The Best New Book Releases Out March 5, 2024

RuPaul had already made a name for himself as a premier drag queen and entertainer before the first episode of Drag Race. But since the show started, he’s become more iconic and has helped usher in a new era of Drag. Here, he offers a more intimate side of himself, detailing his life growing up as a queer Black kid in California, his time as a punk in Atlanta and New York, and how he found self-acceptance.

Though this is a collection of essays rather than a straight memoir (the author does have a memoir as well: Red Paint), it still gets into LaPointe’s experiences as a queer Indigenous woman. With a very punk spirit, the help of her family archives, and her great-grandmother’s anthropological work, LaPointe picks apart narratives surrounding Indigenous people, analyzes cultural displacement, and critiques environmental destruction.

The Queen of Irish detective fiction is back with another Cal Hooper entry, but as with a lot of other detective fiction, I don’t think you necessarily have to have read the first in the series to enjoy this one. Here, Cal retires from the Chicago PD early and moves to the Irish countryside to find quiet. He gets the peace he’s looking for and more — he, local woman Lena, and Lena’s troubled teen daughter Trey start to form what feels like a supportive family. But then Trey’s trifling biological father, Johnny, shows up with a scheme to get rich, and everything goes south. The delicate, newly formed connections of Cal’s family are threatened by a search for gold that turns into a search for a killer.

Award-winning Oyeyemi’s latest is an experimental stack of narrative on narrative. Here, Prague is a living, changing city, which writer Hero Tojosoa is invited to by her sort of ex-friend Sofie. On her way there, she brings an interesting book — Paradoxical Undressing — whose narrative changes each time you open it. She’s not the only one with this shape-shifting novel; the woman whose name she uses as her pen name — Dorothea Gilman — also has it. Well, Dorothea is also in Prague, and as the wacky narrative shifts and turns, tensions between Hero, Sofie, and Dorothea come to a head.

Listen, if I said I ever expected a book’s official blurb to say “Scarface meets Moby Dick,” I’d be lying. Saying that description didn’t immediately intrigue me would also be a lie, but the treats don’t stop there. Izzy is a Pitbull impersonator living in the 305 (Miami, Florida, to the uninitiated) who gets hit with a letter from the rapper’s legal team and immediately has to change his career plans. So, he falls back on his old goal: to become the next Tony Montana. In his quest, he becomes taken with the idea that Lolita, the captive orca at the local aquarium, should be the pet tiger to his Tony Montana. As he tries to get her, the perspective shifts between his and Lolita’s, as they both remember being separated from their families at sea.