13 New Books for April
This month, we’re excited about Small Ceremonies, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, and 10 other books by writers on or of the West.
Small Ceremonies, by Kyle Edwards
The debut from USC Fellow and award-winning journalist Edwards is a coming-of-age novel that follows a group of vividly sketched Ojibwe teens in their last year of high school in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba. As their hockey team fails and the endearing characters are pulled in different directions with their conflicting ambitions and fears, Edwards’s gripping, humane writing tells a new tale of coming-of-age in an Indigenous community. Pantheon, April 1
The Ephemera Collector, by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson
The year is 2035, and Xandria Anastasia Brown hides from clouds of wildfire smoke in the depths of the Huntington Library, battling long COVID and being monitored by AI health bots. Her life is dedicated to researching a way for humanity to move forward and recover from its despair. But one day, when she’s struck by poor health, the library seems to shut her in. Xandria must figure out how to save her work and distinguish between reality and AI before it’s too late. Jackson’s debut is an Afro-futurist work that considers how we remember. Liveright Publishing Corporation, April 1
City of Smoke and Sea, by Malia Márquez
Queenie Rivers drops out of college and moves across the country with her laggard boyfriend to Los Angeles, where she finds disappointment and disinterest in her jobs before she is nearly killed in a car accident. Gran, her Romani grandmother, steps in to look after Queenie and offers her a new job at a friend’s shady bistro. But in a suspicious turnaround, Gran is murdered. As Queenie investigates, she learns more about Gran’s immigrant backstory, as well as the mysterious owner of the bistro, and becomes involved with a group of elemental beings that tie her to Gran in fabulist ways she never could have imagined. Red Hen Press, April 1
The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration, by Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda
Poets Saito and Shimoda have curated a new addition to the literary canon of Japanese American internment, gathering works by descendants of internees. With contributions from 66 poets, this thoughtful, deeply moving, and original anthology provides an intimate history of the incarceration of Nikkei (Japanese immigrants and their descendants) as well as a collective recollecting that transforms intergenerational trauma into an offering of solidarity, love, and resistance to erasure. Haymarket Books, April 1
Sky Daddy, by Kate Folk
Fear and obsession often go hand in hand; with the extreme aversion typical of phobias comes a preoccupation with the same forbidden thing. In a society increasingly afraid of flying, Folk’s debut novel imagines the counterpart to this aviophobia: avio-philia. When not working as an online content moderator in San Francisco, Linda takes routine round-trip flights to exercise her secret sexual attraction to airplanes and fantasizes about dying in a plane crash to consummate her desire. Random House, April 8
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, by Keetje Kuipers
In her fourth collection, queer poet Kuipers compiles poems that consider love in its many permutations, tracing connections (and the disconnections or spaces that separate people) in tones that are, by turns, erotic, beautiful, delicate, funny, melancholy, lusty, surreal. When partners eat oranges in the swimming pool, there is “the heated accumulation / of fragrant peels on the wet / concrete’s edge—like those months / we passed together.” The speaker’s doctor tells her she should be masturbating, and so the speaker conjures a Greek chorus of lovers. The speaker looks back over years of marriage and considers it a pact made with the world. This is exquisite, risk-taking, fiercely alive poetry. BOA Editions, April 8
To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
In six essays originally delivered as his 2023–2024 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, Nguyen takes up the question of otherness as it pertains to literature, politics, ethics, and art. Nguyen brilliantly encapsulates his career-long interest in “what it means to write and read from the position of an other” in these concise, insightful essays that combine criticism and autobiography to explicate themes that pervade his 2016 Pulitzer-winning novel (and the California Book Club’s January pick), The Sympathizer. Belknap Press, April 8
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, by Vauhini Vara
In 2021, Vara’s essay in the Believer about asking an AI bot to write about her sister’s death seemed experimental, eerie, and perhaps indicative of what the future of machines and writing could look like years from now. By 2025, the tool Vara originally used to produce the essay, a previous iteration of ChatGPT, already seems dated. Searches dives into these fleeting technologies and how they invade and alter our lives, tracking Vara’s experiences with early-internet chat rooms, Facebook, Amazon reviews, and more. Her book is a thought-provoking investigation into personal history, creativity, and technology, elements that make us all. Pantheon, April 8
The Imagined Life, by Andrew Porter
Driving up the coast of California in a midlife crisis, Steven Mills seeks out his father’s old friends and family to help him understand more about the year his father was revoked tenure, turned into a paranoid schizophrenic, and mysteriously disappeared, leaving Steve abandoned at the age of 12. Similar to his father, Steve has suddenly become withdrawn, his academic career has plateaued, and his wife and son have left him. As he grapples with these unfortunate connections to his father’s life and tries to gain insight from them, the novel follows his recovery of history and his psychological probing of the present. Knopf, April 15
Siren of Atlantis, by Cedar Sigo
In 2022, at 45 years old, the poet Sigo had a stroke that disrupted his work as a remarkable artist and fractured his relationship with language and communication. Now, healing and recovering his ability to write, Sigo returns to the page with a touching book of poems on where our words come from and how we find them anew. The result is full of curiosity and hope. Wave Books, April 15
Notes to John, by Joan Didion
While the literary market has had no shortage of books examining the work, influence, and legacy of Joan Didion since her death, in 2021 (such as Lili Anolik’s recent joint biography), the forthcoming publication of her previously undisclosed diary comes as a welcome surprise. The journal—which she kept during psychiatry sessions—was found posthumously with a note to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. An anomalous text, it provides a wider glimpse into an ever-elusive literary icon than what writings published during her life provide. Knopf, April 22
Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson, by Claire Hoffman
Before Los Angeles was home to megachurches frequented by celebrities and their pastors, it was the location of the Aimee Semple McPherson congregation. In the 1920s, McPherson was the poster girl for evangelism, using drama and media to bring thousands to her church. But her life was plagued by fear and scandal, and soon skeptics cast doubts on her persuasive and religious ways. Amid it all, she walked into the ocean one day, only to reappear in the desert soon after. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 22
On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, by Bonnie Tsui
Tsui wants to know more about the stuff that makes us move: the tissue in our cheeks that makes us smile, or in our legs that allows us to pick up speed, or in our bodies that prompts us to digest food. To explore the mundane and remarkable aspects of our muscular systems, Tsui joins adventures with humans who use their bodies in incredible ways—athletes and researchers and people drawn to movement and play. A fitting follow-up to Why We Swim, On Muscle cements Tsui as an authority on science, culture, and curiosity. Algonquin Books, April 22
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
Maisie Hurwitz is a freelance contributor to Alta Journal living in Los Angeles. She is a recent graduate of Wesleyan University, where she received her bachelor's degree in English and creative writing.
Will Garrett, Alta Journal's 2024 summer intern, has written for Colorado College's Cipher magazine and the Catalyst newspaper.
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New Releases for July
Upcoming Releases: Moderation and Cozy Dystopias
