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.
Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.
1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.
1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.
With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twelve works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.
Song for Another Home, Bora Lee Reed
Publisher: 37 Ink
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
When news hits in 1950 that the Americans have entered the war between North and South Korea, Oksoon and her family believe the conflict will soon end. But then China joins the war, and they decide to flee their home in Pyongyang despite the freezing temperatures and lack of food. Journeying from the barren, war-torn streets of the North in the winter to the seedy back alleys of the South Korean capital of Seoul in the summer, the family falls in with an unlikely group of miscreants.
Meanwhile, far to the south, Oksoon’s cousin Junho seeks refuge at an orphanage for abandoned children. As the institution struggles to keep its doors open, Junho, with his elementary command of English, is tasked with drafting letters to American missionaries and benefactors to ask for money. When the enigmatic director brings her aristocratic niece to the orphanage, Junho finds himself caught between his impulse for survival and his growing affections for the young woman, even though his feelings put him at risk of being expelled from the only safe place he knows.
Movingly rendered, Song for Another Home highlights the power of resilience, the tension between personal dreams and duty to family, and how choices made in a brief moment have consequences that reverberate across time and through generations.
Bora Lee Reed was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the US as a young child. She grew up in Southern California among a vibrant Korean immigrant community. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and has been awarded residences from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, and Ucross. Bora now lives in Berkeley, CA, where she works as the director of communications for UC Berkeley’s public policy school.
Dooneen, Keith Ridgway
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that—there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Home by invitation, he has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumor, with tunnels, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unraveling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices, and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, “one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them” (The Times).
Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His previous novels include A Shock (winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction), Hawthorn & Child, and Animals. He has also been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His books have been acclaimed “ingeniously slippery” (Lucy Scholes, New York Times Book Review), “bleak, hilarious, chilling and hopeful” (Louie Conway, Vanity Fair), and “like Finnegans Wake, only readable” (John Self, London Times).
Asleep Awake Asleep: Stories, Jo-Ann Bekker
Publisher: Catalyst Collective
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback
With 39 interlinked stories, former journalist Jo-Ann Bekker charts South Africa’s turbulent history through the eyes of Rip—child, adult, mother, reporter, betrayer and betrayed—from the dark days of Apartheid through fledgling democracy. From political assassinations to the loss of childhood innocence, to questions of complicity and reparation, these vignettes explore the everyday lives that carried on within—and despite—a country in turmoil.
The 39 interlinked stories in Asleep Awake Asleep can be read as a hand-drawn narrative map, charting the course of a country’s turbulent history. Together they tell a coming of age and a coming to consciousness story, as Rip – child, adult, journalist, partner, mother – revisits milestones marked and signposts ignored or unseen. Set in the suburbs and newsrooms of South African towns and cities and their wilder surrounds, there are vignettes of relationships; tales of political assassinations, murder and betrayal, and questions asked about complicity and reparation.
Jo-Ann Bekker began writing short fiction in 2012, after working as a newspaper reporter for many years. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University and her short fiction has been published in journals in South Africa and the United States. Asleep Awake Asleep is her first collection of stories. She was born in East London (now KuGompo), and lives in Knysna with her family.
Mudlark, Mary Helen Specht
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Jenny Sweet’s marriage is ending—and with it her band and maybe even her fragile relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Neko. A reluctant wife and mother, Jenny plans a new journey of self-discovery after one more gig at Burning Man. But when Neko disappears amid the chaos of the festival, Jenny fears that everything that mattered to her has been lost. As she races against the dark, Jenny finds herself thrown into the past, and into the heart of a gathering storm.
Now twenty-five, Neko is a mudlark: a trained recruit who braves the rival factions and feral survivalists in the ruins of a crumbling, flooded Manhattan for resources that grow scarcer by the day. When she stumbles upon the master of her mother’s long-lost solo album and later hears that someone else is searching for it—someone who could be her mother, missing for over a decade—she embarks on a perilous adventure with a ragtag crew that will take her from treetop societies to decadent raves to the underground bunker where she will, finally, confront her mother’s fate—and her own.
A profound tale of resilience set in a future wracked by calamity and buoyed by hope, Mudlark is an unforgettable novel that explores how love and art persist as beacons of humanity.
Mary Helen Specht is the author of Migratory Animals, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other publications. A Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her family.
The Age of Migration: A Novella and Stories, Kai Maristed
Publisher: WTAW Press
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Age of Migration follows people on the move— across borders, families, and inner lives— confronting what motion promises and what it costs. Set in intimate, unsettled places around the globe, these stories trace journeys shaped by choice, necessity, and circumstance. Travelers venture into unfamiliar terrain; workers and families face sudden moral reckonings; acts meant as care ripple into unforeseen consequences. With clarity, restraint, and emotional precision, The Age of Migration illuminates quiet negotiations of belonging and responsibility, and asks what it means to carry oneself forward in a world defined by constant change.
Kai Maristed is the author of three novels: Out After Dark (Pen/Hemingway finalist), Fall, and Broken Ground, and the short story collection Belong to Me. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, The American Scholar, among others. She heads the anti-poverty NGO Technology Exchange Lab, Inc.. A translator and playwright fluent in three languages, she has taught at the MFA level at Harvard University, Emerson College, and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She divides her time between Paris, France and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Sun Deluxe: New and Collected Stories, Frederick Barthelme
Publisher: Arcade
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Sun Deluxe: New and Collected Stories brings together a decades-arcing assemblage of work, pairing new and previously unpublished pieces with some of Frederick Barthelme’s classic stories previously published in some of America’s most prestigious magazine and journals.
Known for his unorthodox structure, minimalistic style, and sharp emotional insight, readers will find themselves immersed in his world of condos, truck-stop diners, and characters caught in the delicate act of revising their expectations, misreading one another, and figuring things out, again. This career-spanning collection creates a quietly luminous portrait of American life, then and now, through small and timeless absurdities.
Sun Deluxe stands out as an extensive assortment, capturing Barthelme at his most resonant and enduring, with stories that define modern life with a sharpness that stings yet offers a gentle clarity in an unapologetic, honest manner.
Frederick Barthelme studied fiction with John Barth at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, from which he received his Master of Arts degree. From 1977 to 2010 he taught fiction writing and directed the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He won numerous awards including individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and diverse grants and awards as editor of Mississippi Review and Mississippi Review Online, which he founded and edited. He is the author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction and has been published in GQ, Fiction, Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, Ploughshares, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, The New York Times, Frank Magazine, The Southern Review, the Boston Globe Magazine, and elsewhere. His work has been translated into nine languages. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, co-authored with his brother Steven, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The same honor was awarded to his collection, The Law of Averages. His novel Elroy Nights was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. In 2010 he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction and is presently editor and publisher of the online literary publication New World Writing (previously Blip Magazine).
Imperfect Beings: Stories, Dermot Bolger
Publisher: New Island Books
Publication Date: July 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
In a series of unexpected moments when past loves and choices re-surface with startling clarity, the imperfect beings who populate these stories find themselves finally grasping the impact of crucial early relationships, as joy, loss and betrayal echo across decades.
A man searches for a possible secret half-sister to understand his father. A woman is haunted by a boy’s death fifty years ago. A lighthouse keeper recalls his first relationship. A public figure, slipping into dementia, relives a fateful night that haunts him. A man seeks insights into his mother’s past on a remote Portuguese island. From childhood holidays shadowed by tragedy to chance reunions that rewrite old narratives, Bolger’s complex and deeply humane characters reveal the fragile beauty of human connection.
Born in Finglas, North Dublin, in 1959, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best-known writers across a range of genres. His fourteen novels include The Journey Home, A Second Life, and The Lonely Sea and Sky. His most recent play, Last Orders At The Dockside, had a hugely successful sold-out run at the Abbey Theatre in 2019. His last new collection of poetry was The Venice Suite (2012), a book which resonated widely for its exploration of loss.
Don’t see a fiction title published between 7/21 and 7/27 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.”