This is a story of belonging as lifelong friendships continue to mature. In The Gray New Deal by Miriam Kuznets, Barry owns West House, where he and his family reunite. Doris, Ellen, Jane, Pearl, Tomas, Vihaan, and Barry have been friends since college, and now,...

The Attenuating Puritan by Robert McGuiness is a work of satire that makes the reader wince, or at times laugh somewhat uncomfortably at the state of mental illness, industrial contaminants, and other factors affecting modern day America. A man who has likely suffered from bipolar...

As Human of the Year by Beka Wueste begins, it’s been 20 years since Matt Keegan has seen the outside world. It is now time for him to come home from prison, and his sister, Jenny, is eagerly awaiting his release. Jenny was a young...

Some people hit rock bottom. In Alaskan Humble Pie by Natasha Von Imhof, rock star Ryder Hartley hits it on stage, in front of a crowd, blanking out on the words of his own lyrics. He flees the stage only to run straight into a...

Eric Bush’s The Meaning of Androsia is an epic odyssey that follows Ilya Erynovich Koskayin, also known throughout his two-thousand-year-old life by thirty different names. He wakes up in a train station with no memory, yet his instinct brings back skills and knowledge that can...

Ken Wall’s Bathing With JFK centers on Austin Grant, a Houston lawyer who once found his model for greatness in a John F. Kennedy biography that he read in the bathtub before graduation. Ten years later, Austin is trapped in legal work that has given...

Glenscott Thomas Copper’s Angels Dance on the Head of a Pin follows Scott Rankin, a small red-haired Catholic boy from 1962 La Crosse, after his family’s breakup pushes him from St. John’s parish school toward Chicago. Scott wants to become the priest his Italian grandmother...

The Adventures of Kimo by Eric A. Javier captures the feeling of being a young child desperate to escape a mundane afternoon. Kimo is stuck at home because a thick fog has blanketed the California coast, ending any chance of his going to the beach....

Annie Dike crafts a story about what remains when the ground gives way in this big-hearted saga of trauma and grit. Clovis tells the story of Calliope “Callie” Potts, which begins with a prologue in which her brother Jude’s little sandcastle washes away in the...

Martha Conway’s novel, We Meet Apart, is a deeply haunting historical novel interwoven with intriguing speculative fiction and supernatural elements. The story, set in 1940 during WWII, has two concurrent timelines. In one timeline, Ireland is a free, neutral country. In a second timeline, the...