Tag archieven: American Novel

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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American female writers best novels

American female writers best novels. What are the best novels written by female authors from the United States? When was the novel published and what is its content? Which women’s novels from the United States are considered the best?

American female writers best novels

Of course, you can debate at length what the best American novels by female authors are. In fact, every reader will have their own personal preferences. So a top-so list of the best novels by American female authors isn’t entirely useful.

What are the best novels written by female authors from America?

Our editors have chosen to compile an alphabetical overview of American women’s novels that many consider more than worth reading. We will also be adding new, excellent novels by American authors.

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies 1943 novel first editionJane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies

1943 novel
Editorial rating: ∗∗∗∗
(excellent)
Miss Goering, an eccentric, impulsive New York heiress, resides in her house and tries not to be unhappy. Mrs Copperfield, an anxious, dutiful married woman, has a great fear of drowning, of lifts, of intruders in the night. Two serious ladies, nothing is natural for them and anything is possible.

Willa Cather The Song of the Lark review en recensieWilla Cather – The Song of the Lark

1915 novel
Editorial rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado has a great gift – her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she forges a life as an artist. But if she can never go home again, nor can she leave behind her past.

Save Me the Waltz Zelda Fitzgerald 1932 novel first editionZelda Fitzgerald – Save Me the Waltz

1932 novel
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work.

Hannah Green I Never Promised You a Rose Garden novel 1964 first editionJoanne Greenberg – I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

1984 novel, published as Hannah Green
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Sixteen-year-old Deborah’s identity is shattering, as she retreats further and further from the ‘normal’ world into her imaginary kingdom of Yr, a fantastical inner refuge both lush and horrifying. Sent to a psychiatric hospital, she must, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, try to find a way back.

Annie John Jamaica Kincaid novel from 1985 first editionJamaica Kincaid – Annie John

1985 coming of age novel uit 1985 about Antigua
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
An adored only child growing up in Antigua, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s shadow. When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her.

Elaine Kraf I Am Clarence reviewElaine Kraf – I Am Clarence

1969 novel
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
For Clarence’s mother, life revolves around her young son; she takes him to see specialists to find the cause of his blindness and developmental delays, protects him from the cruelty of other children, and loves him tenderly. But she has her own struggles too. Her sanity is precarious and fractured, making caregiving increasingly difficult.

Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird Amerikaanse roman uit 1960Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

1960 novel
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Summers for Scout in the Deep South are long and golden. Her story is one of innocence, and growing up. It is also about justice. When Scout’s father Atticus Finch, a lawyer, agrees to defend a black man against an accusation by a white girl, he takes on the prejudice of the whole town.

Bernice L. McFadden Sugar review en recensieBernice L. McFadden –  Sugar

2000 novel
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
When she arrives in the southern town of Bigelow, it isn’t long before the neighbourhood is alight with gossip and suspicion. Sugar fears her past is catching up with her. Then she meets Pearl, a woman trying to forget her own trauma. As these next-door neighbours become unlikely friends, they wonder if their lives could finally be changing for the better. But small towns have long memories.

Toni Morrison – Beloved

1987 novel about slavery
Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home – the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, Beloved.

Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged roman uit 1957Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

1957 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Opening with the enigmatic question ‘Who is John Galt?’, Atlas Shrugged envisions a world where the ‘men of talent’ – the great innovators, producers and creators – have mysteriously disappeared. With the US economy now faltering, businesswoman Dagny Taggart is struggling to get the transcontinental railroad up and running. For her John Galt is the enemy, but as she will learn, nothing in this situation is quite as it seems.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith 1943 novel first editionBetty Smith – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

1943 Brooklyn novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
The Nolan family are first-generation immigrants to the United States. Originating in Ireland and Austria, their life in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn is poor and deprived, but their sacrifices make it possible for their children to grow up in a land of boundless opportunity. Francie Nolan is the eldest daughter of the family. Alert, imaginative and resourceful, her journey through the first years of a century of profound change is difficult – and transformative…read on >

The Mountain Lion Jean Stafford Novel from 1947 first editionJean Stafford – The Mountain Lion

1947 coming of age novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle’s Colorado mountain ranch, where they write, hunt, roam. But this untamed wilderness soon becomes tainted by dark stirrings of sexual desire.

The Making of Americans Gertrude Stein novel from 1925 first editionGertrude Stein – The Making of Americans

1925 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Gertrude Stein sets out to tell “a history of a family’s progress,” radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocense novel from 1920 first editionEdith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

1920 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May’s cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence.

Edith Wharton The Glimpes of the Moon first edition from 1922Edith Wharton – The Glimpses of the Moon

1922 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young and attractive, but penniless. Gracefully moving through New York high society, they have the right connections but none of the wealth. When they inconveniently fall in love, Susy devises a plan. They will marry and spend a year flitting across Europe, staying in the homes of their rich friends and living off honeymoon gifts until either one of them meets a better, richer prospect.

Marguerite Young Miss MacIntosh, My Darling review en recensieMarguerite Young – Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

1968 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel—a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young’s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality.

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Afbeelding bovenzijde: Zelda Fitzgerald in 1922 (Public domain)

Betty Smith – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn review and information about the 1943 American novel. In 1943, American author Betty Smith’s novel was published. Here you can read information about the novel’s content, reception, reviews and author.

Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reviews

  • “A profoundly moving novel, and an honest and true one. It cuts right to the heart of life … If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn you will deny yourself a rich experience… It is a poignant and deeply understanding story of childhood and family relationships.” (New York Times)
  • “One of the books of the century.” (New York Public Library)

Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  • Author: Betty Smith (United States)
  • Book type: 1943 American novel
  • Publisher: Vintage Classics
  • Length: 272 pages
  • Format: paperback / ebook
  • Prize: £ 9.99
  • Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the 1943 novel by Betty Smith

Betty Smith’s debut novel is universally regarded as a modern classic. The sprawling tale of an immigrant family in early 20th-century Brooklyn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the great distinctively American novels.

The Nolan family are first-generation immigrants to the United States. Originating in Ireland and Austria, their life in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn is poor and deprived, but their sacrifices make it possible for their children to grow up in a land of boundless opportunity.

Francie Nolan is the eldest daughter of the family. Alert, imaginative and resourceful, her journey through the first years of a century of profound change is difficult – and transformative. But amid the poverty and suffering among the poor of Brooklyn, there is hope, and the prospect of a brighter future.

Betty Smith was born December 15, 1896 in Brooklyn. New York A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Betty Smith 1943 novel first editionCity as  Elisabeth Lillian Wehner. She published four novels: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Tomorrow Will Be Better (1947), Maggie-Now (1958) and, Joy in the Morning (1963). She also wrote two plays: Jonica Stars (1930) and Becomes A Woman, originally titled Francie Nolan (1931). She died in died of pneumonia in Shelton, Connecticut on January 17, 1972 in Shelton, Connecticut, at the age of 75.

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Zelda Fitzgerald – Save Me the Waltz

Zelda Fitzgerald Save Me the Waltz review and information about the 1932 American novel. In 1932, American author Zelda Fitzgerald’s only novel was published. Here you can read information about the novel’s content, reception, reviews and author.

Zelda Fitzgerald Save Me the Waltz reviews

  • “The only published novel of a brave and talented woman who is remembered for het defeats.” (Matthew Bruccoli)
  • “A strangely evocative novel, episodic in structure, painterly in its description, almost hallucinatory in overall effect.” (The New York Times)

Zelda Fitzgerald Save Me the Waltz

Save Me the Waltz

  • Author: Zelda Fitzgerald (United States)
  • Book type: 1932 American novel
  • Publisher: Vintage Classics
  • Length: 272 pages
  • Format: paperback / ebook
  • Prize: £ 9.99
  • Editorial Rating∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the 1932 novel by Zelda Fitzgerald

“We couldn’t go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.”

One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work.

In its own right, it is a vivid and moving story: the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina which captures the spirit of an era.

Zelda Fitzgerald was born July 24, 1900,  in Montgomery, Alabama, Save Me the Waltz Zelda Fitzgerald 1932 novel first editionin the United States was an American writer and artist, best known for personifying the carefree ideals of the 1920s flapper and for her tumultuous marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Save Me the Waltz was the only novel she wrote and was published during her lifetime. She died March 10, 1948, at the age of 47 in the Highlight Mental Hospital Asheville, North Carolina during a fire.

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Jane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies review and information about the 1943 American novel. In 1943, American author Jane Bowles’ only novel was published. Here you can read information about the novel’s content, reception, reviews and author.

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies reviews

  • “My favourite book. I can”t think of a modern novel that seems more likely to become a classic.” (Tennessee Williams)
  • “Jane Bowles”s literary output, small but perfect, puts her on a stylistic planet all her own.” (The New Yorker)
  • “The book I give as a gift. It feels like giving someone an exotic fruit.” (Sheila Heti)
  • “A modernist cult classic.” (Guardian)

Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies

Two Serious Ladies

  • Author: Jane Bowles (United States)
  • Book type: American novel from 1943
  • Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Essentials
  • Length: 272 pages
  • Format: paperback / ebook
  • Prize: £ 9.99
  • Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the 1943 novel by Jane Bowles

Miss Goering, an eccentric, impulsive New York heiress, resides in her house and tries not to be unhappy.

Mrs Copperfield, an anxious, dutiful married woman, has a great fear of drowning, of lifts, of intruders in the night.

Two serious ladies, nothing is natural for them and anything is possible.

For Mrs Copperfield – a trip to Panama, where she abandons her husband for love of a local prostitute. For Miss Goering – a move to a squalid little house on an island and a series of sordid encounters with strangers. Both go to pieces -and both realise this is something they’ve wanted to do for years.

Jane Bowles was born as born Jane Sydney Auer, February 22, 1917 Jane Bowles Two Serious Ladies 1943 novel first editionin New York City. She has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. She lived in Tangier, Morocco, with her husband, writer Paul Bowles, from 1952 until her death on May 4, 1973 in a clinic in Málaga, Spain at the age of 56. She was primarily a playwright and Two Serious Ladies was her only novel.

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Colson Whitehead – Cool Machine

Colson Whitehead Cool Machine review and information of the content of new novel by the American author. Doubleday will publish the Colson Whitehead novel and final volume of his Harlem Trilogy, on July 21, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.

Colson Whitehead Cool Machine reviews

Whenever a review of Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead’s new novel, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.

Colson Whitehead Cool Machine

Cool Machine

Harlem trilogy part 3

  • Author: Colson Whitehead (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Doubleday
  • To be released: July 21, 2026
  • Length: 368 pages
  • Format: hardback / paperback / ebook / audiobook
  • Prize: $ 30.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new Colson Whitehead novel and Harlem Shuffle part 3

An exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime Pepper is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.

Colson Whitehead is born November 6, 1969 in New York City. He is the author of The Underground Railroad, which in 2016 won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble HustleZone OneSag HarborThe IntuitionistJohn Henry DaysApex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives in New York City.

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Gish Jen – Bad Bad Girl

Gish Jen Bad Bad Girl review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author of Chinese descent. St. Martin’s Press will publish the new Gish Jen novel, on October 21, 2025. 

Gish Jen Bad Bad Girl review

  • “What an amazing f***ing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything—except the voices of our parents. Intergenerational mother-daughter mayhem of the absolute best smartest vexing most moving kind.” (Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
  • “Sharp and compassionate … Some relationships are so complex that truth can’t do them justice.” (Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times)

Gish Jen Bad Bad Girl

Bad Bad Girl

  • Author: Gish Jen (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Knopf
  • Released: 21 October 2025
  • Length: 353 pages
  • Format: hardcover / ebook / audiobook
  • Prize: $ 30.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new novel by Gish Jen

The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.

My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .

Gish’s mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid—far more loving to than her real mother—is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But even then he can only sigh, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail—never to return.

Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-Pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain—“Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”—as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.

Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as immensely incisive as it is compassionate.

Gish Jen is born August 12, 1955 in Long Island, New York. She is a second-generation Chinese American. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s. Bad Bad Girl is het sixth novel. She als published non-fiction. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as of a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and of a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short work has appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines, and have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She delivered the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University.

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Brandon Taylor – Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor Minor Black Figures review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author. Riverhead Books will publish the new Brandon Taylor novel, on October 14, 2025. 

Brandon Taylor Minor Black Figures review

  • “Taylor’s most accomplished novel – a sustained, idiosyncratic portrait of an artist.” (The New York Times Book Review)
  • “Brandon Taylor is a literary superstar … Taylor’s third novel [is] a smart and soulful exploration set in the world of art (both contemporary and historical). The book deftly explores race and sexuality, religion and community, and the way love can change a life.” (The Boston Globe)
  • “A meditative, illuminating portrait of friendship and competition, belief systems and the connections between us all.” (People)
  • “Dazzling … a poetic meditation on Black art, friendship, young love and intimacy.” (USA Today)

Brandon Taylor Minor Black Figures

Minor Black Figures

  • Author: Brandon Taylor (United States)
  • Book type: American novel
  • Publisher: Riverhead Books
  • Released: 14 October 2025
  • Length: 400 pages
  • Format: hardcover / paperback / ebook / audiobook
  • Prize: $ 39.00
  • Order book from: Amazon / Bol

Blurb of the new novel by Brandon Taylor

The story of a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity.

New York simmers with heat and unrest as Wyeth, a painter, finds himself at an impasse in his own work.

After attending a dubious show put on by a collective of careerist artists, he retreats to a bar in the West Village where he meets Keating, a former seminarian. Over the long summer, as the two get to know each another, they talk and argue about God, sex, and art.

Meanwhile, at his job working for an art restorer, Wyeth begins to investigate the life and career of a forgotten, minor black artist. His search yields potential answers to questions that Wyeth is only now beginning to ask about what it means to be a black artist making black art amid the mess and beauty of life itself.

As he did so brilliantly in the Booker Prize finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings alive a captivating set of characters, this time at work and at play in the competitive art world. Minor Black Figures is a vividly etched portrait, both sweeping and tender, of friendship, creativity, belief, and the deep connections among them.

Brandon Taylor is born June 1, 1989 in Prattville, Alabama. He  the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He lives in New York City.

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