There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns. In this wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. 

Blending memoir, history, sociology, and politics, Better to Have Gone probes an unsolved family mystery and portrays in vivid detail the daily life and tumultuous history of Auroville, a utopian community striving to create a better world.

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else. As she tries to parse what freedom means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it.

New York Times reporter Thompson-Hernández tells the compelling story of The Compton Cowboys, a group of African-American men and women who defy stereotypes and continue the proud, centuries-old tradition of black cowboys in the heart of one of America’s most notorious cities.

Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an “adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer” (New York Times). By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, and the lost art of ice canoeing.

A collection of trans joy and resilience. Focused on love, partnership, and cultivating the landscape of one’s own body, All the Gay Saints seeks happiness in a world saturated with transphobia and marred by climate change. Though this world is finite, these poems want you to live forever. 

Imagine you could lift time up like a lid; imagine beneath a substratum of first and last particulars that form brief visionary episodes, in which life's beauties and terrors glint and mutate on "the floating filament of temporary/vowels." In Genya Turovskaya's The Breathing Body of This Thought, the protean force of language is newly manifest in poems of sustained acuity and extraordinary power. "Yet it may be possible to be sung back to life." 

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.

Twinsets and pearls, secrets and kinship, rituals that hold sisters together in a sacred bond of everlasting trust. Certain chaste images spring to mind when one thinks of sororities. But make no mistake: these women are not braiding each other’s hair and having pillow fights—not by a long shot.

With a keen sense of character and elegant, observant prose, Crane details the undercurrents of tension in a world where perfection comes at a cost and the best things in life are painful—if not impossible—to acquire: Beauty. A mother’s love. And friendship…or at least the appearance of it. Woven throughout are glimmers of the classical myths that undercut the lives of women in Greek life. After all, the Greek goddesses did cause their fair share of destruction…..

Drunktown, New Mexico, is a landscape scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”

Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.