends was a bawdy, brutal, and beautifully raw chronicle of queer Black life, and Purnell’s follow-up, a memoir-in-verse, promises even more of what made that book a must-read. 

The Rain Artist by Claire Rudy Foster (Feb. 24)

When I was an editor at O Magazine, I had the pleasure and privilege of publishing the dizzyingly good short story upon which this novel is based. It centers on a woman named Celine who is one of the sole remaining umbrella makers in a world in which water (and rain) has become a rare commodity only available to the uber-wealthy. For such a short story, the world Foster built already felt expansive, and I’m excited to see it expanded further. 

The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (Feb. 27)

The always-inventive author of the Pen/Faulkner finalist We Cast a Shadow returns with an electrifying work of historical fiction centered on a gutsy former slave girl who joins a clandestine band of female spies working to undermine the Confederacy. 

Green Dot by Madeleine Gray (Feb. 27)

Hera, the droll and extremely self-aware narrator of Gray’s debut, knows falling for a married man twice her age is an ill-fated cliche. And yet. Hera, who has only ever slept with women, works as a news outlet’s comment moderator, and it’s in the chilly, subterranean-seeming office she meets Arthur, a journalist who throws into disarray who she believes she is and who she wants to be. It’s Conversations with Friends meets Several People Are Typing.  

My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld (Mar. 2)

From the author of The Discomfort of Evening, the first Dutch book to win the International Book Prize, comes a queer and profane take on the Lolita archetype, following a pervy veternarian who becomes infatuated with a fourteen-year-old daughter of a local farmer—a girl who dreams of inhabiting a boy’s body. 

Ellipses by Vanessa Lawrence (Mar. 5)

Set amid the squalor and splendor of New York media, Lawrence’s debut follows Lily, a staff writer at a glossy fashion magazine who feels stalled both personally and professionally. Enter Billie, a cosmetics mogul who wants to mentor Lily…mostly from the distance of a phone screen. But what transpires in the digital realm seeps into real life until it’s all but impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (Mar. 5)

LaPointe follows up her award-winning memoir Red Paint with a collection of essays that explore the challenges and triumphs of proudly embracing a queer indigenous identity in the United States today, drawing on both personal experiences and the anthropological work of her great-grandmother. “Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s essays in Thunder Song are loud, bold, and startlingly majestic,” says Night of the Living Rez author Morgan Talty.

The Tower by Flora Carr (Mar. 5)

Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Carr’s fascinating work of historical fiction portrays the year-long imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in a remote loch-surrounded castle, her only company a pair of inconspicuous-seeming chambermaids. Together, these three women—and later, a fourth, Mary’s lady-in-waiting—plot a daring path to freedom. 

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash (Mar. 19)

If you haven’t read Honor Girl, Thrash’s heartrending graphic memoir about queer summer camp love, then stop reading this and pick up a copy. Here, the author makes her first foray into prose, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of the 1990s Satanic Panic. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler (Mar. 19)

It’s hard to imagine a more important moment for a new Judith Butler book, though their mountain-moving work has always and forever been significant and necessary. Here, Butler examines how authoritarians tie together and blame ideas like “gender theory” and “critical race theory” for the disorienting fear people have about the future of their ways of life, addressing what has become the cornerstone of conservative politics and culture wars: the notion that the very concept of gender—and the questioning of that concept—is a denial of nature and danger to civilization.

All The World Beside by Garrard Conley (Mar. 26)

Many of you might know Conley as the bestselling memoirist and activist behind Boy Erased, a beautifully written and important book about survival and identity and a complicated family. Get ready now for Conley the novelist. His full-length fiction debut is a lush, epic love story set in Puritan New England. Every one of his sentences is a heaven-sent spectacle. 

Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura (Mar. 26)

In this debut novel, Tatum Vega, living a fulfilling life in Chile with her partner Vera, finds her past resurfacing when a reporter contacts her about allegations of abuse against the renowned author M. Domínguez, with whom she had an incredibly complicated relationship. 

Firebugs by Nino Bulling (Apr. 2)

How can it be true that the world we inhabit so often feels both plagued by stasis and altered by constant, irreversible transformation? And what does this mean for individuals hoping to find and understand their own identities? These are the big questions of fiction, questions Bulling illustrates in this graphic novel about a couple navigating intimacy and transition in an environment ablaze from climate change. 

A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins (Apr. 2)

Higgins’s visceral and vivacious debut is about a young, anxiety-ridden, compellingly prickly lawyer who becomes the lover of a married lesbian couple, an arrangement that rearranges her sense of self and her place in the world. I got the chance to blurb this one early, but I’m just going to co-sign Halle Butler’s blurb here: “Sometimes I could not believe how easily this book moved from gross-out sadism into genuine sympathy. Totally surprising, totally compelling.”

Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall (Apr. 2)

An early contender for best title/cover combo. An award-winning playwright makes her prose debut with this collection of short stories, including one in which a lesbian’s wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, and another about an ambitious sexbot. 

The Long Hallway by Richard Scott Larson (Apr. 16)

I first came upon Larson’s work in the queer horror anthology It Came from the Closet, in which he wrote about how John Carpenter’s Halloween—about a boy triggered by heterosexual desire becoming a monstrous masked voyeur—was actually a gay coming out story. I was thrilled, then, to discover the author’s upcoming memoir is a sequel of sorts, exploring how terror on screen sometimes mirrors the terror of queer interiority. 

So Long, Sad Love by Mirion Malle (Apr. 30)

In this graphic novel from the author-illustrator of This is How I Disappear, a French woman who has moved to Montreal to be with her boyfriend begins to uncover dark truths about his past, which forces her to confront who he might be—and who she could become without him. 

First Love by Lilly Dancyger (May 7)

Two summers ago, at the Sewanee Writers Conference, I had the chance to hear Lilly Dancyger read part of an early version of this book, and I was totally stunned. As soon as the reading was over, I started counting down the days until I—and everyone else—could read the whole thing. And now here it is: a soul-stirring compilation of essays about how our earliest intimacies—sisterly, friendly—so often resemble the intensity of romance, how the delineations between different kinds of relationships can blur, how if and when those relationships change or end it can feel like the most devastating heartbreak. 

How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix (May 7)

An early contender for Best Premise: when Myriam and Alison fall in love at a local punk show, their relationship begins to play out as different hypotheticals in different realities. What if the two of them became bestselling lifestyle celesbians? What if they embraced motherhood upon finding an abandoned baby in alley? What if one was a CEO and the other was her lowly employee? 

All Fours by Miranda July (May 14)

For me, July’s 2007 short story collection No One Belongs Here More than You was a formative reading experience, a book about weirdo women that fundamentally altered my ideas of what kinds of stories were possible—something Sally Rooney and I have in common. In her second novel, July brings her singular brand of sardonic melancholia and wide-eyed wisdom to bear on this tale of a semi-famous middle-aged artist who decides to take a left turn from the left turn she had already planned.

Oye by Melissa Mogollon (May 14)

Told through several one-sided telephone conversations between protagonist Luciana and her sister Mari, Mogollon’s inventive debut novel is a unique coming of age story about uncovering family secrets and the secrets of the self. 

We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons (May 14)

Parsons’s first book, the wonderful story collection Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and brimmed with world-weary wit, queer yearning, and Hempel-esque sentences so deftly crafted. Her first novel is just as much a marvel, following a horny housewife and young mother who desperately needs time away for and from herself. 

Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere (May 21)

Like the landscape depicted within, Bossiere’s memoir about growing up genderfluid in a Tucson trailer park and navigating the challenges of identity in the American Southwest promises to be both raw and beautiful. Fairest author Meredith Talusan likens the book to This Boy’s Life, “an indelible portrait of American boyhood that is at once typical and extraordinary.”

Exhibit by R. O. Kwon (May 21)

A few months ago, novelist R.O. Kwon made waves when she read aloud an excerpt from her long-awaited follow-up to The Incendiaries at the Vulture Festival; what better enticement to read something than hearing the author herself warn her own parents against reading it? But if you’ve read The Incendiaries, then you don’t need any further enticement. Kwon’s prose is unlike any other, sensuous and sumptuous and yet razor-sharp. Here, she captures the quick–developing intimacy between a photographer named Jin and a ballerina, to whom Jin spills a family secret—a confession with unforeseen consequences. 

The Guncle Abroad by Steven Rowley (May 21)

Few authors possess the infectious mix of light- and heavy-heartedness that makes every Steven Rowley novel an experience; his gift is to make the reader laugh out loud one minute and clutch their chest the next. Following the success of The Celebrants (a Read with Jenna pick), Rowley returns to the world of the eponymous gay uncle of 2021’s The Guncle, this time sending sitcom star Patrick to Lake Como for his brother’s wedding. 

In Tongues by Thomas Grattan (May 21)

Grattan’s Pen/Hemingway-longlisted first novel, 2021’s The Recent East, was sublime, a book about family and the mundane magic and messiness of everyday life. His second follows a Midwesterner-turned-Brooklynite at the dawn of the new millennium who takes a job as a dog walker for the wealthy, a gig that places him in the orbit of an older couple.  

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn (May 21)

In the new novel from LA Times Book Prize finalist, a “lightly” canceled mid-list author named Astrid attempts to resurrect her fledgling career when an influencer options her previous novel for TV. What seems like manna from heaven turns into a source of tension, assuaged only by a cocktail of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—the Patricia Highsmith special—that also causes blackouts. On top of all that, Astrid just wants to love and be loved—mostly with Ivy, a grad student she meets on Zoom who’s studying lesbian pulp fiction form the 1950s. 

Shae by Mesha Maren (May 21)

Maren’s debut Sugar Run remains one of my favorite novels of the past five years. She is an astute and indispensable chronicler of Appalachian queerness. Her latest centers on two young women in West Virginia—one a teen mother and the other coming to terms with what it means to be trans in rural America. 

Trust and Safety by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman (May 21)

Rosie is jonesing for a cottagecore life right out of a meticulously curated Instagram feed, a rural fantasy she hopes to turn into a reality when she and her husband purchase a Hudson Valley fixer-upper. When her husband loses his job, they have to rent out part of the property. Their new tenants? An attractive pair of Home Depot queers whose presence throws the house into disarray—even as they help repair it. 

Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg (May 28)

There’s something about road trip stories that feel inherently queer: the freedom and desire to be someone else and/or somewhere else, maybe, or the exhilaration of being part of the world while being apart from it. Eisenberg, the acclaimed author of The Third Rainbow Girl, delivers a debut novel that’s part The Price of Salt and part Just Kids, in which two friends journey across America in pursuit of art and love. 

The post 42 Queer Books You Need to Read in 2024 appeared first on Electric Literature.

My novel, River East, River West, is in part a social portrait of restless and suffocated youth in Shanghai. I’ve long been fascinated by the effect of place on adolescence, how a locale’s social and environmental factors exerts an influence on how young people behave or misbehave, how landscape informs crevices of society young people burrow into or the barriers they break out from. In Shanghai, this meant FamilyMarts and dark KTV rooms where teens could drink and frolic, all-night cybercafés and gargantuan malls, city parks teeming with feral cats, residential housing towers dense as concrete forests where supervising adults were too often absent, busy making money in distant cities.

This is a reading list about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly because they live in places where the setting is a driving force for complicated youths. Let these books take you around the globe, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and cafés of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. In these stories of fevered hopes and bleak pessimism, absentee parents, epidemics of violence, the anonymity of buzzing metropolises, the wilderness remote towns, the suffocating provincialism, and racial and class tensions are all vivid setting traits to contribute to a kaleidoscopic collection of youth in flux—spanning continents, but all authentic portraits of hyper-particular settings.

Burundi: Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone

“To live somewhere,” Faye writes, “is to melt carnally into the topography of a place.” In the musician’s debut novel, we meet 10 year-old Gaby, a French-Rwandan boy living in 1990s Bujumbura, Burundi, in a bougainvillea-filled cul-de-sac of the Kinanira neighborhood. He attends the French school, steals and gorges on the neighbor’s mangoes with his band of mostly mixed-race friends, picnics by the glittering lake with his family. Due to inflation, everyone in Bujumbura is a millionaire; democratic elections are on the horizon, neighborhood bars called cabarets brim with colorful opinions and artisanal liquor.

Gaby’s innocent childhood cracks open when his Rwandan mother and French father split up—on their last outing as a family, following a muddy forest trek and a visit to the palm oil factory where his father supervises a colonial enterprise, Gaby notes that the palm oil came to spoil the happiness of his childhood, mixing into the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. In neighboring Rwanda, ethnic tensions are coming to a boiling point, and Gaby’s visit to Kigali with his mother for an uncle’s wedding is full of chilling precursors of the genocide to come. Soon, the unthinkable happens, and Gaby’s once innocent band of boys—who’d smoked cigarettes at his 11th birthday party by a crocodile carcass, who’d picked idle fights over small neighborhood squabbles—are buying grenades off the black market and arming to guard the neighborhood as violence spills across the border. Years later, the cul-de-sac once teeming with great trees is now bare, barricaded with tall walled compounds and barbed wires. But the cabaret— the ubiquitous neighborhood bars where obscurity reigns and tongue are set loose, where the real country, this “small country where everyone knows everyone,”—still stands, and Gaby returns to see if he can still find memories of home and the ghosts who haunt him.

Spain: Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

This novel’s original Spanish title is Panza de Burro, or “donkey’s belly,” a Canarian description of the low-lying cloud cover clinging to the volcanic landscape of northern Tenerife. The ten-year-old narrator and her best friend Idora live in a working class town where many of the adults’ livelihoods are tied to the resort economy of the island’s south. For the girls, the sea is a three hour walk away. They spend much of their languid, suffocating summer failing to get to it, settling instead for a made-believe “canal beach” with concrete slabs and a trickle of water littered with ubiquitous pine needles.

The town’s roads are steep (“a vertical neighborhood on a vertical mountain”), the houses multicolored and half finished, the minimarket a distributor of junk food and mean gossip. The narrator resents the holiday residences her mother needs to clean, from which she feels separated by “a barrier of clear clingfilm.” The girls eat and purge and gorge on berries and pears that make them shit endlessly, they grind their bodies on everything, including each other, they roam in the heat and volcanic haze. The clouds are always low, hovering right above their heads, their oppression a pressure cooker, presaging the boiling point towards which the novel is gathering force.

Afghanistan: 99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai

It is summer in Logar province, and an America-raised teen called Marwand is visiting his family’s village in rural eastern Afghanistan. This is a land of orchards and streams and mulberry trees, of curving roads leading to mazes of interconnected compounds, of courtyards covered with flower petals carried by the wind, of laborers and fields, of US army operations in the surrounding black mountains, “so that those of us down in the river valleys only ever heard the softest hum of gunfire, the gentlest tremble of stone.”

Kochai’s novel unfolds against this backdrop of “Ts” and “psychopathic white boys” and “robots in the sky” in 2005 Afghanistan, but the militarized elements make way for the centerpieces of familial lore, sumptuous feasts, and rowdy shenanigans as the children adventure around this landscape, searching for the escaped and much pestered family dog Budabash. In between, the cousins and friends succumb to mystery illnesses, crash weddings by hiding in burqas, and tell each other countless nesting doll-like stories.

By turns surrealist, absurdist, and deeply heartbreaking, the novel portrays a social landscape of intimate ties and bullet-ridden memories–including a tragedy that marks an eternal wound on the family’s beating heart. This secret is unveiled as layers of tales-within-tales rich with oral tradition are peeled back, culminating to a reveal so poetic and striking that it makes for a landmark chapter in contemporary American literature for its linguistic statement.

Mexico: The Spirit of Science Fiction by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

To the delight of his cult followers (of which I am proudly one), Bolaño’s metaverse of poets coming-of-age in Mexico City appear in this early novel in his oeuvre as familiar echoes, doppelgangers, and kaleidoscopic fragments. Here, we loosely follow Jan and Remo, variants or alter egos of Arturo and Ulises of The Savage Detectives, perhaps, as they roam through 1980s Mexico City, surviving on milk and avocados, dwelling in rooftop tenement rooms, taking part time jobs at newspapers, writing rabid fan letters to writers they admire.

Reading the book can feel like tracing a map of the city: Bolaño writes of “the ghosts that appear behind trees and on cracked sidewalks in the old neighborhoods of Mexico City,” “the dens of San Juan de Letrán, the neighborhoods around Garibaldi where we sold Virgin of Guadalupe lamps on the installment plan, the chop shops of Peralvillo, the dusty rooms of Romero Rubio, the shady photography studios of Avenida Misterios, the hole-in-the-wall eateries behind Tepeyac that we reached by motorcycle as the sun was beginning to rise over the neighborhood…”

The literary youth in the novel drift in and out of the periphery of workshops, talks, magazines, interviews, they harbor crushes and zip around by motorcycle, they hunt for dusty science fiction tomes in foreign language libraries, they question the dark sides of the “artsy parties” taking over the city, they hallucinate of basilica as monsters, they love with unbridled idealism. The book is capped off by the standalone “Mexican Manifesto,” one of Bolaño’s most brilliant short stories (in my humble opinion), which centers entirely on the ecosystem of lust and exploitation inside a Mexico City bathhouse, and is in itself a masterclass in using place as a driving engine in fiction.

Canada: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

1970s, Nunavut, a small town of twelve hundred (human) souls in the Canadian high Arctic. It is a world of freeze and thaw, of sea ice and spring release ripe with smells of the life entrapped, fierce winds and 24-hour sunlight (“The sun is shining brightly overhead. The sun always brings life and mischief, serenity and visions. It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’ve shrugged off my curfew”).

Interspersed with poems and illustrations, this debut novel by Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq juxtaposes the narrator’s sensorial connection with her social and natural environment and ordinary teen preoccupations with the dark underbelly of sexual and substance abuse the town’s children witness and experience. There are butane highs, homes shaking with country music and parties best avoided, the creak of a door opening onto a dark room, unwanted touching, entering, rape. Nearby is the Arctic Ocean, and when it’s frozen over our narrator takes walks on the water. Her adolescent years follow rhythms of cold and thaws, of ever-present darkness and ever-present light; she goes to residential school, is kicked out, she takes up a job at the local grocery store. She grows breasts and kisses the butcher, she harbors crushes on Best Boy, but those are not who enter her in violation. She tells of classes she abhors and creatures she rides in spiritual communion. There are famines, storms, bodies growing within a body and born into the Northern Lights as the narrator navigates pregnancy. Tagaq, a Nunavut native, offers a tale imbued with both the most harrowing darkness and the most poetic ode to the destructive and magical forces in the human soul and the natural world.

China: Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen, translated by Eric Abrahamsen

When Dunhuang gets out of jail, serving a stint for selling fake IDs, he is greeted by a classic Beijing sandstorm. The sky is “a blur of yellow dust behind which the sun glowed,” a “sandpaper sky.” This effect of dull sepia suffuses the novel’s landscape of city hustling, where livelihoods are often on the brink, but does nothing to diminish the novel’s frantic energy. Dunhuang has nowhere to sleep, so we follow him along Beijing’s Ring Roads and various fake good markets—Book City, Electronics City, the university gates where counterfeit masters and doctorates are for sale. He takes up with Xiaorong, a young woman selling fake DVDs with a penchant for arthouse films, and finds shelter for some time. When her boyfriend returns, Dunhuang takes the porno films she’s unwilling to sell and makes enough of a slim profit to rent first a bunk, then a concrete shack with a scholar tree in a dirt yard as his personal urinal.

Undercover police lurk everywhere, everyone is scamming everyone, and when Dunhuang’s new bike is instantly stolen, he takes up running across the city to make DVD deliveries. In between, he gets drunk on cheap beer and hot pot, he fights his buddies and steals their love interests—but at the end of the day, when someone needs a bailout from jail, Dunhuang is here to borrow money and help his friends. Xu captures the frenetic energy of early 2000s Beijing and the fortune-seekers occupying its lower ranks with touching compassion and rattling optimism—the protagonists are survivors fighting for each day in the big city, offering each other glimmers of mercy in what’s often been characterized as a merciless city. A breathless, profoundly engaging portrait of the hustling outsiders of China’s capital, this novel has been called a landmark of the “jing piao” or “drifting in Beijing” genre—an artful anthropological portrait easily read in one sitting.

France: And Their Children After Them by Nicolas Mathieu, translated by William Rodarmor

A lake, a heatwave, a town in France’s Great East region where teenagers Anthony and his cousin are chasing any stimulation that comes their way. At home, the adults are getting hammered at yet another ordinary apéro. The river valley, one close to the Luxembourg border, has drifted into a post-industrial torpor as its mines and factories become ruin; in the teens’ city, an enormous furnace that was once the city’s beating heart has become a monument of rust.

Mathieu, who grew up in this eastern region, writes of lake water “dense as oil,” of beaches called The Dump or the American Beach, where a local variant of mythologized, evil “rednecks” live. Back home, fathers broken by years of driving forklifts are getting angry and drunk over flavored apéricube cheese, railing against the nearby housing projects and the immigrants moving in—“families grew that way, on great slabs of anger over depths of accumulated pain that, lubricated by pastis, could suddenly erupt in the middle of a party.” Racial tensions and frustrated masculinity brew towards menace as the teens steal canoes and Yamaha bikes, or any modes of transport they can get their hands on to move through the desperate valley and seek a shot with the girls they lust after.

Over the course of four summers leaping along the 1990s, Mathieu’s tale follows new feuds and old rancors, long-harbored crushes and dissipating dreams amidst adolescent ennui and rage that curdles into resignation: the characters are constantly confronting their inability to escape their hometown and their affection and ultimate ease here—a sense of unshakable belonging in their forsaken valley.

The post 7 Novels Across the World About Turbulent Coming of Age appeared first on Electric Literature.

My last novel Little Threats, leaned on memory as a thematic device and I didn’t quite grasp the importance of that to me at the time. Fiction is like that. When the subject ended up in my new novel, Sleeping With Friends, I was finally able to write about my own mother’s coma, but through the novel’s character, Mia. She’s a Connecticut housewife who may or may not have had an accident.

There are countless moving stories of memory loss. It’s a universal possibility, either through illness, or aging. But the books I’ve collected here do something different. For example: a drug that can curate memories and allow you to experience someone else’s. Someone hiring out a whole cast to act out and recreate what might be his only memory. An amnesiac detective trying to solve his own tormented past.

All these novels begin with the idea that memory loss could be something more than the act of forgetting. Each of these books take a risk, and offer something original, strange, and fantastic.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

If, like me, you were browsing bookstores every weekend in the late-aughts, no doubt you spotted this book featured it in your local Staff Picks section—and for good reason. Remainder may be equal parts fever dream and intellectual exercise, but there’s more to it than that.

A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident and receives an enormous sum in legal compensation. He has no idea what to do with it. He winds up having a moment of déjà vu, what could be a dream, or maybe an actual memory, and decides to entirely recreate it—right down to the cracks in the wall and the smell of liver frying in a pan down the hall. But this involves buying an apartment building, and hiring actors to live there, practicing for this one significant scene. There’s intense foreboding as he descends further into his obsession: trying to recreate something that may or may not have ever been real. (And yes, McCarthy’s novel came out before the film Synecdoche, New York.)

Fledgling by Octavia Butler

This dystopian novel, which was Butler’s last, is really about the dividing line between one life and another. Shori is recovering from injuries in a cave and doesn’t know anything about herself. She turns out to appear like a ten-year-old though she is much older. She immediately instinctively hunts and eats an animal, but ordinary things, like rain, need to be remembered. “I was recognizing things now, at least by category—bushes, rocks, mud….”

Social constructs are at first unknown—since Shori has no memory—even as she wanders naked through a burned-out town where she wonders if she had in fact lived before. It’s this confusion at the world around her that fascinates me. And of course, Butler being Butler, she then builds everything back up so that we see it with fresh eyes.

The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate

A photographer named Lucien finds himself at the Center, a California rehab where patients are given an experimental drug called Memoroxin (or Mem). It was developed for use among dementia suffers but is also the hip recreational drug of Hollywood because of its addictive voyeurism and ability to curate memories. It’s very Don DeLillo–esque—a very risky esque to try—but Westgate pulls off what could be a high-concept trick, making her own authentic comment on how we live and process in the moment, and after.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Originally published in 1994 but translated and named a best book of 2020 during the pandemic, The Memory Police’s easiest comparison is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet it sings with more poetry than Orwell’s plainspeak. As objects and concepts seem to disappear, only some of an island’s residents are able to remember them. “Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine,” the character’s mother tells him, showing him things she has hidden away that everyone else has forgotten. Ogawa tackles an impossible idea so skillfully, he makes us want to believe it.

Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

With delicate prose, Emma Healey is able to keep us grounded while also achieving a dreamlike effect. The mystery here is very meta: Maud, a woman living with Alzheimer’s, is trying to solve a missing persons case—her best friend who’s suddenly not at home, as well as her own sister who vanished 70 years ago. What is real, and what is imagined? What has been forgotten? And what does it mean when our concerns are dismissed by others?

In the Woods by Tana French

Gripping from the first word, Tana French has become known as a mystery maven for a reason. In this first book of her Dublin Murder Squad series, we begin by being taken into the narrator’s confidence about what he cannot trust of memory. We’re then launched into a precise police-report style recounting of a crime from 1984 of missing children in the woods near Knocknaree. It turns out our detective, Rob Ryan, is actually one of the victims—the one left alive. Trauma has taken his memories of that event. Rob now works as an investigator, so this is a double-case narrative. A 12-year-old girl has gone missing from the same woods, and he has to solve it—while also combing through his own traumatic past.

The Chimes by Anna Smaill

Amnesia through music… New Zealander author Anna Smaill is onto more than just a terrifying earworm here. In a fictional, primitive London, there’s an instrument called the Carillon—which enforces tinnitus, brainwashing its listeners until they can no longer remember. This happens ritually twice daily. Simon has traveled in from the country after his mother’s death, and befriends Lucien—the two teenagers roaming the city. Simon is on a mission to find out the meaning of what his mother told him on her deathbed.

Adjacentland by Rabindranath Maharaj

Adjacentland is an ahead-of-its-time novel which steers into eerie territory with its focus on creativity and AI. Our narrator awakes in a compound, where he comes to believe that he was once a comic book writer who warned that the reliance on artificial intelligence would make the imagination obsolete and subversive. As he searches for sketches, notes, and clues he may have left for himself before his memory loss, both he and the reader learn of Adjacentland, a primitive land of misfits and outsiders. It is only in Adjacentland that the imagination has survived. “Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day,” reads one of his foretelling sketches.

The post 8 Novels About Memory Loss appeared first on Electric Literature.

Memoirs, unlike, say, biographies, do not plod along at the pace of daily life. Their authors distill events, excising superfluous details and controlling the flow of information to create structure. True crime works in a similar way, except that its authors are mining the lived experience of others for material. (Notable exceptions are beautiful true crime memoirs like The Fact of a Body or Memorial Drive.) 

True crime—in its modern iteration anyway—is entertainment predicated on the suffering of others. Despite its name, it is interested in story over truth. It cannot afford to get bogged down in messiness, frustration, and randomness. Fine. Fair enough. I enjoy a tight and twisty narrative as much as the next person. But what are the implications of this kind of storytelling on the survivors of these events? On their communities? On the allocation of material resources (police, media attention, money)? What are the implications for those who consume violence and fear?

My novel, Rabbit Hole, follows a young woman named Teddy whose long-missing sister, Angie, has developed a true crime “fandom.” After their father, who was suspected—on the internet—of involvement in Angie’s disappearance dies by suicide, Teddy starts to engage in the online communities obsessed with her family. Even as Teddy fears the menacing internet rubberneckers who see her as a character in their conspiracy theories, she can’t resist their seductive pull.

The seven novels in this list are interested in various “dark sides” of true crime. Some of them offer correctives to famous true crime narratives, while others investigate the effect of the public’s attention on families, journalists, and victims themselves.

The Comfort of Monsters by Willa Richards

When Dee McBride goes missing in Milwaukee during the “Dahmer summer” of 1991, her disappearance is largely ignored. Media and police resources are instead devoted to obsessing over the details the man Richards refers to only as “the serial killer.” The Comfort of Monsters is a pitch-black book about familial loss, grief, and lurid public interest in grizzly tragedies. Richards explores the way that families and even entire communities can become victimized by tabloid interest in sensational crimes. If you love true crime, you may actually hate this book. The brilliance of Richards’s novel is her refusal to allow the narrative to mimic the fake and tidy structure of a true crime story. Instead, it hems closely to real life and honestly depicts the festering wounds that come with not knowing.  

Penance by Eliza Clark

In a small coastal town, a sixteen-year-old girl is immolated by three of her classmates. Ten years later, the definitive account of the event is penned by a journalist who has spoken to everyone involved and heavily researched the crime. Still a critical question remains: how much of the story is true? Eliza Clark, more than anyone on this list, is explicitly interested in the impulses that drive true crime consumption and the ethics of the genre.

Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

When Claire’s sister Alison goes missing on a Caribbean vacation and turns up dead in a nearby cay, two resort employees are arrested. They are quickly released, but by then the story has already exploded into a tabloid obsession that will haunt Claire for years to come. When she runs into one of the accused men years later, as an adult, Claire must reckon with the unsolved questions at the heart of her sister’s case and the way the crime (and its surrounding hoopla) affected so many others. Schaitkin riffs on a Natalee Holloway-esque disappearance in this novel, which interrogates true crime’s perennial interest in missing white women and the implications that such interest can have on multiple communities.

True Story by Kate Reed Petty

This book is one of my favorite reads of the last few years. A wildly inventive, formally playful look at the fallout from a high school sexual assault, True Story is interested in the role of memory and the way a single, monolithic story can become the dominant narrative around a crime. Alex, the victim at the center of the story, must ultimately defend herself not only against her possible assailants (and the community that rallied to protect the young athletes) but against her friend, Haley, an aspiring filmmaker keen on flattening and commodifying her story.

More Than You’ll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez

We’ve all heard of men with multiple families, but what about a woman leading such a double life? For true crime blogger Cassie Bowman, the story of Lore Rivera—and the dramatic way her marriages ended in the arrest of one husband for the murder of another—is too good to pass up. But as Bowman digs into Rivera’s life, often at the expense of her own personal relationships, she uncovers a story more complex and more human than she bargained for.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The title of Jessica Knoll’s latest comes from something a judge said to Ted Bundy during a sentencing: “you’re a bright young man.” In this novel, Knoll seeks to correct the true crime narrative that has warped Ted Bundy, transforming him from an arrogant, not-actually-all-that-bright murderer into a mythical, larger-than-life charisma machine. By focusing on the sorority sisters who would become Bundy’s final victims, Knoll offers a corrective and perhaps a new focus for avid true crime fans: the bright young women who suffered at Bundy’s hands.

Missing White Woman by Kellye Garrett

I’m showing off a little by including this book, since I was lucky enough to read an advanced copy. It doesn’t come out until April, but you can pre-order it now, and you should. The title comes from the late journalist Gwen Ifill, who is quoted in the epigraph: “I call it missing white woman search syndrome. If there is a missing white woman, you’re going to cover that every day.” Garrett cleverly explores this phenomenon in a book that is itself a twisty page-turner. When Bree wakes up on the final day of a romantic getaway to discover a dead woman in the foyer of the Airbnb her boyfriend rented, she knows she is in trouble. Add that to the fact that her boyfriend is nowhere to be found, and the dead woman is a Gabby Petito-type—someone the entire internet has been looking for. A tense, smart thriller that captures the madness of social media and addresses the intersection of true crime and race.

The post 7 Books on the Dark Side of True Crime appeared first on Electric Literature.

Since then, I’ve compiled a list along these lines each year, and though books by us have become more available and visible, it’s still true that, for instance, a disproportionately large majority of books published by the Big Five—the publishers that dominate the book market—are by white writers. This is also a time when a lot of U.S. schools and public libraries, under severe pressure from right-wing extremists, are banning and censoring books by people of color, and by queer and trans writers. The number of proscribed books is growing at a shocking rate. Dissenters are losing jobs. Here and there, my first novel and an anthology I coedited have been banned; in 2024, I’ll publish my queer, sexually celebratory second novel, Exhibit, and am already bracing myself for impending bans.

I maintain the hope that, one day, American letters will be so inclusive that a piece like this will no longer be useful. But for now, here are some 2024 books I’m excited to read. This is one person’s list, skewed by, in part, an incomplete knowledge of forthcoming titles. Without a doubt, I’m missing excellent books. If you’re looking forward to a book not mentioned here and wish to support it, please consider preordering it from your local bookstore, requesting it from the library, talking about it, or all of the above. Any of this can be enormously helpful to books and their writers.

Some brief notes on methodology: this piece is necessarily front-loaded toward the earlier part of the year, as there isn’t as much information yet about later titles. Much as I love poetry, I’m less up to date on what’s forthcoming in poetry, so I’ve focused on prose. The term “of color” is flawed and ever-shifting. In the past, a couple of versions of this list included nonbinary writers; Electric Literature and I then heard from a number of nonbinary writers that it can be preferable to avoid grouping nonbinary people with women. I’ve since kept this list to women: cis women and trans women, along with nonbinary women who assented to having their books included in this space. The vast majority of nonbinary writers and readers we’ve heard from have continued to find this preferable. Electric Literature will soon publish a piece about anticipated books by LGBTQIA+ writers.

I’m so glad about the novels, memoirs, essay collections, and other marvels coming our way; please join me in celebrating these books.

January

The Fetishist by Katherine Min

I met Katherine Min a decade ago at a gathering of Korean American writers, and was deeply sorry to hear, in 2019, that she’d died much too early. She left behind an unfinished novel that her daughter, Kayla Min Andrews, has completed. The resulting collaboration, The Fetishist, about an ill-conceived kidnapping, is astonishing. I’m thankful this book exists. 

A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson

I’ve followed historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s remarkable writing for a while, and in this book, Gill-Peterson ranges from New Orleans to Paris to the Philippines “in search of the emergence of modern trans misogyny.” “This is a sharply argued work by a brilliant thinker,” Shon Faye says.

Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Darraj

From the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction comes a debut novel depicting a Palestinian American community in Baltimore. According to Etaf Rum, Behind You is the Sea “fearlessly confronts stereotypes about Palestinian culture, weaving a remarkable portrait of life’s intricate moments, from joyous weddings to heart-wrenching funerals, from shattered hearts to hidden truths.”

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson

“With Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson cements herself as one of the most dynamic book makers in our generation and a literary giant. Utter genius tastes like this,” says Kiese Laymon. Wilkinson brings together kitchen ghosts, family photos, and stories of Black Appalachians in this part memoir, part cookbook.

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan

For months, I’ve heard about and looked forward to this debut novel featuring a Malay spy who collaborates with invading occupiers during World War II, and it’s almost here. Dawnie Walton applauds The Storm We Made as a “fearless, gripping, morally complex story” imbued with “an indelible spirit of resistance that never lets you forget the light.”

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

“Come and Get It is an engrossing novel full of intimately portrayed characters and the seemingly innocuous choices that lead to life-altering mistakes,” says Elizabeth Acevedo. Booker Prize-listed Kiley Reid’s second novel follows Millie Cousins, a senior at the University of Arkansas, offered an opportunity that ends up imperiling her hopes.

Your Utopia by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur

Bora Chung’s previous story collection, Cursed Bunny, a finalist for a National Book Award translated by the celebrated Anton Hur, is one of the more unforgettable and surprising books I’ve read in recent years. Chung and Hur are back with more stories.

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn

Dead in Long Beach, California, from Young Lions finalist Venita Blackburn, is centered on a woman who discovers her dead brother’s body then begins replying to texts as him. “You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it’s best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do,” says Saeed Jones. 

Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke

In this novel, estranged sisters reconnect in Kingston to spread their younger brother’s ashes. “A luminous tale of a latter-day Antigone who navigates grief, love, death, sex, violence, language, queerness, race, and three countries with courage, joy, and a tender heart,” says Stacey D’Erasmo.

River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure

Called a “reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative,” this debut is set in 1985 Qingdao and 2007 Shanghai. Garth Greenwell says it’s “a moving portrait of the love between a mother and daughter” in which “familiar narratives of adolescence are scrambled across lines of class, race, and national difference.”

February

Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin

Canisia Lubrin, a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, has written a first book of fiction that “departs from the infamous real-life ‘Code Noir,’ a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire.” The 1686 Code had 59 articles, and Lubrin’s book includes 59 braided stories that Christina Sharpe praises for their “formal inventiveness and sheer audaciousness.”

Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa 

“Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn’t know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history,” says Tommy Orange. A debut memoir from the director of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.

I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall

The profound—and, I’d argue, fictionally underexplored—pain of a friendship breakup is at the core of this novel from Mariah Stovall: after a decade of estrangement, a former friend invites Khaki Oliver to a party for her child. According to Vauhini Vara, “Mariah Stovall’s prose sounds like driving in a car with your best friend, volume up high on your favorite song.”

Almost Surely Dead by Amina Akhtar

Amina Akhtar, founding editor of The Cut, has written a novel about a woman who, having gone missing for a year, becomes the subject of a true-crime podcast. “Part thriller, part family saga, part supernatural horror, Almost Surely Dead will surprise you in the best way possible and leave you thinking about this magnificent book for a long time after you’re done,” says Alex Segura.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

This epic novel from publisher New Directions begins with a cloud heralding an ecological crisis in Australia. Praiseworthy is lauded by Australia’s The Monthly as “an astonishing and monumental masterpiece.”

Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks 

In Maura Cheeks’s debut novel, America is waiting to see if the country’s first woman president will pass a bill authorizing Black families to claim up to $175,000 if they can prove they’re the descendants of slaves. “Maura Cheeks extends humanity, depth, hope, and complexity to a part of the American experience that too often gets flattened into talking points. This book is a testament to the power of great fiction to lead us to a better understanding of the truth,” says R. Eric Thomas.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly

A bestseller in New Zealand, Rebecca K Reilly’s novel about queer siblings in a Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family is praised by Grant Ginder as a “wholly original, laugh-until-you-ugly-cry-on-the-subway debut.”

March

Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang

Kao Kalia Yang gives an account of her Hmong mother’s journey from a Laotian village to a refugee camp, then to the United States. Where Rivers Part, according to Vanessa Chan, is “an immense and important addition to the world’s literature.”

You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker

I’ll read anything the virtuosic Morgan Parker writes, and this National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet, essayist, and novelist is back with a memoir-in-essays combining criticism and personal anecdotes, and described as being “as intimate as being in the room with Parker and her therapist.” The essays explore topics including racist beauty standards, loneliness, and mischaracterizations of Serena Williams. 

Disability Intimacy by Alice Wong

The bestselling activist and writer Alice Wong has edited an anthology of first-person writing on disability, sex, and joy, a follow-up to the powerful Disability Visibility. In her new book, writers delve into “caregiving, community, access, and friendship,” offering “alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others.”

Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet

Since reading her story collection How to Leave Hialeah, I’ve relished Jennine Capó Crucet’s wise, incisive, frequently hilarious writing. Say Hello to My Little Friend features a failed Pitbull impersonator who crosses paths with an orca at the Miami Seaquarium. “Crucet can make you cry before you’ve even realized you’ve become invested and make you laugh even through the hurt,” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah says.

Memory Piece by Lisa Ko

“A group portrait of three women who wrest meaning from a world that is closing down around them, Memory Piece is bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love,” says C Pam Zhang. I’ve thought often of the National Book Award-listed Ko’s first and admirable novel, The Leavers, and have been waiting for her second book. 

The Translator’s Daughter by Grace Loh Prasad

“Grace Loh Prasad interrogates the distance between the homes we have and the homes we long for with the compassion and precision of one who has spent her entire life attuned to language. ‘We were always half a world apart,’ she writes; her essays bridge that gap in innovative ways, using family photos, mythical women, and Taiwanese films,” says Jami Nakamura Lin. The Translator’s Daughter is a memoir relating Prasad’s journey as an immigrant whose family was driven out of Taiwan under the threat of political persecution. 

These Letters End in Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere

In Cameroon, where being queer is legally punishable, a Christian girl and a Muslim girl fall in love. Soon Wiley calls this debut novel “an urgent and devastating story about the cost of living in a place that refuses to recognize your humanity.”

The Manicurist’s Daughter by Susan Lieu

Susan Lieu’s mother, a Vietnamese refugee who set up nail salons in California, died from a botched abdominoplasty. After the funeral, Lieu wasn’t allowed to talk about her mother nor what happened. Searching for answers, Lieu turns to depositions, the surgeon’s family, and spirit channelers.

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

Thunder Song, a collection of essays drawing on family archives and an ancestor’s anthropological work, chronicles Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s experiences as a queer indigenous woman. “None of Sasha’s examinations fail to find truth: page after page, the intersections of family, heritage, history, and music build to countless transcendental moments for the reader, which is not only the magic of this book but a clear testament to Sasha’s immense storytelling power,” says Morgan Talty.

Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham

According to Kim Fu, “The Invisible Hotel wrestles artfully with big, vital questions: How do we honor and care for our elders without reinforcing a cycle of generational trauma? How do we forge new, joyful paths without indulging in mass cultural amnesia or closing our eyes to a world on fire? That it does so in a surreal, riveting, keep-the-lights-on masterwork of horror is all the more extraordinary.” The novel follows a South Korean woman in a small village who drives a North Korean refugee to visit a sibling in prison.

Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi’s many fans will surely be thrilled by this new addition to her inventive oeuvre. Parasol Against the Axe is described as a joyful novel about “competitive friendship, the elastic boundaries of storytelling, and the meddling influence of a city called Prague.”

Anita De Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

In this widely anticipated sophomore book, the bestselling novelist Xochitl Gonzalez tells the story of a first-generation Ivy League student who comes upon the work of a gifted artist decades after her suspicious death. Robert Jones, Jr. calls the novel “rollicking, melodic, tender, and true” and “oh so very wise.”

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

But the Girl, already published to acclaim in the U.K. and Australia, features a Malaysian Australian artist traveling to Scotland intending to write a Ph.D. on Sylvia Plath, plus a novel. Brandon Taylor, the book’s acquiring editor in the U.S., says But the Girl is a “vivid novel of consciousness with a delightful sense of play.”

Starry Field by Margaret Juhae Lee

Margaret Juhae Lee combines interviews with her grandmother, investigative journalism, and archival research to learn more about her grandfather, a student revolutionary who died after protesting the Japanese government’s occupation of Korea.

The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

“This is a gorgeous and completely unique novel, bristling with life like the garden it describes. It is melancholy, erotic, hopeful, meditative, frightening, and even funny―a book about solitude that is never lonely, a book that is both timeless and utterly contemporary,” says Lydia Kiesling. Marie Mockett’s intriguing new novel brings together caretaking, ardor, a cherry tree, an arborist, and The Tale of Genji. 

The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez

“Cristina Henríquez gives us cause to celebrate with this sweeping novel. It speeds us into a wild world of adventure and danger, epic visions of the creation of the Panama Canal,” according to Luis Alberto Urrea. A third novel from the writer of the striking The Book of Unknown Americans.

Green Frog by Gina Chung

I rejoiced in Gina Chung’s first novel, Sea Change, and its tender story of a woman and a giant octopus. Chung’s new book is a magic-imbued collection of fiction that Kali Fajardo-Anstine says is “pulsating with heart and profound emotional intelligence.”

Lessons for Survival by Emily Raboteau

Lessons for Survival, which mingles reportage, autobiography, and photography, is introduced as a “series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.” Imani Perry says the American Book Award-winning Emily Raboteau “traverses generations and geographies, all the while caring for her children, and in so doing, teaches us that to ‘mother’ is to tend, to study, to nurture, and to hand over our most precious inheritances.”

dear elia by Mimi Khúc

I grew up in a part of Los Angeles that was mostly Asian American, and didn’t know anyone who so much as spoke about thinking of seeing a therapist until I went to college. Things have changed since then, but not close to enough; I’m excited for Mimi Khúc’s book, a series of letters described as work that “bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness.” 

Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura

I’ve anticipated Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s debut novel since I first heard her read in 2018, and, at last, the book is almost here. Like Happiness follows a woman living in the aftermath of a consuming, destructive relationship she once had with a legendary writer in New York.

April 

I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter

I Just Keep Talking is comprised of the bestselling Nell Irvin Painter’s essays on art, politics, and racism. “Consistently brilliant, restlessly curious and profoundly empathetic, Nell Irvin Painter’s voice is simply indispensable. This decades-spanning collection pulls together some of her most elegant, engaged and urgent work,” Jelani Cobb says.

Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall

Playwright Jessie Ren Marshall’s debut collection of stories is said to be “ferociously feminist” and “hilarious, heartbreaking, and defiantly optimistic.” Vanessa Hua applauds the book’s “thrilling range of characters—an android, space traveler, former ballerina, jilted wives and more—in stories that examine race, gender, sexuality and other elements of identity with confidence and grace.”

Real Americans by Rachel Khong

I had the deep pleasure of reading an early draft of Real Americans, a shape-shifting, expansive wonder that, in its large-hearted investigations into fortune, luck, class, and trauma, spans countries, decades, and altered realities. It’s an epic and splendid achievement from a writer whose work I’ve loved for years. 

I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López

According to Nancy Jooyoun Kim, “I’ll Give You a Reason is a rare page-turner of a collection: startlingly sensitive, oozing with compassion, and full of both gentle and explosive revelations about human nature, forgiveness, and the grace we sometimes fail to offer ourselves.” These stories, about Dominican immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, have won the Feminist Press’s Louise Meriwether First Book Prize.

The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim

I read the entirety of The Stone Home during a recent flight to Seoul, unable to put it down, often crying. It’s set in a South Korea of the 1980s, largely taking place in a “reformatory center” for marginalized citizens, a state-sanctioned hell of terror and violence. The novel’s portrayals of caretaking, mothering, and tenderness inside and despite the reformatory’s walls are richly layered and intensely moving. 

The Lantern and the Night Moths by Yilin Wang

Poet and translator Yilin Wang translates poems by five modernist Chinese writers, then accompanies the translations with her own essays on “the key themes and stylistic features of modern Sinophone poetry and on the art and craft of poetry translation.” I’ve admired Wang’s translations of poetry, and look forward to reading their hybrid book as well. 

May

Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

I’ve loved Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s poems, and, since I first heard about it, have eagerly awaited her debut book of prose. The collection, which with each essay attempts to “reimagine and re-world what has been lost,” explores the healing potentials of fantasy in the midst of grief. 

Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

It might be evident by now that I tend to be drawn to the prose of poets, and the bestselling poet-essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil is back with a follow-up book of essays, this time centered on food and flavors including shaved ice, lumpia, mangoes, and vanilla. The collection also incorporates illustrations by Fumi Nakamura. 

But What Will People Say? by Sahaj Kaur Kohli

Sahaj Kaur Kohli is a Washington Post advice columnist and the founder of Brown Girl Therapy, a mental health community organization for the children of immigrants. She “rethinks traditional therapy and self-care models, creating much-needed space for those left out of the narrative” with a debut that combines personal narrative, analysis, and research.

I’m a Fool to Want You by Camila Sosa Villada, translated by Kit Maude

A bestseller in Argentina, I’m a Fool to Want You is the second book by the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz- and Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro-winning Camila Sosa Villada to be translated into English. Hailed by Torrey Peters as “a wise, uncommon, and bewitching storyteller,” Sosa Villada’s story collection promises to be formally original and imaginatively wide-ranging. 

Oye by Melissa Mogollon

“An emotional roller coaster of multigenerational chisme, Oye jump-starts your heart in the same way the expletive piques your ear,” according to Xochitl Gonzalez. A first novel including a familial crisis, the revelation of long-held secrets, and an approaching hurricane.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

In this speculative, genre-mixing debut novel taking place in the near future, time travel is run by a bureaucracy. Max Porter calls it “exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender, and moving.” 

Wait by Gabriella Burnham

“Wait simultaneously illuminates the precariousness of young womanhood and existing as an immigrant in the U.S., while showing the resourcefulness and strength needed to survive,” says Daphne Palasi Andreades. A novel about a mother who’s vanished and the sisters trying to bring her back.

How to Make Your Mother Cry by Sejal Shah

Short stories join imagined letters to a valued English teacher in this collection from interdisciplinary writer and artist Sejal Shah. “How to Make Your Mother Cry is an incredible cross-cultural manifesto of word and body: What is home. What is mother. What is family. What is self. What is woman, and how do we story her,” says Lidia Yuknavitch.

See: Loss. See Also: Love. by Yukiko Tominaga

I have an abiding belief that punctuation marks, commas aside, are tragically underused in book titles—colons aside, too, you might say, but those are usually only used before subtitles—and am already delighted by the proliferation thereof in Yukiko Tominaga’s novel. Tominaga’s debut features Kyoko, a Japanese widow, raising her son Alex in San Francisco with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law, and is described as being “tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest.”

June

Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo

Born in the Himalayas, writer-filmmaker Priyanka Mattoo and her family fled the region as a result of rising violence. Mattoo ended up residing at 32 subsequent addresses, an odyssey she chronicles in Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones. “Priyanka Mattoo has recreated the beloved, intoxicating Kashmir of her childhood in this beautiful memoir, and in doing so, renders the place immortal. I would follow Mattoo to the ends of the earth, because she would know what to eat there, and how to make a friend, and then sit me down and tell me a story,” says Emma Straub. 

Tehrangeles by Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour began Tehrangeles in 2011, and this long-gestated novel is described as a “tragicomic saga about high-functioning family dysfunction and the ever-present struggle to accept one’s true self.” The Milanis are fast-food heiresses in Los Angeles; the prospect of having their own reality television show, and the attendant potential fame, evoke the possibility that perhaps too many secrets will be exposed. 

Craft by Ananda Lima

Poet Ananda Lima’s first book of prose, a story collection, starts with a writer who has sex with the devil, then proceeds to write stories for him. I’m already enchanted by this idea, and Gwen Kirby calls the book “a beautiful work of alchemy: strange and familiar, experimental and narrative, topical and timeless, heart-wrenching and wickedly funny.” 

Malas by Marcela Fuentes

A family living on the Texas-Mexico border contends with what might be a forty-year-old curse in this novel said to be “rich with cinematic details—from dusty rodeos to the excitement of a Selena concert and the comfort of conjunto ballads played at family gatherings.” According to Erika Sánchez, “Fuentes has achieved something rare and indelible with this story of complex women.”

July

The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary

The Lucky Ones is a memoir by a survivor of 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Ahmedabad, an Indian metropolis whose chief minister at the time, Narendra Modi, is now the prime minister of the country. “A warning, thrown to the world, and a stunning debut—Chowdhary is a much-needed new voice,” says Alexander Chee.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

This comedic novel follows a novelist braving an ill-fated foray into Hollywood. I’m a longtime fan of Danzy Senna’s writing, and Rumaan Alam calls Colored Television “a riveting and exhilarating novel about making art and selling out, about being middle aged and precariously middle class.”

Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles

In 1840s England, a man whisks his outsider bride, Orabella, to a family estate. Not permitted to leave the house unattended, and waking up in the morning covered in mysterious bruises, Orabella begins to realize the house is filled with dangers both human and ghostly.

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

A Palestinian woman becomes a teacher at a New York school for underprivileged boys, and gets involved in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags. “Like Jean Rhys, Yasmin Zaher captures the outrageous loneliness of contemporary life, the gradual and total displacement of the human heart. This is a novel of wealth, filth, beauty, and grief told in clarion prose and with unbearable suspense,” Hilary Leichter says. 

A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki

Asha Thanki’s A Thousand Times Before is a saga relating the stories of three generations of women who inherit a magical tapestry “through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her,” along with an ability to reshape the world. With this novel, their debut, Thanki depicts decades of loss and power in Karachi, Gujarat, and Brooklyn. 

Docile by Hyeseung Song

A coming-of-age memoir and account of living with mental illness, Docile is said to be for readers of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. The book is extolled by Kat Chow as “a story of loneliness and searching that brims with radiant empathy.”

Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

Lion Women of Tehran is a novel about a consequential childhood friendship and eventual, terrible betrayal. Whitney Scharer calls Marjan Kamali’s prose “evocative, devastating, and hauntingly beautiful.”

August

Silken Gazelles by Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth

As a Jokha Alharthi enthusiast, I’m glad we’ll have a new novel from this formidable, International Booker Prize-winning writer and academic. Silken Gazelles circles around two girls in Oman, and the book is being compared to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.

The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya

I’ve admired Jo Hamya’s writing, and will surely rush to read this novel featuring a young playwright on the verge of finding out what her novelist father will think of her new play, which is informed by a vacation they took years ago in Sicily. Katie Kitamura lauds Hamya’s previous novel, Three Rooms, as being “precisely and beautifully rendered.”

The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Sisters in El Salvador flee violence, and are chased by ghosts of their murdered friends, a “chorus of furies” bent on telling their stories. Peter Ho Davies says The Volcano Daughters is a “marvel of a book, at once lush and stark, mythic and earthy.”

Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities edited by Rachel Kuo, Jaimee Swift, and Tiffany Tso

This collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective gathers organizers, artists, and writers to reflect on contemporary feminism. I can’t wait to read this Haymarket publication of their work.

The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter

In this second novel from the PEN/Hemingway Award finalist Regina Porter, a group of New Yorkers are brought together by the search for a missing pregnant woman. “A lush study of relationships, keen on the particulars of vast human catastrophes,” says Raven Leilani. 

The Palace of Eros by Caro de Robertis

I delighted in Caro de Robertis’s previous novels, and their newest book is a feminist, queer retelling of the Psyche-Eros myth. Madeline Miller calls de Robertis’s writing “brilliant and luminous.”

The Fallen Fruit by Shawntelle Madison

History professor Cecily Bridge-Davis moves through time to try to free her family from a family curse. During these dangerous temporal travels, she encounters a circle of ancestors.

September & later

Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato

National Book Award-listed translator Bruna Dantas Lobato has written a novel depicting a Brazilian college student’s first year in America. She forges a changing relationship with her mother over long-distance video calls. 

Tiny Threads by Lilliam Rivera

Lilliam Rivera is a force in young-adult fiction, and in Tiny Threads, her adult debut, a fashion-loving woman is overjoyed to get a job working with a legendary designer hero. But as a fashion show approaches, so does what might be supernatural menace.

Ruined a Little When We Were Born by Tara Isabel Zambrano

Memorably billed as “Jhumpa Lahiri on LSD,” this collection includes stories having to do with motherhood, mythology, and women’s desires.

First in the Family by Jessica Hoppe

Jessica Hoppe, a mental health advocate and former editor of Stylecaster, has written a memoir about being the first in her family to recover from addiction.

The Water Remembers by Amy Bowers Cordalis

Amy Bowers Cordalis, along with her family and the Yurok Tribe, fought government agencies a long time over the damming of irrigation waters. In 2022, Congress ordered that the dam be removed from the Klamath River, and Cordalis tells the story of this fight and triumph.

The post 75 Books By Women of Color to Read in 2024 appeared first on Electric Literature.

These international programs have different criteria, costs, and application processes, listed below. Some require residents to take part in shared dinners, present talks, engage in events with the local community, or participate in a literary festival; while others emphasize solitude and productivity. 

Here are 17 free or low-cost writing residencies from around the world: 

Latin America

Pocoapoco in Oaxaca, Mexico

Pocoapoco is a non-profit organization dedicated to experimentation, education and relation through artistic & social practices. With a focus on intercultural and interdisciplinary exchange, the program aims to generate, strengthen & connect initiatives & practices that further collective reflection, knowledge & change. Pocoapoco (Spanish for little by little) is both a name and an approach, representing the organization’s guidance from its home in Oaxaca and the global south. From September to April, Pocoapoco hosts 5-week residencies made up of international and local residents who come together to think, work, discuss and collaborate. With a focus on shared practice & dialogue, the residency works to support and connect individuals, ideas and practices catalyzing social discourse, understanding and change. 

Artists and non-artists across all fields are welcome. Pocoapoco considers active observation, dialogue and reflection as essential to building new ways of coming together and creating together across locations, disciplines and practices.

Housing, studio space, and all meals are provided to residents. Sliding scale fees are offered to all accepted residents: the actual cost of each residency is $500 per week but sliding scale fees beginning at $200 week are offered for each resident. Residency fees cover minimal program costs and support for local artists and public programs. Residents are asked to pay what they are able. Sliding scale fees are offered in lieu of partial scholarships to select residents. 

• Cost: Sliding scale fees beginning at $200 to $500 a week
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico

Founded in 2003 to identify talented writers from across the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds, Under the Volcano is a 2-week international residency that convenes every January in Tepoztlán, Mexico, an hour from Mexico City in the foothills of the great volcanoes. A third optional week is available to those able to stay on in the village to write. The residency program’s master classes are open to emerging and accomplished fiction writers, poets, essayists and journalists, and offer high-level feedback and mentorship from master writers. A roster of distinguished guests joins the residency’s core faculty in a program designed to take each participant’s voice to the next level. The program’s diverse, carefully curated community is recreated each year on the principles of mutual support and respect for differences of nationality, character, opinion, identity, age and life choices. The program is priced in three different currencies based on where you earn and work, and payment plans are available on request. Full Named Fellowships are also available, and cover tuition for the program, accommodation in the village, and roundtrip transportation to Mexico City from a single point of origin in either Mexico or the U.S. Fellows are responsible for their transportation to Tepoztlán and should expect to pay for their own meals except for breakfast. If needed, a modest stipend is available to fellowship recipients to cover daily expenses during the program. Limited financial aid is also offered based on applicants’ proof of their past three months of monthly income and expenses.

• Cost: Several pricing plans available, as well as full-named fellowships and limited financial aid
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: Applications open yearly on July 1, and regular acceptances are made until all slots are filled.

Instituto Sacatar in Itaparica, Brazil

The non-profit Instituto Sacatar provides artists from around the world with 7- to 9-week residencies at the beachside estate on the island, to create new works within an international community of artists, many of whom explore the unique cultural heritage of Bahia, Brazil. Sacatar Foundation places creative individuals in immersive intercultural experiences at its international artist residency program. According to its website, “While we sometimes use the word ‘artist,’ we interpret ‘creativity’ in the broadest possible sense. We seek creative individuals of all disciplines and backgrounds, without regard to race, creed, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, marital status, ancestry, disability or HIV status.” Housing, studio space, and food are provided, at no cost. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: $25
• Deadline: TBD

Europe

Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy

Located in the fishing village of Bogliasco near Genoa, the Bogliasco Foundation offers one-month residencies to individuals who can demonstrate notable achievement in the Arts and Humanities. Taking inspiration from the ancient port of Genoa, which has brought global travelers together throughout the ages, the Foundation strives to foster productive exchange by composing intimate groups of 8-10 residents who represent a diversity of disciplines, ages, and nationalities. During their month long stay at the Center, Bogliasco Fellows are provided with living quarters (bedroom with private bath), full board, and a workspace or separate studio, depending on the discipline. All meals are shared, and every evening, Fellows come together for a served dinner featuring typical local cuisine from the region of Liguria. Special Fellowships are also offered, some of which offer a stipend and/or travel support. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: $30 up to one week before each final deadline, then $45 from that date onward
• Deadline: December 1st, 2023 for Fall 2024, and March 14th, 2024 for Spring 2025. 

The Bellagio Center Residency Program in Bellagio, Italy

Located in Lake Como, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program offers academics, artists, policymakers, and practitioners with the opportunity to unlock their creativity and advance groundbreaking work through the completion of a specific project in a residential group setting during 4 weeks of focused time. Rather than a retreat for private reflection, the Bellagio Center Residency offers an opportunity to advance a specific breakthrough project and a stimulating environment to forge cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural connections with other residents that can strengthen their work, shift their perspectives, and spur new ideas. Those invited to apply include artists and writers, including but not limited to composers, fiction and non-fiction writers, playwrights, poets, video/filmmakers, dancers, musicians, and visual artists who share in the Foundation’s mission of promoting the well-being of humankind, and produce work that enhances our shared understanding of pressing global or social issues. Residents are provided with room and board, studio space, the opportunity to bring a partner/significant other to join the residency for all or a portion of their stay, travel funding (based on financial need), and “future participation in an international network of Bellagio Center leaders, united in the shared purpose of creating a better world.”

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: TBD
• Deadline: February

Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, Switzerland

At the foot of the Swiss Jura Mountains, approximately 30 minutes from Lausanne and one hour from Geneva, the Jan Michalski Foundation’s residency for writers features a group of seven cabins that hang from an openwork “canopy” running above the foundation’s campus. Offering ideal conditions for writers and translators, six of these cabins provide stunning views of Lake Geneva and the Alps, while a seventh is oriented towards the forested slopes of the Jura. Residencies vary in length, from 2 weeks to 3 months, and include housing, studio space, breakfast and lunch, and a weekly stipend. Residents are also given access to the residency library and are welcome to participate in cultural activities organized by the Foundation. Writer-pairs working on a collaborative project are also welcome to apply.  

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency Program in Ménerbes, France

Based at the Dora Maar House, the Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency Program offers residencies of one to two months to mid-career arts and humanities professionals. After serving as the summer home of the surrealist artist and photographer Dora Maar, who was once a companion and muse to Picasso, the Dora Maar House was purchased in 1997 by Nancy Brown Negley, an American arts patron who renovated the house to create a residency for writers, academics, and artists. Most of its fellows have completed and published at least one work, or have had at least one solo exhibition, or have completed a full-length film, and are professionals established in their field of expertise. The residency is free to attend and includes private bedroom and bath, private studio, roundtrip travel to and from the Dora Maar House, and a grant based on one’s length of stay. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: $25 
• Deadline: Applications open in February, ending in October

Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France

Founded by American artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill, the Camargo Foundation fosters creativity, research, and experimentation through its international residency program for artists, scholars, and thinkers. Located on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, the Foundation offers time and space in a contemplative and supportive environment, giving residents the freedom to think, create, and connect. The residencies are programmed either by the Foundation, as in the case of the Camargo Core Program, or in partnership. The Camargo Core Program consists of a 10-week fellowship for scholars, thinkers, and artists’ in all disciplines, and provides housing, studio space, a weekly stipend, and transportation to and from Cassis (for air travel, basic coach class booked in advance is provided). Spouses/adult partners and dependent minor children (at least six years old) are welcome to accompany fellows for short stays or for the duration of the residency. Regular project discussions give fellows the opportunity to share their work, and all Fellows are required to be present at these discussions. These project discussions serve as an opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange.

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

Hawthornden Castle in Midlothian, Scotland

Established by Drue Heinz, the noted philanthropist and patron of the arts, the Foundation is named after Hawthornden Castle where an international residency program provides month-long retreats for creative writers from all disciplines and languages to work in peaceful surroundings. Located 7 miles from Edinburgh, Hawthornden Castle stands on an isolated rock above the gorge of the river North Esk, and is entirely surrounded by woods. As guests of the retreat, residents receive full bed and board, and have use of communal facilities including an extensive library as well as the castle garden and grounds. Though Hawthornden Castle will be closed for the entire year in 2024 to undergo extensive repairs and renovation, applications will reopen the same year for residencies in 2025. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

Africa

Nawat Fes in Fes, Morocco

Nawat Fes offers funded residencies of roughly two months in duration to U.S. and international creators in multiple disciplines. Hosted by the American Language Center Fes / Arabic Language Institute in Fez, a member of the American Cultural Association, this residency strives to employ artmaking as a means to cultivate understanding across cultures. Nawat Fes offers residencies in multiple disciplines, including Literature (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Playwriting, Screenwriting, and Literary Translation); Visual and Performance Art; and Music Composition and Performance. The program also accepts artist collaboratives of up to three people. Two Nawat Fes artist residents at a time live and work in the ancient medina of Fes, which is considered one of the most extensive and best conserved historic cities of the Arab-Muslim world. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Fes medina is one of the world’s largest pedestrian zones, containing narrow alleyways leading to ancient architectural treasures, traditional houses, artisan workshops and open-air markets. The residency provides housing and a stipend. In exchange, residents will be expected to offer two opportunities for the community to engage with their work. These could be public programs such as a talk, performance, reading, lecture, workshop or concert, or an exhibition of their work during the residency. These programs are intended for local students of English and/or international students of Arabic, as well as the local community. Artists should be prepared to engage with our community in English or Arabic.

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: $25
• Deadline: Feb 15

Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch, South Africa

Situated in a university town in the Western Cape province, about 31 miles east of Cape Town, the STIAS Individual Fellowships aim to provide and maintain an independent “creative space for the mind” to advance the cause of science and scholarship across all disciplines. It is global in its reach and local in its African roots, and values original thinking and innovation in this context. No restriction is placed on the country of origin, discipline, or academic affiliation when STIAS considers a fellowship invitation. It encourages the cross-pollination of ideas and hence gives preference to projects that will tap into, and benefit from, a multi-disciplinary discourse while also contributing unique perspectives to such a discourse. This interaction is fostered by inviting individual fellows or project teams where each team member is evaluated individually. Under its artists-in-residence program, creative writers are welcome to apply for these semester-long fellowships. Residents receive full funding and are housed, at no cost, at the Wallenberg Research Centre, a state-of-the-art conference and research facility overlooking vineyards, gardens, and mountains. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: April 30th

Asia

Sangam House in Bangalore, India

Located at The Jamun, a spacious bungalow on a quiet, green lane, Sangam House provides 4- and 2-week residencies for writers from India and around the world who have published to some acclaim but have not yet enjoyed substantial commercial success. Sangam House seeks to give writers a chance to build a solid and influential network of personal and professional relationships that can deepen their own work. The word sangam in Sanskrit literally means “going together.” In most Indian languages, sangam has come to mean such confluences as the “flowing together of rivers” and “coincidence.” The intention of Sangam House is to bring together writers from around the world to live and work in a safe, peaceful setting, a space made necessary on many levels by the world we now live in. Residents are provided with large private bedrooms in shared living quarters, studio space, and all meals. There is no cost to attend. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: Applications open in March

Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, China

Located in a converted luxury hotel along the Bund in Shanghai’s former financial district, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel artist residency invites artists from across the globe to immerse themselves in the city’s unique cultural environment while creating new work. Dancers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, writers, painters, conceptual artists, and many more creative individuals from around the world live and work in this historic landmark once known as the Palace Hotel from a period of three to six months. Accepted fellows are provided with assistance towards applying for a Chinese Business Visa (up to 300 Swiss Francs), a roundtrip economy ticket to Shanghai, accommodation, studio space, housekeeping service, and breakfast. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: 30 Swiss Francs (to be donated in full to Doctors Without Borders)
• Deadline: Currently accepting applications

International Writers’ Workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong

IWW is a self-funded, non-profit program supported solely by donations. Its goal is to invite writers from around the world to visit HKBU and engage in creativity-inspiring activities with local students, writers, and the Hong Kong community in general, providing opportunities for cultural exchange within and outside the university campus. Writers in residence stay on campus and interact with university students and staff, as well as with Hong Kong writers and the public. For its Writers-in-Residence Programme, a group of international writers are selected from a competitive pool of applicants each spring and invited to stay on campus for 4 weeks. Applicants must have at least one published book; currently reside outside Hong Kong; and have a functional command of English or Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese). Accommodation on the HKBU campus, roundtrip economy airfare, and a pier diem are provided. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

Oceania

Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship, Centre for Stories in Perth, Australia

Offered by the Centre for Stories in Perth, Western Australia, the Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship is a 9-week fellowship that is open to writers living outside Australia. It aims to support the work of talented individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to ideas and practices that foster belonging and better cross-cultural understanding. The Fellowship is open to fiction, non-fiction, poetry and short story writers who work in English and whose work is available in Australia. Applicants must have at least two full-length publications published by a trade publisher. Applicants currently enrolled in an undergraduate or postgraduate (including higher degree by research) university course are not eligible. The fellowship will take place over any nine-week period between March 2024 and July 2024. 

The value of the fellowship is AUD $35,000 which will cover the following expenses: Living allowance of $15,000, accommodation will be provided for 8 weeks in Perth, return economy airfare, travel expenses and accommodation for a week in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: January 9th

NZ Pacific Studio in Wairarapa, New Zealand

Located in the beautiful Wairarapa region of New Zealand’s North Island, the New Zealand Pacific Studio is an award-winning residency program that hosts creative practitioners from Aotearoa/New Zealand and abroad. It currently operates through a network of hosts, most of whom are artists themselves, who accommodate artists-in-residence on their properties. Through the generosity of individuals and institutions in the local community, several supported residencies are offered each year—for writers, there is RAK Mason Residency, and the Ema Saiko Poetry Fellowship. 

Usually 2 to 3 weeks long, these opportunities vary according to funding periods and may not be offered annually. They cover accommodation, a stipend, access to the residency library, and local transportation. Residents provide for their own meals—though there are often shared meals with hosts—and arrange for their own transportation to and from Wairarapa. Most come with the request to offer a community activity, for which the residency organizers can assist with logistics. 

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature Writers Residency in Caselberg, New Zealand

Run jointly by the Caselberg Trust and Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature, the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature Writers Residency aims to provide international and New Zealander writers with the opportunity to work on a substantial piece of creative writing and to foster connections among creative writers in Aotearoa/New Zealand and internationally. There are no limits in terms of genre, language, or length of writing, and completion of the project during the Residency is not a requirement. This residency is offered annually for a period of 6 weeks to writers from other UNESCO Cities of Literature and to New Zealand writers in alternating years. All residents receive a stipend of NZ$4,000, and international residents also receive up to NZ$3,000 towards travel costs. Accommodation is provided rent-free at the Caselberg House for the six-week duration of the Residency, and power and heating costs are to be met by the resident. The resident may be expected to attend Residency-related events conducted in English during the Residency period such as a welcoming evening, sponsor events, interviews, and community events related to Residency project/theme.

• Cost: Free
• Application Fee: None
• Deadline: TBD

The post Free or Low-Cost Residency Programs from Around the World to Apply to in 2024 appeared first on Electric Literature.