NINETEEN - Angela Boyd
Three generations of a multiethnic, working-class family are each 19 years old, wrestling with events and decisions that will determine the course of their lives. They are on the brink of seismic change as America is also – of the 60s, the Reagan era, a post-9/11 world, a country without Roe.
"Today is Amanda’s last day at home before beginning her sophomore year at Gilman. Gilman, a near-Ivy – Amanda’s confidence shook before she could mail the Yale application – is bricked and austere, its buildings consecrated for presidents and billionaires, one of whom has funded her tuition. She has nearly flunked out but no one knows this."
Bio: Angela Boyd (she/her) is a Mexican-American writer from Wichita. Her work has been supported by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Bread Loaf, and the Macondo Writers Workshop. Angela is fiction editor at The Rumpus and writes the Literary Citizen newsletter, where literature and politics meet.
LIFE WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS - Adam Ryan
Set in post-9/11 New York, Life Without Instructions follows Charlie Devine as he struggles with death, addiction, dead-end jobs, and failed relationships. When he falls for his late friend's girlfriend, he faces a crucial decision: enter the real-world as slick and bewildered as a newborn, or surrender to the depraved abyss. A melancholic and darkly humorous coming-of-age story.
“Sometimes when you black out and come to it’s as routine as flicking on a light switch. And sometimes when you black out and come to, you’re standing on the northwest corner of Perry and Hudson Street covered in blood, smoking a cigarette with a homeless man.”
Bio: Adam Ryan (he/him) has been published by several pop-culture websites that are now defunct (not his fault). In January, he lost his job (also not his fault), and now spends his days trying to write the next chapter of his professional career. He enjoys life with his wife, children, mutts, and scratching that relentless itch to put pen to paper. (Instagram: @arrwriting)
THE CALIFORNIA STORIES - Tracy Haught
The California Stories: Sleepless nights. Squat houses. Shady motels. Surprising connections. One eye always open. Two young women on the streets of California, crushing stratospheric highs and cavernous lows as they sink further into addiction, running from one trauma into the next, during the last vestiges of early nineties Grateful Dead counterculture.
"At fifteen, Story had already been to rehab three times. Expelled from her high school because of the sixty-five days she’d spent in rehab, in addition to all the days she’d skipped school, she had to enroll in a small, alternative high school for misfit kids."
Bio: Just turned sixteen, with a change of clothes, $37 dollars, and a copy of On the Road in her backpack, Tracy Haught (she/her) left home to follow the Grateful Dead. That was 1991; she never went back. Read her stories in Barzakh, Isele, The Lumiere Review, SLAB, Sugar Mule, and elsewhere.
EDISON - Pallavi Dixit
Edison is the story of Prem, a gas-station attendant who must earn $1 million before his true love’s father will allow them to marry. It’s a Bollywood-style love story brimming with song, dance, action, comedy, a love-triangle, an angry parent, an evil villain, and cameos by real stars – a typical masala film in the guise of literary fiction.
“Before leaving, Amitabh Bachchan pulled his wallet from the pocket of his impossibly long, white slacks. “For you to add upon,” he said and presented Prem with a stiff dollar bill on which he scribbled his signature before handing it over. In that instant, with an Amitabh Bachchan dollar in his hand, Prem was overcome with the suddenly renewed possibility of building himself into someone in this country, a man worthy of Leena Engineer, a man of action, an entrepreneur, a success story, a suitable boy, a viable suitor, an extraordinary immigrant in a town of immigrants, a visionary, a husband, a real American hero.”
Bio: Pallavi Sharma Dixit’s (she/her) work has been supported by the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Program, Intermedia Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, and the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program. She is a winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Pages in Progress contest and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, two children and dog, Tiffin.
MOLDED BLUE - Julian Iralu
Homeschooled sisters Chess, Mariposa and Lu Nil live in an isolated desert ghost town hiding a secret: their skin festers with miniature psychedelic mushrooms that their parents sell for profit. As her physical and mental health declines, Lu attempts escape to the nearest city, leaving her beloved sisters behind.
“They will come armed with letter openers and potato peelers and scrape my sister's mold off her back like slivers of artichokes. They will smoke her mold in bongs and pipes or season it with dill and lime, chewing long strips like dried jerky.”
Bio: Julian Iralu (she/her) is Naga-American from the Angami Meyase clan in Nagaland India. She was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, 2022 Gish Jen Writers’ Room of Boston Fellow, and a 2020 GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in Mixed Asian Media.
CITIES OF REFUGE - Tanya Rey
Cities of Refuge centers on a young Cuban-American man wanted for murder in 1995 Miami, and the mother and sister who must wade through the family’s troubled past to find him.
"They hear it coming down the long hallway leading to the warehouse. It’s the same hallway the children had been led through, blind to their fate, when one of their mother’s new friends from the botanica—a woman with eyebrows penciled into upside down Vs—had taken them by the hand and told them they were participating in something special for their mother. A party, she said with her whole face. The most beautiful, funnest party they could ever imagine."
Bio: Tanya Rey (she/her) is a queer Cuban-American writer based in Oakland, CA. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Granta, The Sun, The Georgia Review, Roads & Kingdoms, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Catapult, among others. www.tanya-rey.com
THE RUSTICATED - Lu Han
The Rusticated is the story of Ling, a young girl in Northeast China during the Cultural Revolution. Strong-willed and resourceful, Ling navigates a violent childhood, brutal work conditions, and rapidly shifting political winds. When her younger sister is radicalized, her greatest threat is now the person she sought most to protect. This is a story of family and finding meaning in one the darkest periods of human history.
"The smile Ling wrestled earlier from her sister had long faded. Lan’s lips were dry, her cheeks tender and salt-streaked in the moonlight. Ling wrenched her eyes away from her sister’s face, so small and perfectly oval. There was nothing she could do for her now."
Bio: Lu Han (she/her) is a Chinese-American writer based in New York. Her work highlights the undervoiced through fiction and nonfiction, and can be found in The Margins, Lost Balloon, HAD, The Jarnal, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from Lewis Latimer House Museum and Guernica. Find more at www.helloluhan.com
SUBTRACTION - Kirk Wilson
Subtraction is a story told by the Holy Ghost of Time. Billy Nugget and his love Dolores, accompanied by her dead twin Saint Deborah, embark on a road trip across 1950’s America, where old gods are being replaced by new gods.
“Atomic Age, now. The highways are long and smooth, the bridges bright and new, and Billy’s lives are happening. In Life 1, teachers taught Billy to turtle down under his school desk, so the Bomb couldn’t find him. He lived then inside a sagging house on the outskirts of the Age, with his mother and his father and the Holy Ghost of Time.”
Bio: Kirk Wilson’s (he/him) books include the story collection OUT OF SEASON, the poetry collection SONGBOX, and the poetry chapbook THE EARLY WORD. Kirk’s work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. His awards include an NEA Fellowship and prizes in fiction,nonfiction, and poetry. Kirk’s website is www.KirkWilsonBooks.com
THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT LOVE - Katherine Hurst
Things They Don’t Tell You About Love captures the moment Frieda Weekley elopes with the writer D.H. Lawrence, not realising she may never see her children again. As his affection becomes increasingly coercive, she steps from his shadow to tell her story.
“They say it’s the easiest way, drowning, the easiest way of ending it all. There’s a point at which nothing seems to matter; when life’s scaffolding tilts and creaks and crumbles, and all the pain is smoothed away. It’s not quick, but it’s gentler than leaning into the wind at the cliff edge and seeing the sharp crags rush up to meet you with the sudden sound of skull on stone, cleaner than a blade drawn crimson across a wrist.”
Bio: Katherine Hurst (she/her) is a freelance journalist specialising in homes and interiors. She has a BA and DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford where she was also employed as a non-stipendiary lecturer. Earlier this year, she graduated with an MA in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Bath Spa.
MAYBE, PROBABLY - Scott Hunter
Coming of age in the summer of 1985, Benjamin flees New York for Japan, trying to salvage his academic career and escape AIDS. He doesn’t imagine falling in love, finding friendship, and reckoning with his idea that love and death are intertwined.
“You reached to shake hands as I bowed, which was awkward, and I took you in: you in your high-water khaki trousers, tight; sockless in your black penny loafers, shined; your motorcycle jacket open, leather sleeve straps flapping their buckles; your side-parted hair flopped down not quite blocking the chisel of your cheekbones, two perfect ruddy squares, as if someone had faintly marked you with a fat kanji brush dipped lightly in blood.”
Bio: Scott Hunter’s (he/him) short fiction has appeared in Hong Kong Review, Kyoto Journal, Blood Orange Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Maybe, Probably is his first novel. A 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers fellow, he studies and teaches at the Writers Studio in New York.