There are few collections as charming as Shy Watson’s Horror Vacui (House of Vlad, 2021). Divided into three sections—Poems, Waking Dreams, and Quarantine Diari...
Michael Chang knows how to stay vulnerable to the reader without taking themself too seriously. In DRAKKAR NOIR, the poet’s forthcoming chapbook from Bateau Pre...
Rachel Genn’s second novel, What You Could Have Won (And Other Stories, 2020), chronicles a well-worn path to fame. After a crucial misstep in his career, faili...
The Weak Spot is the first novel from Lucie Elven and Soft Skull Press ushers it into our lives at precisely the right time. A young woman relocates to an isola...
I first found Matt Mitchell’s work in 2020: A Meat Loaf-quoting, love-struck poem that made me homesick for summers in a town I’ve never visited. That same warm...
As we begin to steady ourselves in another year rife with unsteady circumstances, a parallel urgency emerges within. The questions arrive slowly, then in quick ...
“The thing about credit is that interest stacks,” writes Elle Nash in “Define Hungry”—one of several stories in her debut collection that grapple with being ali...
The pains of heaven, the pleasures of hell, imaginary homelands, livestock auctions, naked internet oceans—in his latest collection, Things to Do in Hell (Coffe...
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God reads as an imagistic compendium of surrealist cinema and subcultural manifesto. The text follows a self-proclaimed provincial go...
While the timing of its English publication is embarrassingly relevant, Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn! offers welcomed relief: an existential crisis o...
Though you might recognize Will Johnson as the voice behind Denton-based band Centro-Matic, his debut novel warrants a distinction of its own merit. If or When ...
On August 23, a week after Prime Day, Nancy Bass Wyden, the third-generation owner of New York’s iconic Strand Book Store, took to Twitter. “We need your help,”...
The women in Jules Archer’s Little Feasts are hungry. They’re chowing down on fat slices of tempeh, ripping napkins apart while watching the Investigation Disco...
The first time I talked to Kevin Sterne was at the pizza bar, The Boiler Room, in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. This was after our joint reading at ...
Brian Evenson’s words unsteady the best of readers. They stretch circumstance to convey the uncertain and unsettling; they confuse, morph; lead you to a room in...
In many ways, Gwen Goodkin’s A Place Remote is about belonging: a dissatisfied optometrist confronts the life choices he’s made; a high school student travels t...
Jamie Marina Lau wrote her debut novel over two months, in a state of trance, at the age of nineteen.
The result was Pink Mountain on Locust Island, a rapturou...
A divine symmetry emerges quietly in Nicolette Polek’s debut collection. Imaginary Museums exhibits twenty-six compact short stories, categorized into four dist...
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ debut collection won the 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, and it’s no surprise why: Sleepovers is at once dark and allur...
Jenny Bhatt’s debut short story collection has garnered a lot of attention and praise from critics and reviewers alike. The fifteen short stories in Each of Us ...
To call The New Wilderness a work of dystopian fiction would be a bit of a stretch. Diane Cook’s debut novel sedulously navigates motherhood in the prospect of ...
Details accrue quietly in Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection — in the click-clack of a neighbor’s stilettos, in yolk that clings to the fractured shell of ...
Nick Olson’s debut novel occupies an important space in the psyche of American fiction. Spanning sixteen years in the life of Waldo Collins—who isn’t quite Hold...
Mary South’s debut collection You Will Never Be Forgotten (FSG Originals, 2020) is a stunning compendium of enormous emotions and imagistic writing. Whether we’...
Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8 (Graywolf Press, March 2020) is a book eight years in the making, and the time and care of each of those years is tangible on the page...
Dima Alzayat’s excellent debut collection Alligator (Picador/Two Dollar Radio) pushes the parameters of hybrid-American identity with stories about hurt, loss, ...
I connected with Hilary Leichter earlier this year, when she made an exciting offer on Twitter: if followers were to DM her a receipt of a debut book purchased ...
With a Difference, a joint book of stories by Nick Gregorio and poems by Francis Daulerio, is a collaborative effort forged from a long friendship and a desire ...
Bree Jo’Ann’s new poetry collection Black Glitter was published in August by Monster House Press. With exciting, vivid imagery and powerful emotions at play...
