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A literary tour de force through the symbolic landscapes of recent cultural history, Lookalikes is a text in which everything is as it seems and nothing is as it is.

Thomas Meinecke’s lookalikes resemble many people––Marlon Brando, Shakira, Justin Timberlake, or Josephine Baker to name a few––but never themselves. Illusion is their capital; imitation is their business. They stroll through Düsseldorf's posh Königsallee, reading, quoting, and plagiarizing their way through the history of pop culture and philosophy, exploring categories of realness in parallel worlds and digital chat forums. At the same time, yet another Thomas wanders Brazil in disguise, tracing the journey of Hubert Fichte and his doppelgänger Jäcki. In this endless play of similarities, all identity is lost. 

Between literary and sexual genres, mimesis and authenticity, fiction and reality, these lookalikes only ever find the Other, just as Meinecke’s text duplicates itself in the furor of allusions and reference systems, constantly branching out anew, never remaining the same, always changing these so-called original signs.

Cristina, the young protagonist of Tree of Desire, and her little brother Joaquín run away from a home that is outwardly normal, but inwardly disfunctional. Lost on the streets of Mexico City, they confront some of the most terrifying aspects of city life. Or is it all a dream? The story suggests, without confirming, that sexual abuse has driven Cristina to her desperate escape. But is it an escape? Are they awakening from a dream, or reentering a nightmare?

Serafín, too, is lost in the city. Searching for his father who has deserted the family, he is virtually helpless amid the city dangers. Serafín finds compassion in surprising places, but will he survive to return to his mother and their rural village?

These two novels by one of Mexico's premier writers illuminate many aspects of contemporary Mexican life. Solares describes Mexico's different social classes with Dickensian realism. His focus on young protagonists, unusual in Mexican literature, opens a window onto problems of children's vulnerability that know no national borders. At the same time, his use of elements of the fantastic and the paranormal, and his evocative writing style, make reading his novels a most pleasurable experience.

Formally daring and emotionally disarming, Low-Risk Activities spins out twenty-two uncanny stories that feel like dispatches from a future already here—and already unraveling.

J Efron’s Low-Risk Activities is a genre-defying collection that slips between interview transcript, personal confession, government form, and speculative fable—told through the voices of orphans, immortals, office workers, digital nomads, and posthuman survivors. These are characters in limbo, each trying to make sense of a fractured world where logic doesn’t always follow law.

The book opens with Lan Caihe, a faux-memoir in which a gender-fluid, possibly immortal narrator navigates trauma, desire, and the politics of being unclassifiable—part myth, part autofiction, and entirely singular. Later entries mimic psychological evaluations, immigration interrogations, and philosophical questionnaires, inviting the reader not just to observe, but to participate.

Structured like a psychic excavation, Low-Risk Activities questions how we define personhood, how language shapes identity, and how systems reduce people to data—only to lose the meaning of what that data once held. Efron’s voice is intimate yet disorienting, full of humor, dread, and lyrical estrangement. Fans of Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Rivka Galchen will find familiar resonance in this work that refuses to resolve neatly—and in doing so, reveals something startlingly true.

Lives of longing and resilience, searching and belonging in a debut story collection from a memoirist and renowned advocate for change

For a Lucky Tomorrow Buy a Flower Today. Is it true? a prospective customer asks. About the luck? “Absolutely!” Felma says. Flowers, she knows, are all that’s anchored in this world, even if not for long, and like others in these luminous stories, Felma knows what it is to be rootless. In Lucky Tomorrow, Deborah Jiang-Stein presents an unforgettable cast of characters dreaming of redemption, purpose, and connection in a wounded yet beautiful world.

A young girl stuck working at her family’s candy stand. A former priest trapped on a crowded train. A prisoner robbed of the book she’s been writing. A father haunted by his broken family. A woman confined to a psych ward. A reverend caring for her dying housemate. And Felma, a flower vendor, searching for the daughter she gave birth to while in prison, who was swiftly bundled away. Felma’s story leads us in, through, and around the others—a central beating heart for these lives on the fringes, where Jiang-Stein finds a singular, tenacious humanity.

The stories in Lucky Tomorrow move through settings drawn from the path of the author’s own life: Seattle, where she grew up after being born in an Appalachian prison; Tokyo, where she once lived; the Twin Cities, where she currently resides; and the American South, where she travels for much of her advocacy work with women in prison. Pushing the boundaries of genre, Jiang-Stein delicately layers the stories of these outcasts, eccentrics, and visionaries, gathering them in from the shadows with remarkable empathy and candor, laying bare our shared sorrows and joys.

Schwarzenbach’s clear, psychologically acute prose makes this novella an evocative narrative, with many intriguing parallels to her own life.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach—journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, and traveler—has become a European cult figure for bohemian free spirits since the rediscovery of her works in the late 1980s. Lyric Novella is her story of a young man’s obsession with a Berlin variété actress. Despite having his future career mapped out for him in the diplomatic service, the young man begins to question all his family values under Sibylle’s spell. His family, future, and social standing become irrelevant when set against his overriding compulsion to pick her up every night from the theater so they can go for a drive. Bringing the story back to her own life, Schwarzenbach admitted after publication that her hero was in fact a young woman, not a man, leaving little doubt that Lyric Novella is a literary tale of lesbian love during socially and politically turbulent times.