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The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers’ drug addictions.

JayLynn heads to college intent on gaining distance from her depressed mother, only to learn that her mother’s illness has reached a terrifying peak. She fears the chaos and instability of her extended family will prove too much for her boyfriend, whose idyllic family feels worlds, not miles, apart from her own. When bats invade Zaria’s new home, she is forced to determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to be a good mother. Angel rebels on Derby night, risking her safety to connect with her absent mother and the wild ways that consumed her.

Mama Said separates from stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor, and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities. Kristen Gentry’s stories showcase the wide-reaching repercussions of addiction and the ties that forever bind daughters to their mothers, flaws and all.

The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, who was born in the eastern province of Camagüey in 1902, died in 1989. This new edition of his selected poems, reissued thirty years after its original publication, includes an extensive, new introductory essay by Roberto Márquez, one of the original translators and a leading authority on Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture.

This debut collection turns the ordinary into sweeping tragicomedy, probing the small, daily confrontations that shape a life well lived.

In a debut collection at once deeply felt and delightfully playful, Ernie Wang presents ordinary people struggling with challenges that confront many today: how to find steady, meaningful work; how to manage when our healthcare system fails us; how to navigate thorny relationships with lovers, with friends, with children; how to keep one’s dreams alive, and how to let them go. The thirteen stories in Manual for How to Live Magnificently are intriguingly linked, with narrators becoming players and players becoming narrators. Several stories feature cameos by the irrepressible seventy-something Mabel Rogerson, who serves by turns as catalyst, comic relief, and means to catharsis. The book toggles among dramatically different locales—Dayton, Ohio; Las Vegas; Disneyland; Kamisoshigaya, Japan—drawing them thematically into a shared orbit. 

Though each of Wang’s offerings has heft and poignancy, the stories also serve up superb comic set pieces. A fake fortuneteller forgoes his crystal ball in favor of a snow globe; a priest moonlights as a professional wrestler named the Grim Preacher; a troubled lawyer who reluctantly cat-sits for a friend winds up finding solace with Killer and Hoedaddy. Revelations are reached at the male strip club Dayton Dix, or during a ritual spanking at Hofbräuhaus just off the Las Vegas Strip, or on Captain Hook’s flying galleon during a theme park ride. And almost everyone eventually ends up at Applebee’s. When storylines converge in a terrifying tragedy, Wang takes the opportunity to explore the complexity of family, to deepen our understanding of sacrifice and the many ways people demonstrate love for one another.

Praised at the time as the most emphatically “American” book ever written, Margaret is a breathtaking combination of female bildungsroman, utopian novel, and historical romance. First published in 1845, Sylvester Judd's novel centers on the fictional New England village of Livingston, where the young Margaret Hart strives to escape the poverty and vice of her surroundings by learning from a mysterious teacher, the “Master,” and by entwining herself with the powers of nature. But when Margaret's brother is tried and hanged for murder, this rural community collapses, forcing Margaret to face the temptations of an urban underworld and to confront the intrigue of her family history. Margaret is the story of a young woman's attempt to create a new social order, founded on beauty and truth, in a land plagued by violence, debauchery, and political instability.

As Gavin Jones points out in his new introduction, Margaret perhaps stands alone in its creation of a female character who grows in social rather than domestic power. The novel also remains unique in its exploration of transcendental philosophy in novelistic form. Part eco-criticism, part seduction novel, part temperance tract, and part social history, Margaret is a virtual handbook for understanding the literary culture of mid-nineteenth-century America, the missing piece in puzzling out connections between writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau. 

Margaret was widely read and deeply influential on both British and American writers throughout the nineteenth century but controversial for its representations of alcoholism and capital punishment. Judd's novel remains resonant for today's readers as it overturns conventional views of the literary representation of women and the origins of the American Renaissance.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro has been widely acclaimed Peru's master storyteller. Until now, however, few of his stories have been translated into English. This volume brings together fifteen stories written during the period 1952-1975, which were collected in the three volumes of La palabra del mudo.

Ribeyro's stories treat the social problems brought about by urban expansion, including poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, class struggles, alienation, and violence. At the same time, elements of the fantastic playfully interrupt some of the stories. As Ribeyro's characters become swept up in circumstances beyond their understanding, we see that the only freedom or dignity left them comes from their own imaginations.

The fifteen stories included here are "Terra Incognita," "Barbara," "The Featherless Buzzards," "Of Modest Color," "The Substitute Teacher," "The Insignia," "The Banquet," "Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote)," "The Little Laid Cow," "The Jacaranda Trees," "Bottles and Men," "Nothing to Do, Monsieur Baruch," "The Captives," "The Spanish," and "Painted Papers."

WINNER OF FC2's RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A stunning look at the labor of obsession and the industry of self-destruction

In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In “MEMO 19,” a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in “Rio Grande, Wisconsin,” a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.
 

Available for the first time in English, Hungarian writer Edina Szvoren's short story collection gives voice to lives shaped by repression, cruelty, and silence.

Moments from the Life of a Hedgehog and Other Stories introduces English-language readers to the unsettling, exacting fiction of Hungarian author Edina Szvoren. Disturbing yet deliberately modest, these stories evoke a claustrophobic world of compromise and quiet desperation: fractured families warped by history and habit, boarding schools and workplaces ruled by cruelty, and domestic interiors heavy with unspoken dread. Set in the final decades of Hungarian socialism and its immediate aftermath, Szvoren’s sharply observed miniatures are animated by ever-shifting perspectives—outsiders, misfits, refusers—struggling to make sense of lives largely beyond their control. Grotesque without excess, absurd without relief, Szvoren’s narrative voices overlap and collide in ways that recall Franz Kafka and István Örkény. Yet her work remains firmly grounded in the body: queasy, intimate, and insistently physical, with a feminist and existential charge. Among polyester ornaments and unbearable family encounters, these stories offer a powerful, understated testimony to the unheard—and the nearly unhearable.

This landmark bilingual collection presents a comprehensive selection of Vietnamese poetry spanning nearly fifty years of warfare and its aftermath, from the Indochinese War (1946-1954) through the Vietnam War (1961-1975) and into the post-war period. Edited and translated by renowned Vietnam War scholars and poets Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl, in collaboration with Vietnamese poet and editor Nguyen Ba Chung, this volume captures the voices of Vietnamese writers who experienced, witnessed, or processed the transformative conflicts that shaped modern Vietnam.

Encompassing poetry from multiple generations, these poems reflect on the diverse responses to conflict: some express patriotic commitment, others grapple with loss and trauma, while many explore the intimate human experiences of war. Mountain River demonstrates how Vietnamese poets drew upon a rich literary tradition while creating new forms of expression to address the unprecedented scale of modern warfare. The result is a collaborative effort that represents a significant achievement in postwar Vietnamese-American literary relations and cross-cultural translation.

 ANew York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

Delicate and assured, the stories in My Escapee illuminate unseen forces in women's lives: the shameful thought, the stifled hope, the subterranean stresses of marriage, friendship, and family. Grappling with lost memories, escaped time, the longing to be loved, and the instinct for autonomy, the stories peer inside their characters' minds to their benign delusions, their triumphs and defeats. 

A girl taking a test for admittance to a selective school finds that what she loves most of all is the ordinary. A lonely young woman, sick of being sick, swaps places with her nurse. A college student deploys her more charming roommate to discover the secret rituals of an all-male club on campus. And in the title story, a woman in a nursing home receives mysterious missives from her longtime lover recalling fragments of their old life together.

Poignant and revealing stories from one of the Midwest’s leading authors.

Poignant and revealing stories from one of the Midwest’s leading authors.

WINNER OF FC2’s RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

Meditations on the ways grief is felt and harvested—the funny, the sorrowful, the surreal, and the unmentionable

The stories in My Haunted Home delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Victoria Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” we explore the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder.

Each story is a bite-size piece of haunting candy on a necklace of obsession holding them together. Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.
 

The speaker of the simultaneously funny and devastating poems in this remarkable first collection comes from a country that, like the Soviet Union, no longer exists, a place he treats with a mixture of nostalgia, disdain, and bewilderment as he strives to achieve a sense of order in his current disordered environment, a post-apocalyptic landscape with striking similarities to our own. He takes the reader through haunting and disjunctive childhood memories, on visits to Azerbaijan and West Des Moines, through the ravages of physical and spiritual illness, into and out of wars and ill-fated romantic escapades, as he carefully pieces together a complex narrative of self. This is a book of location and dis-location, intent and inaction, struggle and failure, restraint and mania, love and anger, savagery and healing, grief and merriment, elegy and ode. Technically, the poems-often litanies-are marked by syntactical variation, recurring imagery, paradoxical statement, cultural idioms, shifts between high and low diction, a carnivalesque sense of humor, and an elliptical approach to exposition. The speaker also takes on the identities of various personae in the book, including Joseph Cornell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pol Pot, a vaudevillian, a movie extra, minor dictators, vagrants, ambigendered lovers, and a lighthouse keeper on an uninhabited island.