The Foundling by Amy Meitz begins in 1978 Detroit, where nine-year-old Sunny Berry has spent years hidden inside a failing apartment. Her mother, Roxanne, insists the child she once loved has been replaced by something evil. Hungry and cut off from the outside world, Sunny...

Jean Thesquare’s second book, Re: Claim: A Sultryverse Story, introduces eighteen-year-old Parisian heiress Manon de Rochemaure, who fights off an attempted assault from a classmate, only to watch the elite school side with him. She is exiled to Le Rolle Academy in Switzerland under the...

Catherine Marshall-Smith’s The Resilience of Red Thread follows twenty-one-year-old Emily Miller, who finally musters up the courage to leave her abusive husband, Lee. Lee keeps violating his restraining order, and when a hornet’s nest threatens Emily’s home, she hires an exterminator named Jake Clayton, a...

The House That Fire Built by Kirk Glaser is a collection of narrative poems that tells a story about family trauma. It follows a man who inherits his father’s house and moves in with his wife and daughter. His father died of cancer and left...

No One Sleeps by Townsend Walker is a thought-provoking collection of short fiction. ‘Nessun Dorma’, the first of the twenty works in this anthology, personifies suicidal thoughts in a way that forces you to ponder the meaning of life. The following entry, ‘As Ye Sow,'...

A Body Made of Shadows by Joseph Miguel is a jarring collection of poems and dark art that really digs into the rot of modern life. The author writes with a nervous, frantic energy, almost like a midnight journal someone pulled out of a burning...

Lawrence E. Maynard’s Inevitable: Democracy's Demise offers an alternative history that opens in 1972 when Nixon’s aide, Nicholas Matthews, adopts an infant girl, Yi Nuo, on a historic trip to China. He is unaware that the child is Mao Zedong's secret daughter and that her...

The Baggers by James Hale is a story about the gangs in Saint Albans, Kanawha County. The streets of Saint Albans are ruled by the Baggers, most of whose members are young adults who commit theft and other petty crimes. An older generation of scavengers...

What does a community’s struggle for justice reveal about the courage in each of us? In David R. Yale’s Getting Back Our Stolen Bootstraps, the citizens of Shingle Creek, known as the Creekers, are organizing to reclaim their rights. Paul Makinen, their leader and community...

Kritanut Wattana’s After Us follows Owen, a programmer living in a near-future where artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life. Recently laid off and separated from Jordana and their child, Rowan, Owen is alone in his apartment when every screen delivers the same order:...