8 New Books to Read This May

Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here. Make sure to also have on your radar Men Like Ours, by The Cut’s Bindu Bansinath, and The Field Guide to Nepo Babies, by Vulture’s Fran Hoepfner.

If You’re Already Dreaming of the World Cup

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Death of the Soccer God, by Dimitry Elias Léger
$27
$27

May 12

Standing in front of a machine-gun firing squad in his native Haiti, Gilbert Chevalier, star of the 1950 World Cup, revisits the events of his life in the “pregnant pause” before the end: his rivalry with his half-brother, his years spent as a virtuosic footballer, his many paramours and one true love, Aurélie. Léger’s wild second novel is an exploded version of mid-century history, with former Nazis and “Papa Doc” Duvalier figuring in. —Emma Alpern

If You Love Pen15

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The Sane One, by Anna Konkle
$30
$30

May 5

Before Anna Konkle wrote her rapturously strange TV ode to millennial girlhood with Maya Erskine, she was a lonely kid caught between feuding parents: demanding and sensitive mother; sarcastic and irresponsible father. Eventually, she estranged herself from her dad, only to carefully inch back into his life years later. That probably sounds like a grim story, and it is, but it’s also very funny — and Konkle is daringly open about her family’s years of agonizing tension. —Emma Alpern

From a Booker-Winning Author

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John of John, by Douglas Stuart
$24
$24

May 5

From the Scottish American author of Shuggie Bain comes a third novel set not in the Glasgow of his first two but in a Gaelic-speaking community on the isle of Harris. John-Calum (“Cal”) Macleod, a closeted gay man with a loving but tense relationship with his Calvinist father, returns home from college in the city because his grandmother is unwell. Stuart extends his focus outward to include Cal’s ex-lover and the secrets that even his father has been keeping. The novel feels like a textured and affecting response to an early question posed to Cal: “Who do you belong to?” —Jasmine Vojdani

The Debut We Think Will Win Awards

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The Hill, by Harriet Clark
$19
$19

May 5

Every week, Suzanna visits her mother at a hilltop women’s prison staffed by nuns. It’s a strange place, but maybe only because childhood itself is strange — and Suzanna’s mother, who was part of a revolutionary group that killed a guard at a bank, went under lock and key when Suzanna was very young, leaving her to live with a grandmother who’s simmering with anger. This novel, by the child of a Weather Underground member, is a stunner, filled with confusion and wit. —E.A.

The Dark-Academia Pick

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Offseason, by Avigayl Sharp
$26
$26

May 5

A cynical, self-sabotaging woman in her late 20s has just arrived in a coastal town to teach in an all-girls boarding school during its wintry off-season. She appears to be in control, but underneath her more or less professional surface she thinks obsessively about pedophilia, ephebophilia, and her traumatic teenage experience while popping Adderall and lecturing students in her “The Literature of the City” class on her own irrelevant fixations. Sharp’s is a comically dry and darkly intelligent debut. —J.V.

The Dark-Academia Pick, But Make It Euro

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The Vivisectors, by Missouri Williams
$28
$28

May 26

In this strange yet entrancing gothic novel, gardeners fight back the vegetal life that threatens to overtake their declining city, whose main attraction is a university that draws students from around the world. Agathe, an angry and brilliant young woman, is working as a professor’s ghostwriter when she learns of an on-campus spat with geopolitical undertones between another teacher and Adam, a foreign student whom Agathe’s boss coddles. Agathe befriends the student, and the two develop a vexing intimacy of the kind she’s never known. Throughout, Williams reaches for allegory, weaving a dark and deepening tapestry of tales about what eventually begins to look like love. —J.V.

The Longform Nonfiction Pick

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Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000, by Barry Walters
$35
$35

May 12

Inspired in part by 1981’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, music journalist Barry Walters — of The Village Voice and The Advocate, among many others — has written an excellent history of the queer world’s countless music scenes. It starts with Lou Reed and “Candy Says,” then vaults to Laura Nyro, whose song “Emmie” is a vibraphone-heavy ballad for a female lover. Grace Jones, George Michael, and Tracy Chapman all get chapters of their own. —E.A.

For a New York City Thriller

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The Fine Art of Lying, by Alexandra Andrews
$24
$24

May 5

The doomed lovers in this enjoyably swank novel meet when one of them notices the other scoffing at a large frame of Damien Hirst’s pervasive rainbow dots in a rich person’s house. Clare Bast, the scoffer, is also a rich person — but a newer one, and with better taste. She married into a very wealthy family and put her art Ph.D. on pause after having her first child, leaving her aimless and angsty. An affair with an art dealer is just the answer, but then a sudden death threatens to incriminate her. —E.A