In case it wasn’t obvious by now, Abdurraqib is one of our greatest chroniclers of America. Here he creates a new history of Black performance, from minstrelsy to Lando Calrissian to Def Comedy Jam, with a deftness and vulnerability that draws from all his reservoirs as a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. What makes this all work so well is that Abdurraqib writes from a humble place, both in the form of his longtime devotion to his native Ohio, and also because it is almost as if he never left his childhood bedroom, examining the things he has always liked, never ceasing to ask himself why, why, and why.

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Subtitled A Romance, Stepanova uses her dead aunt’s apartment full of ephemera to truly explore the romance of the mind, the memories that we leave behind, and the stories they tell. Far from a self-aggrandizing tale of one family’s links to Russian history, this is a memoir that transparently performs that act of exploring one’s ancestry and the personal threats involved therein. Enjoy this best as a bedtime book, checking in with Stepanova each night as she discovers one more surprising thing, then another, and perhaps just one more.

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Arudpragasam’s second novel is thrillingly and equally rooted in both Sri Lanka and in matters of philosophy. While the author has spoken about his disinterest in modern notions of character and plot, A Passage North’s story is animated by characters struggling with grief and love amid civil war. It is uncanny how much Arudpragasam feels like Michael Ondaatje’s successor, and like all true successors, exceeds and surprises with each turn.

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Fraia’s work confronts the nature of literature as an elliptical form constantly in conversation with itself. Able to be read in a single sitting, these three linked stories were inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, but are in equal conversation with the work of Paul Yoon and Rachel Cusk, writers for whom the world is at once connected and disconnected.

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There is more thought and life on each chapter of Corin’s third book than most entire novels. Read this book slowly, and savor the sentences—not like poetry, because there is a distinct wit that carries the reader swiftly along—but knowing that each sentence deepens your relationship with these two sisters who, like us, have just lived through one of most bizarre decades of human history.

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Enríquez and her brilliant translator McDowell create a spectacular sense of wonder and dread that draws directly from the author’s literary lineage in Argentina—Silvina Ocampo, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges—and creates new existential nightmares for our age. These are stories that will last in our thoughts and nightmares.

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There are certain books where you can tell the author is plain just having a great time writing. Washuta, member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, is able to bend the form of the essay to her wishes, or rather to the requirements of her subject matter, which range from astrology and witchcraft, to her bipolar disorder misdiagnosis and the seminal Oregon Trail computer game.

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Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel shifts among the perspectives of various family members gathered in Pretoria for the funeral of their mother who has unexpectedly left an inheritance to her Black caregiver. Settle into the modernist prose style, as Galgut’s experiments pay dividends in the second half. For longtime fans of Galgut, this is a marriage of his earliest novels about South Africa and his mature style developed in his last two globe-trotting masterpieces, In a Strange Room and Arctic Summer.

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These days matters of religion float more perceptibly in the air, and Akbar’s poems ground the relationship between prayer and politics in the body and its wondrous desires. Akbar, an Iranian-American poet, often derives his lyrical power from his confrontational sense of humor, lambasting contemporary American imperialism alongside his family’s complex immigrant experience. Akbar’s poetry feels so essential because its immediacy is not simply topical. Each poem feels timeless and elemental, a true ringing bell for those tired of monolithic immigrant stories and art forms.

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The conceit of Guanzon’s novel is powerfully simple: each chapter is titled with the amount of money in the pockets of this down-and-out father and son pair. In a year when inequities continued to be laid bare for all to witness, Guanzon cuts to the heart of the economic matter, generating much drama and tension each time you pick back up with Henry and Junior. Abundance is everything we wanted from a debut novel and from this year: the excitement and urgency of a new voice shaking our shoulders and shouting, listen to me, look at what is happening to us, see this! And doing so with an attention to detail and empathy beyond his years.

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