The Best New Book Releases Out June 20, 2023

*All the content warnings for this one.

If you’ve read the popular and award-winning critique on capitalism that is Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, then you know how dark she can get. You also know how compelling. Here, the Argentinian writer tells 19 stories of the darkest parts of human existence with new perspectives and even a bit of humor. A girl has a rabbit growing between her legs, a woman undergoes a physical transformation through mutilation, cemeteries are visited, and some people have alien girlfriends.

So excited to finally share this YA thriller! Bayron has such a talent for taking familiar narratives and reworking them in a way that is simultaneously thought-provoking and natural. In You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight, 17-year-old Charity Curtis has the summer job any horror lover would want: playing the Final Girl in a full-contact horror game. At Camp Mirror Lake, her and her coworkers act out scenes from the beloved slasher movie Curse of Camp Mirror Lake, trying to make the experience feel as real as possible for guests. But then things get a little too real when her coworkers start disappearing. Now Charity and her girlfriend Bezi are trying to get to the bottom of the murders happening around them while becoming the Final Girls of their own story. Fans of horror will appreciate Bayron’s subversive take on many of the tropes of the genre, including how race and gender have traditionally been portrayed.

We stan a gun-totin’, revenge-gettin’ queen, and 16-year-old Bridget is exactly that. After her raggedy father dies from a snakebite, Bridget must cross the Kansas prairie with no money and her one mule. When she reaches Dodge City, her red hair attracts one of the women who runs the Buffalo Queen Saloon, a respected brothel run by women. She takes to being a “sporting woman,” a sex worker, even enjoying her time with the other women. Like, she really enjoys it, and comes to realize her sexuality through them — particularly the gender-bending gunslinger Spartan Lee. But the peace she’s found through the Buffalo Queen eventually becomes unsettled, and she’ll have to envision her own future for herself.

Oliva — whose family has an intimate relationship with the U.S.-Mexian border and who has worked as a translator for people coming into the U.S. — lays out the complexities of immigrating to the United States. She reflects on how refugees’ trauma must be mined and packaged for the immigration system, ponders who should be considered worthy of American citizenship, and explores how many immigrants are not immediately welcomed but end up handling our most precious industries, like food harvesting, and more.

We love a bit of a hot mess, and Xie’s Kathleen Cheng in Holding Pattern is exactly that. After kind of maybe messing up her life a bit — she goes through an embarrassing breakup and drops out of graduate school — Kathleen returns to her childhood home. Expecting to find a familiarly depressed and homesick mother, she finds instead a happier version of her mother who has a wedding to a tech entrepreneur to plan. Working at a new job that centers around a new form of therapy has Kathleen rethinking all her relationships, including the one with her mother, and the two women start to see themselves — and each other — in a new light.

Through an interior narrative, a butch lesbian details how a summer affair between her and her boss’s wife unfold. Young and unsure of herself, the narrator arrives at a prestigious English boarding school — where privilege and judgement reign supreme — to become its matron. When she meets her constitutional opposite in the confident Mrs. S, a slow-burning attraction unfurls into a risky affair that leads to difficult choices.