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A haunting reimagining of Billy the Kid—myth, violence, and regret collide in a lyrical coming-of-age story woven with history, legend, and the omnipresence of birds.

Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him: The Lives of Billy the Kid by Pamela Ryder is a coming-of-age saga like no other. It reaches beyond the myth of the reckless and romantic rebel, the murdering gunslinger, and the scrappy outlaw. His story is one of survival, mayhem, and regret. Billy is portrayed as a complex and authentic figure. At times he is ruthless, often sympathetic, always clever and engaging. Yet he remains haunted by loneliness as he rides ever closer to the end of his short and violent life.

The child of Irish immigrants, Billy came of age amid hardship and lawlessness, forced to navigate a world that offered him little mercy. From his grim childhood in the tenements of New York to the unforgiving deserts of New Mexico, his journey is marked by loss, chaos, and fleeting moments of grace. He was a boy who became an outlaw, forever running from his past toward an inevitable fate.

Told through shifting perspectives and enriched by Billy’s keen observations of birds, landscapes, and the lives he has taken, the novel unfolds in lyrical, unflinching prose. His fascination with birds, whose freedom stands in stark contrast to his own doomed flight, threads through the narrative. A meditation on myth, mortality, and the stories we tell about ourselves, Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Him is a singular reimagining of the American West. It does not flinch from the blood or the beauty of a life lived on the edge of history.

A fragmented manuscript left unfinished, a voice inherited by time, a ghost lingering in the margins—Daydreamers is what remains when fiction forgets its fiction and when the story you’re translating becomes your own.

Upon the discovery of an unfinished manuscript left behind by his late father, a son’s act of literary translation quickly descends into a ghost story of family rumors, art, and the history we inherit, whether we want them or not. As the son translates the mysterious text, what emerges is a narrative haunted by betrayal, artistic rivalry, and a murder in California’s Chinese literary underground—one that was never solved but perhaps was fictionalized.

Cycling between San Francisco, Los Angeles, China, and Taiwan, the novel unfolds across generations of Chinese immigrants and diaspora artists, linked by tenuous friendships, publishing feuds, and the obscure threads of an act of violence. At the center: a spectral woman named Lena Wu, the object of literary fixation, political allegory, and real-life scandal.

Was the manuscript meant as a novel or a confession? Was the story’s central figure—Lena Wu—a real person or an idea and persona passed between generations of writers, each shaping her into their own myth? And what is the narrator’s responsibility when his father’s version of events begins to implicate those still living? 

Told through letters, interviews, travelogues, and unclaimed fragments, Daydreamers moves through foggy cities, cluttered studios, desert highways, and vanished publishing circles—where stories are currency and silence is survival. Lu constructs a novel that is both noir and anti-noir, both memoir and anti-memoir—a mystery that resists solving, and a translation that becomes its own original work.

It is 1979 and patriarch Bud relocates his family to his conservative hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut. Despite dubious restaurant experience, he uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. Things begin to fall apart when police find an all-too-literal skeleton in the family’s basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.

Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, this colonial gothic novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.

Redefining strength, one truth at a time.

Told in a broken shorthand voice, Mazza's language is acute, evoking a place where the patients, the caregivers, and the system are all disabled. Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage nurse-aides at a state ward for severely retarded and physically handicapped children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out the required therapies for their patients in a 4-hour shift. They're working within a system where money for therapy is only continued if therapy shows improvement--and yet the state-paid therapists who oversee the ward know the patients will never show any improvement. To keep the money coming in, it is up to the minimum-wage caregivers to "see" and chart important improvements, thus keeping the therapy program alive. 

Blinded in their own way by their pet-like adoption of favorite patients, Teri and Cleo struggle to remain both optimistic and realistic. As their personal failures mount--and even transpose or emulate the travesties within the state ward--Teri and Cleo, with their own unseen "disabilities" in dealing with their lives and pasts, react harshly to the breakdown in the emotional balancing act.

How does art mirror and shape our lives? Can it transcend the boundaries of time, wealth, and circumstance? Debra Spark—whose previous work the Washington Post described as "richly imaginative" and "real world magic"—explores these themes in her new novel Discipline. With a trio of important paintings missing, the book weaves together three narratives that span almost a century. From an inhumane boarding school in Maine in the late 1970s to a contemporary Boston art appraiser struggling with raising a teen to the long-lost love letters between a painter and his wife, Discipline is a propulsive literary mystery about family strife and devotion, ambition and authorship, and the abiding and mysterious power of art.

Inspired by the life and family of Walt Kuhn (the painter responsible for the 1913 Armory Show that introduced Americans to modernism) and the scandal-ridden Elan boarding school that was forced to shut down in 2011, this richly drawn, suspenseful novel shows Spark at her most masterful.
 

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time

A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver.

As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.
 

WINNER OF THE FC2 CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE 

Double-Check for Sleeping Children is the newest work by award-winning writer Kirstin Allio

At once formal and tidal, damning and dreaming, Kirstin Allio’s Double-Check for Sleeping Children is charged with prayer, curse, redemption and abasement. Does truth come from reason, or beauty, or suffering? It takes the inner lives of outsiders, dark mirrors, and false ceilings to find an answer.

Families split by social class, a wealthy young widow, addicts, hunters, poor whites, a green card bride and a nursing mother: in twenty poetically and morally propulsive short stories, Allio disquiets the sublimated and palpates shadows. She leads us through the sometimes flooded, other times flood-lit halls of the human soul.

Part menacing, macabre Mary Gaitskill, part Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, and with the taut, wry, tell-all detail of Elizabeth Hardwick, Double-Check for Sleeping Children deals in codedness and transgression. The stories explore coming of age in middle age, anxiety about time and technology, inverted revelation. “What was I supposed to do with Basho and Mosie?” Sheila asks herself about her children in “Uncollected Territories.” “Be my real self? Hand myself over, do what you will with me, plant your strange selves in my private soil?”

A stark, hypnotic exploration of memory, identity, and the fractured stories we inherit, and invent, to survive

Driscoe is a stylistically daring novel that plunges deep into the unstable terrain of memory, identity, and the stories we tell to endure collapse. Hypnotic and recursive, it moves through contradiction as both method and meaning, tracing how belief hardens, fractures, and reforms under pressure. The prose hums with unease, balancing precision and disorientation as certainty dissolves into overlapping versions of the same events.

At its center is Jouska, a man suspended between narratives of success and failure, loyalty and betrayal, progress and ruin. He is pursued by obsessive memories of his ex-wife, his brother, and the elusive figure of Driscoe, by turns entrepreneur, fraud, chemist, builder, trickster. Everyone claims a story about Driscoe. None align, yet all insist on their authority. Entangled in familial conflict and his own faltering recollections, Jouska can neither trust nor abandon any version of the truth.

When Jouska receives an email announcing the death of his superior, the already fragile architecture of his life splinters further. What follows is a journey through a bureaucratic labyrinth where death is both confirmed and denied, and where greed, doubt, presence, and absence pulse relentlessly. Driscoe emerges as a narrative dirge for a collapsing American middle class and the myths that sustained it, tracing the impossibility of aligning personal loss with cultural unraveling. This novel will resonate with readers drawn to literary fiction that is intellectually demanding, formally inventive, and attuned to the psychic costs of living amid social and economic decay.