Categorie archieven: American Novel

Lionel Shriver – A Better Life

Lionel Shriver A Better Life review and information of the content of new novel by the American author. Harper Collins will publish the Lionel Shriver novel on February 10, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Lionel Shriver A Better Life reviews

Whenever a review of A Better Life, Lionel Shriver’s new novel, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.

Lionel Shriver A Better Life

A Better Life

  • Author: Lionel Shriver (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Harper Collins
  • To be released: February 10, 2026
  • Length: 368 pages
  • Format: hardback / ebook / audiobook
  • Prize: $ 30.00 / $ 14.99 / $ 27.99
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new Lionel Shriver novel

In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant—who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be.

Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is skeptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his “hovercraft repose.”

As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart and even, briefly, Nico’s. But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the “migrant crisis” in general—and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.

Based loosely on a program a New York City mayor floated but did not initiate, A Better Life is Lionel Shriver at her best: smart, funny, and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times.

Lionel Shriver was born on May 18, 1957 in Gastonia, North Carolina, United States. She has published many novels, a collection of essays, and a column in the Spectator since 2017, and her journalism has been featured in publications including, The Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.

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Ben Lerner – Transcription

Ben Lerner Transcription review and information of the content of new novel by the American author. Granta Books will publish the Ben Lerner novel, on April 9, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Ben Lerner Transcription reviews

Whenever a review of Transcription, Ben Lerner’s new novel, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.

Ben Lerner Transcription

Transcription

  • Author: Ben Lerner (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Granta Books
  • To be released: April 9, 2026
  • Length: 144 pages
  • Format: hardback / ebook
  • Prize: £ 14.99
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new Ben Lerner novel

A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

Ben Lerner was born February 4, 1979 in Topeka, Kansas. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka SchoolHe has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

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Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon review and information about the 1930 American detective novel, considered by many to be the best ever written. On this page you can read extensive information about the multi-filmed novel by the American writer Dashiel Hammett.

Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon reviews

  • I didn’t invent the hard-boiled murder story; all credit for that goes to Dashiell Hammett.” (Raymond Chandler)
  • Not only the best detective novel we’ve ever read, but also an exceptionally well-written novel.” (The Times Literary Supplement)

Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon

  • Author: Dashiell Hammett (United States)
  • Book type: American detective novel
  • Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
  • First editon: 1930
  • Length: 272 pages
  • Format: hardback / paperback / ebook
  • Editorial appreciation: ∗∗∗∗∗ (outstanding)
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon is the archetypal ‘hardboiled’ detective story, rich in intriguing characters, dark exciting action and featuring the greatest of all cool, tough private eyes, Sam Spade. Written in 1930, the novel has a timeless quality that makes it fresh and exciting for each new generation of readers.

Sam Spade is hired by the alluring Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with ne-er do well Floyd Thursby. But when Spade’s partner Miles Archer is murdered while on Thursby’s trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the mythical jewel-encrusted Falcon, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man and how far can he trust the seductive Miss Wonderley?

Dashiel Hammett’s noir classic is written in sharp, terse prose that gives a cinematic vividness to the characters and their milieu.

Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, Uinted States. He is undoubtedly the writer who has had the greatest influence on the modern crime novel. At fourteen, he left school to support his family and eventually joined the infamous Pinkerton Detective Agency. All his tightly plotted detective novels are unique, but above all, timeless. He died at the age of 66 in Manhattan, New York City.

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George Saunders – Vigil

George Saunders Vigil review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author. Bloomsbury Publishing will publish novel by George Saunders, on January 27, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

George Saunders Vigil reviews

  • “Exquisitely strange and beautiful, devastating, and so, so funny. Nobody but George Saunders writes like this.” (Meg Mason)
  • “He will be read long after these times have passed.” (Zadie Smith)
  • “Openness has long been a hallmark of Saunders’ fiction, and it’s on full display in this elegant and subtle book.” (Kirkus)

George Saunders Vigil

Vigil

  • Author: George Saunders (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury
  • To be released: January 27, 2026
  • Length: 192 pages
  • Format: hardcover / ebook / audiobook
  • Prize: £ 18.99
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the George Saunders novel

What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward…

Not for the first time – in fact, for the 343rd time – Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine finds herself crashing down to earth, head-first, rear-up, to accompany her latest charge into the afterlife. She soon realises however that this man is not quite like the others.

For powerful oil tycoon K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it… isn’t it?

As death approaches, a cast of worldly and otherworldly visitors arrive. Crowds of people and animals – alive and dead – materialise, birds swarm the dying man’s room, and associates from decades past show up, all clamouring for a reckoning.

In this electric novel brimming with explosive imagination, George Saunders confronts the biggest issues of our time with his trademark humour and warmth, spinning a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the inevitable question: who else could we be but exactly who we are?

George Saunders is born December 2, 1958 in Amarillo, Teax. He is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, and five collections of stories including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama has one of his ten favourite books of 2021). Three of Saunders’ books –Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo – were chosen for the New York Times’ list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book on the Russian short story, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

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Rebecca Kauffman – The Reservation

Rebecca Kauffman The Reservation review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author. Counterpoint Press will publish novel by Rebecca Kauffmann, on February 24, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Rebecca Kauffman The Reservation reviews

  • “A restaurant-based mystery reveals more than just the culprit in this sprightly drama … A tender tale that seeks the ‘immeasurable satisfaction’ of an ordinary job well-done. In what is largely a light and funny novel, Kauffman nevertheless touches some of the deeper mysteries of the human condition: desire, longing, and an inchoate sense that there is something larger than our circumstances which binds us all together. A book that proves light touches can leave lasting impressions.” (Kirkus Reviews)
  • “One thing I love about fiction is that it can take you anywhere. For instance, an entire novel can take off when a whole bunch of steak are stolen from a restaurant refrigerator. That this relatively small theft can change the trajectory of people’s lives. With The Reservation, her sixth novel, Rebecca Kauffman has proven herself to be a master of documenting ordinary life—revealing how complicated, rich, puny, funny, beautiful, and absolutely bittersweet it can be.” (Marcy Dermansky, author of Hot Air)

Rebecca Kauffman The Reservation

The Reservation

  • Author: Rebecca Kauffman (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Counterpoint Press
  • To be released: February 24, 2026
  • Length: 272 pages
  • Format: hardcover / ebook
  • Prize: $ 27.00 / $ 14.99
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new Rebecca Kauffmann novel

The Reservation explores the loves and labors of an ensemble of more than a dozen restaurant workers as they strive to get a perfect meal to the table.

On the morning of the most important booking in the long history of the celebrated restaurant, Aunt Orsa’s erupts into chaos with the discovery that twenty-two rib eye steaks have been stolen. Hers is the most august of fine-dining establishments in this Midwestern college town, and tonight Orsa is set to host a large party honoring a very special guest—a bestselling author of national renown.

And what’s up with the recent spate of online reviews, from insulting to frankly terrible? Is Orsa, who wants only to be loved, being sabotaged on several fronts? No one is above suspicion, not the Mennonite baker nor the tattooed hard-ass chef de cuisine. Could the culprit be among the servers, or even the inexperienced undergrad working as hostess?

Who aside from Rebecca Kauffman—with her talent for portraying such abundant and sympathetic characters—could write with the wit and energy needed to launch all these various individuals whirling through their days with such complex and interactive choreography?

Like the works of the mystery guest, The Reservation is a dynamic and captivating story that shows us what it takes to get a beautiful meal to the table.

Rebecca Kauffmann received her MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the author of Another Place You’ve Never Been, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, The Gunners, which received the Premio Tribùk dei Librai, The House on Fripp IslandChorus, and most recently, I’ll Come to You. Originally from rural northeastern Ohio, Kauffman now lives in Virginia.

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Eshani Surya – Ravishing

Eshani Surya Ravishing review and information of the content of the debut novel by the Indian American writer. Grove Atlantic will publish the first Eshani Surya novel, on November 11, 2025. 

Eshani Surya Ravishing review

  • “Ravishing is a marvel of a debut that hums with the ache of becoming—a place where even the mirror is a battleground and every shimmer of beauty carries the weight of longing: for love, for a face we can call our own, and for a world less cruel. Surya expertly reminds us that even though the body remembers grief and abandonment, there can also be a chance to bloom.” (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author)
  • “This debut is thoughtful in its handling of tricky themes of identity, belonging, and, perhaps most compellingly, the intersection of wellness culture and chronic illness. Surya handles this latter with unflinching—even discomfiting—clarity. A speculative take on the all-too-real rot at the heart of the beauty and wellness industry.” (Kirkus Reviews)
  • “How far will you go to keep running from yourself? Eshani Surya’s Ravishing takes this question to new heights, conjuring a dazzling dystopia even as it points a hard finger at our present. You will never look in the mirror the same way again.” (Mira Jacob, author)

Eshani Surya Ravishing

Ravising

  • Author: Eshani Surya (United States)
  • Book type: debut novel
  • Publisher: Grove Atlantic
  • Released: 11 November 2025
  • Length: 320 pages
  • Format: hardback / ebook
  • Prize: $ 28.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the debut novel by Eshani Surya

A provocative, razor-sharp novel about two Indian American siblings caught in the clutches of a beauty tech company, Ravishing is an incisive portrait of a predatory industry and its dangerous ability to capitalize on our deepest insecurities. Full of heart and vulnerability, Eshani Surya’s dazzling debut shines a light on the dark enticements of wellness culture and the ill-fated pursuit of perfection.

For teenage Kashmira, it’s painful to look in the mirror; she has her father’s face, and every feature is a reminder of his abandonment. When a friend introduces her to Evolvoir, a beauty product that changes users’ features, Kashmira is quickly seduced by its ability to erase the triggers of her grief. Meanwhile, at Evolvoir corporate, Kashmira’s estranged brother Nikhil sees the product as an opportunity to make a difference, but is quickly mired in complicity as reports surface of severe side effects in some users. As Kashmira becomes more dependent on the escape the product offers, she is hospitalized with inexplicable symptoms and must negotiate the constraints of her new reality, while Nikhil uncovers a vicious truth that forces him to decide where his loyalties lie.

Deftly excavating the repercussions of living in white spaces, and fearlessly examining the realities of what it means to live with chronic illness,

Eshani Surya is a chronically ill South Asian writer living in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is a 2022 Asian Women Writer’s Workshop mentee, a 2022 Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop scholarship recipient, and a 2021 Mae Fellowship recipient. Ravishing is her first book.

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Terry Dactyl

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Terry Dactyl review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author and activist. Coffee House Press will publish the new Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore novel, on November 11, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Terry Dactyl review

  • “By turns perceptive, touching, and occasionally funny, [Terry Dactyl] is a deep dive into what it means to live authentically as a queer progressive.” (Eleanor Bader, The Indypendent)
  • “Terry Dactyl made me cry and made me laugh out loud. It has all the pain and joy, struggle and delight of the lives of those who color outside the lines. It’s a book about family and friendship and love and knowing when and how to change your life.” (McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death)
  • “Full of glitter and grit … Sycamore’s prose is fluid and funny, tender and propulsive, as she brings us along on Terry’s journey of love, loss, and finding herself.” (Rebecca Hopman, Booklist)

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Terry Dactyl

Terry Dactyl

  • Author: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (United States)
  • Book type: American novel, feminist novel
  • Publisher: Coffee House Press
  • Released: November 11, 2025
  • Length: 305 pages
  • Format: paperback / ebook
  • Prize: € 15,95
  • Order book from: Amazon

Blurb of the new book by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

From iconic author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore comes a breathless search for intimacy and connection, ranging from club culture to the art world, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19.

Terry Dactyl has lived many lives. Raised by boisterous lesbian mothers in Seattle, she comes of age as a trans girl in the 1980s in a world of dancing queens and late-night house parties just as the AIDS crisis ravages their world. After moving to New York City, Terry finds a new family among gender-bending club kids bonded by pageantry and drugs, fiercely loyal and unapologetic. She lands a job at a Soho gallery, where, after partying all night, she spends her days bringing club culture to the elite art world.

Twenty years later, in a panic during the COVID-19 lockdown, Terry returns to a Seattle stifled by gentrification and pandemic isolation until resistance erupts following the murder of George Floyd, and her search for community ignites once again.

In propulsive, intoxicating prose, Terry Dactyl traces an extraordinary journey from adolescence to adulthood, delivering a vital portrait of queer identity in all its peril and possibility.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is born May 31, 1973 in Washington, D.C. She is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, and the editor of six anthologies. Her most recent title, Touching the Art, was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her previous title, The Freezer Door, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her new novel is Terry Dactyl.

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Anika Jade Levy – Flat Earth

Anika Jade Levy Flat Earth review and information of the content of the first novel by the American author. Catapult will publish the new Anika Jade Levy novel, on November 4, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Anika Jade Levy Flat Earth review

  • “Anika Jade Levy’s Flat Earth exudes ennui and sadness, each chapter prefaced by a mordant precis of bizarre fads and news stories to set against its heroine’s apathy and dysfunction . . . There is a glum kind of humour woven into the despair, and the hopelessness is rendered strangely hypnotic in crisp, pitiless prose.” (Suzi Feay, Financial Times)
  • “Reading Flat Earth feels like opening your best friend’s diary and finding out what she really thinks about you, and then falling even more in love with her—realizing that love is something darker and more consuming than you’d let yourself believe. Flat Earth is fierce, hungry, hurting, on fire. The prose in this book makes other books feel like dull knives. This is a book about friendship and imperfect care—about the ways we love not despite but through our brokenness, because it’s what we have. I read this book in a night, breathless and enraptured—wanting to save everyone in it, and wanting to watch them burn forever.” (Leslie Jamison, author)
  • “In a city that eternally produces young, hot, smart, special girls with curatorial-level taste and then discards them when they’ve aged out of the proverbial pleated skirt, even the most delusional woman’s sense of uniqueness and superiority can begin to falter. Unless they manage to produce something aesthetically or culturally relevant that garners attention, fame, and money, these girls fear they may be on the chopping block next—if not today, whenever their amphetamine and Wellbutrin prescriptions run dry.” (Jen George)
  • “Brilliant … In Avery’s narrative voice, Levy has achieved a fantastic yet paradoxical triumph: It’s a voice that manages to carry intimations as acerbic as they are full of longing, as strident as they are vulnerable, and as tart as they are unguarded . . . With her own hyperarticulate, stimulant-driven style, Avery (and Levy behind her) runs into her own life, helter-skelter, as if it were a door she’d forgotten to open. You’ll want to keep reading just to see what she says next. Levy’s utterly original sendup of contemporary life seems destined to become a cult classic.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Anika Jade Levy Flat Earth

Flat Earth

  • Author: Anika Jade Levy (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Catapult
  • Released: November 4, 2025
  • Length: 224 pages
  • Format: hardback / ebook
  • Prize: € 26.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the Anika Jade Levy novel

A young woman struggles with the artistic success of her more privileged, beautiful best friend in this ruthless portrait of the New York art scene in which relationships are transactional, men are vampiric, and women have limited time to trade on their youth, beauty, and talent—it’s Renata Adler’s Speedboat for the Adderall generation.

Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation, Avery takes a job at a right-wing dating app. The “white-paper” she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merges with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself over the course of the novel.

Meanwhile, her best friend, Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary. Frances’s triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world sends Avery into a final tailspin, pushing her to make a series of devastating decisions.

In this generational portrait, attention spans are at an all-time low and dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high. Flat Earth is a story of coming of age in America, a novel about commodification, conspiracy theories, mimetic desire, and the difficulties of female friendship that’s as sharp and sardonic as it is heartbreaking.

Anika Jade Levy is a writer from Colorado. She is a founding editor of Forever Magazine and teaches in the Writing program at Pratt Institute. Her fiction and criticism has appeared in Interview, Magazine, Nylon, Flaunt, Grand, and elsewhere. Flat Earth is her first book.

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Aja Gabel – Lightbreakers

Aja Gabel Lightbreakers review en information about the new novel by the American author. Riverhead Books will publish the second Aja Gabel novel, on November 4, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Aja Gabel Lightbreakers reviews

  • “Compassionate and prismatic, an intellectual adventure as well as a deeply human meditation on memory, family, and reinvention. Aja Gabel’s second novel is my favorite kind: soulful science fiction that speaks to the mind as well as the heart.” (Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists)
  • “Exists in a category all its own: a novel about grief, ambition, and love that is somehow both gripping and deeply felt, as breath-taking as it is mind-bending. Aja Gabel’s prose is like music, vivid with wisdom, curiosity, and emotion.” (Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans)
  • “Gabel beautifully explores the ways the past echoes endlessly in the present and into the future—and the unimaginable lure of being with the ones we love no matter the cost. A poignant and sharp novel about love, loss, and finding light in the darkness.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Aja Gabel Lightbreakers

Lightbreakers

  • Author: Aja Gabel (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Riverhead Books
  • To be released: November 4, 2025
  • Length: 332 pages
  • Format: paperback / ebook
  • Prize: $ 30.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new Aha Gabel Novel

What would you give to relive the past?

Maya, an artist, and Noah, a quantum physicist, share an insatiable curiosity about the world. But their happy marriage has a shadow over it: Serena, the child Noah had with his first wife, who died before she turned four.

When Noah is invited by the Janus Project to unravel the secrets of time travel, he jumps at the opportunity. At a laboratory deep in the Texas desert, he begins participating in a dangerous experiment that could result in something he thought impossible: seeing his daughter again.

Meanwhile, Maya embarks on a journey back to her own past in Japan, and to a formative lover who once shattered her heart. As Noah and Maya grapple with hope and despair, new information emerges that the experiments might not be exactly what they seems.

A heartachingly moving novel, Lightbreakers plumbs the mysteries of human connection, and explores how to love in a world where time is both a healer and a thief.

Aja Gabel is the author of the novel The Ensemble. Her prose can be found in The Cut, the Los Angeles TimesOprah Daily, and elsewhere. She studied writing at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of awards from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her short story “Little Fish” was adapted into a feature film, and she has written extensively for television. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.

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Davey Davis – Casanova 20 or, Hot World

Davey Davis Casanova 20 or, Hot World review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author. Catapult will publish the new Davey Davis novel, on December 2, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Davey Davis Casanova 20 or, Hot World reviews

  • “A story that digs unflinchingly into the intimacy of both sex and illness … Davis’s characters are so haunted by the past that it often becomes syntactically interwoven with the present … Casanova 20 achieves this interjectory effect, punching through the well-charted terrains of sex, death, art, pleasure, and beauty with hedonistically lived-in details and incisive observations that rub the reader right up against the skin and the bedpan.” (Annie Lou Martin, The Whitney Review)
  • “The novel’s conceit is big, its prose attention-grabbing, its sexual joie de vivre propulsive, but, in the end, the most compelling part is the tender nuance of its central characters as they love both each other and the world. The result is a rare gem of a book—afraid of neither joy nor sorrow and patient enough to find the human heart inside all its gorgeous language. A show-stopping novel that carries within it a quiet, steadfast heart.” (Kirkus Review)

Davey Davis Casanova 20 or, Hor World

Casanova 20

or, Hot World

  • Author: Davey Davis (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Catapult
  • Released: December 2, 2025
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Format: paperback / ebook
  • Prize: $ 17.95 / $ 12,99
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new Davey Davis novel

A novel about art, desire, and mortality, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World follows a young man isolated by his extraordinary beauty and his strange friendship with an older painter.

Cursed by an extreme and unrelenting beauty, Adrian has drawn the frenzied attention of adoring strangers since childhood. As a twenty-nine-year-old in New York City, he spends his days drifting between affairs with women (and occasionally men) who provide him with everything he needs, from spending money to luxurious vacations to even, once, a mini yacht. With this generosity comes a dangerous possessiveness that often puts him at risk of much worse than heartbreak. But as people begin removing their masks in the spring of 2021, Adrian’s aimless sexual availability is interrupted by a shocking discovery: He is no longer beautiful.

Across the country, Adrian’s best friend and companion, Mark, a world-famous painter, has returned to the family home in rural Northern California. He’s faced with his own horrible revelation: He’s dying from the same mysterious disease that will soon take his mother and sister.

Despite the depth of their platonic romance, neither man reveals his fate to the other. Feeling as if he’s disappearing from sight, Adrian searches for answers among his thousands of lovers. In a race against his failing body, Mark becomes obsessed with watching fifty-two VHS tapes of unknown origin, left to him by his sister, before it’s too late.

Davey Davis is the author of X and the earthquake room. They write a weekly newsletter and mutual aid fundraiser about art, culture, sexuality, and people named David at itsdavid.substack.com. They live in Brooklyn.

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