Julian Zabalbeascoa is a fierce and assured new talent, and <i>What We Tried to Bury Grows Here</i> is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment.

In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.

In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro’s lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.

Through a chorus of voices—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others—we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart.

A daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death.

Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.

Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.

Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.

An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.

Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an evocative reinvention of the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

"Prescient and timeless, dealing with the inseparability of life and decay, this story, through it all, allowed me to sit deeply with love, family, and forgiveness. Pay attention, a refreshingly honest and singular voice has arrived."
—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat

Entrancing and sentimental, told with wit and sharp insight, The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos examines the joys and traumas of the Latinx American experience through the lens of a young man awakening to the nuances of identity, love, colonization, and home.

"Bromwich infects the senses with dread and wicked insight from the first page to the last—this is a stunning experience not to be missed."
—Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion

With assurance and remarkable dexterity, Kathryn Bromwich’s masterful debut novel is a rich, gorgeously descriptive account of a woman hiding from old ghosts and new in the Italian Alps, while rekindling her own sense of self through nature.

 "A masterpiece clear and honest and alive to the world and its contradictions. Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere will hit you where you live."
—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.

"She Is Haunted is electrically original in both prose style and energy. Fans of inventive fiction such as Elizabeth Tan’s recent Readings Prize-winning Smart Ovens for Lonely People or Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties will find much to admire about She Is Haunted, but this collection will also resonate with anyone drawn to stories of identity and connection, especially female friendships and mother-daughter relationships. An absolute pleasure to read."
—Stella Charls, bookseller at Readings Carlton

A ballerina nurses an injured leg and struggles to learn Cantonese while her husband dances on an international tour of Don Quixote with a new female lead; a mother cuts her daughter’s hair because her own hair begins falling out; a woman undergoes brain surgery in order to live more comfortably in extreme temperatures; a woman attempts to physically transform into her dead husband so that she does not have to grieve.

"Climate change, time travel, startup culture, and volcanic eruptions intertwine in this sui generis outing from [Stintzi]... Told in a series of buzzing numbered fragments, the narrative whirls around a volcano rising in Central Park that looks like Mount Fuji. As the volcano grows, Stintzi builds out the wide-ranging narrative with jump cuts... That Stintzi keeps all these plates spinning is a wonder; that they transform the chaotic present into a fiery, transcendent vision of the future is even more impressive. It’s a brilliant achievement."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.

As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.

With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.