* "September’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature" —Lambda Literary
* "Most-Anticipated New LGBTQIA+ Books of 2021" —Paperback Paris

“Like the light of an event horizon, this work races toward and struggles against the gravity of Blackness. Lovechild of Sun Ra and Sailor Moon, Sean Avery Medlin sings into the narrow space between hope and rage, bridging political and pop culture galaxies. If our suburbs have become burnt-out satellites circling a world long lost to racism, this book is our S.O.S., transmitting radio waves for searchers and survivors. What an expansive and timely poetic voice!”
—Amaud Jamaul Johnson, author of Imperial Liquor, Red Summer, and Darktown Follies

808s & Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, & Mythologies announces a bold and incendiary new voice in Sean Avery Medlin. Against the backdrop of the Phoenix suburbs where they were raised, Medlin interrogates the effects of media misrepresentation on the performance of Black masculinity. Through storytelling rhymes and vulnerable narratives in conversation with both contemporary Hip-Hop culture and systemic anti-Blackness, 808s & Otherworlds pieces together a speculative reality where Blackfolk are simultaneously superhuman and dehumanized.

From the gut-wrenchingly real stories of young lovers unmythed by segregation or former classmates appropriating Black culture, to the fantastic settings of Hip-Hop songs and comic characters, Medlin weaves a tapestry of worlds and otherworlds while composing a love letter to family and self, told to an undeniably energetic beat.

"A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song."
—The Guardian on Virtuoso

In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.

"...[a] novel that quietly builds suspense to the last page."
—Dallas Morning News

Compared to seminal feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, A Mouthful of Air is a powerful, tragic statement on motherhood, family, and survival.

As we follow characters on their journeys of self-discovery through the jungle of Thailand, as a child in the British countryside, or as an aging doctor on the island of Cyprus, Absence evocatively builds a compassionate symphony of nostalgia, attuned to the drama of everyday and the phantoms that linger with us. Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating those memories that forever bind us to one another.

As we follow characters on their journeys of self-discovery through the jungle of Thailand, as a child in the British countryside, or as an aging doctor on the island of Cyprus, Absence evocatively builds a compassionate symphony of nostalgia, attuned to the drama of everyday and the phantoms that linger with us. Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating those memories that forever bind us to one another.

"Alzayat’s slim, powerful debut collection showcases the author’s deep empathy and imagination in stories about grief, assimilation, and trauma... This intelligent collection is a force to be reckoned with."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

*2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Short Story Collection, Finalist.
*2021 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2021, Longlist.

"A stellar debut... Alzayat manages to execute a short but thoughtful meditation on the spectrum of race in America from Jackson’s presidency to present." —Colin Groundwater, GQ

"The richly detailed short fictions in this debut from a Damascus-born scribe form an intricate, breathtaking mosaic of modern Muslim life." —Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine

The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat’s collection are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman performing burial rites for her brother in “Ghusl,” or a great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in “Once We Were Syrians.”

Alzayat’s stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of “Only Those Who Struggle Succeed,” the New York City children on the lookout for a place to play on the heels of Etan Patz’s kidnapping in “Disappearance,” and the “dangerous” women of “Daughters of Manāt” who struggle to assert their independence.

The title story, “Alligator,” is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and intergenerational trauma, told in an epistolary format through social media posts, newspaper clippings, and testimonials, that starts with the true story of the lynching of a Syrian immigrant couple by law officers in small-town Florida. Placed in a wider context of U.S. racial violence, the extrajudicial deaths, and what happens to the couple’s children and their children’s children in the years after, challenges the demands of American assimilation and its limits.

Alligator and Other Stories is haunting, spellbinding, and unforgettable, while marking Dima Alzayat’s arrival as a tremendously gifted new talent.

"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.

"Beňova’s novel riffs on stories old and new, and the means by which we tell and experience them, to bring the reader inside her protagonist’s mind."
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Sometimes running away is the bravest option. Or, so believes Rosa, who ditches her husband and home and takes off on the road. Along the way, she encounters the owner of a puppet theater who’s on a mission to conquer the world with his performance of The Snow Queen.

Which character from this old fairy tale will Rosa identify with? With Gerda, searching fruitlessly for her lost love? With Kai, who flees home and his beloved one day without a word? Or with the Snow Queen, who seems to stand aloof above it all?

With magnetic, sparkling prose, Beňová delivers a lively mosaic that ruminates on human relationships, our greatest fears and desires.

"The Tasmanian landscape and a whole host of engaging, charming and well drawn characters populate the stories that make up Born Into This… a wonderful reminder that there is no monolithic Aboriginal Australian."
—Simon Clark, The AU Review

From an Aboriginal ranger trying to instill some pride in wayward urban teens on the harsh islands off the coast of Tasmania, to those scraping by on the margins of white society railroaded into complex and compromised decisions, Adam Thompson presents a powerful indictment of colonialism and racism.

 "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.

With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.

With remarkable grace, candor, and a poet’s ear for prose, Zachary Pace recounts the women singers — from Cat Power to Madonna, Kim Gordon to Rihanna — who shaped them as a young person coming-of-age in rural New York, first discovering their own queer voice.

"Kalani Pickhart's I Will Die in a Foreign Land is of the best kind of protest novels: one that makes you cry, and then makes you mad as hell. It is so far the best artistic treatment of the Euromaidan and Crimean situation, at turns tense, melancholy, and over-abundantly compassionate. This book is both the napalm and the bandages in one."
—Conor Hultman, Square Books (Oxford, MS)

In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris. The work so perplexed audiences that a riot broke out. “Only a Russian could do that,” says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.”

A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.

I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is a Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death from radiation sickness; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.

As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.

While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy.

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.

"A story about sex, connection and, comically, the Tasmanian BDSM scene, that is by turns profound and funny."
—Kylie Northover, The Age

New Animal is a poignant, darkly comedic look at human connection from a biting and original new voice in Ella Baxter.

Amelia Aurelia is approaching thirty and her closest relationships — other than her mother — are through her dating apps. She works at the family mortuary business as a cosmetic mortician with her eccentric step-father and older brother, whose throuple’s current preoccupation is with what type of snake to adopt. When Amelia’s affectionate mother passes away without warning, she is left without anchor. Fleeing the funeral, she seeks solace with her birth-father in Tasmania and stumbles into the local BDSM community, where her riotous attempts to belong are met with confusion, shock, and empathy.

Hilarious and heartfelt, New Animal reveals hard-won truths as Amelia struggles to find her place in the world without her mother, with the help of her two well-intentioned fathers and adventures at the kink club.

Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.

Whether competing in shopping mall beauty pageants, reflecting on childhood monsters and ballet lessons, or recounting dark cultural ephemera while facing grief and authenticity in the digital age, Gina Nutt’s shifting style echoes the sub-genres that Night Rooms highlights—spirit-haunted slow burns, possession tales, slashers, and revenge films with a feminist bent.

Refracting life through the lens of horror films, Night Rooms masterfully leaps between reality and movies, past and present—because the “final girl’s” story is ultimately a survival story told another way.

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.

*Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.
"Beňová is at her best when she's funny, and her sense of humor tends toward the dry and the dark. Seeing People Off is a fascinating novel. Fans of inward-looking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here."
—NPR

There is a liveliness and effervescence to Jana Beňová’s prose that is magnetic. Whether addressing the loneliness of relationships or the effectiveness of rat poison, her voice and observations call to mind the verve and sophistication of Renata Adler or Rosalyn Drexler, while remaining utterly singular.
Seeing People Off follows Elza and Ian, a young couple living in a humongous apartment complex outside Bratislava where the walls play music and talk, and time is immaterial.
Drawing on her memories, everyday interactions, observations of post-socialist realities, and Elza’s attraction to actor Kalisto Tanzi, Seeing People Off is a kaleidoscopic, poetic, and deeply funny portrait of a relationship.

"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.

*Best Books of 2018 —Entropy

The Blurry Years is a powerful and unorthodox coming-of-age story from an assured new literary voice, featuring a stirringly twisted mother-daughter relationship, set against the sleazy, vividly-drawn backdrop of late-seventies and early-eighties Florida.
Callie—who ages from six to eighteen over the course of the book—leads a scattered childhood, moving from cars to strangers’ houses to the sand-dusted apartments of the tourist towns that litter the Florida coastline.
Callie’s is a story about what it’s like to grow up too fast and absorb too much, to watch adults behaving badly; what it’s like to be simultaneously in thrall to and terrified of the mother who is the only family you've ever known, who moves you from town to town to leave her own mistakes behind.
With precision and poetry, Kriseman's moving tale of a young girl struggling to find her way in the world is potent, and, ultimately, triumphant.

*Winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards for Novel
*The Believer Book Awards, 2019: Editors' Longlists in Fiction
*The Northern California ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2019, Fiction longlist
*2020 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Longlist
*A Best Book of 2019 —Vulture, Entropy, Buzzfeed, Thrillist

A surreal exploration of one woman’s life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday—school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents—with the surreal—rivers of thighs, men for sale and fields of throats—Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

*A Best Book of 2018 —Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed News, Entropy, LitReactor

It’s 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success.

The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.

Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession.

* New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2016.
* The Guardian's "Not the Booker Prize" Shortlist.
* Publishers Weekly's 'Big Indie Books of Fall 2016'

"Deeply satisfying. Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller. [The Gloaming] deserves major attention."
—John Williams, New York Times

In rich, compelling prose, Melanie Finn perfectly captures a world of consequences, and the characters who must survive them. Pilgrim Jones' husband has just left her for another woman, stranding her in a small Swiss town where she is one day involved in a tragic car accident that leaves 3 school-children dead. Cleared of responsibility though overcome with guilt, she alights for Africa, where she befriends a series of locals each with their own tragic past, each isolated in their own private way in the remote Tanzanian outpost.

Mysteriously, the remains of an albino African appear packaged in a box, spooking everyone—sign of a curse placed by a witch doctor—though its intended recipient is uncertain. Pilgrim volunteers to rid the town of the box and its contents, though wherever she goes, she can't shake the feeling that she's being followed.

The Gloaming is a thrilling, haunting new work of guilt, atonement, and finally, hope.

"Daring and unputdownable, The Hare is set to be one of the most talked-about books of 2021."
—Jenny Hollander, Marie Claire

"With The Hare, Melanie Finn has written a powerful story of female perseverance, strength, and resilience. This book has rare qualities: beautiful writing while being absolutely unputdownable, and I will be pressing it into the hands of every reader I know." —Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange, Our Endless Numbered Days, and Swimming Lessons

"This is a page-turner about a tough woman and her con-artist lout of a partner, and I will eat my laptop if it doesn’t get optioned for TV or film the minute it hits bookshelves. It is also woven through with ideas about feminism, parenting, narcissism, and self-sufficiency—a book that is easy to read without being remotely lightweight." —Molly Young, Vulture

The Hare is an affecting portrait of Rosie Monroe, her resilience and personal transformation, of her life under the male gaze, and serves as a striking statement about what it means to be a woman in the world.

Raised by a stern grandmother to be obedient and obliging in an unremarkable blue-collar town in Massachusetts, Rosie accepts a scholarship to art school in New York City in the 1980s. One morning at a museum she meets a worldly man twenty years her senior, with access to the upper crust of New England society. Bennett is dashing, knows that “boats” refer to yachts (though you never use the word “yacht”), teaches her which direction to spoon soup, and tells stories of “Hemingway moments,” of escapades with Truman Capote and Hunter Thompson in exotic locales. Soon, Rosie is living in a boathouse with Bennett on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, and a daughter — Miranda — is born, just as Bennett’s current con goes awry and forces them to abscond in the middle of the night to the untamed wilderness of Northern Vermont.

Almost immediately, Rosie and Miranda are left at an uninsulated cabin without a car or cash for weeks at a time, so Bennett can tend to a teaching job that may or may not exist at a local university. Rosie is forced to survive on her own, to care for her young daughter, to learn how to stack firewood, snowshoe into town, hunt for wild game, and forage in the forest. As Rosie and Miranda’s life gradually begins to normalize, Bennett and his cons catch up to him, and Rosie is forced to ultimately confront Bennett’s simmering obsession and malevolence.

The Hare is an astounding new literary thriller from a celebrated author at the height of her storytelling powers.

"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.

"The Red-Headed Pilgrim is a revelation that achieves starry dynamo-level energy from the jump. Maloney's prose is sharp and vivid, full of trippy precision, and his story is funny, wild, painful and wise."
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask

The Red-Headed Pilgrim is an irresistible novel of misadventure and new beginnings, of wanderlust and maybe bad decisions, of parenthood and divorce, and of the heartfelt truths we unearth when we least expect it.

With the assurance and grace of her acclaimed novel The Gloaming—which earned her comparisons to Patricia Highsmith—Melanie Finn returns with a precisely layered and tense new literary thriller.

The Underneath follows Kay Ward, a former journalist struggling with the constraints of motherhood. Along with her husband and two children, she rents a quaint Vermont farmhouse for the summer. The idea is to disconnect from their work-based lifestyle—that had her doggedly pursuing a genocidal leader of child soldiers known as General Christmas, even through Kay's pregnancy and the birth of their second child—in an effort to repair their shaky marriage.

It isn't long before Kay's husband is called away and she discovers a mysterious crawlspace in the rental with unsettling writing etched into the wall. Alongside some of the house's other curiosities and local sleuthing, Kay is led to believe that something terrible may have happened to the home's owners.

Kay's investigation leads her to a local logger, Ben Comeau, a man beset with his own complicated and violent past. A product of the foster system and life-long resident of the Northeast Kingdom, Ben struggles to overcome his situation, and to help an abused child whose addict mother is too incapacitated to care about the boy's plight.

The Underneath is an intelligent and considerate exploration of violence—both personal and social—and whether violence may ever be justified.

With the energy, wit, and singularity of vision that have earned him a reputation as a celebrated and charismatic musician, The Vine That Ate the South announces J.D. Wilkes as an accomplished storyteller on a surreal, Homeric voyage that strikes at the very heart of American mythology.

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening," where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice—the one and only, Carver Canute—set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine. Their quest leads them face to face with albino panthers, Great Dane-riding girls, protective property owners, and just about every American folk-demon ever, while forcing the protagonist to finally take stock of his relationship with his father and the man's mysterious disappearance.

The Vine That Ate the South is a mesmerizing fantasia where Wilkes ambitiously grapples with the contradictions of the contemporary American South while subversively considering how well we know our own family and friends.

"Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue."
—Sarah Moss, The Guardian

This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape.

Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective.

The book is a fictional time-capsule curated by Erin from this time comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics.

Triangulum is an ambitious, often philosophical and genre-bending novel that covers a period of over 40 years in South Africa’s recent past and near future — starting from the collapse of the apartheid homeland system in the early 1990s, to the economic corrosion of the 2010s, and on to the looming, large-scale ecological disasters of the 2040s.

In 2040, the South African National Space Agency receives a mysterious package containing a memoir and a set of digital recordings from an unnamed woman who claims the world will end in ten years. Assigned to the case, Dr. Naomi Buthelezi, a retired professor and science-fiction writer, is hired to investigate the veracity of the materials, and whether or not the woman's claim to have heard from a “force more powerful than humankind” is genuine.

Thus begins TRIANGULUM, a found manuscript composed of the mysterious woman’s memoir and her recordings. Haunted by visions of a mysterious machine, the narrator is a seemingly adrift 17-year-old girl, whose sick father never recovered from the shock of losing his wife. She struggles to navigate school, sexual experimentation, and friendship across racial barriers in post-Apartheid South Africa.

When three girls go missing from their town, on her mother's birthday, the narrator is convinced that it has something to do with "the machine" and how her mother also went missing in the '90s. Along with her friends, Litha and Part, she discovers a puzzling book on UFOs at the library, the references and similarities in which lead the friends to believe that the text holds clues to the narrators’s mother's abduction. Drawing upon suggestions in the text, she and her friends set out on an epic journey that takes them from their small town to an underground lab, a criminal network, and finally, a mysterious, dense forest, in search of clues as to what happened to the narrator's mother.

With extraordinary aplomb and breathtaking prose, Ntshanga has crafted an inventive and marvelous artistic accomplishment.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.

A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.

"A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the cruel absurdity of Antonin Artaud, the fierce candour of Anaïs Nin, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song."
—The Guardian

As Communism begins to crumble in Prague in the 1980s, Jana’s unremarkable life becomes all at once remarkable when a precocious young girl named Zorka moves into the apartment building with her mother and sick father. With Zorka's signature two-finger salute and abrasive wit, she brings flair to the girls’ days despite her mother’s protestations to not “be weird.” But after scorching her mother’s prized fur coat and stealing from a nefarious teacher, Zorka suddenly disappears.

Meanwhile in Paris, Aimée de Saint-Pé married young to an older woman, Dominique, an actress whose star has crested and is in decline. A quixotic journey of self-discovery, Virtuoso follows Zorka as she comes of age in Prague, Wisconsin, and then Boston, amidst a backdrop of clothing logos, MTV, computer coders, and other outcast youth. But it isn’t till a Parisian conference hall brimming with orthopedic mattresses and therapeutic appendages when Jana first encounters Aimée, their fates steering them both to a cryptic bar on the Rue de Prague, and, perhaps, to Zorka.

With a distinctive prose flair and spellbinding vision, Virtuoso is a story of love, loss, and self-discovery that heralds Yelena Moskovich as a brilliant and one-of-a-kind visionary.

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.

BuzzFeed "Most Highly Anticipated Books Of 2020"

Ant is back in Chicago for a funeral, and he typically enjoys funerals. Since most of his family has passed away, he finds himself strangely attracted to their endearing qualities: the hyperbolic language, the stoner altar boy, seeing friends in suits for the first time. That is, until the tragic death of Ray—Ant’s childhood friend, Vince’s teenage cousin. Ray was the younger third-wheel that Ant and Victor were stuck babysitting while in high school, and his sudden death makes national news.

In the depths of a brutal Midwest winter, Ant rides with Vince through the falling snow to Ray’s funeral, an event that has been accruing a sense of consequence. With a poet’s sensibility, Shah navigates the murky responsibilities of adulthood, grief, toxic masculinity, and the tragedy of revenge in this haunting Midwestern noir.