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Debut short-story collection in English from acclaimed fiction writer Ali Hosseini, named a Favorite Short Story Collection of 2023 by the Chicago Review of Books

The stories in Dare the Sea explore Iran’s landscape, culture, and the undercurrent of change affecting its people—both in Iran and the United States. The stories in the first half of the collection are set in Iran in the time before and just after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Each tale discloses the obstacles rural Iranians lived with on a daily basis and the exigencies of survival: petty theft, corruption, drug trafficking, religion, and love. Stories in the second half take place in exile, where characters are seemingly dropped into American locales like the Midwest or Hawaii, taking in their situation with only the survival skills they’ve learned in their own land and enduring the hardships of being strangers in a new country.

Loosely interconnected by reappearing characters, the stories in Dare the Sea are strongly linked by the country of Iran, its landscape, its history, and its hold on its people.

Follow the everyday lives of those trying to keep up with a changing Nashville, Tennessee.
 
Set in the rapidly changing city of Nashville, Tennessee, the characters in Dear Second Husband struggle to make their marriages, friendships, and families thrive despite the pressures of modern life. An unapologetic widower, a self-destructive musician, a teacher grieving a miscarriage, and a mother trying to be everything for everyone rely on resilience and persistence to find joy and belonging in the fragile connections between one another.

Hugh Sheehy’s riveting new collection draws heavily from the genres of horror, mystery, science fiction, and myth.

These are tales of seekers, often damaged, who find themselves caught up in skewed realities, facing lurking threats, violent deaths, strange entities, and alienating technologies. Confronted with unsettling, escalating, circumstances, the disparate cast of characters are driven toward self-revelation and perverse moments of poignancy.

A troubled high schooler traps a peer in an underground storage space. A traumatized felon returns home to rob the man who molested him as a child. A videogame help-line operator suspects a regular caller, obsessed with a disturbing role-playing game, of real-life misdeeds. In the title story, an unhappy couple adopts a “designer animal,” a genetic hybrid created to be the perfect pet. But the “grot” makes trouble in the neighborhood, becoming emblematic of a deeper problem. “Something is wrong with the world,” the narrator’s husband explains. “A design flaw. It’s so thoroughly corrupted, I’m not sure how to fix it.”

Inventive and unpredictable, these thirteen stories are wholly immersive, showing Sheehy at his captivating best.

Sensorily rich and narratively captivating, the stories in Detonator are utterly addictive.  Author Peter Mountford invites readers with a balance of humor, sensuality, and compassion while spanning continents, offering intimate portraits of flawed characters caught in the crosshairs of personal and political upheavals.  

In “One More Night Behind Walls,” set against the early 1980s-onset of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the young protagonist observes, “Some say the grown-ups used the war as an excuse to let go, but I think it’s more like the war forced them together, and that’s what made them go off the rails.” Soon, the interpersonal dramas of the expat community beget casual debauchery and fatal consequences during a drunken New Year’s Party.  

In other stories, an American consultant faces personal and professional ruin after fateful decisions concerning Ecuador's post-revolution economy. A divorcee in her forties finds unexpected chemistry with her ex-husband’s girlfriend after a Scottish Highland funeral. A married suburban feminist experiments with the escape of a dangerous love affair in Washington, D.C.   

With remarkable sensitivity and psychological acuity, Mountford positions his characters not at the center of historical events, but at their peripheries — witnesses to momentous changes they can only partially comprehend.  

“Our minds were frail, troubled by old wounds that kept calling for help, and we were forever confused and looking in the wrong direction,” says the character of the title story, “Detonator,” about a man who blows up his life, again. And again.   
 
Rather than rendering them insignificant, this perspective reveals their profound humanity as they navigate desire, grief, and meaning against political instability and social transformation.  

Mountford illuminates each character with stunning humanity — free from condescension — as consequences swirl through even the purest intentions. With striking precision, he captures the visceral authenticity of emotions as characters gather fragmented understandings of their place in the world. Each story traces a unique path along the plane curve of history, honoring the messy, beautiful complexity of lifetimes unspooled and most of all — lived.

A collection of twelve stories by award-winning author Christine Sneed
 
The stories in Direct Sunlight, award-winning author Christine Sneed’s latest, are inspired by the memorable strangeness of everyday life. The characters in these topically diverse tales experience events that bring the terms of their day-to-day lives and their relationships into focus in a way hitherto foreign to them.
 
The title story features two adult children learning of their father’s second family long after his death in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Mega Millions” explores the aftermath of a small-town midwestern factory employee’s enormous lottery win. In “Dear Kelly Bloom,” a young journalist takes on the role of advice columnist at a faltering Chicago newspaper around the time of the 2008 financial meltdown and soon finds himself tasked with replying to his own mother’s letter requesting guidance on family matters. In “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis,” a contentedly childless man tries to make sense of his sister’s decision to adopt a capuchin monkey after she and her husband find themselves unable to conceive a baby of their own.
 
The stories in Direct Sunlight rely on humor but are balanced by Sneed’s clear-eyed sobriety about the sorrows inherent in the human condition.

Complicating the idea of a single immigrant narrative, the stories in Diversity Quota move from the US to Nepal and back again, showing how displacement can lead to suffering or hope—sometimes simultaneously. In Kathmandu, Nepalis are frequently caught up in battles between tradition and progress; in the United States, their cultural dislocation is often emblematic of the larger predicaments immigrants face. Ranjan Adiga navigates these larger problems of racism, inequity, and gender roles, while simultaneously centering the humanity of his characters, flaws and all.

In these stories, the lines between “winners” and “losers” in a rapidly globalizing world become frayed and warped. A Nepali migrant’s worst fears materialize in “Leech.” A couple in “Denver” tries to acclimate to a new social class. A middle-aged man is attracted to his barber in “Haircut and Massage.” A Nepali professor is captivated by a white American student in “The Diversity Committee.” In often unexpected ways, Adiga captures moments of survival amid worlds colored by precarity.

Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican, the only book of fiction by playwright and poet Jack Agüeros, affirms the triumphs and ordinary struggles of the Puerto Rican experience in New York. In stories that span the 1940s through the 1990s, Agüeros re-creates the barrio in all its multifaceted immensity, with its candy stores, plaster saints, fruit vendors, sidewalk games of dominoes, knife fights, and stories of successful craftspeople and entrepreneurs.

These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet, experiences, but throughout Agüeros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion. Richly detailed, wry, and matter-of-fact, Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican is an important achievement by an accomplished American writer.

Double Toil and Trouble is the first new volume of fiction in more than a decade by beloved Arkansas writer Donald Harington (1935–2009). Featuring the long-lost suspense novel of the title and four previously unpublished or uncollected stories, this volume adds several new chapters to the saga of Stay More, the fictional Ozarks village that serves as the setting for more than a dozen other Harington novels.

Edited by longtime Harington scholar Brian Walter, Double Toil and Trouble also includes an appendix featuring the author’s spirited correspondence with the editor who originally inspired the title novel, providing an insider’s look at the American literary scene and Harington’s own early assessment of his work. Spanning several decades of the author’s career, this volume gives readers a Harington who is at once familiar and fresh as he experiments with new formal possibilities, only to once again endear the vagaries of love, life, and folk language to us.
 

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?”