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.
American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee
Publisher: Cardinal
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.
Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times “100 Best Books of the Century.” She serves as the New York State Author Laureate from 2025 through 2027. She is the 2024 recipient of The Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence. Lee has received the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Bucheon Diaspora Literary Award, and the Samsung Happiness for Tomorrow Award for Creativity from South Korea. She is the recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lee is an inductee of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in Harlem with her family.
May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry
Publisher: Transit Books
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and replica food to bring medieval rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for two littered with small hints of intimacy, it must appear as if the people have just left the room.
After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.
The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.
A riveting debut from an award-winning poet, May We Feed the King is a story seen through shadows and old slips of paper, heard through cracked doors and murmured breaths. It asks how history takes shape—and how the stories that survive can distort the lives they claim to preserve. Laced with desire and longing, Perry’s novel is a searing meditation on the small details and large gaps that make up a life.
Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. Her first book-length collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, Stone Fruit, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.
Friends and Lovers, Nolwenn Le Blevennec, Madeleine Rogers (Tr)
Publisher: Peirene Press
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Three friends, all exhausted young mothers living in Paris, escape to Tunisia for a New Year’s getaway. By the hotel pool, they savour a rare moment of freedom, reliving past mistakes (and making new ones) while dreaming of adventure. Three years later, they reunite for another holiday, this time at a remote, disused lighthouse off the coast of Brittany. But the easy camaraderie of their earlier trip has faded.
Tensions simmer, and long-held dynamics begin to shift – especially when it’s revealed that one of them is writing a film inspired by their friendship. Full of humour and insight, Nolwenn Le Blevennec’s latest novel explores growing up, growing apart and the rich, if painful, bonds of female friendship.
Nolwenn Le Blevennec is a journalist and writer. She is editor-in- chief at L’Obs, and lives in Paris. Friends and Lovers is her second novel; her first, As The Eagle Flies, was published by Peirene in 2023.
Madeleine Rogers is a translator from French and Italian, and has worked in publishing since 2019. She studied Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, and Translation Studies at UCL. She lives in London.
Beautiful Distance, Nao-Cola Yamazaki, Charlotte Goff (Tr)
Publisher: SJP Lit
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A man sits in a cafe, sipping a green juice and watching the world go by. A white butterfly flutters through the air; a calico cat jumps onto a wall; cherry blossom petals fall, softly, to the ground. Life, momentarily, stands still, as our unnamed narrator prepares to visit his terminally ill wife in hospital, and reminisces on the life they have shared together.
A prize-winning bestseller in Japan, Beautiful Distance is a profoundly affecting and intimate story that looks with honesty and tenderness at the journey towards the end of a life. It explores what family means, how we think about death, and the lasting power of small acts of love.
Nao-Cola Yamazaki (Yamazaki Nao-Cola) is a Japanese writer. They pride themselves on writing “things no one else can say in words anyone can understand”. They have won the Bungei Prize and the Shimase Award for Love Stories and been nominated multiple times for the Akutagawa Prize.
Charlotte Goff is an Edinburgh-based literary translator. She was selected for the National Centre for Writing’s 2024 Emerging Translator Mentorship, and mentored by Polly Barton. She has also translated Tree by Aya Kōda.
Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives, Nao-Cola Yamazaki, Polly Barton (Tr)
Publisher: SJP Lit
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Art student Isogai first models for one of his tutors, the much older Yuri, then begins a passionate affair with her. As he gets to know her better, he struggles to understand his own emotions and place in the world, just as he yearns to be closer to her and for her to share more of herself with him.
A touching portrait of late adolescence, with Isogai captured with exasperation, humor, and tenderness, Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives is also, and above all else, an exploration of the exhilarating and destabilizing experience of a first love that defies prediction or explanation.
Nao-Cola Yamazaki (Yamazaki Nao-Cola) is a Japanese writer. They pride themselves on writing “things no one else can say in words anyone can understand”. They have won the Bungei Prize and the Shimase Award for Love Stories and been nominated multiple times for the Akutagawa Prize.
Polly Barton (trans. Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives) is a Japanese writer and translator. Her translations include Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa and There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. Her translation of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2024. She is the author of two nonfiction books, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History, and a novel, What Am I, a Deer?
Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith
Publisher: White Rabbit
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In Strangers on the Shore, Michael Smith – author of cult classic The Giro Playboy, which captured the arty demi-monde of Shoreditch gentrifying into a hipster hellscape – stays one step ahead of the property developers as he stumbles through the uncanny psychic landscape of Hastings, in an astonishing work of autofiction that explores the experience of becoming a father and the disarming grief of leaving your youth and its dreams behind.
The flâneuring Michael at the centre of the book has moved down to the ‘dogshit capital of the South Coast,’ started a family and opened a bar. He finds himself pouring wine in a ‘drinking town with a fishing problem,’ philosophising, procrastinating, morbidly obsessed with Aleister Crowley, who died in poverty in a BnB in this shabby seaside resort full of artistes and occult morris dancers.
A book about what it is like to live on the margins, sliding into a precarious middle age in turbulent times, both giving up and starting a-new, Strangers on the Shore is deeply and unashamedly romantic, whilst also angry about the dystopian Britain we’ve sleepwalked into. Revered by Andrew Weatherall as ‘the acid house Montaigne’ and The Idler as ‘Rimbauld on the dole,’ Michael Smith has written an endlessly moving book of transcendent beauty about fathers and songs and the pleasures of an introspective life.
Michael Smith is a writer and filmmaker. The author of two novels and a novella published by Faber (The Giro Playboy, Unreal City, Shorty Loves Wing Wong), his work has also featured in The Guardian, Esquire, and Dazed & Confused. He has written and presented BBC4 documentaries (Citizen Smith, Drivetime) and had a regular slot on BBC2’s The Culture Show. Recently, he has focused on directing independent “video-poems” that have screened at places like the Barbican and the NFT. He also collaborated with Andrew Weatherall on a spoken word album of Unreal City. Michael is currently the only person he knows who chooses not to have a mobile phone.
Wither, Dan Warner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
The algorithm has a will of its own.
We were obsessed with technology.
Now, technology is obsessed with us.
Before he went off the grid, Mick had a plan: get a high-powered job, escape flyover country, and leave his past behind.
Then he met Regression. A black-box technology that builds a person’s perfect digital twin. Every piece of data. Every secret. Every mistake. The greatest invention since fire. And Mick gets to test it out in a remote Ozark town.
A year later, Mick is clawing his way out of the woods, haunted by the act of violence that sent him into hiding. But when he gets back to Bloom, Missouri, he finds a ghost town with cars still in the driveways and cans in the cupboards, like everyone just walked away. Mick will leave, too, as soon as he finds his girlfriend, Alison, earns forgiveness, and finds Regression before it finds him first.
Dan Warner is a writer and documentary filmmaker from St. Louis, Missouri, where he lives with his wife and kids in an old home under perpetual repair.
The King of Aloe Vera, Tomas Moniz
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Seventy-five-year-old Rey has lived on the same block in San Francisco’s Mission District for most of his life, watching his city transform. A widower for ten years, he spends most of his time volunteering at the library, but by the end of the month, Rey must move into a senior retirement and leave his neighborhood behind. It’s at the library during one of his last shifts where he meets Q, on probation, post breakup with her girlfriend and dealing with a troubled family. As Rey tries to decide what to do with the rest of his days, literally counting them off and cutting his remaining ties, Q begins to insert herself into his world in a way that he can’t deny.
A story about Latinx identity, intergenerational friendship, and chosen family, Moniz’s novel takes us on a journey through senior dance classes, illegal bike trips over the Bay Bridge, and fair housing rallies. And as the days tick down, Rey and Q find themselves leaning on each other for answers on how to find community and purpose, make amends, and process grief.
For readers of Steven Rowley and Claire Jimenez, equally funny and tender, The King of Aloe Vera delights in how we choose to live, and live out, our lives.
Tomas Moniz is a Latinx writer living in East Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and a Lambda Literary Award. His second novel, All Friends Are Necessary, won the 2024 California Golden Poppy Award. He teaches at Berkeley City College, the Antioch MFA program and St. Mary’s College. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.
Dodge City, Patrick deWitt
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke has received his draft notice, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War. A straitlaced, apolitical twenty-three-year-old from Concrete, Washington, Lee is studying at UCLA until a fistfight leads to his expulsion—and his removal from the deferment list. The draft notice forces him to make the first political decision of his life, and though he’s happy in California and loves his girlfriend, he will leave the country and head for the border.
He signs up at a drive-away car-delivery service, chancing into a showroom-new Jaguar bound for the East Coast. Bringing only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, he makes his stimulated progress against the width of the country, pining for the life he’s left behind and wondering what his decision will mean for his future.
But he is not just saying goodbye to the country of his birth. In four different towns strung out along the northern United States, Lee visits each member of his immediate family: his father, a World War II veteran in a state of degradation; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic and never-ending performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother, Harry; and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.
An arresting portrait of a country in flux and a family in disarray, Dodge City represents a signal achievement in an already illustrious body of work by the “twenty-first-century Mark Twain” (Slate). Witty, moving, and delightfully off-kilter, Patrick deWitt’s sixth novel is a brilliant and raucous exploration of family, country, division, and war, from an elegant humorist who never shies from the stranger aspects of human behavior.
Patrick deWitt is the author of The Librarianist and French Exit (both national bestsellers); The Sisters Brothers (a New York Times bestseller short-listed for the Booker Prize); and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.
The Radiance, Ayad Akhtar
Publisher: Summit Books
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is plunged into a spiritual awakening he can’t tell from madness. In its grip, he’s drawn to a brilliant campus colleague by an uncanny pull, and into a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.
Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. Akhtar is the author of the novels American Dervish, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and Homeland Elegies, named one of 10 Best Books of 2020 by The New York Times. He has also authored the plays McNeal, Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. Akhtar was named the New York State Author in 2021.
Mestra: A Short Story, Madeline Miller
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.
Her father, on the other hand, is cursed. As punishment for disrespecting the goddess Demeter, he is in possession of an unnatural, insatiable hunger. Devoted Mestra suggests using her new gift to help her father. But if his hunger is bottomless, how much will he take from her? Soon she must decide: Will she keep helping her father survive or finally break free?
A jewel-like tale of human fallibility, and her first new work of fiction since the publication of Circe, Mestra confirms Madeline Miller as our high priestess of mythology.
Madeline Miller is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Song of Achilles and Circe, and the short story Galatea. Her books have been translated into forty languages. Miller studied in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms, and has an MA in Classics from Brown University.
Sophie, Standing There, Meg Mason
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Sophie Pattison loves books. And as well as a dream job at a local book festival, she has a husband she adores, a lifelong best friend, Emma, and a brother she’s always been close to. Which makes you wonder why since Christmas Sophie has been living alone, estranged from Emma, avoiding her brother, and about to be fired.
Now it feels like the only thing she has left is reading. When Sophie re-discovers an author she first read in her twenties, the words on the page reach her in a new way—becoming both solace and company. Sophie devours every one of the author’s novels and begins to dream of meeting her, but knows they never will. But what if she did? What if, by then, the author feels like a friend? What if, for Sophie, it feels almost like love?
In this much anticipated novel, Meg Mason captures the heartache and dark humor of our relationships in all their complexity, with a story about the power of connection and an ode to the inexplicable nature of the human heart.
Meg Mason is the author of Sorrow and Bliss, which became an international bestseller after it was first published in Australia. Winner of the British Book Industry Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, it has since been translated into more than 30 languages. Her first career was in journalism, beginning at the Times of London, later writing for Vogue, Elle, GQ, Sunday Style, and The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts and Murmurs. Born in New Zealand, she lives in Sydney with her husband and two daughters.
Garden, Hiroko Oyamada, David Boyd (Tr)
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Crabs scurrying over a landfill. Huge tadpoles writhing in a pond. A gecko stuck to the window. A sudden invasion of ants. Nature mysteriously creeps in and overruns the realm of humans in this stunning collection of stories.
Hiroko Oyamada masterfully conveys the sense that seemingly stable and ordinary people are cracking at the edges, that a surreal encounter with an animal can change the entire course of one’s life, that an obscure local ritual can have profound consequences. In these fifteen stories we find young couples navigating pregnancies, toddlers, and in-laws; men and women returning to their childhood homes to rediscover the enigmatic traditions they’d left behind; and children who plumb dreamlike riddles in the natural world.
Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. Her novel The Hole won Akutagawa Prize.
David Boyd teaches translation at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies. He won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2018 for Slow Boat by Hideo Furukawa, in 2022 for The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, and in 2024 for Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa.
Marble, Taylor Catalana
Publisher: Modern Artist Press
Publication Date: September 29, 2026
Format: Paperback
Marble is the feminist retelling of the life of the Virgin Mary, sharing her story before she became a mother.
Out on the edge of the Roman Empire, Maryam dreams of the world beyond her village, her solitude occasionally broken by a mysterious figure named Gabriel. But when Maryam’s father dies and leaves behind debts that his only child must pay in servitude, she is thrust into the heart of the treacherous royal court of King Herod the Great. Before long, a brutal act of jealousy and betrayal leaves Maryam alone in a country simmering with unrest. When she sets out to salvage her future, she is jarred by the discovery that she will soon become a mother. Maryam must decide to take her life into her own hands, and nothing — not a princess, not an empire, not even an angel — will stop her from seeing her own will be done.
With luminous prose and page-turning storytelling, Marble gives voice to one of the most famous mothers, narrating an unforgettable and resounding story of feminine identity, strength, and choice.
Taylor Catalana is a writer and museum professional who studied art history and theology at Fordham University and King’s College London. Born and raised in New Jersey, she currently lives in Brooklyn with her dog. Marble is her first novel.
69 38 78: Stories, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, Daniela Ordóñez Delgado (Tr)
Publisher: Sundial House
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Rendered in a variety of registers, this collection of short stories by Venezuelan author Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez ranges from stark realism and poetic interludes, to forays into the fantastic, a nod to noir, and surprising flashes of humor. Titled after his late mother’s phone number, 69 38 78 is divided into three parts, each corresponding to a distinct space: the territory of childhood and adolescence, the mythical realm of the sacred Montaña de Sorte in Venezuela, and the European landscape of adulthood and migration. These perspectives converge on a shared vision: narration as an act of tenderness, as a quest to preserve the fleeting memories of individuals who refuse to be consumed by oblivion and the passage of time. A comprehensive exploration of one of the most captivating literary voices in contemporary Latin America.
Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1967) As a short story writer, he is featured prominently in leading anthologies of contemporary Spanish-language short fiction. Among his prior story collections are En las ruinas (Tiflos Prize 2024), La diosa de agua, Ideogramas, El Vals de Amoreira, and Hasta luego, Mister Salinger. He is also a novelist and some of his published titles are: Los maletines (Briefcases from Caracas), La ola detenida, El baile de Madame Kalalú, Arena Negra, and Una tarde con campanas, among others. His work has been translated into English, French, Galician, and Georgian. Juan Carlos holds a PhD in Latin American literature from the University of Salamanca and lives in Madrid.
Daniela Ordóñez Delgado is a writer from Colombia who lives in New York City, where she is pursuing an MFA in Writing at Columbia University. She specializes in fiction and literary translation.
Narcissa & Other Stories, Alban Kojima
Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
This collection features a novella, two novelettes and a number of short stories. Threaded throughout the collection is the notion that sex and sexual behaviour should be treated as a normal part of human interaction rather than kept hidden.
Alban Kojima earned an M.A from Temple University and an M.S. in information science from Drexel University in Philadelphia. In 1988, he became Japanese Studies Informationist for Penn Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the same time he taught a graduate seminar entitled Japanese Studies Resources and Problems of Research. Since late-2012, Kojima has focused on writing. He has published in Tokyo, Japan, Yuzo Kayama and His Music: A Global Fascination (Sairyūsha, 2014), Alexie Sultanov (Alpha-Bater Books, 2027), Coal Boy (Guernica Editions, 2023), and Tyrone and Myles (Guernica Editions, 2024). He lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Let Us Go Then, You and I, Clifford Thompson
Publisher: RIZE
Publication Date: October 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
At the funeral of Charles Maddox, Theo Brown hears testimonies about his dead best friend’ s full, rich, glamor-filled life— stories that make Theo wonder if he really knew Charles, and if Theo himself has really lived. Trying to make up for his thirty-seven humdrum years, eager to help Charles’ s grieving sister, and wanting to find out what happened to his friend, Theo leaves his native Washington, DC on a journey of discovery, and self-discovery, among Charles’ s circle in New York. Part psychological realism, part detective story, Let Us Go Then, You and I explores the question behind the question: What is the best way to live in this world?
Clifford Thompson’s previous books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays. His work has appeared in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. Thompson lives in Brooklyn.
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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.”
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.”
Excerpt: “On the puzzle still inside my head” by Truong Tran
“I am trying to excavate memories. I am trying to negotiate the difficult realities of existing as a brown man in this country and within the consciousness of white America.” Read an excerpt from Truong Tran’s forthcoming book from City Lights, How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir.
“These poems try to make sense of how I arrived at a life that probably seems well thought-out, but has been one reactionary choice after another.” Read three poems by A.R. Dugan, our fifth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Sleeptalking.”
Original Fiction: Muse by Somtoo Celestine Ezioha
“What I tried to trace was the underside. How watching someone closely for long enough becomes a substitute for approaching them.” Read the second original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Muse” by Somtoo Celestine Ezioha.
“After childbirth, my body became a site of criticism rather than something to be celebrated for what it had endured and created. Writing this became a way to confront that experience…” Read three poems by Tanya Tuzeo, our sixth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “i get Botox.”
“Through images of a familiar street, personal belongings, and a figure suspended in time, the poem considers absence, remembrance, and the quiet ways we continue searching for those who are gone.” Read two poems by Aardhra Chandran, our seventh, and final, biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Street View, 2021.”
Original Fiction: Aletheia by Kalliste Hardy
“Each fragment opens a door to the unsaid or the forgotten, letting language bruise and bloom. It is a study in red, in inheritance, in language, and of the quiet haunt of becoming.” Read the third, and final, original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Aletheia” by Kalliste Hardy.