One year ago this month, Publishers Weekly launched its newest newsletter, PW Picks, a Friday missive highlighting the best and biggest new books coming out the next week, sharing our interviews and profiles featuring authors of note, and much more. But its best feature is its most personal: each week, our reviews editors single out the titles they’re most passionate about and excited for you to read.
If you’re reading this, we don’t have to tell you, but we will anyway: hundreds, if not thousands, of books get published each and every week of the year. And our editors, as astute and attuned to the publishing landscape as anyone in the business, read a staggering number of them. And they don’t want you to miss the good ones.
To that end, we asked them to look back at the more than 150 titles they’ve recommended in the newsletter to date and share 20 they especially don’t want you to overlook. So please, do take a look, and enjoy. —John Maher, senior news and digital editor
Open Throat
This slim, singular dispatch from the mind of a queer mountain lion living in the Hollywood Hills is probably my most-recommended book of the year. You can gulp it down in a single afternoon, and the lingering buzz from its tonal mastery and syntactic playfulness might make you burn through it again before bed. —Conner Reed, mystery and memoir reviews editor
A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria
This stimulating combo of memoir and cultural history connects Crampton's all-too-relatable propensity for symptom-Googling with fascinating tidbits about hypochondria's historical lineage. It's illuminating, well-written, and in the end, pretty moving. —CR
Swallow the Ghost
The best crime fiction makes you feel like the ground is shifting beneath your feet, and this audacious triptych from Montague—a debut, no less—does exactly that. What begins as the story of an unhappy book publicist blossoms into an emotionally fraught detective yarn, then again into a thought meditation on public and private personae. —CR
The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
This urgent new history of the Holocaust argues that the widespread and popular view of the Holocaust as a coldly mechanized engine of death is a form of sanitization, and that without a true reckoning with the ideology and thinking that led to the Holocaust—which Stone reveals was indeed highly emotional and, disturbingly, emotionally satisfying for its perpetrators—we will not be able to recognize the signs of impending genocide when they come again. —Dana Snitzky, history and current affairs reviews editor
The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos
This book feels a bit like walking into a dream. The author is led to a secret door in Mexico City that opens up an entire hidden underworld of not just grassroots healthcare but also a clandestine service of people-hiding. The desperate people who live in the anexos (and draw on not much other than a well of seemingly perpetual hope to sustain them) sing songs, tell stories, and relate their own dreams to the author. The author’s claim that “anexos are everywhere” starts to feel more like a dream logic, although it’s also a real statement: She returns to the U.S. and finds them in California. Anexos are everywhere. Anexos are here. —DS
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
Elliott’s surprisingly enthralling investigation into how medical research whistleblowers feel about having exposed unsafe studies rolls back the veil on a dangerously insular industry, where employees are encouraged to shut up and follow orders. The focus on how the whistleblowers feel about what happened to them—their sense of ill-fatedness—makes for deeply engrossing reading. —DS
Close to Home
Among the new generation of Irish writers coming to fruition is Michael Magee, whose wrenching debut perfectly captures the buried trauma of the Troubles and the economic upheaval following the 2008 recession. It’s also an incredibly thoughtful study of a young man’s conflicted relationship with his hometown. —David Varno, literary fiction reviews editor
Coexistence
I picked this up while editing our starred review and was completely taken in by the grit, heart, and wit of this author’s stories about academia, the art world, and Cree reservation life. It’s a great sign when a book causes me to blow off work. —DV
Someone Like Us
The narrator of Mengestu’s beautiful novel explores a series of intriguing mysteries and conundrums—such as the reason why he was raised to know his biological father as a family friend. —DV
This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity
When poets turn to prose, the results are often, let's say, florid. Not so with Deming's poignant exploration of the relationship between loneliness and creativity, in which his dexterous facility with language only enhances his sharp insights into the creative process. —Marc Greenawalt, science and pop culture reviews editor
Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir
I was pleasantly surprised by this memoir, which details Morimoto's travails as a "rental person" who accompanies clients on activities of their choosing under the condition that he doesn't have to do or say much. The intriguing client stories are elevated by Morimoto's poignant reflections on how the stresses of work and capitalism have devastated his family and cheapened the value of human life. —MG
Gratuitous Ninja
We often talk about how graphic novels are an art object. Well, this cannily constructed, accordion fold-out, fancy-boxed comic is supercool proof—and while pricey, it would I must say make for a very impressive holiday gift. The inimitable Ron Wimberly remixes hip-hop and street-fighting pop culture references in a gritty fantasy saga of ninjas in NYC, with snappy satire and over-the-top action sequences that span literally 400 feet unfolded (and 600+ pages). —Meg Lemke, comics and graphic novels reviews editor
Brooklyn’s Last Secret
For fans who want more gently unfolding plots like Roaming, crossed with happenstance humor of High Maintenance and verve of John Wray's Gone to the Wolves, Brooklyn's Last Secret is not to miss. Brooklyn cartoonist Stein's a musician herself—and part-time local bartender—and her authentic experience touring rocks out through this wry, joyfully watercolored graphic novel styled as a roadtrip diary of an under-the-radar indie band. Her celebrated recent books have been autobio, but this turn to fiction feels still very true to life. —ML
Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir
The graphic memoir of acclaimed Chinese activist artist Ai Weiwei came as a complete surprise in our reviews inbox, and once I got over panic that we somehow didn't know it was coming, the surprise doubled in how elegantly Weiwei, his cowriter Elettra Stambouis, and the cartoonist Gianluca Constantini work in concert. Together, they illuminate the history of Weiwei's family—who have been detained and exiled within China across two generations of artists—along with his probing philosophical thinking, infectious curiosity, and drive despite political persecution. There's a surfeit of graphic biographies of famous artists out there, many cut-and-pasted for school adoption. This is anything but template. —ML
Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel
Habib navigates the messy intersection between global tourism and colonialism in vivid, mind-expanding essays on passport discrimination, travel guidebooks, and why it's so easy to find a Thai eatery in Barcelona. It's an excellent look at wanderlust's more complicated side. —Miriam Grossman, religion and self-help reviews editor
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
While recent years have seen no shortage of memoirs from those who've left the church, McCammon takes a deeper and more revealing look at the forces that have driven a generation of 20 and 30 year olds from fundamentalism and the lasting cultural and political effects of that shift. Balancing close research and the author's own recollections of an evangelical youth, it's a smart, unsparing look at the lasting effects of religious trauma. —MG
The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are
Trotter spares nothing in this gut-punch memoir debut: accidentally setting his house on fire as a child; his mother’s murder; and the intense creative drive those tragedies sparked and led to his co-creation of The Roots as rapper Black Thought. It’s a powerful portrait of loss and renewal, rendered in prose that’s as assured as his lyrics. —MG
The Privilege of the Happy Ending
Formal experimentation and fairy tale elements are like catnip to me, so Johnson’s latest collection was hard to resist. Featuring squirrel ghosts, squid girls, and sphinxes, these wild speculative shorts take the form of classic fables, modern bestiaries, and riddles told by crows. —Phoebe Cramer, SFF, horror, and romance reviews editor
Really Cute People
When Charlie winds up snowed in with their celebrity crush, activist Buffy, and her husband, Hayden, the trio slowly work their way toward becoming a sweet, spicy, and supportive throuple. The result is a fun, feel-good poly romance. —PC
Navigational Entanglements
You can count on de Bodard to deliver dazzling space operatics, even in a compressed page count. This impressive novella about rival clans who must work together to stop an alien entity is no exception. —PC
