AWM Staff Picks: 2023 Favorites

All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers

From the publisher: “Everyone from Wakarusa, Indiana, remembers the infamous case of January Jacobs, who was discovered in a ditch hours after her family awoke to find her gone. Margot Davies was six at the time, the same age as January—and they were next-door neighbors. In the twenty years since, Margot has grown up, moved away, and become a big-city journalist. When Margot returns home…Wakarusa is exactly how she remembers—genial, stifled, secretive. Then news breaks about five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over, who’s gone missing under circumstances eerily similar to January’s. With all the old feelings rushing back, Margot vows to find Natalie and to solve January’s murder once and for all. But the police, Natalie’s family, the townspeople—they all seem to be hiding something. And the deeper Margot digs into Natalie’s disappearance, the more resistance she encounters, and the colder January’s case feels….”

—Annie, Interim Assistant Director of Programming & Education

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

From the publisher: “The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.”

—Linda, Director of Development

American Indian Stories by Zitkála-Šá

A powerful and insightful look at her own life as an illustration of the attempt by the European settlers to force their culture and beliefs onto the people whose land they had stolen and who they had consistently abused. As one of the most important Native American activists of her day, her writing is still incredibly personal and moving.

You can learn more about Zitkála-Šá, who also went by the name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, by listening to this episode of Nation of Writers, featuring Zitkála-Šá scholar Dr. P. Jane Hafen.

—Carey, President

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

From the publisher: “It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined—every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute…and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.”

—Matt, Community Engagement Manager

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

From the publisher: “When X―an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter―falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction…Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.”

—Maya, Marketing & Creative Associate

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

I would not say that I had a ~happy~ time reading this, but sometimes it’s nice to read a book and feel understood, particularly regarding grief.

—Courtney, Education Program Coordinator

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

From the publisher: “As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, David Sedaris is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown… In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than the incomparable David Sedaris.”

—Linda, Director of Development

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

From the publisher: “A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania… Together, their stories tell a gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal, in which their tentative friendships may turn out to be the thing that ultimately saves them.”

—Courtney, Education Program Coordinator

The Incarnations by Susan Barker

From the publisher: “A ‘brilliant, mind-expanding, and wildly original novel’ (Chris Cleave) about Wang, a Beijing taxi driver whose past incarnations over one thousand years haunt him through searing letters sent by his mysterious soulmate. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of Wang’s previous lives—from escaping a marriage to a spirit bride, to being a slave on the run from Genghis Khan, to living as a fisherman during the Opium Wars, and being a teenager on the Red Guard during the cultural revolution—bound to his mysterious ‘soulmate,’ spanning one thousand years of betrayal and intrigue… Seamlessly weaving Chinese folklore, history, literary classics, and the notion of reincarnation, thisis a taut and gripping novel that reveals the cyclical nature of history as it hints that the past is never truly settled.”

—Carol, Institutional Giving Manager

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

From the publisher: “A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel… Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last. Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story. A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as ‘inspired, lyrical,’ ‘elegiac,’ ‘ingenious,’ as well as ‘too sappy by half,’ Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.”

—Linda, Director of Development

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

From the publisher: “In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant—and that her lover is married—she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.”

—Carol, Institutional Giving Manager

Paradise by Toni Morrison

From the publisher: “‘They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.’ So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.”

—Maya, Marketing & Creative Associate

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

From the publisher: “In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs), Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field—naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork—masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.”

—Cristina, Guest Services & Operations Supervisor

Sins of the Black Flamingo by Andrew Wheeler, art by Travis Moore, coloring by Tamra Bonvillain, and lettering by Aditya Bidikar

Described by many as the purest form of “Be Gay, Do Crime,” this queer heist comic is one of my most exciting reads this year. Unabashedly queer and fun, the book is filled with amazing characters and incredible potential for follow-up releases.

—Matt, Community Engagement Manager

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

From the publisher: “Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid. True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior. The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend.”

—Maya, Marketing & Creative Associate

The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

This book did not come out this year, and it is the third of a trilogy, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one of those books that has settled in my brain and I keep finding pieces of it out in the real world and in myself.

—Ari, Assistant Director, Operations & Exhibits

The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

From the publisher: “Dave’s is an extraordinary life made of up ordinary moments, and he tells stories just like he writes songs—from his soul. Whether recounting his time as a kid in Toughskins in the Virginia suburbs, as a skinny teenager drumming his heart out for punk band Scream, living through the explosion and implosion of Nirvana, or hustling all the way around the world to escort his daughters to the Father/Daughter dance (only to be ignored as soon as his girls found their friends) The Storyteller is just like its author, as real as it gets.”

—Annie, Interim Assistant Director of Programming & Education

Swamp Story by Dave Barry

From the publisher: “Jesse Braddock is trapped in a tiny cabin deep in the Everglades with her infant daughter and her ex-boyfriend… Broke and desperate for a way out, Jesse stumbles across a long-lost treasure, which could solve all her problems—if she can figure out how to keep it… Meanwhile, Ken Bortle of Bortle Brothers Bait and Beer has hatched a scheme to lure tourists to his failing store by making viral videos of the ‘Everglades Melon Monster.’ The Monster is, in fact, an unemployed alcoholic newspaperman named Phil wearing a Dora the Explorer costume head. Incredibly, this plan actually works, inspiring a horde of TikTokers to swarm into the swamp in search of the Monster at the same time villains are on the hunt for Jesse’s treasure. Amid this mayhem, a presidential hopeful arrives in the Everglades to start his campaign. Needless to say, it does not go as planned. In fact, nothing in this story goes as planned. This is, after all, Florida.”

—Annie, Interim Assistant Director of Programming & Education

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

Amazing and unique narrative perspective that makes the place, the pool, feel like such a complicated living thing, and then a sudden shift in that narration moves you along so strikingly.

—Carey, President

There There by Tommy Orange

From the publisher: “A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize…They converge and collide on one fateful day at the Big Oakland Powwow and together this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. There There is fierce, funny, suspenseful, and impossible to put down—full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.”

—Christopher, Director of Operations

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

From the publisher: “Sam and Sadie—two college friends, often in love, but never lovers—become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before… Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.”

—Christopher, Director of Operations

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

From the publisher: “Florence Darrow has always felt she was destined for greatness, but after a disastrous affair with her married boss, she starts to doubt herself. All that changes when she sets off for Morocco with her new boss, the celebrated but reclusive author Maud Dixon. Amidst the colorful streets of Marrakesh and the wind-swept beaches of the coast, Florence begins to feel she’s leading the sort of interesting, cosmopolitan life she deserves. But when she wakes up in the hospital after a terrible car accident, with no memory of the previous night—and no sign of Maud—a dangerous idea begins to take form…”

—Christopher, Director of Operations

Wonderworks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories by Angus Fletcher

From the publisher: “Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement… Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for 25 of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.”

—Carol, Institutional Giving Manager

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

From the publisher: “A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser-known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure.”

—Nate, Digital Content Associate