New Fiction Titles (9/1/26)

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.


The Disappearers, Marlon James

Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.
One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.
In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

Marlon James is the author of the Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings; the National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; the New York Times-bestselling Moon Witch, Spider King; The Book of Night Women; and John Crow’s Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, his novels have won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Born in Jamaica, James lives in New York City.


I Liked Rex: Stories, Diane Williams

Publisher: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook

Diane Williams is one of the great masters of the American short story: her tiny, coruscating tales are among the most tender, funny, peculiar, and searching works in all of contemporary literature. I Liked Rex explores sex, love, marriage, and all that comes after; it is a book about living, but more importantly, about how to be alive. Williams’s genius lies as much in what is left unspoken as in what is laid out on the page; behind images of startling beauty and strangeness, entire chamber dramas of the heart unfold, and the pleasure of these sphinxlike tales comes from their unremitting mystery, which is the same mystery fundamental to life and to love. A collection of rare originality and daring, I Liked Rex is a complete and utter delight.

Diane Williams is the author of several collections of short fiction and the founder and editor of the literary annual NOON. An omnibus of her work, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, was published in 2018. I Liked Rex is her twelfth book of fiction. The NOON archive, as well as Williams’s personal literary archive, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library. She lives in New York City.


Under Story, Chloe Benjamin

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.

Chloe Benjamin is the author of The Immortalists, a New York Times bestseller, and The Anatomy of Dreams. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick, The Immortalists was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington PostEntertainment Weekly, and others. The Anatomy of Dreams received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Originally from San Francisco, CA, Chloe is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.


How Can My Manager Be So Stupid?, Kazumasa Hayami, Haydn Trowell (Tr)

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Kyoko Tanihara loves books. Just about. But life at the Musashino Bookshop is starting to get her down. Instead of promoting her favorite stories, she finds herself distracted, tearing her hair out at the mere sight of her infuriating manager Takeru Yamamoto who can’t seem to do anything but get in her way of success.
From Yamamoto’s useless obsession with self-helps books to his cringey remarks on the hottest author in town, everything about Yamamoto seems designed to set Kyoko off. All that amid her struggle to make a name for herself in the publishing world, it’s tough for her to keep her love of literature pure and alive.
Until one day she is handed a book that speaks to all her frustrations, and opens her eyes to a whole new reality. What if there’s actually more to her manager’s obnoxious antics? What if, just maybe, her manager isn’t so stupid after all?

Kazumasa Hayami is a writer, born in 1977 in Kanagawa Prefecture. His debut novel 108 was a bestseller and later made into a manga and a film. He won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award for his novel Innocent Days, and the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize for The Royal Family (Passing the Reins). His novels are almost all adapted for screen.
Haydn Trowell is an Australian translator of Japanese literature whose work has appeared in GrantaElectric Literature, and Words Without Borders. He has translated fiction by major prize-winning authors such as Yasunari Kawabata, Maki Kashimada, and Rie Qudan, and he has worked extensively with publishers in Australia, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.. Haydn holds a PhD in translation studies from Monash University and has a background in both translation and creative writing.


Vulture Gold: Stories, Micah Dean Hicks

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook

Welcome to a dark country of sadness and wonder. Where a wedding dress turns a reluctant bride into a flock of birds, and families put on their wolf coats before devouring one another. These growling, prickly-feathered stories blur the lines between human and animal, living and dead. Teenage spirits are condemned to drive around their hometown forever. Five brothers learn that they were once crows. The bank hires a man to go into foreclosed houses and kill their monsters. Two sisters find an oven that can resurrect the dead. Plumbers kidnap mermaids trapped in a city sewer system. A mockingbird sings a woman’s sins. A boy with a single swan’s wing yearns to fly. And watching over all of them is the queen of the dead, who sends her vulture men to scavenge the bones. The characters in these modern fairy tales challenge expectations and norms in a dark and magical shared world.

Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones and the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, the New York TimesLightspeedNightmare, and Gulf Coast. He teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of South Florida.


The Black Box: Stories, Mata Kastrisiou, Kostas Kaltsas (Tr)

Publisher: ARB Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback

Fierce and sophisticated, dark and dreamy, The Black Box is a collection of transgressive, poetic fiction by Mata Kastrisiou. Each story reveals an unsettling vision of the fantastic merging with the everyday. A homeless person beds down for the night on New Year’s Eve, schoolchildren compete for a trip to meet their favorite cartoon character, a murderous domestic melodrama unfolds on a distant asteroid, an elderly man reckons with his failing memory on an empty beach—Kastrisiou explores these points of view and more with economy of language and acute social consciousness. Ranging from the darkly comic to the tender and gently melancholy, Kastrisiou writes with empathy, lack of pretense, and a deep insight into our shared humanity. Now in English for the first time, this writer of rare sensibility is sure to entrance readers of Kate Folk, Edouard Louis, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Mata Kastrisiou is a writer, actor, and documentary film editor from Athens. She teaches writing in Greek public schools and other non-formal spaces. She is the author of two books; Hallo, Cosmonaut (Apopeira, 2021), and The Black Box, published in Greek as Garbage Trucks at 6 a.m. (Eridanus, 2013), shortlisted for the Greek State Literary Prize for Debut Author.
Kostas Kaltsas is an author and translator living in Athens, Greece. His translations into Greek includes works by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, and Ishmael Reed.


Parallel Circuits, José Sotolongo

Publisher: Running Wild Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback

Pablo and Beth have been happily married for twenty years, but a traumatic experience with an older woman when Pablo was a teen resurfaces in his psyche and threatens to destroy his current life. He resolves to confront the woman in question, but their relationship is overlaid with strong family ties. As he tries to distance himself emotionally from the memory, he discovers that his son is being physically abused by a boyfriend. Pablo struggles mightily to come to terms with his own past as he tries to protect his son. Woven into his struggles is the family history his Cuban mother divulges, and the social perspective of Akhil, a Syrian immigrant he befriends, and who proves to be devastatingly influential. In the end, Pablo succumbs to forces outside of himself that are mightier than he could have imagined.

Born in Cuba and reared in the US, José Sotolongo has been writing since age ten. His fiction and poetry have been widely published in literary magazines and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is the author of The Optimistic Cuban (Histria Books), a historical novel about the Cuban Revolution. He lives with his husband on a goat farm in the Catskill Mountains of rural New York.


Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times, Darlene Madott

Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback

Closing Ceremonies is a collection of linked love stories that explores the aftermath of love. Who among us has not suffered the after-shocks? The sorrowing souls that inhabit these tales struggle at various stages of the grief cycle: from denial and paralysis to anger and desire for revenge; to bargaining and, ultimately, for some characters and for others incompletely, acceptance and reconciliation. Some of the stories handle the love quandary comedically—for example, the triptych of stories about Francesca and Concetta, who embrace a sisterly friendship born of betrayal. Others are more elegiac, such as the story of Thor and Lovise: unsanctioned lovers who get to orbit about each other, however briefly. “Appropriation” is a coming-of-age story where the longed-for first kiss is obtained, but not in the way the kiss was desired. What links these stories? Human yearning to move out of love away from an obsessive attachment, to a selfless state where genuine love becomes possible again.

Darlene Madott is an award-winning author of 10 books, including Winners and Losers, Stations of the Heart, and Making Olives and Other Family Secrets. Winners and Losers (her 9th book) grew out of her legal practice of over 3 decades, andwas named The Miramichi Readers Best of 2023. She has twice won the Bressani Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Vanderbilt-sponsored Carter V. Cooper EXILE editions award three times, and for the inaugural Nona Heaslip Best Canadian Short Stories Award. Widely anthologized, she has participated in international literary conferences, most recently as an invited plenary-panel speaker on Alice Munro for the International Conference of the Short Story in English, 2025, Killarney, Ireland. She has been translated into Italian and published by the prestigious Les Flâneurs Edizioni, Italy. Her 10th book, Closing Ceremonies, now includes Dying Times.


The Love Song of Monkey, Michael S. A. Graziano

Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook

In a surreal exile on the floor of the Atlantic, a young man faces his own death and his wife’s infidelity. The Love Song of Monkey is a meditation on the simple, inexplicable, and lasting power of love, cast in the metaphor of a journey to the depths of the ocean floor. Precise and beautifully crafted, this modern fable is rich with humor and deep thought.

Michael S. A. Graziano, PhD, is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. In addition to The Love Song of Monkey, he has also released his latest novella, Love, published earlier this year,The Divine Farce, a TikTok sensation, and Death My Own Way. He has also published popular science books including God Soul Mind Brain (Leapfrog Press, 2010), Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford University Press, 2013), Rethinking Consciousness (W. W. Norton, 2021), which was a finalist for the Penn-Faulkner award, and most recently, Charlie’s Lab (Press 53, 2023). He has regularly written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. 

He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and a backyard fox family.


Let All Our Ghosts Depart: Stories, Meghana Mysore

Publisher: West Virginia University Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook

In this powerful debut collection, present-day women of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Meghana Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. At times, this disorientation skews speculative, where deceased mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars. At turns absurd and darkly humorous, the women in Mysore’s stories all experience transformation, be it small or monumental, where they find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.
In Meghana Mysore’s debut short story collection, present-day women and girls of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. In the world of these stories, ghosts are real–in “Repair Shop,” dead mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars; in “Hoarder,” the narrator’s ex-lovers transform into scarves that won’t let her go. In another story, a daughter, trapped inside her grief, spends her days Face Timing with her dead father, watching him become a young man she never knew.
At turns absurd and darkly humorous, and sometimes speculative, Mysore’s stories touch on real-life experiences of intergenerational trauma, womanhood, the fluidity of desire and longing, and coming home to one’s body. Her characters have faced violences small and large, holding losses that bind them to their pasts and weigh them down in daily life. Each of these stories contains an experience of transformation, be it small or monumental for these women, who find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.

Meghana Mysore’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Yale ReviewThe Massachusetts ReviewThe Audacity, and more. She is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Mysore has been a Steinbeck Fellow and a scholar at McCormack Writing Center and Bread Loaf. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a BA in English from Yale. Mysore has taught as visiting faculty at Amherst College and Bucknell University, and is in an incoming assistant professor of English and creative writing at Randolph College in central Virginia.


The Girl With Seven Lives, Vikas Swarup

Publisher: Pegasus Books
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Devi is a fighter. Growing up in the slums of Delhi, she has learnt that survival comes at a cost—and naturally, that means she’s made a few enemies along the way.
Now she’s being held captive, her life up for sale in an online auction, where the highest bidder will determine her fate.
With her existence hanging in the balance, Devi proceeds to give her captor ‘a confession to beat all confessions’ – as over the course of a single night, Devi unveils the secrets of her seven extraordinary lives.
Devi is the ultimate survivor – a girl from the gutters who dares to rewrite her own destiny. But, like Sheherazade in the Arabian Nights, will she survive the longest night of her life?

Vikas Swarup is a former Indian diplomat and internationally bestselling author. His debut novel, Q&A, was translated into forty-seven languages and became the multiple Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.


Asmodeus, Rita Indiana

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback

Asmodeus, a millennia-old demon, has inhabited Rudy, a once-legendary Dominican rock star, for decades. But in 1992, the demon’s powers begin to fade. What follows is a desperate weeklong odyssey as Asmodeus ricochets through the bodies of the inhabitants of Santo Domingo’s underworld: from Guinea, a young metalhead plotting a warehouse heist, to Mireya, the daughter of a former torturer, to other souls caught in his chaotic orbit. Each possession reveals another layer of a city still reeling from the Balaguer dictatorship. And each new host engenders a surprising tenderness in the demon.
From acclaimed musical artist and author Rita Indiana, Asmodeus is written in urgent prose punctuated by original décimas, ten-line rhyming poems drawing from Latin American musical and oral tradition. Indiana weaves together Dominican heavy metal, black magic, and political trauma. Asmodeus is a supernatural noir, riotous thriller, and searing portrait of a nation grappling with its complicated past.

Rita Indiana is a writer, composer, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She has written six novels including Tentacle, winner of the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers. She lives in New York City.


Those Who Vanish: Stories, Patricia Grace King

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Hardcover

Offering readers a direct window into the Guatemalan internal armed conflict (1960–1996), the stories in Those Who Vanish wrestle with the question of individual responsibility in the face of global forces, portraying with sensitivity American citizens in Guatemala during the conflict and the later experience of Guatemalan expats in America. We see how trauma ripples: through generations of a family, across oceans and borders, and even into the very fabric of our relationships.
Upon finding human teeth on their doorstep, two peace workers bury them out of respect for the dead. A tomboyish blonde American who grew up poor in rural Maryland must confront fraught issues of class when she begins dating a wealthy Guatemalan man. At a Mennonite sleepaway camp in Kentucky, two missionary kids connect over their shared experiences in Central America—until they don’t, hormones and hard memories bubbling between them. Never once does King shy away from difficult terrain, instead rendering the most awkward and awful of moments with clarity and precision, interrogating choices at every turn. And what were we doing? Why had we come? These are questions worth pondering.
Winner of the 2026 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Those Who Vanish is a collection we can’t afford not to read. Through stories that explore faith, violence, survival, and the resilience of the human heart, King insists we think critically about foreign wars and the roles we might play in them. Likewise, she asks us to consider the personal wars we wage against each other, and our own selves, as we decide who we are and what we’re willing to fight for.

Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the United Kingdom, where she resides. Her short fiction has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and the Florida Review’s Leiby Prize. Other stories have been published by PloughsharesThe Gettysburg ReviewNarrative, and Nimrod. A former Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, she has received additional support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the British Library. Those Who Vanish is her first book.


The Submerged: Stories, Will Boast

Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook

In ten surprising, devastating stories, Will Boast explores the complex ways in which we long for a home, for connection and purpose. A Sicilian barber takes on a refugee as an apprentice and upends his own quiet village life. A lonely New York architect starts an ill-advised relationship with an aspiring congressman. The comic mayhem of teenage locals in a tourist town suddenly turns deadly serious. A shooting in northern Wisconsin involving an immigrant sets a community against itself. The Submerged draws unforgettable portraits of those forced into exile and those who choose it themselves. Boast asks just what we’ll do when the time comes to leave everything behind.

Will Boast is the author of a previous story collection, Power Ballads; a memoir, Epilogue; and a novel, Daphne. His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times MagazineThe New RepublicThe GuardianThe American ScholarGranta, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He’s held fellowships from Stanford University, the American Academy in Rome, the University of East Anglia, Yaddo, and MacDowell, and he’s taught at Stanford, the University of Chicago, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome. He resides in Chicago, Illinois.


Hermit, Susan Blood

Publisher: Sea Crow Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2026
Format: Paperback

Holly’s carefully assembled life is unraveling, and she needs a reset. She creates a DIY home retreat, complete with scavenged cushions and a vow of inner peace. For one shining instant, it works. Then chaos returns.
In a desperate bid for solitude, Holly accepts a position as a garden hermit on a historic estate. Alone in a weather-beaten shed, she leans into silence, simplicity, and the hope that isolation will bring clarity. But winter is harsh, the estate holds secrets, and the person who took everything from her once is back, this time threatening everything she’s become.
Sharply funny, unexpectedly thoughtful, and quietly suspenseful, Hermit is a novel about reinvention, resilience, and finding wisdom in the mayhem of life.

Susan Blood is the recipient of an Arts Foundation of Cape Cod Written Word Fellowship and Provincetown Community Compact dune shack residency, where this novel was first drafted. Her work has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, The Magazine of Yoga, Bachtrack, The Petrigru Review, and regional newspapers. A collection of Susan’s essays, How Not to Do Things, was published by Surface Popper Publications in 2017. Her radio show – Opera Betty: opera for people who hate opera – has aired since 2010 on community radio WOMR. She has read and presented at fundraising events for organizations including the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, WOMR Community Radio, and Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, and she continues to support writers and visual artists as the Institutional Giving Manager at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.


Don’t see a poetry title published between 9/1 and 9/7 here? Contact us to let us know!

Front Page header (Issue 13 - Summer 2026)

Contents

Two Poems by Maggie Wang

“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.

Four Poems by Joely Williams

“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.

Two Poems by Irene Cunningham

“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.

Three Poems by Joshua Zeitler

“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.

Three Poems by A.R. Dugan

“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.

Three Poems by Tanya Tuzeo

“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.”