This exquisite collection of short stories challenges the borders between science fiction, horror, fantasy, and psychological realism. It was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2017. The collection centers on women and their bodies, provocatively underscoring the pleasure and desires women experience, but also the realities of the violence executed on their bodies. A woman’s X surgery results in an unwanted houseguest, an alternate universe where women inexplicably dissolve and disappear, but materialize in an unexpected place, a reimagination of every episode of Law and Order: SVU through the speculative lens full of ghosts, doppelgängers, and girls with bells for eyes. Machado’s stories are sexy, queer, comic, but deadly serious. And unfortunately, they continue to be deeply timely, given the ongoing persistence of misogyny and gendered violence. They also importantly emphasize nonnormative bodies and lived experiences: the fat, queer, wounded, all through lush prose that expands possibilities in contemporary fiction.

Ferris’ graphic novel, set against the backdrop of 1960s Chicago, tells the coming-of-age story of Karen Reyes as she tries to solve the murder of her mysterious upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor who’s the catalyst for the unfolding of the interconnected stories around her. My Favorite Thing is filled with B-movie horror and the iconography of pulp monster magazines. It draws on Ferris’ childhood growing up in Chicago and her love of monsters and horror. The first volume won the 2017 Ignatz Award for “Outstanding Graphic Novel” and two 2018 Eisner Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award.

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and listed as Lit Hub and The Millions most anticipated books of book 2019, Flores’ debut novel is set in an alternate South Texas universe, where a third border wall had been erected between the United States and Mexico. In this alternate world narcotics have become legal, making way for a new contraband in the unsanctioned market. Termed “filtered” animals, this new contraband is animal species previously extinct that have been resurrected to amuse the wealthiest of society. The novel’s protagonist, Esteban Bellacosa, has his life turned upside down after his encounter with a journalist takes him to an underground dinner where filtered animals are served. He finds himself on a surreal journey filled with dangerous syndicates who sell shrunken heads, stolen Olmec statues, and the encounter with legends of a long-disappeared object of an indigenous tribe: the mysterious Trufflepig. Flores’ novel is filled with humor, zany scenes, and absurdist satire that offers a reflection on current conditions on the US-Mexico border.

In this collection of essays, Capó Crucet, author of the short story collection How to Leave Hialeah and the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, offers candid reflections on her experiences as a first-generation Cuban American. Raised in Hialeah (the second largest city in the Miami metropolitan area) and the daughter of Cuban emigrants, Capó Crucet examines the political and personal forms of American identity and the spaces where these identities are expressed. Essays are sited in environments like Disney World, a rodeo in Nebraska, and an upstate New York university campus, reflecting on Capó Crucet’s exclusions of the American Dream in spite of the attempt to assimilate within white American culture. Her prose is audacious and filled with humor, and as Renee Hudson says in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the book is “a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a first-generation college student, a child of immigrants, and a professor to boot….An exploration of what it means to be Latinx in the time of Trump.”

“I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,/can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this/when the war ended. The war ended/depending on which war you mean: those we started,/ before those, millennia ago and onward,/those which started me.” These are the opening lines of Diaz’s titular poem from her 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Postcolonial Love. Centering on the postcolonial experience from the perspective of indigenous, Black, and other people of color, the poems highlight the ongoing violence executed against indigenous peoples, underscoring that this violence is not an element of the past, but continues from the individual to the systemic and institutional. Throughout, she rejects indigenous stereotypes and reflects on what it means to survive as a queer Aha Makav woman in the 21st century. 

Diaz’s collection highlights the intersection of the colonizer’s language (Spanish and English) with an indigenous one (Mojave), further describing how the languages and traditions of both indigenous peoples and European colonizers influence American culture. Diaz reclaims poetic conventions, especially the love poem, with its roots in European traditions, governed by patriarchal control and heteronormativity, and retools its imagery and language, making it her own. Centering the experiences of queer women of color, the collection demands readers examine the world with care, understanding that not everything can be translated, and that diverse voices—queer, women, Black, indigenous, POC—can offer a form of resistance against dominant histories and their effect on bodies and their desires.

This new young adult novel by Rivera, the author of Dealing in Dreams (2020), We Light the Sky Up (2021), and The Education of Margot Sanchez (2019), tells the story of Eury, who moves from her home in Puerto Rico to the Bronx because of Hurricane Maria. She is haunted by this traumatic event, as well as by an otherworldly spirit, Ato. Against the fear of this spirit and the memories of what happened to her family in Puerto Rico, there’s also a boy, Pheus, who tries to help Eury fight her demons. Centering the Afro-Latinx experience, Never Look Back reimagines the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and like the protagonists of this ancient story, Eury and Pheus must fight for each other and their lives.

This young adult LGBTQIA+ ghost story by Thomas, a trans, Latinx New York Times bestselling author, is all about magic and acceptance, asking what it means to be your true self. When Yadriel summons a ghost and then cannot get rid of him, he is not only determined to prove himself as a real witch and convince his family of brujxs (the non-gendered word for witch in Spanish) of his powers, but also solve the murder of his ghost, Julian. Alongside his cousin and best friend, Maritza, Yadriel follows clues to allow Julian to tie up loose ends, all while asking his family to recognize his true identity. Described by reviewers as “heart-pounding,” “funny, heartfelt, intense, moving, and fast paced,” Cemetery Boys was longlisted for a National Book Award.

In this travelogue, journalist and activist Ramos introduces readers to the various communities that make up the controversial term “Latinx.” From indigenous Oaxacans in upstate New York who rebuilt a main street in a postindustrial town, musicians in Milwaukee, drag queens, environmental activists, farmworkers, and migrants detained at the border to a group fighting for reproductive rights in Texas, Ramos’s account draws on extensive field research as well as her own personal story. Finding Latinx chronicles how a sense of collectivity and solidarity among Latinxs is strong in a way that it has not been in decades. The book is an inspiring call for us to expand our understanding of what it means to be Latinx and a demand for recognition within a larger American landscape.

Immediately after the 2016 election, Cornejo Villavicencio, who, as one of the 800,000 young people known as “Dreamers” protected by DACA, decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. Embarking on a trip across the country to tell the stories of other undocumented immigrants, The Undocumented Americans explores these lives, as well as her own, finding three-dimensional individuals who are often reduced to political pawns or nameless laborers by the media. The stories she tells present the lives of undocumented immigrants in all their complicated realness, beyond the expected idealized or naively inspirational. She explores the routine love, heartbreak, senselessness, and crudeness that permeate their day-to-day lives. From New York City to Miami to Flint to Cleveland and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio combines reporting alongside personal narratives to highlight stories of resilience, resistance, mental illness, death, and love. In these stories we also encounter the writer herself as she contends with questions of family, survival, love, and duty and examines what it means to be unmoored and seen as expendable Americans.

Alvarez is recognized as one of the most important and influential Latinx writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work explores themes of identity, family, and cultural divides in novels like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and now Afterlife. The novel’s central figure is an immigrant writer,  Antonia Vega, who has just retired from her position as a college English professor when her husband, Sam, dies. More tragedy ensues: her unstable sister disappears, an undocumented pregnant teenager appears on her doorstep. Set against our current politically divisive moment, Afterlife asks how we can live in a world seemingly broken and build community, and also asks what we owe others in moments of crisis.

Lost Children Archive is the fictional follow-up to Luiselli’s American Book Award–winning Tell Me How It Ends, which is structured around 40 questions she translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation. Born in Mexico City and raised in South Africa, the author is well-versed in discussions of immigration and belonging. In Lost Children Archive, a couple take a road trip from New York to Arizona in the middle of summer with their two children. Traveling west, the bonds between the couple are tested, and the children try to make sense of the friction between their parents against the backdrop of American politics in the news: thousands of children trying to cross the US border who instead find themselves detained, lost.

In this novel, a Dominican woman—the titular character—and a pirate make their way to New Orleans after the American occupation of the island in 1916. There they have a child. Adana writes a science fiction novel, which earns rave reviews. She begins writing a sequel, but falls mortally ill, destroying the only manuscript before she dies. A world away and decades later, Saul Dower is clearing out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers the mysterious manuscript written by Adana. He attempts to track down Adana’s son, tracing him to Chile, the Dominican Republic, and finally to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Zapata’s book is an ode to family, literary networks, the love of science fiction, possibilities embedded in parallel worlds, and what it means to be unmoored.

What are Latinxs and how do they fit within the racial makeup of the United States? Gómez, a critical race scholar, attempts to answer this question by arguing that only recently have the groups comprised within Latinx—Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans—begun to see themselves and be seen by others as part of a cohesive racial identity. The instigator for this change, she argues, is extreme anti-Latinx racism. Amidst this argument, she offers a detailed history of the construction of this racial identity and how Latinxs have come to identify.

From Moreno Garcia, the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow (2020), Mexican Gothic (2021), and Velvet Is the Night (2022) comes a reimagination of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Wells has a challenging racist legacy and writers like Victor LaValle and filmmakers like Jordan Peele have turned to a reimagination of his work. Moreno Garcia follows in this tradition, centering a young woman, Carlota Moreau, who grows up in a distant estate in the Yucatán peninsula. She is the daughter of a genius…or perhaps he is a madman, who performs strange scientific experiments. Surrounded by a group of hybrid part-human, part-animal monstrosities, Carlota is living in a placid, static world. That all changes with the arrival of Eduardo Lizalde, the charming son of Doctor Moreau’s patron. The chain reaction he ignites raises many questions for Carlota and in the middle of the jungle, she just might find them.

Diaz is a fascinating new writer in Latinx literature. He was born in Argentina, his family emigrated to Sweden, where he was raised, he returned to Argentina, and now lives in New York City. His stories do not center on Latinx characters or themes typically associated with Latinx literature. His 2017 novel, In the Distance, for example, is the story of a Swedish immigrant living in the mid-19th century, but also explores questions of immigration, citizenship, and national belonging. In Trust, Diaz focuses his story in 1920s New York and Wall Street. Benjamin and Helen Rask are at the top of the wealthy echelons of society, yet there are doubts about how this banking tycoon and his wife, the daughter of aristocrats, accumulated their immense fortune. Trust puts forth various competing narratives about the mystery surrounding the Rasks’ wealth. Spanning over a century, Diaz’s novel is a literary puzzle, asking readers to journey with it in the search for the truth, while confronting the duplicities that emerge against the power of capital and easy manipulation of facts.

Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. In his latest collection of poetry, Antes que la isla es volcán/Before Island Is Volcano, Salas Rivera offers Spanish and English versions of the same poems—poems that imagine a decolonial Puerto Rico. The collection offers readers a variety of Puerto Rican imaginaries, confronting the storied histories of the island through the lives of those who live there and those in the diaspora. Winner of the 2022 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, Antes que la isla traces difficult lineages to the English-language literary canon to explore Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States, the Caribbean, and to itself. Poet Daniel Borzutzky writes of the collection that Salas Rivera “insists that our future exists (and explodes) in the poem, insists on planting the body as an offer of return, as the living becoming that composes history. He proposes that ‘going back’ is a political and poetic act, a trip back to magma, to memory and to the words that attest to our struggle against the colonial yokes that keep trying to ensnare us.”

Limón is the current US poet laureate and the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, Bright Dead Things, nominated for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Sharks in the Rivers. In her latest collection, Limón asks what it means to be sensitive to the joys and hurts of the world, meditates about the meaning that takes place between nature and the human world, asks what the relationship is that connects us and allows us to see ourselves in other humans, other creatures. In this exploration, there is also loss, with suggestions of the pandemic, ghosts that become manifest in memory. In the poem “Privacy,” Limón writes: “There was no message/given, no message I was asked to give, only/their great absence and my sad privacy/returning like the bracing, empty wind/on the black wet branches of the linden.”

Craig Morgan Teicher, writing in the New York Times, says Limón’s “poems presume aloneness and reach out to the reader to seal a sort of virtual communion,” which we need now more than ever.

In this young adult novel, Camino Rios looks forward to the summers, when her father visits the Dominican Republic. Yet one summer he doesn’t arrive. In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father has died in a plane crash. Separated by an ocean, Camino and Yahaira have to face the death of their father and the painful secrets that his death will uncover. This dual narrative/novel-in-verse, by the author of the National Book Award winner The Poet X, is attentive to the complicated duality of grief and love, loss and forgiveness, and the ties that shape us.

This debut novel by Gónzalez is a timely meditation about the aftershocks of environmental disaster and resilience in the face of destruction. It was written in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, and one cannot help but think of the current catastrophic devastation Puerto Rico is experiencing from Hurricane Fiona. Olga Dies Dreaming tells the story of Olga and her brother Pedro, both popular figures in their hometown of New York City. Pedro is a congressman representing a gentrifying Brooklyn and Olga is a wedding planner for Manhattan’s elite. Yet, behind closed doors things are more complicated: their mother, a Young Lord turned radical, abandoned them when they were children to pursue militant political causes, but with the hurricane approaching, she reemerges in their lives. González’s novel investigates political corruption, familial conflict, and the notion of national belonging and upward mobility, all while asking what it means to survive.

Released just this month, Cruz’s latest novel is one I cannot wait to read. Her previous novels include Soledad, Let It Rain Coffee, and Dominicana. In How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, protagonist Cara Romero is laid off from her job at a lamp factory during the 2008 recession. In her mid-50s, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. After being put in contact with a career counselor, Cara begins to narrate the story of her life. Through 12 sessions, she recounts love affairs, friendships, financial struggles, experiences of gentrification, loss, and what truly happened to her son, Fernando. The novel presents a woman who has experienced all of life’s difficulties, but continues to be resilient. Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban, describes Cruz’s novel as luminous, one that “offers up a funny, smart, engaging handbook to survival (work, love, children, familia) in a crazily changing world.”

Muñoz’s latest collection of short stories, The Consequences, is not out yet (publication date: October 18), but is already garnering a lot of buzz. Sandra Cisneros, author of House on Mango Street, says it is “haunting, powerful, humble, precise,” adding “I wish I had written these stories”—remarkable praise from one of today’s most important Latinx writers. Muñoz’s previous works include the short story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, and the novel What You See in the Dark (a reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho). Here, he returns to the short story form, setting them in the 1980s in the small towns around Fresno, Calif., focusing on Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers and the routine challenges faced by their families. The characters—straight, gay, immigrant, American-born, young, and old—navigate the complicated, sometimes violent, realities of their lives, which are also marked by tenderness and care.

This lyrical coming-of-age story is by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Hudes (Water by the Spoonful), who wrote the book for the hit Broadway musical In the Heights. Set against a North Philadelphia barrio, Hudes’ Puerto Rican family is her collective muse. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton and In the Heights, says Hudes’ “sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.” Throughout the book, she describes the lessons she learned from her family and how watching and listening made her who she is. She movingly describes having to find her voice as she navigated the vastly different worlds of North Philadelphia and Yale University, and how she became an activist. My Broken Language is a meditation on home, memory, and belonging, narrated by a woman whose love for music and song form a thread throughout the book.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History, Ferrer’s Cuba offers an important chronicle of the island’s past and its complicated relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, the book provides a thoughtful evolution of the island, from conquest and colonization, slavery and freedom, independence and revolution to the current post-Castro present. Cuba draws on more than 30 years of research, offering a monumental account that results in a new understanding of our relationship to the island nation.