From the first story you're hooked. He plays with speculative fiction, and a measure of strangeness to convey some pretty impactful stuff. His story Zimmer Land from that collection wrecked me. The book makes me think of something between George Saunders' The 10th of December and Paul Beatty's The Sellout.

Tommy Orange's There, There was another really good one, too. It's sold as a novel, but it feels more like a collection of interconnected stories. He's gotten a lot of comparison to Sherman Alexie, but really it's just the Native American focus that does it. His stories are all very urban centered (Oakland) with a pretty heavy leaning on the present. The guy moves from hip-hop to Native American tradition, to history pretty damn well.


Last year Gabe Habash wrote this book called Stephen Florida which I'm still mining for depth. On its surface, it's a book about a college wrestler trying to win his division championship before he graduates. I don't give a shit about wrestling, but this book depicts drive and dangerous obsession exceptionally well. Without being overly sensational or just silly, Habash managed to write the most disturbed character I've read since American Psycho's Patrick Bateman.