21 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021
As our TBR list grows longer, with no end in sight, here are 21 books that will be released this year that we are particularly excited about.
Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour - January 5 ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Black Buck tells the story of the rise and fall for a young black salesman at an all-white NYC tech startup. It’s the story of how one man battles racism and microaggressions to get to the top of a cult-like startup. When it becomes clear he’s the token Black guy, he hatches a plan to help people of color infiltrate America’s sales teams, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game. It’s a razor-sharp novel that skewers America’s workforce, explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.
Outlawed by Anna North - January 5 ( Bloomsbury)
The Crucible meets True Grit in this riveting adventure story of a fugitive girl, a mysterious gang of robbers, and their dangerous mission to transform the Wild West.
White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind by Koa Beck - January 5 (Simon and Schuster)
A timely and impassioned exploration of how our society has commodified feminism and continues to systemically shut out women of color.
Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity by Nadia Owusu - January 12 (Simon Schuster)
This poetic, genre-bending work—blending memoir with cultural history—from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu grapples with the fault lines of identity, the meaning of home, black womanhood, and the ripple effects, both personal and generational, of emotional trauma.
Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses - January 19 (Catapult)
Craft in the Real World challenges current models of craft and workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers. Matthew deconstructs craft as a set of expectations about how and whose stories should be told—that, in America, traditionally cater to (straight, cis, able, upper-middle-class) white males— and considers how we can best invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces. At the end of the book are suggestions for teachers for building syllabi, grading, and introducing new methods into the classroom, and a series of helpful exercises and writing prompts for students and other writers.
The Removed by Brandon Hobson - February 2 (Ecco)
Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.
Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen - February 2 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present.
Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz - February 2 (Grove Atlantic)
Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.
Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar - February 2 (Catapult)
Coloring this road trip are journeys abroad and recollections of a life lived with daring. Reclaiming her autonomy after a life of survival—domestic assault as a child, and later, as a wife; threats and doxxing after her viral tweet about Barbara Bush—Jarrar offers a bold look at domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexuality through the lens of the punished-yet-triumphant body. On the way, she schools a rest-stop racist, destroys Confederate flags in the desert, and visits the Chicago neighborhood where her immigrant parents first lived.
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder - February 2 ( Simon and Schuster)
Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones- February 2 (Little, Brown and Company)
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town in Baxter Beach, Barbados, told by an astonishing new author of literary fiction.
Come Fly the World by Julia Cooke - March 2 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
In a Mad-Men-era of commercial flight, Pan Am Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up. ulia Cooke’s intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters, from small-town girl Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few Black stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of their new jet-set life.
The Arsonist’ City by Hala Alyan - March 9 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Nasr family of the book is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. And in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, family secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold them together. Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).
Sarahland by Sam Cohen - March 9 (Grand Central Publishing)
In Sarahland, Sam Cohen brilliantly and often hilariously explores the ways in which traditional stories have failed us, both demanding and thrillingly providing for its cast of Sarahs new origin stories, new ways to love the planet and those inhabiting it, and new possibilities for life itself.
Girlhood by Melissa Febos - March 30 (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny. Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.
Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia - March 30 (Macmillan)
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women.
Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer by Jamie Figueroa - April 6 (Catapult)
In the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, in the aftermath of their mother’s passing, two siblings spend a final weekend together in their childhood home. As the siblings reckon with generational and ancestral trauma, set against the indignities of present-day prejudice, other strange hauntings begin to stalk these pages: their mother’s ghost kicks her heels against the walls; Rufina’s vanished child creeps into her arms at night; and above all this, watching over the siblings, a genderless, flea-bitten angel remains hell-bent on saving what can be saved.
Low Country by J. Nicole Jones - April 13 (Catapult)
After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men and unwanted spectacle, Jones finds herself face to face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake.
Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger - May 1 (Santa Fe Writer's Project)
Dancyger’s father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away.
Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy by Larissa Pham - May 4 (Catapult)
Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love--with a place, or a painting, or a person--and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss--from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde--Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder - July 20 (Doubleday)
In this blazingly smart and voracious debut, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog.
