With the start of Issue 13, Philly Chapbook Review will now publish information on new literary novels and short story collections the same way we have for full-length poetry books (prose chapbooks will be covered in a monthly post). Every Tuesday, we’ll publish an update about what titles we know are releasing in the following week.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Twenty Minutes of Silence, Hélène Bessette, Kate Briggs (Tr)
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In an opulent villa near the English channel lives a well-to-do family. A man—a husband, father, and employer—has been shot dead. The bullet is from his own gun, which he got from the Germans during the war. In this family, the father has a safe, a monkey wrench, a wife, and a maid named Rose. The son has a swing, a croquet set, a rain coat, and a car. They all read detective novels to fall asleep (the father), to stay awake (the son), to distract herself from an empty marriage (the mother). Packed with brutal revelations, the novel centers on the twenty minutes of silence it takes for the family to alert the doctor (who lives next door) of the father’s death. Everything in this high-octane drama is subject to change, including the setting and the characters, who are truer to life than might at first appear. But who if anyone is the true criminal and who is the victim? In this marvelous and sui generis novel, written in Bessette’s signature taut and stripped-back prose, the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head.
Hélène Bessette (1918–2000) published thirteen novels with Gallimard between 1953 and 1973, won the Prix Cazes in 1954, and was twice in the running for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. After her editor Raymond Queneau’s death in 1976, her publisher ceased to support her. In 2000, she died in poverty and in poor mental health, with her body of work out of print and largely forgotten. It was only several years after her death that her singular articulation of what, with specific intent, she called “the poetic novel” found a new and avid readership in France.
Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lectures and seminar notes: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. This Little Art, her genre-bending essay on the art of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. In 2021, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her debut novel, The Long Form, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2023 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.
Air, Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles (Tr)
Publisher: Liveright
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Paul, a Swiss interior designer living alone in the remote Orkney Islands, receives an unusual commission from Kuki, a prestigious design magazine: travel to a massive data center in Norway and coat its cavernous interior in the “perfect white.” But after a solar storm disrupts the facility, Paul mysteriously vanishes into space and time.
Ildr, a young girl living in another realm, mistakes an oddly dressed stranger for a deer and shoots him with an arrow. Nursing the stranger back to health, she begins to suspect he is not of her world. Soon, the two are fleeing the Duke of Tviot’s murderous soldiers through a myth-haunted landscape, heading toward a subterranean city carved into a cliff above the Frozen Sea—a place rumored to lie beyond the duke’s reach.
Air is Christian Kracht’s most seductively disorienting work yet: a haunting journey through a world that may be a dream, the afterlife, or reality’s inverted twin.
Christian Kracht’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Zurich with his wife and daughter.
Daniel Bowles’s translation of Eurotrash was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025. He teaches at Boston College.
Ada, Mark Haber
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
In a remote country in Europe, Gerard Desacroux IV, petty tyrant and French nationalist, wants nothing more than to be reunited with Ada, the object of his desire ever since their brief fling in Paris years before. Though Ada is on her way to visit, there are the unfortunate matters of civil unrest, assassination attempts, and Ada’s affluent (and highly inconvenient) husband to contend with before bliss is attained. Despite it all, Desacroux IV is determined that nothing—neither war, nor ominous weather, nor the rising swell of indignant peasants—shall stand between him and Ada.
Told with Mark Haber’s trademark exuberant absurdity, Ada is a comedy about the mania of power, unrequited love, and the solitude of authority.
Mark Haber was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Florida. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden (2019, Coffee House Press), was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022, Coffee House Press), was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Public Library and Literary Hub. Mark’s fiction has appeared in Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light, among others. Mark lives in Minneapolis.
Astronaut!, Oana Aristide
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Romania, 1989, the twilight of Ceau?escu’s dictatorship: Daily news flashes of seemingly random murders grip the nation. The suspect? A man-eating bear.
Amid the fear of informants, official lies, and daily rationing, two bright lives collide. Constantin, an idealistic police detective prone to scribbling fairy tales in his notebook, is tasked with solving the string of mysterious deaths. Lia, a rebellious, inquisitive schoolgirl pining for more color in her life, is unwittingly drawn into an eccentric elderly neighbor’s secret plot against the regime. While everyone around them is flattened into submission, the two find the spirit to carry out small acts of defiance. Their decisions will have sweeping consequences—for themselves, for their families, and for their country.
Masterfully plotted and psychologically astute, Astronaut! is both a chilling detective novel and a moving coming-of-age tale. It carries a powerful message: the lies we accept today become the truths of tomorrow.
Oana Aristide was born in Transylvania and spent her childhood in communist Romania. She has variously worked as a macroeconomist in London, cabinet advisor in Bucharest, travel journalist, and hotelier in Greece. She now lives in Sweden.
Famous Men, Julie Buntin
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she’s never known?
Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he’s not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.
A gripping novel about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again.
Julie Buntin‘s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, released in ten territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
How to Date a Fanatic, Aruni Kashyap
Publisher: HarperVia
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men in the city, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.
Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country’s political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.
Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.
Aruni Kashyap is an acclaimed author and translator of several novels and poetry collections and has received awards and fellowships from Harvard, NEA, and more. His work has appeared in CNN, ELLE, India Today, The New Indian Express, and other publications. He is an associate professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.
The Other Wife, Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
Zuzu met her best friend Cash on the first day of college, and nothing was ever the same. Tall, witty, and popular, his friendship represented a kind of belonging for Zuzu, who had always felt like an outsider growing up mixed race in her rural hometown. Though their friendship was charged with longing, it never progressed to romance. Now approaching her forties, Zuzu has built a stable life with her wife Agnes, a steadfast and career-driven lawyer. Yet Zuzu is haunted by the choices that have shaped her: living with her mother instead of her father in childhood, pursuing law over art, and marrying Agnes while harboring complex feelings for Cash.
When a sudden loss pulls Zuzu back to her hometown, the “what ifs” in her mind become louder than ever, and she begins to unwind the turns that have led her here. Will she embrace the choices she’s made, or risk everything for a chance to chase the past? A novel that speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age, The Other Wife is as heartfelt as it is daring in its deep reckoning with the past and quest for true joy.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy was awarded a Stegner Fellowship in 2014. She is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their family.
I Want You to Be Happy, Jem Calder
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Chuck and Joey meet in a bar. He’s in his mid-thirties; she’s twelve years younger. He long ago abandoned his ambition of being a novelist and works as a copywriter at a big ad agency. “Lead copywriter,” he corrects himself. Joey is living paycheck to paycheck on her barista wages and privately dreams of making it as a poet. They go back to Chuck’s luxury flat—a world away from Joey’s cramped house-share, the crumbs in her bed. Soon, Joey is imagining a future between them and Chuck is moving on from a mistake in his recent past. Amazing, how meeting a new person can make you feel so new.
Funny, excruciating, and true, Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp-eyed tale of two people searching for meaning and connection in modern times, missing the mark maybe, but still trying.
Jem Calder was born in Cambridge and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. He is the author of the short-story collection Reward System.
Please Don’t Touch the Body: Stories, Emily Doyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
By turns tender and irreverent, the 11 genre-bending stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body are thrillingly concerned with the devastation—and power—of being alive today.
In the collection’s first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades. In the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped, and controlled by his young, queer owner. And in “Thank You No Thank You,” a young woman grapples with the rules she learned in her religious childhood, the freedoms of her new and more liberal life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend.
Together these inventive, emotionally rich stories reveal an incredible new vision and “a writer to watch” (Rita Chang-Eppig).
Emily Doyle has an MFA from UC Riverside. She has received awards including the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Participant Scholarship and the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and her work has appeared in The Sun, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.
Animare: Stories, Patrick Woodcock
Publisher: Tidewater Press
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
Acclaimed poet Patrick Woodcock grants breath and memory to objects he has encountered during more than thirty years as a migrant writer. In tales that move between laughter and rage, tenderness and defiance, he allows them to speak of what he has seen and felt in geographies and histories that range from Iqaluit, Nunavut, to Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Kurdish North of Iraq and beyond. Whether a boat, a baby carriage, a strip of bark, or a stone, each narrator bears witness to the quiet beauty and enduring sorrow that mark the human world. Beneath them all runs a single current—a profound love of life, and a tireless belief that injustices must be righted and human triumphs, however fragile, must be honoured.
Patrick Woodcock is the author of ten books of poetry that have been translated and published in fourteen languages. Always Die Before Your Mother was shortlisted for Canada’s ReLit award in 2010 and reached the number one spot on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list. You can’t bury them all was shortlisted for the JM Abraham Poetry Award (2017) and won the Alcuin Society Book Design Award for Poetry. An inveterate traveller, he is currently based in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
Cloudthief, Nathaniel Rich
Publisher: MCD
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover
A criminal career has to begin somewhere, and this one begins at a Manhattan storage facility. It shapes up, at best, as an entry-level heist, breaking into a barely protected storage unit to pilfer Upper West Siders’ forgotten belongings. But our burgeoning criminal encounters something more unexpected than a dusty treasure trove: a resident, Virginia, a young woman who has found a way to live off the grid in the heart of Manhattan.
Virginia, unsurprisingly, has an idiosyncratic sense of how the world works—and a deeply analytic mind and skillset that make it clear just how small potatoes the storage unit heist is. Soon the two of them are a criminal duo with their eyes set on the most lucrative target the twenty-first century has to offer: data. The bank heist or the museum robbery is a thing of the past, and with purely digital theft and fraud, it’s too hard to get away clean. The overlooked targets are the giant, anonymous data centers with hard drives full of all the information that make the world go round. Here, the data is physical, and no one is paying that much attention.
Or so they convince themselves.
Hitting every beat of the classic heist story but brilliantly updated for our times, Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief escalates from a low-rent hustle through the slightly more glamorous data heist to one final grand, seemingly noble, high-stakes scheme that, of course, promises to change everything. And does, if not in the way anyone planned for.
Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History (MCD, 2019), a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Award and a winner of awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physics. He is also the author of the novels King Zeno (MCD, 2018); Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013); and The Mayor’s Tongue (2008). Rich’s short fiction has been published by McSweeney’s, Esquire, Vice, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The American Scholar; he was awarded the 2017 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction and is a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction.
Har Mar: Stories, Hilal Isler
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: July 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Hilal Isler’s gripping debut story collection, Har Mar, women in the early twenty-first century navigate the complex spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves. Isler’s characters are all on the verge of something—success, rebellion, revelation—and they want to disappear as much as they want to be seen. Moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States, these stories trace migrations both physical and emotional: a nanny plots to flee the wealthy family she cares for in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul; in Har Mar, a quiet mall tucked in the suburbs of Minneapolis, a bookseller escapes her grief in a complicated relationship with a wig retailer; an actress is hired by a famous American novelist to portray her at public events.
The women in Har Mar don’t always make sound decisions, and they’re not trying to be heroes. But they are reaching—imperfectly, but fiercely—for connection, truth, and home. With moving prose and a deep sense of longing, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the margins, to live in translation, and to build a life at the edge of belonging.
Hilal Isler teaches at the University of Texas. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, New York Magazine, The Believer, The Baltimore Review, The Paris Review online, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 McKnight Fellow in Creative Prose and lives with her family in Austin.
The Moose Lottery, Kelly E. Sullivan
Publisher: Stanchion Books
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Moose Lottery is a novella written in a style of hardscrabble New England gothic. It follows logger and father Carl Riendeau as he struggles to maintain a grip on his life through a series of bad choices and disasters. After winning a coveted place in the state’s seasonal moose hunt, Carl’s luck turns for the worse: his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his son sustains serious injuries in a car accident and faces federal charges for drug trafficking; as Carl tries to raise the money for her legal fees, fight her parents for custody of his son, and help his friend deal with layoffs and a coming recession, he determines to bring eight-year-old Luca moose hunting with him no matter the consequences.
The character-driven narrative turns on questions of trust and miscommunication in an unforgiving rural environment, exploring violence and tenderness toward both human and nonhuman life.
Kelly E. Sullivan is the author of the novella, Winter Bayou, and two chapbooks of poems, Fell Year (Green Bottle Press, London, 2017) and Toledo Blade (Dancing Girl Press, 2024). She publishes scholarly work as well, including an article on stained glass artist and illustrator, Harry Clarke.
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Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”