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A hybrid of short works exploring the 1859 Carrington solar flare

A flood of illumination, a cosmic cataclysm frozen in time—the Carrington Event of 1859 was the most disruptive solar flare in recorded history, an electromagnetic storm that wiped out telegraph systems across the world and which, if it were to occur today, might well destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit.

Candace Nunag’s A Solar Flare is a hybrid of short essays, research notes, poems, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs, as well as bits of flash fiction, all simultaneously contemplating technology and memory, while preoccupied with the 1859 solar flare. The ghost of the Carrington Event haunts A Solar Flare with the promise of definitive answers about the narrator’s many severed connections: her digital, supernatural, eastern, western, and analog past. It is an attempt to illuminate the path of thought, wending its way through the tangles of rumination and irreconcilable spaces of wonder.

A coming-of-age tale of a young Dominican American boy facing a grave loss and a feathered phantom

Between the looming buildings of Brooklyn, a young Dominican American boy only ever called mijo by his family has just lost his father to brain cancer. In the wake of his grief, he begins to see his deceased father take the form of a pigeon and ghost, acting as protector and advisor in moments of duress and confusion. Determined to find out the truth behind his father’s appearances, he sets out on the streets of Brooklyn with his outspoken friend Naño, and in the hills of the Dominican Republic with his cousin Matias, in search of answers, only to discover more ghostly apparitions and inexplicable occurrences. In a world of lost things and in-betweens, the grief-stricken son must choose whether he can bear to let go of his father or accept the consequences of what we let haunt us.
 

A classic work of twentieth-century Slovak literature that blends naturalism and depictions of rural life with the supernatural.

After many years, Libor returns to his native village, where he has been appointed gamekeeper. His childhood sweetheart, Zuna, is waiting for him there. But his homecoming is far from idyllic. He has “tasted city life” and soon becomes an outsider to the villagers. According to them, Zuna has become a local prostitute who sleeps with anyone who pays her. Zuna’s father, an old miller, has gone blind because he made a pact with the devil. The mill where Libor and Zuna used to play as children has fallen into disrepair and ruin. The more Libor gets to know the world that he has returned to, the more confused he becomes. The village is full of superstitions, secrets, and hostility. He meets the charcoal burner Tavo, who lives high in the mountains, and learns from him the mysterious and bloody story of Zuna’s birth. He also learns what matters most to him: Zuna is pure and innocent. Libor starts a relationship with her from scratch. But just when their forgotten love might finally come to fruition, He appears—a vagabond who can transform into a wolf—and Libor discovers that Zuna is meeting with him. Is it a monster that gouges people’s eyes out? The devil, or our immaterial, dark alter ego? Reality, dreams, and fantasy blend in Libor’s mind as his hopes seem crushed beyond redemption.

An experimental narrative by eco-fiction author and poet Patrick Lawler evolves out of the interactions between twenty-four extinct animals and those characters who struggle for significance in the face of their own extinction.

Patrick Lawler’s second novel, Conversations with Extinct Animal, is a dialogue between psychology and ecology—between poetry and story. A suicide note masquerading as a love letter, the novel transcends genres and keeps kaleidoscopically shifting: sometimes it is an elegy, and sometimes it is a therapy session—but always these are the field notes for the end of the world.

As a collection of characters associated with The Facility come to terms with an individual’s death, they must confront their own losses amid the colossal absence of the twenty-four extinct animals. All the characters float between various inexplicable, mystifying “syndromes” that call into question their identities and, ultimately, call into question the elements of story itself. “Looking at pictures of the Extinct Animals, I can’t help but wonder if it is too late to save the world—especially since there are so many different worlds,” observes the narrator of the novel in his efforts to save the unsavable.

“A deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness.” —Boston Globe
“A distinctive debut from a promising author.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A stunner from the very first page.” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions
And praise from Ann Patchett, Alice McDermott, Danielle Evans, Elisa Albert, and Aimee Bender

Populated with lovers who leave and return, with ghosts of the Holocaust and messages from the dead, Courtney Sender’s debut collection speaks in a singular new voice about the longings and loneliness of contemporary love. The world of these fourteen interlocking stories is fiercely real but suffused with magic and myth, dark wit, and distinct humor. Here, ancient loss works its way deep into the psyche of modern characters, stirring their unrelenting lust for life.

In “To Do With the Body,” the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In “Lilith in God’s Hands,” Adam’s first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.

For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.

WINNER OF THE CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A technocratic collapse erases an obscure poet from existence, she and her pet moss ball refuse to disappear

Marimo, Mon Amour is a surreal, contemplative novel set in the quarantined borough of Alphabet City, where a botched data migration leaves obscure poet Zinger Zingiber effectively erased from the record. Furloughed from her jobs as a dumpling-maker and asylum specialist, she withdraws to her apartment with only her pet moss ball, Marimo, for company. As the Bureau of Misidentification bans forbidden words and controls identity, Zinger appoints herself the “Minister of Loneliness,” observing a world suspended in time.

From this quiet refuge, Zinger meditates on solitude, the fragility of memory, and the small, ephemeral moments that become acts of meaning. Her narration drifts between dream and reality, blending whimsy with philosophical inquiry. Lyrical and recursive, the novel draws on the psychological depth of Dostoevsky and the surreal sensibilities of Italo Calvino and Yoko Ogawa as it explores agency a plague of absentia. Marimo, Mon Amour will appeal to readers of literary and speculative fiction, fans of surreal or philosophical narratives, and anyone drawn to meditations on isolation, resistance, and the endurance of the human spirit.

WINNER OF FC2’s AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW/RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATE FICTION PRIZE 

Step inside a gallery where the strange feels familiar.

A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your mate—a paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Gray’s stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird.

Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

Faris argues that by combining realistic representation with fantastic elements so that the marvelous seems to grow organically out of the ordinary, magical realism destabilizes the dominant form of realism based on empirical definitions of reality, gives it visionary power, and thus constitutes what might be called a "remystification" of narrative in the West. Noting the radical narrative heterogeneity of magical realism, the author compares its cultural role to that of traditional shamanic performance, which joins the worlds of daily life and that of the spirits. Because of that capacity to bridge different worlds, magical realism has served as an effective decolonizing agent, providing the ground for marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures to develop and create masterpieces. At the same time, this process is not limited to postcolonial situations but constitutes a global trend that replenishes realism from within.

In addition to describing what many consider to be the progressive cultural work of magical realism, Faris also confronts the recent accusation that magical realism and its study as a global phenomenon can be seen as a form of commodification and an imposition of cultural homogeneity. And finally, drawing on the narrative innovations and cultural scenarios that magical realism enacts, she extends those principles toward issues of gender and the possibility of a female element within magical realism.

2025 PEN America Finalist, Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

2025 National Book Award Honoree, "5 Under 35" 

2025 Gold Medal, Independent Publishing Book Awards (IPPY): Short Fiction

In a town trapped in endless July, love, resistance, and imagination break the loop

Enter a world where time stands still and summer never ends. In the enchanted town of Tannery Bay, it’s July 37, and then July 2 again, but the year is a mystery. Trapped in an eternal loop, the residents embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, unity, and defiance against the forces that seek to divide them. 

Otis and Joy, intrepid siblings, work with their family and friends to oppose a formidable adversary: The Owners. These cunning and ruthless old men, driven by insatiable greed, hold the town hostage, exploiting its resources and dividing its people. In this powerful #OwnVoices narrative, Tannery Bay is a captivating tale of Black Joy and Queer Joy and the ways in which family is both biological and chosen, where love transcends boundaries, and where art is a vehicle for change.
 

The Black Rose of Halfeti opens with a letter delivered at midnight in Ankara, Turkey. In this letter, an elderly doctor who has begun to experience the first signs of dementia professes his love and desire for a relationship with the narrator, a woman in middle age beginning to contemplate her own mortality. From there, the novel moves between Mardin, Izmir, and Ankara; the past and the present; and the real and the imagined as the narrator seeks to know the doctor both in his prime and in his struggle to hold senility at bay. In these dreamlike landscapes, the author effortlessly introduces King Darius, the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, the actress Silvia Pinal, and the archetypal dream woman as the narrator’s guides in her efforts to understand the human psyche.

Nazli Eray has established herself as a master of magical realism, the perfect tool to bring to life this poignant meditation on love, aging, and the role of memory. And, as in her earlier novels, she paints vivid images of the urban landscapes of Turkey, capturing both the present and the past.

WINNER OF FC2’S RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A novel about two teenage lovers who disrupt a World War II internment camp in Arizona

Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven’s wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It’s also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes.

In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.

 

A fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel, The Castle.

Seth Rogoff's masterful and mesmerizing novel, The Castle, draws inspiration from the enigmatic and incomplete final sentence of Franz Kafka's influential work of the same title. Follow renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum as he finds his way into the deserted landscape of Kafka’s world where the village of Z. lies eerily silent. The inhabitants vanished like phantoms leaving only remnants of their lives.

From these fragments, Kirschbaum pieces together a vision of a world in crisis triggered by the arrival of a stranger named K. To unravel this mystery, not just for the sake of the vanished village of Z. but for the world beyond, Kirschbaum is compelled to venture where K. could not—the deepest core of the castle.

The Castle is built upon lost documents, forgotten stories, and imagined histories. Unbound by the constraints of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum embarks on an extraordinary journey, seeking meaning through the fertile ground of imagination and embracing the inherent paradox of existence.

Asks who gets the right to call themselves a good person in a morally bankrupt world 

In The Flat Woman, women exclusively are blamed for the climate crisis. Seagulls drop dead from the sky, and the government, instead of taking responsibility, scapegoats a group of female ecoterrorists. When a girl’s mother is incarcerated for climate crimes, she is forced to raise herself alone. As a young woman, she begins a romance with an environmental activist whose passion makes her question her own role in the world. By turns hilarious, deadly serious, and completely absurd, The Flat Woman asks who gets the right to call themselves a good person in a world ripe with disaster. 

Driven by complex academic and moral questions, The Flat Woman is certain to appeal to fans of feminist and experimental literature, as well as fans of Margaret Atwood, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson, Kelly Link, and Anne Carson.

A collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables about the burden on women and families.

The Pillow Museum is a collection of 56 flash fictions, micro-essays, and contemporary fables set in various simulacra of our world. Claire Bateman’s gorgeous prose captures the imagination with closely observed details of people and places that are startlingly familiar yet unreal, where nothing can be taken for granted, including narrative logic: "It was snowing the night they had the fight about the glass piano whose music provided all the light in the house."

In an authoritative voice that offers no apologies or justifications, The Pillow Museum evokes a closely observed slipstream strangeness that refuses to take any moment or detail for granted—a fruitful, delirious disruption.

An exploration of magical realism’s contemporary resurgence, as writers attempt to capture the realities of climate change.

What literary mode could possibly convey the extent of today’s climate catastrophes? In The Surprising New Life of Magical Realism, Charlotte Rogers argues that the answer is magical realism, a genre whose defining characteristic is to make the unbelievable an unremarkable part of everyday life. She pairs classic works by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Rosario Ferré with contemporary novels by Carlos Fonseca, Fernanda Melchor, and Rita Indiana to show how the techniques of magical realism enable new approaches to scenes of environmental collapse and social injustice. Challenging widespread accounts of the genre’s decline, Rogers shows that the signature aesthetics of magical realism—the marvelous, the amazing, the strange—are integral to twenty-first-century fiction.

WINNER OF THE SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A postimperialist future shaped by revolutionary struggle and healing, where plant-based technology reshapes sovereignty and intimacy

Weirdly Tuned Antennae is a coming-of-age adventure story that hums with sensory detail, political force, and the uncanny beauty of nature in a profoundly transformed world. This speculative tale traces one person’s attempt to explore how freedom is embodied, shared, and fought for, and how love can emerge from networks far older and stranger than the self.

Set in the monsoon-soaked Himalayan foothills in a near future, the story follows Navi on their quest to reconnect with their estranged mother, a freedom fighter in the ongoing battles for self-determination. Navi quickly gets entangled with a lineage of healer-witches who possess mastery over the spirit world and over the cell; a ubiquitous plant-based technology that channels energy and information, revolutionizing both political and bodily sovereignty. Navi’s journey is soon distracted by a mysterious lover driven by an interplanetary longing for home that mirrors Navi’s own search for belonging.

Rejecting the familiar arc of Western dystopia, Weirdly Tuned Antennae imagines a postimperialist future rooted in collective struggle, internationalism, and the liberation of human potential. Lush, moody, and deeply character-driven, it will resonate with readers who admire the speculative ethics of Octavia Butler and the quiet emotional force of Kazuo Ishiguro.