Milo Todd‘s novel, The Lilac People (Counterpoint Press), a national best-seller, was named a Stonewall Honor Book and an American Library Association Notable Book. The Lilac People is the story of a trans man and his girlfriend who are ripped from their best lives by the ascent of Hitler, the Holocaust, and the subsequent liberation by the Allies…

If you’re a fan of short fiction and flash fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve read one of Yasmina Din Madden’s gorgeous, funny, harrowing stories. For years, I have been eagerly waiting for Yasmina’s debut collection You Know Nothing (Curbstone Press).  Yasmina and I first met at my first-ever AWP in Washington DC in 2017;…

There’s no requirement to read Nadia Staikos’s debut novel Until They Sleep (Guernica Editions) when you yourself are sleepless, but that’s what happened to me, opening the book in the middle of the night and instantly falling into its world. The writing is lush and lively, sending readers to a remote village in Greece full…

Miriam Gershow’s new novel, Closer (Regal House Publishing, June 2025) tracks the fallout from a racially charged incident at an Oregon high school. As students, teachers, counselors and families relate their experience of the consequences of racial intimidation, friendships and loyalties splinter and regroup, marriages fray, and more tragedy looms. The plot is fast paced…

Tom Comitta is that rare thing: an experimental writer whose experiments have been worth the effort. Call it collage, assemblage, found text, or literary supercut, Comitta’s last major work, The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023), wasn’t just the meeting point for hundreds of other authors’ sentences (though that it was) but an astonishingly seamless…

Joyce Hinnefeld and Gene Garber met in another century, when Hinnefeld was an English/Creative Writing Ph.D. student at the University at Albany. She took Garber’s fiction workshop along with an independent study on narrative theory, and when it was time to find a advisor for her dissertation, a novel, she mustered the courage to ask…

Hayden Casey’s first book, Show Me Where the Hurt Is (Split/Lip Press), opens with a quotation from Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband: “A wound gives off its own light/ surgeons say/ If all the lamps in this house were turned out/ you could dress this wound/ by what shines from it.” In the…

The only certainty in life is that death not only comes for us all, but it also comes for those we love. Grief is to be expected, yet our sorrows are often private affairs. Sometimes we lead ourselves out of the darkness. Sometimes the darkness swallows us. And sometimes we stumble upon a brother or…

Debbie Urbanski doesn’t want to be interviewed. That’s the first thing I notice when we ask Google to record and transcribe our conversation on a Wednesday afternoon in March. After the release of her first book, After World — a novel she began working on during the Obama administration, but did not release until after…

If you’re not already familiar with Josh Denslow, you should be. Denslow, author of the story collection Not Everyone is Special and the novel Super Normal, is a gifted chronicler of character-centered fiction that straddles the line between reality and fantasy.  You might find a unicorn in one of his stories, but the unicorn is…

Anu Kandikuppa’s debut story collection, The Confines (Veliz Books, 2025) takes a grimly absurd look at marriage, reimagining love, attraction, and the social conventions that bind human beings. In stories set in India and the United States, eccentric characters struggle to express themselves—through binge eating, hypochondria, yelling at a corpse, and even through bird poop. They…

These Worn Bodies (Moon City Press, Nov. 1, 2024) by Avitus B. Carle is collection of flash fiction that is wondrous in its form and its imagination. Bodies are deconstructed to discrete parts (boobs! orgasms!) or made of paper or popcorn. Flies are elevated to main characters. Agency is for everyone. Both societal and genre…