In a basement apartment beneath an abandoned candy factory lives an unnamed Florida man and his roommate, Will, a stand-up comedian. After discovering Will can cook gourmet meals - though only while blackout drunk on tequila - the two begin a restaurant business, employing the audience members who regularly attend Will's sets. Things immediately start to get weird. Household appliances gain sentience and develop feelings; Tampa's water system becomes tainted with psychotropics; Will keeps disappearing and reappearing, and starts going kind of mad with power; and a cult run by a man who looks like Santa may or may not be orchestrating everything from a motel in St. Petersburg.Through it all, our Florida man keeps getting distracted by arcade games and his own thoughts.

What's On the Menu?

Humor & Entertainment

Griffin, Chase

Humor

Long Day Press

Senator Minotaur is proof of the unexplainable and a candidate to become the next president of the United States. Senator Minotaur believes we must cleave in twain the obstacles impeding our nation's security, cleave them like a sharp axe to wood. A Greek scholar and an avid swimmer, Senator Minotaur resides in Florida with his wife and their soon-to-be adopted son; an orphan himself, Senator Minotaur is unshakably committed to literacy programs and education funding for children under protection of the state. Please do not try to shake his hand. Likewise, Senator Minotaur's stances on gun control, marriage, and the importance of water conservation to our economy are unambiguous, and he politely asks that you do not ask him to repeat or clarify his stances. Senator Minotaur believes in Florida and God, and is softly but firmly asking for your vote.

On the Campaign Trail

Literature & Fiction

Bradley, J.

Literary

Years after an accident that kills her college roommate and leaves her disfigured, Whimsy is still struggling to live with a face that betrays the traumas of her past.Whimsy is a 7th grade teacher in Metro Detroit; her insecurities are compounded by her students, who never pass up a chance to humiliate her. However, when Whimsy meets Rikesh, a journalist who writes a human interest piece about her crash, she finally feels happiness is possible. Though he is emotionally unavailable, Whimsy is stuck on pursuing Rikesh, and they use one another to project what they lack. As she struggles with self-doubt in their courtship, at work, and in her friendships, she considers the ways her own perceptions of her physical appearance have shaped her reality."Whimsy is lonesome and poignant, and even a bit funny, too. Shannon McLeod has written a moving, authentic portrait of a young woman at the start of her adult life, wrestling with its unfairness and unease. McLeod's heroine longs to be seen fully, and with compassion, but can't yet see herself that way, and it's compelling to watch her move through the world."- Edan Lepucki, New York Times Bestselling Author of California and Woman No. 17"Shannon McLeod's writing is funny, raw, and ultimately intimate and tender."- Bryan Hurt, author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France"In her tough and surprising debut novella, Shannon McLeod makes her nuanced observations feel inevitable. With steady restraint and immaculate pacing, rendered in only the simplest of strokes, it builds and builds to finally rupture so much greater than the sum of its parts."- Tim Kinsella, author of Sunshine on an Open Tomb"The women in Shannon McLeod's debut story collection, Whimsy, are reminiscent of the women in Mary Miller's Big World and Roxane Gay's Difficult Women; young American women navigating a new world of female aloneness and autonomy, an aloneness in turns empowering and dizzying, battling society and men and themselves for feelings of self-worth and deservedness, battling the stillness of autonomy."- Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a: a novel

Whimsy: a novella

McLeod, Shannon

In the world of Love Stories, the seams of reality have been subtly loosened. Anteater professors battle impostor syndrome, trains search for soulmates, and men grow taller and taller until their heads scrape the stars. A frustrated young couple resorts to communicating only through the exchange of exotic fruit, until guava is all that matters. An astronaut touches down on a foreign planet, only to realize that the alien world mirrors Earth. Brouckaert, in this singularly imaginative debut collection, evokes a universal yearning, a raw desire, a pang of nostalgia, an ache in your chest that comes when you find yourself cleaved from your lover, from your people, from the place you call home.

Love Stories: And Other Love Stories

Brouckaert, Justin

Burnt Sienna

Bohnsack, Joshua

Short Stories & Anthologies

The Everys are a family just the same as any other. Bailey kisses corporate ass for a paycheck; Nicky does extracurriculars and feels wary of popularity; Reese and Val have marital issues. In fact, the four of them are so much like every other family that they have no specific race or gender. Their heads are also shaped like... well, shapes: circle, star, triangle, square. Or wait, does that last bit make them odd? And if it does, what does sameness even mean? A pilot episode in print, The Everys is both an ode to and a satirization of all the familial sitcoms saying the same thing: that our struggles are universally human and also totally unique, just like each of us (at least we think we are?).

The Everys

Lee, Cody

Dramas & Plays

In the midst of a water shortage, a mango vendor weighs her sexual desire for a taxi driver against wanting to bathe first. Protesting an illegal extradition, two like-minded student activists march on Honduras's U.S. embassy but find themselves drifting apart in more complicated ways. And as flooding and hunger threaten the safety of his family, a father continues to strike against the United Fruit Company. Set against political and environmental turmoil in Honduras over the scope of more than half a century, the stories in Rain Revolutions mark the beginnings of a promising young Honduran writer.\n﻿"Rain Revolutions is a minor miracle. In three important stories, Bessie Flores Zaldívar connects the dots between individual characters and the failures of the systems that define the parameters of their agency. National infrastructure, poverty, imperialism-these massive forces constrain the characters' lives, but not their hearts. Watch out for Zaldívar; I can't wait to see what she does next." 
- Matthew Salesses, 
author of Craft in the Real World\n"Rain Revolutions is a book about soft drizzles that turn to downpours. This is a literal and figurative lluvia that converts puddles to torrents washing over busied Tegucigalpa streets, over political murals calling for freedom and peace, and accumulate into apocalyptic floodwaters that deliver life and death to our posterity. After the stories' aguaceros, the ground hardens with truth and life, hope for better futures." 
- Ayendy Bonifacio 
from the foreword

Rain Revolutions

Zaldívar, Bessie F

Beginning with a heroic couplet found inside a fortune cookie and ending with the novella's titular poem, How to Adjust to the Dark is both a collection of poetry and self-examination by a poet, Charlotte, looking back on her early twenties after an extended period of writer's block. Explicating the romantic relationships, personal history, and struggles embedded in each of her poems, Charlotte gradually uncovers the many versions of herself she has inhabited and the traumas woven into her beliefs about who she was as a writer and person at each critical point in time. A hybrid of prose, poetry, and theory in the vein of Bluets and Leaving the Atocha Station, How to Adjust to the Dark is a writer's frank, extended examination of the idea that falling in love and making art have to hurt to be good, and the work it takes to disentangle oneself from this notion in order to grow into who it is we want to be, what we wish to write about, and how we choose to make a life.

How to Adjust to the Dark

Van Laer, Rebecca

"A man's face hangs in the heat outside my aunt's car. Years ago, before I was born, it was my face. In the here and now of this aspen-green pearl Toyota Camry, woozy from the hot Sprite fumes, I am a mulch dealer reincarnate."\nUnder the crush of heat waves that melt asphalt, rampant mortality rates, and a summer with her wine-soaked aunt, eleven-year-old Bermuda escapes through her past life as the Topsoil Baron: a man whose addiction to huffing cologne ads and Listerine keep him steady as he struggles to keep a declining mulch business afloat. As the Baron chases a hurricane that could save his livelihood, the threat of financial ruin looms larger and the seams of his marriage begin to split in ways he can't ignore. At the same time, the noises Bermuda hears coming from the forest surrounding her aunt's neighborhood are growing louder, unsettling plant life is sprouting everywhere, and remnants of her dead sister, Lorraine, intrude more often.\nWith a voice reminiscent of Jesse Ball's How to Set a Fire and Why, speaking from within a landscape like those found in Diane Cook's Man V. Nature, MILKSHAKE is a sludge ballad of reincarnation, suburban squalor, kids' meal toy burial grounds, mutant gators, fortune-telling mollusks, and the Low Country of Vermont. It is a sound like Doom, doom, doom, a fever dream of a novella in which fantasies of the mundane become an escape from a world in the throes of freak environmental crises. And it is, above all, the coming of a weird and talented new writer upon the land.

Milkshake

Dahlke, Travis

An Atavic Fear of Hailstorms

Reis, João

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