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.
Beginning Middle End, Valeria Luiselli
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.
Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches at Harvard University and Bard College. She lives in New York City.
When Mikan Road Was Ours, D.K. Furutani
Publisher: Atria Books
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Amid a sweltering Los Angeles heat wave, Murano, a reclusive high school English teacher, is muddling through life. Reeling from his father’s sudden death as well as his own recent cancer diagnosis, he passes time hazily grading papers and appeasing disgruntled parents while counting down each day until summer vacation.
The monotony breaks when he inherits his great-uncle Benjiro’s unpublished memoir. What Murano expects to be a grim reminder of his position as the half-white son of the family’s outcast instead whisks him away to 1930s California, to a time when the Murano family was inseparable, relishing life together on their bucolic farm. As the memoir introduces him to relatives he never knew existed and unearths hidden complexities of the past, Murano is pulled close to the Japanese identity he’s dismissed all of his life. Faced with the reality of his family’s dissolution, Murano becomes determined to understand its breaking point following their incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II, no matter what hidden truths he might uncover about his ancestors or himself.
Lovingly crafted with poignant and profound attention to historical detail, When Mikan Road Was Ours is a rich meditation on belonging that seamlessly blends the intricacies of heritage, the resilience of family bonds, and the struggle to reconcile a past filled with both heartache and hope.
Born and raised in Southern California, D.K. Furutani is the author of When Mikan Road Was Ours, winner of Simon & Schuster’s third-annual Books Like Us contest. His work has received support from the Periplus Collective and the Tin House workshops. He resides in Los Angeles with his wife and three cats.
Finding Belle, Reeta Chakrabarti
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A lost child.
When Mivvi is young, her mother Belle is a puzzle: beautiful, troubled, and, terrifyingly, increasingly disconnected from the world.
A displaced mother.
Belle came to England upon her marriage, a whirlwind romance from the beaches of Mombasa to the English suburbs. But far from friends and family, her life and love affair began to crumble.
A family secret.
As Mivvi grows up in the shadow of her mother’s illnesses and her father’s absences, she must reconnect the pieces that her mother scattered. Can she uncover the secrets clouding their past – and in doing so rewrite her own story?
Reeta Chakrabarti is a journalist and broadcaster who is a Chief Presenter for BBC News, and has also reported extensively at home and abroad for the BBC. Born in London, she was brought up in Birmingham. She lived in Calcutta, India, as a teenager where she attended Calcutta International School before returning to the UK for university. She began working for the BBC in 1992 and has been there in various roles for over 30 years. She has previously been a judge for the 2021 David Cohen Prize for Literature; she was the chair of the 2021 Costa Book of the Year; and in 2023 chair of the BBC National Short Story Award. Reeta lives in London with her husband and has three children.
The Obsessed, Lizzie Buehler
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Astrid is obsessed with Russian American novelist Sofiya Sova, whose life trajectory serendipitously parallels Astrid’s own and whose writing seems to encompass every anxious thought Astrid has ever had. Desperate to find the purpose she’s always craved, Astrid begins her PhD program hoping to fully embody the ethos of Sofiya Sova’s novel.
But when Astrid’s long-term boyfriend, Charlie, breaks up with her after moving to Japan, and a spontaneous Hinge date connects her with a fellow Sofiya Sova obsessive named Elijah, Astrid quickly finds herself transcribing the love plot of her favorite Sofiya Sova novel onto her own life . . . until one day, Elijah begins to pull away and Astrid is left flailing in a life scaffolded by obsession.
A bighearted portrait of the anxieties of desire, The Obsessed explores the trials of modern dating, the strange ennui of academia, and the question of how to create a world for yourself within and without the confines of your influences. What we’re left with is a striking portrayal of how a willing reader can bring a text to life, and similarly the animating power of a good novel.
Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist (winner of the CWA Dagger for crime fiction in translation), Art on Fire, and Table for One by Yun Ko-eun, and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Harvard and Princeton. The Obsessed is her debut novel.
The Red Earth, Morgana Kretzmann, Daniel Hahn (Tr)
Publisher: HarperVia
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
On the lush Brazil-Argentina border, greed runs deep. A proposed hydroelectric dam spells doom for both the vibrant ecosystems of the Turvo State Park and the people who call it home. Park ranger Chaya refuses to stand by while her beloved land is razed. Her estranged cousin, Preta, a hardened leader, fights her own battle, walking a thin line between survival and poaching traditions. Then there’s Olga, the prodigal journalist, burdened by guilt and the secrets she left behind. Their paths collide as the encroaching threat pulls them into a fierce battle against corrupt politicians, shadowy smugglers, and the ghosts of their shared past.
Loyalties are tested, old rivalries flare, and alliances arise in the unlikeliest places. And at the heart of it all, a family legacy, shrouded in myth and trauma, surfaces with devastating consequences. Echoing recent episodes in Brazilian history, The Red Earth is a whirling torrent of drama, sisterhood, and sacrifice, revealing the real-life stakes and cost of protecting the rainforest and its inhabitants.
Morgana Kretzmann was born in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, on the border with Argentina, and currently lives in São Paulo. She is a writer and screenwriter. In 2021, she won the São Paulo Literature Prize with her debut novel, To Dust. She is also the author of the acclaimed ecological novel Agua Turva, published by Companhia das Letras and quickly sold to Germany, France, the United States, and Latin America. Kretzmann worked as a screenwriter on the Disney+ series Tarã, which explores the legend of a people in the Amazon rainforest. She graduated from the extension course in Cinematographic Screenwriting at PUC-RIO and also holds a degree in Environmental Management from the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with thirty-something books to his name. He has translated fiction from Portuguese, Spanish and French (from Europe, Africa and the Americas) and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. He has written works of narrative non-fiction for adults and the text of a picture-book for children; and edited a number of reference books including “The Ultimate Book Guides”, a series of reading guides for children and teenagers. His books have won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award.
Vernal Thaw: A Novel of Love at a Slant, Frances Cannon
Publisher: Set Margins
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Franky, a young adjunct professor haunted by encounters with violent men, falls into an intense relationship with Vera, an older neurosurgeon shaped by a childhood in homophobic Soviet-era Ukraine. As they attempt to build a life together, their shared desire snags on unhealed wounds.
Frances (Franky) Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Queer Flora, Fauna and Funga (Valiz Press), Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press), Willow and the Storm (Green Writers Press), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press).
Don’t see a fiction title published between 7/28 and 8/3 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.”