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.
Avalon, Rise, Madeline ffitch
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Ditched on the side of the road, two friends shelter for the night in a barn. When they wake, one comes face-to-face with his destiny—an antique letterpress, the Vandercook No. 4.
Woody and Leroi have been friends their whole lives. But as Leroi falls in with the collective that cooks every Sunday in the park, learning about traveler symbols and how to slice a cucumber, Woody starts to snort the pills he’s been selling. He makes his art: beautiful letterpress signs for protests, and business cards commissioned by a woman he knows as Stasia but whom others know to be the leader of a white nationalist movement. Stasia bought the barn with the Vandercook in it; she says Woody can use it anytime. What does she want in return?
Woody and Leroi are just two residents of this Appalachian town. Their lives intersect, often at the library, with a cast of delightfully eccentric individuals. Eloise, the town librarian and lifelong activist. The punks at Food Not Bombs. Sharon, a wry social worker. Emma, a mom trying really hard not to take out her anger on her kids. Amber, the health goddess who runs the Discipline Cafe. Sylvester, an unhoused man with a long history in town. Matt Mistelthwaite, a World War II veteran with his own connections to the Vandercook. When Stasia insists on hosting a European Heritage Rug Braiding workshop at the library, everyone’s lives will be upended.
In Avalon, Rise, an ensemble novel genuinely rooted in the collective, Madeline ffitch asks big questions and doesn’t look away from the answers.
Madeline ffitch is the author of the novel Stay and Fight, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a Lambda Literary Prize, as well as the story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn. She cofounded the punk theater company Missoula Oblongata and was part of the rural direct action collective Appalachia Resist, which took as its commitments environmental and racial justice. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Tin House, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital State of the Art Prize and two O. Henry Prizes and was included in the 2024 Best American Short Stories anthology. She lives with her children in the hills of Appalachian Ohio.
Hollywood, Ending, John Green
Publisher: Dutton Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
For rising talents Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo, being cast in the buzzy biopic Andy Warhol Never Gets Old is the opportunity they’ve both been waiting for. They’re on the verge of breaking out, and maybe even falling in love. Soon, the movie is blowing up, and so are their lives—in exciting, but also terrifying, ways.
John Green artfully blends a behind-the-scenes Hollywood love story with an unflinching examination of the insatiable attention economy. Told through dual points of view, the novel brilliantly juxtaposes the on-screen study of Warhol’s life at the dawn of celebrity culture with the intimate struggles of two young people figuring out who they are, both together and alone.
Tender, heartbreaking, and shrewdly funny, this is a story as only Green can tell it. Hollywood, Ending is a deeply observed novel about the tension between a public and a private life, and the audacity to pursue the kind of love we all deserve.
John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, The Anthropocene Reviewed, and Everything Is Tuberculosis. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. John’s books have won many prizes, including an Audie Award, an Edgar Award, the Michael L. Printz Medal, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. John lives with his family in Indianapolis.
The Strangers, Naomi Alderman
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.
As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief—a place with its own logic and rhythms—the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.
Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?
From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.
Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Alderman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was chosen by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. As a video games designer, she is the cocreator and lead writer of the bestselling smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run! She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and lives in London.
Ghost Story, Elisa Lodato
Publisher: Manilla Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Off the windswept coast of Scotland lies Finish Island—rugged, remote, and long deserted. Once a home, it now stands empty, a place of dark history and deep memory, guarding its stories closely.
Unable to write since her daughter’s death, Seren comes to the island to work, hoping that solitude and silence will unlock her next novel. But the island has memories of its own—restless, unsettled, and unwilling to stay buried.
As strange events grow ever more disturbing, Seren begins to see eerie connections between her past and the island’s history. There is something here—something ancient and unforgiving. Will she uncover its secrets before it’s too late?
Elisa Lodato grew up in London and read English at Cambridge. Her debut novel, An Unremarkable Body, was longlisted for the 2016 Bath Novel Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Costa First Novel Award. Her second novel is The Necessary Marriage and Ghost Story is her latest novel. Elisa lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and two children.
What’s a Snow Leopard to You?, Chen-Fu Hsu, Howard Goldblatt (Tr)
Publisher: Arcade
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Chen-Fu Hsu’s debut novel begins with a young Taiwanese naturalist on an arduous quest for the elusive snow leopard, weaving in excerpts from translated entries from a left behind diary of a fictional Japanese monk, which bears witness to the seismic transformations of Tibet across the decades under Chinese rule.
Following his deeply spiritual connection to Tibet, the protagonist sets off on multiple journeys to the region, describing in brilliant detail the vast beauty of the Tibetan plateau and the wildlife that has existed since time immemorial. However, on his third visit to the region, he is harassed at every turn by the Chinese police who confiscate his belongings, including his books, eventually forcing him to leave for Taiwan. One book overlooked by the Chinese police is the long-lost diary of Udagawa Ekai, a Zen monk who traveled to Lhasa in the postwar years. The diary tells the monk’s story up until his death as a recluse, and paints a picture of a Tibet that has a diverse and deeply religious culture that has fought against invaders on multiple fronts.
Hsu laces excerpts from Ekai’s diary within his narrative, tracing the changes sparked from the horrors of the Chinese military annexation in the 1950s through the Cultural Revolution and into the contemporary age of forced economic development. Through encounters with the people of Tibet and their stories, What’s a Snow Leopard to You? spans the divide between an intimate portrait of a land in flux and a philosophical inquiry into humanity’s fraught yet enduring bond with nature. This richly layered work braids history with myth, environmentalism with art, and creates a single story of change in one of the world’s most sparsely inhabited regions.
Chen-Fu Hsu ( 徐振輔) was born in Taipei in 1994. He holds a BS in Entomology and an MA in Geography from National Taiwan University. His works have been selected four times in the Chiu Ko Publishing Annual Prose Selection and won several awards such as Taipei Literature Annuity. While having no ambitions in photography, he dreams of photographing snow leopards, narwhals, birds of paradise, and other creatures that some believe are myths. Serving as a Canon lecturer, he has held a solo exhibition of Wildlife Photography titled “Wings over and over, and light covers light. ” What’s a Snow Leopard to You? is his debut novel that has already won many literary awards in Taiwan.
Howard Goldblatt (Tr) translates fiction from China and Taiwan, including novels by Nobel laureate Mo Yan, five of whose works are published by Arcade (The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Big Breasts and Wide Hips; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh). He has also translated works by Chiang-Sheng Kuo (The Piano Tuner) and Liu Zhenyun (I Did Not Kill My Husband; The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon; Remembering 1942, all with Sylvia Li-chun Lin and published by Arcade).
Sylvia Li-chun Lin (Tr), a former teacher and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, is a full-time translator and seasonal gardener. She and Howard Goldblatt live in Lafayette, Colorado, with their sometimes surprising cat, Domino.
Antitherapies, Jacques Fux
Publisher: UNM Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Winner of Brazil’s prestigious São Paulo Prize, Jacques Fux’s brilliant literary debut novel unveils an outrageously entertaining Portrait of the Artist as a Young Schlemiel. Antitherapies relates the life journey of a young Jewish man coming of age in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from his sensitive childhood and the primal indignation of circumcision, through awkward adolescence, and up to early adulthood and his decision to become a writer. Its peevish protagonist sees Jewishness in general as a festive carnival of irritations. The sources of his joy as well as his misery include his mother’s overbearing love; the Nazis, who never really left the stage after their defeat in 1945; his absurdly high IQ; and his grappling with the perpetual tension between cultural assimilation and the preservation of his Jewish identity and heritage.
Told through twenty-one playful “anti-therapeutic” sessions, the narrator summons myriad remembrances of things past, chronicling how he carefully considered and then ultimately rejected an assortment of possible life paths: astrophysicist, delinquent, clairvoyant, forger, hairdresser, logician, charlatan, and mathematician, among others. Fux masterfully integrates poetry, humor, magical realism, and a host of literary allusions—including Borges, Pessoa, Joyce, Primo Levi, Georges Perec, and Phillip Roth—to create a delightfully rich and original work of autofiction.
Jacques Fux is a Brazilian writer and mathematician. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Herança, an acclaimed novel that explores transgenerational trauma, and Meshugá, winner of the Manaus Literary Prize. His work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew.
The Strongest Woman in the World, Steinunn Helgadóttir, Larissa Kyzer (Tr)
Publisher: Open Letter Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Siblings Eiður and Gunnhildur grow up in a household balanced uneasily between emotional volatility and unspoken grief—a home where their parents are never happy at the same time. When tragedy fractures the family, the siblings are separated, their lives diverging in unexpected and quietly extraordinary ways.
Eiður turns to activism, seeking order and justice in a world that rarely offers either. Traveling to Lesbos to lead a group of rebel activists aiding the refugee crisis, he fears that he lacks the passion and empathy necessary to enact true social change. Gunnhildur, who hides a physical strength most would find unimaginable, becomes a funereal beautician, renowned for her ability to lend peace and dignity to the dead. In her meticulous care for the bodies of others, she finds a way to hold the world still, if only briefly.
These two threads—Gunnhildur’s superhero-like strength and Eiður’s activism—come together at a jail, where Gunnhildur attempts to prove that she really is the strongest woman in the world.
Steinunn G. Helgadóttir (b.1952) is a visual artist and well-known Icelandic poet and prose writer. She received The Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize 2016 for her novel Voices From the Radio Operator’s House. Helgadottir’s work has been exhibited at solo and group art exhibitions around the world. She has also curated numerous art exhibitions in several museums and galleries in Iceland.
Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic literary translator. Her translation of Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s A Fist or a Heart was awarded the American Scandinavian Foundation’s 2019 translation prize. The same year, she was one of Princeton University’s Translators in Residence. Read LessIn 2020, Larissa cofounded Eth & Thorn, a chapbook press dedicated to Icelandic poetry and short fiction in translation. Larissa is co-chair of PEN America’s Translation Committee and runs the virtual Women+ in Translation reading series Jill!
Packages, Danny O’Dea
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Set against the charged intimacy of a Southern college town, Danny O’Dea’s debut follows Michael McKnight, a young man orbiting grief, desire, and moral uncertainty as he navigates friendship, sexuality, faith, and the quiet violence of complicity. When a series of mysterious packages begin arriving at an off-campus house, Michael finds himself drawn into a web of secrecy that forces him to confront not only what his peers are capable of, but what he himself is willing to ignore.
Moving fluidly between memory and present action, Packages is both a coming-of-age story and a reckoning—about masculinity, queerness, guilt, and the ways institutions and friendships fail the most vulnerable. With prose that is sharp, intimate, and darkly funny, O’Dea captures the intoxicating freedom of youth alongside its moral blind spots, asking how responsibility is formed, deferred, or abandoned altogether.
At once tender and unsettling, Packages announces a bold new literary voice and marks the arrival of a writer unafraid to look directly at the cost of looking away.
Danny O’Dea is a writer whose work examines grief, masculinity, and the quiet violence of looking away. His fiction is concerned with the stories we tell to survive—and the cost of believing them. Packages is his debut novel.
this heart, Curtis Smith
Publisher: Trompe L’oeil Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The thirty stories in this heart take the reader to landscapes sometimes gritty, sometimes lavish, sometimes otherworldly— but all these places are made familiar by the humanity and grace Smith offers this life’s misfits and lost souls. Using prose both lyrical and spare, this heart offers a vision of a world that aches with a harsh and unforgettable beauty.
Curtis Smith published over 125 stories and essays, and his work has been cited by or included in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Best Small Fictions, The Best Microfictions, and the WW Norton anthology New Micro. He worked with indie presses to put out seven novels, five story collections, two essay collections, and one book of creative nonfiction. His 2020 novel The Magpie’s Return was named an indie pick of the year by Kirkus, and the 2023 novel The Lost and the Blind was a finalist for Foreword Review’ s indie fiction release of the year. Fall of 2026 will see the simultaneous release of his next two books, (step)sisters (a novel) and this heart (a story collection).
(step)sisters, Curtis Smith
Publisher: Trompe L’oeil Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Kiley loves her stepsister Nora, loves her so much she refuses to use the word step, believing it gives too much credit to the fathers who gave them nothing. The girls came up hard, watching over each other, their backs to the wall and their fists raised. Their small town and all its sad histories abandoned with their move to Philadelphia, where they work nowhere jobs and pocket the money they make in the city’s underground economy. Their goal— a stash large enough for a down payment, their dream of owning a shop they’ll call their own. But there are problems. The sketchy characters of the city’s drug trade. The months-long trash strike and rats everywhere. Most troubling, Nora’s demons, the ones she’s tried so desperately to escape yet which rise just when their dream is within reach. (step)sisters offers an unforgettable portrait of struggle and addiction and hope and heartbreak, and above all, the love between two survivors who can only count on each other.
Curtis Smith published over 125 stories and essays, and his work has been cited by or included in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Best Small Fictions, The Best Microfictions, and the WW Norton anthology New Micro. He worked with indie presses to put out seven novels, five story collections, two essay collections, and one book of creative nonfiction. His 2020 novel The Magpie’s Return was named an indie pick of the year by Kirkus, and the 2023 novel The Lost and the Blind was a finalist for Foreword Review’ s indie fiction release of the year. Fall of 2026 will see the simultaneous release of his next two books, (step)sisters (a novel) and this heart (a story collection).
Four Night Seas: Stories, Niamh Mac Cabe
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Set across liminal landscapes, this collection of fourteen stories from award-winning author Niamh Mac Cabe feature characters navigating emotional or existential thresholds—grieving, seeking meaning, or reconciling with the past.
Whether it is a reclusive sculptor haunted by guilt, a lost child drawing maps in the sand, or a greyhound silently shadowing a man to a mountain lake, Mac Cabe’s lyrical prose and inventive narrative structures evoke an eerie, tender intimacy.
Rich and atmospheric, exploring themes of memory, solitude, loss, and the mysterious rhythms of nature and human connection, this collection blurs the line between the internal and external world, and invites us into spaces of beauty, melancholy and subtle transformation. Four Night Seas marks the arrival of a vital new voice in Irish writing.
Niamh Mac Cabe is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and hybrid prose. She’s also a visual artist, an editor, a writing mentor, and a lecturer at ATU Sligo.
Mistranslation, Madeleine Moss
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In upstate New York in 2001, nine-year-old twins Sabina and Camilla spend the summer weathering the moods of their erratic mother while finding themselves pulled toward diverging interests: Sabina into the mystery of their absent French father and Camilla into burgeoning popularity. But their lives are shaken up by the arrival of an Arab French family across the street. Thrilled by what she sees as a link to the country of her origins, Sabina attempts to befriend the family’s son, Khalil, and is rebuffed for reasons she doesn’t understand.
Yet as the twins and Khalil come of age, they are drawn into a tense and ever-shifting triangular dynamic. As Sabina strives to find her father and make sense of her mother, as Camilla confronts whether the power she held in youth translates to adulthood, and as Khalil reckons with the psychological fallout of a family tragedy, their paths converge in ways both surprising and inevitable. Bookended by events with global resonance, Mistranslation is a continent-spanning chronicle of family, inheritance, and the reverberations of the choices we do—or don’t—make.
Madeleine Moss holds a degree in French literature from Cornell University and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Strasbourg, France.
Orpheus Nine, Chris Flynn
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the small, sleepy town of Gattan, population 7448, it happened at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning. At the local soccer field, only one boy, aged ten years and one week, remained standing as the brothers, sisters and parents of his teammates realised the horror they were witnessing. Their screams split the sky.
One hundred and thirty million died that first day.
Every day since, on the morning of a child’s ninth birthday, it happens again. No one knows why. The ongoing horror becomes known as Orpheus Nine and bereft parents cruelly labelled Orpheans. Global leaders have no answers as chaos takes hold. Conspiracy theories and violence spread as scientists wrestle with the ongoing toll and anxious citizens and militant Orpheans try to take matters into their own hands.
In Gattan, the chasm between life before and after grows wider for three old friends, now parents. They struggle with waves of grief at the loss of one child, guilt at one child’s survival and anger as another child edges closer to their birthday. No matter the cost, each of the friends attempt to fight the unfathomable in their own way. But the reality is, the clock keeps ticking, the world order is crumbling and the gods are watching …
Born in Belfast, Chris Flynn now lives in a small town in regional Victoria. He is the author of Mammoth, The Glass Kingdom and A Tiger in Eden, the story collection Here Be Leviathans, and three books for children in association with Museums Victoria, Horridus and the Hidden Valley, Horridus and the Night Forest and The Quest for Kool. His work has appeared in Spinning Around: The Kylie Playlist, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Monster Children, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Meanjin, The Guardian, The Age, The Australian, The Big Issue, Australian Book Review and many other publications. Chris’s books have been shortlisted for and won prizes such as the Indie Book Award, Commonwealth Book Prize, Russell Prize for Humour, Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and Aurealis Award. His mum and dad were foster parents. He grew up with more than 100 brothers and sisters, all aged under nine.
We Are All But Fumbling Creatures, Chad B. Anderson
Publisher: Burrow Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
From an unlikely band of runaways fleeing slavery, to a fractured family searching for answers amid a climate-ravaged future, Chad B. Anderson’s debut collection entwines short stories with mixed media artworks by Jeffrey D. Guinn. Inspired by the Southern Gothic tradition, We Are All But Fumbling Creatures explores the tangled impacts of history, geography, trauma, and the natural world on who we become and what we pass down.
Guinn’s assemblages – created from wood scraps, dirt, animal bones, and other detritus gathered throughout the Shenandoah Valley – contain their own stories that complement and converse with Anderson’s motifs of haunting echoes, half-buried truths, and the ghosts we carry even if we do not name them.
Chad B. Anderson has published fiction in Salamander Review, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Best American Short Stories 2017, Clockhouse, and Burrow Press Review. He curated and edited What’s Mine of Wilderness?, an anthology of poetry, prose, and art, published by Burrow Press in 2023. He has had residencies at the Carolyn Moore Writers House in Portland, Oregon, the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida, and Art Omi: Writers (formerly the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony). He has served as a production editor and a co-managing editor for Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, a guest editor for Burrow Press Review, and an associate fiction editor for Orison Books. Born and raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he earned his B.A. in American Studies and English from the University of Virginia and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where he served as fiction editor for Indiana Review. He lives in Michigan with 33 houseplants and counting.
Messes We Made, Mick Bennett
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Pushcart-nominated Mick Bennett’s characters deal with unexpected conflicts: a senior citizen tap dances his way into a hot date and a mugging, estranged young lovers unexpectedly reunite at a mental correctional facility, and a father nearly comes to blows with his nineteen-year-old son the night before the wedding. Stories appear in chronological sections—Maturing, Adulting, and Aging. In this eighteen-piece collection, Messes We Made captures both quiet victories and silent defeats.
Mick Bennett grew up in Belmar, New Jersey. He holds a BA from Gettysburg College and an MA in English from Shippensburg University. He taught high school and community college English for 33 years. Married 42 years with two grown children and a granddaughter, he is.the author of five novels, and his short fiction has been published for five straight decades.
DRYAD, Marcella Haddad
Publisher: Game Over Books
Publication Date: September 22, 2026
Format: Paperback
Dryad is a collection of short stories taking place in both our world & others, for readers who;
-have ever read a plaque in the Egyptian wing of The Met
-enjoy learning about new weird animals
-wonder what happens after we die
-have ever eaten something you’re not supposed to
-are tired of wedding planning
-read victorian epistolary novels at a formative age
-have ever been in a confusing lesbian friendship/enemyship
-feel alone in a big city
-like pears
Marcella Haddad (she/her) is the author of Sidewinder (Gateway Literary Press), Witch House (Ghost City Press), and A Portable Practice. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in Apparition Lit, Okay Donkey, Variant Literature, and others. She received her MFA from UMass Amherst and her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Her manuscript was selected as the winner of Gateway Literary Press’s Surrealist/Fabulist Novella contest. She teaches creative writing.
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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.”
“Through images of a familiar street, personal belongings, and a figure suspended in time, the poem considers absence, remembrance, and the quiet ways we continue searching for those who are gone.” Read two poems by Aardhra Chandran, our seventh, and final, biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Street View, 2021.”
Original Fiction: Aletheia by Kalliste Hardy
“Each fragment opens a door to the unsaid or the forgotten, letting language bruise and bloom. It is a study in red, in inheritance, in language, and of the quiet haunt of becoming.” Read the third, and final, original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Aletheia” by Kalliste Hardy.