In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance, and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human.

Enter a world where time stands still and summer never ends. In the enchanted town of Tannery Bay, it’s July 37, and then July 2 again, but the year is a mystery. Trapped in an eternal loop, the residents embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, unity, and defiance against the forces that seek to divide them.

April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, Dan and Isabel are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—and with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

It is the Fourth of July 2019, and the Mason family is gathering for its annual celebration at the family’s historic Chesapeake farm, Mason’s Retreat. Once again, Harry Mason has once again goaded his wife, Kate, and their children into participating. Their oldest, Rosalie, is having trouble with her marriage; the youngest, Ethan, is in the throes of a fitful first relationship. In between, Eleanor despairs over her stalled novel. Kate, recovering from a second round of chemotherapy, is at the center of this ritual of remembrance. Tart and candid, she asks her husband, “What crimes against humanity did your family not commit on this farm?” And so it happens that when the family, joined by a cast of neighbors and cousins from France, sits down for dinner, the question of how they should regard their past comes to the fore.

From a tiny volcanic island, a biologist obsessed with saving coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband. Intellectually precocious and moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her schoolteacher stepmother, Kate, together into near total isolation. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia—and questions her own ability to become a mother—one of her sixteen-year-old students, Athyna, is already caring for a toddler full time and finding herself more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave. When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. 

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkelanimates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Set in November 1918 on the opulent, castle-like island estate of an eccentric millionaire, Claude Arkel, this atmospheric, compellingly readable novel reimagines the life of Anna Filing Fort―whose husband, Charles Hoy Fort, was the most famous “anomalist” of the early twentieth century. Settling in as guests on Prosper Island, the young couple find themselves quarantined in a shabby outpost far from Mr. Arkel’s mansion―from which, they learn, three girls have gone missing. After she encounters a figure in the woods that may be the ghost of her long-lost friend Mary, Anna resolves to find out who Mr. Arkel really is, and what has become of the missing girls.

American women―American wives―have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. In Saigon in 1963, Tricia and Charlene form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering as they do how their own lives as women on the periphery have been shaped and burdened by America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.

In 2001, a few months after the death of her husband, Angela is devastated when she is ejected from her graduate program in linguistics. The young widow and her four-year-old child move into her mother’s house, and Angela finds underpaid work at the Center, a fledgling organization utilizing an experimental therapy aimed at helping nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. Angela begins to work closely with Sam, a twenty-eight-year-old patient, and their relationship soon turns intimate. When Sam’s family discovers their relationship, they intervene and bring charges. As Angela tells her story from prison, we are plunged into the inner workings of her mind as she rejects all else in pursuit of a more profound understanding of language and humanity.