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 2023.
For more literature from independent publishers, read our 2023 year-end roundups of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, children’s literature, and art and drama, featuring more than 750 books published by CLMP member presses.
Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani
Copper Canyon Press | May 17, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
Abani “moves between his Igbo ancestry and migration to the United States in poems that evoke the holiness of grief through the startling, central practice of inhaling an immolated Bible.”
Alice James Books | September 13, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Set in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, “these poems navigate the liminal space between language and silence.”
There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie
Coach House Books | October 3, 2023
Featured in The Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2023 (CBC Books)
Baillie’s memoir is a “richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide.”
Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press | November 7, 2023
Featured in Bookshop.org’s Best Books, 2023 (Bookshop.org)
Cross-Stitch is a “debut novel of female friendship and coming-of-age.”
Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes by Nicky Beer
Milkweed Editions | March 8, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry
Beer’s latest collection of poems is “a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors.”
Translated from the French by Tina Kover
Europa Editions | May 16, 2023
Featured in Books We Love (NPR), The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 (TIME)
This novel is “a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.”
The Book of Eve by Carmen Boullosa
Translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee
Deep Vellum | May 9, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Boullosa “offers a take on the Book of Genesis that dismantles patriarchy and rebuilds our understanding of the world-from the origin of gastronomy, to the domestication of animals, to the cultivation of land and pleasure–all through the feminine gaze.”
Dorothy, a publishing project | October 3, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News), Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
This debut novel “reaches back to the start of the novel tradition and outward to the complexities of contemporary life.”
Deep Vellum | March 14, 2023
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize
This novel “tells the story of the Kinzlers, a complex working-class family firmly rooted in northwestern Montana.”
The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas
Translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis
Coffee House Press | September 12, 2023
Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature
In this crime novel, “a biologist returns to Colombia after fifteen years abroad” and “quickly becomes entangled in the trappings of his past and his increasingly bizarre present.”
Nightboat Books | September 20, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This poetry collection is “a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.”
Europa Editions | August 8, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Set in New Zealand in the 1980s, this psychological thriller explores “themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism.”
Europa Editions | October 17, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
This novel is “the story of a woman, of a nation’s love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.”
Look at This Blue by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Coffee House Press | March 29, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This poetry collection “examines America’s genocidal past and present to warn of a future threatened by mass extinction and climate peril.”
The Nature Book by Tom Comitta
Coffee House Press | March 14, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
“Part sweeping evocation of Earth’s rhythms, part literary archive, part post-human novel,” The Nature Book “collages descriptions of the natural world into a singular symphonic paean to the planet.”
A Cowardly Woman No More by Ellen Cooney
Coffee House Press | April 4, 2023
Featured in Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly)
In this novel set over the course of one day follows “a wife, mom, and career woman who brings herself first nervously, then more and more bravely, through a monumental transformation.”
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games
Graywolf Press | November 21, 2023
Featured in The 10 Best Books of 2023 (InsideHook)
Edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado, this anthology features essays exploring video games by Hanif Abdurraqib, Charlie Jane Anders, Alexander Chee, Larissa Pham, and more.
No Way in the Skin Without This Bloody Embrace by Jean D’Amérique
Translated from the French by Conor Bracken
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 15, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 PEN Award in Translation
In this book-length poem, “each page is as brief as a hurricane’s eye, glimpsing the eerie territory his speaker traverses like an apocalyptic flâneur.”
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
Milkweed Editions | May 23, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
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.”
Feminist Press | September 12, 2023
Featured in Our 23 Favorite LGBTQ+ Books of 2023 (Them)
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.”
Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Seven Stories Press | September 12, 2023
Featured in The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 (TIME)
The Young Man is Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux’s “account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties.”
Graywolf Press | November 1, 2022
Winner of the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Dr. No is “a sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising.”
The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick
Seven Stories Press | November 8, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
This novel in verse is a “passionate tangle of modern relationships, where a barbed tweet can be as dangerous as the narrator’s bon-mots.”
Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls
Transit Books | October 31, 2023
By the recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
In this novel, “a man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road.”
A Queen in Bucks County by Kay Gabriel
Nightboat Books | November 8, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry
This poetry collection is “an epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor.”
Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy
Archipelago Books | October 24, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
This feminist novel “broke the silence around abortion to reshape the way women’s bodies and rights were perceived in 20th-century Argentina.”
The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel
Translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
New Vessel Press | January 17, 2023
Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature
According to Patrick Nathan, Gardel’s National Book Award–winning novel “reminds its readers of an uncomfortable truth: that even a life of regret can be a beautiful one.”
The Great American Everything by Scott Gloden
Hub City Press | May 16, 2023
Featured in Best Debut Short Story Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit)
The Great American Everything is “a short story collection exploring the bounds of contemporary family and how we move forward in a world so often changed by loss.”
A Dead Name That Learned How to Live by Golden
Game Over Books | 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry
This debut collection “weaves poems, family photographs, & self-portraits to share a journey of survival & living in the American south.”
Copper Canyon Press | April 18, 2023
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit), Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly)
In these poems, 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.”
Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez
Coffee House Press | June 7, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction and for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
This book is “a meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders.”
distant transit by Maja Haderlap
Archipelago Books | March 22, 2022
Translated from the German by Tess Lewis
Finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
This poetry collection “traverses Slovenia’s scenic landscape and violent history, searching for a sense of place within its evershifting boundaries.”
A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero
Restless Books | June 28, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
Hadero’s stories “feature immigrants, refugees, and those on the brink of dispossession, all struggling to begin again, all fighting to belong.”
Graywolf Press | September 5, 2023
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit), Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker), Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly), The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 (TIME)
These poems and lyric fragments “make an inventory of truths that carry us through night’s reckoning with mortal hope into daylight.”
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
Grove/Atlantic | April 4, 2023
Featured in Best Novels of 2023 (Electric Lit), 100 Notable Books of 2023 (The New York Times), Best Books of 2023 (Vulture)
Hammad’s second novel, following a Palestinian production of Hamlet in the West Bank, “is a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.”
The Kudzu Queen by Mimi Herman
Regal House Publishing | January 10, 2023
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize
The Kudzu Queen tells the story of “the self-proclaimed Kudzu King, who arrives in rural North Carolina in the spring of 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu; and of Mattie Lee Watson, the fifteen-year-old who falls in love with him—until she discovers Mr. Cullowee, like the kudzu he promotes, has a dark and predatory side.”
Hub City Press | September 12, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews), 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
This debut novel “delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South.”
MissSettl by Kamden Ishmael Hilliard
Nightboat Books | June 14, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry
In this debut poetry collection, “sonically vibrant, polyphonic, typographic experimentation gleefully strategizes resistance and life under white supremacist capitalism.”
Fence Books | April 19, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Poetry, Longlisted for the 2023 PEN America Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
“An epic poem about reparations and the female body,” Maafa “undoes the erasure of trauma and of black femininity.”
McSweeney’s | June 7, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Written after Hopler’s terminal cancer diagnosis, this posthumously published poetry collection is “a testament to courage, love, compassion, and the fierceness of the human heart.”
God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu
A Public Space Books | June 7, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Fiction and for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction
The nine stories in this collection, all exploring queer male intimacy in contemporary Nigeria, ask, “can deep love and hope be sustained in spite of the dominant expectations of society, and great adversity.”
Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
Open Letter Books | April 11, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Ninth Building is “a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi’s experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside.”
Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson
McSweeney’s | October 24, 2023
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
In this debut novel, “Slide—a barber with an opaque past—embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods.”
Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones
Coffee House Press | September 13, 2022
Winner of a 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Jones’s new poetry collection “confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt.”
Conversations with Birds by Priyanka Kumar
Milkweed Editions | November 8, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
Kumar’s “stirring collection of essays brings the avian world richly to life.”
Optic Subwoof by Douglas Kearney
Wave Books | November 15, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
In Optic Subwoof, “readers are invited into a work of creative nonfiction where language is at its best and most playful and yet most serious.”
So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan
Grove Atlantic | November 14, 2023
Featured in The Best Books of 2023 (Oprah)
According to Kathleen Alcott, the stories in this collection explore “misogyny through the eyes of women who react to it and men who blister with it.”
Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal
Translated from the French by Jessica Moore
Archipelago Books | February 4, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker), The Best Books of 2023 (The New York Times), Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly), Our 20 Favorite Books of 2023 (Vanity Fair)
In this novel, “a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons.”
Grove Atlantic | July 12, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Firecracker Award in Fiction, the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award
This debut novel is “about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father.”
Copper Canyon Press | April 4, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Skeletons is “a prismatic collection which shrugs off even the most disillusioned nihilist with humor and intimacy.”
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas
Grove Atlantic | March 14, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This novel is “set at a religious training center in Beijing, focusing on the unlikely love story of a Buddhist nun and a Daoist priest.”
Milkweed Editions | May 10, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Griffin Prize
The Hurting Kind is “an astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves,”
Graywolf Press | September 27, 2022
Winner of a 2023 American Book Award
Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell “depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism.”
Grove/Atlantic | December 5, 2023
Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
This novel is “a terrifying, suspenseful vision of an Ireland careening towards authoritarianism.”
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Grove Atlantic | November 8, 2022
Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
This novel follows “a young microbiologist investigating an unfathomable deep vent in the ocean floor, leading her on a journey that will encompass the full trajectory of the cosmos and the passage of a single human life.”
The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao
Graywolf Press | August 1, 2023
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit)
The Kingdom of Surfaces “imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives.”
50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse by Karyna McGlynn
Sarabande Books | April 26, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry
According to Cate Marvin, these poems “are like those spectacular mixed cocktails that carry our troubles away: they are spiked with the oddest ingredients and supremely intoxicating. I love their daring, their deep-diving humor.”
Stories of a Life by Nataliya Meshchaninova
Translated from the Russian by Fiona Bell
Deep Vellum | February 1, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Fiction
Stories of a Life is a “memoir-novel of one young woman’s experiences growing up around, and despite, men in the post-Soviet malaise of the late ‘90s.”
indecent hours by James Fujinami Moore
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry
In this debut poetry collection, “sensual, political, and imagined worlds collide, tracing a history of diaspora and trauma that asks: what do we do in the aftermath of violence, and why do we long to inflict it?”
The Book of Disbelieving by David Lawrence Morse
Sarabande Books | July 18, 2023
Featured in Must-Read Debut Short Story Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit)
These nine stories “open portals to fabulist worlds and magical objects: a village built on the back of a whale, a holiday that requires literal leaps of faith, a tower that houses an entire civilization, a diary that blurs the line between imagination and memory.”
Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim
Archipelago Books | May 2, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
This novel is “a sweeping, multi-generational tale blending fable, farce, and fantasy.”
Grove Atlantic | April 18, 2023
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit), Our 20 Favorite Books of 2023 (Vanity Fair)
This new collection “shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.”
Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene by Alessandra Naccarato
Book*hug Press | September 27, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
In these essays, Naccarato “addresses fundamental questions about our modern relationship to nature amidst depictions of landscapes undergoing dramatic transformation.”
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
Graywolf Press | April 12, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
In this novel set in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, “an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café.”
Omnidawn | January 20, 2023
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
This poetry collection “holds an amalgamation of texts, constructing a shimmering haunting of tenderness, hunger, and detritus.”
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Grove Atlantic | July 18, 2023
Featured in Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly)
Small Worlds “follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline.”
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
Open Letter | March 21, 2023
Featured in Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly)
This novel “juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city.”
Orphan Bachelors by Fae Myenne Ng
Grove Atlantic | May 9, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This is a memoir of “San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion”
Ugly Duckling Presse | September 15, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
Nguyen’s book is “a story without a center: an anti-allegory that finds its meaning in echoes and refracted light, a book stitched together by the O woven through the work as its visual spine and sonic refrain.”
A Man of Two Faces by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Atlantic | October 3, 2023
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
Featured in Best Nonfiction of 2023 (Electric Lit), Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker), Books We Love (NPR), The Best Books of 2023 (Oprah)
Nguyen “expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America.”
PLEASURE by Angelo Nikolopoulos
Four Way Books | February 15, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Nikolopoulos’s PLEASURE is “a book-length poem which muses on the phenomenology of solitude in a pastoral landscape, written in a diaristic, lyric mode, where the queer ‘I’ alternately savors the decadence of isolation and stands at the precipice of despair.”
Hugs and Cuddles by João Gilberto Noll
Translated from the Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto
Two Lines Press | October 18, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction
The narrator in this novel “zealously recommits himself to a man he calls ‘the engineer,’ a childhood friend with whom he shared a pivotal sexual encounter.”
Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker
Coffee House Press | February 8, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Jawbone is “an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.”
Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker
Coffee House Press | October 24, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
This novel is a “techno-horror portrait of the fears and desires of six young artists whose lives are upended by a controversial video game.”
Wave Books | October 25, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 2023 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
This poetry collection “tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.”
The Girl Before Her by Line Papin
Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter and Ly Lan Dill
Kaya Press | August 15, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
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
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
In this debut short fiction collection, Pasaribu “blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements.”
Graywolf Press | September 5, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Patel’s debut novel “offers a devastating critique of class, social media, patriarchy’s hold on us, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.”
Europa Editions | June 20, 2023
Featured in Best Novels of 2023 (Electric Lit), The Best Books of 2023 (Oprah)
Mrs. S is a debut novel “exploring the nature of queer love and attraction, the transformative power of desire, and the dissonance between self and place.”
From Unincorporated Territory [Åmot] by Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn | April 5, 2023
Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry
This book “explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.”
Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most
Copper Canyon Press | October 24, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
Edited by Carl Phillips and Erin Belieu, this anthology features “fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays that explain how and why each poet chose a poem as their ‘personal best.'”
Graywolf Press | May 2, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News), Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Porter’s latest book is “a novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you’re not alone.”
Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology
Autumn House Press | 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Anthology
Edited by Michael Walsh, this anthology featuring more than 200 queer writers “amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry.”
Translated from the German by Lucy Jones
Transit Books | March 7, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Reimann’s first novel to appear in English is “a story of sibling love ruptured by the Iron Curtain.”
West: A Translation by Paisley Rekdal
Copper Canyon Press | May 2, 2023
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry
This hybrid collection of poems and essays “draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943).”
The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
Grove Atlantic | January 24, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker), Books We Love (NPR)
Riker “animates the novel of ideas with a beating heart and turns one woman’s midnight crisis into the performance of a lifetime.”
Noemi Press | December 15, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 PEN Open Book Award
Tommye Blount writes, “Gorgoneion is a thousand-headed beauty lithely slithering from the past, present, and future as it examines the nature and pervasiveness of empire.”
On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer
Translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott
Two Lines Press | February 21, 2023
Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Originally published in 1982, this novel by the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize “tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her choosing.”
Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
The Song Cave | November 1, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry
According to Ladan Osman, “Dereliction considers an afterlife without any sense of resignation, cups the end times in hands that make and remake.”
Graywolf Press | October 3, 2023
Featured in Must-Read Debut Short Story Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit), Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly)
This short fiction collection “brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure.”
The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore by Jasmine Sawers
Rose Metal Press | October 11, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
This flash fiction collection is “equal parts love letter to the old tales and indictment of their shortcomings, offering a new mythology to reflect the many faces and voices of the twenty-first century.”
A New Race of Men from Heaven by Chaitali Sen
Sarabande Books | January 17, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
A New Race of Men from Heaven is a collection of stories “about characters who wander but are never truly lost.”
Graywolf Press | March 1, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Firecracker Award in Poetry
In Customs, Sharif “examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America.”
Translated from Korean by Anton Hur
Feminist Press | April 12, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Fiction
In this novel set over the course of one summer in Seoul, Shin “explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire.”
The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs by George Singleton
Dzanc Books | August 15, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This short fiction collection “follows shysters and schemers, film buffs and future ornithologists, unlikely do-gooders, and the men who make up Veterans Against Guns in North America.”
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
Graywolf Press | March 15, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Fiction
When I Sing, Mountains Dance is “a spellbinding novel that places one family’s tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself.”
The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone
Translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions | May 30, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This novel is “a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.”
Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder
Black Lawrence Press | April 14, 2023
Featured in Must-Read Debut Short Story Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit)
Set in the Bangalore region of South India, Boomtown Girl “explores the ambitions, delusions, and struggles of people navigating a rapidly developing city.”
Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press | November 1, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
According to Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Concentrate is the mouth that refuses to swallow America’s blackest desires, which have too long centered their wealth on the lives and deaths of Black girls and women.”
Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Graywolf Press | June 6, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
Owlish is “a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.”
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Grove Atlantic | May 2, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (Amazon), Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews), Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker), 100 Notable Books of 2023 (The New York Times), Books We Love (NPR)
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977 and set in Kerala, The Covenant of Water “follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning–and in Kerala, water is everywhere.”
Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner
Graywolf Press | February 7, 2023
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This novel “explores the phantasmagoric nature of contemporary life, especially for nonbinary migrants, and daringly revises how solidarity and justice might be sought and won.”
Night Letter by Sterling Watson
Akashic Books | January 31, 2023
Featured in 25 Must-Read Books Published in 2023 by Independent Presses (Los Angeles Daily News)
This novel is “a taut thriller set in Florida’s desolate panhandle, part coming-of-age story, all hard-boiled noir.”
Nights from This Galaxy by Wil Weitzel
Sarabande Books | March 14, 2023
Featured in Must-Read Debut Short Story Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit)
Nights from This Galaxy “captures the spirit of a wild and wonderful planet, while acknowledging our shared fragility and the imminent grief that binds us all.”
As She Appears by Shelley Wong
YesYes Books | May 10, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
In this poetry collection, Wong “writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.”
The Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie
Graywolf Press | September 20, 2022
Finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Poetry
In her second collection, Xie “cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon
Europa Editions | September 19, 2023
Featured in Best Books of 2023 (The New Yorker)
In this “sweeping epic” and “stirring family story,” Yakhina “recounts the story of a people, a republic, a nation, a tale that begins in quietude, flows and grows mighty, crosses space and time, like the Volga River itself.”
Graywolf Press | March 7, 2023
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit), 100 Notable Books of 2023 (The New York Times), Books We Love (NPR), Best Books 2023 (Publishers Weekly), The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 (TIME)
Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry
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.”
The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang
A Public Space Books | May 9, 2023
Featured in Best Debut Short Story Collections of 2023 (Electric Lit)
The Sorrows of Others is a short story collection “about people confronted with being outsiders—as immigrants, as revolutionaries, and even, often, within their own families.”
