Comics
These gorgeous, globe-spanning works showcase japanese manga, chinese manhua, and homegrown american artistry.
Gilt Frame
Matt Kindt and Margie Kraft Kindt (Dark Horse) $29.99
Harvey award winner Kindt collaborates with his mother, Margie Kraft Kindt, on this charming cozy whodunit that follows amateur sleuths investigating the murder of a Parisian antiques dealer. Matt’s painted art cheerfully mixes in evidence and documents, such as maps, diagrams, and handwritten police questionnaires. The delightful mystery is topped off with a funny and unexpected final twist worthy of Agatha Christie.
Insectopolis
Peter Kuper (Norton) $35
Kuper, an Eisner winner, delivers a lyrical graphic history of the relationship between insects and humans. The narrative opens with a brother and sister heading to an exhibit on insects at the New York Public Library. Then a disaster wipes out humanity, and at an unspecified time in the future, talking monarch butterflies, dung beetles, and other insects explore the building and the exhibit. Kuper’s visuals are breathtaking and many moments, like a monarch suddenly perceiving the magnetic field that will guide her home, are magical.
Kylooe
Little Thunder, trans. from the Chinese by Montana Kane (Dark Horse) $29.99
Hong Kong artist Little Thunder’s enchanting debut comprises three stories linked by the uncannily cute character Kylooe, a furry white
monster who inhabits people’s dreams. Vibrant, elegant drawings, drenched in color, give life to fantastic creatures and phantasmagorical dreamscapes, as well as lovingly observed details of Hong Kong. Diving into this lush escapade is like sliding down a rainbow, rain showers and all.
Raging Clouds
Yudori, trans. from the Korean by Chloé Vollmer-Lo (Fantagraphics) $34.99
In Renaissance-era Holland, Amélie, the young wife of a merchant named Hans, feels constricted by social mores. Then Hans brings home a purchase from his latest trip abroad: an enslaved Asian woman, called Sahara. Amélie resents the newcomer, but as time passes the two women recognize that they are trapped together. Yudori brings 16th-century Europe to life, lavishing detail on art, jewelry, clothing, and clockwork.
Santos Sisters
Greg and Fake (Fantagraphics) $24.99
This self-aware pastiche blends an entire Saturday morning cartoon lineup into an entertaining sugar rush. Granted powers by the mysterious Madame Sosostris, trash-talking teens Ambar and Alana transform into superheroines in luchador masks. The Santoses’ world is a streetwise mash-up of 1980s and ’90s kiddie cartoons, incorporating nods to Archie, Scooby-Doo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Marvel’s Star Comics. Canny Gen X and millennial readers will appreciate the trippy nostalgia.
To Broadway
Maurane Mazars, trans. from the French
by Dan Christensen
(Abrams ComicArts) $25.99
In late-1950s Germany, young dancer Uli diligently studies classical ballet, but adores American movie musicals. A tryst with Anthony, a Black American dancer, convinces him to move to New York City and pursue his dream of making it on Broadway. Mazars details the nuances of mid- century bohemian New York, including the open secret of gay culture in the theater world, capturing the era in blazing watercolor.
Will Eisner:
A Comics Biography
Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur (NBM) $29.99
Weiner and Mazur turn the oft-told story of comics pioneer Will Eisner (1917–2005) and his bootstrapping ethos into a humorous and heartwarming chronicle. The book traces the ups and downs of the artistic life and career of Eisner and also tells the saga of the rise of comics art in America, peppered with informative asides. Comics creators and fans will relish this glowing portrait of a bygone era.
General Fiction
Whether historical, contemporary, or with a bit of genre spice, these novels speak to a wide swath of lit lovers.
The Emergency
George Packer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) $29
Journalist and National Book Award winner Packer delivers a propulsive Orwellian novel set in a strange future world. The emergency of the title begins when a city’s ruling elite flees and teenage looters take to the streets. Eventually, an egalitarian youth movement called Together rises. Packer writes with spare elegance and mounting urgency, and while the depictions of class and intergenerational conflicts have clear parallels to real-world matters, the novel never loses its taut dramatic edge.
Fonseca
Jessica Francis Kane (Penguin Press) $28
This masterful novel, a luminous exploration of a woman’s resilience, draws from a 1952 journey British author Penelope Fitzgerald made to Mexico. Penelope’s husband is an alcoholic, their literary journal is near bankruptcy, and she’s pregnant. When she receives letters from two women who say they might leave their silver mining fortune to Penelope’s son if she brings him to Mexico to meet them, she can’t refuse.
Meet Me at the Crossroads
Megan Giddings (Amistad) $28.99
In this mesmerizing work, the world is tranformed by the sudden appearance of seven strange doors, which many come to believe are portals to a mystical realm. The story centers on teenage twins Olivia and Ayanna, who decide to explore what’s on the other side of the door that appeared in their Michigan hometown. Olivia accidentally enters first and disappears, leaving Ayanna behind to grapple with the loss and find her way back to her sister.
Muscle Man
Jordan Castro (Catapult) $27
A day in the life of a discontented literature professor forms the core of Castro’s caustic latest, a good pick for anyone toiling in a crummy academia job. Harold would rather lift weights than attend his department’s monthly staff meeting at Shepherd College, where tuition soars and students are pampered. Despite Harold’s chiseled physique and conceited nature, Castro portrays him as confused and alienated, capturing male loneliness in all its funk and fury.
What a Time to Be Alive
Jade Chang (Ecco) $28.99
Lola is 31, jobless and broke in L.A., and reeling from the death of her best friend. When a creatively edited video of Lola delivering a mock TED Talk among friends goes viral, she becomes an internet self-help celebrity. At the same time, Lola begins searching for her birth mother, who was deported to China when she was a child and has since disappeared. It’s a moving story of origins, grief, and youthful angst.
The Women of Wild Hill
Kirsten Miller (Morrow) $30
This enchanting offering finds witches fighting the patriarchy in their ancestral home on Long Island. Actor and producer Brigid has been estranged from her sister, Phoebe, since their mother’s suicide 30 years earlier. Both believe their mother’s last boyfriend, a media mogul, was responsible for her demise. Now, hearing news of the mogul’s death, they take it as a sign from the Old One, the spirit that guides them, to come home.
Mysteries & Thrillers
Questions of whodunit, and why, and what happened next will keep readers entertained Well into a long winter’s night.
A Christmas Witness
Charles Todd (Mysterious Press) $23.99
The latest whodunit featuring Scotland Yarder Ian Rutledge finds the long-running series in top form. Rutledge’s plans to spend Christmas 1921 with his sister are disrupted when his boss directs him to Kent, where ex-colonel Lord Braxton claims an unidentified horseman tried to run him down. Todd keeps readers off-balance throughout and poignantly explores his lead’s emotional struggles as he comes to suspect that Braxton isn’t
telling the whole story.
Flashout
Alexis Soloski (Flatiron) $28.99
In 1972 New York City, Allison Morales falls in with Theater Negative, a cultlike group of avant-garde performers, seduced by the group’s intoxicating notions of personal freedom and by their leader. She joins them on a hastily assembled European tour that quickly turns disastrous. Twenty-five years later, Allison, now teaching theater in L.A., decides to seek out Theater Negative’s surviving members. It makes for a heady, atmospheric thriller.
The Killer Question
Janice Hallett (Atria) $30
A struggling British pub called The Case Is Altered relies on its quiz crowd to keep the lights on. When a new team shows up and trounces the regulars, accusations of cheating escalate until somebody’s found dead in a nearby river. Much of the story comes together through trivia categories, WhatsApp messages, police interviews, and emails. Puzzle enthusiasts will have a ball piecing it all together.
Murder at the Christmas Emporium
Andreina Cordani (Pegasus Crime) $27.95
Holiday magic goes horribly wrong in this canny combination of whodunit and horror. Merry Clarke steals her boss’s invitation to the reopening of Verity’s Emporium, a Wonka-esque London toy store. Merry and a handful of other VIPs find themselves drugged by their complimentary hot cocoa, and awake to discover the dead body of the store’s head toymaker. Cordani’s devious and perfectly calibrated plotting leaves plenty of room for shocking twists.
No Body No Crime
Tess Sharpe (MCD) $29
Rich girl Chloe and trailer park denizen Mel fall into a secret relationship after their confrontation with Toby, a teen drug dealer, ends with them burying his body in the woods on the night of Chloe’s 16th birthday. Six years later, Chloe has fled to the Canadian wilderness and Mel is a PI. After Mel tracks down her former flame, the pair rekindle their connection while trying to avoid capture by men seeking answers for Toby’s death. Readers who love rooting for antiheroes will adore this.
The Vanishing Place
Zoë Rankin (Berkley) $30
At the outset of this triumphant thriller set in rural New Zealand, a blood-stained girl devours food straight off a grocery store’s shelves. When Constable Lewis Weston arrives, he’s stunned by her resemblance to his friend Effie, who disappeared two decades earlier before resurfacing as a police officer in Scotland. When Effie learns that the girl is the only witness to a murder, she returns to New Zealand and confronts memories of her own isolated childhood in the bush.
Poetry
If poetry is, as Seamus Heaney said, “language in orbit,” these volumes will send their recipients straight to the stars.
The Essential C.D. Wright
C.D. Wright, edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers (Copper Canyon) $22
The brilliant and multitalented Wright died unexpectedly in 2016, leaving behind a legacy of astonishing breadth. Attuned especially to the poor and disenfranchised, the victims of racialized violence, and the incarcerated, Wright strove to represent people in full. Gander, the poet’s husband, and Wiegers, her longtime friend and editor, have compiled a thrilling assemblage.
The Never Was
Tyler Knott Gregson (Central Avenue) $23
This collection of fragments of verse, which Gregson revisits through the lens of a late-in-life autism diagnosis, explores his experience of neurodivergency. Typewritten on scraps of loose-leaf, old envelopes, and weathered paper, the fragments are scrapbooked alongside new full-length poems, photographs, and drawings, bringing readers along on the author’s journey of self-reflection.
Night Watch
Kevin Young (Knopf) $29
National Book Award finalist Young offers an impressionistic and potent collection of poems written over 16 years. Young’s work examines inheritance in poems detailing his family history in Louisiana; a sequence spoken by Millie and Christine McCoy, the conjoined African American “Carolina Twins” displayed in P.T. Barnum’s circus; and a cycle inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. This elegant volume deepens the body of work by a significant American poet.
Super Gay Poems
Stephanie Burt (Harvard Univ.) $29.95
In this compulsively readable anthology, Harvard English professor Burt presents 51 poems that address and exemplify queerness in America. Burt chose to only include poems published post-1969, establishing the year of the Stonewall riots as the inception of modern queer identity; her chronological selections begin with Frank O’Hara’s “Homosexuality” (1970) and culminate in the 2020s, with works including Danez Smith’s “Waiting for You to Die So I Can Be Myself.” It’s a dynamic and comprehensive collection.
Romance
Put a bow on those happy holiday wishes with sweet and spicy tales of happily ever after.
Futbolista
Jonny Garza Villa (Levine Querido) $16.99
When college freshman and star soccer player Gabriel “Gabi” Piña kisses his male classmate Vale on a dare at a frat party, he’s delighted but confused. As the pair grow closer, Gabi fears the ire of a homophobic team captain and feels he must choose between the game and the guy he loves. There’s plenty of heartfelt wisdom—and thrilling soccer matches—along the way, but it’s the sweetly sexy romance between Gabi and Vale that really makes this shine.
Grape Juice
Eliza Dumais (831 Stories) $14.99
To learn more about the vintages she sells, Alice, who works for a New York wine importer, heads to French wine country to volunteer during the three-week harvest. She’s a bit cautious after the end of a long-term relationship, but she starts to open up to Henri, the vineyard owner’s nephew. Henri makes a habit of asking Alice pointed questions as they pick grapes, fostering intense chemistry. This will delight hopeless romantics and armchair travelers alike.
The Honeycrisp Orchard Inn
Valerie Bowman (Avon A) $18.99
After Ellie gets dumped by her boyfriend and fired from her job in Manhattan, she returns to her Long Island hometown to help her
parents prepare their inn for the upcoming harvest festival. One thing she hadn’t planned on: having to share the inn’s attic apartment with the son of the nearby orchard’s owner, whom she hasn’t seen since they were kids. The cozy autumnal setting provides an idyllic backdrop for the sweet yet sensual romance between former childhood friends.
If I Told You, I’d Have to Kiss You
Mae Marvel (Griffin) $18
In this unabashedly queer Mr. and Mrs. Smith–esque mix of thriller and romance, Yardley and KC’s relationship is burdened with lies. Neither woman realizes that they’re keeping the same secret: they’re both spies working for the same agency. When the truth comes out, KC and Yardley try to put their drama aside and work toward the greater good—but there’s no denying the complicated feelings they still have for each other.
The Trouble with Anna
Rachel Griffiths (Gallery) $19.99
Griffiths’s delightful Regency romp kicks off with spirited horsewoman Lady Anna Reston learning that her grandfather’s will stipulates she must marry the man he names as her guardian—Julian Aveton, the ninth Earl of Ramsay—if she wants to inherit her home and her beloved horses. Julian is equally blindsided by this news, but as he woos Anna with stolen kisses, they’re surprised by their developing friendship and mutual attraction.
Zomromcom
Olivia Dade (Berkley) $19
This lively, laugh-out-loud romantic adventure whisks readers to an intriguing post-zombie-apocalypse setting. When soapmaker Edie Brandstrup tries to save her “sweet idiot” neighbor Chad from a zombie who has somehow breached containment, he reveals that his name’s not really Chad and he’s not really human—he’s Gaston Maxime “Max” Boucher, a centuries-old vampire. Dade’s leads have serious chemistry, both sexual and emotional, which serves them well throughout their misadventures.
Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror
Tales of imagined pasts, projected futures, and slightly askew presents transport eager readers.
Automatic Noodle
Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom) $21.99
In 2064, after a war for independence that split California from the rest of America, Staybehind, Sweetie, Cayenne, and Hands are robots contracted to a San Francisco fast-food restaurant, a front operation for crypto launderer Fritz Co. When Fritz Co. slips town, the squad decides to revive the joint as a hand-pulled noodle joint. Newitz packs this tale with simmering action, endearing characters, and political savvy, topping it all off with generous dollops of humor and imagination.
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories
Edited by andré m. carrington (Library of America) $24.95
Carrington sets out to “remind” Black readers and authors that “we have the power to define ourselves and redefine our worlds”—and he succeeds with aplomb. Filled with grandmasters (Nalo Hopkinson), multiple-award winners (N.K. Jemisin), and breakout stars (Phenderson Djèlí Clark, Victor LaValle, Tochi Onyebuchi), this eclectic survey conjures innovative storytelling and fresh ideas from traditional genre motifs.
The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association
Caitlin Rozakis (Titan) $18.99
This clever fantasy puts a unique twist on the magical school trope by focusing on the harried, unmagical parents of a magically gifted child. After kindergartner Aria gets bitten by a Connecticut werewolf, her mother Vivian gets swept up into the often terrifying world of
the East Coast’s elite private magical academies. The resulting romp offers both gentle satire and a sympathetic depiction of the struggles of caring for a special needs child.
House of the Beast
Michelle Wong (Harper Voyager) $34
In this masterfully constructed gothic coming-of-age tale, 11-year-old Alma is living in disgrace with her unwed mother when her father, Lord Zander Avera, comes to retrieve her. Zander needs an heir to serve as a vessel for their elder god, the Dread Beast. He amputates Alma’s left arm and sacrifices it to the god, who later oversees her training to prevent a falling star from bringing darkness. It’s a story replete with love, politics, and betrayal, helmed by a wonderfully earnest heroine.
Moonflow
Bitter Karella (Run for It) $18.99
Sarah is a broke trans woman growing and selling shrooms to make rent. A wealthy client pays her to go into notoriously dangerous woods to hunt down a powerful hallucinogenic. When Sarah and her guide venture into the woods, they discover something far more sinister than fungi. Their journey is gory and weird enough to satisfy any horror fan, but the book’s real triumph is its wonderfully realized heroine.
When the Tides Held the Moon
Venessa Vida Kelley (Erewhon) $29
In 1911 New York City, Benny, a Puerto Rican immigrant, makes a meager and dangerous living as an ironworker. He crafts the metal support for a huge glass tank for the owner of a Coney Island carnival, who offers Benny a home and a better job if he catches the tank’s intended inhabitant: a real live merman. It makes for a captivating blend of history, fantasy, and good old-fashioned carnival magic.
