The Best New Book Releases Out April 2, 2024

This week brings another entry to the Black girl horror surge I just mentioned last week. In this collection, authors tell 15 thrilling stories that center Black girls and subvert horror tropes. There are monster slayers, contentious spirits, and face-to-face showdowns with death. Authors included are Erin E. Adams, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Justina Ireland, L. L. McKinney, Vincent Tirado, and others.

If you’re looking for more YA horror, there’s the fabulist and southern gothic Something Kindred by Ciera Burch.

Ivar has been living by himself, save for a few animals, on an island north of Scotland for decades. Then, after all that time of minding his business, an impoverished Scottish minister, John, shows up to evict him. But the process doesn’t go too smoothly. When John first gets to the island, he falls and hurts himself, and it’s Ivar who takes care of him. Though the two men don’t speak the same language, they learn to communicate, and Ivar is able to see himself through another person for the first time in a long while.

In this Indigenous coming-of-age debut novel, 12-year-old Derik Mormin learns of the trauma of his ancestors, explores the differences between rural and urban living, and reconsiders masculinity. It’s got a unique perspective that looks at everything from primordial visions to dances with (tamed) cannibals, and it all starts with a storm.

We readers love a good book about books, and this one has such an interesting premise. Yorick is an apprentice librarian who was meant to curate the Titanic’s second-class library, but one of his superiors takes his place at the last minute. After the ship inevitably sinks, he finds his name on a list of people lost to the tragedy, and it makes him think a bit. This brush with mortality leads him to open a bookshop in Paris like he’s always wanted to, and he even finds a secret society of other people who were meant to board the Titanic, but, through a twist of circumstances, didn’t. In this society — which turns into a book club of sorts — he meets heiresses and alluring men, some of whom he experiences love/friendship triangles with. Then the group gets shaken up by the threat of the Great War and a member’s death.

As I mentioned earlier, April is Poetry Month, and this collection — edited by the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States — is perfect for those of us ready to engage with a new kind of nature poetry. The 50 previously unpublished poems here are everyone from Joy Harjo to Jericho Brown, and look at how we relate to our natural environments, whatever they may entail.

For more new poetry, there’s With My Back to the World by Victoria Chang.