The Oprah Book Club–inspired publicity surrounding Ayana Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, may deter cynical readers of serious literary fiction, rightly suspicious of market-driven literary hits, from reading Mathis’s book. If so, it is unfortunate.

Mark Anthony Neal’s Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities is a tour de force through contemporary black popular culture that resists any presentist impulses.

Pauls Toutonghi’s energetic second novel, Evel Knievel Days, tells the story of Khosi Saqr, a museum guide at the Copper King Mansion in Butte and “western Montana’s most famous half-Egyptian shut-in.”

G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is an unusual, exciting work of urban fantasy that broadens the usual meanings of “urban” and “fantasy.” What does it mean, the novel asks, for a person to turn to or away from faith? What kind of magic is needed to allow disenchanted, half-secularized young citizens of the Arab world to take ownership of their society?

Don Lee’s The Collective explores the politics of Asian American culture through the story of three characters: Joshua Yoon, Jessica Tsai, and Eric Cho. A Korean American from Mission Viejo, California, Eric serves as the narrator, but the book revolves around Joshua, a Korean orphan adopted by two liberal Jewish professors at Harvard.

Maps are ubiquitous now, embedded in nearly every mobile device, but in the early days of America, maps were far more precious. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten argues that the formation of the United States allowed cartography to become an institutionalized practice in the country.

Philippine National Book Award–recipient Gina Apostol is a novelist with a penchant for unlikely heroes. Gun Dealers’ Daughter, her American debut, is no exception. The bulk of the novel offers the confession of Soledad Soliman, or “Sol,” a wealthy young woman turned communist rebel who had participated in a murder plot against an American counterinsurgency expert in Marcos-era Philippines.

Dana Johnson, author of the beautifully written Elsewhere, California, wants so much for you to know her novel is about place, that she puts one of the nation’s most famous states in its title. This is also a novel about color: the color of skin, water, sky, and Dodgers’ hats, the color of grass and blood, the color of paint and concrete.

An Arab Melancholia seems tailor-made for the contemporary cultural wars between liberal humanists and Islamic fundamentalists. “Abdellah Taïa,” the book’s blurb declares, “is the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco.”

Almudena Grandes’s best-selling El lector de Julio Verne is the second novel in a planned series of six, Episodios de una guerra interminable, a large-scale narrative project that will aim to convey the devastating trajectory of the first twenty-five years of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, a period, according to Grandes, that has been largely forgotten.

Is there something missing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? One would think that an author’s say over her work’s substance would be final. Yet the novel’s prolific adaptations seem obsessed with filling in the gory details that Shelley avoids.

The Round House is, arguably, the first foray into genre fiction for celebrated Native American novelist Louise Erdrich, and the result is a gripping whodunit. The crime: the brutal rape and attempted murder of an Ojibwe woman, Geraldine Coutts, on a remote North Dakota Indian reservation in the spring of 1988.

Within 25 years, a life of “possibility,” including clean water, energy, education, information, health, and freedom, will be attainable for all, so claims Abundance. Global networks and interconnectedness will make abundance possible.

Addiction by Design is as compelling as a horror story—a sad, smart horror story that calls off the Luddite witch hunt (Down with the machines!) in favor of an approach that examines the role of gaming designers within existing social systems of gender and class disparity.

Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong recounts some three decades of Vietnamese diasporic history; the novel comes equipped with a multigenerational family tree, and whether you take this as an invitation or a warning may well predict your response to the book.

Do we know how to talk about Jewish writers when they are not talking about Anne Frank? Despite the several prizes awarded to Binocular Vision, with their attendant publicity, Pearlman remains a largely unknown quantity. Why?

The first thing that needs to be said about the winner of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction—The Song of Achilles, a retelling of the Iliad by first-time novelist Madeline Miller—is that it is a pleasure to read a version of the Trojan war in which Achilles and Patroclus are in a devoted partnership, sex very much included.

The year 2012 marks both the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth and the 75th anniversary of her death. It’s a fact that would appeal to the authoress: her novels are populated by characters for whom each beginning contains the end of what might have been.

Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White takes advantage of the generic pluralism comics have enjoyed, or suffered, since becoming “respectable” in the mid-1980s.

From the financial sector breakdown to Arab Spring revolutions to global climate change, we observe a persistent attempt to segregate crises into coherent, and largely independent, units.

New York’s tech scene at the turn of the millennium was a nexus of youth, cool, and well-paid creative jobs. When it contracted, many workers faced not only their own lay-offs, but what felt like the demise of an entire industry.