This year was another banner year for independent literary publishing! We’re proud to share this list of CLMP member publishers’ books honored by major literary awards and featured in best-of lists in 2024.
For more literature from independent publishers, read our 2024 year-end roundups of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, children’s literature, and art and drama, featuring more than 900 books published by CLMP member presses.
Dream of Xibalba by Stephanie Adams-Santos
Orison Books | May 2, 2023
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
According to Jessica Hundley, Adams-Santos “deftly leads us on in mythic and transformational meditation on the ways in which we’re formed by both the ghosts of our past and the rich tapestry of our present moment.”
Trash by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny
Translated from the Spanish by JD Pluecker
Deep Vellum | March 21, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction
This novel “interweaves the voices of three women with lived connections to the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.”
None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza
Feminist Press | October 17, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
In this memoir, Alabanza “considers the meaning of gender, and the role it plays in a world that rigidly and aggressively enforces the binary.”
The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa
Translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and Ranya Abdelrahman
Restless Books | April 2, 2024
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Featured in The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 (TIME)
Al-Essa’s novel is “a perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.”
The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali
Translated from the Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman
Archipelago Books | January 24, 2023
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2023 Greg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
This novel is “a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory, set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict.”
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books | February 13, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
The poems in this debut collection “arise from the speaker’s tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.”
Nightboat Books | August 15, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
Teeter is “an autohistoriography of felt time that arises from subversive hearing practices and the emotional prosody of a mother tongue one does not understand but activates in another poetic language.”
Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
Graywolf Press | May 7, 2024
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
Not a River is a novel “about masculinity, guilt, and irrepressible desire, written in a style that is spare and timeless.”
Fonograf Editions | February 27, 2024
Featured in The 16 Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2024 (Them)
This poetry chapbook is “a venting of ecological rage, a communal cry in many voices against the few who keep us in this situation by using power to perpetuate inaction.”
Transitory by Subhaga Crystal Bacon
BOA Editions | November 14, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
Transitory is “a collection of elegies memorializing 46 transgender and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the US and Puerto Rico in 2020.”
A Film in Which I Play Everyone by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press | September 5, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry and for the 2024 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2024 (The New York Times)
In her new collection, Bang “falls in and out of love with men, with women, and struggles to realize her ambitions while suffering crushing losses that give rise to dark thoughts.”
Not Even the Dead by Juan Gómez Bárcena
Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore
Open Letter Books | July 18, 2023
Finalist for ALTA’s 2024 National Translation Award in Prose
This novel is the story of “a path pointing northward, always northward, that is to say, always toward the future, on a hallucinated journey from the sixteenth century New Spain to today’s Trump wall.”
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space by Catherine Barnett
Graywolf Press | May 7, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR), Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
The poems in Barnett’s latest collection about “the loneliness that collects in mirrors and faces … are like speculative prescriptions for this common human experience.”
Blood on the Brain by Esinam Bediako
Red Hen Press | September 17, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
Blood on the Brain is “a novel about the complications of family, romance, and culture—and how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head.”
Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf
Nightboat Books | October 1, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
Baez Bendorf’s third collection “resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.”
Translated from the French by Tina Kover
Europa Editions | May 16, 2023
Finalist for the 73rd National Jewish Book Award in Fiction
This novel is “an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.”
Book*hug Press | March 22, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Nonfiction
Crying Wolf is “a gripping memoir that shares the raw path to recovery after violence and spotlights the ways survivors are too often demonized or ignored when they belong to marginalized communities.”
The Limitless Heart by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Haymarket Books | October 17, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry
In this collection, Boyce-Taylor “explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes.”
Simpatía by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn and Noel Hernández González
Seven Stories Press | March 11, 2024
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
Simpatía is “a suspenseful novel with unexpected twists and turns about the agony of Venezuela and the collapse of Chavismo.”
Portraits as Animal by Victoriano Cárdenas
Bloomsday Literary | April 14, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
In this collection, “in conversation with Taos’s rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas writes through his transition, acknowledging that ‘to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me.'”
Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica N. Cardwell
Feminist Press | March 12, 2024
Featured in Best Nonfiction of 2024 (Electric Lit)
Cardwell’s book is a “hybrid of personal memoir and criticism, considering the work of Black visual artists as a means to explore loss, legacy, and the reclamation of life through art.”
Translated from the Spanish by Heather Houde
Feminist Press | May 7, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Bookshop.org)
The stories in this debut collection depict “the disillusionment that comes with being young and queer in Puerto Rico.”
The Queen of Steeplechase Park by David Ciminello
Forest Avenue Press | May 7, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
In this novel about an Italian-American teenager in 1930s Coney Island, “Ciminello doesn’t bother with realism, telling his tale with vivid, irrepressible language seasoned with plenty of profanity and earthy sexuality.”
Wire Mothers by Katharine Coldiron
Whisk(e)y Tit | May 12, 2024
Featured in The 16 Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2024 (Them)
In these five stories, “A woman begins to eat books when food can’t satisfy. A reporter discovers that sympathy for the devil might be misplaced. A grandmother organizes her crimes into neat checklists.”
Taking to Water by Jennifer Conlon
Autumn House Press | October 16, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
The poems in this debut collection “question gender and embrace queerness through the natural world of North Carolina.”
We’re Alone by Edwidge Danticat
Graywolf Press | September 3, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR), Best Nonfiction of 2024 (Electric Lit), Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
Danticat’s essay collection “asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.”
Translated from the French by Jessica Moore
Archipelago Books | October 29, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
This volume, containing seven short stories and a novella, “opens up a torrent of curiosities, hauntings, and questions about place and language.”
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda
Feminist Press | September 10, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
The thirteen women in these linked stories “spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to endure, telling their own stories in bold, unapologetic voices.”
The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo
Graywolf Press | July 9, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker), Best Nonfiction of 2024 (Electric Lit)
In this collection of conversations, D’Erasmo “asks eight legendary artists: What has sustained you in the long run?”
The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies
Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer
New Vessel Press | October 8, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, this “haunting autobiographical novel shows that the Nazi occupation of France is not an event in the distant past but part of family histories and memories that still go unspoken.”
Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen
BOA Editions | October 10, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry
Desire Museum “touches on lost love and friendship, climate crisis, lesbian relationships, and the imprisonment of children at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz
Acre Books | March 5, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
In Bad Mexican, Bad American, “the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a ‘disadvantaged Brown kid’ takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form’s ties to Surrealism.”
Village by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Coffee House Press | February 7, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This collection “examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations.”
I could die today and live again by Summer Farah
Game Over Books | March 26, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
Inspired by the realm of The Legend of Zelda, these poems “explore madness, girlhood, and the reverberations of empire.”
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel by Debra Magpie Earling
Milkweed Editions | May 23, 2023
Winner of a 2024 American Book Award
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is “an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.”
The Eyes & the Impossible by Dave Eggers
McSweeney’s | May 9, 2023
Winner of the 2024 John Newbery Medal
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, this illustrated chapter book is “powered not only by Eggers’ impressive knack for inhabiting the minds of other species, but also by the physical form of McSweeney’s deluxe, all-ages edition.”
Feminist Press | September 12, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction
This debut novel “is an intimate sprawl of memory, migration, and queer desire—charting the messy layers of love and loss that constitute a life.”
Holy American Burnout! by Sean Enfield
Split/Lip Press | December 5, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This essay collection “wrestles with the physical, mental, and emotional burdens that American society places on educators, students, and all relatively conscious minorities in this country.”
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie
Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Seven Stories Press | October 1, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
This book is “an account of Annie Ernaux’s love affair with journalist Marc Marie while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their combined project to document images and memories.”
For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus by Varun Gauri
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | October 8, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
According to Tania James, this debut novel “tells the story of two people navigating the bumpy terrain of an arranged marriage while also contending with community politics in suburban Ohio.”
Translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
Archipelago Books | April 16, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews), Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
Gråbøl’s debut novel “offers a critique of institutionalization and an urgent recalibrating of the language and conceptions of care.”
Copper Canyon Press | April 18, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2024 Griffin Prize, Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
In her fifteenth poetry collection, Graham is “part historian, part cartographer as she plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors.”
Graywolf Press | September 5, 2023
Finalist for the 2023 NBCC Award in Poetry
These poems and lyric fragments “make an inventory of truths that carry us through night’s reckoning with mortal hope into daylight.”
Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian
Noemi Press | March 15, 2024
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
This novel-in-stories “takes on art, labor, romantic love, pregnancy, and parenthood—and the role of friendship in forging a life.”
motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life by Destiny Hemphill
Action Books | March 1, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Poetry
According to Bianca Stone, motherworld “transforms language into something map-like, topographical, somatic.”
The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón
Archipelago Books | April 2, 2024
Featured in The Atlantic 10: The Books That Made Us Think the Most This Year (The Atlantic)
This poetry collection is “an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma—and its horrific relevance in today’s Colombia, where mass killings continue.”
Rebozos of love by Juan Felipe Herrera
FlowerSong Press | May 22, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This collection invites the reader to “imagine yourself standing on a mountain at dawn, singing these poems from 1970 to 1974, at the crossroads of many social movements.”
When There Was Light by Carlie Hoffman
Four Way Books | March 15, 2023
Winner of the 73rd National Jewish Book Award in Poetry
The poems in Hoffman’s second collection “map out a topography where global movements of diaspora and war live alongside personal reckonings.”
Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver
Milkweed Editions | January 10, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
This collection is “an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love.”
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives
Graywolf Press | October 15, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Vulture)
In this collection of essays, Ives “examines events and records from her own life—a childhood obsession with My Little Pony, papers and notebooks from college, an unwitting inculcation into the myth of romantic love, and the birth of her son—to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored.”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | February 13, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
Song of My Softening “studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
Because You Were Mine by Brionne Janae
Haymarket Books | July 4, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
In this collection, Janae “dives into the deep, unsettled waters of intimate partner violence, queerness, grief, and survival.”
American Gospel by Miah Jeffra
Black Lawrence Press | March 24, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
The three storylines in this book “braid together a portrait of a neighborhood in flux, the role of community and violence in our time, and the struggles of a very real and oft misunderstood city.”
The Perfect Bastard by Quinn Carver Johnson
Northwestern University Press | September 15, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Poetry
This collection is “an innovative poetic interrogation of wrestling, queerness, and staying true to oneself.”
Hood Vacations by Michal ‘MJ’ Jones
Black Lawrence Press | January 20, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
Hood Vacations is “an unflinching recollection of Blackness, queerness, gender, and violence through lenses of family lineage and confessional narrative.”
Milkweed Editions | March 5, 2024
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry
Featured in Books We Love (NPR), Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit), The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 (TIME)
In these poems, Joudah “offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them.”
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
Feminist Press | September 24, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Bookshop.org)
According to Nino Cipri, Killjoy’s novel is “a reminder that fantasy can be a vehicle for so much: interrogations of power, knowledge, ethics, an exploration of how to live in the world.”
Gasher Press | September 1, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
The poems in this collection “meditate on love and motherhood in the context of environmental crisis, foregrounding the domestic in a quest to continually re-imagine a hopeful future.”
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails by Halyna Kruk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia M. Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk
Arrowsmith Press | May 1, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2024 Griffin Prize
This poetry collection is “a guidebook to the emotional combat in Ukraine.”
Kurdistan +100: Stories from a Future State
Deep Vellum | August 6, 2024
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
This anthology “poses a question to twelve contemporary Kurdish writers: might the Kurds have a country to call their own by the year 2046—exactly a century after the last glimmer of independence (the short-lived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad)?”
Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home by Chris La Tray
Milkweed Editions | August 20, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Amazon), Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, this book “creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories.”
You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy
Red Hen Press | September 19, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Firecracker Award in Fiction
You Were Watching from the Sand is “a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children—who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange—bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities.”
The Bridesman by Savyon Liebrecht
Translated from the Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann
Europa Editions | December 5, 2023
Finalist for the 73rd National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation
This novel is “a gripping and moving tale about family, place, and the unceasing power of the past to reshape our lives and identity.”
Noemi Press | March 15, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
This collection “centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender-nonconforming self in our current political moment.”
I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López
Feminist Press | April 9, 2024
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
The stories in I’ll Give You a Reason “explore race, identity, connection, and belonging in the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey.”
Instructions for the Lovers by Dawn Lundy Martin
Nightboat Books | June 25, 2024
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
Instructions for the Lovers is “a taught, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.”
Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott
Two Lines Press | May 14, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
Martínez’s debut novel is “class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.”
Red Hen Press | February 7, 2023
Finalist for the 2023 NBCC Award in Autobiography
In this memoir featuring artwork by Wakida, Masumoto discovers “a ‘lost’ aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled.”
American Mother by Colum McCann with Diane Foley
Etruscan Press | March 5, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
In this book, McCann “channels Diane Foley’s voice as she tells her story, as the mother of American journalist Jim Foley—in search of answers, beyond justice, found through dogged, empathetic, spiritual enquiry.”
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo
Translated from the Portuguese by Sophie Lewis
Restless Books | December 5, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Fiction
Melo’s novel “conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.”
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Seven Stories Press | March 12, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
In this debut novel, Mendoza “weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth.”
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Transit Books | April 2, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
Traces of Enayat is “a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature’s tragic heroine.”
Deep Vellum | April 2, 2024
Longlisted for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Told in three distinct voices, this novel “brings together a rapturous teenage love story set in Chile, the hunt for the author of an eye-opening literary detective story, and a complex reckoning with American political intervention in South America.”
The Tree Doctor by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Graywolf Press | March 19, 2024
Featured in The Best Books of 2024 (Oprah), Best Books of 2024 (Bookshop.org)
This novel is “full of bodily pleasure, intense observation of nature, and a profound reckoning with the passage of time both within ourselves and in the world we inhabit.”
A Public Space | August 6, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
This memoir “asks what it means to write with full honesty about one’s life—to explore who we were, and how our choices shape and allow who we become.”
perennial fashion presence falling by Fred Moten
Wave Books | May 2, 2023
Longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Prize
The poems in this collection “present Moten’s ‘shaped prose’ on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia.”
The Villain’s Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Deep Vellum | March 12, 2024
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature
According to Jay Gao, The Villain’s Dance is “a riotous and incandescent exploration of violent cartographies and colonial imaginaries.”
Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
Archipelago Books | October 29, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
This novel “at its core is a story of what happens when women—black women and girls—seek the truth by any means.”
Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison by Ahmed Naji
Translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls
McSweeney’s | October 17, 2023
Finalist for the 2023 NBCC Award in Autobiography
This chronicle of Naji’s time in prison “stands as a testament to the power of the creative mind, in the face of authoritarian censorship.”
Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press | April 2, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews), Best Books of 2024 (Bookshop.org)
Like Love is “a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work.”
Giant On the Shore by Alfonso Ochoa
Translated from the Spanish by Shook
Transit Books | May 14, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
Illustrated by Azul López, this children’s book is “a tale of vulnerability and belonging that explores the enormity of self-doubt and the tremendous potential in taking risks.”
Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Transit Books | May 2, 2023
Winner of the NBCC’s 2023 Greg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, Finalist for ALTA’s 2024 National Translation Award in Prose
“Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals,” this novel “offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman’s sexual encounters and psychological struggle.”
Brother Nervosa by Ronald Palmer
Barrow Street | April 15, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This poetry collection “explores questions of gender, sexuality, and queerness, the relationships between poetry, theater, and film, and wrestle with grief, violence, love, and desire.”
The Girl Before Her by Line Papin
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter and Ly Lan Dill
Kaya Press | August 15, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Fiction
This novel “offers a window onto the existential anguish of displacement as experienced by a child on the cusp of becoming a woman.”
Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
Translated from the Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao
Feminist Press | June 6, 2023
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2023 Greg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
In this debut short fiction collection, Pasaribu “blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements.”
Deep Vellum | June 13, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Poetry
This collection “derives its title from the Russian word which denotes a melancholic longing without a singular cause, longing for a better world than the late-stage capitalist hell we live in.”
Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek
Graywolf Press | April 16, 2024
Longlisted for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
In this novel, Polek “describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?”
Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray
BOA Editions | April 11, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry
In this poetry collection, Ray is “pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman’s body.”
Dark Days: Fugitive Essays by Roger Reeves
Graywolf Press | September 17, 2024
Winner of a 2024 American Book Award
This debut work of memoir, theory, and criticism builds “a profound vision for how to see and experience the world in our present moment, and how to strive toward an alternative existence in intentional community underground.”
Central American Book of the Dead by Balam Rodrigo
Translated from the Spanish by Dan Bellm
FlowerSong Press | May 31, 2023
Finalist for ALTA’s 2024 National Translation Award in Poetry
This bilingual poetry collection “draws a compelling portrait of one of the most critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: the massive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty.”
Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Graywolf Press | August 6, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
In this novel, Rosenfeld “shines an extraordinary light on the black hole of losing a sense and on the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.”
To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
Archipelago Books | January 9, 2024
Longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Prize
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
To the Letter is a poetry collection that “follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair.”
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry by Ryan Ruby
Seven Stories Press | November 19, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
In this book, Ruby “uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.”
The Quickening: Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World by Elizabeth Rush
Milkweed Editions | August 15, 2023
Winner of the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Quickening is “an immersive journey through both exterior and interior landscapes, deftly crossing the boundaries between the frigid Antarctic and the warm heart.”
There Will Never Be Another Night Like This by John Salter
Slant Books | January 9, 2024
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
In this short fiction collection, Salter’s “insights into the human condition, its dreams and nightmares, are always unflinching but never without compassion.”
The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
Europa Editions | May 14, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker), 100 Notable Books of 2024 (The New York Times)
This novel, which follows seventy-two ragazzi in Sicily, is “a polyphonic tale of immigration and community.”
Woman, Life, Freedom by Marjane Satrapi
Translated from the French by Una Dimitrijevic
Seven Stories Press | March 19, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
Woman, Life, Freedom is “an urgent, groundbreaking and visually stunning new collection of graphic story-telling about the present Iranian revolution.”
Translated from the Russian by Martha M. F. Kelly
Slant Books | September 12, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
According to Scott Cairns, “in these elegantly shaped and deliciously allusive utterances, Sedakova interrogates the puzzlement of the human heart—her heart? every human heart? the heart of the invisible but suspected God?”
Graywolf Press | March 5, 2024
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker), Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit)
Seuss’s latest poetry collection “investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean?”
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
Nightboat Books | June 27, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This collection “was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child—during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise.”
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press | November 12, 2024
Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature
This novel “unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.”
Your Kingdom by Eleni Sikelianos
Coffee House Press | January 10, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
This collection “inquisitively and energetically investigates our notion of biological kingdoms, calling us to “let the body feel all its own evolution inside.”
Winter King by Ostap Slyvynsky
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova
Lost Horse Press | September 30, 2023
Finalist for ALTA’s 2024 National Translation Award in Poetry
Winter King “presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry.”
Graywolf Press | August 20, 2024
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2024 (The New York Times), Best Poetry Collections of 2024 (Electric Lit), Best Books of 2024 (Bookshop.org), Best Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly), The 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 (TIME)
This poetry collection is a “kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love―those given and made―are burning.”
The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone
Translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions | May 30, 2023
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
This novel “is a masterpiece of Italian fiction, one that is steeped in Neapolitan lore.”
The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan by Domenico Starnone
Translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions | October 15, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
This is a “seemingly candid novel that belies remarkable psychological depths and infinite degrees of enchantment.”
Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
Transit Books | October 1, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
This novel is “a subtle and intimate accounting of a daughter’s final days with her mother, set amid the rush of Tokyo’s red-light district.”
Dreaming the Mountain by Tuệ Sỹ
Translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins
Milkweed Editions | June 13, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Sỹ’s collection “represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience.”
The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems by Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press | April 13, 2021
Winner of the 2024 National Book Award in Science + Literature
This decades-spanning selection of Sze’s poetry is “an invitation to immerse in a visionary body of work, mapping the evolution of one of our finest American poets.”
Deep Vellum | May 14, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (The New Yorker)
The chapters in this memoir “move associatively, commenting on each other indirectly and drawing out questions of assimilation, race, class, gender, nature and the general problem of being and knowing.”
The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer by Tomas Tranströmer
Translated from the Swedish by Patty Crane
Copper Canyon Press | October 31, 2023
Winner of the 2024 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
The poems in this bilingual collection—which is “a stunning testament to an illustrious career”—“range from agile haiku to cinematic prose.”
Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Graywolf Press | June 6, 2023
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2023 Greg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
Owlish is “a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.”
Kaan and Her Sisters by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Trio House Press | July 1, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This poetry collection “illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration.”
Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Open Letter Books | September 17, 2024
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This book is “a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil—especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic’s birth country—and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing.”
Zakwato & Loglêdou’s Peril by Azo Vauguy
Translated from the French by Todd Fredson
Action Books | March 1, 2023
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2023 Greg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
This book of poems is “exhilarating, alert, and animated by both Bété oral poetics and modernist zeal.”
Autumn House Press | October 16, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction and for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction
In these braided essays, Wade “invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture.”
The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Feminist Press | February 13, 2024
Featured in Best Books of 2024 (Bookshop.org)
Edited by Marisa Crawford, this collection features essays that “link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.”
Joan of Arkansas by Milo Wippermann
Ugly Duckling Presse | July 1, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Drama
Joan of Arkansas is “an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video.”
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
Milkweed Editions | April 2, 2024
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, this is a collection of poems “reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by 50 of our most celebrated contemporary writers.”
From From: Poems by Monica Youn
Graywolf Press | March 7, 2023
Winner of a 2024 American Book Award and of the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
In Youn’s latest poetry collection, “one sequence deconstructs the sounds and letters of the word ‘deracinations’ to create a sonic landscape of micro- and macroaggressions, assimilation, and self-doubt.”
LittlePuss Press | October 17, 2023
Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction
The seven stories in this collection are “about young transgender life from the Upper Midwest to New York City.”
