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GrubStreet Artistic Director Chris Castellani's The Art of Perspective (Graywolf) debuted early this year to critical acclaim for his insightful examination of the writer's perpetual point-of-view problem. Commended by the Boston Globe as "a master class — in 140 pages — on how various narrative strategies make novels tick," Castellani's book is "a modest, gracefully written meditation on creativity and craft," writes Kirkus Reviews

Heralded by Publishers Weekly as a "fully realized depiction of how art and life inform each other," Omar Musa's debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, follows three restless young immigrants in small-town Australia in what the Los Angeles Times calls "a searing coming-of-age story that tackles race and masculine identity, dislocation and disempowerment." Musa appeared at Harvard Book Store in March to read from his explosive debut, and I caught up with him recently to talk politics, hip-hop, and role of the storyteller. Plus, click the audio track to find out how to spell "fuck" in Australian.

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Only a week after its May 3rd publication, Pamela Wechsler’s first novel, Mission Hill, has garnered praise from Publisher’s Weekly, The Washington Post, Associated Press, and many other sources

"Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them." 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is that rare example of a book that manages to be many things at one time, and to do so almost flawlessly: it is at once a spy novel, a political satire, a gripping account of an oft-misunderstood war, and a meditation on the nature of what identity means when your identities are in conflict.

The titular sympathizer is a man without a country, made up of conflicting identities and political ...