The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony asks: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Osman’s speakers, who are almost always women, assert and reassert in an attempt to establish authority, often through persistent questioning. Specters of race, displacement, and colonialism are often present in her work, providing momentum for speakers to reach beyond their primary, apparent dimensions and better communicate. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony is about love and longing, divorce, distilled desire, and all the ways we injure ourselves and one another.

At the height of her career, Sarah Ruhl had just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovered the left side of her face completely paralyzed. In a series of piercing, witty, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, wife, mother, and artist. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, postpartum depression, marriage, being a playwright and working mom to three tiny children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness.

By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years.

In Cranial Fracking, Frazier has gathered his insights on the most urgent issues of today. From climate change (what did Al Gore say at his colloquium on the rising temperatures in Hell?) to the state of culture (what do you do when you’re afflicted with Loss of Funding?) to Texas (what should we do with Texas?), he has all the answers. Or, at the very least, a lot of questions.

We are living through an unprecedented, revolutionary era. Across the country, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, homes, and their own lives to Covid-19. In the midst of the pandemic, historic protests erupted in the summer of 2020 over the constant brutality against Black Americans. Galvanizing and lyrical, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love, edited by Tracy K. Smith and John Freeman, captures and gives voice to all of the roiling sentiments of the moment in an anthology for the ages.

A collection of whimsical, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables that take the gloom and melancholy of our political moment and find subversive solace by overturning the protocols of tale-telling. The adventures in The Cheerful Scapegoat cross a comedy of manners with a Sadean orgy, and language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles slapstick and vertigo. These stories take the tchotchkes of queer culture—codes and signifiers—scrambles them together, and blows them up into an improbable soufflé.

At once an album of tales, a portrait gallery, a soundscape, and hymnbook, Heard-Hoard encompasses a chorus of voices shot through with (mostly human) histories and mysteries, their “old appetites as chronic as tides.” Recognized for his “wildly original” poetry and his “uncanny and unparalleled ability to blend lyric and narrative,” Atsuro Riley gives us a profound evocation of lives and loss and lore.