Ilana Masad

Claire Fuller's beautifully written new novel follows 51-year-old twins who never left home, forced finally to cope with the outside world and some unpleasant family secrets after their mother dies.

In 1938, a housewife went to the press complaining of a poltergeist in her home — and a ghost hunter investigated. Kate Summerscale's true tale is about women and power, anxiety, and choices.

Essay after essay, it becomes clear that writer Lauren Hough is drawing parallels between the Family and good ol' fashioned American Exceptionalism in all its various facets.

Sanjena Sathian's novel follows a Georgia teenager, son of Indian immigrants, as he struggles with balancing his own ambitions and those of his parents, and finding his own way to be brown in America.

Though author Melissa Febos' essays dip into her adult life, they keep trying to find the child and teenager that she was — how she learned to be, feel, believe, and react.

The victims of the man dubbed the "Last Call Killer" were all gay men; Elon Green tries to shine a light onto their complicated lives, the messiness of who they were, and an era of queer life in NYC.

Tyler Stovall writes white freedom is "the belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free" — noting nations were built on it.

Writer Nadia Owusu has lived many lives. Her nonlinear memoir, centered on the idea of physical and metaphorical earthquakes, is about all of the parts of what is her single, complex life.

Throughout her essays, Melissa Faliveno is constantly straddling blurry lines, never willing to let any of her topics lie comfortably still, always turning them over to look at another facet.

In framing Tomine's life trajectory via professional and personal setbacks and moments of mortification, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist becomes mesmerizing, funny, and deeply honest.