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.
Sunrise, Téa Obreht
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making.
In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll begins to direct town’s annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. And when an upstart author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, unassuming, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the places we lay claim to, and most of all, of our own lives.
Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Southwest Book Award, and have been finalists for the National Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.
The Hill in the Dark Grove, Liam Higginson
Publisher: Hogarth
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Carwyn and his wife, Rhian, have lived a quiet life as sheep farmers in the remote Welsh mountains for decades, tending to ancestral land that has been in Carwyn’s family for generations. But recent years have taken their toll: local friends lost one by one to old age or rising prices; the accumulation of debts; new English tourists, more every year, disrespecting the land—littering, camping on private property, needing to be rescued when they misjudge the elements.
When Carwyn finds a strange stone head in a disused corner of the farm, he realizes the artifact is just one piece of something much larger—something unfathomably old. Despite Rhian’s protests, Carwyn becomes obsessed with unearthing the structure, and soon neglects the daily work of the farm to keep digging. Meanwhile, the sheep fall sick more easily than any season before, and a tragic accident on market day threatens to leave an increasingly isolated Rhian without a way to satisfy their ever-more-insistent creditors. Through it all, Carwyn becomes convinced that uncovering the site and determining its original purpose will be the key to solving everything. But there was a reason his ancestors kept the past buried, and in disturbing the earth, he has called forth a power greater and more terrible than he could have imagined.
Enthralling and atmospheric, Liam Higginson’s The Hill in the Dark Grove expertly weaves together myth, psychological suspense, and supernatural horror, heralding a sparkling new literary talent.
Liam Higginson was born and raised in the deepest hinterlands of rural North Wales. In what some might generously call a varied career, he has been an extremely bored accountant, helped out at a B&B in a French watermill, run errands for the CEO of a large consultancy firm, spent lockdown in an empty holiday cottage while a herd of goats took over the town, and now works with his wife at Llandudno Pier.
Storyknife, Jess Row
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
In his first story collection in fifteen years, Jess Row evokes white America—specifically liberal, educated white Northeasterners—awkwardly and hilariously poised on the precipice of cultural and global collapse.
In “The Empties,” a woman questions whether the writing skills she acquired at liberal arts college can be useful in the face of apocalypse. In “Summer Song,” a chorus of bourgeois voices sings out its privileged discontent. “Reading Group Guide” satirizes book-club chatter with questions that veer from the absurd to the obscene. Each story turns a lens on its own machinery, exposing the quiet politics encoded in literary convention. Using surgical precision, biting irony, and formal experimentation, Row pierces through the stories white America tells itself—and the narrative structures that make them seem natural, inevitable, and true.
Storyknife is a funny, troubling, indelible look at a culture whose rituals and expectations are dissolving into thin air.
Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine, the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. He’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award; his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and many other publications. He teaches at NYU and lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.
Slow Elephants of Milan, Ángel Bonomini, Jordan Landsman (Tr)
Publisher: Transit Books
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
A man and woman on a road trip make an unplanned detour to Laar, an empty city of palaces and canals that may be no city at all. Two gaucho rebels are captured during war—one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy. And a traveler in postwar Italy is inspired, almost against his will, to record the mysterious progress of two elephants through the foggy streets of Milan.
In twelve short fictions threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine, Ángel Bonomini (The Novices of Lerna) explores “the sweet and subtle interrelations of things.” Originally published in 1978 and appearing in English for the first time, Slow Elephants of Milan is an indispensable addition to our literature of the strange and fantastic.
Ángel Bonomini (1929-1994) is one of the great previously untranslated writers of Argentine fiction, a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, and Julio Cortázar. His debut collection, The Novices of Lerna, was originally published in 1972, but Bonomini’s meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. In his lifetime, Bonomini was a two-time recipient of the prestigious Premio Konex.
Jordan Landsman was born in New York City. After graduating from Binghamton University, he spent several years living in Buenos Aires, where he cocreated the BA Comedy Lab and taught literary workshops at Walrus Books. Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna was his first translation.
Wounded Boarders: Stories, George Singleton
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
A seasoned house flipper befriends a club of hook-handed, shuffleboard-playing war veterans to deter a potential stalker. A couple in a middle-of-nowhere ghost town quells their boredom by luring would-be robbers to their house. A former yearbook photographer enacts revenge upon the students who got him fired. And a fallen-from-grace comedian pays a visit to the hypnotist looking to curb his less-desirable habits, then finds the treatment a bit too effective for his liking.
Crafted with Singleton’s distinctive mix of satire and charm, the stories in Wounded Boarders take readers from binocular-clad boyhood to the inbox of an adjunct professor and a host of others at the end of their rope. Undeniably Southern in nature, these stories capture the absurdity of the mundane, offering a glimpse into the routines and recollections of imperfect people whose lives are stranger than fiction.
George Singleton has published ten collections of stories, two novels, a book of writing advice, and a collection of essays. Over 250 of his stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, Story, One Story, Playboy, and elsewhere. Non-fiction in Garden and Gun, Oxford American, Best Food Writing, and elsewhere. He’s received a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His collection The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs was named a Top 100 Book of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Under the Falls, Richard Russo
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
When Tyler Sinclair left Stone Mountain at eighteen, he had no plans of returning. With only a duffel bag full of clothes, a few bucks stolen from his father’s dresser, and a guitar, his most prized possession, Tyler disappeared without so much as a goodbye. Eighteen years later, Tyler, now the frontman of a famous band aptly named Stone Mountain, finds himself returning to his hometown for a one-night-only benefit concert to support his old friend, Doc, who lost feeling in his legs following a childhood accident. As Tyler ascends the mountain, memories of his childhood come rushing back—memories of his abusive father and despondent mother, of the friends he left behind—and he quickly learns that, for many people on Stone Mountain, the past does not feel like so long ago, and not everyone has been eagerly awaiting Tyler’s return.
At the concert, resentment simmers just beneath the surface, and Tyler finds himself confronted with faces new and old: there’s Curt, Tyler’s childhood best friend, now Stone Mountain’s chief of police, and his star officer, Deb, an out-of-towner who may have bitten off more than she can chew by accepting a job in Stone Mountain. And then there’s Freddi, Curt’s wife and Tyler’s former lover, a woman whose questionable dealings and fraught history with Tyler will become the catalyst for a tragedy that will upend each of their lives and threaten to validate Tyler’s worst fear: that “Stone Mountain is the kind of place you might escape from once, if you’re lucky, but not twice.”
Under the Falls is at once a propulsive thriller, a gut-wrenching portrait of a tight-knit rural community undone by the sins of its past, and an unflinchingly honest depiction of how porous the line between right and wrong, good versus evil, can become. This is a stunning, deeply empathetic novel, one that takes Russo’s penchant for character-driven drama to thrilling new heights.
Richard Russo is the author of ten previous novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; the memoir Elsewhere; and the essay collection Life and Art. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Falmouth, ME.
Piñen: Stories, Daniela Catrileo, Jacob Edelstein (Tr)
Publisher: FSG Originals
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the all-too-real streets of Santiago de Chile, Daniela Catrileo gives us a portrait of a generation in search of itself. In “Warriache,” two childhood friends whose lives have been marked by their part-Mapuche identity and the memories that bind them circle each other at a party. Their dance of delays and inevitable meeting expands into a tale across epochs—one that gives life to the hidden and suppressed experiences of those who live on the margins of other stories. In “Pornomisery,” a young girl considers the sexual violence that seems to lurk behind every closed door in her cloistered community and darken every possible route of exit.
Piñen is suffused with the humanity of its vivid, complex characters, bringing a side of modern Chile to vibrant life. It also marks the confident next step in the career of a writer poised to become one of the boldest and most uncompromising chroniclers of modern life in Latin American literature.
Daniela Catrileo is a writer and a professor of philosophy based in Valparaíso, Chile. She is a member of the Colectivo Mapuche Rangiñtulewfü and part of the editorial team at Yene, a digital magazine. She has published three poetry collections—Río herido, Guerra florida, and El territorio del viaje—as well as the novel Chilco and the essay Sutura de las aguas: Un viaje especulativo sobre la impureza.
Jacob Edelstein is a translator from the South Bay of Los Angeles, California. He earned an MFA in literary translation from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and holds a certificate from the Taos Institute. His translation of Patrimonio by Santiago Arau was published in 2024, and his translations of Monserrat Sepúlveda’s ¡Hasta mi mama! and Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco were published in 2025.
A Tehran So Quiet and Other Stories, Mehdi M. Kashani
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: August 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Focusing on the indelible effects of displacement on the Iranian diaspora’s psyche, Mehdi M. Kashani’s debut collection presents narratives that, though often unresolved, remain faithful to the depth of the emotion they depict. The twelve stories in A Tehran So Quiet delve into familial tensions, interracial relationships, trauma, infidelity, misunderstandings, and sexual dalliances. Sisters on the outs who reunite to settle family matters. A girl leaves an unresolved relationship at home to join a man she married abroad. A father seeks connection with his young son in the aftermath of divorce. A woman grapples with the West’s indifference to Iran’s political turmoils. A man takes extreme measures to protect his wife’s honour. This collection will resonate deeply with readers, particularly those affected by immigration and diasporic experiences, and with anyone drawn to raw, multicultural explorations of human complexity.
Mehdi M. Kashani is an Iranian-Canadian writer based in Toronto. His short story “So Long, Gregor” was shortlisted for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His fiction and nonfiction work has been published in various Canadian and American magazines and nominated for multiple awards.
Ravenous, Sara Cooper
Publisher: Roseway Publishing
Publication Date: August 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Breigh is a hot elder millennial who is obsessed with the brands she is ambassading for. Her policy is YES, and her livestreams are viral. But she’s pregnant now, and her body’s changing. It’s not that she’s hungry. She’s definitely not depressed. She just sometimes eats boxes of makeup before passing out.
Daddy’s bought a brand-new home for Breigh and Baby, complete with a Greenguard Gold-certified, twice-imported velvet infant chaise — but is he cheating on her with a hotter, younger coworker? Breigh has to get Baby out before it ruins her. She has to create more and better content than the other Momfluencers. She has to unbox something new. She has to unbox … Baby! Baby approves of her seven-step marketing plan. Welcome to #LiveBirth.
Breigh’s increasingly unhinged life reflects her generation’s anxieties around psychological manipulation through social media platforms. Multi-award-winning author Sara Cooper presents a wild debut novel in this incisive satire of consumerism, performative femininity, and social media.
Sara Cooper is a debut novelist and an award-winning playwright-lyricist. She lives in New York with her husband John and their son Theo. MFA Graduate Musical Theatre Writing, NYU. Sara currently teaches at Purchase College. Ravenous was a Finalist for the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.
The Vanishings: Eight Stories, Kavi Yaga
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Eight jeweled hauntings . . . the disappeared and disappearing, the once-longed-for, the self, the empty door . . . each story immerses you in an intimate, propulsive life that will lodge in your bones. Devastatingly comedic and heartbreaking, together, this collection offers an expansive portrait of South Indian life in today’s 21st-century, global world—an unsettling ode to all that modern life takes from us, and brings to bear on, our heritages and human relationships.
Through the rich colors and sounds of vivid rural and urban South India—eight people, across class, gender, and generational barriers, set out alone in search of someone or something missing. When strange, perhaps supernatural, occurrences interrupt: an unlucky cloud; a magic fairness cream; a fortunetelling parrot, a chance meeting with a guru “godwoman”; a massive citywide power outage; a giant talking moon bird; national rumors of milk-drinking Ganesh idols; even objects in a house after a divorce—what price will each person pay for choosing to believe in them?
Kavi Yaga lives in Hyderabad, India. The Vanishings was selected by Kaveh Akbar as The George Garrett Fiction Prize: Judge’s Choice. Her travel memoir, Walking in Clouds (HarperCollins) was nominated for the “AutHer”Award and recognized by Condé Nast Traveler, India—and still ranks #3 in its “Amazon.in’s” category. Co-compiler and co-author of the anthology Work, Wisdom, Legacy: 31 Essays from India (Orient Blackswan 2025), a 2023 Yaddo Residency Fellow, and recipient of the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction’s 2nd-Place Award selected by Matt Bell, Yaga’s stories and essays have appeared in One Story, Swamp Pink, River Teeth Journal, and elsewhere.
The Bully in My Pillow, Kik Lodge
Publisher: Stanchion
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
A man walks into a bar with an Erection Taser™ his girlfriend has made him wear. A grieving mother clings to the memory of her son’s imaginary friend. A Foley artist recreates the soundtrack of his splintered heart. The Bully in My Pillow is a collection of flash fiction (and one short story) by Kik Lodge with drawings by Jérôme Fage. It explores fractured humans through stories about grief, longing and loneliness. It’s bleak, occasionally absurd, with gallows humour never far away.
Kik Lodge writes short fiction from St Symphorien d’Ozon, a small village in the Rhône valley. Her stories have been included in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026, Wigleaf top 50 and she has a habit of coming third in competitions. She hosts open mics for European Writers Salon, connecting writers in Europe and beyond through workshops and events.
Jérôme Fage is a cultural mediator in an archaeological museum by day, and at night he draws. He studied Art History and Archaeology and has a thing for what’s hidden or forgotten.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/11 and 8/17 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.”
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.”