Heart the Lover, by Lily King (Grove). The relationship between Jordan, the narrator of this affecting novel, and Yash, the man she falls in love with in college, is complicated from the start. (Before they get together, she dates his best friend.) King’s book is broken into three parts: in the first, the two fall in love and travel; in the second, Jordan is married to someone else; in the last, they navigate grief and illness. As the novel encompasses their relationship, from start to finish, it questions whether a person can inhabit any moment other than the present. Jordan thinks, at one point, “Maybe it’s true what the philosopher said, that the past and the future don’t exist, that this is the only moment we ever have, this moment right now and this moment and this—”
Muscle Man, by Jordan Castro (Catapult). This mysterious, occasionally nightmarish campus novel follows a professor of literature during a single, eventful day during which he commits petty theft, attends a departmental meeting, and—most thrillingly to him—goes to the gym. The book’s uncomfortably tight lens on the professor’s interior life reveals it to consist largely of resentment for his co-workers and a strong desire to exercise. Throughout the day, as the professor’s thoughts cascade from Dostoyevsky to YouTube fitness influencers, nearly every one of Castro’s acerbic, unfiltered paragraphs contains a bristling insight about literature, weight lifting, or academic politics.