Every week, the staff of Librairie D+Q select our favourite new releases. Read on for this week's picks!

This searing debit novel by New Orleans author Maurice Carlos Ruffin is at once a pitch-black comedy and a chilling horror story. Set in the near future, heightened targeted surveillance and severe law enforcement regulations have put black lives at an ever terrifying risk. The prospect of demelandization centers the story, with a black father desperately considering it for his son.

Following up her exquisite book of poems There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a new collection of colloquial, restless, and timely poetry. Cataloguing the black present, her heroes and predecessors, her personal narrative, Parker offers a rich vision of curiosity and grief.

A strange and bewitching collection of stories from one of Mexico’s leading eccentric authors. The translator Poniatowska calls them “stories that sing like a river,” which I take to mean that they flow through time, elegantly picking up vestiges, tales, and characters on its way.

Emily Bernard’s new memoir opens with two quotes that introduce the book so succinctly and aptly: James Baldwin responding to an interviewer, “black is a state of mind,” and Simone de Beauvoir writing. “The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.” She weaves twelves personal essays, both exploring narratives of blackness and fearlessly sharing the stories that have shaped her.  

In this wild, thrilling, and mournful look to a time past and changed, a young girl and her father join a field-based anthropology class in lieu of taking a vacation. There, they go back in time, enacting the tools and knowledge of the ancient Britons from the Iron Age. It’s a book that toggles between the past and present, questioning unreserved reverence for former civilizations and their rituals.