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If you’ve read my recommendations before, like this one on 10 Books that 'Disrupted' the Literary Status Quo or my 2021 end-of-year review, you know that I always sneak a few books published decades ago onto my lists. The reason is simple: When I was doing my damndest to break into the literary world, I read dozens of books, many of which took place in a time before I was even born. These older books, from the likes of Ann Petry, John A. Williams, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and so many more, provided a rich backdrop for my own writerly efforts, and it was through their works that I was better able to understand my own, as well as my role as a writer. They told me, “We may be dead, but we’ve done this, and we know what it takes. Don’t give up.��

On the flip side, there’s also immense value in reading newly published contemporary novels and collections, which live alongside us in real time. I’ve never used a typewriter, but I do own an iPhone. (Is this an endorsement? Pay me, Apple!) The Jazz Age has come and gone, and while I can visit a bar in Harlem where the greats once played, I can only imagine what it was like, rather than live it.

The beauty of fiction set during the time we’re breathing, laughing, and loving in is that we can reach out and graze our fingertips against life happening right now, which not only enriches our understanding of places, people, and culture, but gives us the opportunity, should we have the desire and privilege, to experience them for ourselves. To walk the streets of Paris that Naima Coster depicts in What’s Mine and Yours. To visit New Orleans and eat a beignet (Are they even good? I can’t tell.) while reading Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You. To sidestep that appealing babysitting gig because we saw what happened in Such a Fun Age.

So to share some modern love, I’ve put together a list of novels and collections published in the past three years or forthcoming in 2022. Some of them I’ve read and loved; others are on my ever-growing TBR (cue a solitary bead of sweat trickling down my forehead as I think about it).

But as we both already know, this is an incomplete list, which means that if you don’t see a book both set in recent times and published in the past few years, please do your literary civic duty and leave it in the comments below. And if you do happen across a recommendation that you loved, please also share your thoughts––you can’t spell “community�� without “comments.�� Well, you can, but you get what I’m saying��

Read, and be merry!