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FALL 2026 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

GLOBAL READS ISSUE

WHAT TO READ NEXT IN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING

OUR STORY

S H E LF

U N B O U N D

M A G A Z I N E All we wanted was a really good magazine. About books. That was full of the really great stuff. So we made it. And we really like it. And we hope you do, too. Because we’re just getting started.

FALL 2026

Water Finds a Way

WINNER OF 2025 Shelf Unbound Indie Book Awards

Blake is coming home. Leland is running from the past.

Can they find redemption from their mistakes in their small coastal town?

* * *

“Full of grit and atmosphere, suspense and feeling.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Perry crafts the action with a cinematic scope.” — Publisher’s Weekly

“What a fiercely original novel!” — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Days of Wonder

"Water Finds a Way is a richly atmospheric novel of second chances, small-town loyalties, and the hard-earned grace of redemption." — Shelf Unbound

Shelf Unbound Staff. PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarah Kloth PARTNER, PUBLISHER Debra Pandak CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Christina Consolino Michele Mathews V. Jolene Miller Chrissy Brown Corinna Kloth Jane Miller Anthony Carinhas

WHAT TO R EAD NEXT ?

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SUBSCRIPTION TO SHELF UNBOUND W W W . S H E L F M E D I A G R O U P. C O M

CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF SHELF UNBOUND? Follow us on social! For Advertising Inquiries: e-mail sarah@shelfmediagroup.com For editorial inquiries: e-mail media@shelfmediagroup.com

FALL 2026

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THE THANJAVUR INCIDENT

Commander Aarav Cheran—a renowned nuclear physicist and Indian Naval analyst—is thrust into a crisis that no war game ever imagined. As two nuclear nations edge toward catastrophe, Aarav must navigate a fractured landscape of political power plays, military brinkmanship, and catastrophic technological failure. The fate of millions may rest on his ability to outmaneuver forces poised to plunge the world into chaos.

2003: THE TIME-LOOP DEVICE

Nolan Emerson, PhD, is a brilliant young theoretical and experimental physicist who is a professor at the University of Geneva, and the lead scientist at the CERN particle accelerator. He is a leader in the areas of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Dr. Emerson devises an experiment so radical and revolutionary that it seeks to unlock the astounding, complex, and mysterious secrets of Einstein’s space-time. Ultimately, his work challenges the fundamental notions of consciousness and of the concept of reality itself.

1918: THE GREAT PANDEMIC Major Edward Nobel’s mission, as a physician, is to help protect American troops from infectious ailments during the First World War. However, his unique vantage point in Boston allows him to detect an emerging influenza strain that is an unprecedented global threat. Eventually, the 1918 influenza pandemic killed up to 100 million people, and became the worst natural disaster in human history.

1877: A NORTHERN PHYSICIAN IN SOUTHERN UNGOVERNED SPACES Colonel Charles Noble is a US Civil War veteran, and an Army surgeon reservist. Extreme violence in the former Confederacy, in anticipation of a national election, has caused President Grant to send additional federal troops to the Southern states. Terrorists are determined to counter Noble’s good intentions, as they threaten the civil rights, and the very lives, of all who oppose them.

1980: THE EMERGENCE OF HIV Dr. Arthur Noble is a brilliant first-year medical resident in San Francisco. Noble encounters a strange new ailment that seemingly appears out of nowhere, and delivers its victims a most horrible merciless death. Dr. Noble struggles to find answers to the medical mystery, even as many researchers and society refuse to believe that it is a serious public health hazard, or that it even exists.

LEARN MORE AT

WWW.DAVIDCORNISHBOOKS.COM

CONTENTS

I N TH IS

ISSUE

FEATURES 19 She Speaks Louder Than Borders By Sarah Kloth

30 Interview: The Depopulation translator Thomas Bunstead By Sarah Kloth

40 Read Outside The Lines By Sarah Kloth SECTIONS 28 Bookstagram

66 Interview: Shane Jesse Christmass By Anthony Carinhas

80 Banned At Home: Read Everywhere Else

36 Girl Plus Book

By Sarah Kloth

49 Recommended Reading

86 Interview: Murder at the End of the

94 Book Shelf 102 Indie Catalog 114 Indie Bookstore 110 Podster 116 Indie Reviews 136 Indie Press Spotlight 142 On Our Shelf

FALL 2026

World by Akane Araki, Translated by Jesse Kirkwood By Sarah Kloth

A WORD FROM THE PUBLISHER

Beyond Borders. BY SARAH KLOTH, PUBLISHER

There’s something about fall that makes us want to read a little more slowly. Maybe it’s the changing light, the cooler evenings, or the return of those quiet moments when settling into a good book feels like the perfect way to spend an afternoon. Fall has always felt like a season of discovery to me—and this year, we’re leaning into that idea by looking beyond our own borders and exploring stories from around the world. In this issue of Shelf Unbound, we’re celebrating global reads: books that introduce us to new places, cultures, perspectives, and ways of seeing the world. Some will take you halfway around the globe. Others may simply offer a glimpse into a life or experience that feels entirely different from your own. And that’s one of the things I love most about books. You don’t need a passport to travel. You just need to open a cover.

Independent publishers and authors play a particularly important role in bringing these voices to readers. They often take chances on stories that might otherwise be overlooked, champion translated works, and give space to perspectives that deserve a wider audience. In a publishing landscape that can sometimes feel dominated by what is already familiar, these books remind us how much there is still to discover. So as the seasons change, I hope you’ll let your reading take you somewhere unexpected. Pick up a story set in a country you’ve never visited. Read a translated novel. Follow an author whose perspective is different from your own. You may find a new favorite book—or, just as importantly, see something familiar in an entirely new way. Here’s to a fall filled with good books, new perspectives, and a little bit of travel from the comfort of your favorite reading chair. Enjoy the issue! 

DOUBLE is fast, sharp, and relentlessly suspenseful — and winner of a 2026 Independent Press Award. IS THE PRESIDENT MAD? Or is something far more dangerous unfolding in the Kremlin? Gerry Burke’s explosive espionage thriller delivers two full-length novels in one gripping volume — a highstakes collision of Russian spies, American gangsters, MI5, and the CIA. Double the danger. Double the intrigue. Double the payoff. DOUBLE brings together two highstakes espionage thrillers packed with international intrigue and betrayal. Together, these gripping stories reveal a world where power is fragile, loyalties shift without warning, and no one escapes the consequences of the game.

Two novels. One pulse-pounding ride. SUNBEAMS FROM SIBERIA

A brilliant Russian physicist is sent on a covert mission to dismantle one of Britain’s most powerful institutions. The clock is ticking. The consequences are global.

THE HITMAN FROM HONOLULU

Learn more at www.gerryburke.net 8

FALL 2026

A retired American gangster agrees to one final job — only to discover he’s walking into a trap set by the very people who hired him.

“The best basketball story since Hoosiers!” - Kevin Borseth Retired UW-Green Bay Basketball Coach

“The feel-goo

– Victor

“A poignant history of a small town, as seen through the lens of youth sports” - KIRKUS Reviews – GET IT! In 1960s Bessemer, a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, playing for the high school basketball team—the Speedboys—was every boy’s dream. But when a young, inexperienced coach is hired to lead the team, the Speedboys’ usual aspirations of winning championships suddenly become far humbler: they merely want to win a single game.

Mired in an epic losing streak, the team’s declining fortunes come to mirror those of the town itself. Mines are shuttered. Jobs are lost. Filled with historical a What transpires is nothing less than a testinsights of the town’s soul andtribute the character of its people. to the author’s beloved ho

Filled with historical insights and laugh-out-loud moments, Bring One Home is a tribute to the author’s beloved hometown and their undeniable determination to win.

Available via Amazon, IngramSpark, and at your favorite bookstore

Avail 9

From Helena P. Schrader

★OVERALL FICTION WINNER – 2026 IndieReader Discovery Awards★

#1 AMAZON AVIATION BESTSELLER You met Flying Officer Priestman in the Battle of France. You followed Squadron Leader Priestman through the Battle of Britain. “This is the best book on the life of us fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain that I have ever seen. Refreshingly. it got it smack on the way it was for us. I couldn’t put it down!” - Battle of Britain Ace, Wing Commander Bob Doe “...A painstakingly researched war novel with complex characterizations.” - Kirkus Reviews

BUT THE WAR ISN’T WON YET.

Control of Middle Eastern Oil and the Suez Canal hang in the balance.

MALTA MUST BE HELD! The story continues with

VOICES ON THE WIND Wing Commander Priestman joins the fight to defend Malta - as Senior Intelligence Officer. On the front line are men like: Flying Officer Ned Nettleton, flying Beaufort torpedo bombers, and Chief Officer Stevie Mackay of the British Merchant.

Discover the series at - Helena P. Schrader, Historian and Novelist 10

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TRILOGY COMPLETE. T H E R AY M O N D M AC K E Y M YS T ER I E S

WELCOME TO SPIRAL NOIR.

THREE MYSTERIES. ONE DETECTIVE’S D E S P E R AT E D E S C E N T F O R T H E T R U T H . H O L D YO U R B R E AT H I F YO U C A N . “. . .[ T] H E R AY M O N D M AC K E Y

“ R AY M AC K E Y I S O N E O F T H E

MYSTERY SERIES DOES NOT

BEST CHARACTERS OUT THERE

D I S A P P O I N T…”

IN THE LITER ARY WORLD.”

— US REVIEW OF BOOKS

— READER VIEWS

S TA R T T H E T R I L O G Y T O DAY. I F YO U DA R E .

PARIS HAS A HIDDEN CITY. IT’S TIME YOU MET THE NEIGHBORS. Beneath the romance and grandeur of Paris lies another city entirely. In City of Immortals, bestselling author and photographer Carolyn Campbell guides readers through the winding paths of Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where history, art, music, and memory converge among the tombs of legends. Part travel narrative, part visual exploration, and part historical journey, this richly illustrated book invites readers to meet the artists, writers, and visionaries who continue to shape Paris long after death. THAT MAKES PARIS “SOEVERYTHING RICH IN MEMORIES IS DISTILLED IN THE HUNDRED ACRES OF PÈRELACHAISE CEMETERY, WHERE THE DEAD COME TO LIFE.”

— Michael Webb, Form magazine Find Where to Buy

Get Your Copy

Download the companion app and explore Père-Lachaise like a local guide in your pocket. Unlock interactive maps, walking tours, and the hidden stories behind Paris’ most legendary residents. 12

FALL 2026

Unlock the secrets of the paranormal and discover a deeper meaning to your own life with The Can Sack Ghost. Step into a world where the unexplained feels surprisingly close to home. This fascinating collection of true encounters explores mysterious experiences, unexpected messages, and unforgettable moments that challenge what we think we know. “This isn’t just a collection of ghost stories; it’s a captivating journey into the heart of the unknown, told by a voice you’ll trust, enjoy, and long remember. An absolute gem.” - Goodreads reviewer In The Can Sack Ghost beloved author John Russell blends true ghost tales, philosophical reflections, humor, and straight talk.

AVAILABLE ONLINE AT AMAZON, BARNES & NOBLE, APPLE BOOKS & MORE

FIND OUT MORE AT WWW.JOHNRUSSELLAUTHOR.COM 13

I N D I E I N TH E N EWS Top News in Independent Publishing The indie publishing world is heading into fall with some big shifts underway — from a new awards program putting independently published books in the spotlight to indie bookstores gaining new digital tools, AI reshaping the conversation around authorship, and a new alliance giving independent manga publishers a stronger collective voice. Here’s what’s making waves in independent publishing this Fall.

Kirkus Launches Its First Indie Book Awards Kirkus Reviews has announced the winners of its inaugural Kirkus Indie Awards, recognizing eight independently published books across categories including memoir, literary fiction, mystery and 14

FALL 2026

thriller, science fiction and fantasy, romance, and children’s literature. The awards attracted 48 finalists from an initial pool of independently published titles, giving indie authors a new high-profile platform alongside one of publishing’s bestknown review brands.

Libro.fm Is Bringing Ebooks to Indie Bookstores Independent audiobook platform Libro.fm is expanding beyond audio. The company announced that it will begin testing ebooks with its network of more than 5,000 independent bookstore partners this fall, with a broader consumer rollout expected in 2027. The new platform will include flexible credits and LibroSync, allowing readers who own both formats to move between an ebook and audiobook. The move could give indie bookstores

INDIE IN THE NEWS

a stronger digital alternative to Amazon while keeping sales connected to local booksellers.

Indie Manga Publishers Join Forces Five independent U.S. manga publishers have launched the Independent Manga Alliance, creating a new organization designed to give smaller manga publishers and creators a collective voice. Founding members include Manga Mavericks Books, Mahjong Pros, Strict Algorithm, Red String Manga, and Curation Entertainment. The alliance plans to expand its membership as independent manga continues gaining traction with American readers.

Independent Bookstores Keep Finding New Ways to Build Community The bookstore experience continues to evolve beyond simply selling books. New platforms such as Lit Circle are connecting readers with bookstores hosting author events and literary

programming, while book bars, subscription models, and other hybrid concepts are creating new reasons for readers to visit physical stores. Meanwhile, independent bookstores remain under pressure from rising operating costs, with 234 UK booksellers recently joining a campaign for greater businessrate relief.

Indie Booksellers Pick Their Next Big Reads The August Indie Next List gives readers a peek at what independent booksellers across the country are putting into customers’ hands right now. The 25-book list includes everything from literary fiction and romantasy to historical fiction and debut novels — with booksellers offering their personal pitches for why each one deserves a spot on your TBR. One to watch: Sea of Charms by Sarah Beth Durst is getting particular attention for readers who love magical creatures, found family, romance, and a little escapism. 15

“

A rich, engrossing tale about the antebellum South that delivers indelible characters.” - Kirkus Reviews, starred In 1843 Louisiana, Monette, the beloved, biracial daughter of a wealthy planter is sold into slavery along with Cyrus, a boy torn from his mother without a chance to say goodbye. Together they are purchased by the Jensey family, where soon, destinies collide. Fox Creek is a powerful novel set during one of the most turbulent times in American history. It is a story of race, privilege, the battle of wills, and the denial of freedom. But most of all, it is a story of love, a love that transcends all that threatens to tear it apart.

FALL 2026

My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift Harold Phifer

Discover Resilience in the Face of an Unlikely Relationship In My Bully, My Aunt, and Her Final Gift, Hal confronts the bittersweet memories of his childhood, shaped by his aunt’s unpredictable and often cruel influence. As he plans her memorial—a gathering no one seems eager to attend—Hal is pulled back into a world of twisted philosophies and emotional turbulence. But amid the chaos, he discovers unexpected lessons that lead to healing, self-discovery, and redemption. Through laugh-out-loud moments and heartfelt revelations, this memoir reveals how even the darkest relationships can leave behind profound gifts of wisdom and growth.

Available at: 17

IT IS 2058.

Civilization is hanging by a thread. NYPD detective Nick Garvey and President Lenora Allison are battling the remnants of the murderous World Council while confronting the forced release of a deadly, man-made plague and the destruction of Friendship City. President Allison destroyed the first plague — only to learn a second, more lethal one is imminent. Ishmael, the World Council’s mysterious new leader, now targets Friendship City, the autonomous union of Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico, where citizens are building their own protective Bill of Rights. Called from Houston, where his daughter is recovering from a coma, Nick joins the President in Washington to stop the coming catastrophe. But Nick searches for Ishmael — and Ishmael finds him first. Captured alongside the President and their families, surrounded by rifles, they face a final threat.

“A familiar but sometimes-offbeat SF action thriller complete with a prospectus of good government.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS

Ishmael begins his countdown.

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, EBOOK, AND AUDIOBOOK FORMATS 18

FALL 2026

F E AT U R E

She Speaks Louder Than Borders. Women writers, translated into English in 2026, whose books cross languages, break form, and reclaim the stories only they were positioned to tell

BY SARAH KLOTH

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

“

A story crosses a border only when someone insists on carrying it across.”

In February, the Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash published a novel about a nun who is silenced, beaten, and very nearly erased for the crime of thinking for herself. Two months later, that novel — She Who Remains — was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, one of six finalists chosen from 128 books submitted from around the world. The nun in Karabash’s story is denied a voice inside her own account. The woman who invented her claimed one instead — in Bulgarian first, and now in English. That gap is the real story hiding inside this year’s crop of women in translation: the story of what gets allowed to survive the crossing into another language, and who gets to decide. Books arrive in translation the way people arrive at a border: vetted, delayed, sometimes turned back outright, and always changed a little by the crossing itself. For most of publishing history, that vetting favored a narrow kind of story by default — a soldier’s war, a man’s exile, an experience already assumed to be universal. A woman’s account of grief, captivity, desire, or labor moved through that same crossing far more slowly, treated as a special case that owed the border guard extra paperwork. A handful of small presses rewrote that math by asking a different question of every manuscript: was the writing exact, rather than whether it was already familiar. That shift is happening now, at the exact moment actual borders are getting harder to cross. Refugee routes are closing. Trade publishing keeps consolidating into fewer, more risk-averse hands. And yet a chronically underfunded slice of American independent publishing — presses with names like Transit, Charco, and Open Letter, several of them one bad grant cycle from folding — keeps spending years of translator labor on books that make their case purely on the strength of the writing: a nun’s fury written in a single unbroken breath, a myth rewritten as a cartel horror story, a woman training in total sincerity to become the strongest person alive. Every acquisition is a dare, renewed. What follows are the books that took it, and — wherever we could get them — the words of the women who wrote them, on why. 20

FALL 2026

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

The Crossings. 2026 has given English-language readers an unusually deep shelf of women writing in translation. This is a curated selection, chosen because each writer crossed something specific: a language, a form, a silence, a myth. Where possible, we went to the source: the authors’ and translators’ own words, in their own interviews, about why these particular crossings mattered enough to make.

Apparitions

She Who Remains

BY MARGO GLANTZ

BY RENE KARABASH

TRANSLATED BY ELLEN JONES

TRANSLATED BY IZIDORA ANGEL

CHARCO PRESS · JANUARY 20, 2026 · MEXICO

SANDORF PASSAGE / PEIRENE PRESS · FEBRUARY 10, 2026

The late grande dame of Mexican letters returns with a slippery, genrebending meditation on memory, the body, and the ghosts that accumulate in a long writing life. Glantz, who died in 2025, remains one of Latin America’s most formally daring essayist-novelists, and Jones’s translation captures the restless, associative style that made her a touchstone for generations of Mexican writers. Glantz traced the book’s origin to a single, visceral encounter with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Saló:

“It struck me so hard that as soon as I got home, I started writing the book.”

— Margo Glantz, in an interview with El Cultural / El Español (translated from the Spanish)

“The ‘voice’ appeared suddenly and told the story in a single breath, it dug through my wounds, defied rules — no formal sentence structure, no capitalisation, no quotation marks.”

— Rene Karabash, in an interview with The Booker Prizes

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

On The Calculation of Volume

Piñen

BY DANIELA CATRILEO

BY SOLVEJ BALLE

TRANSLATED BY JACOB EDELSTEIN

TRANSLATED BY BARBARA J. HAVELAND

CHARCO PRESS · 2026 · CHILE

NEW DIRECTIONS · APRIL 14, 2026

The fourth installment of Balle’s mesmerizing, Nordic Council Prize–winning septology continues the story of Tara Selter, a rare-book dealer trapped reliving the same November day. Balle has said the premise came from an idea she tried for years to abandon, especially once Groundhog Day beat her to the high concept — but it kept resurfacing, more philosophical than comic each time: “I realised that there was something in it that I wanted to know more about — the philosophy of the repetition; what happens if the day repeats itself.” — Solvej Balle, in an interview with The Booker Prizes

FALL 2026

A fierce, tender story collection about Mapuche youth navigating identity, poverty, and belonging in contemporary Chile, from a writer, artist, and philosophy professor who is one of the leading voices of Mapuche literature today. Catrileo chose her title carefully — it’s Chilean slang with a specific, loaded history: “‘Piñen’ is significant because it can name race, class, and gender... it’s a Mapuche word that I reclaim as the colloquial speech of Chileanness.” — Daniela Catrileo, in an interview with Radio Concierto Chile (translated from the Spanish)

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

Fortress of the Forgotten Ones BY FAHMIDA RIAZ

TRANSLATED BY SANA R. CHAUDHRY OPEN LETTER BOOKS · MARCH 2026 · PAKISTAN

The late Fahmida Riaz was one of South Asia’s most fearless feminist poets and novelists, censored and briefly exiled for her politics. This first English translation of her fiction introduces Anglophone readers to a writer whose formal daring and nerve rival betterknown contemporaries. Riaz spent decades defining, in plain terms, what her feminism was actually asking for: “What it means for me is simply that women, like men, are complete human beings with limitless possibilities. They have to achieve social equality... there is the right to walk on the road without being harassed, or to be able to swim or write a love poem like a man without being considered immoral.” — Fahmida Riaz, quoted in Dawn (Images), reflecting on her life’s work

X Is Where I Am BY SARA TORRES

TRANSLATED BY MAUREEN SHAUGHNESSY CHARCO PRESS · MARCH 3, 2026 · SPAIN

Shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, this ferocious debut follows a woman cloistered — and brutalized — within a secretive religious order. Karabash, also an actor and playwright, found her characters after seeing a photography exhibition on Albania’s “sworn virgins,” women who take on a male social role at the cost of erasing their own femaleness. She described how the novel arrived once that image took hold: “While my mother was dying, I was making love. The image astonishes and disturbs me.” — opening lines of X Is Where I Am, as reported by EFE / efeminista.com (translated from the Spanish)

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

Cathedrals

Medea Sang Me A Corrido

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES RIDDLE

TRANSLATED BY JULIA SANCHES AND HEATHER CLEARY

BY CLAUDIA PIÑEIRO

CHARCO PRESS · JUNE 9, 2026 · ARGENTINA

Argentina’s best-selling crime novelist returns with a multigenerational mystery: a teenage girl’s murder thirty years unsolved, a family quietly unraveling, and a father whose stubborn love finally forces the truth into daylight. Riddle’s translation gives Piñeiro’s propulsive plotting its full due in English. On the novel’s central, uncomfortable idea — that gender violence gets explained away as a private matter of love gone wrong — Piñeiro has been blunt: “It seems that in every case, romantic love is treated as the prelude to gender-based violence. And that’s not true.”

— Claudia Piñeiro, in an interview with Infobae (translated from the Spanish)

FALL 2026

BY DAHLIA DE LA CERDA

FEMINIST PRESS · JUNE 16, 2026 · MEXICO

From the International Booker– nominated author of Reservoir Bitches, a reimagining of Medea as an avenging antiangel moving through Mexico’s cartel wars, border deserts, and clinics. Co-translated by two of the field’s most sought-after voices from Spanish, it insists that joy and care stay fully available to its characters, even inside the violence. As de la Cerda put it at a 2024 FIL Guadalajara presentation on the book: “Even in a violent context, people also deserve to enjoy life and find moments of care and connection — it’s also okay that in the midst of violence we like to dance, we like to organize ourselves among ourselves, we like to take care of each other.” — Dahlia de la Cerda, quoted by Zona Docs (translated from the Spanish)

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

We Were Forbidden

The City

TRANSLATED BY ROS SCHWARTZ

TRANSLATED BY ALICE BANKS AND KATIE WHITTEMORE

BY JAQUELINE HARPMAN

TRANSIT BOOKS · JULY 7, 2026 · BELGIUM

Three previously untranslated novellas from the late Belgian author of I Who Have Never Known Men, whose cult following has only grown since her death. Harpman died before this collection reached English, so we asked instead the person who has spent nearly thirty years inside her sentences. Translator Ros Schwartz, who corresponded with Harpman by mail in the 1990s and has now translated three of her books, on the throughline across all of them: “Her women are all rebels in their own way, breaking societal taboos, sometimes scandalously... translators can have agency through the books we choose to champion — focusing on untranslated women writers and bringing them into English.” — Ros Schwartz, interviewed by Hannah Peterson for Parnassus Books’ Musing, June 27, 2026

BY LARA MORENO

OPEN LETTER BOOKS · 2026 · SPAIN

Moreno has built a reputation in Spain for unsentimental, interior novels about women’s domestic and creative lives; this cotranslation tracks three women across Madrid and the city’s invisible labor that keeps it running. Asked about the immigrant workers who move through the book’s background, Moreno met the question head-on: “I don’t think we want to look at them. We eat the strawberries they pick, our houses are clean, they care for our elders — but we don’t want to look at them.” — Lara Moreno, in an interview with Trabalibros (translated from the Spanish)

F E AT U R E CONTINUED

Also Worth Watching. Some of the year’s most talked-about titles arrived just before the calendar turned and are still very much shaping the conversation. Ana Paula Maia’s On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated by Padma Viswanathan for Charco Press, was shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize; Maia has said the confined, brutal setting of her penal-colony horror story owes a debt to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and to Foucault, and that writing it left her with a bleaker, wider point: “beyond the application of laws to criminals, in the end, we are all imprisoned in this world, with walls that may or may not be visible” (from an interview with The Booker Prizes). Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child, translated by Martin Aitken, was longlisted for the same prize — a 17th-century Danish witch trial narrated by the wax doll at its center. Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s Boudoir and Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s The Strongest Woman in the World, both out from Open Letter as part of a 2026 Icelandic “Translator Triptych,” introduce English readers to a literary scene they’ve mostly met, until now, through crime fiction alone. And Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2026, guest-edited by Arthur Sze, gathers poetry and prose from more than sixty languages, with women translators and authors well represented throughout — proof that the anthology remains just as vital an entry point into this work as any single novel. This happens by 26

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design.

A Chorus, Heard in Full. Nonprofit presses in Oakland, Rochester, Edinburgh, and Brooklyn treat translation as infrastructure, building whole catalogs where the rest of the industry chases single, low-risk bets — and translators like Frances Riddle, Julia Sanches, and Izidora Angel are given the runway to become known for a specific sensibility, credited as artists rather than functioning as invisible intermediaries. What that infrastructure protects, book by book, is exactly what publishing has always been fastest to erase: a voice that sounds like itself and only itself, from a woman who claimed her place at the border rather than waiting to be waved through. So consider this list an invitation to cross something yourself. Start anywhere: with a Bulgarian nun’s fury that comes in a single unbroken breath, an Icelandic strongwoman’s training montage, a Chilean collection that keeps its own slang exactly as spoken. Each of these women wrote as though the border already belonged to her. In a year when so many actual borders are closing — to refugees, to journalists, to the free movement of people whose stories resist a tidy category — a small press deciding a Bulgarian nun’s rage is worth translating intact is itself an act of defiance. It’s a wager, renewed with every book, that the map still belongs to whoever is willing to walk the whole of it.

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BOOKSTAGRAM Each issue we feature a new bookstagrammer highlighting some of their amazing work.

NAME: AVERY FAVORITE GENRE: ROMANTASY BOOKS READ PER YEAR: 15-20 APPROXIMATELY FAVORITE BOOK: CRESCENT CITY HOUSE OF EARTH AND BLOOD FAVORITE AUTHOR: SARAH J. MAAS CURRENTLY READING: HAZELTHORNE BY CG DREWS, WILD SIDE BY ELSIE SILVER, AND I JUST FINISHED BUTCHER AND BLACKBIRD BY BRYNNE WEAVER 28

FALL 2026

@BurningCauldronFitness TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOU. @BurningCauldronFitness: My name is Avery, I grew up outside of Charlotte NC and got to play football in college in the mountains of NC. I’m a big fan of books, musical theatre, anime, sports and the gym. Ive been a lifelong athlete, gained a bunch of weight after i finished college football and lost my routine. I got back into reading, specifically listening to audiobooks. Thanks to books, I have locked back in, got back into a routine with the gym and my overall fitness. I got out of reading when I was younger and its been the greatest decision I could have made to finally get back into it. TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR BOOKSTAGRAM ACCOUNT AND HOW IT GOT STARTED. @BurningCauldronFitness: Im super passionate about fitness, health, books, and trying my best to get other men to be a better version of themselves. Getting guys away from the red pill type of content that typically goes along with the fitness space. The type of books I read tend to be romantasy/spicy/ romance books and not enough men read in general, let alone books that would be in those genres. When I first started posting on social media, I was looking for an outlet to talk about the books I was reading, have public accountability for me to be consistent in the gym and meet some cool people who liked the same things I do. WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE INDIE/SMALL PRESS AUTHOR AND WHY? @BurningCauldronFitness: L.C. Moon, Jayme Smith, Andrew Givler, and Josh Volk to name a few. They are all really great people, I love their writing styles and the books that i have read from each of them have been unique and really cool. I mainly listen to audiobooks so i really have to vibe with a book to read the physical copy.

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INTERVIEW

Interview with Thomas Bunstead Translator of The Depopulation

BY SARAH KLOTH

FALL 2026

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The History Behind The Novel

anything it’s about trying to bring that love and enthusiasm to bear.

The Depopulation is set in the 1600s, in a region caught between Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule, during a period when raiders marauded through the area — an episode that saw tens of thousands of Guaraní people killed or driven from their homes, including many living around the Jesuit mission where the novel begins.

TWO OF THE MAIN

THIS STORY IS ROOTED IN A

JUST NAMES FROM A HISTORY

REAL AND PRETTY BRUTAL CHAPTER OF SOUTH AMERICAN HISTORY. HOW MUCH DIGGING INTO THAT HISTORY DID YOU HAVE TO DO BEFORE YOU FELT READY TO TRANSLATE THE BOOK?

TB: I dug a little and already knew a little about the period, but as a translator, I tend to think that the original itself should and must and basically will contain all I need to know. I’m trying to recreate my own experience of the original, and given that I loved the book, more than

CHARACTERS, FATHER RUIZ AND FATHER MACETA, ARE BASED ON REAL JESUIT PRIESTS. HOW DID YOU APPROACH TRANSLATING REAL HISTORICAL FIGURES TURNED INTO CHARACTERS, WHILE STILL KEEPING THEM FEELING LIKE FLESH-ANDBLOOD PEOPLE RATHER THAN BOOK?

TB: Again, the original told me pretty much all I needed to know, but that said, it was useful to know a bit about Marina Closs’s writing process. She sent me some of the works that drew her into the subject and from which she’d lifted ideas and phrases. One was by a Catalan anthropologist and priest that contained an interpretation of the Guaraní worldview and their concept of the “soul/word,” and the other, by an anthropologist from Paraguay, was a transcription 31

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and Spanish translation of sacred Guaraní texts. These are of course records of colonialism in action, and the partial, flattening nature of the priests’ interpretations—which are nonetheless entirely in earnest— is clearly key to the bizarre yet recognizable world into which Closs take us. ONE CHARACTER CLAIMS TO BE THE SON OF GOD, AND

myself attending to small technical things at a sentence level—a different approach to contractions, for instance, than one would take with a modern-day voice, to give a concrete example (it’s difficult to talk usefully about translation in the abstract…). Still this was really about following the Spanish, which in its own way transports us into a historical moment while avoiding obvious egads!-ye olde-Monty Python-isms.

ANOTHER BELIEVES SHE USED TO BE A PLANT — AND THE BOOK TREATS THIS COMPLETELY MATTER-OFFACTLY. HOW DID YOU FIND THE RIGHT TONE IN ENGLISH SO READERS JUST GO ALONG WITH IT, THE WAY YOU DID?

TB: As always in a translation, just about every sentence and clause potentially contains a fork in the translator’s path. With a very “voicey” book like this one, where there’s a lot going on in the space between what the narrator knows and is able or willing to reveal, and what we know, and what the characters know, I certainly found 32

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Carrying the Story Into English This is Marina Closs’s Englishlanguage debut. The novel moves between a narrator, diary entries from Father Ruiz, and passages that read almost like a chorus of Guaraní voices. WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO BE THE ONE TO BRING MARINA’S VOICE INTO ENGLISH?

TB: It’s rare to come across books that feel both zany and urgent. There’s a sort of enthused, wide-eyed nihilism to the world Closs creates. The depiction of Fathers Ruiz and

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Maceta—and how recognizably, transhistorically human she makes them—seems like a clear decision: by bringing their world so messily and disconcertingly to life, she takes us inside what is troubling about colonial projects far more effectively than straight history or indeed straight lambasting satire. ABOUT THE BOOKS WERE THERE SPECIFIC WORDS OR IDEAS — RELIGIOUS TERMS, OR THINGS TIED TO THAT TIME PERIOD — THAT WERE ESPECIALLY HARD TO TRANSLATE?

TB: The original novel is in Spanish, but contains some Guaraní terms, which it felt important to retain, glossing in certain instances, but always trying to get across the strangeness of the world for the Spanish outsiders and the impossibility of fully putting it inside their Catholic-Old World box. And there’s also this clash/interface with the Portuguese language spoken by the marauding Mestiços (as I decided to term them). This was a balancing act, and doubtless another translator would have approached it differently. The Portuguese I had to think about; which language is proximate to English in the way Portuguese is proximate to

Spanish? I mean, which language would an English speaker hear and, presuming they weren’t a linguist and couldn’t lean on Latin or Greek or anything, still partly understand? In The Depopulation, there are crucial scenes late in the book when Portuguese-speaking characters appear, and the Spanish-speakers can mostly understand what they are saying, but are also flummoxed and have to kind of make it up—how to get that across? Footnotes were also out-of-the-question for me. It basically took a bit of license, and a little more explanation and in-line decoding than Spanish readers would obviously need, to try to ensure those moments would land. HOW INVOLVED WAS MARINA IN THE TRANSLATION PROCESS, IF AT ALL?

TB: She was involved, thankfully. One of the interesting discussions we had concerned the mechanics of a catapult that features towards the end of the book! It’s fashioned from a kind of bamboo that grows in the jungle, and shoots these little mudand-stone projectiles. I needed to ask lots of question so I could get a full picture of the contraption and be sure to supply the right verbs and so 33

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on when it’s wheeled into place and the projectiles loosed. Things like that.

Closs’s Rising Career — and What Drew You In Closs has already won and been shortlisted for some major literary prizes, and her writing has drawn comparisons to acclaimed authors like Guadalupe Nettel and Samanta Schweblin. WHERE DO YOU SEE THIS BOOK FITTING IN ALONGSIDE THOSE COMPARISONS?

TB: I’m not sure the similarities should be overstated, though they’re certainly all electrifying writers. Perhaps in Closs’s other works, which have yet to be published in English – Tres Truenos, Pombero, La encendida silenciosa – the concerns with Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate/ Fever Dream are a bit clearer than in a historical fiction like The Depoulation. An interest in the uncanny/ numinous, a neofabular/fantastical tinge (nobody say magical realism, please), a 34

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psychological acuteness, an ethical probing, a clear feminist edge… But each are quite different writers, really. YOU’VE COMPARED WHAT CLOSS IS DOING HERE TO WHAT HILARY MANTEL DID WITH THOMAS CROMWELL — TELLING A FAMILIAR KIND OF STORY IN A WAY THAT UPENDS WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY ALREADY KNOW. WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS BOOK GETS READERS TO SEE DIFFERENTLY ABOUT THIS PERIOD OF HISTORY?

TB: I think I meant more in terms of the voice than any rippingup of received historical opinion. Closs is clearly bringing this slanted historical tone, both arrestingly and weirdly “historical” and somehow modern, that powerfully inserts us into the world. Whenever I look at those books by Mantel, it’s the voice above all I’m astonished by. My guess is that it must have involved Mantel immersing herself in voices contemporary with Thomas Cromwell, and writing “out of ” that place.

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YOU’VE SAID THIS BOOK AFFECTED YOU IN A WAY THAT REALIST NOVELS USUALLY DON’T, AND THAT IT CONVINCED YOU CLOSS HAS REAL GREATNESS IN HER. WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR BOOK THAT GOT TO YOU LIKE THAT?

TB: It did something to me bodily, the way great books do. There is an undertow of hilarity to the encounter between the priests and Overá in particular, and in turn between those three and certain longsuffering female characters, but none of it is

played for laughs; the Spanish priests are of course horrendous colonial cyphers, yet Closs brings us inside their wholly earnest attempts to do what they’re there to do—save poor benighted souls! It’s highwire stuff. WHAT DO YOU WANT READERS COMING TO MARINA’S WORK FOR THE FIRST TIME TO KNOW BEFORE THEY START?

TB: That this is only the beginning—she is quite prodigious! 

“Of all the happy, hermitic lands, the Guayrá was the jewel.” So begins this polyphonic wonder of a novel set in a 17th-century Jesuit mission founded within the wild South American subtropics by the mystical and intense Father Ruiz and his assistant Father Maceta. As the priests seek to convert the indigenous Guaraní and unravel the many religious mysteries that surround them, the harmony of their community is abruptly upended by the arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus. But an even larger threat presents itself when word arrives that European marauders and slave hunters will soon descend upon the peaceful mission, compelling Overá and the priests to launch a mass exodus into the heart of the jungle. Full of humor, passion, and terror, The Depopulation (Bellevue Literary Press) brilliantly evokes the moment when modernity’s spark set fire to a still-magic world. 35

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FALL 2026

The Underground. BY MAY OKTAN

Picture growing up somewhere supposedly perfect — clean, safe, no chaos — where the price of that perfection is one ceremony a year, when the city's baby boys are sent away to "the Underground," a place no one is permitted to question out loud. Everyone calls it an honor. Elara, our nurse heroine, has never quite believed them. That persistent sense that something is very wrong is what makes The Underground difficult to put down. Elara's government-official father is gone, her mother has spent years teaching her not to ask questions, and then a long-buried secret surfaces that she cannot unsee — one that unravels everything she thought she knew about her family, her city, and the spotless life she was raised to be grateful for. May Oktan builds a dystopia that gets under the skin slowly, through the quiet horror of realizing the adults you trust most have been lying to you politely, for your own good.

WHAT TO READ IN YA FICTION Young adult fiction continues to become one of the most popular genres – mostly for adults. Join us each issue to find your next YA read.

THE UNDERGROUND BY MAY OKTAN

Readers drawn to dystopian YA for the moment a heroine stops accepting the story she's been fed will find that moment here, and then some — The Underground keeps twisting the knife well after it arrives. Tense and smart, it's the kind of book that leaves you questioning every "perfect" thing you've ever been told to simply accept.

G+B RECOMMENDED READ

RECOMMENDED AS YOU R N EX T

YA R E A D

THE UNDERGROUND . They told her the world was perfect. But perfection always comes at a cost. Above ground, life is peaceful. Controlled. Safe. A place where the formula for a flawless society has supposedly been found, and Elara has always done her best to follow it. In her pristine community, honor is earned by sending newborns to the Underground city in service of the greater cause. Still, a sense of unease has always lived inside her—a feeling that something isn't quite right. But in a world like hers, tradition is not something to be questioned. When a buried secret surfaces, suspicion spirals into a dangerous journey of discovery. As Elara digs deeper, she begins to unravel unsettling truths about her family, her society, and the role she was meant to play. In the most unlikely place, connections grow. Unexpected. Fragile. And maybe even something deeper. 38

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W H AT P E O P L E A R E S AY I N G A B O U T G I R L + B OO K

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“The awesome Girl+Book YA book review blog.....I smiled to see Blue Karma recommended for "tom-boys, tree climbers, adventure seekers, and backyard-campers" because I have answered (or still do) to all of these descriptions....The Girl+Book blog continues to make my day.” - J.K. ULLRICH, AUTHOR OF BLUE KARMA

“I Just Read Girl Plus Book’s Review Of Revelation, And It Made My Night!” - ELLERY KANE, AUTHOR OF LEGACY SERIES

F E AT U R E

READ OUTSIDE THE LINES Global Literature Worth Discovering A curated collection of translated books organized by country of origin.

BY SARAH KLOTH

FALL 2026

TRANSLATED FICTION France

MEXICO Restoration

The Dance and the Fire

BY AVE BARRERA

BY DANIEL SALDANA PARIS

TRANSLATED BY ELLEN JONES

TRANSLATED BY CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY

Die, My Love BY ARIANA HARWICZ TRANSLATED BY SARAH MOSES

& ROBIN MYERS

The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers BY FOUAD LAROUI TRANSLATED BY EMMA RAMADAN

The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings

Red Ants

The River in the Belly

BY PERGENTINO JOSE

BY FISTON MWANZA

TRANSLATED BY THOMAS BUNSTEAD

MUJILA

BY JUAN RULFO

TRANSLATED BY J. BRET MANEY

TRANSLATED BY DOUGLAS J. WEATHERFORD

Mrs. Murakami's Garden BY MARIO BELLATIN

Isles of Firm Ground BYIGNACIO RUIZ-PÉREZ TRANSLATED BY MIKE SOTO

"Muslim" a Novel BY ZAHIA RAHMANI TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW REECK

Forgetting BY FREDERIKA AMALIA FINKELSTEIN TRANSLATED BY ISABEL COUT AND CHRISTOPHER ELSON

Sphinx BY ANNE GARRETA TRANSLATED BY EMMA RAMADAN

TRANSLATED BYHEATHER CLEARY

TRANSLATED FICTION Spain

Peru One Hundred Guinea Pigs BY GUSTAVO RODRÍGUEZ TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HAHN

The World We Saw Burning BY RENATO CISNEROS

X Is Where I Am BY SARA TORRES TRANSLATED BY MAUREEN SHAUGHNESSY

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun BY MÓNICA OJEDA

TRANSLATED BY FIONN PETCH

TRANSLATED BY SARAH BOOKER

Blood of the Dawn BY BY CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY ELIZABETH BRYER

El Paso I Give You My Silence: A Novel

BY BENJAMIN VILLEGAS TRANSLATED BY JAY NODEN

BY JUAN VILLORO

BY MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

TRANSLATED BY FRANCISCO CANTÚ

TRANSLATED BY ADRIAN NATHAN WEST

The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Marayrasu BY EDGARDO RIVERA MARTÍNEZ TRANSLATED BY AMY OLEN

Tungula's Gift BY LUIS ABELARDO NÚÑEZ TRANSLATED BY ADA FIDLER AND ROGER FIDLER

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The Game at the End of the World

BY PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ TRANSLATED BY JEFFREY DITEMAN

Eating Ashes BY BRENDA NAVARRO TRANSLATED BY MEGAN MCDOWELL

TRANSLATED FICTION Argentina

Brazil Bury Your Dead

Spotlight on the World

BY ANA PAULA MAIA

BY ASTRID CABRAL

TRANSLATED BY PADMA VISWANATHAN

TRANSLATED BY ALEXIS LEVITINY

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer

We Are Green and Trembling

BY BELÉN LÓPEZ PEIRÓ

BY GABRIELA CABEZÓN

TRANSLATED BY MAUREEN SHAUGHNESSY

CÁMARA TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MYERS

The Dark Side of Skin BY JEFERSON TENORIO TRANSLATED BY BRUNA DANTAS LOBATO

MACUNAÍMA: THE HERO WITH NO CHARACTER BY MÁRIO DE ANDRADE TRANSLATED BY KATRINA DODSON

The Plains BY FEDERICO FALCO TRANSLATED BY JENNIFER CROFT

All That Dies in April BY MARIANA TRAVACIO TRANSLATED BY SAMANTHA SCHNEE

An Infinite Sadness BY ANTÔNIO XERXENESKY TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HAHN

VASTLANDS: THE CROSSING BY JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA

Love Training BY ANDRÉS NEUMAN TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MYERS

Thirst BY MARINA YUSZCZUK TRANSLATED BY HEATHER CLEARY

TRANSLATED BY ALISON ENTREKIN

TRANSLATED FICTION China

Korea Swell

A GREATER MUSIC

BY SON BO-MI

BY BAE SUAH

TRANSLATED BY JANET HONG

TRANSLATED BY DEBORAH SMITH

Night Train

Taiwan Travelogue

BY XU ZECHEN

BY YÁNG SHUĀNG-ZI

TRANSLATED BY JEREMY TIANG

TRANSLATED BY LIN KING

Everyday Movement BY GIGI LEUNG

EMPLOYEE NO. 9 BY KIM HYE-JIN TRANSLATED BY JAMIE CHANG

CATCALLING BY LEE SOHO TRANSLATED BY SOJE

Mending Bodies

TRANSLATED BY JENNIFER FEELEY

BY HON LAI CHU TRANSLATED BY JACQUELINE LEUNG

City Like Water BY DOROTHY TSE

Counsel Culture

Death Fugue

BY KIM HYE-JIN TRANSLATED BY JAMIE CHANG

Vaseline Buddha BY JUNG YOUNG MOON TRANSLATED BY YEWON JUNG

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BY SHENG KEYI TRANSLATED BY SHELLY BRYANT

TRANSLATED BY NATASCHA BRUCE

TRANSLATED FICTION Norway

Japan THE DEATH OF A CERTAIN WOMAN BY YASUSHI INOUE

Mistress Koharu BY NOBORU TSUJIHARA TRANSLATED BY KALAU ALMONY

ON THE OTHER SIDEIS MARCH BY SÓLRÚN MICHELSEN

Self-Control BY STIG SÆTERBAKKEN TRANSLATED BY SEÁN KINSELLA

TRANSLATED BY VARITA THOMSEN

TRANSLATED BY J. MARTIN HOLMAN

Gifted BY SUZUMI SUZUKI TRANSLATED BY ALLISON MARKIN POWELL.

Is It Poetry? BY TOSHIKO HIRATA TRANSLATED BY SPENCER THURLOW AND ERIC E. HYETT

The Ark BY HARUO YUKI TRANSLATED BY JIM RION.

Beautiful Distance BY NAO-COLA YAMAZAKI TRANSLATED BY CHARLOTTE GOFF

Vaim Hotel BY JON FOSSE

The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch BY THURE ERIK LUND TRANSLATED BYDAVID M. SMITH

TRANSLATED BY DAMION SEARLS

A Silent Language BY JON FOSSEI TRANSLATED BY DAMION SEARLS

Melancholy I & II BY JON FOSSE TRANSLATED BY GRETHE KVERNES AND DAMION SEARLS

TRANSLATED FICTION Poland

Chile PIÑEN

EXQUISITE CORPSE

BY DANIELA CATRILEO

BY MALÚ URRIOLA

TRANSLATED BY JACOB EDELSTEIN

Chilco BY DANIELA CATRILEO TRANSLATED BY JACOB EDELSTEIN

HONEY, I KILLED THE CATS

MER DE GLACE

BY DOROTA MASŁOWSKA

BY MAŁGORZATA LEBDA

TRANSLATED BY BENJAMIN PALOFF

TRANSLATED BY MIRA ROSENTHAL

TRANSLATED BY ELENA BARCIA

PEDRO THE VAST BY SIMÓN LÓPEZ TRUJILLO

A Thousand Peaceful Cities BY JERZY PILCH TRANSLATED BY DAVID FRICK

Golem BY MACIEJ PŁAZA TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES

TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MYERS

Cars on Fire BY MÓNICA RAMÓN RÍOS TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MYERS

The Cracks We Bear BY CATALINA INFANTE TRANSLATED BY MICHELLE MIRABELLA

Auroville: A City of Dreams BY KATARZYNA BONI TRANSLATED BY MARK ORDON

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER BY KAZIMIERZ MOCZARSKI TRANSLATED BY SEAN GASPER BYE

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The World Is Your

Bookshelf

Reading across borders is more than an opportunity to discover new stories—it’s a way to discover new ways of thinking. A translated book can transport us to a place we’ve never been, introduce us to traditions we may not know, or give us a glimpse into a life that looks entirely different from our own. And sometimes, it can remind us just how much we have in common. The books featured here represent only a small sampling of the incredible literature being published around the world and brought to English-language readers. Behind each one is an author with a story to tell, a translator who helps carry that story across languages, and often an independent publisher willing to champion a voice that might otherwise remain beyond our reach. So don’t think of this list as an ending—it’s a starting point. Follow an author, explore a country, seek out a translator whose work you love, or simply choose the cover that catches your eye. Let curiosity guide your next read. There’s an entire world waiting for you between the pages.

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FALL 2026

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EXCERPTS

SHELF UNBOUND’S RECOMMENDED READING Take a bite from your next favorite book.

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Murder at the End of the World. BY AKANE ARAKI, TRANSLATED BY JESSE KIRKWOOD

Pushkin Press | August 2026 A Potentially Hazardous Friday It was just after eight o’clock when the snow finally let up, and now the first patches of blue were showing through the clouds. The droplets on the windscreen shimmered in the morninglight. Slowly but surely, the sky was clearing. Snow and rain were my mortal enemies. Last Friday, the Ursid meteor shower had hit its peak, and with it being a new moon, conditions had been perfect—until a thick layer of nimbostratus flattened the pre-dawn sky into a murky grey. Still, if this weather held, I might finally get another chance to observe the winter stars. There was a jangle of cheap metal by my ear. Isagawa had leaned over from the passenger seat 50

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and was shaking the car key right by my face. “Come on, then. Fire her up.” The key for training car number thirty-two came, like that of all the other cars, with a ridiculously oversized keyring—a sort of monkey character with garish pink fur and bulging eyes. For the mascot of a driving school, it was a pretty wild design, and not cute in the least. I finished adjusting the rear-view mirror and gingerly took the key, taking care not to make contact with Isagawa’s hand. “I have a soft spot for the mountains, you know,” she said abruptly. “I was in the mountaineering club at high school. There were only three of us, mind.” “I thought you did judo.” “Well remembered. Yeah, judo was my thing, really. I only signed up for mountaineering to fill out the numbers.”

Isagawa kept up a steady stream of chatter while I fumbled through my pre-drive safety checks. It wasn’t hard to guess why she’d mentioned mountains. This was day thirteen of stage two of the standard driving licence course, which meant I’d be learning how to drive on mountain roads. “How about you?” she went on. “You into hiking? I guess the main places groups head to around here are Mount Homan or Mount Hiko.” “Not really my thing.” “Let me guess. You’re not the field trip type.”

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“Uh, yeah, I guess not.” “I wasn’t either. Where’s the fun in tramping about in a big group like that? Hiking for pleasure’s different, though. You get to pick your own route, go at your own pace…” I let her words wash over me, only half listening as I slid the key into the ignition and turned it. Our seats shook; the speedometer jumped. I’d never really cared much for cars, or driving, but this part I liked. The feeling that, all of a sudden, you were breathing life into an inanimate object. I released the handbrake and slipped the gear into drive. Without me even touching the accelerator, the car began to edge forward. Idle creep, they call it. A feature of most cars with automatic

transmission. I steered us across the large car park and out of the driving-school grounds. Glancing around cautiously, I inched the front bumper out onto the main road. Dazaifu Driving School sat on Prefectural Route 35, which cut through the town of Dazaifu and connected Chikushino with Koga. It had been a popular way of bypassing the tolls on National Route 3 or the Kyushu Expressway, and traffic had always been pretty steady. The area around the driving school used to get particularly busy because of all the visitors bound for the famous Tenmangu shrine.

or even person in sight. “Take a right here,” said Isagawa, gazing dead ahead. I flicked the indicator and did as she told me, dutifully glancing left and right before making the turn. “Stay on this road for now. I’ll tell you when to turn.” As we drove towards the sun, the information centre at the west gate of Dazaifu Tenmangu came into view. Unlike the main approach to the shrine, which teemed with cafés and souvenir shops, this quieter side road was mainly lined with small car parks that had sprung up to cater to tourists.

The town looked different these days, though. Right now, there wasn’t a single car

ABOUT THE BOOK TWO MONTHS UNTIL THE APOCALYPSE. TWO WOMEN WITH NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and the human race has just over two months to live. But twenty-three-year-old Haru, stargazer and chronic worrier, is still trying to pass her driving test. Then she finds a body in the boot of her car: a woman, stabbed and tortured. There’s a murderer on the loose. And it turns out that Haru’s driving instructor is an ex-cop with a manic devotion to justice. So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the two women team up to catch the culprit regardless of the danger. After all, the world’s not quite over yet…

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Planting and Painting the Landscape. BY T.D. MOTLEY

Stoney Creek Publishing | August 2026 Slow Learners, Landscapes, and Ladybugs When the Muse wakes you in the middle of the night, get up. There's creative work that needs doing, and the Muse doesn't want you to waste, ignore, or postpone inspiration. When I was a much younger adult, I sometimes was tempted to mumble an excuse to her, to childishly suggest that I'd get around to whatever inspired notion she'd awakened me with, but maybe later in the day. Somewhere along my own life's long, slow learning curve, I realized how shallow and unthankful were such petty pleadings. For all my mature artist's life, I have risen when the Muse gracefully tugs at my sleeping mind, no matter the early hour; even an hour long before the arrival of “rosy-"ngered dawn,” as Homer splendidly describes sunrise in The Odyssey. I've always advised my students to pay attention to their individual Muse. “Inspiration is calling your name,” I tell them. What if the artist turns back over 52

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into slumberland too often? What if the Muse is denied too often? How incredibly horrid if once too often you mumble to the Muse, simply out of lazy, slovenly mind, “I'll get to it later. Promise. Just gonna catch a few more winks right now.” Somewhere along the way, I asked myself “What if the Muse doesn't come back?” I don't want the Muse to disappear, to not return, never to gently wake me from sleep once more to get up and make inspired art. The thought of her absence, of her disappointment in my perceived lack of commitment, is enough of a trigger-reminder that always shames me to rise and seize the day. Shame was society's primary motivator in Classical Greece. In Book Five of The Odyssey, Homer !nally shows us the king who was a farmer, the hero of the epic saga, slumped on a beach, weeping hopelessly like a baby. He's being held captive as the boy-toy of Calypso, a goddess who rules the island of Ogygia. Athena responds to his sad plight and his pathetic

laments. She appeals to Zeus on his behalf. Zeus sends Hermes to deal with Calypso, and Athena becomes the inspira-tional Muse for Odysseus. It's about a third of the way into the saga before Odysseus !rst learns to ask for her help, and then he learns to burn fragrant herbs for her in thanksgiving for the gift of her divine assistance. He begins to practice these necessary and respectful rituals only about halfway through his epic journey. Odysseus was a fast talker, but a slow learner. ~ I was awakened this morning about three.

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Annie didn't stir, now long accustomed to my occasional Muse-driven late-night wakeup calls. Daughter Liz, back home between permanent jobs, snored gently, but just enough to be heard through her closed bedroom door. I don't tease her about the snoring. I knew that Nike, the beautiful goddess-named Bluetick Coonhound, would be sleeping on the floor by the side of Liz's bed. The soft sound of my daughter's light snoring always lulls Nike fast into dreamland. If Liz's door is already closed when Nike sneaks in, she winds up at the foot of our bed, but Annie and I are clearly second choice when Liz is in the house.

space of an open door, for example. I suspect that Sol, our miniature donkey, has secretly been giving her infiltration lessons on the art of invisibility, of coming and going without detection. Sol is the smartest four-legged beast in our rural menagerie. He is a master of deception, is always on the reconnoiter for opportunity, and loves to recruit other animals to aid and abet his schemes. His small size allows him access to places where larger equines fear to trod lest they get trapped. At times he seems to disappear as suddenly as to appear. Perhaps he's a “shapeshifter” the Hopi have told stories about for ages.

How the dog manages to be in and out of the house, seemingly at will, perplexes me. I certainly rarely notice the wily hound sliding her lean frame around me unseen, sneaking through the narrow

If the little charmer had opposable thumbs, he would be the world's best pickpocket. Even Dickens' “Artful Dodger” would have envied our donkey's seemingly bottomless bag of schemes and deceptive

tricks. It had been a moonless night with a cooling breeze. Spring still ruled, but June would bring early previews of summer heat soon enough. City folks would describe it as “pitch black” outside, and request a flashlight, probably. But farmers with early chores and artists who paint night scenes know that Earth and sky are never truly “pitch black.” Total darkness devoid of any light may exist in nooks and cran-nies of Carlsbad Caverns, but not in nocturnal exterior environs of Barnes County, in any season or weather.

ABOUT THE BOOK Planting and Painting the Landscape is a warm, reflective novel about an aging artist-farmer, Sam Bartlett, who tends thirty acres of North Texas land while wrestling with memory, creativity, and change. A sequel to The Art of Farming, it blends richly observed scenes of daily farm work―gardening, livestock, and Saturday farmers markets―with the inner life of a painter whose nights belong to the Muse and the stars. As Sam and sidekick Annie navigate suburban sprawl, family transitions, and the encroaching language of “branding” and “development,” the farm becomes a fiercely protected sanctuary where stewardship, community, and craft still matter.

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A Hard Left. BY PAUL MCGRATH

Stoney Creek Publishing | September 2026

The Aurus Senat came to a stop in a blue plume of smoke outside the dreary beige, monolithic building that took up nearly a full block of 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg. There was no address number on the nondescript fourstory building; that was by design. Heavycoated guards, wearing camouflage and armed with Kalashnikovs, patrolled the perimeter sidewalks, and the outcropped brickwork marking the roofline shielded security cameras placed at twenty-foot increments. The structure was the very definition of paranoia. When a building is too big to hide, fear can be used to keep eyes from prying—or mouths from talking. The mid-February snowfall was beginning to produce faster and 54

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heavier salvos, and the flurries were forming piles in the street. The driver of the Aurus leapt from the vehicle and moved quickly to open the rear passenger door. Nikolai Ivanov, fearing for his handmade alligator shoes, dodged the slushy curb as he stepped out of the vehicle and put his black beaver Cossack hat atop his head for the short walk to the door. He pulled his overcoat tight, waved an arm at the driver, and trudged toward the entrance and into the building’s intimidating security antechamber. His status afforded him no protection from this room. His credentials, like those of anyone else who entered, were checked thoroughly. Ivanov, who had just turned fifty-five, was the newly promoted director of the Glavset, the Russian name for the innocuous

Internet Research Agency (IRA). In the West, the site was given a label with a darker connotation: the “Propaganda Kitchen.” The stew of zeroes and ones that emerged from this building had been creating mischief, mayhem, and malevolence for decades. One former IRA employee, a journalism student who became a pseudo-mole, described his work there as “a merry-go-round of lies.” Its political inﬂuence and disinfor-mation “active measures”—a term that originated in the 1950s—had ensnared

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countries across the globe. For those in the game, “active measures” are intended to be covert and offer a veneer of deniability for the perpetrators. The IRA typically saw 400 or so employees working day and night in twelvehour shifts in vast open ﬂoor plans, manufacturing disinfor-mation and proKremlin propaganda (among other mischief). The so-called “troll farm” is a quasi-private company believed to have been created by businessmanturned-oligarch-turnedwarlord Yevgeny Prighozin, the future founder of the Wagner Group, a private military organization. Prighozin and the Wagner Group were often used to

perform the “bloodwork” of the Russian president, at least until the two had a falling-out over Russia’s conduct in the Ukraine war. The spat turned into a short-lived coup that eventually saw Prighozin banished to Belorussia. A plane crash—or was it an assassination attempt?— in August 2023 killed Prighozin and nine others, ending the dispute for good.

Typhoon in late 2024, gaining remote control over targeted servers and then penetrating nine U.S. telecommunications companies. The Chinese purloined access to the metadata of millions of cellphone users in the Washington, D.C., area, including devices.

The Russians were far from being the only world actors partaking in cyber warfare and information theft. The North Koreans were cred-ited—blamed?—for a bold assault against Sony Pictures in 2014, one that proved quite embarrassing to certain movie moguls. The Chinese launched Salt

ABOUT THE BOOK In this explosive third novel in Paul McGrath’s award-winning Terran Incognita Series, Russian disinformation masterminds and a ruthless Texas tech billionaire are about to unleash a “data vacuum cleaner” that can rip through the world’s financial systems―and hand Moscow unprecedented power. Deep underground in Virginia, a vanished prisoner suddenly reappears in a different body, forcing the FBI to reopen the most bizarre case in its history. And at the center of it all are two off-the-books Xylodonian Guardians, hiding in plain sight as a small-town Mississippi couple, quietly using alien tech to freeze militias, topple traffickers, and derail mass killers before they strike. 55

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The Witch of Sonora. BY JOHNNIE BERNHARD

Stoney Creek Publishing | September 2026 Nocona Ketemoczy Border Patrol Agent Edwards County, Texas My name comes from a dead language, the language of the Comanche. The language died because that was what progress demanded. And progress was nothing more than The Man with his big stick and a fat wallet. A few forgotten Indians, dancing in their faded eagle feath-ers, still spoke the language on the federally mandated land of the Comanche Nation in Oklahoma. Festivals tried to recall the language when youth dressed in buffalo hide chanted the words of the Comanche Ghost Dance song. But here in Central Texas, where I was born, my father and I spoke those archaic words every day. Not as a remembrance but as the only way to speak with full meaning. The Comanche way was not dead to us. My name, Nocona, means “wanderer.” I don’t know if the name made me who I am, or I became that man despite the name. As a Marine in Afghanistan, I wandered for years, not typically staying in any one place for long, until I returned to Texas to work as 56

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a border agent in Edwards County. My father told me my name was spiritual, derived from The People. The Comanche of Texas were the last free band of Plains Indians to surrender to the Whites and be marched off to live out their days in disillusionment on a reservation. Like a language, people’s history should mean something. Or it becomes lost, forgotten, and absolutely meaningless. Since I was a kid, I’ve been a wanderer. That curiosity to see behind the veil has led me into few paradises and many private hells. But the need to look beyond what was obvious began in Mexico City when I was eleven years old and walked away from my family into the Mercado de las Brujas, the Witches Market. We were there as a family, not on vacation but on a reli-gious pilgrimage for my mother. A Mexican girl from San Anto-nio, she was raised on a Catholicism both mystical and superstitious. She believed in Saint Mary as well as Santa Muerte, but it would be Mary who would bring a cure for her breast cancer, so my faithful mother prayed. That year my father took

every sweaty penny he could beg, borrow, and steal and got my mother to Mexico City. Not that he believed in miracles but because he loved her. It wasn’t a demonstrative love. It was a love made from hard times a man and a woman endured in a place without biracial niceties. We were halfbreeds. Like the song Cher belted out in the seven-ties. The racist monikers got a bit more comical or crueler, depending on where I lived at the time. Wetback. Red Man. Kaw-Liga. You’ve heard the names. You get the idea how deep the shit was for an Indian. My bloodline was like most Comanche. Whites, Mexicans, Mestizos, and other tribes mingled in our veins. The Comanches stole and traded children

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and women throughout their borderless world from the Great Plains to as far south as Mexico. There was no racism when it came to taking other human beings. It was about survival for the tribe. With a nomadic lifestyle and the harsh physical labor of the Comanche women, miscarriages and infertility were the norm. My father was an independent and proud man who worked on a horse ranch outside Bandera, Texas. He was a direct descendant of the Penateka Comanche Chief Ketemoczy, who signed a treaty in 1847 along the Pedernales River in Fredericksburg. It was the only treaty never broken between Whites and Indians. It forged a peace between the Comanche and the German settlers of nineteenth-century Texas. Unwavering once he gave his word, my father was like his people. I’d like to think I am the same type of man. In 1988, my father gave his word to my mother about Mexico City, so she could pray

at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. My mother said she felt cured after that visit. I’m sure my father doubted her, but he indulged her optimism with a shopping trip to the Mercado Sonora. I remember my mother being happy to spend cash money in the tourist trap with vendor stalls of bullwhips, sombreros, and goatskin wine bags. My little sisters each got a thin white Mexican dress embroidered with #owers of orange, pink, and turquoise. Farther back in the mercado, away from the tourists and vendors, was a shop for the voyeur and the mystic seeker, the Mercado de las Brujas. As a wanderer and a typical boy who hated shopping and being with my annoying sisters, I found my opportunity to escape. I wandered from my parents on that day in 1988, an eleven-year-old who was both terri$ed and curious by what I saw. Voodoo dolls, the bodies of animal fetuses #oating in broth in glass jars, clustered

pieces of animal and human hair fastened to crucifixes and cloth dolls, things both undetectable and unimaginable—all for sale. I stood in front of a display of icons of the Catholic Church, tiny saints of clay, as well as statues of Santa Muerte, the saint of death, who was represented as a female skeleton with a scale in one hand and a scythe in the other. My mother said she was a good saint who could deliver us safely to the after-life. She looked horrible to me! I moved quickly away from the little Santa Muerte statues. I continued to explore the maze of stalls until behind those stalls were small rooms, where people entered through many doors and openings covered with curtains and strings of plastic, colored beads.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Evil rides the borderlands—and it knows your name. Haunted by a witch only he can see, a traumatized Comanche-Mexican border agent joins an elderly rancher who shelters trafficked girls to stop ritual murders tied to Palo Mayombe, facing cartel brutality, generational trauma, and spiritual warfare in the violent, unforgiving borderlands of West Texas.

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Dispatches from Berlin. BY CAROL J. WILLIAMS

Stoney Creek Publishing | October 2026 WEST BERLIN— NOVEMBER 1989 Natalie Chester peered out the window of the overnight train from Warsaw as it clattered through East Berlin’s grim outskirts. She spotted something moving along the horizon toward the frost-covered no-man’s land east of the Berlin Wall. As the train drew within a mile of the Friedrich Strasse station, the primrose glow of winter sunrise illuminated the hastening movement toward the barrier on the border with West Berlin. Her breath caught when the train closed the distance enough for her to see the shapes of people packed so densely on the roadway they ﬂowed together like a human tide. The closer the procession moved toward the wall, the faster people walked, accelerating as if worried they might reach it too late. Natalie could make out the looks of intensity on their faces, a mixture of wonder and apprehension propelling them through the last minutes of a dash to freedom. The sight of thousands— tens of thousands—carrying 58

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nothing but the rumpled winter coats on their backs erased the fear that had kept her awake all night. She closed her eyes and dropped her head against the seatback. So she hadn’t missed it after all. Communist authorities had announced the previous night, just a few hours before Natalie boarded the train out of Warsaw, that East Germans no longer needed government permission to leave their country. She was relieved to get a seat, but during the ten-hour journey she’d struggled to regain her confidence. How had she, an award-winning journalist, almost lost one of the biggest stories of the century? She felt her cheeks redden when she recalled how she’d persuaded Foreign Editor Byron Kennedy to let her fly from Bonn to Warsaw instead of Berlin two days ago to cover West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s official visit to Poland. His trip was to culminate with a journey to Auschwitz, Kohl becoming the first postwar German leader to offer atonement for the Nazis’ slaughter of six million

European Jews. Natalie had insisted to her boss that the latest protests in East Germany in demand of competitive elections and freedom to travel abroad were likely to go the way of recent Soviet reform movements—nowhere. But close to midnight Kohl had flown back to the West German capital after the explosive news that East Berliners were flooding through the open gates of the infamous wall, a suddenly obsolete symbol of repression. Natalie, marooned in Warsaw with no story and no airline flying to either side of Germany until morning, scrambled to buy a ticket on the midnight train to East

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Berlin. She felt no sense of excitement, only fear that the late-night pronouncement might be revoked, another cruel betrayal after months of stalled negotiations between pro-democracy demonstrators and their Kremlin-allied oppressors.

wasteland on the eastern side of the wall. They dislodged Natalie from her seat to wrest their voluminous baggage from the racks overhead, huge bundles of clothing they’d told her through hand signals they’d bought in China.

But here they were, East Germans moving toward the newly punctured wall as if drawn by a magnet. Wideeyed disbelief beamed from some, wariness from others— all people who a day earlier couldn’t imagine getting a glimpse of life beyond the hated wall. They looked to be shedding their trepidation with each step.

“Smotri!” Natalie said in Russian, hoping the imperative “look!” was close enough to Polish. Her voice cracked as she gestured toward the current of East Germans moving parallel to the train and disappearing through the open border crossing into West Berlin. She covered her mouth with her hand, muﬄing her whispered revelation: “All these people are free.”

Five Polish black-market traders with whom Natalie had shared the compartment overnight stirred at the ﬁrst hiss of brakes on the approach to Friedrich Strasse station. They yawned and stretched, heedless of the joyous commotion ﬂooding into the

They shrugged oﬀ her attempts to draw attention to the masses hurtling toward the open crossing. They probably have no idea what has happened in the weeks they’ve been on their far-ﬂung shopping trip, Natalie guessed, returning her gaze to the scene

of emancipation she’d lost hope for after the crushing failure of reform during her years covering the Soviet Union. Natalie’s reverie broke with the screeching halt of the train. She grabbed her knapsack and wheeled suitcase and joined passengers squeezing out onto the platform. Travelers inside the station, more animated than the sleepy Poles who’d shown little interest, jostled for a view out the open eastern end of the cavernous station, sending up a cacophony of shouts and applause amplifying the usual noise of Berlin’s busiest train hub. As she made her way through the dense throng on the platform, Natalie watched a conductor struggling to shoo excited spectators onto their waiting trains.

ABOUT THE BOOK

As the Berlin Wall crumbles, two lives are unexpectedly connected by history’s fault lines. Veteran foreign correspondent Natalie Chester races into West Berlin on the night the Wall opens in November 1989, expecting the story of a lifetime— crowds surging toward freedom, a superpower standoff dissolving in real time, a Cold War ending in celebration not bloodshed. Instead, she finds her.

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Good Cotton People. BY A. B. CÁRDENAS

Stoney Creek Publishing | November 2026

Bonnie’s Café in the small farming community of Huisache boasted the best country breakfast menu for miles around. This was because there were no other cafés for miles around in this desolate part of West Texas called the Trans Pecos farming basin, but the fluffy, golden biscuits at Bonnie’s were still good. They were what veteran cotton farmer William Allen Littlejohn, 82, enjoyed most with early morning coffee along with a panoramic sunrise’s debut through the busy café’s large windows facing east. They framed the sun as it slowly illuminated the rugged mountains yielding to the flat, brushy expanse of West Texas. Yes indeed, morning coffee along with two biscuits, a little butter and honey along with a heaping helping of picturesque John Ford-like landscape did just fine for William Allen. His wife, Hannah, died in 1918 and although Littlejohn Farm’s cook and housekeeper Corina made good biscuits, William 60

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started each weekday with an early breakfast at Bonnie’s to get a jump on the day along with the farming community’s news. Halfway through the 20th century, Huisache, along with a few other farming communities in the Pecos basin, still had limited access to news outside their region, one of the least populous and isolated in the Lone Star state. This late spring of 1951, talk of the new cotton harvest combines, wonder chemicals, and better fertilizers was on everyone’s lips. Change was upon them again as it always had in the world of American agri-culture and national politics, the latter having much to do with the former. “Your good Mexican cotton people should be pulling in any day now, Mr. Littlejohn?” county farm agent Donny Franks rudely interrupted. “It gonna be their last cotton haul? Any idea what they gonna do for work next? They gonna back to old Mexico, ya reckon?”

William Allen Littlejohn, descendant of English colonial South Carolina cotton growers who helped pioneer cotton cultivation in the antebellum South, farmed cotton in the basin since before the Great Depression and Dust Bowl days. In that time, he dealt with many a caustic county, state, and federal agriculture agent, though Franks was by far the worst; a useless, nosey bureaucrat seeking only a steady check. His father, Michael James Littlejohn, would have classified Franks as a lifer; a lazy, inefficient fool expecting retirement. Without looking up, William smartly laid the

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fork down while staring at the spectacular sunrise for an uneasy moment before slowly growling a reply: “Well now, I do not believe that is any of the state govern-ment’s business, Mr. Franks, nor certainly of yours. No, I believe not. Now, if there is anything else you would like to bother me with what had been the start of a most splendid day, I wish to finish my breakfast with no further interruptions and in peace. Good day.”

irrigation water along with restrictions on how much of a crop he could grow. There had been ill-conceived U.S. Agriculture Department edicts early in FDR’s administration in 1933, including the Agriculture Adjustment Administration. To William, it all served no productive purpose with respect to his cotton farming operation and only proved to be yet another example of big government’s intrusion into his business.

Gulping hard twice, an embarrassed Franks quickly shuffled off without a word, seeking refuge at a nearby table ringed by chatty grain farmers obviously feeling the effects of Bonnie’s heady coffee. Aside from the general incompetence of most farm agents, William equally resented growing federal, state, and even local government regulation of his

However, the agent’s questions did prompt reflection on issues William was finding difficult to address—investing major capital in new machinery and chemicals. This morning upon rising and feeling the aggregate but manageable aches and pains an old, persistent farmer suffers, it occurred to him there was another option; stop farming

and retire. He was in good health, standing an erect six feet with a slight paunch that farmwork kept in check. William possessed a noble head full of hair that years ago morphed from wiry silver to soft cotton white. Financially, he could easily absorb the high cost of modernizing, but the elimination of field laborers made his farming spirit wane. Slowly running a rough-hewn hand through the thick mane, he recalled quipping to friends that cotton farming was his life and anticipated dying one early sunny morning while inspecting a cotton field ready for harvest.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Where cotton and conscience collide, one good man bets his soul on the people the world tries to forget. In 1951 West Texas, aging cotton grower William Allen Littlejohn faces mechanization, memory, and moral reckoning as migrant lagunero families arrive for their final season on his Pima cotton farm, testing whether one good man’s quiet defiance of racism and exploitation can redeem a legacy rooted in slavery and empire.

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Fox Creek. BY M.E. TORREY

Sly Fox Publishing LLC. | September 2025

Chapter 1 March 1843 The year is 1843, and the fertile, sun-drenched lands along the Mississippi River in Louisiana are alive with the rhythms of plantation life. Sugar and cotton fortunes flourish under the hands of planters who have inherited not only land but a social order built on the exploitation of human labor. Among these plantations is Fox Creek, a sprawling estate upriver from New Orleans, owned by William Jensey and his wife, Sarah. The Jenseys are typical of the Southern elite in many ways, proud of their wealth, concerned with appearances, and determined to maintain their family legacy. But beneath the surface of polite manners and carefully managed plantations lies the harsh reality of a society dependent on slavery—a reality that will soon intersect with lives far beyond the Jenseys’ understanding. Into this world comes Monette, a young, biracial girl born the cherished 62

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daughter of a French Creole sugar planter. Her early childhood is filled with privilege and protection. On her father’s plantation, she knows little of the wider world, shielded from cruelty, attended by devoted servants, and surrounded by the routines of genteel life. She grows up believing she belongs, that her place among the privileged is secure, and that her identity is clear and defined. But tragedy intrudes abruptly: through circumstances she cannot fully comprehend, Monette is seized from the familiar comforts of her home, carried to the bustling, chaotic streets of New Orleans, and sold into slavery. She is not alone in this devastating upheaval. Alongside her is Cyrus, a boy large and strong for his age, recently torn from his mother and bereft of any farewell. Both are terrified, unmoored from family and home, thrown into a world where their bodies, labor, and very existence are treated as commodities. While Monette clings to the memory of her previous

life, trying to maintain the illusion of identity and belonging, Cyrus must confront the harsh physical and psychological realities of slavery. He is resilient and determined, but the lessons of survival come at a high cost. The children’s new home is Fox Creek Plantation, a place that will shape and define the trajectory of their lives. William Jensey, the patriarch, is a man of his time, proud and hardworking, determined to make Fox Creek prosperous for his heirs. He treats his enslaved workers with what he considers fairness— allowing small freedoms, doling out punishments

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only when necessary, and striving to maintain order. Sarah, his wife, moves through the estate with a blend of grace and authority, overseeing the household while adhering to the rigid social norms expected of a Southern lady. Their children, Kate and Breck, inhabit the worlds of privilege and expectation, yet they differ in temperament. Breck is diligent and bookish, anxious to earn his father’s approval, yet uncertain about the path laid out for him. Kate, spirited and romantic, embraces the social life of the plantation with the enthusiasm of youth. Monette’s place within this world is complicated. She is assigned as Kate’s companion, living in the household, sharing games, lessons, and the intimacies of girlhood. On the surface, she is welcomed, even treated almost as a surrogate family member. But

the line between privilege and oppression is indelible. Monette is never truly equal; her race marks her, her status is defined by ownership, and she must navigate the subtle yet constant reminders that her position in this society is conditional. Pretending life is normal becomes both a strategy for survival and a form of self-preservation. Monette buries her past life and distances herself from Cyrus, who is sent immediately to the fields, forced into the relentless labor that defines the lives of enslaved men and boys. Cyrus’s transformation is rapid and brutal. The fields are unforgiving, demanding strength, endurance, and obedience. He encounters cruelty both systemic and personal, learning the lessons of survival that will mark him as determined and unyielding. Yet despite the distance, he

does not vanish from Monette’s consciousness—or from her life. His presence lingers as a reminder of the world they were both forced into, a world that refuses to acknowledge their humanity. Fox Creek itself is a microcosm of the broader society of the antebellum South. The plantation operates with strict hierarchies and rigid codes, where every gesture, task, and interaction is infused with the weight of race and power. Beneath the veneer of wealth and elegance lies a harsh system in which lives are controlled, families are fragmented, and the threat of violence is ever-present.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Set in 1843 Louisiana, Fox Creek follows Monette, the young daughter of a French Creole planter who is kidnapped and sold into slavery alongside a boy named Cyrus. Sent to Fox Creek Plantation, Monette is drawn into the world of the white planter family while Cyrus is forced into the fields. As they grow older, Monette struggles with identity, privilege, and the brutal realities of slavery, while her bond with Cyrus endures despite the forces trying to keep them apart. Both sweeping and deeply personal, Fox Creek is a story of survival, injustice, and love against impossible odds.

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My Bully, My Aunt & Her Final Gift. BY HAROLD PHIFER BookBaby | February 2025

Next, the secretary advised me to take a seat while she notified the headmaster of my arrival. During those dreadful moments I did everything I could to remain calm. Nervously, I kept patting my foot to the floor and heard each and every tap. Suddenly, shouts of extreme havoc rung out just like the other times! “Oh God no! Jesus, please help me Lawd! I got you, Sir, I got you,” were screams filling the airwaves. The door opened and a battered female raced right past me with her hands covering her face. She kept mumbling phrases that shouldn’t be repeated by innocent lips. I couldn’t believe those disgusting words coming out of her baby-sized mouth.

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Then damn, another nightmare was possibly moments away. I needed an out and fast. Fearing for my life, I formulated my plan of action. Right before Principal Shellshock steadies his paddle, I was going to blow out all the gas I reserved in my little butt. I was never a fan of the fart game, but I was scheming like a veteran. That’s all I had, and it was my “A game.” My intentions were to rip a good hard one that opens my belt, ruffles my pants, and sends my new shoes flying across the room. Then all options would be left to the principal. He could chance tearing into me and losing a lung or take cover and let me go. Punishing me will become a hazard to his health.

For the moment, I felt really good about that notion. I didn’t have much else to cling to, but I was dangerously packing breakfast from Aunt Kathy. Yes, I was sure my stink bomb defense would win that day. According to past reports, I would be the first and only kid at Mitchell Memorial to get on the scoreboard against the headmaster. Make that, Hal “1” and Principal Shell Shock “0.” ____ “Well, Aunt Kathy

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implored me to settle down. She kept issuing threat after threat with such statements, “Boy, do I need to beat the black off of you,” or “Gorilla will be your name when I’m finish!” Yes, I got the message but beating my butt wasn’t going to be enough. Heck, I had been waiting for three long, long years just to join Jerry. Anything short of a bullet wasn’t going to stop me.” ____ “Aunt Kathy wasted no time reading me the riot act. She accused me of overstepping my bounds and showing off at church. According to her calculations, “I needed to get my ass snapped back in shape”! Then she said,

“Don’t worry, I plan to cut you a “New Ass” when we get home!” “Yes Ma’am,” I said. It was just another day in paradise! Yes, I knew I was cooked. I was finished.” ____ “Once the Reverend was out of sight, Aunt Kathy eyeballed me up and down with a frown more terrifying than ugly on an ape. My life still hung in the balance. As much as I tried, I couldn’t hold my emotions any longer. She started up again, “Boy, for a minute, I was really scared for your ass! But I’m gonna let you slide this time!”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. She went even deeper, “You may have slipped through the cracks, but if I catch you taking a shit out of turn, I’m beating your ass!” “Yes ma’am,” I said once again.

ABOUT THE BOOK In “My Bully, My Aunt, and Her Final Gift”, Hal revisits the complicated relationship he shared with his late Aunt Kathy, a woman who stood as the antithesis of positivity in his life. Despite her domineering and often cruel behavior, her passing left Hal with an unexpected opportunity for humor, healing, and reflection. As he plans her memorial—a gathering that no one seems eager to attend—Hal’s childhood memories resurface, pulling him back into a world shaped by his aunt’s unpredictable rules and twisted philosophies. Blending heartfelt truths with laugh-out-loud moments, Hal weaves a tale of resilience, self-discovery, and ultimately, redemption. This memoir offers a lighthearted yet honest look at how even the darkest relationships can leave behind gifts of wisdom and self-awareness.

INTERVIEW

Interview with Shane Jesse Christmass Author of Xerox Over Manhattan

BY ANTHONY CARINHAS

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I N T E R V I E W CONTINUED

Delirium, desire, cultural collapse and fractured memory collide in Shane Jesse Christmass’s wildly inventive fiction. Across books that mutate language and dismantle conventional narrative, they explore the strange, destructive and often hilarious machinery of human behavior. Here, Christmass talks influence, collaboration, creativity and why the best literature might be the kind that refuses to be easily read.

Ghosts, Influences, and Collaboration HAVE YOU SEEN THE CURE IN ORANGE? IT WAS FILMED IN FRANCE AND COPIES ARE VERY HARD TO FIND. IF YES—DID IT INFLUENCE YOU AS AN ARTIST?

SJC: Yes, I’ve seen The Cure in Orange, loved it, watched it obsessively in high school. Where I lived, there was a television station that had to provide public access programming, news, films and soaps for immigrant communities. But when the channel first started in the 1980s, late at night they would also show a lot of interesting music and art programming. They’d broadcast things like The Cure in Orange, and I taped

it onto VHS. The tape didn’t survive high school, although I do have their DVD somewhere. The concert was one of those things that completely altered my perspective. And this is 1987, so The Cure was still an anomaly with some of their biggest albums yet to come. INTEREST IN BOOKS CHANGE LIKE A WEATHERVANE DEPENDING ON WHERE SOMEONE IS IN THEIR LIFE. WHO AND WHAT ARE YOU READING THESE DAYS?

SJC: I just finished reading some poems by Kitty Saint-Remy. I’ve also been reading Patrick Cowley’s homoerotic journals, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts, Lana Valdez’s I Rot, Holly Coleman’s Good Girl and Cynthia Ross’s The Love Ministry. I’ve got Parker Love Bowling, Mary Morgan and Linda Rosenkrantz waiting for me. And anything Danielle Chelosky releases goes to the top of the pile: I’m basically waiting for Romantic Abjection to be released. Greta Schledorn’s Now More Than Ever is a story that refuses to leave me alone after reading it. Nastya Valentine’s Ultimate Fantasy absolutely blew me away. Emma Newman-Holden’s It 67

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Feels So Good to Be a Victim is one of the best fucking things I’ve ever read. For the future, I look forward to reading some Bambi Lake and books by LittlePuss Press. DOES HYSTERICALLY REAL STILL PRINT YOUR LIMITEDEDITION BOOK DELIRIUM/ LEERING/LIQUID MORPHINE IF A REQUEST IS RECEIVED?

SJC: No, I don’t think Hysterically Real ever received requests to print Delirium/Leering/Liquid Morphine. It was always intended more as a digital artefact, a PDF that exists in the temporary landscape of the internet. I’ve always liked that ephemeral quality. The internet creates these accidental ghosts of things: links disappear, websites shut down, journals dissolve, archives become inaccessible. There’s something appealing about that kind of impermanence. Not everything has to be preserved. Sometimes things have a particular life span, exist for a moment, reaches whoever it was meant to reach, then slip away. There’s allure in that. I do like that title though, so that may play out somewhere else. Having said that, I’m contradicting myself because the work has recently been taken down. 68

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Per my request. I’m exploring the possibility of giving some of that material a physical existence. I’m working with Ira and Filthy Loot on a book that expands on some of that artwork. It’s a huge undertaking. We’ve fucked around and ended up with a 200-plus-page project that brings all the usual problems: production costs, printing, logistics, whether the venture can actually match the scale of the idea. We’re seeing where it goes. It may end up becoming something smaller and more focused, perhaps a series of volumes released over time rather than one enormous book. YOU GOT TO WORK WITH PHILIP BEST ON A SCI-FI ANTHOLOGY CALLED HUMAN RIGHTS FROM AMPHETAMINE SULPHATE PRESS. STEVEN PURTILL ALSO PUT TOGETHER THE ART FOR SEX SHOPS OF SHERMAN OAKS. WAS THAT COLLABORATION AS FUN AS IT SOUNDS?

SJC: I think fun is probably the right word, Phillip worked with Steven, and Steven created the images and sent them to Phillip. This is just for Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks mind you. It was more a case of relying on Phillip and Steven’s previous procedures,

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whatever they had done on other books. At a certain point, you should step away and let other artists do what they do. Phillip and Steven are both serious about what they do. When I saw the images, I immediately thought—yes—that’s it. He nailed it. It was one of those moments where you recognize that something has ABOUT THE BOOKS landed exactly where it needs to. Sometimes you shouldn’t overthink everything. There’s a temptation to control every element, to explain what something should be, but that can kill the strange, the unexpected connections, that make art interesting. You must trust another creator’s instinct, the audience’s ability to bring their own interpretations and experience. The most interesting responses often come from the distance between what I intended and what someone else discovers. Amphetamine Sulphate is very much Phillip’s thing. He has a specific vision for how those books should look, feel and exist. When you send him a manuscript, you’re not just handing over text, you’re entering his wider artistic language. It’s more about recognizing that you’re collaborating with someone whose aesthetic vision you already believe in. You wouldn’t send Phillip the work if you didn’t

want that conversation to happen. There’s a particular pleasure in seeing someone else take something you’ve created and find a visual language for it. Something you never could’ve imagined yourself. That’s one of the great things about collaboration— sometimes the work becomes more of itself when it passes through another person’s hands. YOU ARRANGED AN ELECTRONICA SOUNDTRACK FOR SEX SHOPS OF SHERMAN OAKS AND BELFIE HELL. WHERE CAN PEOPLE STREAM THAT OR ANY MUSIC YOU MADE WITH MATTRESS GRAVE OR SNAKE MILKER?

SJC: I used to make mixtapes for each novel when they were released. They were essentially DJ sets, proper mixed sets, of whatever I was listening to while writing those particular books, not really soundtracks in the traditional sense, but more like a document of the atmosphere surrounding the work. Those are mostly still available on Mixcloud. The Mattress Grave and Snake Milker material is available across the usual streaming platforms, although it’s a little patchy. Not everything made its way onto every streaming 69

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service, and I’ve probably been less diligent than I should have been about maintaining the catalogue over the years. A lot of the material is also available on Bandcamp. To be honest, I’ve allowed some of it to slowly disintegrate, which is probably consistent with how I view a lot of this stuff. It’s also been a long time since I released a new Mattress Grave or Snake Milker album. There was some EP a few years ago when I recorded around eight new tracks for the Latex Texas reissue on Filthy Loot, but beyond that I haven’t really returned to making a full record.

Intimacy, Memory & Madness METH-DTF FOLLOWS AN UNNAMED NARRATOR AND ITS BOYFRIEND SAMUELL AROUND LOS ANGELES. THE PSYCHOTIC BREAKDOWN IS INDUCED FROM OBSESSION, MENTAL ILLNESS AND CHRONIC SUBSTANCE ABUSE. IS THIS A CAUTIONARY TALE OR A CASE STUDY ON WHY PEOPLE DON’T ALWAYS HAVE THE BEST INTENTIONS FOR THEMSELVES OR OTHERS?

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SJC: I don’t think METH-DTF is a cautionary tale in the traditional sense. A cautionary tale usually implies there is a clear lesson, you know, you should avoid this behaviour, make better choices, don’t follow this path. I’m less interested in that kind of moral framework. People rarely experience their own lives as a warning. They experience them as necessity, you must experience survival, lean into obsession you’re trapped in. For me, METH-DTF is closer to a case report of human behaviour. It examines what happens when certain impulses are amplified. The need for connection, validation, escape, manipulation, some sort of intimacy. What occurs when all that, all these impulses, collide with addiction, loneliness, psychological instability. The characters aren’t making decisions thinking about destructive impacts. I think that’s one of the things that fascinates me about destructive behaviour: from the outside, it can seem irrational, but from within your own logic, it often makes complete sense. People aren’t trying to destroy themselves. They’re trying to relieve something. They’re trying to fill a void, quiet a noise, escape a feeling, sometimes it’s

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good fun, sometimes it’s not. It goes back to the ideas I explored in Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks and Latex, Texas. In those books, I was interested in the way people become trapped by the stories they tell themselves. The difference with METH-DTF is that everything is pushed into a more extreme and exposed environment. ABOUT THE BOOKS This isn’t a morality play. Los Angeles was the perfect setting for that because it’s a city built around reinvention and performance. I see METH-DTF less as a warning, more as an observation, like I said, a case report. I have little interest in stories where people are simply waiting to be saved. If we’re waiting around for someone else to rescue us, we’ve already lost. The idea of salvation from the outside, like outside ourselves, is just fiction. THE SEX SHOPS OF SHERMAN OAKS EXAMINES AN AMBIGUOUS NARRATOR AND ITS PARTNER, MADHAB, AS THEY METAPHORICALLY SPLATTER ACROSS A CYBERPUNK UNIVERSE ON THE BRINK OF COLLAPSE. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE IMPASSIONED LOVE\HATE RELATIONSHIP YOU FOUND BEWITCHING?

SJC: The relationship between the narrator and Madhab in The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks was really where I first started exploring this idea of intimacy as something unstable, something that can be both magnetic and destructive at the same time. After the cast of thousands that is in Belfie Hell, I really just wanted something that had two characters. I sort of kept having the mental idea that this was my romance novel. I’ve never been particularly interested in the idea of love as a pure or uncomplicated force. Think about how love is portrayed in Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana. It’s heartbreaking, so the interesting territory is the contradiction. Someone can be the person who saves you, or enlivens you or whatever, and they can also be the person who damages you, you know sometimes simultaneously. So yes, their relationship and the universes around them was always on the edge of collapse. That theme continued to evolve with Latex, Texas, the focus moved onto memory, the psychological aftermath of relationships. How do these fucking people remain inside us after they’ve left, does intimacy create residue. We don’t just remember people, we carry weird, distorted versions 71

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of them around, this oddness, this internal lore of loved ones gone, dead, or who have left us in other ways. With METH-DTF it evolved further, that investigation became more extreme and behavioural. The person who know you best also has the ability to disrupt your sense of self. I was interested in the intensity between the narrator and Madhab, but I became more fascinated by the contradictions within that intensity. Why are we drawn to people who unsettle us? Why do the same qualities that attract us to someone sometimes become the qualities that make the relationship impossible? The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks became a romance novel that mutated into something, how people try to escape their own isolation through another person, and what happens when they discover that nobody can completely rescue them from themselves? I was probably pouring over sad memories a lot during the writing of that book, if that isn’t completely obvious. XEROX OVER MANHATTAN SWIRLS IN PANDEMONIUM WITH CHARACTERS THAT WEAVE IN AND OUT OF

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CONTEXT. I’LL ADMIT I’VE NEVER COME ACROSS THE PREMISE WHERE A LUNATIC LIKE PRESIDENT RICKY (AS IN BUSINESS—NOT POLITICS) BERATES THE NARRATOR. SO WILD. HOW DID THE CONCEPT OF RICKY EVOLVE FOR THIS NOVEL?

SJC: President Ricky really began as an idea about a president, any president, not specifically POTUS, more like the president of Standard Oil, not sure why they kept resonating given that Standard Oil don’t exist, but really a president more as a character. President Ricky is this corrupt or compromised person, so that’s obviously a trope right, straight from any screenplay, but you know, fiction doesn’t invent this shit out of nowhere, there’s some historical record of power, this political power being entangled with ego, money, self-interest. I wanted to have all that come out with President Ricky. I was literally sucking up the empirical evidence on how concentrated power attracts assholes who aren’t interested in responsibility, just more influence for ill ends. So Ricky isn’t really one person, he’s a bunch of ideas inside someone. And

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the reason Ricky berates the narrator is because Ricky exists in a universe where everything is a transaction and everyone is an audience. Ricky can’t simply communicate—he has to perform. Even a conversation becomes a stage. He’s not interested in understanding another person. Ricky has created a world where he is ABOUT THE BOOKS always the protagonist, where modern culture rewards behaviour like this. What does someone look like when they have become nothing but an embodiment? It was also fun to write like a maniac.

Unreadable Worlds BELFIE HELL UNRAVELS IN NEW ORLEANS WHERE CHARACTERS, CELEBRITIES AND HIP-HOP ARTISTS SINK INTO A DELUGE OF ABSURDITY AND CULTURAL ALLUSION. MIDWAY INTO THE BOOK YOUR ESSAY ON CREATIVITY INTEGRATES REALLY WELL WITH THE BOOK’S THEMATICS. WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR HUMANITY TO TOTALLY REVOLT AGAINST SOCIAL MEDIA AND AI?

SJC: I don’t know if humanity will revolt against social media and AI in

the sense of a dramatic uprising. I think they should. But I think it will be more complicated than that, it might be something more than a flatout refusal. Humans are incredibly adaptable, dynamic creatures, we’ve historically embraced technologies that diminish certain parts of ourselves while expanding others. The problem isn’t technology itself, actually that’s not true the technology is environmentally impactful, but there’s a few different things going on, it’s the surrender of our agency to systems designed primarily around big tech extracting attention, data, your behaviour for coin, your desires are now monetised, stolen copyright. There were big ideas sold to us around social media—sold as a tool for connection. It’s become an environment where people began performing themselves for invisible audiences. I remember when sampling was the end of the world, apparently the camera was going to kill painting or some shit, but those things weren’t outsourcing what makes our human experience meaningful. Not sure how AI will replicate curiosity, boredom, procrastination, fixation, or personal connections to other creative people. The most radical act now might be refusing to participate in the economy 73

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of visibility, weird given I am doing an interview, but the internet created this idea that everything has to be witnessed to have value. Belfie Hell is very much about that collision, bear in mind it is a 2018 book, where celebrity, technology, identity and entertainment became one giant feedback loop. Those characters are drowning in cultural information but starving for meaning. They’re surrounded by endless expression but increasingly disconnected from genuine experience. I don’t think the future is going to be humans versus machines, even though it’s great for science fiction. I think the more interesting conflict is humans versus the parts of themselves that willingly surrender to convenience. Will humans continue valuing the strange, irrational, inefficient things that make creativity human in the first place? But as long as we live in a world where people can witness unimaginable atrocities, genocides in real time and still remain largely paralyzed, if we struggle to mobilize ourselves around human lives being destroyed in front of us, I find it difficult to believe there will suddenly be some mass awakening against technologies that make doomscrolling 74

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more pleasurable when we take a shit. But yes, revolt. Prove me wrong. YEEZUS IN FURS CULTIVATES AN ATMOSPHERE THAT UNGLUES PEOPLES’ PSYCHE THE MORE CULT LEADER BECOMES HELLBENT ON VAPORIZING THE MATERIAL WORLD. AS NEW YORK FALLS INTO DILAPIDATED FRENETICISM, THE PROTAGONIST GETS TO OBSERVE THE DESTRUCTION FIRSTHAND. WHAT IS IT ABOUT NEUROTICISM THAT MAKES IT SO HUMOROUS TO WATCH?

SJC: I don’t know if neuroticism is funny in itself. I think certainty is probably funnier. The moment somebody becomes absolutely convinced they’ve discovered the hidden operating system of reality—they’re already halfway into comedy. Yeezus in Furs exists in that space where apocalypse and absurdity become indistinguishable. The Cult Leader genuinely believes he’s liberating humanity by erasing material existence, and everyone around him has their own selfdeception. New York amplifies that.

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It’s already vibrating with too many frequencies at once. The NYC in the book contains incompatible realities stacked on top of each other. NYC feels like the perfect environment for a collective psychological event, it becomes atmospheric, starts behaving like a nervous system. Perhaps it’s about living through an ABOUT THE BOOKS era that contains conspiracy culture, algorithmic thinking, influencer spirituality, political spectacle, financial abstraction. I’m not sure a single narrative can contain all that, so that’s what is happening in the book. I’m just turning the volume up on what is already here. Is it satire? I always though satire was less about prediction and more about exaggeration. Like I said, it’s everything turned up, pushed to the point where you can’t deny it anymore. LATEX, TEXAS IS AN OMINOUS TAKE ON INTIMACY AROUND THE HOUSTON AREA. THE CHRONOLOGY UNFOLDS LIKE CRYPTIC CINEMA AS MICHEAL SIEVES THROUGH FRACTURED MEMORIES IN A TURBULENT TIMELINE. IN A STORY LIKE THIS—WHAT WAS IT LIKE EXCAVATING INTO

THE UNDERBELLY OF HUMAN EMOTION?

SJC: I don’t think I was excavating, perhaps exposing the residue when emotion gets up and leaves. I find I’m pretty unreliable when thinking of my own life, you know archiving my memories about how things went down. Do I remember this event as a neat narrative, in my head perhaps, but really, I remember fluorescent motel signs, carpet bloodstains, and it just becomes sentences that then mutate every time I replay the memories. Latex, Texas is assembled from those contaminations. Michael doesn’t travel through Houston, because Houston is a damaged memory system. The chronology fractures because memory fractures. Trauma doesn’t arrive alphabetically. Houston becomes essential because it possesses that strange mental geography. It’s sprawling, petrochemical, humid, endlessly expanding, so I’m generally suspicious of novels that explain emotion. Once a book starts telling me what someone feels, I’m less interested. I’m far more interested in creating conditions where the reader feels something before they understand why. I’d rather produce a kind of synthetic telepathy—an experience where 75

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you as the reader inhabits someone else’s contaminated consciousness for eighty pages. You then emerge carrying fragments that don’t quite belong to yourself anymore. That’s always felt closer to how memory and intimacy actually function than conventional realism ever has. TELL US ABOUT THE UPCOMING PROJECT WITH CHARLENE ELSBY FROM INSIDE THE CASTLE PRESS. WHO WAS FIRST TO PITCH THIS PARTNERSHIP?

SJC: I basically slid into her DMs one day. We’d been communicating for a while, I’d blurbed one of her books, and I suggested we do it. I’ve only ever asked three people to collaborate on something like this, and the first two projects just completely fell apart. Charlene was actually keen, which was the important bit, obviously. That became the propulsion for me to get on board and actually finish the thing. We had to work out the framework of how and who would write what. We went back and forth for a while about how we were going to collaborate, and it became this really good exercise in selflessness. 76

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Which, honestly, is probably how all personal relationships should operate anyway. I’m forever grateful to Charlene for the book, because it was a nice respite from some of the more challenging books I’d been grinding away at. Not that this book didn’t have challenges. It was fun. It was fast. It didn’t require me to sit contemplating the metaphysical consequence of one sentence for six months. Charlene’s editorial notes were basically just variations of her telling me to fuck things up more. That was pretty much it. YOUR WRITING CREATES A NEW EXPERIENCE WHEN IT COMES TO READING. IT’S FASCINATING HOW YOU BREAK DOWN LANGUAGE INTO A CLASS OF ITS OWN— SOMETHING I’D CALL MUTATED TESTIMONY ABOUT HUMAN BEHAVIOR. IT’S GENIUS. CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE MADNESS BEHIND THE CREATIVITY?

SJC: I think madness, if there is any, comes from refusing to treat language as a transparent medium. We’re taught that words only exist to communicate clearly. I’ve never really

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thought that. Language is unstable. It’s unreliable. It conceals as much as it reveals. Delirium is inside my books, not as a literary device, or experiment, but because your consciousness is fractured. I don’t think or want to think in neat paragraphs. Our lives, namely our inner lives constantly mutate. Conventional prose often ABOUT THE BOOKS tidies that experience into something more coherent than it really is. I wanted to write closer to the texture of thought than to the performance of thought. If my writing feels like what you call mutated testimony— it’s probably because I’m trying to document consciousness before it explains itself, before our horrible memories become narrative, before our trauma become anecdote, before it learns anything that makes it acceptable. There’s raw material just beneath language. HAVE YOU READ GRAVITY’S RAINBOW BY THOMAS PYNCHON? IT’S NOTORIOUS FOR BEING ONE OF THE MOST UNREADABLE BOOKS EVER PUBLISHED—HOWEVER—IT’S ALSO ONE OF THE MOST REWARDING FOR THOSE WHO REACH THE END. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON

PEOPLE WHO LABEL BOOKS UNREADABLE VERSUS THE ONES WHO THRUST NOVELS INTO CULT ACCLAIM?

SJC: I’ve read some Pynchon, although I’m much more interested in the 1960s and 1970s work, so yes, Gravity’s Rainbow stuff. The period where paranoia, technology, politics, counterculture, all collide. Gravity’s Rainbow is the monumental work everyone points toward, but what interests me more is the idea of something that’s labelled unreadable. It seems so dumb. I think that word, unreadable, often reveals more about the reader than the work itself. When someone says a book is unreadable, I wonder if what they’re really saying is that the book is operating outside the boundaries of what they’ve been trained to accept as readable. We’ve become accustomed to immediate comprehension. We want the meaning delivered cleanly, efficiently, with no resistance. But some works are attempting to reach toward things that are not easily organized into human language. Some things are just simply beyond ordinary knowledge, something too large, contradictory or strange for our peabrains to fully contain. In that sense, perhaps the problem isn’t that 77

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the work is unreadable, perhaps it’s that we are limited readers. People used to talk about the ideas around the bicameral mind, the theory proposed by Julian Jaynes, where ancient human consciousness may have functioned differently, people experiencing thoughts or impulses as external voices—rather than as internal monologue like we do today. Perhaps that is what is happening with

so-called unreadable novels, certain works attempting to communicate from outside our usual mental framework. It’s a sad state when something so wondrous as Thomas Pynchon is labelled hard to read, I mean come on. It’s some brilliant science fiction, not that hard to deal with. 

A young man on a radar screen. Sewerage from the storm drain. Makeshift refugee compounds. Dishwasher used as an ice box. The luncheon held on artificial grass. Television. Late 1980s. Evangelical Christianity. Herpes medication. Cocaine and ear canals. Game show contestants. A flavoured Buddhist with black patent shoes. Mass aneurysms. President Ricky reading statistical reports. Race conflicts and routine insults. Spider legs and an open mouth. Fresh towels on translucent skin. Ashblonde curls in the restroom washbasin. War gases and fever organisms. Spiritual exercises on a warm night. President Ricky covered in a mild analgesic. Polaroids and secondhand watches. Silverware. Glassware. Fur stoles. Blood in the railyard. PepsiCola manufactured by the War Department. Plus-sized cartoons and infographics. Sexual research and monthly repayments. Soiled stairwells in dissolving hotel rooms. Shapeless emotions in residential suburbs. Documents for interplanetary space civilization kept in a shoe box. Company constructs steel-like muscles. The athletic legs of office workers. Police paranoia concerning a hippie stronghold. An imminent car crash that involves President Ricky. Reflective eye sockets that contain retractable razor blades. Lice in long black hair. Warm vapors hanging from wide lips. Great fissures in the mountain ranges of North America. Shoe fetishism and flyscreen windows. The filthy hole of President Ricky. 78

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F E AT U R E

Banned At Home, Read Everywhere Else. BY SARAH KLOTH

“A censor can seize a manuscript. Nobody has ever figured out how to seize a translation that’s already loose in another language.”

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Eight books censored, imprisoned, or written their way out of a prison cell, and how translation became the place they survived. Behrouz Boochani wrote his memoir one text message at a time. Confined for more than five years in Australia’s offshore detention center on Manus Island, he had no desk, no computer, no certainty he would ever leave. What he did have was a mobile phone and an intermittent WhatsApp connection. Across thousands of messages, typed in Farsi and sent to translator Omid Tofighian, a book slowly crossed the sea before its author ever could. Sentence by sentence, signal by signal, No Friend but the Mountains emerged from a place designed to erase people from public view. When the book won Australia’s richest literary prize, Boochani was still barred from entering the country to accept it. That paradox echoes through every book in this collection. Here is a novel that disappeared from Chinese bookstores three days after publication. A prison memoir drafted in Egypt with an eyebrow pencil on toilet paper because pens were forbidden. A

novel written in a Kenyan maximumsecurity prison on rationed tissue. A memoir smuggled out of a Turkish prison through meetings with lawyers. Their circumstances differ. Their governments differ. Yet each book arrived at the same threshold, where the greatest threat was no longer whether it could be written, but whether it could continue to exist. None of these works needed English to become literature. They were already complete, already urgent, already dangerous in the languages that first gave them life. What English offered was something else: another jurisdiction. Another readership. Another chance. Translation, in these cases, was never simply an act of literary exchange. It became a form of passage. A book denied space in one language found room to breathe in another. The eight works that follow span six decades and five continents. Some were banned. Some were confiscated. Some were composed behind bars with whatever materials their authors could hide or borrow. Their writers did not know who would read them, only that someone, somewhere, eventually might. A government can confiscate a manuscript. It can silence a publisher. It can imprison the writer. What it cannot easily reclaim is a story that has already crossed into another language. 81

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Eight Books That Wrote Their Way Out: Presented in the order they were written or first published, tracing the censor’s reach from a kenyan maximum-security prison to a chinese ban that took three days to land.

1. Devil on the Cross

BY NGUGĨ WA THIONG’O Written in Gikuyu, translated into English by the author · Kenya · composed 1977–78, published 1980

Arrested without charge on New Year’s Eve 1977 and held at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Ngũgĩ used the months of his detention to compose the first modern novel written in Gikuyu, on rationed sheets of toilet paper. His choice of language was itself the argument: a direct refusal to keep writing Kenyan literature in the colonizer’s English.

2. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison

BY NAWAL EL SAADAWI Translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth · Egypt · written 1981–82, published 1983

Imprisoned by the Sadat government in 1981 for ‘crimes against the state,’ the Egyptian doctor and novelist was denied pen and paper. She smuggled in a stubby black eyebrow pencil from a fellow prisoner and wrote on a roll of coarse toilet tissue, documenting how the women inside — secular intellectuals and Islamists alike — organized to survive each other’s company as much as the state’s.

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3. The Satanic Verses

BY SALMAN RUSHDIE Written in English · India / United Kingdom · published 19881980

Banned in India within days of publication and burned in the streets of Bradford before Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the author’s death in 1989, the novel spent the following decade as the most famous banned book in the world, forcing Rushdie into hiding for years under British police protection. Its ban made translation moot in one direction and urgent in every other: publishers across dozens of languages defied the fatwa to keep it in print.

4. The Land of Green Plums

BY HERTA MÜLLER Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann · Romania · published 1994 (German), 1996 (English)

Müller was dismissed from her factory translating job in the late 1970s after she refused to become an informer for Ceaușescu’s secret police, the Securitate, and spent the following years under surveillance, interrogation, and censorship before emigrating to Berlin in 1987. The Nobel committee that awarded her the 2009 Prize in Literature praised a writer who, they said, ‘with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.’

5. Dream of Ding Village

BY YAN LIANKE Translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter · China · published 2006

A novel about a rural blood-selling scandal that left an entire village HIV positive, pulled from circulation on the Chinese mainland just three days after it reached shelves. Yan, one of China’s most decorated living novelists, has had six of his most recent books published only in Taiwan and Hong Kong — never on the mainland where he lives and teaches.

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6. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

BY SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich · Belarus · published 2013 (Russian), 2016 (English)

The 2015 Nobel laureate’s oral history of the Soviet collapse was pulled from Belarusian libraries in 2023 and stripped from the national school curriculum two years earlier, part of a broader purge following the Lukashenko government’s crackdown on the 2020 protests. Alexievich left for exile in Berlin that same year, forced to abandon years of unfinished manuscripts behind her.

7. No Friend But The Mountains

BY BEHROUZ BOOCHANI Translated from the Farsi by Omid Tofighian · Iran / Manus Island, Australia · published 2018

Composed entirely over WhatsApp during more than five years of indefinite offshore detention on Manus Island, where the Australian government sent Boochani after he sought asylum by boat. The book went on to win Australia’s Victorian Prize for Literature, the country’s most valuable literary award — a prize its author could not travel to collect.

8. I Will Never See The World Again

BY AHMET ALTAN Translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar · Turkey

Arrested in the purge following Turkey’s failed 2016 coup and sentenced to life without parole for allegedly sending ‘subliminal messages’ in support of the plot, the veteran journalist and novelist wrote his memoir from Silivri Prison, smuggling pages out through his lawyers one visit at a time.

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What Survives the Sentence. None of these authors intended to become symbols of censorship. They intended to write books. The censorship came afterward. So did the translation. Behind every volume here is another, quieter act of courage: a translator deciding that one voice, written under surveillance or behind prison walls or against the threat of disappearance, deserved another life. Not a replacement life, but an additional one. Another language. Another readership. Another archive against forgetting. Boochani eventually received his prize money. He still could not enter the room where his work was being celebrated. Perhaps that distance says everything. Between the country that tried to contain a book and the readers who welcomed it anyway lies the enduring purpose of translation. It does not make literature universal. It makes literature harder to erase. Every language a censored book enters becomes another place where memory survives, where power loses a little of its certainty, and where a writer’s voice continues long after borders, prisons, and bans have tried to silence it.

INTERVIEW

Interview: Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki, translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood BY SARAH KLOTH

Akane Araki was born in 1998 in Fukuoka, Japan. She is a graduate of Kyushu University's School of Letters. Murder at the End of the World is her first novel, and it won the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize. Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator working from Japanese into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, his translations include The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai, Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto and The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa (available from Pushkin Vertigo). 86

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Where the Story Began.

Before Murder at the End of the World existed in English, it was Akane's prize-winning debut — a serial killer story that set out to do something different with a familiar genre. MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD IS YOUR PRIZE-WINNING DEBUT. WHAT FIRST INSPIRED THE STORY, AND WHAT DID IT MEAN TO HAVE IT RECOGNIZED WITH THE EDOGAWA RAMPO PRIZE?

AA: The starting point for the novel wasn’t actually the idea of an asteroid striking Earth. Just before graduating from university, I started attending driving school, and that was where the initial inspiration came from. I have poor coordination and I’m also quite timid, so I found the lessons really hard. I was really miserable there, and to take my mind off it I started imagining a novel set at a driving school. Before long, I’d decided I wanted to write a mystery featuring an instructor and a student as an investigative duo.

But I couldn’t think of a plausible situation where you’d have two ordinary civilians taking the lead in an investigation instead of the police, so I ended up creating a dystopian setting in which the police had been severely incapacitated. When I was writing the book, my biggest ambition in life was to win the Edogawa Rampo Prize. It’s a highly prestigious award with a long history, and its previous winners and judges are all leading figures in the field. So from the age of fifteen, when I first started writing mysteries, I’d dreamed of having the title ‘Edogawa Rampo Prize winner’ attached to my name. It’s been four years since I won, but even now it doesn’t quite feel real. THE NOVEL HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS A SERIAL KILLER STORY “WITH A DIFFERENCE.” WHAT DID YOU WANT TO DO DIFFERENTLY WITHIN THAT GENRE?

AA: The various ingredients of the novel are not especially new in themselves, but by combining them in my own way I hoped to 87

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create something that would read differently from the serial-killer novels that had come before. In particular, two key aspects of the novel feel fresh to me: it’s a female buddy story, and a ‘road novel’ set in a regional city. Many of the settings in the book come from the area where I was born and brought up, but it isn’t the kind of place you’d ordinarily expect to see depicted in a novel or television drama. To people living in big cities like Tokyo, Kyushu is a distant and little-known part of the country – and young women who choose to stay and make their lives in those sorts of provincial areas also tend to be overlooked. So I thought that if I could combine the everyday scenery I knew so well with a mystery story, I might be able to create a world that would feel unfamiliar to lots of readers in different ways. HOW DID YOU THINK ABOUT TONE, SUSPENSE, AND MISDIRECTION AS YOU BUILT THE STORY? 88

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AA: The story takes place with the end of humanity fast approaching, but I deliberately tried to avoid making the overall tone too bleak. I was interested in portraying the ordinary routines that return after people have come to terms with tragedy or simply resigned themselves to it, which is why the protagonist’s narrative voice is so matter-of-fact. Another feature of the novel is that almost every scene is presented from the protagonist’s first-person point of view, which allows me to control how much information is given to the reader. By only gradually disclosing key information – while intentionally concealing other things – I tried to enable readers to experience the suspense of the story from the same perspective as the protagonist. WHAT FIRST DREW YOU TO AKANE'S WRITING, AND WHAT MADE THIS NOVEL FEEL LIKE THE RIGHT PROJECT TO BRING INTO ENGLISH?

JK: The novel had been on my radar after winning the prestigious

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Edogawa Rampo Prize, but my curiosity was really piqued when I learned it was set in Dazaifu in Kyushu, where I spent my first year in Japan, back in 2012. The idea of revisiting a part of the country that holds so many memories for me – this time refracted through ABOUT THE BOOKS Araki’s striking apocalyptic vision – was irresistible, as was the chance to spend time with such convincing and sensitively drawn female protagonists, who remain all too rare in crime fiction. So when Pushkin approached me to translate the novel, I was all ears. THIS IS ARAKI'S PRIZE-WINNING DEBUT. HOW DID YOU APPROACH TRANSLATING A BRAND-NEW VOICE, ESPECIALLY WITHIN A GENRE LIKE CRIME FICTION THAT HAS SUCH PARTICULAR CONVENTIONS?

JK: Araki writes in such a fresh and winning style, and I wanted to stay true to that as much as possible. Even the parts of the book that hew more closely to traditional crime fiction are filtered through the perspectives of Haru and Isagawa, so the central challenge was ensuring

that both characters (and their distinct voices) came fully alive in English. Much of that comes down to word choice, especially in dialogue where tiny adjustments can really pull the voice in whatever direction it needs to go – playful, stern, hesitant and so on. JAPANESE CRIME FICTION OFTEN PLAYS WITH STRUCTURE AND PERSPECTIVE IN WAYS THAT DON'T MAP NEATLY ONTO ENGLISH. WERE THERE STRUCTURAL OR STYLISTIC CHOICES IN THE ORIGINAL THAT REQUIRED CREATIVE SOLUTIONS?

JK: Yes – although explaining them properly would require a short essay and also several spoiler warnings! The novel’s structure is closely bound up with its revelations, so some of the trickiest decisions involved controlling exactly when information becomes clear in English. Japanese can leave certain things unstated in ways that English often resists; the challenge is often to preserve that uncertainty without making the prose feel evasive. WERE THERE SPECIFIC WORDS, IDIOMS, OR CULTURAL 89

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REFERENCES IN THE BOOK THAT POSED A PARTICULAR CHALLENGE TO TRANSLATE?

JK: The relationship between Haru and Isagawa is central to the novel, and it rests on the teacherpupil dynamic set up by the fact that Isagawa is technically her driving instructor. Even as they end up solving a murder together, that dynamic never goes away, and in Japanese it’s constantly reinforced by Haru addressing Isagawa as sensei. If you retain the Japanese word every time, it begins to feel intrusive in English, but remove it and you lose something essential to their relationship. I ended up keeping only the instances where it carries an emotional weight that felt important to the scene. HOW CLOSELY DID YOU WORK WITH AKANE DURING THE TRANSLATION PROCESS, IF AT ALL?

JK: Authors tend to be very busy people, and I also feel that a translation needs room of its own to breathe. So I tend to save direct queries until fairly late in the game, when it’s become clear that 90

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the author’s input is really vital. In this case we floated a slightly wild workaround for one particular problem, and Araki (probably wisely) asked us to rethink it. AS A TRANSLATOR WORKING FROM JAPANESE INTO ENGLISH, HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR OWN VOICE VERSUS PRESERVING THE AUTHOR'S?

JK: My job is to try to recreate, using the tools available to me in English, whatever feels most unique or striking about the author’s voice and the experience of reading the novel. Insofar as I have my own ‘voice’ in translation, I think it consists in the choices I make as I go about that process. WHAT HAS IT BEEN LIKE SEEING THE NOVEL REACH ENGLISHLANGUAGE READERS FOR THE FIRST TIME, THROUGH JESSE'S TRANSLATION?

AA:I’m delighted and amazed that, through Jesse’s translation, this novel has travelled to places I could never have reached on my own. When I wrote it, I wasn’t even a professional writer, and I couldn’t even imagine

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people reading it in Japan, let alone in the English-speaking world, so I still find all of this hard to believe. Given the cultural differences involved, I was initially worried about whether readers in the English-speaking world would connect with the novel. I found ABOUT THE BOOKS myself wondering whether such readers could really enjoy a novel containing so many scenes rooted in Japan’s specific driving-licence system and set in such a specifically local part of Fukuoka. If the novel’s qualities have come across, that’s entirely down to Jesse’s sensitive and skilful translation. WHAT WAS THE MOST SATISFYING MOMENT YOU HAD WHILE TRANSLATING THIS NOVEL?

JK: Whenever the novel took me somewhere I recognized from my time in the area: mountains I’d climbed, stations where I used to catch the train. I once ate the best oysters of my life in a hut very similar to the one where a key scene in the novel takes place. I’m not sure how much of that familiarity made

its way into the final manuscript, but it definitely gave me a very vivid sense of the landscape as I translated. WHAT DO YOU HOPE READERS — IN JAPAN AND ABROAD — TAKE AWAY FROM THIS BOOK?

AA: Throughout the novel, there are scenes where the characters find their moral compass being shaken. If the world’s about to end, why not just do whatever you want? If everyone’s doomed anyway, what does it matter if you end up hurting other someone else? At the same time, the novel asks whether there are certain values we should never lose sight of, no matter how extreme our circumstances become. Our world is held together by the trust we place in other people. I’d be very happy if everyone who reads this story comes away convinced of that. WHAT DO YOU WANT NEW READERS TO KNOW ABOUT YOU AS A DEBUT VOICE IN JAPANESE CRIME FICTION?

AA: There are times when I think I’d rather people knew nothing about me. In the novel, Haru, is 91

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patronized by being called ‘young lady’, and I often feel like something similar happens to my work once readers know it was written by a relatively young woman. Even though I’m approaching thirty now, I still often hear people say how surprising it is that a ‘such a young, quietlooking woman’ could write this novel. Whenever that happens, I want to say: forget about me – just read the novel. At the same time, I also feel very strongly that I want readers to know about my background. It’s a very ordinary and maybe quite a dull background, but I think there may be people who would find that encouraging. I was born and raised in one of the more rural parts of Fukuoka, far from Japan’s major cities. I’ve never lasted long in an office job, I’m not very good with people, and the only qualification I have to my name is a driving license. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old woman, and I love nothing more than reading and writing detective stories and crime fiction.  92

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READ AN EXCERPT ON PG 50!

ABOUT THE BOOK An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and the human race has just over two months to live. But twenty-three-year-old Haru, stargazer and chronic worrier, is still trying to pass her driving test. Then she finds a body in the boot of her car: a woman, stabbed and tortured. There’s a murderer on the loose. And it turns out that Haru’s driving instructor is an ex-cop with a manic devotion to justice. So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the two women team up to catch the culprit regardless of the danger. After all, the world’s not quite over yet…

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The Instruction Manual: Helping Parents & Players Navigate Youth Sports BY STEVEN L. DAVIS

"The Instruction Manual" by Author-Head Coach Steven L. Davis is a practical sports playbook built from decades of experience as a multisport athlete, coach, sports parent, and mentor. Learn how to choose youth sports programs, support athletic development, manage challenges and emotions, navigate competitive tryouts and recruiting, and even pursue the dream of playing professionally. Filled with proven strategies and insider tips, this guide helps families make the most of their youth sports journey. Includes a free digital budget planner.

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THE LAST MATRIARCH BY ELIZA AGUDELO

In The Last Matriarch: Everlasting Transformation, Eliza Agudelo shares her deeply personal journey through the loss of her mother, the woman who shaped her life and family legacy. From daily calls and quiet rituals to grief, guilt, generational wounds, and healing, this memoir explores what remains after goodbye and how loss can lead to reflection, truth, and transformation.

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A Portion of Malice BY LLOYD JEFFRIES

An Ancient Evil Rises. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Emery Merrick is ready to end it all when a knock at the door interrupts his plans. Billionaire Thaddeus Drake hires Emery to write his biography, but Drake harbors a dangerous secret. He leads an ancient, secret society bent on fulfilling a prophecy and sacrificing the Earth to a bloodthirsty God. This gripping thriller follows Emery's explosive journey into the apocalypse, as he embarks on an epic quest to confront God as an equal. Deeply stirring, Emery is thrust into a world of darkness, deceit, and brutality.

A Trial of Fate BY J.E. LARSON

Our world is dying. Skylar Cathal is a twentytwo-year-old half-human, half-shifter with a curious mind and knack for bending the rules. Gilen Warrick, Skylar’s childhood friend and the next Alpha of the Solace pack, wants more than just her friendship– but fate has a will of its own. When Skylar is marked as the shifter champion, she must overcome her darkest fears to leave her home and those she loves behind. Daxton Aegaeon, High Fae Prince of Silver Meadows, has sworn to protect Skylar as his ward, but only she can protect her heart.

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Zephyr's Flight

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BY MARISA BILLIONS

What matters more, your place as a daughter or as a mother? Androulla is twentyfour and newly married when she learns that she is infertile. In a bid for Cypriot citizenship she is undergoing adoption by her stepfather, and wondering if she will have to adopt a child one day herself. As this reality sets in, Androulla’s marriage unravels. Between migration departments and doctors’ appointments, she must question what it means to be from somewhere, what it means to be a woman and, when an impossible choice presents itself, which of those things means the most to her.

As a thousand years of peace shatters, a rebellious village girl and her dragon stand against an empire. Astria's only dream is to become a Dragon Rider, but the dragons are leaving. All but Zephyr. Crippled and flightless, he refuses to leave Astria’s side after she saves his life. But the Council of Elders forbids their partnership, fearing the End of Times foretold by an ancient prophecy. Defiance of their orders risks exile— and certain death—in the hostile highlands of the Wild. Determined to fly no matter the cost, Astria is quickly embroiled in a conflict between empires, where only one person understands her desires: a warrior from another land. 97

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The Third Estate

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An East L.A. Pawnbroker Aspires to be a Criminal Mastermind -- The Moth has bitten off more of East L.A. than he can chew. On the fringes of serious crime, the Moth reveals himself as a man whose morals are largely good but whose ethics are shaky. He’s battled by local forces — from the Arpias gang to a detective who’s forced him to fink out fellow crooks. Stumble along with the Moth as he serves a tough, ironic world, never quite getting there.

In an outdoor market, an ordinary woman is gunned down by an assassin. Twelve years later, the killer is back with a new target – and a mysteriously sinister employee. A jet pilot cadet at a military academy, Sophie Allard’s world is shattered when she’s summoned to the Commander’s office with devastating news—her estranged father has died in a mysterious lab explosion. A routine investigation soon spirals into something far more dangerous. With an assassin hunting her every step, will Sophie uncover the truth before it’s too late?

The Pale Flesh of Wood

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Set among the faultprone landscape of Northern California, The Pale Flesh of Wood explores the rippling effects of trauma following the suicide of charismatic yet emotionally troubled WWII veteran Charles Hawkins. Told by three generations of the Hawkins family, the lyrically told braided narrative exposes the unsettling nature when the ground suddenly shifts beneath their feet and how they must each come to terms with their own sense of guilt in order to forgive and carry on.

When vivacious college student Melody Merriweather is summoned home to run her family's general store after her father suffers a heart attack, she's convinced her life is over. The sleepy mining town of Merriweather, Wisconsin is a far cry from her exciting life in Chicago. With the country deep in the Depression and the Mercantile on the verge of collapse, Melody must rally a quirky staff and try to keep the business afloat. As tensions rise and mysterious strangers arrive in Merriweather, Melody finds herself confronting more than just a failing business. She’ll have to face her own misguided assumptions about love, loyalty, and what it means to truly belong.

BY ELIZABETH A. TUCKER

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BY MICHELLE COX

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The Secret Song of Shelby Rey BY RAYNE LACKO

A story of love, music, addiction, and selfdiscovery from the author of A Song For The Road. Eighteenyear-old Shelby Rey can hear people’s secrets as songs—haunting, and painfully honest. After her mom kicks her out, Shelby falls into the orbit of Zac Wyatt, a rock star with a melody she can't ignore. But behind the spotlight lies obsession, rivalry, and a truth that could ruin them all. Caught between love, addiction, and betrayal, Shelby must decide if her gift is a curse—or her only way out.

Measure of Devotion BY NELL JOSLIN

As the Civil War begins, thirty-six year old South Carolinian Susannah Shelburne and her husband Jacob oppose slavery and the Southern cause. Yet their son Francis becomes a Confederate soldier, sparking bitter familial discord. When Francis is wounded near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Susannah embarks on a perilous journey and finds him haunted and delirious; soon thereafter he becomes a prisoner of war. As the war grinds on, Susannah faces impossible choices amidst harrowing revelations from home. This gripping narrative explores themes of sacrifice, resilience, and the profound impacts of war on families; a vivid portrait of a woman's relentless fight for survival and reconciliation in a time of unprecedented turmoil.

The Murmur of Everything Moving BY MAUREEN STANTON

When Maureen Stanton's boyfriend, Steve, at 29, was diagnosed with cancer, they embarked on an all-out effort to save his life. Meanwhile, Steve's childhood friend, Joey, a drug addict, sold Steve's pain medication to pay for Steve's experimental treatments. This eloquent memoir is an odyssey through the difficult but exquisite terrain of love in the face of mortality. Winner of the Donald Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Fox Creek

BY M.E. TORREY

In 1843 Louisiana, the beloved biracial daughter of a wealthy planter is sold into slavery and must survive while caught between the world of the white elite and the brutality of slavery. Sold along with her is Cyrus, a boy big for his age, torn from his mother without a chance to say goodbye. Together they are purchased by the Jensey family, where soon, their destinies will collide. Fox Creek is a story of race, privilege, and destiny. But most of all, it is a story of love, a love that transcends all that threatens to tear it apart. 99

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The Last Whaler. Set against the haunting beauty and brutal extremes of the Arctic, The Last Whaler follows Tor Handeland, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, who are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station on Svalbard when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them home. Beyond enduring the Arctic winter’s eternal night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold—and Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy. The Last Whaler is an elegiac meditation on the resilience of the human spirit, the enduring power of love and remembrance, and the fragile threads that connect us to each other and to our environment. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CYNTHIA REEVES

Cynthia Reeves’s fascination with the Arctic began in childhood, reading tales of doomed polar explorers. Her experience on the 2017 Arctic Circle Expedition along Svalbard’s western shores—and three later residencies in Longyearbyen—has since shaped her writing. Her most ambitious work, The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing), has been praised by the New York Times as "an engrossing historical novel that celebrates ... an icy landscape filled with enchantment and danger." She is also the author of the award-winning Falling Through the New World (Gold Wake Press), inspired by her Italian immigrant roots, and Badlands, winner of Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. A Hawthornden Fellow, Reeves holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr and Rosemont Colleges. 103

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Never Dull!

“Witty and inspirational. As Will Rogers said, 'Everything is funny as long as it is happening to someone else.'" - reviewed by Cowgirl Magazine.

This book is a tribute to the author’s remarkable family and the legends of the rodeo world who illustrate life lessons such as: * Put God first * You can do anything * Be honest * Laugh at yourself * Stand up for what you believe * Attitude is everything * You are never too old * There is no such thing as easy money * Stand by your man * Enjoy the moment * Know what is important

The reader does not have to be a horse person to enjoy this book. The setting of many stories is the rodeo arena, but the values apply to all of us. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HEATHER SHARP Heather Sharp entertains audiences with tales of life as a cowgirl, her journey to becoming a military pilot, and over 30 years with the airlines. She recently wrote about her amazing family in a book aptly titled Never Dull!—a family reunion could easily double as a comedy show!

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The Silver Squad. Barry and Beth, high school sweethearts separated by time and circumstance, find themselves reunited at the Blue Loon Village senior living center in Minneapolis. Now both seventy, they rekindle their relationship only to discover how differently time has shaped them. Beth has blossomed into a free spirit with a goth flair, while Barry has transformed into the curmudgeon he swore in his youth he’d never become. Determined to prove you’re never too old to make a difference, they set off on a daring road trip across America as Silver Squad vigilantes. Along the way, they pick up a woman on the run from her abusive husband, confront a mass shooter with only a can of SPAM for defense, and become accidental celebrities along the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARTY ESSEN Marty Essen is the multi-award-winning author of eight books (three nonfiction and five fiction). He is also a college speaker, activist, adventurer, and photographer. He has written about his adventures on all seven continents and spoken on college campuses in forty-five states.

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Running As Fast As I Can. Daniel Robinson was a punching bag for his drunken father and abused by his pastor. He runs aways, wandering the country during the turbulent 1960s. On his journey, he gets caught up in the hippie drug invasion in San Francisco, racial violence in Cleveland and Detroit. Daniel finally finds love with Kate, who was running from her own demons. When asked to find housing for Charles Vickers, a black man who spent twenty years in prison for a rape Daniel is convinced he never committed, they open their own home to him. This enrages the community when a local girl disappears. Violence erupts—with Daniel as the focus of their rage. Should he stay and fight for Charles—and put his family at risk, or run away again?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN DAVID GRAHAM JOHN DAVID GRAHAM is the founder of Good Samaritan Home, a housing / mentoring program helping men and women restart their lives after prison. In the past twenty-four years, he and his staff have helped more than 2,500 people get a second chance and reenter the community. Prior to publishing his debut novel RUNNING AS FAST AS I CAN at age 75, he was a door-to-door salesman, children’s home counselor, substitute school teacher, truck driver, fireman, building contractor, minister and journalist. John says it was those “detours” that helped him develop the “calloused hands and tender heart” needed to write this story.

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Relentless. On the eve of her five-year wedding anniversary, a devastating terrorist attack in Paris shatters former CIA analyst Kate Preacher’s world and thrusts her into a lethal game of kill or be killed. Her husband, retired Navy SEAL Jake Church, is caught in the chaos—his actions spark a media firestorm and awaken enemies from Kate’s past. Drawn back into a world of deception and betrayal, Kate follows a trail of secrets that point to a shocking global conspiracy. As the investigation paints a target on her back, Kate must decide: is she just a pawn in a deadly international plot—or the one person who can bring it down?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHAEL MALOOF Michael Maloof is the award-winning author of Relentless and its highly anticipated sequel Unstoppable. His globetrotting adventures across forty countries—from dredging for gold in Honduras to training alongside Navy SEALs and CIA operatives—infuse his thrillers with unparalleled authenticity. He's not just writing thrillers—he's lived them.

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Storrow Drive. When investigative reporter Joe Dolan gets embedded with the Boston FBI AntiGang Task Force to research a story, he doesn’t worry. But then he’s subpoenaed to appear in court against a ruthless heroin dealer, and he realizes he’s now known to street gangs as a narc. Soon, Marco, the savage new replacement to the throne, wants to ensure Dolan won’t interfere again. Dolan must rely on his instincts and contacts in the underworld, crossing Boston on the T. His plight becomes a gripping trawl through the seediest underbelly of crime, where a misstep might end your life.

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JAY ATKINSON Jay Atkinson is the author of five narrative nonfiction books and five works of fiction. He’s published two nonfiction bestsellers, ICE TIME and LEGENDS OF WINTER HILL (Crown Publishers NY). His first book, the novel CAVEMAN POLITICS (Breakaway Books, New York) was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. Jay’s narrative nonfiction book, MASSACRE ON THE MERIMACK (Lyons Press, New York) won the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction in 2017. His novel City in Amber, and two story collections, TREE STAND, and TAUVERNIER STREET, are available from Livingston Press. A former twosport college athlete with a degree in philosophy, Jay has traveled extensively to pursue adventures in more than thirty countries. He lives in Methuen, Massachusetts, and teaches writing at Boston University.

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Allie’s Adventure on the Wonder. Fourteen-year-old Allie Little lives in a Wonderland with none of the wonder. Diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), whatever she reads, sees, or hears often becomes nonsense, and the time to be “curiouser and curiouser” is a luxury she can’t afford from the impatient people around her. But one day, on a ferry named the Wonder, Allie meets an odd character named Charlie and sees the creativity and joy that madness can bring. A semi-autobiography of the author’s personal experiences with APD, reimagined through the lens of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, here is a modern fairy tale about accepting the methods in one’s madness to navigate the real world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ERIKA LYNN ADAMS Erika Lynn Adams was born in Helmstedt, Germany in 1986 and has lived in the United States since 1988. Diagnosed early with Auditory Processing Disorder, she faced challenges with language processing, memory, and reading comprehension. With support from specialists and special education programs, she steadily built her academic skills and went on to earn an Associate of Arts degree from Lake Superior College and a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her experiences shaped a strong passion for storytelling across multiple forms of media. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota, where she produces and hosts the nonprofit radio program, The Tale Collector.

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RETURN OF PODSTER!

Shelf Media Group's digital magazine about podcasts and podcasters.

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It Gets Good.

WITH HANNAH, MICAELA, AND KYLEIGH

FIND YOUR NEXT PODCAST BY CORINNA KLOTH

Podster is a column for podcast listeners and serves as a curator for the best of known and unknown podcasts.

About the Podcast

IT GETS GOOD WITH HANNAH, MICAELA, AND KYLEIGH

Welcome to the It Gets Good Podcast where we’ll be discussing our favorite books with you and giving you countless recommendations for your TBR! We’re your hosts, Hannah, Micaela and Kyleigh; just a few best friends that bonded over our love for reading and talking endlessly about the books that we can’t get enough of. Stick around to hear our thoughts & opinions, we promise it gets good. READ THE INTERVIEW ON THE NEXT PAGE. 111

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TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF/ SELVES.

into a community of readers we get to share our love of books with every week.

HM&K: It Gets Good is hosted by three best friends – Hannah, Micaela, and Kyleigh – who share a love of reading and enjoy having great conversations about books. Hannah works in early childhood education as a preschool and childcare director, Micaela is a mortgage closer/ funder, and Kyleigh is an entrepreneur and content creator. When we’re not working or reading, you’ll usually find us playing games, eating ice cream, or making the most of Michigan summers. Our friendship is at the heart of everything we do, and we love inviting listeners to feel like they’re part of the conversation.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PODCAST?

HOW DID YOU GET STARTED WITH THE PODCAST? HM&K: In June 2022, Kyleigh invited Hannah and Micaela over on a whim for what she called a “reading night.” And yes, we literally just got together to read. It quickly became a weekly tradition, giving us time to catch up and talk about the books we couldn’t stop thinking about. After a few months, one of us asked, “Should we start a podcast?!” That simple question turned into something much bigger. That Christmas, Kyleigh surprised us with our very first podcast mics, and by the following spring, It Gets Good officially launched. What started as three friends reading together has grown 112

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HM&K: If you asked our listeners, they’d probably describe It Gets Good as cozy, funny, a little chaotic, and like hanging out with your best friends. We like to call it “semi-organized chaos.” While we definitely talk about books, our conversations naturally wander into life, friendship, pop culture, and plenty of laughter along the way. Whether we’re passionately debating a plot twist or getting completely sidetracked, our goal has always been to create a space that feels warm, relatable, and welcoming. We hope listeners leave every episode feeling like they just spent an hour with friends who love books as much as they do. WHAT’S THE MOST CHALLENGING AND MOST SATISFYING PART OF RUNNING A PODCAST? HM&K: After three years, one of the biggest challenges is continuing to create fresh, engaging content for our listeners. We never want to become repetitive. We’re always looking for new ways to entertain our audience while introducing them to books they’ll love. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of new releases, and we also love uncovering hidden backlist gems that deserve more attention. The most rewarding part is hearing

P O D S T E R CONTINUED

from our listeners after a new episode drops each Wednesday. Messages like, “I was laughing the whole way to work” or “Today’s episode is my new all-time favorite” or “I felt like I was sitting down and giggling with my friends,” remind us exactly why we started the podcast. Knowing we’ve created a space where people can laugh, unwind, and feel connected makes all the work behind the scenes worth it. WHAT’S ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE EPISODES? HM&K: Choosing just one favorite feels impossible! Some of our best episodes are actually the ones where we don’t have much planned. Those conversations tend to be the funniest because they give us room to go on tangents, create new inside jokes with our listeners, and simply enjoy spending time together. While we love diving into books, it’s often those unfiltered moments of laughter and friendship that end up becoming our favorites. WHAT’S YOUR UPLOADING SCHEDULE, AND WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM TALKING BOOK PUBLISHING IN THE UPCOMING MONTHS?

knowing our listeners can count on a new episode every Wednesday morning. The next several months are shaping up to be an exciting time for readers. We’re eagerly anticipating the next installment in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series—we’ve been waiting (somewhat impatiently!) since A Court of Silver Flames was released in 2021. We’re also looking forward to several highly anticipated book-to-screen adaptations. Since our book club theme this year has been adaptations, we’ll be reading, reviewing, and discussing releases like Sense and Sensibility, Verity, Sunrise on the Reaping, and more. It’s going to be a fun season for book lovers, and we can’t wait to experience it all alongside our listeners. WHERE CAN LISTENERS FIND IT GETS GOOD POCAST? HM&K: You can listen to It Gets Good wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. We also love connecting with our community on social media, where we share book recommendations, behindthe-scenes moments, and updates on upcoming episodes. No matter where you listen, we’d love to have you join us every Wednesday!

HM&K: We release a new episode every Wednesday, and we’re proud to say we haven’t missed a single week in more than three years! Consistency has always been important to us, and we love 113

The Monkey’s Paw. TORONTO, ONTARIO

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TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AND THE MONKEY’S PAW BOOKSTORE. SF: The Monkey’s Paw is a small antiquarian shop, specializing in old and unusual printed matter (books and ephemera). Most of our stock was printed in the mid-20th century, and some is even older; we don’t carry anything printed in the digital age. As for subjects and genres, we emphasize visual culture; obsolete opinions and technologies; earnest works on highly specific topics; books as artifacts; and pop detritus. Our literature section is not large, but is carefully chosen. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO OPEN A BOOKSTORE? SF: I opened the Monkey’s Paw in Toronto in 2006. At the time, many secondhand bookshops around the world were closing, or migrating to an online-only model; so it seemed like a perversely good moment to offer a physical space where people could browse and interact with old books. Also, I 114

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had worked at many secondhand bookshops in my youth, and buying and selling old books was pretty much my only marketable skill. WHAT KIND OF READING TRENDS DO YOU SEE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS? SF: Our stock is so diverse and eccentric that it would be hard to identify “trends” among our customers. But some of the genres that sell especially well here are nature field guides; type specimen books; regional and ethnic cookbooks; smut novels; illustrated collections of folktales; arcane technical and how-to manuals; works of radical politics… among many other niche topics. WHAT OTHER SERVICES AND/ OR PRODUCTS DO YOU PROVIDE FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS? WHAT MAKES YOUR STORE STAND OUT? SF: For people interested in discovering old books they never knew existed, the Monkey’s Paw offers a comfortable, well-

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organized space to browse. I like to think the shop is a bit like a museum of 20th century culture, where you can handle the artifacts, and (if you wish) purchase them. For customers without the time or patience to make their own discoveries, we have a vending machine (the “Biblio-Mat”) that sells random/surprise old books for a $5 token. The Biblio-Mat adds a slightly carnivalesque flair to the place. HOW DO YOU SEE THE MONKEY’S PAW EXPANDING IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS? SF: As it is, the Monkey’s Paw already occupies every minute of my time, so I have no plans for expansion. If I can continue to find old books that meet the shop’s criteria, in sufficient quantity to supply the demand, I will be satisfied.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FUTURE OF INDIE BOOKSTORES LOOKS LIKE? SF: I don’t know anything about the new book business, and wouldn’t want to hazard a guess about its future. But as far as old books are concerned: it’s my understanding that in recent years more small secondhand/ antiquarian shops have opened in various cities, following something akin to the Monkey’s Paw model. I would say that our stability over the last two decades proves that a shop like ours -- in the right urban setting -- is a feasible business. Nobody’s getting rich here, but we’re sating the appetites of a good number of curious bibliophiles. Doesn’t every city deserve a place like that? 

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BOOKS IN REVIEW BR

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Books In Review Self-Published & Small Press Book Reviews

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Bully Boy.

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BY TOM WADE

This intense YA story follows 15-year-old high school sophomore Henry Wilton, who has been bullied at school for years, as he turns the table on the teens who torment him and the adults who stand by and let the bullying go unchallenged. Set in an unnamed American city, this contemporary novel is driven by the intriguing protagonist as he’s called names, jostled in hallways, and harassed in an escalating series of violent incidents carried out by multiple bullies. When he tries to fight back, Henry becomes isolated. His friends are unwilling to put targets on their own backs for him, and his teachers, notably the school’s principal and assistant principal, want Henry to keep his head down.

PUBLISHER: VIRTUALBOOKWORM.COM

PAGES: 277 ISBN: 9781638680215

A close third person narrative immerses readers in Henry’s internal thoughts and emotional journey as he confronts the bullies. Increasingly angry, he’s a complex and believable character, struggling to manage his emotions and connect with his peers and family. By fighting back, Henry risks becoming

the aggressor himself in this tense drama. When readers learn he has easy access to his father’s handgun, the stakes only increase. The narrative is presented in two large sections without traditional chapter breaks or clear transitions between scenes. At points this adds to the intensity—readers are caught up in Henry’s spiralling angst—but overall, a better balance could be struck so that readers feel engaged and not overwhelmed. At times, the number of characters presented is unwieldy, as there are numerous teenagers and unsympathetic teachers to keep track of. When other bullying victims suffer, it’s hard for readers to be invested in them, although arguably, this emotional distance effectively portrays Henry’s troubled state of mind. Readers might find Henry’s ultimate method of driving change in his school unrealistic, but he’s a credible, relatable protagonist facing all-too-real struggles. Together, these elements build a compelling read. 

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Devil’s Name.

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BY LORI B. DUFF

Devil’s Name is an engaging story about an attorney who represents a transgender teen. While this is the third in a series, Devil’s Name can stand alone. The story follows Jessica Fischer, attorney in Ashton, Georgia, as she tries to help Alexander, a transgender teen who wishes to change his name before applying for college. They face challenges not only from some members of Alexander’s family but also from the judge, turning what should be a straightforward process into an emotionally fraught situation. Along the way, Jessica must also deal with an unexpected development in her personal life, complicating her relationship with boyfriend Bobby.

PUBLISHER: SHE WRITES PRESS PAGES: 256 ISBN: 9798896364160

The story features well-developed characters. Jessica is passionate and liberal, eager to jump in and defend those who are different in her small, conservative town. In some conversations with locals, she must hold herself back from confronting their remarks, knowing it’s not always helpful.

Alexander is intelligent and perceptive, making a powerful case for why he wants his new name on college paperwork (so that he’s not housed in a women’s dorm or must explain why his name and appearance differ). To his mother’s annoyance, he swears and becomes increasingly upset as complications ensue. Jessica’s older, conservative assistant Diane eagerly shares her opinions while offering firm advice in a crisis. And Jessica’s reporter boyfriend Bobby is caring and supportive, while also able to explain the other side of the argument in ways Jessica appreciates. The plot unfolds smoothly, the complications to Alexander’s case emerging as a surprise but understandable given the environment. Jessica uses every resource to fight them, but is reminded that the law, no matter how clear, is represented by human beings, with their own prejudices and beliefs. The subplot concerning Bobby is compelling as her independence creates a rift after a crisis. All told, readers will enjoy the author’s easy, flowing style, fully fleshed-out characters, and all-too relevant story. 

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The Closing Window.

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BY GREGG ROMAN

In his new novel, The Closing Window, Gregg Roman offers a searing account of the ongoing conflict among Iran, Israel and the United States. The novel’s timeline spans 2018 to 2026 as Roman examines the conflict from multiple perspectives. The two main narrative threads follow several Iranian dissidents, including a nurse and an officer in the Revolutionary Guard, as well as a think tank, the Meridian Institute, dedicated to documenting and aiding persecuted Iranian citizens.

PUBLISHER: MIDDLE EAST FORUM PRESS PAGES: 286 ISBN: 9798996755806

It’s powerful to see those tumultuous years through the eyes of Roman’s characters. Instead of feeling like an outside observer to events such as the assassination of Iran’s leadership in spring 2026, readers get an intimate experience of the reaction of everyday Iranians. Likewise, the perspective of the protagonist, Jonah Keller, Meridian’s executive director, opens readers to a complex interpretation of the stakes in this ongoing conflict.

The novel focuses on the fine print of the 2026 Memorandum of Understanding, negotiated in Islamabad between the U,S, and Iran, to emphasize how individual concessions, such as the agreement to refrain from supporting internal dissent in Iran, undermined the entire document. Roman himself works for the Middle East Forum, a think tank focused on Middle East policy, which undoubtedly contributes to the story’s realism. Despite its many engaging aspects, the novel contains two major flaws. First, characters frequently assess events using the metaphor of a “wall” or a “door,” with one appearing to be an ending and the other an opening. The metaphor is overused and often obscures what is actually going on in the story. Second, by focusing so much on present-day events, The Closing Window suffers from the fact that the news in the ongoing Iranian conflict has already overtaken it. It simply ends rather than builds to a thoughtful conclusion. Readers who closely follow world events will, nonetheless, find this work intriguing. However, attention to the two points mentioned above would expand the book’s appeal.  119

What We Are.

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BY MICHAEL L. ADIX II, MD

In Volume II of Dr. Michael L. Adix’s philosophical series, the author applies theories proposed in his first volume to an ambitious range of topics, including ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and theology. Where the first volume establishes an overarching metaphysical/epistemological grand unifying theory, this second volume tackles more normative territory. Previously, Adix proposed a dualistic ontology composed, on one hand, by the material universe, and, on the other, by the intrinsic experience of it, thus locating consciousness as a co-equal aspect of the fabric of reality. Here, he explores what it means to be a conscious being in a seemingly material, uncaring universe, leveraging the established dualaspect principle to establish ethics, politics, and aesthetics grounded more in empathy than the impersonal logic of the deontologists. PUBLISHER: INSTRINSIC PRESS PAGES: 389 ISBN: 9798950262036

What We Are is technical yet accessible, broad in scope yet intimate in detail. Adix is a neurosurgeon, and each chapter is informed by a medical case study and/or autobiographical

allegory aimed at humanizing concepts discussed. For example, he recounts the story of Ruth Kimball, a patient with a subdural hematoma aggravated by 15 years of unintentional medical neglect, illustrating a variety of basic moral failures that occurred along the way, each seemingly inconsequential. While Adix uses philosophical jargon, it can be intuitively understood, largely due to his gift for rendering complicated philosophical ideas understandable. Like Oliver Sachs, he captivates readers with the scientific mysteries of the human mind. The book also impresses in its thorough anticipation and consideration of potential criticism. Adix is transparent that this remarkable contribution to philosophy is made possible, in part, by AI. He outlines how he used AI as a sparring partner to improve his ideas and arguments or to trade insufficient concepts for better ones. Some might consider that cheating, but the result is something that has survived a process akin to the most rigorous peer review. Indeed, Adix’s book stands as a philosophical work so ambitious and compelling that it shouldn’t be ignored. 

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Where Gods Whisper.

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BY MIKE COLAPIETRO

A slow-burn dystopian drama laced with timely wisdom, Where Gods Whisper offers an unflinching vision of the future layered with dire warnings for our present. In a post-apocalyptic world, readers are introduced to Mencken, who has spent her life confined to three rooms in an underground bunker. Now a young woman, Mencken emerges from the bunker to discover a mystifying and lifeless world, populated with skeletons in steel tombs and the charred evidence of a catastrophe. She soon encounters Oslo, a survivor from the same research complex, but whose memories are mysteriously muddled, as though he hasn’t fully awakened from a dream. Driven to uncover the truth about her missing parents and their lost time, the pair are found by a community of more mind-wiped survivors, deepening the growing mystery. PUBLISHER: PARADIGM PUBLISHING PAGES: 255 ISBN: 9798995064503

Readers gradually learn what brought about the book’s “end of the world” setting through newspaper clippings, text exchanges, redacted memos and manifesto snippets. In the

same way, details of the survival bunker, its residents, and the mastermind at the heart of this psychological puzzle are divulged patiently and thoroughly. As the story unfolds, these documents reveal the advent, decades earlier, of a radical political faction spreading fear in the halls of power and a robotic uprising that predictably spirals into Mencken’s dystopia. A skilled storyteller, Colapietro leads readers on a grim, twisted chase through past, present and future. His prose is meticulous without feeling overworked, the language accessible, yet peppered with ornamental phrases like “manic soliloquy” and “goggled subjugates.” Rich with themes related to chosen family, along with critical commentary on domination, AI, late-stage capitalism and class consciousness, the narrative is both terrifying and invigorating. The occasional explorations of leadership, obedience, teaching and learning are refreshing reminders of our individual will and capacity for greatness. Creatively challenging norms of form and genre, this enrapturing story reads like the long-form lovechild of Asimov and Atwood, making it damn near impossible to put down. 

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And How Have You Been?

BY MARIA JUDITE DE CARVALHO, TRANSLATED BY MARGARET JULL COSTA

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Some writers hand you an ending. Maria Judite de Carvalho hands you a mirror, tilts it slightly, and asks: is that really you? And How Have You Been?—the sprawling final gathering of the Portuguese master’s late short fiction, meticulously translated into English for the first time by Margaret Jull Costa—doesn’t announce itself as a masterpiece. It sneaks up on you the way its women sneak up on their own dissatisfaction: quietly, over the course of an ordinary afternoon, until suddenly the whole shape of a life is visible and there is no unseeing it. Carvalho, who died in 1998 after a career spent largely behind the desks of Lisbon’s newsrooms, wrote nine collections of stories over her lifetime, and this volume culls more than forty of the later ones into something that reads less like an anthology than an interrogation. Her recurring subjects—husbands who vanish into “important things,” wives who sit at home rehearsing the art of seeming happy, children eavesdropping on an adult world that makes no sense—could belong to any number of mid-century domestic novelists. What sets Carvalho apart, and what makes this collection impossible to put down for long, is the precision of the incision. A steady hand, no wasted motion, and somehow, underneath all that control, real blood.

PUBLISHER: TWO LINES PRESS PAGES: 456 ISBN: 9781949641943

Take the opening pages of “The Flying Man and the Woman Who Had No Wings,” in which a respectable bourgeois wife abandons her entire life to follow a circus trapezist she has seen perform exactly once. Carvalho doesn’t dramatize the leap—she’s far more interested in what happens to a woman’s interior life once the leap has already been made, once the romance has calcified into just another set of daily obligations. Or the domestic

claustrophobia of “The Aquarium,” where a wife has trained herself to answer the same question—are you happy?—with a smile she “has to” produce, then spends the day “picking her way through the long, long day, carefully avoiding any traps.” These are stories about women asked to perform contentment on command, and Carvalho never once lets you forget how much labor that performance costs. It would be easy to file this alongside other rediscovered mid-century women writers—there’s a clear kinship with Elizabeth Taylor, another virtuoso of the unbearable ordinary—but Carvalho has stranger tools in her kit than most of her contemporaries. She reaches, unexpectedly, for science fiction: a lion with watchful eyes, visions of a machine-run future stripped of art, a spaceman’s homecoming that curdles into something closer to horror than triumph. These flourishes never feel like gimmicks. They’re simply further proof that Carvalho understood, decades before it became fashionable to say so, that the strangest and most threatening thing any of us will ever face is other people, and the passage of time neither of us can control. Margaret Jull Costa’s translation deserves its own round of applause. Carvalho’s sentences have a way of making a claim and then walking it back mid-breath—stating something is true, only to qualify, hedge, and reconsider before the period lands—and Jull Costa renders that hesitation in English with a fluency so complete it reads as if Carvalho had written in English all along. This is the kind of collection that reorders your sense of what a short story can carry. Carvalho spent a lifetime writing about people who couldn’t say what they meant. In this magnificent, overdue introduction to English readers, she says it for them—precisely, unsparingly, and without a single wasted word. 

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Of Cattle And Men.

BY ANA PAULA MAIA, TRANSLATED BY ZOE PERRY

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Of Cattle and Men is a novella that tells a story about a stun operator—Edgar Wilson—at a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of rural Brazil. Ana Paula Maia incorporates clever elements of horror and mystery for a dark and grotesque atmosphere. As the story unfolds, Edgar finds himself struggling with guilt due to the violent duties he oversees at his job. The visceral writing creates a thick tension of dread that weighs heavy on you.

PUBLISHER: DEEP VELLUM PAGES: 180 EAN: 9781646053766

Ana Paula Maia asks whether eating meat is ethical since humanity has removed itself so far from the food chain you begin to wonder if that’s the real reason behind all the illness and unhappiness plaguing society. As a reader you ask whether it’s right to pay people to kill for you. The material is very original, interesting, and highly enriching once Edgar begins to realize that something is terribly wrong with the cows. Factory workers volunteer to pull all-nighters to see if

they can catch glimpse at what might be hurting the cows. Despite this good intension, the workers who help Edgar are the same workers that live at the factory. This ends up being a bad thing since they can never escape the noise and bloody vehemence while everyone seeks hard answers. Observing the strange behavior doesn’t stop the phenomena from growing in magnitude, especially when it starts to happen more frequently. By the time the crew is overcome by the same unknowing possession, they start to question their place in the world. This book is not be for everyone since it has a haunting portrayal about denial. The prose was shrewd in how it deliberates what happens when the animal-to-human bond breaks down and deteriorates. The entire moral compass of this book rests on the idea that if animals are given freewill or somehow learn it—how would they rebel. 

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We Were Forbidden. BY JAQUELINE HARPMAN, TRANSLATED BY ROS SCHWARTZ

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Before there was I Who Have Never Known Men—the eerie, word-of-mouth phenomenon that turned a 1995 Belgian novel into one of the great sleeper hits of translated fiction—there was a writer quietly building an entire cosmology out of a single, dangerous question: what happens to a person who is told not to think? We Were Forbidden gathers three of Jacqueline Harpman’s novellas, none previously available in English, and together they read like a key to everything that made her famous in the first place—except funnier, stranger, and even more unsettling than you’d expect from the woman who wrote one of the bleakest, most beloved dystopias of the last thirty years.

PUBLISHER: TRANSIT BOOKS PAGES: 112 ISBN-13: 979-8893380583

Harpman knew a little something about being told what she couldn’t do. Born in Belgium, she fled with her Jewish family to Casablanca during the Nazi occupation, trained as a psychoanalyst after a stint in the Resistance, and spent decades writing before I Who Have Never Known Men found its English readership and made her, belatedly, a name. That biography isn’t incidental here—it’s the marrow of this collection. Every one of these three novellas is, at its core, a study of a person who has been handed a rule they didn’t write and are trying to decide whether obedience or defiance will cost them more. The opener, “The Ardennes Forest,” will feel immediately familiar to anyone who loved I Who Have Never Known Men—a band of survivors, a war whose end (or existence) can no longer be confirmed, an order they are forbidden to question. But where the novel isolated its women in near-total silence, this story lets its soldiers argue, doubt, and rationalize their way through the eeriest kind of captivity: the kind with no visible walls. “We were living under the law of a world that might have disappeared: were we not mad?” one of them wonders—and that single sentence tells you everything about how

Harpman builds dread out of nothing but uncertainty. “The Outcast” moves from allegory into something closer to memoir, drawing on Harpman’s own adolescence at a rigid French school in wartime Casablanca. A girl commits one small, ordinary act of intellectual defiance—refusing to simply repeat what she’s told to believe—and watches the punishment for it ripple outward with a speed that still stings. It’s the quietest story in the book and, in some ways, the most devastating, a reminder that the machinery of enforced conformity doesn’t need tanks or prison walls. A classroom will do just fine. Then, just when the collection threatens to become unrelentingly grim, Harpman pulls off her sharpest trick: she gets funny. “The Broom Closet” follows an aging novelist inventing a story to pass the time on a train—a bored bourgeois wife, a broom-closet affair, a marriage curdling toward fantasies of escape—and the narrator can’t stop interrupting her own creation to argue with it, flirt with it, and occasionally confess that she’s just as susceptible to its temptations as the woman she’s inventing. It’s the kind of story that makes you laugh out loud on one page and catch your breath on the next. Kirkus called the collection proof that Harpman belongs in the company of Gogol and Kafka, and “The Broom Closet” is the clearest evidence yet that she also belonged, whenever she wanted, in the company of the century’s great comic writers. Ros Schwartz’s translation is the kind that disappears into the prose the way the best translations do—precise, unshowy, alert to every hairpin turn in Harpman’s sentences as they state a thing plainly and then quietly take it back. At just over a hundred pages, We Were Forbidden is small enough to read in an evening and dense enough to argue about for a week after. This is the rare backlist discovery that doesn’t feel like homework—it feels like finding out your favorite writer had a secret second act you didn’t know to wish for. Whether you arrive as a devotee of I Who Have Never Known Men or as someone meeting Harpman for the first time, this is the kind of introduction that turns readers into evangelists. 

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Crocodiles at Night.

BY GISELA HEFFES, TRANSLATED BY GRADY C. WRAY

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There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching a parent decline from four thousand miles away—the phone calls that arrive at the wrong hour, the guilt of a plane ticket you can’t always buy, the sense that your real life and your other life have started running on two different clocks. Crocodiles at Night, Gisela Heffes’s aching new novel, doesn’t just describe that vertigo—it puts you inside it, shuttling you between a house in Houston and a hospital in Buenos Aires until you, too, lose track of which day you’re in.

PUBLISHER: DEEP VELLUM PAGES: 180 EAN: 9781646053766

Heffes opens with a sleight of hand that sets the whole book vibrating: her narrator announces, in a notebook entry, that the woman at the center of this story isn’t really her—it’s an invented double named Vera Guerenstein. From there, the novel splits and layers itself: notebook entries, lived narration, fragments of correspondence between doctors and family members, all interwoven until fact and fiction stop behaving like separate categories. It sounds like a formal trick. In practice, it reads like the only honest way to tell a story this unbearable—as if inventing a little distance from yourself were the sole way to get close enough to write it down at all. Heffes is a master of making form do the emotional heavy lifting. The novel begins by dutifully counting the days since her father’s

surgery—Day One, Day Two—before time itself seems to give up and the count dissolves into a recurring, haunting label: “Day No Number.” It’s a small typographic gesture that says more about the disorientation of a sickbed vigil than pages of exposition ever could. Grief, this novel insists, doesn’t just steal a person—it steals the calendar too. Some of the book’s sharpest, quietest fury is reserved for the machinery of care itself: a healthcare system fluent in euphemism, doctors who withhold the truth of a prognosis from the one person who most deserves to hear it, a family that builds, in Heffes’s chilling phrase, an entire “stage set” around a dying man so that he never has to know how the play ends. Anyone who has ever sat in a hospital corridor translating a doctor’s evasions into something like an answer will recognize this particular, infuriating fog immediately. The prose itself is where this novel earns its keep. Grady C. Wray’s translation finds the exact English cadence for Heffes’s most devastating images—grief, at one point, is likened to spilling a glass of wine, a stain that “expands until it penetrates some remote space and stagnates there, like words.” That single sentence is worth the price of the book on its own—a reminder that Heffes thinks like a poet even when she’s writing her way through a hospital corridor. This is not a novel that traffics in false comfort, and it doesn’t pretend the ending will surprise you— Heffes tells you as much in the opening pages. What she offers instead is rarer: a mirror precise enough that readers who have lived through a loss like this one will recognize their own reflection in it, and readers who haven’t will come away better prepared for the day they will. Slim, exacting, and unwilling to look away, Crocodiles at Night is the kind of book you finish in an afternoon and think about for months.  125

Pinen. BY DANIELA CATRILEO, TRANSLATED BY JACOB EDELSTEIN

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“Piñen” is a Mapudungun word for the grime that clings to skin and feet—the kind of dirt that never fully washes off. In Chile, it has spent generations as a slur, a word wealthier mouths have used to spit on anyone poor, dark, or indigenous enough to seem unwashed by comparison. Daniela Catrileo takes that word and builds a book out of it, and the effect is exactly as pointed as it sounds: an entire collection that refuses to let the grime wash off, because the grime was never the problem. The problem was always who got to decide what counted as clean.

PUBLISHER: FSG ORIGINALS PAGES: 208 ISBN-10: 0374616566

The stories gathered here move through the peripheries of a Chilean city with the restless, half-belonging energy of the young people who narrate them—Jesús, Valeska, Yajaira, Ale, and others—kids and young adults navigating what the book calls the waria: the non-Mapuche world pressing in on all sides, indifferent at best and violent at worst. A neighborhood big shot goes down in a hail of bullets. A friendship holds two people together while everything around them tries to pull them apart. A young woman’s body becomes a site other people feel entitled to claim. A boy writes his way toward a brother who exists now only as a kind of ghost, present in every room and absent from all of them. Catrileo doesn’t soften any of it, and she doesn’t sensationalize it either—these stories move at the pace of real life, which is to say: quietly, and then all at once.

What makes the collection linger isn’t the violence—plenty of books traffic in violence—it’s how precisely Catrileo locates it inside rooms too small to hold it: a shared bedroom, a bus seat, a doorway where two friends say goodbye without knowing it’s the last time. She writes tragedy the way it actually arrives for most people: not as spectacle, but as something that happens in an ordinary room while the rest of the world keeps moving outside the window. That claustrophobia is the point. These are lives the wider city has already decided not to look at too closely, and Catrileo’s whole project is to make looking closely unavoidable. Catrileo writes from inside the world she’s depicting—she’s a poet, a philosophy professor, and a founding member of Rangiñtulewfü, a Mapuche diaspora collective built to give indigenous artists a platform and a political voice in a country that has spent centuries denying them both. That grounding shows on every page. This isn’t ethnographic fiction written for outsiders to gawk at; it’s fiction written from inside a community, for the people who recognize themselves in it first and everyone else second. Jacob Edelstein’s translation keeps that specificity intact rather than smoothing it into something more generically legible, which means the English-language reader has to do a little of the same work these characters do every day: sit inside a world that isn’t going to explain itself just to make you comfortable. Slim as it is, Piñen doesn’t read like an introduction to anything—it reads like an argument, fully formed: that the lives lived at the edges of a city are not lesser stories, just unrecorded ones. Catrileo hands the mic to characters literature has mostly ignored, and then gets out of the way, and the result is one of the most quietly urgent short story collections to arrive in translation this year. Read it in one sitting if you can. It won’t let you look away halfway through anyway. 

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Patrick Swayze: Still Inspiring! BY SUE TABASHNIK

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Still Inspiring: An Oral History Confirms Patrick Swayze Really Was That Guy Some celebrities get one biography. Patrick Swayze, it turns out, gets an entire chorus. Patrick Swayze: Still Inspiring! is Sue Tabashnik's fifth book built around the actor, dancer, and Arabian horse enthusiast who died in 2009, and it may be her most generous one yet — not a conventional biography at all, but an oral history assembled from more than fifty interviews, written tributes, and archival quotes from the people who actually worked alongside him, grew up with him, guarded him, danced with him, and adored him from the other side of a stage door.

PUBLISHER: PASSION SPIRIT DREAMS PRESS

Tabashnik, a Detroit-area author and former social worker who became a Swayze fan in 1988 and has spent decades interviewing people connected to him, organizes the book into eight loosely themed chapters: colleagues and friends who worked with him behind the camera, actors and stunt performers who shared the set, the dance world that shaped him from childhood, family friends, a film critic and an entertainment journalist, devoted fans, the Arabian horse community he became deeply involved in, and a closing chapter of trivia and career facts. Each chapter opens with Swayze's own words, pulled from decades of

interviews, so the reader hears from him directly before the tributes begin. What emerges, story after story, is remarkably consistent. Nearly everyone in this book — from Point Break castmates who trained alongside Kathryn Bigelow and Keanu Reeves, to North and South costars, to a Chicago hotel security guard once assigned to walk his dogs late at night — describes the same person: a movie star who insisted on doing his own stunts, who called crew members by name, who threw a football to a starstruck thirteen-year-old extra on the set of The Outsiders, and who once got quietly, memorably firm with a young castmate for allegedly looking down on a background extra. Friends and family return to one small but telling detail: almost no one who actually knew him called him Patrick. To them, he was always Buddy — a name from his father, offered to new friends only once he trusted them. There is plenty of nostalgia here too, and it's the book's other great pleasure. Stuntmen recall him teaching himself to skydive before Point Break even wrapped. A young BoJesse Christopher describes talking his way into the role of Grommet by commandeering a friend's audition. Terri Garber remembers Swayze knocking her clean off her feet during a slap scene on North and South. An extra on The Outsiders gets handed a business card that reads "Buddy Swayze, carpenter." Christopher Riordan, who was himself discovered by Fred Astaire, spends much of his chapter remembering Swayze's mother, the choreographer Patsy Swayze, who broke color lines in Houston dance schools and taught her son that fame was never a reason to stop working hard. By the time the Arabian horse breeders show up to talk about a chestnut named Tammen, the reader has been fully absorbed into Swayze's world, from soundstage to stable.  127

Cathedrals. BY CLAUDIA PINEIRO, TRANSLATED BY FRANCES RIDDLE

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A cathedral is built to make you look up — to keep your eyes on the vaulted ceiling instead of what’s happening at eye level. Cathedrals takes that architecture of distraction and applies it to a family, a neighborhood, and a decades-old crime that everyone agreed, tacitly, never to look at directly.

PUBLISHER: CHARCO PRESS PAGES: 3O4 ISBN-10: 1917260288

Thirty years ago, a teenage girl’s body was found quartered and burned in an empty lot. No one was arrested. The girl’s family — middle-class, devout, outwardly unremarkable — simply came apart at the seams and went quiet about it, the way families are taught to. Piñeiro doesn’t open with the crime so much as with its aftermath: the particular, corrosive silence of people who suspect the truth and have decided that suspecting is safer than knowing. It’s only the father’s decades-long, unrelenting love for his daughter that finally cracks the silence open.

What makes the novel so unsettling is how many people Piñeiro implicates along the way. She moves the narration between multiple perspectives, and almost none of them are villains in any simple sense — they’re neighbors, relatives, churchgoers, people who chose obedience over inconvenient questions and told themselves that was the same thing as faith. The real crime scene in this book isn’t the empty lot. It’s every dinner table where someone decided not to ask the obvious question. Frances Riddle’s translation carries the same clean, unshowy precision that has made Piñeiro’s other work — Elena Knows, A Little Luck — land so hard in English. Cathedrals is a crime novel only in the loosest sense; what it’s actually investigating is how a community decides, collectively and without ever saying so out loud, what it can afford to see. It’s a brave, quietly devastating book, and it earns every bit of its slowbuilding fury. 

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Murder at the End of the World. BY AKANE ARAKI, TRANSLATED BY JESSE KIRKWOOD

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An asteroid is two months from ending human life on Earth. Twenty-three-year-old Haru still can’t parallel park. That collision of the cosmic and the completely mundane is the engine of Murder at the End of the World, a debut so confident in its own strange premise that it never once winks at you for buying in.

PUBLISHER: PUSHKIN VERTIGO PAGES: 336 ISBN-10: 1805336533

Haru is mid-driving-lesson, apocalypse or no apocalypse, when she and her instructor — a manically thorough ex-cop named Isagawa — open the trunk of the car to find a woman’s tortured body. There is, obviously, no functioning police force left to call. There is barely a functioning world left. And yet Haru and Isagawa decide, with a stubbornness that becomes the book’s entire moral center, that the murder still matters. That refusal to let the apocalypse cheapen a single human death is what elevates this from novelty premise to genuinely moving crime fiction. Araki, who won Japan’s prestigious Edogawa Rampo Prize for

this book on her first attempt, plots with real rigor — the mystery holds up on its own terms, clues and misdirection and all, even stripped of its end-of-days scaffolding. But the scaffolding is what makes it sing. Every scene is shadowed by the ticking countdown, which turns ordinary detective-novel beats — an alibi, a witness interview, a moment of doubt between partners — into something closer to prayer: small, human rituals performed in defiance of an ending nobody can stop. Jesse Kirkwood’s translation keeps the tone light on its feet even when the material gets dark, which is no small feat given how easily a premise like this could tip into either slapstick or nihilism. Instead, Murder at the End of the World lands somewhere rarer: a genuinely funny, genuinely tense argument for caring about justice even when there’s no future left to deliver it in. Read it before the world ends. Read it especially if you’re worried it might.

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Sleep Phase. BY MOHAMED KHEIR, TRANSLATED BY ROBIN MOGER

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Warif walks out of prison after seven years expecting, at minimum, to recognize the city he’s returning to. Instead he finds a Cairo rebuilt around him — bridges reassembled like footage played in reverse, expats and bureaucrats speaking in unplaceable accents, a translation job he can’t quite get back no matter how many official-looking strangers he meets with. Sleep Phase turns that disorientation into its entire method: the more Warif tries to reassemble a coherent picture of his own freedom, the more the novel itself starts to blur at the edges.

PUBLISHER: TWO LINES PRESS PAGES: 181 ASIN: B0DXW1XGNR

Kheir has a rare gift for describing hallucination and bureaucracy as though they’re the same genre of nightmare — which, in Warif ’s case, they basically are. His meetings with faceless officials read like interrogations dressed up as small talk; his wanderings through the city curdle into something closer to fever dream, lush and vivid and not quite trustworthy. The novel never tells you where the real world ends and Warif ’s imagination begins, and that refusal

is the whole point — after seven years in a system built to erase him, why would he trust the difference either? Robin Moger’s translation is where the novel’s real pleasure lives. Kheir’s prose has an almost tactile quality — bridges rebuilt lamp by lamp, a girl’s feet swinging over a river that seems to ripple in response to her — and Moger renders it with a patience that never rushes toward clarity the reader hasn’t earned. This is fiction that wants you a little lost, on purpose. By the time Sleep Phase reaches its final pages, the line between what happened to Warif and what he’s decided to believe happened to him has become genuinely impossible to locate — and that’s exactly where Kheir wants you. This is a novel about the particular madness of being told, politely and repeatedly, that your own memory can’t be trusted, and it makes that madness feel as beautiful as it is suffocating. 

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Bury Your Dead.

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BY ANA PAULA MAIA, TRANSLATED BY PADMA VISWANATHAN

Edgar Wilson used to stun cattle for a living. Now he collects what the roads leave behind — the deer, the dogs, the occasional cow that wandered too far — and hauls the bodies to a mill where they’re ground into fertilizer. It’s steady work, and it asks very little of him emotionally, which is presumably the point. Then the vultures lead him to a woman’s body hanging from a tree, and Bury Your Dead stops being a novel about roadkill and becomes something much harder to look away from.

PUBLISHER: CHARCO PRESS PAGES: 128 ISBN-10: 1917260342

Ana Paula Maia writes in short, hard sentences that refuse to editorialize, which somehow makes the material more disturbing, not less. There’s no police force equipped to process what Edgar Wilson has found, no hospital system built to receive it — the machinery of the state simply isn’t designed for a body that falls outside its categories, and Maia lets that institutional blankness sit there, unresolved, doing its own quiet damage. The horror here isn’t the body in the tree. It’s how unsurprised everyone is that no one

knows what to do about it. This is Maia’s territory — she’s spent a career finding the exact seam where animal and human stop being separate categories, where slaughter becomes labor becomes routine becomes something almost sacred in its repetition. Bury Your Dead pushes that project further than ever: Edgar Wilson doesn’t perform some late-breaking moral awakening when he finds the woman’s body. He does what he knows how to do, because it’s the only language of care this world has left him. Padma Viswanathan’s translation keeps the prose as spare and economical as a job description, which is exactly right — this is a book that trusts silence to do the heavy lifting. At just over a hundred pages, Bury Your Dead doesn’t waste a sentence, and it will stay with you exactly as long as its length suggests it shouldn’t. 

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The Birthday Party.

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BY LAURENT MAUVIGNIER, TRANSLATED BY DANIEL LEVIN BECKER

Almost nothing is left of the hamlet where The Birthday Party takes place — a few houses, a farm, four people who’ve built a fragile, curiously interdependent life out of near-total isolation. Patrice Bergogne is planning a surprise for his wife Marion’s fortieth birthday. That is, for a while, the entire plot. Laurent Mauvignier spends the first stretch of this novel doing almost nothing except letting you sit inside these people’s heads, and it is riveting in a way that shouldn’t be possible for a book about a birthday party.

PUBLISHER: TRANSIT BOOKS PAGES: 454 ISBN-10: 1945492651

Then the anonymous letters start. Then the unfamiliar car in the driveway. Then night falls, and everything Mauvignier spent two hundred patient pages building gets torn apart in real time. The genius of the structure is that the slowness isn’t padding — it’s the fuse. By the time the violence arrives, you know these four people so completely that watching their carefully constructed

lives come apart feels less like reading a thriller and more like watching a car crash you can see coming and can’t stop. Mauvignier writes in long, winding, comma-spliced sentences that move fluidly between characters’ interior monologues, and it should not work as well as it does — the effect is less like reading and more like eavesdropping on four minds simultaneously, each one certain of a version of events the others don’t share. That accumulation of private, incompatible truths is what makes the eventual reckoning so devastating: everyone in this book has been quietly lying to someone, including themselves, for years. Daniel Levin Becker’s translation holds the sentences’ propulsive, almost breathless rhythm intact across five hundred pages, which is no small technical feat. The Birthday Party is patient, then merciless, then patient again in its aftermath — a novel that understands violence doesn’t erupt out of nowhere, it accumulates, quietly, in every secret a family agrees not to mention out loud.  132

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The Queen of Swords.

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BY JAZMINA BARRERA, TRANSLATED BY CHRISTINA MACSWEENEY

Jazmina Barrera set out to write a short essay about Elena Garro — the Mexican writer, dancer, activist, and mystic who spent most of the twentieth century being reduced to a footnote in her ex-husband Octavio Paz’s biography. The essay refused to stay short. The Queen of Swords is what happened when Barrera let her curiosity win: a sprawling, genre-defying act of literary excavation that treats its subject with the same restless, contradictory energy Garro apparently brought to everything she touched.

PUBLISHER: TWO LINES PRESS PAGES: 264 ISBN-10: 1949641872

Garro is a genuinely difficult person to pin down, and Barrera doesn’t try to flatten her into something tidier than she was. This is a woman who wrote one of the foundational works of Latin American magical realism years before the men who get credit for inventing it, who danced, organized, antagonized, contradicted herself in interviews, and left behind an archive that resists every attempt to build a clean narrative out of it. Barrera’s real subject isn’t just Garro’s life — it’s the impossibility of ever fully retrieving a life,

especially one that history had every incentive to misfile. What keeps the book from ever feeling like a straightforward biography is how visible Barrera makes her own process — the archives she digs through, the dead ends, the moments where the record contradicts itself and she has to sit with the contradiction rather than resolve it. Reading The Queen of Swords feels less like being told a story than being invited along on an investigation, with all the uncertainty that implies. Christina MacSweeney’s translation — her fourth collaboration with Barrera — carries the same lyrical restlessness Barrera’s essay-driven prose is known for, equally comfortable in intimate reflection and hard archival detail. The result is a portrait that honors its subject’s refusal to be simplified, and it makes an overwhelming case for why Elena Garro deserves to be a footnote in no one’s story but her own. 

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The Bluebook of Neb.

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BY MANON STEFFAN ROS

Most end-of-the-world novels want to show you the wreckage. The Blue Book of Nebo wants to show you what two people do with a notebook and a pencil once the wreckage is old news. Set in a hilltop house above a real village in north-west Wales, eight years after a nuclear disaster wipes out the world Dylan barely remembers, this slim, devastating novel finds its power not in spectacle but in the smallest possible unit of survival: a mother and son, taking turns filling the pages of a single shared journal.

PUBLISHER: DEEP VELLUM PUBLISHING PAGES: 156 ISBN-10: 1646051009

The setup is disarmingly simple. Dylan’s mother, Rowenna, assigns him the journal as a kind of homeschool exercise—something to keep his mind sharp when there are no more classrooms left to sharpen it. But when Dylan asks her to write too, to set down the story of “The End” and the vanished world he was too young to hold onto, the book becomes something else entirely: a joint record, written in secret from each other. “We’ve agreed not to read what the other has written, just in case,” Dylan writes. “In case of what, I’m not sure.” That uncertainty is the engine of the whole novel—two people who love each other fiercely, each hiding something on the page the other isn’t allowed to see. Ros splits the narration cleanly in two, and the contrast is where the novel does its quietest, most devastating work. Dylan writes like someone who has only ever known a world of rabbit snares and vegetable beds and a little sister to mind—practical, unsentimental, occasionally very funny, because he has no old world to mourn.

Rowenna writes like someone carrying the entire weight of what used to exist: iPhones, school runs, a version of herself she can no longer fully access. Reading the two accounts side by side feels like watching a language die and a new one get invented in real time, right there on the page. What keeps this from ever curdling into misery-lit is how alive the writing is to small, strange joys—a scavenged bar of chocolate a month past its sell-by date, a mallet swung at a road sign that will become the lid of a mushroom box, the reckless thrill of finding another living person on an empty road and not knowing, for one terrifying second, whether to run or to weep. Ros writes survival as a series of tiny, hard-won luxuries rather than a single grand ordeal—and there’s something quietly radical, too, about a novel this concerned with language itself: written first in Welsh, adapted into English by Ros herself, its characters scavenging books from abandoned houses the way other survival stories scavenge canned food, because “they deserve to be read... they deserve to be appreciated.” In a novel about the end of everything, that single insistence might be the most hopeful sentence in the book. The mystery at the heart of the novel—where Dylan’s baby sister Mona actually came from, and what secrets Rowenna and Dylan have kept from each other for eight years—unspools with a patience that will frustrate readers looking for a thriller and reward the ones willing to sit with a slower kind of dread. This is a book that trusts its readers, young and old alike, to hold complicated, unresolved feelings without needing them tied up neatly. It has already collected a shelf ’s worth of prizes on its way to this English-language edition, and it’s easy to see why: The Blue Book of Nebo is the rare apocalypse story that leaves you thinking less about how the world ended and more about what, exactly, is still worth writing down. 

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Taiwan Travelogue.

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BY YÁNG SHUĀNG-ZI, TRANSLATED BY LIN KING

Taiwan Travelogue arrives in English wearing a disguise, and the disguise is the whole point: the book presents itself as a newly translated 1930s travel memoir by a Japanese novelist, complete with a fictional translator’s footnotes. It’s actually a contemporary novel by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, and the gap between what the book claims to be and what it actually is turns out to be exactly where its power lives.

PUBLISHER: GRAYWOLF PRESS PAGES: 320 ISBN-10: 1644453150

Aoyama Chizuko sails to Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1938 wanting nothing to do with the empire’s official banquets — she wants the food, the language, the real island underneath the colonial administration. Her interpreter, Chizuru, gives her exactly that: train rides, braised pork rice, winter melon tea, a friendship that tips, on Chizuko’s side, into something closer to infatuation. But Chizuru keeps a careful, deliberate distance that Chizuko — charmed, well-meaning, and blind in all the ways powerful people tend to be blind — takes a painfully long time to understand. The novel’s quiet devastation is watching a genuine friendship get warped,

again and again, by a power imbalance one party refuses to fully see. The metafictional frame isn’t a gimmick — it’s an argument. A novel about a colonizer’s blind spots, told as though it were literally a colonizer’s own document, recovered and retranslated generations later, forces the reader to sit inside the same interpretive uncertainty the characters live with: whose version of this story are we actually getting, and what has been smoothed over to make it legible? Lin King’s translation is a genuine feat of layered ventriloquism — rendering not just Yáng’s prose, but a fictional Japanese-to-Mandarin translator’s prose, into English, while keeping every register distinct. The result is a novel that’s as delicious and immersive as its food writing promises, and as quietly damning about the cost of never once questioning your own good intentions. 

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Arcade Publishing

PUBLISHER PROFILE ABOUT Arcade Publishing was founded in 1988 by Dick and Jeannette Seaver and has been an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing since 2010. We aim to continue the original mission of Arcade Publishing—to publish great books and promote new and brilliant voices in literary fiction and nonfiction from around the world. Through the years, Arcade has published works from literary giants such as Samuel Beckett, Leo Tolstoy, Octavio Paz, E. M. Cioran, Ismail Kadare, Nobel Prize–winner Mo Yan, and National Book Award–winner William T. Vollmann as well as new voices such as Emmalea Russo, Chen-Fu Hsu, and many other talented authors. Like the rest of Skyhorse Publishing, Arcade champions the ideal of freedom of speech. We stand firmly against book censorship, a practice that has been and remains all too common. We are committed to publishing high-quality literary works and maintaining a diverse catalog ranging from Justine Barron’s They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up to the sardonic novels of Bruce Wagner. With each list, we strive to introduce new authors and bring new life to classics from the Arcade backlist. 136

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ESTABLISH 2010 LOCATION New York City WEBSITE www.arcadepub.com SPECIALITY Literary fiction, nonfiction MISSION

Arcade champions the ideal of freedom of speech. We stand firmly against book censorship. We are committed to publishing high quality literary works and maintaining a diverse catalog.

AWARDS

Published Nobel Prize–winning author Mo Yan, National Book Award–winning author, William T. Vollmann, among many other literary giants, including Samuel Beckett, Octazio Paz and many more.

SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT

THE STORY BEHIND THE PRESS EVERY PRESS HAS AN ORIGIN STORY. WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO START YOURS?

AP: Arcade Publishing was started by Richard and Jeannette Seaver in 1988. Dick Seaver had worked at Grove with Barney Rosset when it was first founded, where he discovered writers such as Beckett and Burroughs and helped bring them to a U.S. audience. The Seavers were willing to take risks on writers and ideas that challenged convention, and they fought censorship while publishing groundbreaking literature. That spirit is very much part of Arcade’s DNA. Skyhorse is happy to continue the tradition of publishing great, boundary-crossing literature that the Seavers originally set out to champion. We’re interested in books that have something distinctive to say and authors who are willing to push against the expected. WHAT KINDS OF STORIES IMMEDIATELY CAPTURE YOUR ATTENTION, AND WHAT DO THEY ALL HAVE IN COMMON?

AP: Stories that break convention and are singular and worth reading. We’re drawn to books that feel like they could only have been written by that particular author—books with a strong point of view, an unusual voice, or an approach to storytelling that you haven’t

encountered before. For us, originality matters. We want books that stay with you, challenge you, or change the way you think about something. TELL US ABOUT ONE BOOK OR AUTHOR THAT EMBODIES WHAT YOUR PRESS IS ALL ABOUT.

AP: Bruce Wagner–his whole catalog, which we have the rights to most of. New Juche–an incredible artist and master craftsman. Emmalea Russo–a wonderful “canceled” poet turned novelist. AS YOU LOOK AHEAD, WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED TO PUBLISH— OR ACCOMPLISH—NEXT?

AP: We have some extraordinary books coming up. A Table for Fortune by William T. Vollmann is a mammoth 3,000-plus-page novel that should win every award out there. We’re also looking forward to Mountainhead by New Juche, a true artist whose work is unlike anything else, and The Sea Breeze Club by Wu Ming-yi, a titan of Taiwanese literature. Each of these books represents something different, but all of them reflect what we hope to do at Arcade: publish ambitious, original literature by writers with something important and distinctive to say. We hope to continue to be blessed with such wonderful and talented authors and to keep building a list that readers can turn to when they want to discover something unexpected.

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SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT

EXPLORE THE CATALOG What’s A Snow Leopard To You? BY CHEN-FU HSU

Vivienne BY EMMALEA RUSSO

Amputation BY BRUCE WAGNER

TRANSLATED BY HOWARD GOLDBLATT & SYLVIA LI-CHUN LIN

Bad Sex In The Afterlife BY JERRY STAHL

Things That Are Funny On A Submarine (But Not Really) BY YANNICK MURPHY

Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out BY MO YAN

The Hole

BY HYE-YOUNG PYUN TRANSLATED BY SORA KIM-RUSSELL

The Palace of Dreams

BY ISMAIL KADARE TRANSLATED BY BARBARA BRAY

Written In Bone BY SUE BLACK

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The Last Sweet Taste BY CRAIG NOVA

South BY RICHARD PLOETZ

A Table For Fortune BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

Never miss an issue! SIGN UP FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO SHELF UNBOUND MAGAZINE. SUBSCRIBE

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DISCOVERIES

IF YOU

THESE... YOU’RE SURE TO LIKE... Fox Creek BY M.E. TORREY

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DISCOVERIES

IF YOU

THESE... YOU’RE SURE TO LIKE... My Bully, My Aunt, and Her Final Gift BY HAROLD PHIFER

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ON OUR SHELF BS

CHECK OUT

What's On Our Shelf Nobody loves books more than us. We're a team of readers with broad interests and strong feelings about the books on our shelves.

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ON OUR SHELF

HIDE by Carolina Ebeid Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid’s Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory. Hide is a restless innovation of form and multimodal expression breaking open words across Arabic, English, and Spanish to release hidden meanings. Poems trace the letter M back to the Phoenician pictograph of waves, while technological “glitches” are portals that summon oracular voices across the family archive. In swirling “spell” poems, Ebeid conjures Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas write the human shape upon the earth.

CITY LIKE WATER by Dorothy Tse

Your city is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until they’re turned into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home. But soon he is absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, and you can only see him in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister? When the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth, where does it all leave you? Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.

DAUGHTER OF MOTHEROF-PEARL by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong wonders: What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like “invasive” and “endling” in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a “vampire squid from hell.” 143

ON OUR SHELF

WHEN GODOT ARRIVED by Jim Tilley

In his latest collection of eightyone free-verse sonnets, When Godot Arrived, Jim Tilley continues the explorations from the set of new poems in his previous book, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, and serves as an extension of that work. As usual, he draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially in his testaments to family, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook. It is a most expansive read.

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THIS FAR NORTH by

MUD ON THE MOON by Nita

Susan Campbell

Noveno

“When the sound of water shapes sleep. / When cranes disappear from the river. / When maps unfold on hardwood floors. / When north becomes the only direction.” The poems in This Far North hold reverence for the natural world and the ways we find home when we pay attention to what it is offering. Tethered to northern landscapes, Susan Campbell invites readers to look, look deeper at the world’s myriad wonders, to pause and consider what we can learn when we stand still long enough to listen to the trill of kinglets, the susurration of water, snow sloughing in December rain. Seeking gratitude while navigating a world suffused with grief and loss, these poems are compass points, cairns to help us find our way.

Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that intertwines a daughter’s exploration of her Filipino immigrant father’s obscured past with a reimagined version of his untold story. Born in Southeast Alaska, Nita Noveno traces the legacy of her father, who arrived in the US in 1928 as part of a wave of Filipino men seeking better opportunities through manual labor in agriculture and other industries. The book alternates between Nita’s coming-of-age story and imagined chapters of her father’s life, revealing the gaps and silences that lie between their experiences. With a blend of personal and historical imagery, Mud on the Moon offers a rare glimpse into the lives of Filipino immigrants in America. It is a meditation on how family, memory, and identity are shaped by the stories we inherit, both spoken and unspoken, across generations.

ON OUR SHELF

BIRTH LANGUAGE by

GIVEN AWAY by Nahid

Aimee Suzara

Rachlin

Aimee Suzara’s second fulllength book Birth Language centers on a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree. The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquistadors and explorers encountered the precolonial Philippine islands. Guided by the babaylan (shaman) and populated by mythical creatures like the mananngangal, kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.

In 1930s Iran, ten-year-old Mehri is given away in marriage, the first step in a life shaped by forced motherhood, loss, and sacrifice. Alone and afraid, she navigates married life far from the support of her mother and sisters. Pregnant by thirteen, Mehri bears child after child, losing many along the way, and struggles to mother her five surviving children through a haze of grief. In Given Away, Nahid Rachlin traces the hidden scars of her family’s history, carved by a system that grants men complete control and strips women of their voices. Yet within that silence, Rachlin reveals a quiet resistance rooted in sisterhood, love, and endurance.

DREAMS IN WHICH I’M ALMOST HUMAN by Hannah Soyer

At eight years old, Hannah Soyer had no choice but to undergo an intensive spinal fusion surgery, in order to keep her lungs from eventually collapsing. Fourteen years later, she chose another treatment for her neuromuscular condition: regular drug injections into her spinal fluid. But what does “choice” really mean, and how much weight do our choices hold? In taut, lyrical chapters, Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human confronts and communes with bodily autonomy, medical and sexual consent, traveling abroad in a wheelchair, caregiving and caretaking, appreciating the natural world, family history, bedtime stories, fantastical creatures, Irish poetry, and the limits and wonders of language and love. A bold collection of genre-bending essays, this memoir is an investigation into what we (and our words) are capable of, as we yearn to make sense of our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the worlds we inhabit.

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ON OUR SHELF

TALKING TO THE WOLF

CANICULA / DOG DAYS

by Rebecca Chace

by William Archila

A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship, friend breakups, and reconciliations across decades.

From war-torn El Salvador to the streets of LA, Canícula / Dog Days is a bold, bilingual collection chronicling exile, memory, and resilience across borders. William Archila’s Canícula / Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latin Poetry. Canícula, which means “dog days” in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile’s return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila’s poetry for the Spanish reader.

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THE AFTERLIFE OF A THREADBARE JESTER by Khanh Ha

Centering on a Vietnamese intelligence officer’s years-long ordeal in communist reeducation camps, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester offers a heartrending and an illuminating look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. War, literature, religion, politics, loyalty— they are all expertly interrogated through the protagonist’s compelling voice and the memorable cast of characters he encounters. Despite the struggle and suffering, the story never veers into the sentimental or cynical. Instead, it returns again and again to the complexities of the human heart and its will to endure. This is not a novel of ism excoriation; it is, in fact, a story that seeks questions to the truths of life and asks the question: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” A moving, unforgettable, and enlightening must-read.

ON OUR SHELF

THE LIFEGUARD by Laura

THE SOLDIER’S HOUSE

Kasischke

by Helena Benedict

In the town of Mission Hills, Michigan, an elementary school child drowns in the Olympicsized pool at a summer swim club. By most, but not all, the lifeguard on duty that afternoon—a teenage girl who becomes the central focus of a town looking for an object onto which their fears and grief can be projected—is seen as responsible for the tragedy. In overlapping narratives, the truth about the drowning gradually surfaces, and the strange arbitrary but inexorable nature of fate is exposed.

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow, child, and mother by bringing them to his upstate New York home. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends, but the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. In light of the worldwide controversies over refugees, The Soldier’s House is particularly timely and poignant.

KILL DICK by Luke Goebel At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together. Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot. Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

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COLD FIRE by David

THESE SPACE SHIPS

WALKING WHEEL by Molly

Mason

WEREN’T BUILT FOR US by Alan Chazard

Fisk

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

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In his newest poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built For Us, Alan Chazaro reconsiders the possibilities of space travel as the son of Mexican immigrants while navigating daily life across rapidly shifting social spaces. From barren gas stations in Central California during the height of the pandemic to faraway jungle planets governed by paleteros, Chazaro imagines the present and future in ways that are simultaneously bleak and dire, hopeful and beautiful, and seemingly, impossibly unrealized.

In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless. Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California’s Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie’s baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple’s first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail. Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a selfsufficient era that some only halfremember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.

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YELLOW by Amy Pence The desire for relevance—and to It’s

1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature— until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.

MORNING LEAVES by

THE OPPOSITES GAME by

Laing F. Rikkers

Brendan Constantine

An award-winning fusion of poetry and nature-inspired art, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy is a tender, soul-stirring meditation on grief, healing, and the quiet rediscovery of wonder, one morning at a time.

In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.

Through movement, creativity, and a deep reverence for the natural world, Rikkers offers a compassionate path forward in difficult times. Her honesty and vulnerability invite reflection, while opening space for joy, connection, and renewal. Infused with luminous art and verse, Morning Leaves is the perfect gift for anyone seeking healing, resilience, and hope. Step with her among the trees and find your way through the shadows back into the sunlight.

The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.

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OUTCAST by Oliver

PARTY LINE by Kyle

Basciano

Carrero Lopez

After hearing leprosy being used as an anti-immigration dog whistle, Oliver Basciano began a journey into the past, uncovering how this ancient disease has been weaponized, used to justify forced exile and social ostracism around the world. Traveling from the last leprosarium in Europe to remote villages in Mozambique, from Siberian settlements to Brazil’s hinterlands, Basciano builds a history that centers the voices of patients and those forced into the colony system. Along the way, he finds communities formed in exile, patient activism, and the persistent human capacity for joy.

Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people— wield power over those they have othered.

In this pulsating, compassionate book, the trope of medieval suffering is transformed into a bitingly relevant study of hope and solidarity.

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The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.

A CATALOG OF FUTURE MERCIES by Serena Chopra In this luminous memoir-inpoems, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy in an immigrant family haunted by generational violence. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to be a survivor descended from both survivors and perpetrators. Through divinatory poetics and crosstemporal storytelling, she parallels national histories of violence with the paradox of caretaking for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. And, in the specters of generational violence, Chopra invokes an imperative to stay present with lineages of trauma rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A lyric woven in four parts, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.

ON OUR SHELF

EARTH 7 by Deb Dlin

WITHOUT TERMINUS by

Unferth

Chaun Webster

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know— and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet. Webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.

Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?

ATTENTION SEEKING BEHAVIOR by Aea Varfis-Van Warmelo

I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie? The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behavior wants to tell you about Normal Ben, the man she’s been seeing: their running jokes, the stories she’s told him. She wants to tell you about the incorrect belief that tiny facial expressions betray a person’s real feelings. She wants to tell you about the time she went to a therapist to try to cure her lying habit. She wants to tell you about the body she found on a walk through the park. She wants to tell you about lies she’s told her demeaning, erratic boss. She wants to tell you about the history of police interrogation techniques, which use deception to extract false confessions. She wants to tell you that all lie-detection methods are phony. She wants to tell you what it’s like to read opposing testimonies in a sexual assault case. She wants to tell you about her ex-boyfriend, who is a liar. But is she telling you the truth—or does she only want your attention? 151

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Howe

QUESTIONS 27 & 28 by

THE MEMORY MUSEUM by M

Karen Tei Yamashita

Lin

For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates—who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military—whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them—many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan— to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.

THIS POOR BOOK by Fanny

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Stretching from the present to the future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing debut collection depicts characters finding beauty amidst the disorientation of migration, the contradictions of living between cultures, the perverse realities of race and class, and the delicate dance between survival and resistance. In “Scenes from Childhood,” an elderly woman in a dystopian reality is visited by forgotten memories of her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a fraying couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco to surprising results. “You Won’t Read This in the News” imagines four migrant workers and petty thieves who forge an unshakable connection across one desperate night. A filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood and artmaking in “Tough Egg.” And in a newly instated Memory Museum generations into the future, two sensory architects weave a moving tapestry of love and radical hope. Brimming with joy, insight, and emotional power, The Memory Museum unveils M Lin as an irresistible new talent with fearless political and stylistic imagination.

ON OUR SHELF

OVERTAKELESSNESS by

THE SPOIL by Maile

CHARLOTTESVILLE by

Daniel Moysaenko

Chapman

Deborah Baker

Overtakelessness is a powerful reckoning with war, its ruinous proximity to daily existence and the dissonance of experiencing it from afar. These poems trace the long history and the present circumstance of the ongoing and devastating war in Ukraine, a country whose origins far predate Russia’s, despite Moscow’s propagandist claims. Through the lens of the Ukrainian diaspora witnessing the current violence from America, Daniel Moysaenko attempts to square a centuriesold motherland with a newly aggrieved contemporary nation. A third country emerges in these poems: one that, though spectral, exists in a perpetual future, “astounded at what’s left of living.”

In a rambling split-level house on the outskirts of Tacoma in the 1970s, a young girl is preoccupied by the anomalous phenomena she reads about in magazines: alien visitations, ESP, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle. Meanwhile, she and her stepbrother, thrown uneasily together by disaster and divorce, grow increasingly convinced that a malevolent presence resides in their house, and they develop elaborate strategies to live with it. Years later, Mandy is living in Las Vegas in a modern townhouse caring for her mother who is in a terminal decline from Alzheimer’s. She works for a real estate company but struggles to focus on her tasks. She takes medication to manage her ADHD, which has her zagging between distraction and obsession, always halfway through some home renovation project. Then, while digging through a box of her mother’s things hoarded in her garage, she sets something loose. Something old and baleful: a demon that soon possesses one of her neighbors, an affable semiretired house flipper and handyman named TK. What follows is a gripping and often terrifying story of familial grief in which the past is both elusive and paralyzing, and questions of science and spirit become urgent.

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens. Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far-right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.

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A different language is a different vision of life.” — FEDERICO FELLINI

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Fall 2026 | Global Reads | Shelf Unbound Magazine