Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings for the previous month are published at the end of each month. This post contains information about prose chapbooks that we know about published during June 2026.
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.
Sand and Gravel Press
Survival Skills, Elizabeth Rosen
In Survival Skills, Elizabeth Rosen’s richly varied chapbook of flash fiction and short stories, characters push and pull against each other, flee, and do whatever it takes to get by. Two sisters—one who survived abuse in the family—pack up their deceased parents’ home and decide if there’s anything left worth keeping. A high school senior smokes a joint on the dock with his younger brother and the two young men lament their uncertain futures. In the title story, a woman seeks casual sex in order to survive the grief and uncertainty caused by her husband’s debilitating stroke. Beloved pets die, bodies bruise, and nobody makes it out unscathed. In these seven stories—often surprising, sometimes harrowing, but always rendered in Elizabeth Rosen’s confident, exacting prose—we’re reminded of what it means to be human.
IKE: A Publishing Project
The Fourth Man, Bryan Hurt
The first three men on the moon return to parades, book deals, and instant mythmaking. But the fourth? He steps onto the lunar surface only minutes later and finds himself erased before he even gets home. What follows is a wry, unsettling portrait of a man watching his own legacy evaporate in real time.
Bryan Hurt turns the machinery of fame inside out, exposing how quickly collective memory calcifies—and how arbitrary the line is between the celebrated and the invisible. Part satire, part elegy, The Fourth Man lingers with its quiet ache, reminding us that history is less a record than a spotlight, and someone is always standing just outside its beam.
YesYes Books
The Only Way Out Is Through: Essays, Katie Jean Shinkle
“Katie Jean Shinkle’s The Only Way Out Is Through is a contemplation on ‘ghost-time,’ the pasts we erase, but which remain nonetheless, which persist. It tells a story of a breakup, or rather a story of multiple breakages, severances between / within self and other, intimacy, love, care—a story that repeatedly opens and closes on the possibility of change, of renewal, much like the process of living itself.” —thirii myo kyaw myint, Names for Light: A Family History
Bottlecap Press
Ghost in the Rain: Stories, Matthew Jakubowski
In these 12 microfictions and flash stories, Matthew Jakubowski traces a terrain of otherworldly-ness populated by lost ghosts, haunted lovers, immortal siblings, amorous trees, and undead pandemic parents, each reflecting a facet of our changing world’s natural beauty.
Rich with gothic humor, surreal flourishes, and poetic fracturing, these stories address mortality and vulnerability with a steady belief in the mess of human intimacy, the risks and value in the eternally creative act of loving wildly and unconditionally.
With Ghost in the Rain, we see the elusive moments in life refusing to vanish, enduring the elements of our world and our hearts, gaining greater meaning to move us closer to the core of who we each are and who we are meant to be.
Such Late Night Radio: Stories, Travis Flatt
Such Late Night Radio is a collection of flash fiction stories that delve into the odd. The weirdness that drifts somewhere beyond your bedtime. That threatens to keep you up at night, tuned in, transfixed. Turn the volume down low, huddle around, and dim the lights. Cozy up with a blanket and some snacks. You might laugh, you might sniffle, you might whisper, “Oh, dang.”
These six flash fictions transport the reader from their couch, coffee shop, airplane, or wherever, and whisk them away to exotic locales and far-flung, bizarre lands. Bucket list places like grocery stores, hiking trails, basketball courts, or the dump. So go ahead and call in sick for work, because tonight, fist full of marshmallowy cereal, you’re going to tell bed to wait; you’ll say, “ Okay, okay—but, just one more episode,” of Such Late Night Radio.
Don’t see a prose chapbook published between 6/1 and 6/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”
ADHD in a Non-ADHD World: on Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
“[Hurwitz] shares moments of angst and moments of awe. More than that, there are moments of deep recognition. She sees herself in [her sons] and, in fact, receives a later-life ADHD diagnosis of her own.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor, Nancy Murphy.
“The woman’s head & hair are lavishly dressed. I probably leapt off the logic of the hairdresser being blind and therefore had to work on the head/body/mind rather than just hair as a surface issue of presentation.” Read two poems by Irene Cunningham, our third biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Blind Hairdresser.”
Flash Fiction: Nova by Kimmy Chang
“‘Nova’ is a lyrical second-person story about the narrator’s first true encounter with death…the story presents loss not as beautiful in itself, but as the place where beauty begins.” Read the first original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Nova” by Kimmy Chang.