Michele Filgate

As part of our toast to literary New York, which has included original short stories and talks with some of the city’s hottest writers, we’re rounding up the 2016 books by NYC authors we’re most excited about. Dig into these novels, which tackle everything from slavery and biomedicine to the Manson family and Parisian opera star.

Get lit, people! Almost every evening, our fair city brings NYC authors—both bigwigs and up-and-comers—to a variety of stages from bars in NYC to some of the city's best bookstores. New to the scene? Here are the ones to check out.

“Size matters not,” to quote Yoda. And at least as far as NYC’s lit scene goes, boy is he right. Our city is packed with envelope-pushing presses—some of which publish some of today’s best books and biggest heavy-hitting authors today—operating out of spaces as tiny as a NYC apartment.

Stephanie Danler owns at least 200 cookbooks. She adds anchovies to almost everything she eats, savoring the intense umami flavor. She plows through the works of Alice Waters, pioneer of the slow-food movement, like she reads novels: intensely and thoroughly, from cover to cover. And recently, she received a letter from that world-renowned chef, congratulating her on her debut novel and recalling meeting her when she was a waiter at Buvette.The 32-year-old’s foodie status comes as no surprise given the backdrop of Sweetbitter (Knopf, out May 24). Set in a restaurant based on Union Square Cafe, where Danler toiled as a back waiter at age 22, it’s a coming-of-age story of another 22-year-old, Tess, as she lands that very same job. It’s rich in sensory descriptions, the kind of book that one doesn’t just read but devours. “A certain connoisseurship of taste,” Danler writes in the beginning of the book, “a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.” (If you think that’s a lovely way to describe the uncertainty and insanity of early-twenties-dom, Sweetbitter is for you.)Despite possessing similarities to her protagonist, Danler is quick to clarify that Sweetbitter isn’t a simply a memoir packaged as a novel. “Anyone who’s worked with me will probably say that it’s surprising that it’s so non-autobiographical,” she says. “The characters are made up, and the plot is fully made up,” she continues. “However, th