May 2, 2025
On the first Friday of each month, we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. For our May First Novel Friday, First Novel Prize winner De’Shawn Charles Winslow (Decent People) served as the evening’s moderator.
May’s Featured Debuts:
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
Power and corruption, family, and the ghosts of one’s past come together in this thrilling and unforgettable story about the search for belonging. Set in the Passage Rouge Nation, Big Chief follows Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate who is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. Thanks to his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, Caddo maintains a tenuous grip on power—that is, until the arrival of activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, chaos erupts, and Mitch is pitted against his family. Together with Layla, he must work to prevent the reservation’s descent into violence.
The Fantasies of Future Things by Doug Jones
Two men, Jacob and Daniel, must reconcile their human dignity with the price of their professional ambitions as they work for a real estate development company displacing Black residents in preparation for the 1996 Olympics. Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. In the midst of navigating his volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father’s identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he’s willing to do to achieve it remains a question only he can answer.
When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris
In this heart-wrenching novel, a young Black gay man, estranged from his father, must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex. On the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar—never mind that his parents won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has died in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotions resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, with his fledgling marriage and newfound self-confidence spiraling into despair.
Featured Books
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Big Chief
By Jon Hickey
Published by Simon & Schuster
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.
But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.
Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.
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The Fantsies of Future Things
By Doug Jones
Published by Simon & Schuster
Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don’t have happy endings.
When Jacob meets Sherman, a social worker fighting for one of the families being displaced by the project, he must decide if rejecting security is worth the risk of embracing the unknown. In the midst of navigating his grief, and volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father’s identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he’s willing to do for it remains a question only he can answer.
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When the Harvest Comes
By Denne Michele Norris
Published by Random House Publishing Group
The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness.
But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an acclaimed violist.
When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has been in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, risking his fledgling marriage along the way.
In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that, in the end, we are more than the men who came before us.
Featuring
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Jon Hickey
Jon Hickey
Jon Hickey earned his MFA at Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. His short fiction has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast Online, Virginia Quarterly Review, Meridian, and the Madison Review. Jon lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
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Douglas E. Jones
Douglas E. Jones
Douglas E. Jones graduated from Morehouse College and received an MFA from Columbia University. In 2007, he was an inaugural Lambda Literary Fellow at American Jewish University, where he studied with Dorothy Allison. His nonfiction has been included in the anthology Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art and his poetry has been published in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS. Doug is a full-time, licensed real estate agent in Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. He lives in Atlanta. The Fantasies of Future Things is his debut novel.
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Denne Michele Norris
Denne Michele Norris
Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA.
Her short story Last Rites appears in Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology published by Atria Books in 2018, and her story Daddy’s Boy appears in the new anthology Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction. Her fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story Where Every Boy is Known and Loved was a finalist for the 2018 Best Small Fictions Prize. She is a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review Fiction Workshop.
She is the former Fiction Editor for both Apogee Journal and The Rumpus, and is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot. Her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, is forthcoming from Random House.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Nichols
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De’Shawn Charles Winslow
De’Shawn Charles Winslow
De’Shawn Charles Winslow is the author of Decent People, and In West Mills, winner of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, an American Book Award recipient, a Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction winner. He was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Publishing Triangle Award. He was born and raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in the New York Metropolitan area.
Photo Credit: Julie R. Keresztes
