Incandescence (by Jose)

Being a brief, subjective and incomplete appraisal of fabulous, brilliant, must read New Women Novelists.

All these writers are guaranteed to share a lived experience that will leave a haunting afterimage in your imagination, and which you will undoubtedly recall with a sense of, "Wait, wasn't I there when that happened?"

Nell Zink: When you were a kid, did you ever wave a sparkler on the Fourth of July and accidentally ignite the entire box? That was your anticipation reading Mislaid, Nicotine or Doxology. Only N.Z. would notice that, in spite of our collective paranoia, terrorists should be, "measured in parts per billion."

Julia Phillips: Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth, infected every reader with anxiety and anticipation, and with a bedrock sense of place where few have ever visited: New York Times Ten Best Books, 2019 and finalist for the National Book Award. 

Olga Tokarczuk: You'll get dirt under your fingernails turning pages of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead--but it's fragrant Polish soil from a rapidly vanishing forest. And, oh yeah, she recently won the Booker International Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Annalee Newitz: Take care reading her second novel, The Future of Another Timeline--some pages are sharp as razors and there could be blood. She's a feminist Neal Stephenson (for historic depth) and Cory Doctorow (for radical thought) rolled into one riot grrl. 

Jenny Erpenbeck: Dealing with the refugee crisis, Go Went Gone revealed Erpenbeck to be the compassionate soul and literary voice of New Germany. Like Angela Merkel, she grew up in totalitarian East Germany and is intimate with being trumped by hateful oppressors.

N.K. Jemisin: You could easily break a nail turning pages of Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, or even a finger, and quite possibly your heart. Hell, you are holding the weight of an entire world in your hands. With the Fifth Season she became the first black novelist to win science fiction's Hugo Award. With the Obelisk Gate and the Stone Sky she won it three years in a row, a first for any author.

Elif Shafak: The most popular woman writer in Turkey is not popular with the country's dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan: he'd like to imprison her for acknowledging the Armenian Genocide in the Bastard of Istanbul. The premise of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is so original that I won't spoil its shock factor by describing it here.

Ottessa Moshfegh: If you lapse into a coma reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation it won't be because of Moshfegh's crystaline prose; you're probably just overly empathetic. Her new novel, Death in Her Hands, is a metaphysical murder mystery in which an older woman broods over a different form of relaxation. 

Ling Ma: Her debut novel, Severance, is a personal, ordinary, whimsical, zombie apocalypse. Candace Chen exchanges second generation immigrant ambivalence for the banality of office culture, with sublime understatement. Didn't you get the memo? Are the Endtimes really going to be that much different from the workaday world?

Fernanda Melchor: Unflinchingly precise and unsettlingly brutal, Hurricane Season is a storm of human violence in forsaken small-town Mexico that must have been written in the blood of its victims. This courageous novel gives corrosive new meaning to the phrase, "witch hunt."

Yoko Ogawa: If things start disappearing from your life while reading the Memory Police, don't worry, you won't remember them anyway. An unpredictable, timeless paralysis haunts this book in ways that defy the readers's anticipations.

Linn Ullmann: After honing her writing skills on several Scandinavian bestsellers, Ullmann surprised readers with Unquiet. If you decide to write Biofiction, you better have material worth writing about. In her case, it was growing up as a the daughter of genius filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and his superstar Liv Ullmann--lives of incarnate incandescence.