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. 

An explosive, breakout speculative thriller in which a powerful new metal arrives on Earth in the wake of a meteor shower, triggering a massive new "gold rush" in the Midwest and turning life as we know it on its head. The first of a cycle of novels set in a shared universe.

Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else. As she tries to parse what freedom means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it.

Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father. He never shows up, instead sending her an allowance, care of an older Lebanese man. As the week progresses, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and catastrophic affair, shattering her on the cusp of adulthood. A compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.

In these nine pieces, Beard investigates love and betrayal, grief and survival in the precise, searingly personal language for which she is beloved. These genre-defying works capture both the quietly luminous moments of daily existence and those of life-and-death decision, showing a pioneering author at the pinnacle of her talent.

These gripping stories find inspiration in news headlines about recent events. Ordinary people negotiate their tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. As a whole, the collection forms a troubling yet irresistible mirror of our time.