The Nightlife

Elise Paschen

In this collection are infidelities and funerals, umbrellas hurtled by the wind, landmines hidden in sand, and tightly wound rhymes that hint of a spirit coiled, waiting in the dark.

Babel-17

Samuel R. Delany

Rydra Wong is a poet, a captain, an erstwhile cryptographer, and a burgeoning telepath.

In this well-argued polemic, Devon Price outlines three tenets of what they term the “laziness lie”: that your worth is your productivity, that you cannot trust your own feelings and limits, and that there is always more you should be doing.

In Drift(er), Jake Skeets addresses the Richard Avedon photo that adorns the book’s cover: “to drift is to be carried by a current of air or water / but men are not the teeth / of their verbs.”

False narratives

On An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

In the opening poem in this collection, Tishani Doshi addresses her reader: “I agree to turn my skin inside out, / to reinvent every lost word, to burnish, / to steal, to do what I must / in order to singe your lungs.”

Black Sun

Rebecca Roanhorse

On the solstice, in the city of Tova, there will be a convergence—a total eclipse of the sun.

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich

Tookie works in a bookstore, and Flora—her most annoying, and most loyal, customer—has just died. This does not mean she has left the bookstore.

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber & David Wengrow

Some books seek to simplify or clarify the past; this one seeks to complicate it.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Each essay in this collection is a a full-throated declaration of a democracy of species—with humans as the minority voice.

Echopraxia

Peter Watts

Daniel Brüks is a baseline: a human with few enhancements, no cortical inlays, no way to blink and see subtitles in his vision.

Oddkin

To whom are we actually responsible?

Tao Te Ching

Lao Tzu & Ursula K. Le Guin

Turning to these poems at the end of many a dark day has felt like holding the gift of a small, fierce light.

Blindsight

Peter Watts

Siri Keeton, missing half his mind, is sent out on a mission to discover the source of thousands of probes that surrounded Earth and screamed an unintelligible alien signal before burning up in the atmosphere.

The Word for World Is Forest

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Athsheans live among a forest, on a planet that “yumens” are attempting to colonize.

Lost in Work

Amelia Horgan

“Our entrance into work is unfree, and while we’re there, our time is not our own.”

The Problem with Work

Kathi Weeks

A provocative and irresistable argument that the need to “work for a living” is not a natural order but rather an invention—and one that can change.