My 5 Most Anticipated Books of May/June 2024

The title really says it all, so let’s get straight into it! Spring has sprung, the weather is better, and here are my 5 most anticipated books that drop this month and next.

The Miseducation of a 90s Baby by Khaholi Bailey

I mean, I obviously love Y2K-era work, so I’m very excited about The Miseducation of a 90s Baby by Khaholi Bailey (Clash Books, 5/14/2024), a funny and vulnerable essay collection about growing up during that time and reflecting upon it now as an adult decades later. The book’s getting comps to one of my favorite writers—Samantha Irby. And the cover is brilliant, with the essay titles Sharpie’d on a CD. 

(I will say that all five books in this article have great covers. In general, I’m constantly impressed with how strong book cover design is these days and how many different directions you can go with it. We’ve truly moved on from the book blob covers of only a few years ago.)

I actually just got Khaholi’s book over the weekend, even though it doesn’t come out until May 14th. That’s the fun thing with preorders—besides being a good way to support authors, sometimes you, as the reader, may get the book a little early, as a treat. I flipped through today and here’s a little excerpt to entice you—the opening lines from the essay “Baby’s First Relaxer.”

As puberty approached us all, it became clear that my classmate Roxy, with her medium brown skin and mermaid waves, was destined to rack up those in-class deliveries of carnations every Valentine’s Day. Daffodil, the new girl with the slack jaw and the stiff plaits, was destined to pretend she has a super hot boyfriend who happens to live in another town. I feared I would land somewhere in the middle.

The Summer Love Strategy by Ray Stoeve 

In Ray Stoeve’s third YA novel, two friends decide to help each other find love by emulating their favorite rom-coms and end up falling for each other instead. As someone who related a lot when Mitski once said, “A lot of my adolescence was like that. Me thinking I was doing the right thing by re-creating a movie scene that I’d seen but then realizing that’s not how it happens in real life” it goes without saying I like the premise of The Summer Love Strategy (Abrams Books 5/7/24—today!).

What I like about Ray’s books is they are both high concept, with a great one-sentence hook, while also full of quiet, sometimes even quite introspective moments. I interviewed Ray about their debut novel Between Perfect & Real back in 2021 for The Rumpus. 

Also, just to talk about covers again, I’ve been thinking about this book’s cover since it was revealed. Covers with illustrated depictions of a novel’s characters can be tricky to pull off, but this one really works for me. I like the way the main characters (Hayley and Talia) are drawn and the cheeky way Hayley (on the right) is giving the reader eye contact.

Woman of Interest by Tracy O'Neill

I admire how Tracy O’Neill shifts genres while still circling some of the same themes in each book. Her first novel was the coming-of-age story The Hopeful, her second was the chilly spy novel Quotients, and now we have a memoir, Woman of Interest (Harper One, 6/25/24). Written more like a mystery novel than a traditional memoir, it follows Tracy's search to find her birth mother in South Korea. Her interest in this search is spurred by living through deep COVID 2020—suddenly, she has an acute anxiety that this woman she has never met might be dead.

I don’t know what it is about national or global tragedies, like COVID, but something about them makes my mind wander to those I’m estranged from or those whom I have never met. Maybe it’s the (somewhat untrue) idea that we’re all having this universal experience—“we haven’t had much in common over the years, but we do share this one thing now, so are you thinking of me like I’m thinking of you?”

Also, I’m an adoptee, and honestly, I’ve had trouble relating to some other adoption stories or memoirs. They can feel somewhat identity politics-focused in a way that I find a little too tidy and obvious and I’d prefer something a bit more elusive and cerebral. When Woman of Interest was announced, I thought to myself, “Finally! Someone treating this subject matter like the existential investigation it is!” Really looking forward to its release in late June.

You Are the Snake by Juliet Escoria

Juliet Escoria’s second collection You Are the Snake (Soft Skull Press, 6/18/24) promises stories of girlhood, family, and urge. I’ve read Juliet’s previous books, and there are two qualities I like in all of them. They’re empathetic and human, but they resist easy moralizing—I don’t particularly want to see characters who always do and say the right thing, I want to see people who do some low-key fucked up shit! lol

I think about this interview Juliet Escoria did a lot, particularly her answer to the last question about how to craft urgent and chiseled sentences. That’s the second quality I love in her work—her sentences have great pop and sound, but they aren’t just decorative. They have meaning and pull punches. Looking forward to more of that in You Are the Snake.

She’s also making videos to go with several of the book's stories, which I think is very cool and a nice follow-up, as it’s something she did for her first collection, Black Cloud. 

The Island by Oscar d’Artois

Okay, I guess since I’ve already read this one, it technically doesn’t count toward a “My 5 Most Anticipated Books” list. But Oscar d’Artois is my Shabby Doll House pressmate, and at the beginning of 2024, this was by far my most anticipated book. In fact, I bugged Oscar on a regular basis about sending me his manuscript. Or during The Shabby Doll House Conference, I would present these rather involved meeting agendas with a long list of agenda items that began with, “Ahem, first things first: can you send me The Island.”

Well, it was worth the wait, I must say. I’ve been cracking a few jokes here, and I feel I should continue to say funny things because The Island (Shabby Doll House, 6/4/24) is a very funny book, but instead, I want to say something sincere. The Island’s full title is The Island: Haiku for My 33rd Birthday and I feel it captures something very thirties. Your twenties have chaotic quarter-life crises, and your forties may bring mid-life crises, but your thirties have their own strange existential quandaries. There’s this sense that your friends and peers are all starting to take different paths, committing to living life in different ways, and sometimes that can make you feel totally alone. Of course, that’s not true. You’re not alone, or at least, you’re not alone in feeling this way. That’s what I came away with from The Island, that I was not the only one thinking some of my strange thirty-something thoughts—from serious anxieties around death to my more petty thoughts around other people’s behavior—and a feeling of not being alone is, of course, one of the great reasons to read books.