New Books From Rachel Aviv, Emily Rapp Black, Vanessa Hua & Lisa Russ Spaar

(l-r): Rachel Aviv, Emily Rapp Black, Vanessa Hua, Lisa Russ Spaar

Rachel Aviv (’10), You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, Knopf, July 2026

“You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. ‘I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,’ Aviv writes. ‘It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too—her particular longings and humiliations and needs.’

“Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world. You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.” (photo: Rose Lichter-Marck)

Emily Rapp Black (’06), I Would Die If I Were You, Counterpoint Press, May 2026

“Drawing upon her previous work and over two decades of teaching, Emily Rapp Black explores how art can move us through moments of grief and loss while celebrating the spirit-lifting potential of all creative acts.

“‘To be disabled is to be exiled; to have a terminal illness is to be isolated in one’s time-limitedness; to grieve is to be annihilated; and to live is inevitable: all of these, together and at once, form the core of the truth of being human.’ As most artists know, approaching their ‘hard’ stories in a way that feels joyful, redemptive, and meaningful can be difficult to near impossible. With I Would Die If I Were You, celebrated author Emily Rapp Black has designed a guide that will help creative people working in any medium make meaning out of loss. For her entire life, she has been answering awkward questions in elevators: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘What happened to your body?’ And, in the case of her son’s terminal illness and death, she’s been told more times than she can count: ‘I would die if I were you.’ Rejecting such cruel and casual conclusions, Rapp Black posits that part of the human project is to experience grief and loss, and nobody gets out alive, and no writer—or person—survives anything alone. We need empathy, and for that we need community, and we need all the stories told within them to reach our fullest potential. I Would Die If I Were You is a bold and bracing blueprint—part memoir, part craft book—for how art making can lead us to our fullest truths.” (photo: William Waldron)

Vanessa Hua (’15), Coyoteland, Flatiron Books, May 2026

“Living in El Nido, a privileged community in the hills east of Berkeley, is supposed to mean you’ve made it. So when Jin Chang moves there with his wife and daughters after years of scraping by, he hopes it will finally be the end of his bad luck. What his family doesn’t know is that he’s bending the rules for one final scheme: to make it big in real estate. Next door, Blair Belle prides herself on her progressive politics. After all, she treats their new nanny, Ana Rodriguez, and her daughter like family—even if she doesn’t know them all that well. But she can’t help but feel skeptical of the new neighbors, especially when she begins to suspect that Jin’s plans might interfere with the Belle’s own luxury development.

 “Jin’s teenage daughter Jane can tell her dad is keeping a secret, but she’s also struggling to navigate El Nido’s cliques. Tasha Washington has always felt isolated, too, as one of the only Black girls at the school. In the wake of a coyote attack, Jane and Tasha bond. Together, they hatch a plot to expose the town’s hypocrisies. The shockwaves will rock their own families. As fire season escalates, and the roaming coyote continues to unleash chaos, the characters become embroiled in a series of scandals that will change El Nido—and their own fates—forever. Urgent, riveting, and deeply heartfelt, full of sharp wit and keen empathy, Coyoteland is at once a delicious suburban drama and an unflinching exploration of our current moment.” (Photo: Marc Puich)

Lisa Russ Spaar (’00), Soul Cake, Persea Books, May 2026

“Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Soul Cake, which takes its title from an ancient mummer/wassailer’s carol, leans with late-life, hibernal ecstasy into Spaar’s flood subjects: God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved. Bodily and mysterious, the poems wrest from their rich, sumptuous, surprising lexicon flashes of dread, beyonding, and gnosis.” (photo: Cheryle St. Onge)

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