Emma Eisenberg is not just the author of Housemates and The Third Rainbow Girl. She is also the co-founder of Blue Stoop, a Philadelphia non-profit organization that supports writers in many ways — and a connoisseur of books, especially those written by people who are either from Philly or who currently live here. (Oh yeah, this isn’t her first time writing for The Citizen, either.)
Here is a list of books, all new this year, she is most excited about. When you buy these, please make sure you do it through an independent — and hopefully Philly — bookseller.
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
The tenderest book about an alien girl in Northeast Philadelphia faxing her home planet — a story that is really about falling back in love with being human. Released January 16, 2024 from MacMillan Publishers.
Bertino is a Northeast Philadelphia native and Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. She also authored Parakeet, 2AM at the Cat’s Pajamas, and the short story collection Safe as Houses and received both the Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize.
Sex With a Brain Injury by Annie Liontas
A dynamic, raw, sexy, innovative and much needed memoir-in-essays about the far-reaching effects of traumatic brain injury. Released January 16, 2024 from Simon and Schuster.
Liontas, a Philadelphian by choice, is the genderqueer author of the novel Let Me Explain You and co-editor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. They have served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers.
Ghostroots by ’Pemi Aguda
A haunting, intimate and surprising collection of 12 short stories set mostly in Lagos, Nigeria. Released May 7, 2024 from W. W. Norton.
Aguda, originally from Lagos, Nigeria, now calls Philadelphia home. She too has won the O’Henry Prize — for short fiction.
Reunion by Elise Juska
This novel about a college reunion canceled during the pandemic and then rescheduled is masterful and surprising. Released May 7, 2024 from HarperCollins.
Juska’s previous novels are If We Had Known and The Blessings. A professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, she and her family live outside Philly.
Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler
There are so many books about drinking but so few about getting sober. Deagler’s debut novel, set mostly in south Philly, starts to fill that hole. Released May 7, 2024 from Astra Publishing House.
Deagler left Philadelphia after getting sober. He now lives in California.
This Land is Holy by noam keim
An extremely necessary and timely collection of essays, keim writes about being a Queer Arab Jew in a settler family in occupied Palestine. Releases May 28, 2024 from Radix Media.
keim grew up in France, studied in Paris, then Ann Arbor, Michigan, and now Philadelphia, where they work to support individuals impacted by incarceration.
God Bless You Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas
A North Philly vet working as both an EMT and a PhD student navigates being a Black man, a son and a father in this moving follow-up to Sink. Releases June 18, 2024 from Hachette Book Group.
Thomas, a Frankford native and PhD candidate at Penn, was Blue Stoop’s second director who aspires to be a teacher. In 2023, David Williams interviewed him for The Citizen.
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
A child goes missing at an Adirondacks summer camp in this novel that is secretly about class and the American wealth gap. Releases July 2, 2024 from Penguin Random House.
Moore is author of the New York Times bestselling novel Long Bright River, Heft and The Unseen World. The winner of the 2014-2015 Rome Prize in Literature lives in Philadelphia, where Citizen Co-executive Editor interviewed her about Long Bright River in 2020.
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