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Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
Twelve years after its original publication, beloved Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami's novel Breasts and Eggs has been made available to English-speaking readers in an expanded and reworked edition. The book is what it says on the tin: It tracks the stories of three women—one who develops a fixation with breast implants, another who develops a fear of puberty, and a third who explores sperm donation in her desperation to have a child. Kawakami is known for her manipulation of language, and in Breasts and Eggs the body is just another given, with tenderness traded for candor.
Lurking, Joanne McNeil
If there were ever a book designed for quarantine reading, this is it. In Lurking, cultural critic Joanne McNeil dissects the strange world of online activity, a world we are all currently beholden to, for better or for worse. McNeil is interested in the internet's contradictions, and there are a lot of them, including the thirst for public visibility that perilously coexists with the anxieties surrounding online privacy. In the story McNeil tells, search engines and fake accounts have defined the past quarter-century, building the web just as it builds us. We may as well get to know the house we live in.
Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan
For those who have gone headfirst into the new Netflix series Normal People, based on Sally Rooney's book of the same name, it is worth noting that the first excerpt of Exciting Times was hand-plucked by Rooney herself for the Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly. The company you keep is no accident—Exciting Times, the debut novel by Naoise Dolan, folds Dolan into the swell of young Irish authors rising in the literary world. The book involves a high-flying millennial love triangle in the bustle of Hong Kong, but Dolan's writing—and her indifference toward pleasing the masses—brings it down to earth.
Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller
Science reporter Lulu Miller's debut novel is, in essence, a nonfiction biography addressing the taxonomy of fish. It's also an aggressively human story about what happens when you absolutely refuse to listen to every beck and call of the universe. Why Fish Don't Exist follows American naturalist David Starr Jordan, a man whose dedication to discovering and recording species of fish was foiled by lightning, fire and just about every other element—including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which left a thousand of Jordan's findings in shards of glass. He rebuilt, carefully, and a century later, Miller has brought his story to the page.
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor
Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season, now published in an English translation three years after its debut, is gory and indulgent in all the ways you want a gothic crime novel to be. The novel centers on a folkloric witch in small-town Mexico whose violent death is discovered by a group of kids near the irrigation canals, leaving far more questions than answers. The witch is one thing—the abducted women, callous mothers, drug dealers and addicts are another, with each collapsed together within Melchor's rich, winding prose. It's hardly a comforting read, but maybe we've had enough of those for one pandemic.