Ever read a novel so good you pump your fist and roar upon finishing it? (Excellent; us too.) The United States may be out of the World Cup, and the NBA Finals are a distant memory, but LSA’s literary champions give us plenty to cheer about. Here are six novels by LSA faculty and alumni that will make you want to shout ¡GOOOOOOOOL! Get out there, readers, and up your game. 

  • Julie Buntin (faculty, Helen Zell Writers’ Program) Famous Men, Random House, 2026. If you loved Marlena, Buntin’s award-winning 2017 debut, which takes place in northern Michigan, you’re in for a treat with Buntin’s new novel, Famous Men. The novel—part of which is also set in Michigan—is the story of Will, a young, working-class woman in a complicated relationship with an older male poet. The Boston Globe says that “every sentence is diamond cut,” and that Famous Men “pleases and provokes from every vantage point, but what is especially remarkable is Buntin’s audacity, her gutsy choices, and her clarity. She’s pumping her fist in the air, and we can hear her roar.” 
  • Heather Colley (A.B. ’20) The Gilded Butterfly Effect, Three Rooms Press, 2025. Colley’s debut novel is told in the alternating first-person narratives of glamorous Stella and introverted Penny, two young women whose dark, chaotic, and absurd campus experiences foster a complex friendship, at a large university in Ann Arbor, Michigan (ahem). The publisher describes the book as an “unflinching yet humorous perspective on modern campus life, from the highs of the non-stop party scene to the lows of prescription drug abuse, exploring issues of body dysmorphia and campus sexual assault … perfect for fans of Mona Awad’s Bunny, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with a nod to the campus literary tradition of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or.” Kirkus Reviews praises the book’s “manic, fizzy energy.” 
  • Mo Daviau (M.F.A. HZWP ’13) Epic and Lovely, West Virginia University Press, 2025. Daviau’s second novel is a long letter from a dying woman in Los Angeles to her physician, expounding upon parenthood, illness, and the stories of a beauty queen, a lounge singer, and a tech billionaire. About the book, Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe, writes, “Full of tenderness, dark humor, and aching vulnerability, Mo Daviau has written a stunning novel … Epic and Lovely is a meditation on inheritance—both genetic and emotional—that deftly explores what it means to leave behind a legacy when time is running out.” 
  • Lillian Li (M.F.A. HZWP ’15) Bad Asians, Henry Holt & Co., 2026. Li’s second novel centers on four ambitious 20-somethings at the beginning of the 2008 Great Recession—and the video that the friends make documenting their career frustrations that accidentally goes viral on a new website called YouTube. Li’s book takes on competition in a close-knit community, the complexity of life-long friendships, and a moment in American history when working hard and being smart simply wasn’t enough to achieve the kind of success to meet parental expectations. Publishers Weekly calls the book “[a] whip-smart … piercing social commentary.”
  • Lauren Morrow (M.F.A. HZWP ’21) Little Movements, Random House, 2025. Morrow’s debut novel is the story of a dancer who leaves her home, marriage, and job to pursue her long-held dream of becoming a dance choreographer. The book has been called “smart, incisive, and hilarious,” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and LSA faculty member Peter Ho Davies writes: “What makes Little Movements so necessary is Morrow’s thoughtful, deeply felt examination—by turns frustrated, furious, and frank—of what it means to be an artist of color amid the constant pressure of representation.”
  • E.Y. Zhao (M.F.A. HZWP ’23) Underspin, Astra House, 2025. Zhao’s coming-of-age novel is the story of the preternatural rise, and the shattering fall, of a table-tennis prodigy named Ryan Lo. Zhao, who competed professionally in table tennis (and who says that “ping-pong” is as valid a term for the sport as “table tennis”), has written a polyphonic book in which the mystery of Lo’s death is unraveled by those who knew him best. Fellow HZWP alum Olivia Cheng (M.F.A. ’24) writes in The Metropolitan Review: “In the great sports novel, the game is rarely just a game … the most enduring works in the genre use sport not to celebrate victory but to illuminate the private costs of ambition. Underspin … understands that the most important matches take place far from the scoreboard, in the spaces where doubt accumulates and the body becomes a record of what it has endured.”