June 21, 2025
Two novels, a triad of novellas, and two collections of essays bring us to the official opening of summer. All are enlightening and worthy of bringing along on a holiday. There is a book of essays from a prize-winning novelist that illuminates the history of Black women; a big, beautiful family saga from California; three collected pieces of short fiction that reveal the many facets of love and desire; fierce pregnant girls running amok in the Florida Panhandle; and a futuristic debut about what it really means to ‘be alive.’
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Misbehaving at the Crossroads
By HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS
Published by HARPER
Jeffers, known for her acclaimed debut novel, shortlisted for The Center for Fiction 2021 First Novel Prize, returns with a powerful collection of writing. These essays span subjects from the devastating events of January 6th to meeting James Baldwin and realizing he knew her abusive father. Jeffers pays homage to her spiritual and literary foremothers such as Toni Morrison, and she explores the ‘crossroads’ that Black women have come to in this country—a place of challenge and hope. Her incisive observations about Black women throughout American history, coupled with a penetrative examination of her own personal life as a Black Southern woman, give this book weight and exigency.
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Bug Hollow
By MICHELLE HUNEVEN
Published by PENGUIN PRESS
If you are unfamiliar with Michelle Huneven, you can start right here. She introduces the Samuelsons, a happy California family in 1970s Altadena, CA. The beloved brother has graduated from high school and is on his way to Ole Miss on a scholarship. But his trajectory changes when he becomes enamored with a counterculture commune called Bug Hollow and falls in love (so ’70s). Then tragedy strikes and the family is splintered. We follow their personal stories over the decades: the parents, one sister with a cancer diagnosis, and the other who befriends her brother’s girlfriend and becomes caretaker for the child born of their love affair. Pitch perfect.
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Room on the Sea
By ANDRÉ ACIMAN
Published by FSG
As Aciman proved in his indelible novel, he knows how to write about love, loss, and pleasure. These three novellas include “The Gentleman from Peru,” where a group of male friends vacationing at an Italian hotel become fascinated by a mysterious gentleman about whom they speculate—is he an ex-assassin? A painter? In the title piece, a lawyer reading the Wall Street Journal and a psychiatrist reading Wuthering Heights meet cute at jury duty; and “Mariana” is narrated by a woman studying in Italy who is rejected after a brief love affair and becomes consumed by her obsession with her ex-lover. Aciman’s prose is full of longing and melancholy—you can lose yourself in this dreamy collection.
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The Girls Who Grew Big
By LEILA MOTTLEY
Published by KNOPF
Nightcrawling brought Mottley much-deserved recognition in 2022. Her new novel, narrated by three young pregnant women, is a worthy successor. It follows a group of teenage mothers in Florida considered pariahs, but they give back as good as they get. Take Simone: giving birth to twins in a flatbed truck and chewing off her own umbilical cord. Adela describes the ‘Girls’ of the title as “ruthless.” She has been banished from her Midwest home until her baby comes. And there’s Emory, who takes her baby son to high school with her. Motherhood gets a penetrating dissection from a writer whose overflowing imagination gives this novel a propulsive energy.
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UnWorld
By JAYSON GREENE
Published by KNOPF
In Greene’s debut novel, he brings four voices together in a world of self- driving cars and hospitals that use AI to replace doctors. Anna’s young son Alex has tragically died, either in an accidental fall or by suicide. Anna’s digital entity, Aviva, becomes emancipated, but retains Anna’s suppressed emotions. Aviva is now being ‘hosted’ by Cathy, a former addict, turned professor. And Samantha, who was Alex’s closest friend, remains haunted by his death. One quickly feels the overlapping boundaries that give Greene’s novel its eerie power. In this world, there is fluidity between man and machine. But it is also a very tender story about grief.
