2019 · Ocean Vuong · 256 pages · Literary Fiction
A lyrical, devastating debut novel written as a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, weaving together war, addiction, queerness, and the immigrant experience with the precision of a poet and the vulnerability of a confession.
2024 · Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages · Fiction / Literary
Martyr! announced poet Kaveh Akbar as a major novelist with one of the most celebrated debuts of its year, the story of Cyrus Shams, a newly sober Iranian-American poet obsessed with making his death mean something, whose research into martyrs leads him to a terminally ill artist spending her final days as a museum installation. It's a novel about addiction, grief, and the hunger for significance that manages to be riotously funny on the way to devastating, with sentences that carry a poet's charge. The dream interludes divide readers and the ending leans on a convergence some find too neat. The voice converts nearly everyone.
2019 · 3 Seasons · Apple TV+ · Comedy-Drama
Dickinson took one of American literature's most studied figures and turned her into a rebellious young woman fighting for creative freedom in a world that had no interest in giving it to her. Hailee Steinfeld's performance grounds the show's wildest instincts, and the best episodes find a real emotional charge in the collision between Emily's ambitions and her era's constraints. The anachronistic approach that defines the series is also its most divisive element: the modern music, contemporary language, and tonal shifts between comedy and drama don't always coexist cleanly, and some stretches feel more interested in being clever than in being coherent. It's a show that swings big and connects often enough to justify the misses, earning its Peabody Award through sheer creative commitment.