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.
Exit Party, Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
Emily St. John Mandel is the author of six novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022. Her previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama’s list, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages; and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honors, has been translated into 36 languages, and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
Fallow, Sarah Anderson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Natalie knows one truth: There is no such thing as a good job.
As the clock ticks away at the workplace harassment call center, she tries to ignore the increasing pain in her jaw. She has no dental insurance. She has no skills or ambitions. She has student loans. And, minute by minute, she hears the many ways workers are not just not getting by, but actually getting hustled.
Then, at the blood bank where she sells her plasma, a mysterious flyer leads her to The Company. Natalie turns out to be the perfect candidate for their pilot program: in-house surrogate. The Company pitches it as an opportunity to help women access greater gender equity, motherhood without maternity leave. Finally, she will be adequately—generously—compensated.
For years, her every need is met: stacks of healthy meals in the refrigerator of a luxury condo, fitness coaches and nutritionists, around-the-clock healthcare. Between deliveries, she takes time off—no obligations or expectations. For the first time in her life, she is good at her job; for the first time, she feels free.
But just as she’s about to fulfill the terms of her contract, a staffing decision upends everything and drags her deep into another social experiment. There she meets new questions about her future, her freedom, her purpose, and what she can expect from the world.
Woundingly funny and deeply moving, Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is a tender, hilarious, alarmingly real vision of a woman balancing on the knife-edge of capitalism as she comes to realize who she wants to be.
Sarah Anderson is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she won two Hopwood Awards. Her story “Take Me to Kirkland,” originally published in Joyland, is featured in The Best American Short Stories 2025.
Proof of Progress, Elizabeth Castellano
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Maria Astorini, once popular character actress and late-night talk show darling, is having a moment. The B-list actress has survived deaths, divorces, a famous mother, a Hollywood blacklist, a string of public embarrassments, an aging face, financial ruin, an empty nest, a difficult best friend, and a worldwide pandemic. Now, she’s back and bigger than ever. A small, unexpected role has heightened her celebrity status and propelled her, at age sixty-five, into the limelight. And then, along comes the call Maria has spent decades avoiding. It’s her publisher asking “Where is that book?”
Maria knows the world doesn’t need another celebrity memoir. To finally fulfill her contract, Maria writes, or attempts to write, or, at the very least, sends a pile of pages meant to vaguely resemble the book she promised to deliver nearly four decades earlier.
In a series of bite-sized anecdotes, she candidly recalls her past, chronicling the significant, and insignificant moments of her full, funny, and extraordinarily unpredictable life.
Maria hasn’t been able to write a book about her life—she’s been too busy living it.
Elizabeth Castellano lives in New York, and is the author of Save What’s Left and Proof of Progress.
The Queen of Bad Influences: Stories, Jim Shepard
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,” and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boon, North Carolina (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love, William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”), while the title story introduces us to the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences,” as their vexed devotion unfolds in part on the liner Lusitania.
With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which cataclysm, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious, and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard celebrates what is best in us: the love and friendships we sustain, and the passions and grace we grant one another.
Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal, the PEN/New England Award, the Ribalow Prize, and the Clark Fiction Prize, as well as six story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Eight of his stories have been selected for publication in The Best American Short Stories, two for The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three for The Pushcart Prize. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, the fiction writer Karen Shepard, and a Pittie mix and a beagle.
The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch, Genevieve Plunkett
Publisher: Amethyst Editions
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
It’s 2005: Cell phones are dumb, dick pics are email attachments, and twenty-one-year-old Drew is aimlessly circling in a small Vermont town. Taking a job at a horse stable, Drew is drawn to her seemingly decent but heartbroken manager, Tristan, but finds herself even more entranced by his stories of Cleo, his older, elusive ex.
When Cleo reemerges to open a coffee shop, Drew bolts over to work there instead. Soon the women are an exhilarating conspiracy of two, serving and snarking on regular locals and tourists while drawing closer to each other. Then, in the wake of a personal tragedy, Cleo embarks on an affair with a newcomer. As their intimacy shifts and slips, Drew begins to lose herself—but how much of herself did she have in the first place? Genevieve Plunkett’s latest is an offbeat ode to bisexual desire, identity, and how far a person will go to avoid feeling lonely.
Genevieve Plunkett is the author of In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel and Prepare Her. A recipient of an O. Henry Award and the Sewanee Review’s Andrew Lytle Prize, her writing can be found in the Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, Write or Die, Story, and the Southern Review, among others. She lives in Vermont with her partner and their children.
The Body of the Thing, Karishma Jobanputra
Publisher: And Other Stories
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Traversing bougie neighbourhoods in Manhattan, sun-drenched piazzas in Italy, coastal Maine, and the bustle of London, these stories chase the fallout when women’s bodies are valued for their beauty and youth, dismissed and discarded when ill, or made useful as parents and caregivers. Fluid, sensual, and fearless, The Body of the Thing is about looking at and living in the female body – and all of its complicated realities and wonders.
Karishma Jobanputra is a British-Indian writer currently based in London. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction programme, her work has been listed for the Brick Lane Short Story Prize and the Disquiet Literary Prize for Fiction. The Body of the Thing is her first book.
Dancing at the End of the World: Novel-in-Stories, Michelle Sacks
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Beginning in 1933 amidst the rumblings of fascism and the demise of the Weimar Republic, and concluding in the fraught social and political climate of the present day, the collection weaves seamlessly through the defining years of the iconic city.
From the first story, we are introduced to Klara von Arnsberg, the aristocratic daughter of a famed industrialist, whose fierce instinct for both survival and reinvention is a mirror for that of Berlin itself. The life—or rather, many lives—that Klara builds for herself over the decades to come, are ever entangled with the fate of the city as we bear witness to the Holocaust, the post-war years, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ensuing years of dramatic transformation.
As we move through the decades of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Klara is ever-present in the stories and the characters we encounter: Turkish guest workers in the 1960s and Syrian refugees in the twenty-first century, frustrated housewives in the new Berlin of money and rampant gentrification, Cold War Berliners hardened by unimaginable cruelty, expats in search of themselves, tech entrepreneurs who dream of immortality, and the lost children of the cultural revolution. All are linked to Klara, to her desires and fears, her greatest love, and the ultimate fate of both her legacy and the country itself.
Michelle Sacks is the author of the novels, You Were Made for This (Little, Brown and Company, 2018) and All the Lost Things (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) and the short story collection, Stone Baby (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Her work has been translated into eight languages and has appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
In the Shadow of the Architect, Bradley Bazzle
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Coalescing around themes of family and belonging, the past’s influence on the present, and the ways we define ourselves, these stories show us people forced to grapple with who they are—and who they could become. A closeted teenager learns from the nude model in his life-drawing class what it might mean to be a gay man in Fort Worth. A lifestyle blogger looking to expand her influence hires a photographer whose work destabilizes her family. A boy finds friendship in the precocious daughter of a recently deceased architect whose fame and force of personality continue to dominate their lives. In Bradley Bazzle’s deft hands, these characters—on the cusp of change, willingly or not—discover truths about themselves, some of which they might regret learning.
Bradley Bazzle is the author of the novel Trash Mountain and the story collection Fathers of Cambodian Time-Travel Science. His work has appeared in New Letters, New England Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. Originally from Dallas, Texas, he lives with his family in Athens, Georgia, where he teaches improvisational comedy.
Dear Future Occupants, Keith Stahl
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
It is 1979 and patriarch Bud relocates his family to his conservative hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut. Despite dubious restaurant experience, he uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. Things begin to fall apart when police find an all-too-literal skeleton in the family’s basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.
Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, this colonial gothic novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.
Keith Stahl is a former restaurateur who teaches creative writing at Syracuse University and Writers Voice. He is the author of the poetry collection From the Gunroom. Originally from Litchfield, Connecticut, he lives in Skaneateles, New York.
Boyhood, David Keenan
Publisher: White Rabbit
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, Aaron Murray, is on the cusp of that moment when adolescence becomes adulthood. His own journey of grief and recovery has been guided by an angel, ‘The Precious Gift’ – perhaps imagined, perhaps real – who has blessed Aaron with redemptive, messianic powers. These have enabled him to see through the past and present, joining the dots between a vast array of characters; ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters and the Vampire of Derry over five decades, all tied up in each other’s fate.
As Aaron’s visions span cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, Boyhood builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.
A book of great joy, of laughter in the face of horror and delight in storytelling by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is a hymn to the resilience of youth, to the brave dreams of artists and lovers and a love letter to Glasgow – a city where magic happens.
David Keenan is the author of six critically-acclaimed novels; the cult classic This is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore Award; The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, Xstabeth, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year and Industry of Magic & Light. He is also the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a history of the UK’s post-punk and Industrial music scenes. He has been writing about music since he was seventeen years old, most consistently for The Wire, and between the years 2004-2014 he co-ran the cult Glasgow record shop Volcanic Tongue. His selected music writing was published in 2025 as the collection Volcanic Tongue.
Manual for How to Live Magnificently: Stories, Ernie Wang
Publisher: Acre Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In a debut collection at once deeply felt and delightfully playful, Ernie Wang presents ordinary people struggling with challenges that confront many today: how to find steady, meaningful work; how to manage when our healthcare system fails us; how to navigate thorny relationships with lovers, with friends, with children; how to keep one’s dreams alive, and how to let them go. The thirteen stories in Manual for How to Live Magnificently are intriguingly linked, with narrators becoming players and players becoming narrators. Several stories feature cameos by the irrepressible seventy-something Mabel Rogerson, who serves by turns as catalyst, comic relief, and means to catharsis. The book toggles among dramatically different locales—Dayton, Ohio; Las Vegas; Disneyland; Kamisoshigaya, Japan—drawing them thematically into a shared orbit.
Though each of Wang’s offerings has heft and poignancy, the stories also serve up superb comic set pieces. A fake fortuneteller forgoes his crystal ball in favor of a snow globe; a priest moonlights as a professional wrestler named the Grim Preacher; a troubled lawyer who reluctantly cat-sits for a friend winds up finding solace with Killer and Hoedaddy. Revelations are reached at the male strip club Dayton Dix, or during a ritual spanking at Hofbräuhaus just off the Las Vegas Strip, or on Captain Hook’s flying galleon during a theme park ride. And almost everyone eventually ends up at Applebee’s. When storylines converge in a terrifying tragedy, Wang takes the opportunity to explore the complexity of family, to deepen our understanding of sacrifice and the many ways people demonstrate love for one another.
Ernie Wang is a second-generation Chinese-Japanese-American. He grew up on US military bases in Japan, and for a short while worked as a contract specialist for the Department of Defense. His short fiction and essays appear in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Story, Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
Blow Yourself Up, Ankur Thakkar
Publisher: TriQuarterly
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.
Ankur Thakkar is a writer and multimedia artist whose stories have appeared in Guernica, [PANK], and TriQuarterly. He was a 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar and his artwork has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, Leah De Forest
Publisher: Betty
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
It’s March 2020 and Hadley Parris is faltering. She’s just been told she has multiple sclerosis, her teenage daughter is about to grow up and away, her opinionated mother wants to talk about the virus everyone’s worried about, and Hadley’s student needs a place to stay. Hadley’s small Brooklyn apartment becomes a pressure cooker in which four women must navigate a rapidly unfolding pandemic, a bee invasion—and each other.
Hadley, eager to be helpful, takes in her gifted student, Anna. Anna, who is living with the aftermath of family violence, would prefer to imagine a future in which she doesn’t need anyone at all. Hadley’s daughter, Isabelle, grieves an increasingly bleak climate outlook while feeling torn between her mother’s needs and her mercurial Australian-born grandmother Aileen. Bees continue to emerge from the growing hive inside Hadley’s kitchen wall. Meanwhile, Anna’s Australian-born mother, Miranda, is in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal incident and hopes for forgiveness that may not be forthcoming.
As a field hospital is erected in Central Park and New Yorkers pause each evening to cheer emergency responders, Hadley’s discovery of genealogical ties dating back to the Salem witch trials forces her to confront family secrets and reckon with the legacy of her ancestors. Full of compassionate insight and incisive wit, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow is a provocative, sweeping meditation on immigration, family ties, and the ways that we must all face the future—together.
Leah De Forest was born in Geelong, Australia. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Griffith Review, CRAFT Literary, Ohio University’s Quarter After Eight, Bodega Magazine, Fiction Writers Review, LEON Literary Review, Monash University’s Verge 2020, Kill Your Darlings, and The Canberra Times. She serves as an editor at Bloom, a literary website featuring authors who debut at 40 or older. She teaches writing at Harvard Extension Schools, and she lives in Boston.
Searching for Anthony Love: A History of Dust, Ginger Teppner
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Told through fragments, meditations, and moments of startling clarity, the book traces how love continues to shape consciousness long after its object is gone. Searching for Anthony Love explores the interior spaces where longing, embodiment, and spiritual inquiry collide—where sadness becomes a location, vulnerability a form of knowledge, and the body both a shelter and a site of fracture.
Ginger Teppner is a writer and educator who serves as English faculty at Polk State College and South University and leads writing workshops at theearthof.com. She holds a BA in Cultural Studies from SUNY Empire State College and an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa University. She has authored three chapbooks: 28 Gestures (Precipice Collective), I Should Have Been Linen (The Lune), and Watercourse (Lulu), and is widely published in online and print journals. Teppner was honored to co-teach a writing workshop with Andrew Helton as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in CityXVenice, the Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. She currently lives in central Florida with her husband, two dogs, a cat, and a cockatiel.
Foam, Kate Zambreno
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Who are all these Evas? They puncture and disrupt the domestic space and equilibrium of the narrator, who alternately relies upon them or administers their care. Foam is the latest boundary-blurring, genre-resistant, strange and speculative new fiction from Kate Zambreno, the inimitable and relentless literary stylist and conceptualist. Inspired by the absurdities of Eva Hesse and other soft sculpture, these are speculative art essays and textures, a document of precarity and slippery time—mischievous, moody, estranged—a masterwork of tone and atmosphere.
Kate Zambreno is the author of more than ten books that confound genre—variously novels, speculative essays and reports, performative lectures—including, from Semiotext(e), Book of Mutter, Appendix Project, and the feminist cult classic, Heroines. They also co-authored, with Sofia Samatar, a work of experimental criticism, Tone. Forthcoming from Semiotext(e) are two novels of interiority and precarity, Foam and Performance Art. They are a doctoral student in Performance Studies at NYU, thinking through resistance and duration.
The Meaning of Daughter, Alexia Nader
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
After immigrating from Lebanon to Haiti as a young girl, Merjan comes of age in an insular, conservative community, where it seems as though her sole escape is marriage. In the late 1970s, Merjan’s daughter Yvonne also finds herself on the cusp of a marriage of convenience. In the present day, Yvonne’s daughter Eva becomes unexpectedly pregnant and moves back to her childhood home in Miami, only to find her family upended by feuds. An intimate family saga, The Meaning of Daughter explores questions about maternal ambivalence, ambition, artmaking, and how desire resists gendered expectations.
After immigrating from Lebanon to Haiti as a young girl, Merjan comes of age in an insular, conservative community, where it seems as though her sole escape is marriage. Striking a bargain with a young art dealer, she marries and dreams of becoming a painter, only to discover her husband’s support tethered with expectations.
In the late 1970s, Merjan’s daughter Yvonne is a young woman on the cusp of a marriage of convenience. Though resentful of her mother, Yvonne dreams of establishing a Haitian art gallery in New York with the help of a well-connected older man—but her time there ends disastrously, creating a deep rift between her and her family.
In the present day, Yvonne’s daughter Eva is a student whose art draws inspiration from her grandmother Merjan’s largely undiscovered work. When Eva becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she moves back to her childhood home in Miami to sort out her ambivalent feelings, where she finds her family upended by feuds. An intimate family saga, The Meaning of Daughter explores questions about maternal ambivalence, ambition, artmaking, and how desire resists gendered expectations.
Alexia Nader’s writing has appeared in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among others. Nader lives in San Francisco, California.
The Shitbird, Spencer Fleury
Publisher: Stanchion
Publication Date: September 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Shitbird is the story of Colin McAllister, a seaman in the US Coast Guard, and a poor fit for the role at best. He’s an outsider, a stoner with a bad attitude and a smart mouth, a combo that often puts him on the wrong side of an ass-kicking. He only joined up because he was fresh out of options when he was expelled after a college party turned into a case of suspected arson. And when he finds the dead body of well-liked shipmate Fred Sobel on the far side of a minuscule Caribbean Island during a routine afternoon of R&R, his life immediately takes a turn for the worse. His shipmates—most of them, anyway—jump to the conclusion that he must be responsible. They want to take justice into their own hands and throw McAllister overboard in the dead of night, but the intervention of Fred’s closest friend—the popular Wade Lucas—keeps them at bay. Until, that is, McAllister’s nemesis Dennis Hebert starts planting doubt in Lucas’s mind. As Lucas’s allegiance wavers and tensions with the rest of the crew escalate, McAllister quickly finds himself in a very dark place. Once sure of his own innocence, now he’s not so certain. If he’s not careful, he’ll end up just like Fred—and maybe bring the whole crew down with him.
Spencer Fleury is the author of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories (Malarkey Books, 2024) and How I’m Spending My Afterlife (Woodhall Press, 2021). He lives in San Francisco and Portugal.
One Soft Infested Summer, Matthew Heiti
Publisher: Latitude 46
Publication Date: September 17, 2026
Format: Paperback
Brothers Milo and Woe—gifted with strange psychic abilities—must confront the malevolent force threatening to consume their once idyllic neighbourhood of Kinder Hill. Children are disappearing and they can help.
Fast forward to 2019, Miller Hackney—a failed writer and failing member of the human race—abandons his final novel to chase a faceless child in a green raincoat through the alleys and subway tunnels of Toronto. These two stories, seemingly worlds and decades apart, are drawn inexorably to a collision at the bottom of all labyrinths. Blending the nostalgic adventure of The Goonies with the psychological suspense of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, One Soft Infested Summer is an epic story about found families, the horror of loss, and the redemptive magic of storytelling.
Born in a meteor crater, Matthew Heiti is a Genie-nominated screenwriter, playwright, and author. He has published drama and fiction including his first novel, The City Still Breathing (Coach House Books), and the play for teens, Black Dog: 4 vs the wrld (Playwrights Canada Press). His short fiction has been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, winning several distinctions, including the Carter V. Cooper award and Grain Magazine’s short fiction prize. He teaches Creative Writing at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, where he lives. More about his writing can be found at harkback.org
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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.”