“So true to mixed experience, it feels defiant.” –Sofia Samatar, winner of the World Fantasy Award   In this timely and instantly notable fiction debut, Haris Durrani immerses readers in the life of a young American Muslim struggling to understand himself in the context of his family, classmates, and contemporary urban life. Engineering student Jihad, or “Joe” as he introduces himself in the confusing intersections of post 9/11 New York City, finds himself on a personal quest of possibly a spiritual nature, even if he isn’t sure that’s what it is – after all, it’s hard enough to keep halal in his Dominican-Pakistani-Muslim Washington Heights household. He’s surprised to find himself in the stories his Uncle Tomás tells of his own youth, stories in which Tomás fights both the devil and the weaknesses of the flesh – often at the same time. Culture, nation, religion, family, identity, race, and time battle for dominion over Jihad until he realizes he is facing the same demon his uncle claims to have defeated, and all Jihad has to fight with is himself. Durrani's stories, memoirs, and essays have appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The University of Toronto Undergraduate Journal of Middle East Studies, The 2014 Campbellian Anthology, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and The Best Teen Writing of 2012, 2011, and 2010. He writes for altMuslimah and has appeared regularly on John Hockenberry’s NPR show The Takeaway.

Technologies of the Self (Driftless Unsolicited Novella)

Literature & Fiction

Durrani, Haris A.

United States

Brain Mill Press

C. M. McKenna’s compelling voice has earned a devoted audience and multiple awards for her erotic fiction. Her page-turning literary debut, Badger, disturbs and titillates with the story of a recovering pill addict whose compulsive fascination with a Boston antihero spirals out of control. Nearly twelve months sober, Adrian Birch feels like a nobody. But when her wrist is broken in a hit-and-run accident, she’s avenged by the Badger, a secretive street vigilante. Instantly obsessed, Adrian takes to staging suicide and constructing chance meetings to get his attention. Their resulting affair is harsh and needy, wrought with McKenna’s signature dark eroticism—until the connection gets out of hand and ignites the violent passions of the city. Hailed for her “evocative,” “intense,” “realistic,” and “engrossing” stories by reviewers at Publisher’s Weekly, USA Today, and Romantic Times, McKenna now establishes herself as a rising star in neo-noir. Badger challenges the reader to imagine how an impulsive young man is killed, offering only the perspective of the fascinating and unreliable Adrian Birch.

Badger

McKenna, C. M.

Literary

“So true to mixed experience, it feels defiant.” –Sofia Samatar, winner of the World Fantasy Award In this timely and instantly notable fiction debut, Haris Durrani immerses readers in the life of a young American Muslim struggling to understand himself in the context of his family, classmates, and contemporary urban life. Engineering student Jihad, or “Joe” as he introduces himself in the confusing intersections of post 9/11 New York City, finds himself on a personal quest of possibly a spiritual nature, even if he isn’t sure that’s what it is – after all, it’s hard enough to keep halal in his Dominican-Pakistani-Muslim Washington Heights household. He’s surprised to find himself in the stories his Uncle Tomás tells of his own youth, stories in which Tomás fights both the devil and the weaknesses of the flesh – often at the same time. Culture, nation, religion, family, identity, race, and time battle for dominion over Jihad until he realizes he is facing the same demon his uncle claims to have defeated, and all Jihad has to fight with is himself. Durrani's stories, memoirs, and essays have appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The University of Toronto Undergraduate Journal of Middle East Studies, The 2014 Campbellian Anthology, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and The Best Teen Writing of 2012, 2011, and 2010. He writes for altMuslimah and has appeared regularly on John Hockenberry’s NPR show The Takeaway.

Technologies of the Self (Driftless Unsolicited Novella Series)

This is life. After summer, the green leaves always change colors and fall off the trees. Dogs die, no matter how much you love them. Land is sold, even if you used to tell yourself you were going to die on the property. And people get old. Even me. Ellie Davenport has watched the same valley change with the seasons since she was a child. A sharp and intelligent woman, she's enjoyed a stellar professional career, a full love life featuring interesting men, and a small but loving circle of family and friends. Now she’s on the other side of the valley, retired, alone, and the view is much different. She wants to believe that it’s just as beautiful from this side, looking back at her life, but the self-sufficient resiliency she’s always depended on to keep her path straight and people at arm’s length isn’t as reliable in the crowded and socially uncomfortable microcosm of assisted living. The discovery that her old work rival, Dave Andrews, is just down the hall, just as annoyingly handsome, and keeps showing up on her daily hike is most definitely a disaster and not at all interesting. I would have thought that, living as long as he has, some of that arrogance would have been burned off through the fires of life, but evidently it hasn’t been. He’s still the same jackass who showed up in my office one day and told me my budget for periodicals would be cut in half starting immediately. Dave isn’t just the same as he always was. Loss has a way of moving into the the heart and changing people. Except — sometimes a long walk with a smart woman can show you just how much room you still have left for love. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it, but telling yourself there’s nothing to hope for doesn’t ever work. We’re human beings, after all. Hope is what we do.

Late Fall

Adams, Noelle

Contemporary

If you look for yourself in the past and see nothing, how do you know who you are? How do you know that you are supposed to be here? When Wyatt brings an unidentified photograph to the local historical society, he hopes staff historian Grayson will tell him more about the people in the picture. The subjects in the mysterious photograph sit side by side, their hands close but not touching. One is dark, the other fair. Both wear men’s suits. Were they friends? Lovers? Business partners? Curiosity drives Grayson and Wyatt to dig deep for information, and the more they learn, the more they begin to wonder — about the photograph, and about themselves. Grayson has lost his way. He misses the family and friends who anchored him before his transition and the confidence that drove him as a high-achieving graduate student. Wyatt lives in a similar limbo, caring for an ill mother, worrying about money, unsure how and when he might be able to express his nonbinary gender publicly. The growing attraction between Wyatt and Grayson is terrifying — and incredibly exciting. As Grayson and Wyatt discover the power of love to provide them with safety and comfort in the present, they find new ways to write the unwritten history of their own lives and the lives of people like them. With sympathy and cutting insight, Ottoman offers a tour de force exploration of contemporary trans identity.

Documenting Light (Hellum and Neal LGBTQIA+ Literature)

Ottoman, EE

Genre Fiction

The Mathematics of Change breaks open and breaks down the equation of midlife, proving balance is imaginary and change the only possible solution. The aching and terrible excitement of Carol’s affair with her graduate school professor has settled, fifteen years later, into the frustrated complacency of faculty wife responsibilities and motherhood. Carol wants more, but can’t have more. She can’t have as much, surely, as her best friend, the painfully enigmatic Mitch, who keeps their long-ago erotic relationship irritatingly compartmentalized and spends too much time in her secret lair of an engineering lab. She can’t have what the gorgeous new faculty member Abby has — a publishing career, slinky dresses, and a way of prying out vulnerable and damaging confessions from even causal acquaintances. Mitch knows Carol wants more, but she also knows it can’t come from her. She’s grappling with the terror that comes from knowing she could have everything. Her lab is on the verge of a breakthrough, and then there’s Reginald: warm, funny, British, impossibly long-distance, compelling. Except, she’s not really talking to Reginald, unless she can’t help it. Meanwhile, Carol is talking to her too much and desperately yanking their past out of the mothballs, and Abby’s primary scholarship seems to be predatory and tempting advances. Mitch could have more than she ever thought possible, but she can’t work out the math. A darkly witty debut novel from the recipient of the 2017 Al-Simak Award for Fiction from Arcturus and The Chicago Review of Books.

The Mathematics of Change (The Hellum and Neal Series in LGBTQIA+ Literature)

Kabak, Amanda

“Maybe my map will help a little. If only to comfort, to say: someone else visited this place; someone else survived to make this map.” When Sarah Hahn Campbell learned of the sudden and inexplicable death of her partner, Lia, she was thousands of miles away from the Alaska town where they made a life together. Lia's mental deterioration had forced her to flee to protect her daughter’s safety and her own emotional well-being — but she never stopped loving Lia, never believed their relationship over. The unexpected news of Lia's death plunged her into terrible grief, guilt, and self-doubt, raising painful questions she couldn’t find the answers to. Grief Map is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of the aftermath, a lyrical guide to her journey in the landscape of love through loss and beyond, to the rediscovery of hope and the possibility of happiness. With passion and fearless dedication, Campbell explores the history of her relationship, her discovery of lesbian identity, and the innumerable gifts and hardships of love to offer an account that is part memoir, part poetry, part elegy — a map that is universal, and will speak to anyone who has loved.

Grief Map (The Hellum and Neal Series in LGBTQIA+ Literature)

Campbell, Sarah Hahn

Poetry

She is Hettie Alabama — unlikely, scarred, single-minded, and blood bound to a revolver forged by a demon. The first book in an epic, magic-clad series featuring the Wild West reimagined as a crosscultural stereoscope of interdimensional magic and hardship, The Devil’s Revolver opens with a shooting competition and takes off across the landscape after a brutal double murder and kidnapping — to which revenge is the only answer. Hettie Alabama, only seventeen years old, leads her crew of underdogs with her father’s cursed revolver, magicked to take a year off her life each time she fires it. It’s no way for a ranch girl to grow up, but grow up she does, her scars and determination to rescue her vulnerable younger sister deepening with every year of life she loses. A sweeping and high-stakes saga that gilds familiar Western adventure with powerful magic and panoramic fantasy, The Devil’s Revolver is the last word and the blackest hat in the Weird West. "Features vivacious characters with tricks up their sleeves." —Publishers Weekly "Immensely readable, gritty, and sharp as a spur rowel, THE DEVIL'S REVOLVER is a western with a twist." —Deanna Raybourn, New York Times bestselling author of the Julia Grey novels "The Devil's Revolver is a riveting ride that mixes the grit of Westerns with the world of magic. McGrath loads this fantastic story with action, suspense, adventure and unforgettable characters. You'll definitely want to pull the trigger." —Wynne Channing

The Devil's Revolver (The Devil's Revolver Series)

McGrath, V. S.

Bare Lit

Bhanot, Kavita

Short Stories & Anthologies

"A nuanced and sexy take on growing up and learning to accept who you are." —Teen Vogue Nick Melnikov doesn’t know where he belongs. He was just a kid when his Russian-Jewish family immigrated to Michigan. Now he’s in London for university, overwhelmed by unexpected memories. Socially anxious, intensely private, and closeted, Nick doesn’t expect to fall in so quickly with a tight-knit group of students from his college, and it’s both exhilarating and scary. Hanging out with them is a roller coaster of serious awkward and incredible longing, especially when the most intimidating of the group, Dex, looks his way. Dex Cartwell knows exactly who he is: a black queer guy who doesn’t give a toss what anybody thinks of him. He is absolutely, one-hundred-percent, totally in control of his life. Apart, maybe, from the stress of his family’s abrupt move to an affluent, largely white town. And worrying about his younger brother feeling increasingly isolated as a result. And the persistent broken heart he’s been nursing for a while . . . When Nick and Dex meet, both find themselves intrigued. Countless late-night conversations only sharpen their attraction. But the last thing Nick wants is to face his deepest secret, and the last thing Dex needs is another heartache. Dex has had to fight too hard for his right to be where he is. Nick isn’t even sure where he’s from. So how can either of them tell where this is going? A master of building tender and meaningful characters with heartbreaking stakes, Liz Jacobs deftly introduces audiences to the compelling, deeply personal narratives possible in coming-of-age and New Adult romance. ABROAD is an instant classic that approaches LGBTQIA+ and immigrant experiences from a powerful own-voices perspective.

Abroad: Book One (The Hellum and Neal Series in LGBTQIA+ Literature)

Romance

Jacobs, Liz

Multicultural & Interracial

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