Coming of Rage: Books About the Millennial Existential Crisis

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. They’ve been together for a few years — good years — but now they’re not sure why they’re still a couple. When Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together or fracture everything they’ve ever known. And just maybe they’ll all be okay in the end.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is studying. An introverted young man from Alabama, Black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends. But over the course of one weekend, a series of confrontations conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. However, when the two strike up a conversation — awkward but electrifying — something life-changing begins. A year later they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Soon, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself — a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first-century America. All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one girl’s journey to make her home in the world.

Perceptive, mordantly funny, and full of heart, How to Fall Out of Love Madly examines women’s many relationships — with one another, their mothers, their work, men, and themselves — to reveal their underlying power and complexity. It asks, why do so many smart, compassionate, otherwise empowered women tolerate egregious behavior from the men they love? And what will it take for them to reclaim control?

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return …

At first glance, our quirky, overworked narrator seems to be on the cusp of a perfect life: she is studying for a prestigious Ph.D. in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud, and her successful, supportive boyfriend has just proposed to her. But instead of feeling hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence. When it all becomes too much and her life plan veers off course, she finds herself on a new path of discoveries about everything she thought she knew. Smart, moving, and always funny, this unique coming-of-age story is certain to evoke a winning reaction.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s critically acclaimed utterly unique series Fleabag took the world by storm with its piercing dialogue, ruthlessly dry wit, and deeply human drama. In Fleabag: The Scriptures, Waller-Bridge brings together the filming scripts, complete with the original stage directions as well as exclusive commentary on her creative process. Now recognized as one of today’s most essential voices, she delivers powerful insights into her now-iconic protagonist: the hilarious, emotionally damaged, sexually unapologetic woman who can make viewers laugh, cry, and cringe in a single scene.

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.