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.
Range, Dorthe Nors, Caroline Waight (Tr)
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback
Gunn Haven, professor of astrophysics, has taken a partial leave from the Institute where she teaches and moved to a rural area. She’s here for the clear night sky and for solitude as she tracks gamma-rays bursts and researches the origins of the universe.
But while Gunn studies celestial bodies, she is also contending with the movement of earthly bodies. There are her nearest neighbors: Brit, who cuts everyone’s hair and wants to know everyone’s business, and Jenny, Brit’s restless teenage daughter. There is her young protégé; Gunn has sent him away to find his own path, yet longs to have him close. There are remote colleagues and dead loved ones, often in her thoughts. And there is the menacing Gable Woman, who, after catching the Professor wandering onto private property, is intent on putting her in her place.
How to navigate the humanmade boundaries of a boundless universe? How to be a caretaker if you’re not a mother and stand apart from the community? Gunn’s inquisitive mind ranges over these questions as she splits firewood, walks the forest, solves formulas, sits in shooting stands, lies in fields, sips coffee, and observes—the animals, the locals, the seasons, the stars, her memories. Reaching from the everyday to the infinite, from sensory details to contemplations of the cosmos, Range is a gripping investigation of the many kinds of distance we cross through space and time.
Dorthe Nors is most recently the author of A Line in the World, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. Her works of fiction include ?Wild Swims, Karate Chop, So Much for That Winter, and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Denmark.
Caroline Waight’s is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, German and Norwegian. She was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Translation Award and received a special commendation at the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
What Endures, Pauline Holdstock
Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The stories in What Endures range through and respond to a clickbait world evolving at terrifying speed, revealing the absurd and ridiculous nature of everyday life. What does it mean to endure in a world starving for truth and connection, what makes life worth living, what can be discovered and preserved from the onrush of experience—vicarious and actual—that comes at us? With bracing wit, Pauline Holdstock’s stories move back and forth through time and circumstance to unpack what it is that saves us from despair, each of them pointing in their own magical way to that one, fragile thing that has the power to endure and to live on in others.
Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. Her novels The Hunter and the Wild Girl and Confessions With Keith have each been awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
The Breakup, Kurt Andersen
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Natalie and Asher’s marriage has been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they see their fellow Americans and AI-drenched life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie now lives in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher lives in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States). Apart for the first time since they met, Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.
When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux –– and resilience –– within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?
Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.
Kurt Andersen is the author of the recent New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as bestselling novels, among them You Can’t Spell America Without Me, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh he co-created the dystopian comedy series Command Z. He co-founded Spy magazine and hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360. He’s a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, and was previously editor-in-chief of New York as well as a columnist for The New Yorker. He grew up in Nebraska, went to Harvard, and lives in New York City with his wife Anne Kreamer.
The Maltese Version, Katy Simpson Smith
Publisher: FSG Originals
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Are Leonie and Max in love? They might be, still, or they might simply be living separate but intertwined existences. And she might be pregnant. And he might be missing? He’s certainly not answering her text messages, off on some questionable assignment translating poetry from a language he seems to barely know. Malta. He’s gone to Malta.
Anna, the poet, guards her work closely as she alternately charges and rambles around her disintegrating island home—the house her father built and filled with his paintings, the house her mother struggled and failed to survive in. Will Max bring her success enough to keep it? Can this foreign man really take her words, her art, into his tongue? Does every partnership require some form of surrender?
Leonie and Rhoda are both travel writers, Rhoda a practical practitioner, a veteran of the island beat. So when Max blinks off the map while on Malta, it’s not such a leap for Leonie to ask Rhoda to track him down. Once there, Rhoda might discover more than Max’s indiscretions. This Mediterranean island of sun-washed villas undermines her sense of reality. What kind of caper is this? Whose story is being written? And what will she do with a new version of herself?
Full of mischief, charm, and wisdom, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Maltese Version upends our notions of love, language, desire, understanding, and the many ways we make meaning.
Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a Vogue best book of the year; Free Men; The Everlasting, a New York Times best historical novel of the year; and The Weeds. She is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub, among other publications. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.
Hello, Limerence, Momo Yamaguchi
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Mika is about to turn 25, and all she has to show for it is a soul-sucking office job and a terminal case of virginity. Between unwanted advances from co-workers and subway commuters, and love-bombing from unappealing fuckboys, Mika’s ready to explode. Her only therapeutic outlet is her imagination, which manifests in a series of comically violent and horny fantasies.
Determined to change her fate, and with the encouragement of Nana, her certified “Hot Girl” best friend, Mika loses half of her virginity to Tyler, a Japanese-American boy with an allergy to commitment. The other half is taken by a man with a drawer full of red flags, all while Mika indulges in fantasies of women much to her titillation and confusion.
Caught in a love(less) triangle, Mika also must weather a mysterious outbreak spurred by the unhygienic bathroom practices of white male westerners. Will she emerge from quarantine a new woman? Or, spurred by a reunion with an estranged friend, can she shift her life in a new direction? Could this be yet again limerence, or might it be the beginning of something a bit less one-sided?
Scathingly funny, delightfully profane, and surprisingly heartfelt, Hello, Limerence is a story for the unloved and the unhinged—a madcap spin through the frenzy of one woman’s desire.
Momo Yamaguchi was born in Tokyo, educated in the U.S., and lives and works in London. Hello, Limerence is her first novel.
Don’t see a fiction title published between 8/18 and 8/24 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.”