As the publishing calendar moves from June to July, it marks the halfway point of 2020, prompting the creation of “best-of-the-year-thus-far” lists. Many of these lists highlight diverse authors. Here are five writers getting repeated attention.

• Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
  (One World).
  Park, who works in multiple forms,  here turns to essays to catalog and explore issues of identity, self, and belonging.

• The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit).
  Building off a beloved short story, Jemisin sets her newest work of magic in New York City, a city with a soul that awakens citizen-defenders who fight the darkness.
   
• Deacon King Kong by James McBride (Riverhead).
  This buzzy new novel from National Book Award–winning McBride (The Good Lord Bird) is both an Oprah Book Club pick and also on its way to the small screen as a TV series. The story traces the multilayered fallout from a shooting in 1969 Brooklyn.
   
• Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo; tr. from Chinese by Jamie Chang (Liveright: Norton).
  A woman who does as she is expected suddenly exhibits the most unexpected behavior, speaking in voices of other women. A key title in a new wave of women authors changing the face of Korean fiction.
   
• Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead). Taylor’s debut is many things, a campus novel, a lab lit novel, a story of queerness, race, abuse, and prejudice, but centrally a tale of isolation and the desire for connection.