Justin Chen

Title: Severance Author: Ling Ma

Candace Chen, one of the last people alive in New York City after a fungal infection spreads around the world, spends her days as the sole employee of a defunct publishing company. Darkly and dryly humorous, the novel is a zombie horror story, an office satire, a coming of age narrative, an immigrant saga, and a mediation on the perils and pleasures of nostalgia.

Title: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Author: Olga Tokarczuk

What is the best way to live in a cruel and barbaric world? How should we value the lives of animals compared to those of humans? Who is worthy of a voice? These are the questions confronting Janina—an elderly astrologist living in a rural Polish village. Translated from its original Polish in 2018, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a dark fable with a complicated morality and eccentric humor fit for our contemporary predicaments.

Title: Weather Author: Jenny Offill

Described as “the perfect worry novel”, Jenny Offill’s latest work is about the weather (mainly the looming threat of climate change) but it also speaks to weathering smaller anxieties (politics, marriage, interfamily relationships, a failure to live up to expectations). Told through narrative fragments and wry observations, Weather offers a kaleidoscopic and tender experience of being alive during uncertain times.

Title: In The Waves Author: Rachel Lance

In the Waves is Rachel Lance’s firsthand account as a biomedical engineer working to solve a 131-year old mystery: Why did the Confederate vessel, the H.L. Hunley, capsize hours after it became the first submarine to sink a warship? Combining popular science and historical mystery, Lance deftly explores the physics of underwater explosions, the human drama of the Civil War, and her single-minded obsession as a research scientist.

Title: The Emissary Author: Yoko Tawada

The Emissary, one of the strangest and most inventive stories that I’ve read, follows a day in the lives of a Japanese grandfather and grandson after an unnamed environmental catastrophe. In this dystopian world, children are born frail and sickly while the elderly remain healthy and strong. Due to the pollution, most animals and plants have gone extinct, everyone changes sex at least once in their lives, and old holidays have been replaced with new ones like “Being Alive is Enough Day”. Translated from its original Japanese, this short novel pushes the boundary of both language and visions of the future.

Bluets, an essay of sorts told through 240 loosely-linked prose poems, is an intricate and dreamlike reading experience. At its core, the writing focuses on the author’s attraction to the color blue, the end of a romantic relationship, and the care of a friend who becomes quadriplegic after an accident. These intensely personal experiences—presented alongside the ideas of other writers, artists, and philosophers—create new ways of thinking about perception and personal suffering.

Real Life begins when Wallace, a graduate student at a predominantly white Midwestern University, decides to join his friends for an outing at the lake. Hyperobservant, intelligent, and depressed, Wallace has entered academia to earn a PhD in biochemistry—and to erase his past as a queer, black child in the rural south. Instead, over the course of a weekend, Wallace’s life unravels with the urgency and horror of a social thriller. Told with precision and nuance, Real Life, portrays the looming forces of racism and academic isolation alongside the sharpness of hidden personal trauma.

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the novelist Haruki Murakami meditates on the connections between writing and running—in particular, the combination of talent, focus, and endurance that is needed to complete a novel or a race. However, the memoir isn’t specifically meant to inspire readers to starting writing or running. Instead, it is more like conversing with an eccentric friend. Alternating between the philosophical, matter-of-fact, self-deprecating, humorous, and irreverent, Murakami gives a new perspective on finding meaning while living a solitary life.