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.
Dèy, Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami. When she hears gunfire while at a shopping mall, she takes shelter in a nearby restaurant, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners. Once she’s safely home, Magnolia keeps this traumatic event from everyone. But given her life back, she begins to see everything clearly: her extraordinary bond with her daughter, Zoë; her nearly broken relationship with Zoë’s father; the challenges of her mentally troubled mother, whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself; and her father’s affair with a woman who has borne him a child. While struggling through the labyrinth of her past, Magnolia must also come to terms with the losses sustained that life-altering day, and nearly every day by her parents and sibling in Haiti.
Can love or family protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart? Which side will prevail for Magnolia? Pulled between these questions, each of which involves a high-stakes choice—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: flitting and shimmering between different worlds.
Taking as its title a Haitian Kreyòl word for mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance not only of sharing grief but also of inseverable family ties. Brave and striking, Dèy is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with her signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist; Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times Notable Book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; and Krik? Krak!, also a National Book Award finalist. A Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and elsewhere.
Life of M, Rachel Cusk
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
The movie star M is one of the most recognizable faces of our time. Her image is everywhere. It has been like that since she was a child.
With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. M may live in the same places as real people. She may meet her friends or collect her children from school or walk her dogs as they do. But it seems the rules of reality have melted away.
Now, a writer has decided to pay close attention to M’s life in the hope of understanding who she really is. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths—about the very experience of living—might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture?
In this astonishing novel, Rachel Cusk hunts for these truths without ever swerving away into self-deception. Her pursuit leads us across olive groves and beaches, behind the smoked windows of limousines, and through beautiful cities considered the great masterpieces of civilization. And at every turn, Cusk contemplates the cost of this beauty—and what we might lose when we are hypnotized by it.
Life of M is a thrilling investigation of who we are, and who we pretend to be, at this late stage of modern life when we are mesmerized more than ever by the images we see everywhere. It cuts through a world of noise and spectacle to bring us an eerie music of immense power and beauty.
Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place (Prix Femina Étranger), the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction, including her most recent novel, Parade (winner of the Goldsmiths Prize). She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Malaparte Prize, and she has been awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She lives in Paris.
Crocodilopolis, John Manuel Arias
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Once a powerful, cold-blooded politician in Costa Rica, Seth Oreamundo is now living in exile in Washington, D.C.—and his younger brother Osario is to blame. Born into a corrupt political dynasty and raised on a seemingly idyllic coffee estate, the Oreamundo brothers were destined for greatness. But a dark family secret and a scandalous double crossing sent their lives into a tailspin, changing the country forever.
Osario must pay, and Seth decides the only way to do so is to return home to Costa Rica with the goal of feeding his brother to the infamous river crocodiles of their childhood. What follows is a spellbinding story of revenge alternating between Seth’s murderous plans and memories of the brothers’ upbringing. With the wisdom of biblical myth and the soapy wit of a telenovela, Crocodilopolis is a masterful interrogation of power, masculinity, destiny, and legacy from a literary star on the rise.
John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer and author of the national bestselling novel Where There Was Fire. A Canto Mundo fellow and an alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, his work has been published in the Kenyon Review, PANK, the Rumpus, and Akashic Books. He has lived in Washington D.C.; Brooklyn, New York; and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
Last Day of a Prior Life, Andrés Barba, Lisa Dillman (Tr)
Publisher: HarperVia
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
While eagerly preparing a house for prospective buyers, a woman finds herself face to face with a strange sight: a seven-year-old boy who doesn’t blink. Seemingly appearing and disappearing before her again and again, he sooner resembles an apparition. But one thing is clear: the boy wants something from her. Choosing to leave her everyday world behind, the woman steps through the looking glass, inadvertently nurturing a disturbing co-dependence and discovering a suspended time, a loop, and another life in the process.
Containing all the elements of a perfect ghost story, Last Day of a Prior Life is a richly atmospheric, disturbing, and dazzling gem of a novel that calls to mind the gothic tales of Shirley Jackson and the fractured realities of Black Mirror. Winner of the Premio Finestres, Barba’s latest demonstrates his exquisite talent for dissecting human intimacy and excavating the links between past and present, while delivering a masterful exploration of human longing and the ties that bind us, even across time itself.
Lisa Dillman is a translator from the Spanish whose work has been twice named a finalist for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and received the Best Translated Book Award and Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Jacaranda, Gaël Faye, Sarah Ardizzone (Tr)
Publisher: Hogarth
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Milan—the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother—blames flunking his exams on the emotional toll of the genocide in his mother’s homeland. In truth, his mother never talks about Rwanda; the violence is an abstraction that only reaches their French suburb through television broadcasts. That is, until Milan meets Claude, a small boy with a bandaged head whom Milan’s mother introduces as a cousin who has come to France seeking medical treatment. Milan embraces him as the brother he’s always wanted—until, one day, Claude is sent back to Rwanda without warning, leaving Milan heartbroken and confused.
Four years later, the boys reunite as teenagers when Milan visits Rwanda for the first time with his mother in the wake of her divorce and discovers a more fractured and vibrant community than he could have imagined. But the trip raises more questions for him than it answers—about family, the war, and its aftershocks. Over the course of many years, Milan will return to Rwanda again and again, compelled to unearth the secrets that have taken root in the shadows of long silences, confront the past, and imagine a new future.
Partly inspired by acclaimed author Gaël Faye’s own relationship with Rwanda and its history, Jacaranda is a rich and deeply felt portrait of a man seeking to understand his family and his nation as it heals from the unthinkable.
Gaël Faye was born in 1982 in Burundi to a French father and Rwandan mother. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the genocide in Rwanda, the family moved to France. An author, songwriter and hip-hop artist, he released his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un croissant au beurre, in 2013. His first novel Small Country was an international bestseller and was awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. He lives in Paris.
Sarah Ardizzone is a translator of diverse French-speaking voices. Her work spans hip-hop lyrics, film scripts, memoir, picture books, graphic novels and literary fiction. Sarah has received the Scott Moncrieff prize twice, the Marsh award twice, and a New York Times notable book accolade. She was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2022 and made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
Gaining Ground, Joan Barfoot
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Paperback
Abra is a wife and mother living a suburban dream—until one day, she walks away. In a woodland cabin, her new life alone begins. There are no mirrors, no clocks, no memories: just the squirrels breathing in the forest, and the silence of vegetables growing. Years later, a young woman arrives, and the past-flashes begin. Daughter? A strange word. Is this her? And what will this mean?
Gaining Ground, originally published as Abra in North America, is a both a radical meditation on living on your own terms and an exquisite work of art. It calls to anybody who has ever wanted to escape—who has asked what it costs to be wild, to be sane, to be free.
Joan Barfoot (born 1946) is the author of eleven novels. Her books, which reviewers have celebrated as “harrowing and hilarious” and “gloriously subversive”, have been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A recipient of the Marian Engel Award, she has also been a journalist during much of her career. She lives in London, Ontario, Canada.
Ghost Cities, Siang Lu
Publisher: Summit Books
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”.
How is his relocation to a ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed—then recreated, page by page and book by book—all in the name of love and art?
Siang Lu is the Miles Franklin–winning author of Ghost Cities and the ABIA-winning The Whitewash, the cocreator of The Beige Index, and the creator of #SillyBookstagram. Siang is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Don’t see a fiction title published between 8/25 and 8/31 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”
ADHD in a Non-ADHD World: on Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
“[Hurwitz] shares moments of angst and moments of awe. More than that, there are moments of deep recognition. She sees herself in [her sons] and, in fact, receives a later-life ADHD diagnosis of her own.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor, Nancy Murphy.
“The woman’s head & hair are lavishly dressed. I probably leapt off the logic of the hairdresser being blind and therefore had to work on the head/body/mind rather than just hair as a surface issue of presentation.” Read two poems by Irene Cunningham, our third biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Blind Hairdresser.”
Flash Fiction: Nova by Kimmy Chang
“‘Nova’ is a lyrical second-person story about the narrator’s first true encounter with death…the story presents loss not as beautiful in itself, but as the place where beauty begins.” Read the first original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Nova” by Kimmy Chang.
“To fit the nuanced, dimensional experience of dysphoria and transition into narrative…often feels flattening, falsely assured. I wanted to look at this discomfort I felt, to see what was necessary in it.” Read three poems by Joshua Zeitler, our fourth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Cobbling.”