Critics' Picks Out in Paperback

"An astonishingly rendered work of fiction, as much a meditation as a narrative." – Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

"Abdurraqib traverses the Golden Era of 1990s basketball...while also remembering personal, formative moments of beauty and struggle growing up in the Midwest... Abdurraqib delicately shows what it means to remember and revisit your childhood...and love it whole-heartedly, despite its cracks." – Rachel Sonis, TIME

"Perhaps the word 'romantic' has been too thoroughly attenuated to use in praise, but 'Held' may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the most poetic — not just in sentiment but in form...these sections demand bridging elisions, catching thematic echoes and restitching a chronology that’s been reordered across almost 120 years." – Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Make room, American fiction, for a meaningful new voice... [Headshot is] fresh and strong and sinuous... so enveloping to read that you feel, at times, that you are writing it in your own mind." – Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Robinson explores the moral ramifications of jumping at the chance of long-deferred happiness — even if it's at the expense of others... What starts as a story about rekindled, mature love becomes an operatic tragedy about passion and honor." – Heller McAlpin, NPR

"The urge to dissect Helen Oyeyemi’s mercurial fiction is as irresistible as it is immaterial to the enjoyment of her magical worlds. And never have the desires to scrutinize or get swept away been more intriguingly opposed than with her latest novel, Parasol Against the Axe, an intricate and opulent portrait of her adopted hometown, Prague." – Cory Oldweiler, The Washington Post

"A time-bending neo-noir novel in the vein of Ling Ma’s Severance, Flux is about the lives of three men undergoing loss, whose lives converge when a 28-year-old uncovers a time-traveling conspiracy at his new place of work that’s being used to cover up a network of dark secrets." – Sophia June, NYLON

"Posnanski is a bit like the guy telling baseball stories at a bar – if that guy is clever, funny, not averse to hyperbole, sentiment or numerology, willing to go to great lengths to track down a fact and possessed of a way with words... if you were that kid who felt a surge of gladness when Baseball Digest turned up in the mailbox, and if the game has continued to hold a place in your heart, well, I've got just the book for you." – Ben Yagoda, Wall Street Journal

"[The Limits] displays one of the most impressive aspects of Freudenberger's work: Deep research is effortlessly deployed in the service of a story and pressing contemporary issues are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the novel. Here, Freudenberger's moral passion about the capitalistic exploitation of natural resources and the horrors of climate change charges the novel with an ethical force. As always, her graceful, limpid writing style makes the novel eminently readable." – Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

"Gonzalez's depiction of the racial and economic dynamics of Raquel's boastfully liberal yet starkly socially stratified Ivy League college is scalpel sharp and painfully accurate." – Carole V. Bell, NPR