Hello, friends. Are you looking for some book recommendations for this month? Because we have some of those. We’ve got novels, we’ve got nonfiction, we’ve got poetry. Dig in!
Adele Bertei, No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene
(Apr. 1, Beacon Press)
From the vantage point of decades later, it’s eminently clear how influential — and how flat-out good — No Wave was. Writer Adele Bertei was there for the subgenre’s inception, including a stint in the Contortions, and this new book provides a firsthand look at music evolving.
Mar García Puig (translated by Mara Laye Lethem), The History of the Vertebrate
(Apr. 2, Peninsula Press)
In 2025, among the books winning English PEN’s PEN Translates award was this work of nonfiction by Mar García Puig. It’s an ambitious and wideranging book, chronicling its author’s election to office and experience giving birth in the span of a few days.
Emma Straub, American Fantasy
(Apr. 7, Riverhead Books)
If you’ve been reading Emma Straub for long enough, you’ve probably read something written by her on the subject of boy bands. With that in mind. it’s not surprising that her fiction would eventually touch on it — and sure enough, American Fantasy is a comic novel set on a cruise where the main draw is a reunited boy band decades after their heyday.
Daphne A. Brooks (ed.), Blackstar Rising and the Purple Reign: The Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince
(Apr. 14, Duke University Press)
In 2016, the deaths of both Prince and David Bowie were a massive cultural loss — and one that we’re still reckoning with a decade later. This new book brings together a staggeringly great array of writers to discuss the lives and legacies of both men.
Merrill Joan Gerber, Someone Should Know This Story
(Apr. 14, Sagging Meniscus)
In a 1965 review of Merrill Joan Gerber’s debut collection, the New York Times hailed the book’s “delicate and constantly shifting balance of loyalties between parents and children and, more precisely, between mothers and daughters.” Gerber has been writing memorable stories for a long time, and this new volume collects 25 highlights from across her career.
William Lessard, /face
(Apr. 14, Kerpunkt Press)
What happens when poetic forms and technology collide? In /face, William Lessard uses patents for facial surveillance devices to create something new and haunting. Or, as John Madera wrote in a review last year, “Lessard’s is a poetics of refusal, of ungovernability, of unrepresentability.”
Julia Wertz, Bury Me Already (It’s Nice Down Here): Comics on Pregnancy and Parenthood
(Apr. 14, Black Dog & Leventhal)
We’ve long enjoyed Julia Wertz’s candid, wryly funny comics, which are equally adept at charting their creator’s inner life and giving readers a detailed sense of place. Her latest collection chronicles her return to California and embarking on family life just as the pandemic began.
Zach Powers, The Migraine Diaries
(Apr. 15, Jackleg Press)
With his new novel, Zach Powers is channeling the time-honored tradition of writers exploring the experience of having a body. As the title might suggest, here Powers describes one man’s struggle with migraines beginning in his 30s. And hey, the Brooklyn Rail recently published an excerpt.
Ross Barkan, Colossus
(Apr. 28, Arcade Publishing)
In his new novel Colossus, Ross Barkan brings his readers into the troubled headspace of a Michigan pastor. “His sunny exterior masks an inner ruthlessness, a furious drive to fully reinvent himself,” Barkan has said of his protagonist — and those are all characteristics that make for memorable fiction.
Jimin Han, Dreamt I Found You
(Apr. 28, Little, Brown and Company)
In a 2024 interview, Jimin Han described a research trip she had planned for her next book. “There’s a small city in South Korea, called Namwon-si, and apparently the Korean Romeo and Juliet story originated there. This was a story that helped people resist the Japanese occupation,” she said. The novel that resulted from that research is — you guessed it — this one.
Note: all release dates and cover artwork are subject to change.