The best new books that are out today
  Hello, book lovers! Each week, dozens of new releases hit the shelves. These are our favorites. ❤️📚 –The BuzzFeed Books team
Outlawed by Anna North  Credit: nocknockbooks "In an alternate version of late-1800s America, babies are a hot commodity after a flu wiped out much of the population. Ada, a young newlywed, hasn't gotten pregnant yet; in a world where women who are unable to have children are treated like witches, her only choice is to become an outlaw. She joins up with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a group of misfits who refuse to conform to gender or societal norms. But their dream of creating a utopia for outcasts comes with a dangerous plan — one that Ada isn't sure she can live with." —Kirby Beaton
Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour  Credit: HMH Books "Mateo Askaripour's blazing debut follows Darren Vender, aka Buck, a young Black Brooklyn native who goes from shift supervisor at Starbucks to sales wunderkind at Sumwun, a remote counseling tech startup. Sumwun's CEO — well intentioned but suffering from a severe god complex — takes Buck under his wing, but conveniently looks the other way as Buck, Sumwun's lone Black sales agent, is hit with racism running the gamut from microaggressions (like when he has to role-play calls with white coworkers mimicking AAVE) to outright aggressions disguised as hazing (like when those coworkers dump a bucket of white paint on his head). Still, Buck is great at sales and skyrockets to success. The only problem is he loses himself — and his connections to his home and community — in the process. It's a fast-paced, sharp, hilarious story with a lot of heart, and though both the blatant racism and indulgent startup culture might seem exaggerated, it's a good idea to resist the urge to read it as satire: In an LA Times interview, Askaripour said, 'No Black person would describe what Darren experiences as surprising or absurd.'" —Arianna Rebolini
Get it from Bookshop for $23.92, or Amazon for $18.29. I highly recommend the audiobook read by Zeno Robinson, $22.95 at Libro.fm.
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.  Credit: putnambooks "On a plantation in the Deep South, two enslaved young men, Isaiah and Samuel, find moments of intimacy in the barn where they share duties tending to the animals. There, they can let their love — and a rare sense of hope — bloom. But their love threatens the system of the plantation. And when an older man, who is also enslaved, starts preaching of sin, others on the plantation begin to turn against each other. Isaiah and Samuel's love brings the plantation, and the weight of its prisoners' histories, to a powerful moment of reckoning." —Kirby Beaton
Happily Ever Afters by Elise Bryant  Credit: elisembryant "Ready for a super-sweet YA romance that'll kick off your 2021 with some happy swooning? Good! Bryant's Happily Ever Afters is Jane the Virgin meets To All the Boys I've Loved Before. Tessa Johnson has never felt like the main character, but she can pen herself as one in the stories she writes. When she's accepted into a creative writing program at a prestigious art school, this should be her time to shine — but Tessa suffers from writer's block. The perfect remedy? Creating her very own a list of romance novel-inspired steps to a happily ever after. Her eyes are set on Nico as her goal prince charming, but then there's the sweet and sensitive boy next door who's unknowingly throwing off her plan. Bryant's debut is exactly what we all need to cast away those post holiday blues." —Farrah Penn
The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh by Molly Greeley  Credit: William Morrow "A queer reimagining of Pride and Prejudice's Anne de Bourgh, this novel follows Anne as she breaks free of the laudanum-filled, sheltered life her parents forced upon her. Armed with her vast inheritance, she flees to London, staying with her cousin Col. John Fitzwilliam as she attempts to join high society and forge a new identity — one that is uniquely her own." —Kirby Beaton
Also noteworthy: A Picnic in the Ruins by Todd Robert Petersen, a zany heist thriller about a sociologist who unexpectedly crosses paths with a poorly planned attempt to steal Native artifacts.
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins, a domestic thriller–slash–updated southern Gothic about a dog walker (and thief) who falls for one of her clients, but finds herself haunted by his late wife.
A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion, a dark drama about a family dealing with the aftermath of a mother's fateful decision to kick her 12-year-old daughter out of the car on one tense night in 1980s suburban Pennsylvania.
Now in paperback: These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card: Card's debut opens with a scene of an old man on his dying day, reckoning with a secret that's plagued most of his life — the man known as Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley, who faked his death more than 30 years ago and abandoned his life in Jamaica to start anew in the US. From there, Card moves into the past and future, exploring the stories of Paisley's ancestors and descendants — enslaved women in colonial Jamaica, his struggling daughters in modern Harlem — and the ways each generation's trauma bleeds into those that follow.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett — Patchett's latest is a rich and evocative story of family and place — the relationships that define us and how they change over a lifetime: the emotional weight of physical spaces and the specific power of those we inhabit in our youth. Here that space is the eponymous Dutch house, the ostentatious mansion at the center of our narrator's very identity; every element of his life — the loss of his mother, his dependence on his sister, his career and values — can be traced to his father's baffling decision to purchase it. It's a story of the endless and impossible search for meaning, written in beautiful, quiet prose.
Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston Davis: Comprising fiction Hurston began writing in 1925, when she was the sole black student at Barnard, Hitting a Straight Lick is a collection of shrewd short stories touching on gender, race, and cultural touchstones of her time and place — including eight stories found in the archives of long-out-of-commission periodicals
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland: While a grad student working in the archives at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Shapland stumbled upon a treasure trove of writing by the author Carson McCullers — transcripts from therapy sessions and love letters written to a woman named Annemarie. Using the letters as inspiration, Shapland traces the origins of McCullers' life while simultaneously addressing her own queer awakening. With its short, often elliptical, chapters, it's the kind of book that feels in conversation with the nonfiction of Maggie Nelson and Carmen Maria Machado.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener: Journalist Anna Wiener digs into her years spent entrenched in Silicon Valley, working in customer support at a San Francisco–based male-dominated e-book startup. Wiener pulls no punches in her searing criticisms of tech startup culture — its wealth and excess juxtaposed against the city's growing homelessness epidemic; the dissolution of the boundary between work and life, aided by an office full of toys and perks that make it suspiciously easy to stay long past work hours; the ethically iffy ways data can be used to manipulate customers; and the seemingly unchecked power of a very white, very male industry.
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