The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.

The third and final book in Percy’s innovative and acclaimed Comet Cycle, The Sky Vault follows the aftermath of an airplane that goes missing over Fairbanks, Alaska, in the wake of the comet, and a teenager’s search for answers about his father's final moments aboard the flight.

A collection of short stories told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, exploring desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. Five Tuesdays in Winter showcases Lily King’s spare and stunning prose and gift for creating lasting and treasured characters.

To his neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding furniture salesman making a decent life for himself and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Harlem Shuffle is a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem.

By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual, and social crosscurrents of the past fifty years.

A collection of whimsical, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables that take the gloom and melancholy of our political moment and find subversive solace by overturning the protocols of tale-telling. The adventures in The Cheerful Scapegoat cross a comedy of manners with a Sadean orgy, and language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles slapstick and vertigo. These stories take the tchotchkes of queer culture—codes and signifiers—scrambles them together, and blows them up into an improbable soufflé.

A transgressive, foulmouthed, and brutally funny spiral into the imperfect lives of queer men desperately fighting the urge to self-sabotage. As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure—from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama—Purnell's characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it—or perhaps because of it—they shine.

The second novel in The Comet Cycle, a grippingly original sci-fi series in which a passing comet has caused irreversible change to the growth of fungi, spawning a dangerous, invasive species in the Pacific Northwest that threatens to control the lives of humans and animals alike.

Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on leave. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along, and his sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case. The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal—sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers—and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt delivers a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling story of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

The stories in Said Sayrafiezadeh’s new collection are set in a contemporary America full of people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, death of a mother, loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, invisible economic and political forces. Searing, intimate, slyly funny, and marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times.