PopSugar included Antonia Angress’ SIRENS & MUSES in a collection of must-reads for 2022, praising: “Antonia Angress’ debut novel SIRENS & MUSES sucks readers into the merciless New York City art scene where four artists wrestle with rivalries, attraction and politics…[with a] tumultuous dynamic.” and praised the characters’ “tumultuous dynamic.” Ballantine Books will publish the novel on July 12, 2022.

GOLDEN AX, the debut poetry collection by Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Rio Cortez, received a beautiful rave in the July/August print issue of Essence. The review reads: “Cortez examines how her family came to the American West after Reconstruction — and reimagines the landscape through the lens of Black people who both embody and defy its realities. In the process, we are pushed to envision our own futures on the frontier, united by a collective aspiration to freedom.” Elsewhere, The Atlantic published a poem from the collection titled “Ars Poetica with Mother and Dog” on July 3. Penguin Books will publish GOLDEN AX on August 30, 2022.

CONCERNING THOSE WHO HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP by Adam Soto received a great review from Publishers Weekly. The reviewer writes: “Soto (THIS WEIGHTLESS WORLD) returns with an imaginative and otherworldly collection...In these well-crafted stories, Soto evocatively shows how the characters are at turns mystified by inexplicable experiences or haunted by burdensome pasts...Readers will be enriched by the way this work thoroughly investigates the human heart.” Astra House will publish the short story collection on September 27, 2022.

Carlene Bauer’s latest novel GIRLS THEY WRITE SONGS ABOUT was named one of the “Best New Books of 2022” by People Magazine, who praise it as “a fantastically vivid story about feminism and friendship.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the book on June 21, 2022.

IN SENSORIUM by Tanaïs is one of NPR’s Best Books of 2022. Book critic and Desi Books podcast host Jenny Bhatt writes: “All our perceptions, interpretations and emotions are filtered through our five senses and stored as sense memories. American Bangladeshi Muslim writer, perfumer and entrepreneur Tanaïs’ IN SENSORIUM shows how these sense memories can evoke our most powerful emotional responses across time and space. With bold and lyrical language, this singular sensorium is structured like a perfume with base, heart and head notes. It interlaces South Asian history with personal history, diasporic longing with homeland love, and ancestral trauma with present-day crises. Well-researched explorations of eroticism in ancient religions, the violence of British colonialism and South Asian patriarchal cultures, and capitalism-induced environmental damage are synthesized artfully with intensely personal revelations about love, sex, liberation, selfhood and healing.” Harper published the book on February 22, 2022.

THE STARS ARE NOT YET BELLS by Hannah Lillith Assadi is one of NPR’s Best Books of 2022. Author and editor Leland Cheuk writes: “Hannah Lillith Assadi’s second novel, THE STARS ARE NOT YET BELLS, is vastly different from her dazzling debut, SONORA. While SONORA was a contemporary, coming-of-age story centered on female friendship, THE STARS ARE NOT YET BELLS is a historical romance, spanning generations. Suffering from Alzheimer’s, Elle, the novel’s elderly protagonist, looks back on a lifetime of compromises in love and health. Assadi’s sharp and impressionistic sentences elevate a familiar premise into an exhilarating reading experience.” Riverhead Books published the novel on January 11, 2022.

VERY COLD PEOPLE by Sarah Manguso is one of NPR’s Best Books of 2022. Writer and book critic Kristen Martin writes: “VERY COLD PEOPLE may follow a girl’s coming-of-age in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is less a traditional bildungsroman than a study of whiteness and its ravages. Set a fictional town in Massachusetts obsessed with its colonial history and rigid class structures and unfolding in sharp vignettes, this is a haunting book about the loneliness of growing up in a place where you are acutely aware you don’t belong, but pretend that you do in order to survive.”
Hogarth published the novel on February 8, 2022.