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Contemporary Fiction Views Part II: Two weeks of new books [1]

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Date: 2026-04-22  

This new formatting workout has been a good exercise in how to not get stuck in a rut. Which is a fancy way of saying I thought this week’s original post was long enough without adding two weeks of new book releases. And that working with this new platform is in the wonky stage.

But here are some of the new releases from last week and this week. As always descriptions are by the publishers and links are to The Literate Lizard.

From the week of April 13:

Go Gentle by Maria Semple

Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a “coven”—like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia—and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger.

Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous, and international intrigue . . . and her past—which she has worked so hard to bury—lands like a bomb in her present. Inflamed by unquenchable desire, Adora finds herself a woman wanting more: and she’ll risk everything to get it.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein

Forty-year-old Jean Dornan cannot escape the summer of 1998, when, as a college student studying abroad in France, she embarked on an inappropriate relationship with her professor. Now, decades later, when that professor contacts her out of the blue with an invitation to his retirement ceremony, Jean’s long-standing malaise becomes an emotional crisis. Desperate to understand why this relationship derailed her life so completely, she begins rereading her old diaries and is shocked to realize that her own disastrous affair occurred during the summer of the Lewinsky scandal, yet she never saw the parallels.

Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola

The Longe siblings are really botching their parents’ American Dream.

Sola Longe, eldest daughter, estranged from the family, is secretly back home in Chicago for the first time in a decade. She’s a newly single and recently disgraced influencer trying to quietly put her life back together again. The other three Longe siblings aren’t doing much better.

Anjola is in love with her best friend, who just got engaged to someone else; Karen, a college junior and the baby of the family, is grappling with her sexuality and self-image; and Ola, the golden child with a baby of his own on the way, is questioning his marriage and how to raise a Black son in America.

Sola’s unexpected return sets them on a crash course towards each other, and when the four siblings find themselves together again at their Nigerian immigrant parents’ Thanksgiving table, a decade’s worth of secrets and a lifetime of resentments explode to the fore.

The Take by Kelly Yang

Maggie Wang, a broke young Asian American writer, needs a lifeline. Ingrid Parker, a veteran white Hollywood producer with her career on the edge, offers an irresistible deal: $3 million for ten experimental medical sessions to reverse her aging, using Maggie as a transfusion partner, and mentorship.

For Ingrid, it’s a chance to reboot her fading career. For Maggie, it’s access and freedom—money to support her parents and the connections to finally get her novel published.

What starts as a professional transaction exchanging blood quickly becomes a complex psychological dance. As Maggie gains unprecedented access to Ingrid’s hard-earned wisdom, Ingrid sees in Maggie a weapon against an industry that’s been trying to sideline her.

See You on the Other Side by Jay McInerney

The celebration of the thirty-fifth wedding anniversary of Russell Calloway’s best friend, Washington Lee—the least likely monogamist of his acquaintance somehow having become over the years a model husband and father—at the Odeon in the Spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality as the specter of the Covid-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval—frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact—the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they could never have anticipated as fatal consequences ensue.

American Spirits by Anna Dorn

Thirty-eight-year-old Blue Velour has finally achieved the critical acclaim she’s long been chasing. Over the last decade, she’s released six studio albums to mixed reviews, landing her somewhere between performance artist and niche legend. But her latest album, Blue’s Beard—a cheeky reference to the subreddit fanatically dedicated to her suspected secret relationship with longtime producer Sasha Harlow—has rocket-launched her reputation. Blue hires nerdy superfan Rose Lutz as her assistant to handle the pressures of the upcoming tour.

When the pandemic shuts down the tour, however, Blue decides to hole up in the redwoods with Sasha to make another album. An aspiring singer herself, Rose is frothing at the mouth to be isolated in a cabin with these two legends, but what begins as a creative retreat spirals into a flurry of chaos and betrayal—culminating in a tragic act that changes their lives forever.

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

In The Palm House, Laura’s long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine—one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura’s relentlessly “outward-facing” mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn’t have centipedes in the kitchen.

Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill

Forbidden from leaving her house from girlhood until marriage, Nicole has only her mother’s lessons and what she can see from her bedroom window to draw on in forming her view of the world, and of herself. Taught that the mushrooms which cover the women in her village are repulsive and dangerous, she conforms to a rigid set of rules to protect herself and those around her.

When her wedding day arrives, Nicole moves from one prison to another—an empty mansion on the very outskirts of town belonging to the husband she’s been promised to since birth. As she haunts the edges of Silas’s unknowable life and decaying home, maintaining control over her own transforming body becomes increasingly impossible. And when another wife with rebellious tendencies pays Nicole an unexpected visit, something within her cracks open. Their furtive explorations yield confusing answers, unearthing the long-buried secrets of the generations of resentful brides that came before. Unmoored, angry, and at last awakened, Nicole must reckon with who she really is, and perhaps, give in to what she truly wants.

A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia

A debut novel inspired by the true story of the author’s grandparents, tracing the slow-burn love story between a Catholic priest and a progressive theology teacher across Rome and England during the twentieth century

It’s the 1960s, and David is handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. An exemplary Catholic priest, devotion to God is all he’s ever known, and all he ever thinks he will. In London, Margaret is adrift, healing from the loss of her parents and the end of a recent love affair. Increasingly drawn to the church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith, taking up a teaching position at an all-girls school in David’s diocese.

Decades later, Margaret is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history. So begins the story of forbidden love and ardent faith, devotion and sacrifice, as the consequences of David and Margaret’s unlikely union play out across generations. A first novel from an award-winning poet, A Private Man traces the exquisite love of two brilliant characters caught between passion and piety as they seek to usher the church they cherish into a more progressive era.

The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley

It’s just a puff piece about a farmer’s market, I said to myself. It’s not going to kill anyone.

It started out like any other morning for the Fact Checker. The piece, “Mandeville/Green,” didn’t raise any red flags. There were more pressing stories that week—it being 2004 New York City and all.

“Mandeville/Green” was a light, breezy look at a local farm called New Egypt, whose Ramapo tomatoes were quickly becoming the summer’s hottest produce. At first glance, the story seemed straightforward, but one line made the Fact Checker pause: a stray quote from a New Egypt volunteer named Sylvia making a cryptic reference to “nefarious business” at the farmer’s market. “People sell everything here,” she’s alleged to have said. “It ain’t all green.”

When Sylvia abruptly disappears the morning after an unexpectedly long night with the Fact Checker, he becomes obsessed with finding her. Did Sylvia discover something unsavory about New Egypt or its messianic owner? Is it possible she had some reason to fear for her safety? Or was it simply something the Fact Checker said?

The Monuments of Paris by Violaine Huisman

Violaine Huisman grew up in Paris with her beautiful, bipolar mother —the subject of Huisman’s acclaimed debut novel The Book of Mother —and her iconoclastic, flamboyant father, whose self-dramatization made him a formidable raconteur and a questionable parent. The one constant in her father’s personal narrative was his obsession with his childhood during the Vichy regime in France and of his father Georges, long dead, a Belgian Jew whose heroic and tragic biography had taken on the trappings of family myth. In The Monuments of Paris, Huisman transforms these complex layers of history into a moving fiction about exile and belonging, about the lies families are built on and the truths they hold dear.

As the novel opens, “Violaine” returns to Paris from her adopted home of New York City to visit her dying father for the last time. And as he once again tells the story of his father’s rise and fall during the Second World War, Violaine becomes herself obsessed with this myth of her grandfather Georges—and with the nearly erased story of the most significant of his many mistresses, a beautiful and aristocratic woman named Choute, who bears a strange resemblance to her own mother. With the help of a local historian, she sets out to hunt down the truth as it might be known, and in so doing creates the necessary and deeply compelling fiction that is this singular book.

The Left and the Lucky by Willy Vlautin

Eddie Wilkens is a workaholic house painter in his early forties. His wife has left him to her regret, and his main employee, Houston, is a loafer and scoundrel who barely shows up for work. Unassuming and self-reliant, Eddie is thoughtful man who rarely gets angry, despite life’s frequent provocations, but he is ruled by a guilt that he has carried for nearly twenty years.

Next door, a woman and her two sons move in with her frail and aging mother. The youngest boy, Russell, eight-years-old, is quiet and small for his age and lives in constant terror of his increasingly lost and troubled fifteen-year-old brother, Curtis. As their mother struggles to keep the family together and the grandmother’s health begins to faulter they find themselves unable to protect Russell and themselves from Curtis’s cruelty, which threatens to explode in frenetic violence.

Though neither knows it, Russell and Eddie will become each other’s saving grace.

While Russell’s home life disintegrates he begins waiting in Eddie’s backyard for him to get off work. Eddie offers the boy small acts of kindness: he feeds him, gives him jobs to do, listens to his dreams of escape, and offers Russell a glimpse into a world of hope and humor. A world of misfit painters, a derelict muscle car, an old dog, and the comradery and companionship of Eddie and his crew. In return, Russell gives Eddie a reason to carry on and helps him lay to rest the guilt that has plagued him for half of his life.

Lázár by Nelio Biedermann, translated by Jamie Bulloch

debut, inspired by the author’s own family story—a gothic, inter-generational family saga capturing the rise and fall of an aristocratic Hungarian family against the backdrop of the two world wars.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son’s peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son’s uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor’s brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe.

Lajos’s birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they’re swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through.

Fish Tales by Nettie Jones

Lewis Jones is a party girl for the ages. Confident and cavalier, she seeks freedom and a good time, leaving mayhem in her wake. Strutting between the bohemian demimonde of New York City and the affluent Black community of Detroit, she is supported in her adventures by her husband, Woody, and accompanied by her friend Kitty-Kat, a gay hustler with impeccable style and a knack for finding all the best spots. She guzzles champagne, snorts piles of cocaine, wakes up on silk sheets with a variety of lovers. And then she is upended by the handsome, erudite, often cruel Brook—a man who has his own bevy of admirers. Soon, Lewis and Brook are ensnared in a struggle for dominance that launches them into a shock of violence.

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton

What does it mean to lose yourself – and is that something you should be aiming for? A young woman with little interest in games takes up a job in Frankfurt at a famous gaming company, naively set on reinvention. On her morning commute, in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing, she encounters a nice-eyed stranger who returns her forgotten umbrella and finds herself catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession – not just with this endlessly attractive spectre, but also with the feverish karaoke trips from which she draws the ultimate solace.

Like Wafers in Honey by Leah Eskin, illustrated by Jeska Verstegen

This debut novel from food writer Leah Eskin of the Chicago Tribune combines the historical sweep and emotional power of The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer and the resonant use of food and recipes of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.

The story opens on the mountaintop town of Pitigliano, Italy, once called Little Jerusalem for its vibrant, centuries-old Jewish community. But the year is 1943. Mussolini has enacted anti-Jewish laws across Italy, and the family of Stella Fortuna struggles to maintain any sense of their former life. Then, one night, a neighbor comes to their door holding a ricotta pudding and tells them, “You must leave now. You’re in grave danger.” The Nazis have arrived to help the Fascists of Italy enact their own Final Solution.

Porcupines by Fran Fabriczki

Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn’t understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.

Best Literary Translations 2026 edited by Noh Anothai, Oyku Tekten, Wendy Call, Kola Tubosun, guest edited and introduced by Arthur Sze

Compiled from over 450 submissions written in 62 original languages, the third edition of this groundbreaking annual anthology features a chorus of voices from across the globe. Collecting translated works from French to Xitsonga, Farsi to Korean, Ukrainian to Guaraní, Best Literary Translations 2026 is a vibrant collection of poetry, essays, and short fiction, and hybrid work, each accompanied by a translator’s note reflecting on the discovery, translation, and resonance of the original work. For enthusiasts of literature in translation and newcomers to global literary traditions alike, Best Literary Translations offers a glimpse into essential writing from many corners of the world.

The Weathering by Artem Chapeye, translated by Daisy Gibbons

Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye’s new novel follows a young couple who escape city life to the mountains in Ukraine, only to discover an altered reality upon their return.

As in Ling Ma’s Severance and Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, the survivors must seek ways to retain their humanity and help to build a new world in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild.

Surrender by Jennifer Acker

Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her father’s farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once she’s settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health.

Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandy’s employer, a solar energy company.

A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna

In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara is watching and waiting. The smell of dung and dust hangs over her world. She is desperate to leave her petty life in the village and escape the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother.

Marrying a middle-class accountant allows her to escape to the capital, but she soon finds that life as a respectable housewife is not enough. She wants what the rich mothers at her children’s school have. Her desire for wealth and freedom becomes an obsession—one for which she’ll push her marriage and herself to the brink. When her brother comes back into her life, dragging the specter of all she’s escaped, Tara must decide if there are any lines she won’t cross to live the life she deserves.

Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar

Foreign correspondent Rita Das has left New York for the war-torn Middle East, a reassignment she asked for after learning she is pregnant but uncertain whether the father is her husband or her lover. As she strives to shed light on the fallouts of the war, Rita finds herself embroiled in her own conflicts with her interpreter and her news editor, her sources and her colleagues. She is unable to accept the loss of her mother and deal with her guilt for not being at her side when she died.

Fiercely independent and ambitious (and, in her journalism, deeply humane), Rita is also in denial about her need for intimate human relationships. As she goes into the field to report on the war, she grapples with the physical and emotional tolls of her pregnant body and a turbulent region where the numbing repetition of war slides suddenly into horror. When her news editor delivers urgent orders for her to return to New York, Rita is faced with a choice about how she wants to live her life as a journalist and a soon-to-be mother.

Set in the years immediately after 9/11, and drawn from Devi Laskar’s own experience as a government reporter in the 1990s and early aughts.

And, from this week:

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