Essay by Rachel León • I met Nora Decter over Zoom when we were tasked to outline her forthcoming novel, What’s Not Mine. We were both fellows in Stony Brook University’s BookEnds program, paired to work together on our…
In The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland, Agata Izabela Brewer probes potent memories and delicacies from her Polish childhood in a home of maternal neglect and alcohol abuse. Expertly written and researched, with historical threads of Communism…
Debra Spark’s new novel, Discipline, spans decades and a diverse cast of characters, from art-world insiders to houseless teenagers. While, on the surface, the novel is a literary mystery about a missing trio of valuable paintings, Spark also compels…
On the settee, and smoking, Susan Dunn watches out the glass door to the yard, where one squirrel rapes another. She feels no need to stop it, hasn’t creased a brow or pursed a lip, and goes on smoking…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
I go to churches because they’re quiet. The world is too loud. The first time I went, I was hiding. I’d been paying for a flat white at the café near my old office when my ex-fiancé and his…
In celebration of the inaugural Novelette Print Prize, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler corresponded via email with Guest Judge Hanna Pylväinen, author of The End of Drum-Time. In the resulting interview below, they discuss choosing point of view, honoring…
Number one had cerulean blue eyes and haloed heat as we danced at Sadie Hawkins in our matching flannel shirts and he wandered night stairs and stars almost as stoned as his mother and strummed “Dust in the Wind”…
At her Berkeley kitchen table, Janet Goldberg runs her finger over mapped roads in the Sierras that lead to a region she has hiked for decades, terrain that forms the backdrop of her debut novel, The Proprietor’s Song. The…
Kate Brody and Nishita Parekh are debut authors who met on Instagram. They both released their first thrillers in January 2024 and have crossed paths in virtual events like the Penguin Random House Debut Mystery Panel. In the months…
