2023 Short Fiction Collections

Beach Town: Stories

by David Daniel (Jan 2)

Shift whistles at the soap factory and the shipyard, along with the changing tides, mark the rhythms of life in the beach town. This is a world of fast food, double dates, and Saturday morning haircuts at the barber shop-a world as seemingly uncomplicated as a summer night’s ride on a carousel. A lonely girl from “away” seeks connection with high school classmates who give no notice; a harried salesman confronts his deepest fear; a middle-aged woman reckons with unfulfilled dreams; and a man returns for a class reunion and finds himself face to face with something beyond his imagining.

In Beach Town, David Daniel recreates the seaside town of North Weybridge, recalling in stories poignant and sometimes mysterious, the loves and losses, the magic and hard realities of clam diggers, sailors, barmaids and disillusioned lovers, characters revealed in moments of crisis or enlightenment. (Loom Press)

The Company of Strangers: Stories

by Jen Michalski (Jan 9)

The stories in Jen Michalski’s new collection reveal an America in which ideas of genuine community ring false and the spiritual backbone of family life is damaged, perhaps beyond repair.

Characters, many of them queer Gen-Xers of a certain age, find themselves looking—often desperately—for a way to understand the lives they’ve lived and a way to move forward with at least the possibility of future happiness. In “Long Haul,” a gay man visits his estranged uncle to lay to rest the unresolved guilt they both feel over the childhood disappearance of his sister. In “Great White” a gay man who was the sperm donor to a lesbian friend’s pregnancy, is confronted with the possibility of genuine parenthood when the friend’s partner dies and she is laid-low by grief. And in the title story, a young woman affirms her sexuality by having an affair with her brother’s wife; the fallout leading her to regain her footing only when she befriends an elderly gay couple vacationing in the area.

In stories that relentlessly demonstrate the tensions of the 21^st century, Michalski’s The Company of Strangers provides a sometimes comical, sometimes touching portrait of what is perhaps our most pressing question: How do we make a life? (Braddock Avenue Books)   

The Blue Women: Stories

by Anukrti Upadhyay (Jan 24)

A striking new collection of short fiction from the award-winning author of Kintsugi, Daura and Bhaunri.

A young girl who forms a curiously intimate friendship with a bat…
A man whose life is wrecked by an unsightly big toe…
A teenager who will go to any lengths to have her stepfather to herself…

The stories in The Blue Women paint vivid portraits of people’s lives as they encounter the strange and the enigmatic – whether it is other people, creatures, nature, the inanimate, or themselves. With rare insightfulness, Anukrti Upadhyay shines a light on the fractures and fears, the prejudices and wounds, the desires and memories that inhabit the deepest recesses of her characters’ psyches.

Original and gripping, these are stories that will worm their way deep into your heart and mind. (Harper Collins India)

The Faraway World

by Patricia Engel (Jan 24)

From Patricia Engel, whose novel Infinite Country was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick, comes a “rich and compelling” (The Washington Post) collection of ten exquisite, award-winning short stories set across the Americas and linked by themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.

Two Colombian expats meet as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, both burdened with traumatic pasts. In Cuba, a woman discovers her deceased brother’s bones have been stolen, and the love of her life returns from Ecuador for a one-night visit. A cash-strapped couple hustles in Miami, to life-altering ends.

The Faraway World is a collection of arresting stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Country, Patricia Engel, “a gifted storyteller whose writing shines even in the darkest corners” (The Washington Post). Intimate and panoramic, these stories bring to life the liminality of regret, the vibrancy of community, and the epic deeds and quiet moments of love. (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)

Nine Bodies in a Puddle: A Collection of Interconnected Short Stories

by Colin Dunbar (Jan 30)

If you are reading this book in the presence of other people, I need you to stop immediately.

Wait.

Wait until you are completely isolated, locked away, and hidden from the world.

Find someplace that is entirely silent. The sound of birds chirping, the humming of an air conditioner, the distant chatter of people a few rooms away – escape it.

Bring a mirror.

Once there, isolated from the rest of the world, focus on the details of your reflection.

Stare intently at the echo of your blinking.

Look into the whites of your eyes.

Isn’t it wrong?

It looks nothing like you.

-o-0-o-

Nine Bodies in a Puddle is a collection of interconnected short stories that slowly traverses from a fairy-tale-like atmosphere toward the realm of horror — written by Colin Dunbar, author of The Era of the Orb, Sanity in the Absurd, and The Creator’s Almanac. (Indie)

At The End Of It All: Stories From The Shadows

by Suzanne Craig-Whytock
Foreword by Steven Baird (Jan 31)

Enter a surreal landscape of the twisted and unusual. Wander through the echoing corridors of old manor houses, explore dead cities and hidden rooms, and dance with menacing marionettes. Lyrical, haunting, and occasionally humorous, At The End Of It All is a collection of twenty-seven stories that explore joy and sorrow, gratitude and grief, and hatred and desire. Open the cover, feast on the stories inside…and if you’re lucky, Mr. Death just might show up for dessert. (Potter’s Grove Press LLC)

Scream if You’re Having Fun

by Aaron Michael Cook (Feb 2)

Come one, come all, the park is now open.

Twenty-three rides await. Some will humor, others will horrify. From a werewolf on the prowl to a vengeful housewife to a man who will do *anything* to help his favorite basketball team win, nothing is off the table in this debut collection of short stories. When you’re hungry, grab some of our world-famous cuisine in the dining hall and don’t forget to stick around for a performance from a mysterious new singer. Oh, and just ignore that giant rock in the sky,

The ride is about to begin. Please keep your arms and legs inside at all times. (Indie)

Call and Response: Stories

by Gothataone Moeng (Feb 7)

Richly drawn stories about the lives of ordinary families in contemporary Botswana as they navigate relationships, tradition and caretaking in a rapidly changing world.

A young widow adheres to the expectations of wearing mourning clothes for nearly a year, though she’s unsure what the traditions mean or whether she is ready to meet the world without their protection. An older sister returns home from a confusing time in America, only to explain at every turn why she’s left the land of opportunity. A younger sister hides her sexual exploits from her family, while her older brother openly flaunts his infidelity.

The stories collected in Call and Response are strongly anchored in place – in the village of Serowe, where the author is from, and in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana – charting the emotional journeys of women seeking love and opportunity beyond the barriers of custom and circumstance.

Gothataone Moeng is part of a new generation of writers coming out of Africa whose voices are ready to explode onto the literary scene. In the tradition of writers like Chimamanda Adiche and Jhumpa Lahiri, she offers us insight into communities, experiences and landscapes through stories that are cinematic in their sweep, with unforgettable female protagonists. (Viking)

The Journey Prize Stories 33: The Best of Canada’s New Black Writers

edited by David Chariandy, Esi Edugyan, Canisia Lubrin (Feb 7)

This much-anticipated, game-changing special edition of Canada’s premier annual fiction anthology celebrates the country’s best emerging Black writers.

For over thirty years, The Journey Prize Stories has consistently introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. The 33rd edition of Canada’s most prestigious annual fiction anthology proudly continues this tradition by celebrating the best emerging Black writers in the country, as selected by a jury comprising internationally acclaimed, award-winning writers David Chariandy, Esi Edugyan, and Canisia Lubrin.  

An eagle-eyed mother and a hungry child contend with the aftereffects of an unusual multi-course meal. Both the debts of the past and the promise of the future hover over two siblings as they debate what to do with an unexpected windfall. A pesky but beloved baboon looms large in the memory of a daughter whose family has been forced to move to a new town. Unclear boundaries and cheerful hypocrisy dominate a woman’s whirlwind romance with a photographer. A schoolgirl contends with complicated emotions as she awaits the return of her long-absent mother. News of a hunter’s death reverberates throughout his family, travelling across oceans and phonelines to trouble his cousin’s already-shaky relationship. An office worker joins a lost grandmother on an unexpected pilgrimage. After years away, a woman journeys back to Jamaica—and back to the sister who refused to leave with her—stirring up insecurities, laughter, and wounds unhealed by time. All the instructions in the world cannot protect a family from the impacts of grief. The only Black girls in school experiment with what it means to be a lady when you’re not yet a woman.

When Trying to Return Home: Stories

by Jennifer Maritza McCauley  (Feb 7)

A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond—and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms

Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.

Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley’s Black American and Afro–Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life—even if we haven’t always been willing to listen. (Counterpoint)

Evil Flowers: Stories

by Gunnhild Øyehaug (Feb 14)
translated by Kari Dickson

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Present Tense Machine and Knots, a collection of playfully surreal stories about love, death, and metamorphosis.

In Evil Flowers, a precise but madcap collection of short stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug extracts the bizarre from the mundane and reveals the strange, startling brilliance of everyday life.

Across twenty-five stories, Øyehaug renovates the form again and again, confirming Lydia Davis’s observation that her every story is “a formal surprise, smart and droll.” The stories converse with, contradict, and expand on one another; birds, hagfish, and wild beasts reappear, gnawing at the fringes. A section of a woman’s brain slips into the toilet bowl, removing her ability to remember or recognize types of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information from fiberoptic cables, and a new museum sinks into the ground.

Inspired by Charles Baudelaire, a dreamer and romantic in the era of realism, Øyehaug revolts against the ordinary, reaching instead for the wonder to be found in fantasy and absurdity. Brimming with wit, ingenuity, and irrepressible joy, these stories mark another triumph from a dazzling international writer. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Love Like That: Stories

by Emma Duffy-Comparone (Feb 14)

A sharp, witty book about brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount wrong.

Whether diving into complicated relationships or wrestling with family ties, the girls and women who populate Love Like That―misfits and misanthropes, bickering sisters, responsible daughters, and unhappy wives―don’t always find themselves making the best decisions.

A woman struggles with a new kind of love triangle when she moves in with a divorced dad. A lonely teenage beach attendant finds uneasy comradeship with her boss. A high school English teacher gets pushed to her limits when a student plagiarizes. Often caught between desire and duty, guilt and resentment, these characters discover what it means to get lost in love, and do what it takes to find themselves again.

Utterly singular and wholly unforgettable, Emma Duffy-Comparone’s stories manage to be slyly, wickedly funny at even their darkest turns and herald the arrival of an irreverent and dazzling new voice. (Holt Paperbacks)

Mystery in the Making: Eighteen short stories of murder, mystery and mayhem

by Ann Granger (Feb 14)

Throughout her distinguished career, Ann Granger has penned an array of hugely entertaining and gripping short stories. To mark her thirtieth anniversary as a crime writer, eighteen of these compelling mysteries have been brought together to delight and enthral crime fans everywhere.

From a nosy neighbour who trusts no one to a jealous nephew protecting his inheritance, and from a ghostly apparition on a cruise ship to an Oxford undergraduate who cannot escape his past, Ann’s short stories transport readers from the Highlands of Scotland to the rugged coast of Cornwall and from the Victorian era to the present day. In each story there is an intriguing mystery to captivate the most avid crime fan, making this a collection to treasure. (Headline)

Sweetlust: Stories

by Asja Bakić  (Feb 14)
translated by Jennifer Zoble

The eleven stories in Sweetlust interweave feminist critique, intertextuality, and science fiction tropes in an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future.

In a dystopian world with no men, women are “rehabilitated” at an erotic amusement park. Climate change has caused massive flooding and warming in the Balkans, where one programmer builds a time machine. And a devious reimagining of The Sorrows of Young Werther refocuses to center a sexually adventurous Charlotte.

Asja Bakić deploys the speculative and weird to playfully interrogate conversations around artificial intelligence, gender fluidity, and environmental degradation. As she did in her acclaimed debut Mars, Bakić once again upends her characters’ convictions and identities—and infuses each disorienting universe with sly humor and off-kilter eroticism. Visceral and otherworldly, Sweetlust takes apart human desire and fragility, repeatedly framing pleasure as both inviting and perilous. (The Feminist Press at CUNY)

The King Is Dead: Stories

by Walter Tevis (Feb 14)

For the first time ever, a complete collection of short fiction the New York Times bestselling author of The Queen’s Gambit

Walter Tevis is widely regarded as a master for both his gritty poolhall novels and his brilliant rendering of the world of competitive chess. This long overdue collection establishes Tevis’s rightful place as a maestro of the short form, as well. Bringing together the 1981 short story collection Far From Home with a host of other previously unpublished stories from journals and magazines, this entertaining collection showcases Tevis’s characteristic perceptiveness, empathy, and range.

In one story, a man receives a phone call from his future self and follows their instructions to unpreditcable, calamitous results. In another, a famous actor and a young actress showcase their talent for acting both on and off the stage. Here also are five short stories set in poolhalls, including one that features Fast Eddie Felson and another that was the basis for the novel The Hustler. Here also is his first fictional foray into chess, with a ranked chess player finding fellowship in the prison yard with another player.

In all of them, Tevis reminds again and again why his writing has long been revered for its roving curiosity and innate humanity. (Vintage)

The Collected Enchantments

by Theodora Goss (Feb 14)

A wicked stepsister frets over all the ways in which she failed to receive her mother’s love. A lost woman travels through an enchanted forest looking for someone who can remind her of her name. A girl must wear down seven pairs of shoes to gain help from a witch. A fox makes a life with a human, but neither can deny their true natures. A young woman returns to her childhood home and the fantastic stories she left there. A man lets himself be taken prisoner by the Snow Queen to prove that the woman who loves him would walk barefoot through the ice to save him. Medusa cuts her hair for love.

The Collected Enchantments gathers retellings of folk and fairy tales in prose and verse from World Fantasy and Locus award-winning author Theodora Goss, creator of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series. Drawing from her Mythopoeic Award-nominated collections In the Forest of Forgetting and Songs for Ophelia and her Mythopoeic Award-winning tome Snow White Learns Witchcraft, and adding new and uncollected stories and poems, The Collected Enchantments provides a resounding demonstration of how, as Hugo and Nebula award winner Jo Walton writes, Goss provides “a vivid, authentic and important voice” that, in the words of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association Grand Master Jane Yolen, “transposes, transforms, and transcends times, eras, and old tales with ease.” (Mythic Delirium Books)

Welcome Me to the Kingdom: Stories

by Mai Nardone (Feb 14)

“Mai Nardone is a writer with an atlas straight to the heart. I did not want to put this book down and neither will you.”—C Pam Zhang, bestselling author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold

We came with the drought. From the window of the train, the rich brown of the Chao Phraya River marked the turn from the northeast into the central plains. We came for Bangkok on the delta. The thin tributaries that laced the provinces found full current at the capital. And in the city, we’d heard, the wealth was wide and deep.

In 1980, young lovers Pea and Nam arrive in Bangkok in search of a life, and a world, beyond Thailand’s rural outskirts. Thirty days, they promise each other. Thirty days for Pea to find work, for him to put aside his violent and unstable past and take root in this strange new land. But Bangkok does not want for male laborers, especially teenage boys with thick provincial accents, and when time finally runs out on their promise, it’s Nam who ultimately adapts to the capital’s ruthless logic and survives.

Spanning decades and perspectives, seamlessly shifting between the absurd and the tenderhearted, the interwoven stories of Welcome Me to the Kingdom introduce three families—Nam, her American husband, Rick, and their daughter, Lara; Vitat, a Thai Elvis impersonator, and his only daughter, Pinky; and Tintin and Benz, orphans who have adopted each other as brothers—who employ various schemes to lie, betray, and seduce their way to the “good life.”

These disparate citizens of Bangkok orbit each other over the next three decades—sometimes violently, passionately colliding. Through skin-whitening routines, cult conversion, gambling, and sex work, the collection’s characters look for reinvention in a city buckling under the weight of its own modernity.

Wildly imaginative and ambitious, Mai Nardone’s stories reveal the growing discrepancy between Bangkok’s smiling self-image and its ugly underbelly, and, in the process, offer a striking portrait of a city unmade by the whims of global capitalism, in a kingdom caught between this world and the next. (Random House)

A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness: Stories

by Jai Chakrabarti (Feb 21)

In the fourteen masterful stories that make up this collection, Jai Chakrabarti crosses continents and cultures to explore what it means to cultivate a family today, across borders, religions, and race.

In the title story, a closeted gay man in 1980s Kolkata seeks to have a child with his lover’s wife. An Indian widow, engaged to a Jewish man, struggles to balance her cultural identity with the rituals and traditions of her newfound family. An American musician travels to see his guru for the final time—and makes a promise he cannot keep. A young woman from an Indian village arrives in Brooklyn to care for the toddler of a biracial couple. And a mystical agent is sent by a mother to solve her son’s domestic problems.

Throughout, the characters’ most vulnerable desires shape life-altering decisions as they seek to balance their needs against those of the people they hold closest. The stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness capture men and women struggling with transformation and familial bonds; they traverse the intersections of countries and cultures to illuminate what it means to love in uncertain times; and they showcase the skill of a storyteller who dazzles with the breadth of his vision. (Knopf)

Musings: 75 Short Stories

by Don Tassone (Feb 21)

Presenting 75 new short stories based on the author’s reflections, his musings, on real-life happenings. They show what pausing to reflect can reveal and invite a closer look at the passing parade of events through our daily lives. (Toerner Press)

Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality

by Lindsay Wong (Feb 21)

From the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories. They’ll haunt and consume you—in strange and unsettling ways.

Living forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred.

There’s a courtesan from 17th century China who, try as she might, just can’t manage to die. Grandmama Wu, who returns from the dead to protect her grandchildren from bullies. Not to mention an Internet-order bride who inadvertently brings the apocalypse to Nebraska City.

From Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted—by first loves, troublesome family members, and traumatic memories. Intertwining horror, the supernatural, and mythology, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality riotously critiques contemporary life and fearlessly illuminates the ways in which the past can devour us. A collection about transformation and what makes us human, it solidifies Lindsay Wong as one of the most vital and electrifying voices in Canadian literature today. (Penguin Canada)

Gynecology

by Camilla Outzen Rantsen (Feb 24)

There are seventeen-year-old girls chased by pop stars and weird reactions to having guns pulled on them. Everyone has their own expectations of reality, and young women are bombarded by a reality way too old for them.

There are breakups written like a fashion expose and a couple of useful ways to train wolves.

But mostly, you’ll find stories of relationships. Whether it’s friends, lovers, our past, stories in the news that we are now participants in, whether we like to be or not, and how we react to things we have been almost hypnotized to be okay with.

There are stories of road trips where graveyards are the most comforting sights and where love is so deep that you forget you have chosen someone who thinks of you in the same way that you do and that has, at times, led you to seek professional help.

There are stories of the spells of beauty, friendships, and the secrets we keep for people who no longer like us.

There are heiresses in fabled hotels whose notoriety hangers-on snort through the nostrils of their own random lives. And of course, naturally, relationships explained through real estate terms.

All in all, Guynecology is the what the title promises. An intersection between men and women, boys and girls, and any other pronoun you prefer. Stories of love, fear, and actual ghosts are always universal. The protagonists of these stories vary from seventeen and as far up you dare to imagine, and they learn through the grand view of retrospect, or they don’t, and will continue to blame you for things you never even knew existed. The protagonists are humans. Except for one, but don’t tell her. (Fulton Books)

Home is a Made-Up Place

by Ronit Plank (Feb 26)

Award-Winning Collection of Stories That Grapple With What It Means to Belong

Home Is a Made-Up Place invites readers into the lives of people grappling with emotional injuries and confronting the past to become who they wish to be.

Set in NYC, New England, the Southwest, and rural Alaska, a single mother fights to protect her son, a daughter tries to forget her missing mother, a couple struggles to keep a marriage together and their children safe, and a family must face the truth about their father.

Bracing and intimate, Home Is a Made-Up Place is a collection of stories about fighting for personal power, recognizing the difference between what can and cannot be changed, and the pull of familial attachments despite the toll they might take. (Motina Books)

Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories

by Thomas Mann 
translated by Damion Searls  (Feb 28)

Sparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Mann’s best stories—including his masterpiece, in its first English translation in nearly a century.

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer—“the starched collar,” as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann’s genius.

The headliner of this volume, “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” (in its first new translation since 1936)—a subtle masterpiece that reveals the profound emotional significance of everyday life—is Mann’s tender but sharp-eyed portrait of the “Bigs” and “Littles” of the bourgeois Cornelius family as they adjust to straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is a free-standing excerpt from Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks—a sensation when it was first published. “Death in Venice” (also included in this volume) is Mann’s most famous story, but less well known is that he intended it to be a diptych with another, comic story—included here as “Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull.” “Louisey”—a tale of sexual humiliation that gives a first glimpse of Mann’s lifelong ambivalence about the power of art—rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection. (Liveright)

Hope Verdad Presents: Short Stories for Thinkers

by Francesca Flood (Mar 2)

In an imbalanced and flawed world, it is often the choices we make that define us.

This well-crafted collection of nine short stories will grab your attention, hold it, and leave you wanting more. Covering a wide range of topics from lottery tickets, to organized crime, to the supernatural. Yet there is a common thread between them. You might see the impact and importance of free will and choice in our imperfect world.

Stories can teach us a lot about our beliefs, moral compass, fears, and feelings. The more we reflect on stories, the more we discover about ourselves. How we feel about a character’s behavior often reflects our own state of mind, opinions, and biases.

Short Stories for Thinkers provokes a lot of questions and will get you thinking. It conjures images of relatable characters, scenes, emotions, and the dilemmas they confront. Embedded within each story are esoteric messages that ask you to dig deeper into the storyline, use your investigative skills for clues, and stretch your imagination.

These short stories make you think about life’s intricacies and complexities. (Hope Verdad, LLC)

Horrors of the Night

by Matthew Battistone (Mar 3)

Horrors of the Night is a collection of short stories that will send shivers down your spine. A father and son recovering from a recent tragedy meets with a malicious force in the woods. A mysterious fog descends on a city, bringing an unknown evil with it. A mother does anything she can to protect her daughter from a mysterious spirit in the wake of a great loss. A man goes to new extremes with tragic consequences after the sudden loss of his wife. If you love a good scary story to escape into, you will get that and more in this unique and chilling collection. (Dorrance Publishing)

Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories

by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu (Mar 7)

“Even in death, who has ownership over Black women’s bodies?”

Questions like this lurk between the lines of this stunning collection of stories that engage with African women’s histories, both personal and generational. Their history is not just one thing: there is heartbreak and pain, and joy, and flying and magic, so much magic. An avenging spirit takes on the patriarchy from beyond the grave. An immigrant woman undergoes a naturalization ceremony in an imagined American state that demands that immigrants pay a toll of the thing they love the most. A first-generation Zimbabwean-American woman haunted by generational trauma is willing to pay the ultimate price to take her pain away―giving up her memories. A neighborhood gossip wakes up to find that houses are mysteriously vanishing in the night. A shapeshifting freedom fighter leaves a legacy of resistance to her granddaughter.

In Drinking from Graveyard Wells, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu assembles poignantly reflective stories that center the voices of African women charting their own Black history through the ages. Ndlovu’s stories play with genre, from softly surreal to deeply fantastical. Each narrative is wrapped in the literary eloquence and tradition of southern African mythology, transporting readers into the lives of African women who have fought across space and time to be seen.

Drawing on her own early experiences as a Zimbabwean living under the Mugabe dictatorship, Ndlovu’s stories are grounded in truth and empathy. Ndlovu boldly offers up alternative interpretations of a past and a present that speculates upon the everyday lives of a people disregarded. Her words explore the erasure of African women while highlighting their beauty and limitless magic. Immersed in worlds both fantastical and familiar, readers find themselves walking alongside these women, grieving their pain, and celebrating their joy, all against the textured backdrop of Zimbabwe. (University Press of Kentucky)

Old Babes in the Woods

by Margaret Atwood (Mar 7)

A dazzling collection of fifteen short stories from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments.

Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood’s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. 

The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; “Impatient Griselda” explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and “My Evil Mother” touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love—and what comes after.

Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate. (McClelland & Stewart)

A Manual for How to Love Us

by Erin Slaughter (Mar 14)

A debut, interlinked collection of stories exploring the primal nature of women’s grief—offering insight into the profound experience of loss and the absurd ways in which we seek control in an unruly world.

Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the subtle brutality of the mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us is a tender portrait of women trying their best to survive, love, and find genuine meaning in the aftermath of loss.

In these unconventional and unpredictably connected stories, Erin Slaughter shatters the stereotype of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in all of us. In each story, grieving women embrace their wildest impulses as they attempt to master their lives: one woman becomes a “gazer” at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, a couple speaks only in their basement’s black box, and a thruple must decide what to do when one partner disappears.

The women in Erin Slaughter’s stories suffer messy breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw meat to commune with their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast.

Set across oft-overlooked towns in the American South, A Manual for How to Love Us spotlights women who are living on the brink and clinging to its precipitous edge. Lyrical and surprisingly humorous, A Manual for How to Love Us is an exciting debut that reveals the sticky complications of living in a body, in all its grotesquerie and glory. (Harper Perennial)

Chrysalis

by Anuja Varghese (Mar 14)

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.

The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it. (Astoria)

New Suns 2

edited by Nisi Shawl (Mar 14)

New Suns 2 brings you fresh visions of the strange, the unexpected, the shocking—breakthrough stories, stories shining with emerging truths, stories that pierce stale preconceptions with their beauty and bravery. Like the first New Suns anthology (winner of the World Fantasy, Locus, IGNYTE, and British Fantasy awards), this book liberates writers of many races to tell us tales no one has ever told.

Many things come in twos: dualities, binaries, halves, and alternates. Twos are found throughout New Suns 2, in eighteen science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories revealing daring futures, hidden pasts, and present-day worlds filled with unmapped wonders.

Including stories by Daniel H. Wilson, K. Tempest Bradford, Darcie Little Badger, Geetanjali Vandemark, John Chu, Nghi Vo, Tananarive Due, Alex Jennings, Karin Lowachee, Saad Hossain, Hiromi Goto, Minsoo Kang, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Malka Older, Kathleen Alcalá, Christopher Caldwell and Jaymee Goh with a foreword by Walter Mosley and an afterword by Dr.Grace Dillon. (Solaris)

The Accidental Universe and Other Stories

by Gerard Marconi (Mar 14)

The Accidental Universe and Other Stories begins with a riff on the oldest tale known to man and then takes us from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present day and beyond.

Some are traditional short stories about one person while others vary the point of view and still others are in the form of one-act plays. Individual lives are explored in different venues and at different times, but they all touch on the search for meaning in a chaotic universe. From the religious beliefs of Christopher Columbus to those of modern evangelicals, from the words of Shakespeare to those of Samuel Beckett, from the paintings of Andrew Wyeth to those of Andy Warhol, and in the lives of grave diggers as well as artists, this unique collection of humorous and serious stories will engage the minds, hearts, and imaginations of readers on an unforgettable journey. (Apprentice House)

Little Moments

by Utosha L Curry (Mar 17)

Even when you are looking at the impossible, believe that God still can! A collection of short stories honoring the miraculous moments we often overlook that connect us, even when those moments may not look like the miracles we picture when we pray, Little Moments acknowledges and celebrates the miracles that God works in our lives-and reminds us that if we aren’t careful we might miss them! (Dorrance Publishing Co.)

Fools Should Never Marry!

by  Lil Miss (Mar 19)

A collection of short stories and lessons on marriage, Fools Should Never Marry! shows glimpses of life in a one-sided marriage, and the emotional turmoil a wife can face when her most trusted support is lacking in love and devotion. With each story a question is posed, “Who is the fool? Him, Her, or Both?” By opening up the conversation, readers can take an introspective look into one marriage and evaluate any issues within their own. By pinpointing the fool in each scenario, you too can reflect on your own relationships and determine if there are any significant issues that need addressed and make the right decisions for your own well-being. (Dorrance Publishing)

A Broken People’s Playlist

by  Chimeka Garricks (Mar 21)

A Broken People’s Playlist is set to the soundtrack of life, comprised of twelve music-inspired tales about love, the human condition, micro-moments, and the search for meaning and sometimes, redemption. It is also Chimeka Garricks’s love letter to his native city, Port Harcourt, introducing us to a cast of indelible characters in these loosely interlocked tales.

There is the teenage wannabe-DJ eager to play his first gig even as his family disastrously falls apart—who reappears many years later as an unhappy middle-aged man drunk-calling his ex-wife; a man who throws a living funeral for his dying brother; three friends who ponder penis captivus and one’s peculiar erectile dysfunction; a troubled woman who tries to find her peace-place in the world, helped by a headful of songs and a pot of ginger tea.

Infused with the author’s resonant and evocative storytelling, each page holds “the depth of a novel” (Hari Kunzru); a character, a moment that will—like a favorite song—long linger in the heart and mind. (HarperVia)

Ten Planets: Stories 

by Yuri Hererra (Mar 21)
translated by Lisa Dillman

A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fiction by “one of Mexico’s finest novelists” (Vulture).

The characters that populate Yuri Herrera’s surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer’s work.

In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.

In Ten Planets, Herrera’s consistent themes—the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms—are explored with evident brilliance and delight. (Graywolf Press)

Nature Trail Stories

by  Shannon McLeod (Mar 24)

The characters in Nature Trail Stories escape to nature and commune with it. A housewife fantasizes about avenues of her own demise, a young man wants to save his addict brother from himself, a counseling patient tries therapeutic screaming instead, a mother seeks bonding with her teenage son during lockdown, a young woman finds healing through sexual exploration at a music festival. Ruminative and reflective, Nature Trail Stories interrogates humans’ desperation for and struggle with connection, highlighting the power of solitude as an agent of personal alchemy. (Thirty West Publishing House)

The Last Catastrophe: Stories 

by  Allegra Hyde (Mar 28)

A hopeful, speculative short story collection about how humanity grapples in a world transformed by climate change.

“Dazzling, inventive, and glinting with dark humor.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

A vast caravan of RVs roams the United States. A girl grows a unicorn horn, complicating her small-town friendships and big city ambitions. A young lady on a spaceship bonds with her AI warden while trying to avoid an arranged marriage. In Allegra Hyde’s universe nothing is as it seems, yet the challenges encountered in these pages mirror those we face in our modern age. Spanning the length of our very solar system, the fifteen stories in this collection explore a myriad of potential futures through the concept of “global weirding,” planetary and social disruptions due to climate change. In unexpected and genre-defying ways, this revelatory collection reminds us that our world is precious, and that protecting it has the potential to bring us all together. (Vintage)

Thrillville, USA

by Taylor Koekkoek (Mar 21)

A raw and remarkable debut story collection concerning substance abuse, societal alienation, and doomed romance from a writer whose work has appeared in prestigious literary journals including The Paris Review.

An amusement park employee overdoses after eating the gel of a fentanyl patch. Two homeless men discover the body of a drowned woman. A sister encounters a dangerous stranger while driving her brother to rehab. Ex-lovers seek to rekindle their relationship with the aid of an earthquake.

In the nine masterful stories that comprise Thrillville, USA, debut author Taylor Koekkoek depicts Americans living on the margins of society, seeking escape from isolation and underemployment in drugs, booze, and self-destructive relationships. While the action is set largely in the rural Pacific Northwest, the characters’ malaise and disaffectedness is endemic of the country as a whole. The title takes its name from the aforementioned amusement park, but Thrillville is as much a state of mind as an actual place—a sardonic commentary on contemporary America consumed by opioid addiction, social media obsession, wealth inequality and political polarization.

Yet as haunting as these stories are, they are not hopeless. Gorgeously written, they share a transcendental quality—an acknowledgment of and appreciation for the beauty in all things, even the most profane and grotesque. (Simon & Schuster)

Abnormal Statistics

by Max Booth III (Mar 28)

“Abnormal Statistics takes us on a desolate walking tour of the everyday American nightmare. Come see what’s happening behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of your neighbors, your best friends, the people you trust most. Bleak and bloody horror that’s as raw and immediate as a pile of yellowed teeth, roots and all.” -​Trevor Henderson, creator of Siren Head

Suburban decay, familial horror, bleak lullabies. Abnormal Statistics is the debut story collection from Max Booth III.

Bad times are waiting for you.

Featuring 10 reprints and 3 stories original to this collection (including a brand-new novella called “Indiana Death Song”). (Apocalypse Party)

I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and other Stories

by Julianna Baggott (Mar 28)

Bestselling author Julianna Baggott delivers her mind-bending debut short-story collection, featuring an array of genres populated by deeply human characters, and with film rights to the stories already having been sold to Netflix, Paramount, Amblin, Lionsgate, and others!

In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out. In “Portals,” a small town deals with hope and loss when dozens of portals suddenly open. In “The Now of Now,” two teenagers who can literally stop time find themselves falling in love. In “How They Got In,” a grieving family starts to see a murdered girl in all of their old home videos. In “The Versions,” two stand-in androids fall in love at a wedding, even though they’re not programmed to have emotion. And many other stories of the weird and wonderful. (Blackstone Publishing)

Tombs: Story Collection

by Junji Ito (Mar 28)

Three-time Eisner Award winner Junji Ito invites you to the horrific Tomb Town and beyond.

Countless tombstones stand in rows throughout a small community, forming a bizarre tableau. What fate awaits a brother and sister after a traffic accident in this town of the dead? In another tale, a girl falls silent, her tongue transformed into a slug. Can a friend save her? Then, when a young man moves to a new town, he finds the house next door has only a single window. What does his grotesque neighbor want, calling out to him every evening from that lone window?

Fresh nightmares brought to you by horror master Junji Ito. (VIS Media LLC)

White Cat, Black Dog: Stories

by Kelly Link (Mar 28)

Seven ingeniously reinvented fairy tales that play out with astonishing consequences in the modern world, from one of today’s finest short story writers—MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow Kelly Link, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble

Featuring illustrations by award-winning artist Shaun Tan

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In “Skinder’s Veil,” a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers—or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction. (Random House)

From Far Around They Saw Us Burn

by Alice Jolly (Mar 30)

Words begin to lose their meanings, flaking off into air like moths. Friendships cultivated over a lifetime fall apart in testing circumstances. What does the stranger with yellow eyes really want?

From Far Around They Saw Us Burn is the eagerly awaited first short story collection from Alice Jolly, one of the most exciting and accomplished voices in British fiction today.

The extraordinary range of work gathered here is united by a fascination with how everyday interactions can transform our lives in unpredictable ways. These are stories of lonely people, outcasts and misfits, and the ghosts that inhabit our intimate spaces. The result is a compelling, arresting and, at times, devastating collection – not least in the title story, which was inspired by the tragic true events of the 1943 Cavan orphanage fire.

Written with an exemplary eye for detail and an intimate understanding of the complexities of human nature, Jolly’s collection builds up towards the ultimate question: what is revealed of us when we peel away the surfaces, and is it enough? (Unbound)

Tales of a Spiritual Sun

by Paul Kiritsis (Mar 30)

From the Sphinx communicating through a Ouija board to Narcissus’s traditional, terrible fate morphing into his first glimmer of hope, Tales of a Spiritual Sun re-writes the Greek myths as never before. The tales of the familiar are tackled, such as the stories of Medusa, King Midas, and Pandora. Yet, Tales of a Spiritual Sun also includes those that are, perhaps, less well known such as Orpheus, Proteus, and Psyche.

All the stories are viewed from new angles or written with modern twists. They take on new lives, with fresh locations and messages at their heart. These include a scientific experiment ready to change the world on the night it is set to end and a personal detective who must decide if a man, claiming his wife is a nymph, is delusional or about to commit an awful crime.

Tales of a Spiritual Sun allows readers to discover ancient myths in a bold and original way, in both contemporary and traditional settings. (Olympia Publishers)

Under My Skin: Stories

by K J Parker (Mar 30)

Here is the right book. Under My Skin, K.J. Parker’s superb new collection, includes almost 700 pages of novelettes and novellas, some appearing here for the first time anywhere, with one completely new novel-length tale, Relics.

These stories are everything readers have come to expect from Parker, populated by con men and kings, magicians who don’t do magic and messiahs who don’t offer redemption, by holy men and holy fools. But be warned, not only is all perhaps not what it seems, all can usually be counted on to not be what it seems. Parker’s unruly and unreliable narrators, who sometimes fool themselves even more than they fool us, stride along muddy paths through lonely hills or across marble floors in grand palaces, always finding trapdoors opening beneath them.

In The Thought That Counts, for example, a man who claims to have been magically granted the wisdom of the world finds that he’s not wise enough to recognize a figure from his past who may prove that wisdom isn’t enough in every situation. In My Beautiful Life, a man who starts life as the son of a village prostitute rises as high in his world as anyone can, only to find that tumbling from such a height makes for a long, long fall. And in the epistolary novel Relics, readers are offered not just one unreliable narrator but two, as an archduke and a relic hunter describe their highs and lows to one another in a series of missives that even the writers don’t necessarily fully believe, much less the recipients.

K.J. Parker first came to prominence with The Engineer Trilogy. Since then, the author has gone on to pen dozens of novels, novellas, and short stories, winning a couple of World Fantasy Awards along the way and earning legions of fans. Subterranean Press is proud to offer this third collection from a modern master, a true ally guiding us through an uncertain — but endlessly fascinating — world. (Subterranean Press)

Anything That Moves and Other Stories

by Jamie Stewart (Apr 4)

From being caught having their first orgasm by their mom’s best friend to being stalked and propositioned by a fundamentalist pastor; from soliciting spanking dates over the Internet to scoring a coveted invitation to a threesome with some elf fetishist neighbors, art rock darling (Xiu Xiu) Jamie Stewart’sjourney of fleshy self-discovery and queer awakening makes for an extraordinary, cringy, unputdownable epic in miniature, burning always with radical and often shocking self-criticism.

A one-of-a-kind exploration of abasement, depravity, joy, and embarrassment (and even joy in embarrassment), Anything That Moves is a series of comic, tragic X-rays of sex. It is funny, erotic, anti-erotic, honest, brave, icky, and hauntingly sad by turns. It demonstrates too how love and forgiveness can percolate around the edges of even the most traumatic relationships.

Stewart’s band Xiu Xiu has been called “self-flagellating,” “brutal,” “shocking,” and “perverse,” but also “genius,” “brilliant,” “unique,” “imaginative,” and “luminous.” Readers can expect nothing less from Anything That Moves. (And Other Stories)

Butter: Novellas, Stories, and Fragments

by Gayle Jones (Apr 4)

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyperrealist to the mystical, in intricate multipart stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.

Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico, and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas; about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film, and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial society.

Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories

by Tennessee Williams (Apr 4)
edited by Tom Mitchell

Seven previously unpublished stories of the Great Depression by America’s poet laureate of the lost

These tales were penned by one Thomas Lanier Williams of Missouri before he became a successful playwright, and yet his voice is unmistakable. 

The reliable idiosyncrasies and quiet dignity of Williams’s eccentrics are already present in his characters. Consider the diminutive octogenarian of “The Caterpillar Dogs,” who may have just met her match in a pair of laughing Pekinese that refuse to obey; the retired, small-town evangelist in “Every Friday Nite is Kiddies Nite,” who wears bright-colored pajamas and receives a message from God to move to St. Louis and finally, finally go to the movies again; or the distraught factory worker whose stifled artistic spirit, and just a soupçon of the macabre, propel the drama of “Stair to the Roof.”

Love’s diversions and misdirections, even autoerotic longings, are found in these delightful lagniappes: in “Season of Grapes,” the intoxicating ripeness of summer in the Ozarks acquaints one young man with his own passions, which turn into a fever dream, and the first revelation of female sexuality blooms for a college boy in “Ironweed.”Is there such a thing as innocence? Apparently in the 1930s there was, and Williams reveals it in these stories. (New Directions)

Patterns of Orbit: Stories

by Chloe N Clark (Apr 4)

Chloe N Clark’s Patterns of Orbit spans genres, perspectives, and styles to articulate contemporary uncertainties in a rapidly changing world. 

Steadily gazing into and across the uncanny valley, Clark examines those jarring or subtle shifts in familiar stories, writing light into dark, and offering slivers of hope despite the longest of odds.

Successfully navigating a potent concoction of science fiction, folktale, and horror this collection of literary, character driven stories combines the accumulated forces and darker natures of those genre elements, unleashing the terrors of alien fungi, forest demons, and interplanetary specters upon her characters. However, while these characters, capable and intelligent, face off against their prescribed monsters, it is their existential misgivings on the state of their worlds or conditions that will leave an indelible mark on the reader.

An impressive entry in the literary/genre hybrid canon, this collection offers a satisfying read to the connoisseurs of both genre and literary fiction. So, be bold. Take a swim through the anti-gravity. You are sure to be captured by Patterns of Orbit. (Boabab Press)

The People Who Report More Stress: Stories

by Alejandro Varela (Apr 4)

The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories brimming with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins, acutely aware of the stresses that modern life takes upon the body and the body politic.

In “Midtown-West Side Story,” Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbours, and the restaurant’s regulars in preparation for a move to the suburbs.

“The Man in 512” tracks Manny, the childcare worker for a Swedish family, as he observes the comings and goings of an affluent co-op building, all the while teaching the children Spanish through Selena’s music catalogue.

“Comrades” follows a queer man with radical politics who just ended a long-term relationship and is now on the hunt for a life partner. With little tolerance for political moderates, his series of speed dates devolve into awkward confrontations that leave him wondering if his approach is the correct one.

A collection of humorous, sexy, and highly neurotic tales about parenting, long-term relationships, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict from the author of The Town of Babylon, The People Who Report More Stress deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities but being unable to do anything about them. (Astra House)

Collision: Stories From the Science of CERN

edited by Rob Appleby & Connie Potter (Apr 6)

A decade after the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the large Hadron Collider at CERN still leads the world in the search to uncover what the universe is made of, how it was formed, and what fate may lie in store for it.

If there is such a thing as a cutting edge, it surely lies 100 metres below the Swiss-French border, at the point the beams collide. As part of a unique collaboration, this book pairs a team of award-winning authors with CERN physicists to explore some of the consequences of what the LHC is learning, through fiction.

Authors include Sherlock and Dr. Who writer Steven Moffat, novelist and Small Axe screenwriter Courttia Newland, Dame Margaret Drabble and SF legends Ian Watson (whose credits include the screenplay for the Spielberg’s A.I.) and Stephen Baxter (winner of the Philip K Dick and John W Campbell Memorial Award). Featuring CERN physicist and engineers: Professor Lyn Evans, Professor John Ellis, Dr. Andrea Bersani, Dr. Tessa Charles, Dr. Joey Huston, Dr. Michael Davis, Dr. Carole Weydert, Dr. Joe Haley, Dr. Kristin Lohwasser, Dr. Pete Dong, Dr. Daniel Cervenkov, Dr. Andrea Giammanco. (Comma Press)

The Disappeared: Stories

by Andrew Porter (Apr 11)

A collection of stories that trace the threads of loss and displacement running through all our lives, by the acclaimed, award-winning author of The Theory of Light and Matter

A husband and wife hear a mysterious bump in the night. A father mourns the closeness he has lost with his son. A friendship with a married couple turns into a dangerous codependency. With gorgeous sensitivity, assurance, and a propulsive sense of menace, these stories center on disappearances both literal and figurative—lives and loves that are cut short, the vanishing of one’s youthful self. From San Antonio to Austin, from the clamor of a crowded restaurant to the cigarette at a lonely kitchen table, Andrew Porter captures each of these relationships mid-flight, every individual life punctuated by loss and beauty and need. The Disappeared reaffirms the undeniable artistry of a contemporary master of the form. (Knopf)

The Whole Animal

by Corinna Chong (Apr 11)

A refreshingly original debut collection of short stories that grapple with the self-alienation and self-discovery that make us human.

For fans of Souvankham Thammavongsa, Lynn Coady, and Lisa Moore comes a striking debut collection of short stories that explore bodies both human and animal: our fascination with their strange effluences, growths, and protrusions, and the dangerous ways we play with their power to inflict harm on ourselves and on others.

Throughout The Whole Animal, flawed characters wrestle with the complexities of relationships with partners, parents, children, and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging, and autonomy. Bodies are divided, often elusive, even grotesque. In “Porcelain Legs,” a pre-teen fixes on the long, thick hair growing from her mother’s eyelid. In “Wolf-Boy Saturday,” a linguist grasps for connection with a young boy whose negligent upbringing has left him unable to speak. In “Butter Buns,” a college student sees his mother in a new light when she takes up bodybuilding.

With strange juxtapositions, beguiling dark humour, and lurid imagery, The Whole Animal illuminates the everyday experiences of loneliness and loss, of self-alienation and self-discovery, that make us human. (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Hit Parade of Tears: Stories

by Izumi Suzuki (Apr 11)
translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom

Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.

A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki’s stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer’s work. (Verso Fiction)

One or Several Deserts

by Carter St Hogan (Apr 11)

Queer, strange, grotesque: eight intimate fictions give voice to bodies at the margins as they yearn and claw at their own flesh. Some of these bodies flicker in and out of reality; some find rebirth in a sentient disease; some consume the bowels of their lovers; others wrestle with sexual awakening at the hands of a giant stone in the wide American prairie. Bristling with defiance, cruel but tender, “One or Several Deserts” bends reality with a logic all its own. (11:11 Press)

Bound in Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror

edited by Lor Gislason (Apr 18)

An Anthology of Trans Body Horror brings together 13 trans and non-binary writers, using horror to both explore the darkest depths of the genre and the boundaries of flesh. A disgusting good time for all!

Featuring stories by LC Von Hessen, Theo Hendrie, Derek Des Agnes, Winter Holmes, gaast, Charles-Elizabeth Boyle, Hailey Piper, Joe Koch, Layne Van Rensburg, Bitter Karella, Amanda M Blake, Lillian Boyd, Teliesin Neith. (Goulish Press)

Games and Rituals: Stories

by Katherine Heiny (Apr 18)

The beloved author of Early Morning Riser brings us glittering stories of love—friendships formed at the airport bar, ex-husbands with benefits, mothers of suspiciously sweet teenagers, ill-advised trysts—in all its forms, both ridiculous and sublime.

The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny’s characters range from mischievous to tender: In “Bridesmaid, Revisited,” Marlee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid’s dress to work. In “Twist and Shout,” Erica’s elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In “Turn Back, Turn Back,” a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor’s deception. And in “561,” Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband’s ex-wife move out of the family home. (“It’s like you’re North Korea and South Korea . . . But would North Korea help South Korea move?”) 

Katherine Heiny, one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, running late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, has delivered a collection of glorious humour and immense kindness. (Knopf)

Instructions for the Drowning

by Steven Heighton (Apr 18)

“To say Heighton is an immensely talented writer is true enough but insufficient … As good a writer as Canada has ever produced.”—National Post

A man recalls his father’s advice on how to save a drowning person, but struggles when the time comes to use it. A wife’s good deed leaves a couple vulnerable at the moment when they’re most in need of security—the birth of their first child. Newly in love, a man preoccupied by accounts of freak accidents is befallen by one himself. In stories about love and fear, idealisms and illusions, failures of muscle and mind and all the ways we try to care for one another, Steven Heighton’s Instructions for the Drowning is an indelible last collection by a writer working at the height of his powers. (Biblioasis)

Places Like These

by Lauren Carter (Apr 18)

A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend’s tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend’s secrets for his own purposes. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, rural Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter’s poignant short stories reflects each character’s journey.

Psychologically complex and astute, Places Like These plumbs the vast range of human reactions to those things which make us human—love, grief, friendship, betrayal, and the intertwined yet contrasting longing for connection and independence. (Book*hug Press)

The Wishing Pool and Other Stories

by Tananarive Due (Apr 18)

American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due’s second collection of stories ranges from horror to science fiction to suspense. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due’s stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope. 

In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, or other universal struggles set against the supernatural or surreal. All of them are written with Due’s trademark attention to detail and deep characterization. In addition to previously published work, this collection contains brand-new stories, including “Rumpus Room,” a supernatural horror novelette set in Florida about a woman’s struggle against both outer and inner demons. (Akashic Books)

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and other Stories

by Tobias S Buckell (Apr 18)

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories is Tobias S. Buckell’s seventh short fiction collection and is comprised of 15 stories, several of which are original to the collection or were previously only available through his Patreon.

This collection ranges from galactic adventures to intimate explorations of humanity—sometimes in the same story—rich with a sense of wonder and deft storytelling. (Apex Publications)

Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays

edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K Law, Susan Forest (Apr 22)

How would first contact–on earth, in space, on another planet–transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized sentience on Earth?

What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the depths of space? Or . . .

Life–beyond us.

Dive in as the European Astrobiology Institute presents fifty-four original SF Stories and Science Essays on life, from microbial to macro, from automatic to sagacious. Each speculative story is followed by a professional essay illuminating the scientific underpinnings of the story and providing a new window into the cutting-edge knowledge about exploration for life in the universe.

SF STORIES BY: Eugen Bacon, Gregory Benford, Renan Bernardo, Jana Bianchi, Tobias S. Buckell, Eric Choi, Julie E. Czerneda, Tessa Fisher, Simone Heller, Valentin D. Ivanov, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lisa Jenny Krieg (translated by Simone Heller), Geoffrey A. Landis, Rich Larson, Liu Yang (translated by Ladon Gao), Lucie Lukačovičová, Premee Mohamed, G. David Nordley, Malka Older, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Tomás Petrásek, Brian Rappatta, Arula Ratnakar, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Bogi Takács, Peter Watts, and B. Zelkovich.

SCIENCE ESSAYS BY: Jacques Arnould, William Bains, José A. Caballero, Dimitra Demertzi, Martina Dimoska, Tessa Fisher, Dennis Höning, Valentin D. Ivanov, Fabian Klenner, Nina Kopacz, Geoffrey A. Landis, Natuschka Lee, Ania Losiak, Stephen Francis Mann, Connor Martini, Tony Milligan, Philippe Nauny, Julie Nováková, Erik Persson, Tomás Petrásek, Joanna Piotrowska, Giovanni Poggiali, Amedeo Romagnolo, Stefano Sandrelli, Floris van der Tak, Jan Toman, Sheri Wells-Jensen, and Raymond M. Wheeler (Laksa Media Groups Inc.)

Fear and Other Stories

by Dalpat Chauhan (Apr 24)
translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar

Chauhan’s writing is resistance literature. It echoes the harrowing screams of a people long suppressed.

Fear and Other Stories is a reminder of the inherent dangers of the Dalit life, a life subjected to unimaginable violence and terror even in its most mundane moments. In this collection of short stories, veteran Gujarati writer Dalpat Chauhan narrates these lived experiences of exasperation and anger with startling vividity. His characters chronicle a deep history of resistance, interrogating historical, mythological and literary legends, foregrounding the perspectives of the disenfranchised.

Chauhan deftly wields his prose to counter dominant narratives, pointing out gaps and voicing the silences within. In ?The Payback, for a change, we see famished savarnas begging Dalit families for food that they scorn otherwise. The eponymous Fear follows the heroic but doomed resistance of Dalit youths fighting against savarna men with the ‘right’ to enter their homes and molest women inside. And the allegorical Cold Blood features a doctor who tries to leave behind his identity with his surname, only to be reminded of it when the savarnas accept his blood, but not water from his hands.

Hemang Ashwinkumar’s nimble translation introduces the English reader to Chauhan’s heart-wrenching stories while unmasking a rural Gujarat unrecognizable from its supposedly vibrant idylls. His introduction to the book not just contextualises Chauhan’s work, but is also a touching and thought-provoking commentary on the larger canvas of Dalit literature. (Pengin India)

Filmi Stories

by Kunal Basu (Apr 24)

The eight stories of this collection are about unforeseen terrors and adventures, surreal comedies, the apocalypses and the sublime poetry of everyday life. A disgruntled trucker sets out to kill his rival, ending up as the saviour of migrant workers trapped by a pandemic. A novice jailor breaks the law only to learn that nothing in this world is beyond pardon. A corpse dressed immaculately in a suit is discovered on a beach, the trail of the suspects stretching across continents in casinos and cruise ships. The nude paintings of a dead artist set the stage for a murder in a gallery. Hunt for a terrorist leads to a dangerous game of luring a prey out of its lair using a human bait. A man finds himself as the sole passenger of an airplane flying from one deserted airport to another. An innocent shopkeeper learns the wisdom of the Mahabharata on the verge of losing his innocence.

Written with words and marked by light and shadow, sounds and silence, these tales stalk a bunch of unruly actors performing roles that take on lives of their own. (Vintage)

Red Road Redemption

by Pamela Fullerton (Apr 24)

Red Road Redemption is an unforgettable collection of short stories filled with haunting characters, both human and animal, overflowing with thought-provoking drama, humor, and nostalgia. Take an unquiet walk in the woods, peer through a poignant lens at disappearing family farms, and cheer for the dog pack struggling to bring home the best gifts ever.

Find a holiday allegory to share, classic car memories, and the story of a bull who purrs, all seasoned with triumph and tragedy. Encounter the Unseen Menace, the Old Grey Mare, and a distinctive terrier named Dickens. Meet the Forest Witch, grieve in the hay loft of a magnificent barn, and rejoice in the yarn of the Pink Tiger.

Each of these ‘Country Tales from the Heart of Wisconsin’ is a unique depiction of the varied inhabitants found at the farm, an Amish harness maker’s shop, the neighborhood tavern, and right next door: all in the heart of red granite country.

Join us for a memorable stroll down that iconic red gravel road. (Wisconsin Writers’ Association)

This is My Body, Given For You

by Heather Parry (May)

About the book: A girl suffering a bizarre menstrual aberration is exploited by those around her, including her father. A boy expresses his love for a nonhuman man by making himself animalistic. A girl abandoned by her community discovers the possibility of transmutation through cannibalism. A man struggles with his wife’s choices around her existence, and considers whether he should leave her alone in her semi-oblivion, or join her.

In This Is My Body, Given For You, Heather Parry places in our hands fifteen stories in which the body is something that can be changed, altered, and escaped from. With dripping blood, bruised tentacles, and seamed skin, Heather Parry’s debut short story collection will consume you. (Haunt Publishing)

Lost Places: Stories

by Sarah Pinsker (May 2)

A new collection from the author of Nebula Award winning A Song for a New Day and Philip K Dick Award winning Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea.

A half-remembered children’s TV show. A hotel that shouldn’t exist. A mysterious ballad. A living flag. Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Pinsker’s second collection brings together a seemingly eclectic group of stories that unite behind certain themes: her touchstones of music and memory are joined by stories about secret subversions and hidden messages in art. Her stories span and transcend genre labels, looking for the truth in strange situations from possible futures to impossible pasts. (Small Beer Press)

The Private Apartments

by Idman Nur Omar (May 2)

Moving, insightful, linked stories about the determination of Somali immigrants — despite duty, discrimination, and an ever-dissolving link to a war-torn homeland.

In the insular rooms of The Private Apartments, a cleaning lady marries her employer’s nephew and then abandons him, a depressed young mother finds unlikely support in her community housing complex, a new bride attends weddings to escape her abusive marriage, and a failed nurse is sent to relatives in Dubai after a nervous breakdown. These captivating and compassionate stories eloquently showcase the intricate linkages of human experience and the ways in which Somalis, even as a diaspora, are indelibly connected. (Astoria)

The Private Life of Spies and The Exquisite Art of Getting Even: Stories of Espionage and Revenge

by Alexander McCall Smith (May 9)

From the beloved author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series comes a new short story collection: half spy-stories, half tales-of-revenge; all highlight the kinder, funnier, gentler sides of espionage and retribution.

In this dual collection of short stories, Alexander McCall Smith brings his trademark humour, warmth and wisdom about the human condition to inventive tales of spying and vengeance. In one story, a WW2 spy dropped deep into enemy territory manages to disguise himself—quite convincingly—as a nun. In another, an invitation to join the Vatican Secret Service sends a prospective operative down a rabbit hole of controversy and confusion. A third story finds an author, on the brink of public ruin, seeing the error of his ways after an act of kindness saves the day.

A keen observer of humanity imbued with a sparkling imagination, Alexander McCall Smith illustrates throughout these two delightful collections that transparency is paramount and forgiveness is restorative. With surprising insight and a healthy helping of humour, these stories remind us that, in the end, the high road is often the better one for all of us. (Knopf Canada)

No One Will Come Back for Us

by Premee Mohamed (May 16)

Here there be gods and monsters – forged from flesh and stone and vengeance – emerging from the icy abyss of deep space, ascending from dark oceans, and prowling strange cities to enter worlds of chaos and wonder, where scientific rigor and human endeavour is tested to the limits. These are cosmic realms and watery domains where old offerings no longer appease the ancient Gods or the new and hungry idols. Deities and beasts. Life and death. Love and hate. Science and magic. And smiling monsters in human skin.

Premee Mohamed’s debut collection of contemporary cosmic horror and dark fantasy heralds the arrival of a new and vibrant voice on the cutting edge of modern speculative fiction. (Undertow Publications)

Above Discovery

by Jennifer Falkner (May 23)

“It is the part that is missing that I am drawn to, that I try to pin down. My gaze is always divided by what is here and what is no longer here. That, for me, is where the deepest pleasure lies, where the sweet overcomes the bitter.”

A couple coping with a recent loss are tasked with taking stock of a late biology enthusiast’s hoard. A support worker dedicated to rehabilitating young women suffering from, among other things, a certain unexpected effect of the climate apocalypse faces a truth that shatters the illusion separating her work and her personal life. An archaeologist formerly working in Syria struggles with her decision to flee from unrest, while the people she has left behind face an uncertain fate.

In Jennifer Falkner’s richly imagined first collection, past and present glancingly converge, making the familiar outlines of myth, history, and everyday life seem suddenly strange. With spare, elegant prose, Falkner introduces the reader to those whose narratives are written in the language of empty space. Above Discovery is a stunning debut collection from an author to watch. (Invisible Publishing)

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

by Roque Dalton (May 23)
translated by Jack Hirschman

“The revolutionary the dictatorship couldn’t kill, the trickster poet favored by the gods.”—Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

Poems of revolution by one of Latin America’s most beloved poets

One of Latin America’s greatest poets, Roque Dalton was a revolutionary whose politics were inseparable from his art. Born in El Salvador in 1935, Dalton dedicated his life to fighting for social justice, while writing fierce, tender poems about his country and its people. In Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases / Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle, he explores oppression and resistance through the lens of five poetic personas, each with their own distinct voice. These poems show a country caught in the crosshairs of American imperialism, where the few rule the many and the many struggle to survive—and yet there is joy and even humor to be found here, as well as an abiding faith in humanity. In striking, immediate, exuberantly inventive language, Dalton captures the ethos of a people, as stirring now as when the book was first published nearly forty years ago. “I believe the world is beautiful,” he writes, “and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” (Seven Stories Press)

Suite as Sugar and Other Stories

by Camille Hernández-Ramdwar (May 23)

Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma.

From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto’s condo culture, from Havana’s haunted streets to Trinidad’s calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate, reflecting legacies of abandonment and loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands.

Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. Tying this collection together is the casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being. (Rare Machines)

When The Hibiscus Falls: Stories

by M Evelina Galang (Jun 13)

Seventeen stories traverse borderlines, mythic and real, in the lives of Filipino and Filipino American women and their ancestors.

Moving from small Philippine villages of the past to the hurricane-beaten coast of near-future Florida, When the Hibiscus Falls examines the triumphs and sorrows that connect generations of women. Daughters, sisters, mothers, aunties, cousins, and lolas commune with their ancestors and their descendants, mourning what is lost when an older generation dies, celebrating what is gained when we safeguard their legacy for those who come after us. Featuring figures familiar from M. Evelina Galang’s other acclaimed and richly imagined novels and stories, When the Hibiscus Falls dwells within the complexity of family, community, and Filipino American identity. Each story is an offering, a bloom that unfurls its petals and holds space in the sun. (Coffee House Press)

Happy Stories, Mostly

by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (Jun 16)
translated by Tiffany Tsao

In their stunning fiction debut, queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements.

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Happy Stories, Mostly introduces “one of the most important Indonesian writers today” (Litro Magazine). These twelve short stories ask what it means to be almost happy—to nearly find joy, to sort-of be accepted, but to never fully grasp one’s desire. Joy shimmers on the horizon, just out of reach.

An employee navigates their new workplace, a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers; a tourist in Vietnam seeks solace following her son’s suicide; a young student befriends a classmate obsessed with verifying the existence of a mythical hundred-foot-tall man. A tragicomic collection that probes the miraculous, melancholy nature of survival amid loneliness, Happy Stories, Mostly considers an oblique approach to human life: In the words of one of the stories’ narrators, “I work in the dark. Like mushrooms. I don’t need light to thrive.” (The Feminist Press at CUNY)

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories

by Agustina Bazterrica (Jun 27)
translated by Sarah Moses

If not for money, then maybe for love.

A collection of nineteen dark, wildly imaginative short stories from the author of the award-winning TikTok sensation Tender Is the Flesh.

From celebrated author Agustina Bazterrica, this collection of nineteen brutal, darkly funny short stories takes into our deepest fears and through our most disturbing fantasies. Through stories about violence, alienation, and dystopia, Bazterrica’s vision of the human experience emerges in complex, unexpected ways—often unsettling, sometimes thrilling, and always profound. In “Roberto,” a girl claims to have a rabbit between her legs. A woman’s neighbour jumps to his death in “A Light, Swift, and Monstrous Sound,” and in “Candy Pink,” a woman fails to contend with a difficult breakup in five easy steps.

Written in Bazterrica’s signature clever, vivid style, these stories question love, friendship, family relationships, and unspeakable desires. (Scribner)

The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories

by Jess Walter (Jun 27)

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes—for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous—as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.

We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world’s most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams. (Harper Perennial)

Truth & Dare

by So Mayer (Jul)

The debut fiction collection from an inimitable critic, Truth & Dare is a deeply personal and fantastical ride through gender, trauma, queerness, science, history, and religion.

Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England’s worst pogrom comes for York’s particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London’s famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex.

Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it’s been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it.

A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours. Truth or dare? Both, always. (Cipher Press)

Here in the Night

by Rebecca Turkewitz (Jul)

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy.  Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.

At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe—at least fleetingly—that anything could happen.

These stories will stay with you. (Black Lawrence Press)

The Beast You Are: Stories

by Paul Tremblay (Jul 11)

A haunting collection of short fiction from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club, A Head Full of Ghosts, and The Cabin at the End of the World.

Paul Tremblay has won widespread acclaim for illuminating the dark horrors of the mind in novels and stories that push the boundaries of storytelling itself. The fifteen pieces in this brilliant collection, The Beast You Are, are all monsters of a kind, ready to loudly (and lovingly) smash through your head and into your heart.

In “The Dead Thing,” a middle-schooler struggles to deal with the aftermath of her parents’ substance addictions and split. One day, her little brother claims he found a shoebox with “the dead thing” inside. He won’t show it to her and he won’t let the box out of his sight. In “The Last Conversation,” a person wakes in a sterile, white room and begins to receive instructions via intercom from a woman named Anne. When they are finally allowed to leave the room to complete a task, what they find is as shocking as it is heartbreaking.

The title novella, “The Beast You Are,” is a mini epic in which the destinies and secrets of a village, a dog, and a cat are intertwined with a giant monster that returns to wreak havoc every thirty years.

A masterpiece of literary horror and psychological suspense, The Beast You Are is a fearlessly imagined collection from one of the most electrifying and innovative writers working today. (William Morrow)

I Met It Once

by Kate Doyle (Jul 18)

This “gorgeous, electric” collection of short stories is about the inner lives of young women during their transformative twenties, navigating relationships, nostalgia for the past, and the uncertainty of the future (Mary-Beth Hughes, author of The Ocean House).

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents. Throughout, in stories both lyrical and haunting, young women search for ways to break free from the expectations of others and find a way to be in the world. 

Written with crystalline prose and sly humor, the stories in I Meant It Once build to complete a profoundly recognizable portrait of early adulthood and the ways in which seemingly incidental moments can come to define the stories we tell ourselves. For fans of Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood, and Melissa Bank, these stories about being young and adrift in today’s world go down easy and pack a big punch. (Algonquin Books)

Jackal, Jackal: Tales of the Dark and Fantastic

by Tobi Ogundiran (Jul 18)

From the Shirley Jackson award nominated author comes a highly anticipated debut collection of stories full of magic and wonder and breathtaking imagination!

In “The Lady of the Yellow-Painted Library” a hapless salesman flees the otherworldly librarian hell-bent on retrieving her lost library book; “The Tale of Jaja and Canti” sees Ogundiran riffing off of Pinnichio, but this wooden boy doesn’t seek to become real, but wanting to be loved, journeys the world in search of his mother—an ancient and powerful entity who is best not sought out. “The Goatkeeper’s Harvest” contains echoes of Lovecraft, where a young mother living on a farm finds that goats have broken into her barn and are devouring all her tubers. As she chases them off with a rake, a woman appears claiming the goats are her children, and that the young woman has killed one of them and must pay the price: a goat for a goat. (Undertow Publications)

Thriller: An Anthology of New Mystery Short Stories

edited by Don Bruns (Jul 23)

From Beat It to Billy Jean, the songs we know and love take on a brand new, thrilling connotation in this anthology edited by Don Bruns.

In this second collection in the Music and Murder Mystery series, nine award-winning, bestselling authors have written their own interpretations of the Thriller song list. With original work from some of the best mystery authors out there, the anthology includes stories from Heather Graham, Jeffery Deaver, William Kent Krueger, Dahlia Rose, and David R. Slayton, among others.

With poignant, frightening, and intriguing stores from some of the best writers in the genre, this eerie collection is sure to keep you up at night–and maybe even haunt your dreams. (Blackstone Publishing)

The Rage Letters

by Valérie Bah (Aug 15)
translated by Kama La Mackerel

An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex — in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.

Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances.

Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah’s The Rage Letters — set in Montreal and beyond — are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters’ desire, rage, and acts of rebellion. (Metonymy Press)

Open Up

by Thomas Morris (Aug 17)

The new collection from a literary star – five achingly tender, innovative and dazzling stories of (dis)connection.

Everything felt familiar and nostalgic. It was the joy and blood-thrill of being understood, of being ready to give himself entirely to another.

From a child attending his first football match, buoyed by secret magic, and a wincingly humane portrait of adolescence, to the perplexity of grief and loss through the eyes of a seahorse, Thomas Morris seeks to find grace, hope and benevolence in the churning tumult of self-discovery.

Philosophically acute and strikingly original, this outstanding suite of stories is bursting with a bracing emotional depth. Open Up cracks the heart as it expands the short story form. (Faber & Faber)

Stinetinglers 2: 10 MORE New Stories from the Master of Scary Tales

by R.L. Stine (Aug 29)

From R.L. Stine, the master of horror for young readers, comes ten new stories that are sure to send a shiver down your spine.

Two kids embark on a field trip to the zoo…and stumble upon a creature they never expected to meet. A boy makes a machine that puts kids in charge…but at what cost? A child is sure his new house is haunted…but is it just in his head? And each story comes with a personal introduction from Stine himself.

Laced with Stine’s signature humor and a hefty dose of nightmarish fun, Stinetinglers 2 is perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Stine’s own Goosebumps books who want even more scares. These chilling tales prove that Stine’s epic legacy in the horror genre is justly earned. Dive in, and beware: you might be sleeping with the lights on tonight! (Feiwel & Friends)

Star Wars The High Republic: Tales of Light and Life

(Sep 5)

Thrilling short stories featuring fan favorite characters from the beloved High Republic series each written by a New York Times bestselling author.

The High Republic authors share unmissable short stories that bridge Phases, resolve mysteries, and offer tantalizing hints of what is to come. 

Rejoin the adventures of the Jedi and Padawans, Pathfinders and Path members, heroes and villains ahead of the launch of Phase III.

Authors:

Zoraida Córdova, Tessa Gratton, Claudia Gray, Justina Ireland, Lydia Kang, George Mann, Daniel José Older, Cavan Scott, and Charles Soule (Disney Lucasfilm Press)

Furies: Stories of the wicked, wild and untamed

introduction by Sandi Toksvig (Sep 26)

A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers:

Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O’Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeymi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Smith – introduced by Sandi Toksvig.

DRAGON. TYGRESS. SHE-DEVIL. HUSSY. SIREN. WENCH. HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE. VITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT. FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO.

For centuries past, and all across the world, there are words that have defined and decried us. Words that raise our hackles, fire up our blood; words that tell a story.

In this blazing cauldron of a book, fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers have taken up their pens and reclaimed these words, creating an entertaining and irresistible collection of feminist tales for our time. (Virago)

A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories

by Terry Pratchett (Oct 5)

A truly unmissable set of unearthed stories from the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett: award-winning and bestselling author, and creator of the phenomenally successful Discworld series.

An exclusive collection of twenty early short stories by one of the world’s best loved authors, these are rediscovered tales that Pratchett wrote under a pseudonym for newspapers during the 1970s and 1980s.

Whilst none of the stories are set in the Discworld, they hint towards the world he would go on to create in his award-winning and globally bestselling series, containing all of his trademark wit, satirical wisdom and fantastic imagination. These are tales which entertain, enlighten and, most importantly, make you laugh.

Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Council with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and travel millions of years back in time to The Old Red Sandstone Lion pub.

The final ever ‘new’ writing to be published from the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett, A STROKE OF THE PEN is a must-have collection of fantastic short stories for fans, old and new. (Transworld)

Roman Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri (Oct 10)
translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz

Rome—metropolis and monument, suspended between past and future, multi-faceted and metaphysical—is the protagonist, not the setting, of these nine stories: the first short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the form since her number one New York Times best seller Unaccustomed Earth, and a major literary event.

In “The Boundary,” one family vacations in the Roman countryside, though we see their lives through the eyes of the caretaker’s daughter, who nurses a wound from her family’s immigrant past. In “P’s Parties,” a Roman couple, now empty nesters, finds comfort and community with foreigners at their friend’s yearly birthday gathering—until the husband crosses a line. And in “The Steps,” on a public staircase that connects two neighborhoods and the residents who climb up and down it, we see Italy’s capital in all of its social and cultural variegations, filled with the tensions of a changing city: visibility and invisibility, random acts of aggression, the challenge of straddling worlds and cultures, and the meaning of home.

These are splendid, searching stories, written in Jhumpa Lahiri’s adopted language of Italian and seamlessly translated by the author and by Knopf editor Todd Portnowitz. Stories steeped in the moods of Italian master Alberto Moravia and guided, in the concluding tale, by the ineluctable ghost of Dante Alighieri, whose words lead the protagonist toward a new way of life.SEE LESS

Best American Short Stories 2023

edited by Min Jin Lee (Oct 17)

A collection of the year’s best short stories, selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee and series editor Heidi Pitlor.

Min Jin Lee, author of the highly acclaimed National Book Award Finalist Pachinko, selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. (Mariner Books)

Jewel Box: Stories

by E Lily Yu (Oct 24)

A luminous collection of short fiction by award-winning writer E. Lily Yu, Jewel Box showcases incandescent stories from a master of language that reflect and refract the sharp intimacies of our world, burning brilliant against the dark.

Angels, monsters, and bees. Birdwatchers, emperors, and prison wardens. These and more populate the twenty-two new and old stories from award-winning author E. Lily Yu, collected for the first time here in her debut short story collection. From her early innovative work that won her the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, such as “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” to recent short fiction such as “Small Monsters,” E. Lily Yu’s writing has continued to garner award nominations and recognition from the literary community for its faceted beauty, cutting edge, and uplifting heart.

Collecting award-winning stories from across her career alongside brand-new pieces, Jewel Box rings with stories of delight and tales of tremendous weight. At turns bittersweet and boundary-breaking, poignant and profound, this collection of stories sing, as the oldest stories do, of what it means to be alive in this strange, terrible, beautiful world. (Kensington Books)

Skin Thief: Stories

by Suzan Palumbo (Fall)

Dead Detectives Society

edited by James Aquilone (Dec)

Throughout history and infinite dimensions, there exists a secret group of supernatural investigators operating on the fringes of society, lurking in the shadows, working the strangest cases with little reward. They are hardboiled zombies and ghosts, mythological creatures,  ass-kicking vampires and even tortured humans. Uncanny sleuths whose normal is the bizarre and weird. Now, for the first time, their adventures are together in this one-of-a-kind anthology.

In the tradition of the great pulps of yesteryear, Kevin J. Anderson, Steve Niles, Nancy A. Collins, Joe R. Lansdale & Kasey Lansdale, David Avallone, Jonathan Maberry, Lisa Morton, Nancy Holder & Alan Philipson, John Jennings, Tim Waggoner, Jeff Strand, Rena Mason, and James Aquilone hadve joined forces for Dead Detectives Society. 

They bring their creations Dan Shamble, Cal McDonald, Sonja Blue, Matt Richter, Dead Jack, Johnny Fade, and Saul When: Halloween Detective, among others.

Dead Detectives Society boasts 13 short stories, each accompanied by a full-page illustration by such artists as Zac Atkinson and J.K. Woodward.

Cover art by Hugo Award-winner John Jennings. (Monstrous Books)