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Fall 2025 Catalog
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The High Heaven
by Joshua Wheeler
Publication date October 7, 2025 fiction
A multi-genre debut novel tracing one woman’s quest for faith across the American West during the Space Age
In 1967, on the night of the first Apollo mission, a child named Izzy is orphaned when the doomsday cult she was born into clashes with the sheriff in the high desert of New Mexico. She’s taken in by a struggling rancher who is trying to keep his mind from falling apart as NASA rocket tests encroach on his outer range. Inspired by the true story of a UFO cult in a village near White Sands, this novel traces Izzy Gently’s whole life: from tragedy on the ranch, through addiction and a rich cast of eccentrics in Texas, to New Orleans, where Izzy is haunted by her past even as she uses lessons from childhood to counsel people who have lost the ability to see the moon.
In The High Heaven, Joshua Wheeler explores American piety as it mutates over the course of the Space Age, as technology changes notions of both humanity and the heavens. Shot through with the speculative while paying homage to three iconic genres—neo-Western, picaresque, and Southern gothic—Izzy’s life story becomes a mirror for the warping of manifest destiny and, ultimately, a testament to the human will to seek meaning from the universe.
Suffused with the absurdist history of American space travel and the wide-open landscapes of the Southwest, The High Heaven chronicles a larger-than-life adventure of one extraordinary woman who, despite tragedy, never loses sight of redemption.
Joshua Wheeler is the author of the essay collection Acid West, which was named a best book of 2018 by Newsweek, The Paris Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine. He’s written for The New York Times, Alta, and Harper’s Magazine, and he teaches at Louisiana State University.
The High Heaven: A Novel
Crawl
by Max Delsohn
Publication date October 21, 2025 fiction
A darkly comic, introspective debut collection that looks beneath the surface of trans life in 2010s Seattle
What to do when starting testosterone unlocks a newfound desire for men? How to respond when your boss’s boss asks if you’ve had “the surgery” and then requests you talk her niece out of transitioning? What obligation do you have to intervene in the faltering mental health of the baby trans drug dealer you’ve met only once while tripping on the acid he sold you?
The young transmasculine characters in Crawl navigate these and other questions in the dive bars, bathhouses, parks, workplaces, music venues, beaches, and college campuses of 2010s Seattle. Max Delsohn’s stories—by turns exuberant, heartfelt, tragic, and wry—portray the pleasures and pains of sex and romance, the possibilities and ambivalences of gender expression, and the joys and failures of community in a city and a time that has branded itself a radical queer utopia but proves much more complicated in reality.
Max Delsohn’s writing appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, VICE, Joyland, The Rumpus, and Triangle House, among other places. He earned an MFA from Syracuse University. He lives in Los Angeles.
Crawl: Stories by Max Delsohn
Trigger Warning
by Jacinda Townsend
Publication date September 16, 2025 fiction
A new novel about the enduring trauma of police brutality by the award-winning author of Mother Country
Early in life, Ruth survived a series of devastating events: Her little brother died from a childhood illness, her mother died of grief, and then her father was shot by the police right in front of their home. In the years following her father’s murder, Ruth pushes her past underground. She changes her name and moves to Kentucky, marries a man named Myron, and together they raise a kid. It’s been two decades, and she is, by outside measures, living a good life—but why doesn’t it feel good? When her marriage comes to a sudden end, their house burns down in the middle of the night, and she learns that her estranged sister has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Ruth is jolted back into action. She flees again, this time back to her home state of California, with her nonbinary teenager in tow, perhaps ready at last to face her pain and retrieve her former self.
Searing, surprisingly witty, and deeply human, Trigger Warning is a novel about the durational aftermath of anti-Black police violence. Through the perspectives of Ruth and Myron, and those of their friends and their child, Townsend explores divorce and desire, the heartbreaking brevity of parenting, the push and pull of old friendships, and the possibility, after incredible trauma, of reconnecting to what makes us feel alive.
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Trigger Warning: A Novel by Jacinda Townsend
The Natural Order of Things
by Donika Kelly
Publication date October 7, 2025 poetry
An extraordinary and unexpected book of finding happiness, by the award-winning author of The Renunciations
What does a life look like on the other side of survival, and can the one who survived come to recognize that she did?
Donika Kelly’s poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world.
The Natural Order of Things is a brilliant and moving book, one that reaches toward equilibrium and something like happiness.
Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Natural Order of Things: Poems by Donika Kelly
The Year of the Wind
by Karina Pacheco Medrano; Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem
Publication date November 4, 2025 fiction
A lyrical novel depicting the devastating effects of political violence in Peru on three women’s lives
Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation’s fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara’s political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed.
In her first novel to be translated into English, Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption.
The Year of the Wind: A Novel by Karina Pacheco Medrano; Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem
Algarabía
by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Publication date September 2, 2025 poetry
A Puerto Rican trans epic that blends poetic play and speculative fiction, by a Lambda Literary Award winner
Una epopeya puertorriqueña trans que mezcla poesía y narrativa especulativa, por un ganador del Premio Lambda
Algarabía is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.
An inhabitant of Algarabía, a colony of Earth in a parallel universe, Cenex struggles to find a name, a body, and a stable home. The song of Cenex weaves and clashes texts by cis writers on trans figures with fragments from historical, legal, and other nonliterary texts. Cenex leads us through his childhood hospitalization, his years as an experimental subject, a brief stay in suburbia, twisted meanderings, and not-so-far-off lands accompanied by a merry band of chosen queers.
Referencing everything from pop culture to Taino cosmology and philosophy (at times in a single line), this book laughs at its own survival with sharp, unserious rage. The edition is composed of two original texts—one written in the Puerto Rican dialect of Spanish, the other in a reconsideration of English. Algarabía inscribes an origin narrative for trans people in the face of their erasure from both colonial and anti-colonial literary canons.
Algarabía es una epopeya que sigue el viaje de Cenex, un ser trans que narra su vida retrospectivamente mientras navega por las historias contadas en su nombre.
Habitante de Algarabía, una colonia de la Tierra en un universo paralelo, Cenex lucha por encontrar un nombre, un cuerpo y un hogar estables. El canto de Cenex entreteje y enfrenta textos de escritores cis sobre figuras trans con fragmentos de textos históricos, documentos legales y otras fuentes extraliterarias. Su protagonista nos conduce a través de su hospitalización temprana, sus años como sujeto experimental, una breve estancia suburbana, meandros retorcidos y unas tierras no tan lejanas en la compañía de un grupo jovial de cuirs predilectos.
Poblado de referencias a la cultura popular, la cosmología taína y la filosofía (a veces dentro de un mismo verso), este libro se ríe de su propia supervivencia con una rabia pícara y aguda. La epopeya se compone de dos textos originales: uno que fue escrito en español puertorriqueño y el otro que fue escrito en un inglés alterado. Algarabía inscribe un origen para las personas trans ante su exclusión de los cánones literarios coloniales y anticoloniales.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, he has received a Premio Nuevas Voces, a Juan Felipe Herrera Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize.
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera es un poeta y traductor puertorriqueño. El Poeta Laureado de Filadelfia del 2018-19, ha recibido los premios Nuevas Voces, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lambda, y el premio Ambroggio inaugural.
Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
False War
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez; Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Publication date November 4, 2025 fiction
An ambitious, panoptic novel about exile as both condition and state of being by a major young Cuban writer
The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others do leave but never quite get anywhere.
In this multivoiced novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together the stories of many people from all walks of life through a series of interconnected daisy chains. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, roaring in Yankee Stadium, lost in the Louvre, intensely competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a junket for émigré dissidents in Berlin, these characters learn that while they may seem to be on the move, in reality they are paralyzed, immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion.
The fractured narrative, filled with extraordinary portraits of ordinary people, reflects the disintegration that comes from being uprooted. At the same time it is full of tenderness, moments of joy and profound release. False War confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation in Latin American letters.
False War: A Novel by Carlos Manuel Álvarez; Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Natural History
by Brandon Kilbourne
Publication date November 4, 2025 poetry
A unique work of science and poetry, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Natasha Trethewey
A research biologist at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Brandon Kilbourne illuminates the intersections between science and poetry in poems that demonstrate the wonder, curiosity, and precision required by both disciplines.
Natural History opens by confronting the hidden histories within the study of biology and its links to colonialism, including the revelation that European scientists used slave ships to transport specimens from Africa and the Americas back to Europe. Across the collection, Kilbourne describes how these histories of exploitation are still reflected in dioramas of elephants, rhinoceroses, and African people displayed in natural history museums. Other poems narrate the intricate work of studying fossils, and a longer sequence recounts an expedition above the Arctic Circle to recover evidence of how a fish’s fins gave rise to the diversity of limbs found among amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Natural History is a rare and fascinating debut, and Kilbourne’s exquisite eye brings the role of the working biologist to life.
Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne
We're Alone
by Edwidge Danticat
Publication date September 2, 2025 nonfiction
A collection of exceptional new essays by one of the most significant contemporary writers on the world stage
Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.
From hurricanes to political violence, from her days as a new student at a Brooklyn elementary school knowing little English to her account of a shooting hoax at a Miami mall, Danticat has an extraordinary ability to move from the personal to the global and back again. Throughout, literature and art prove to be her reliable companions and guides through both tragedies and triumphs.
Danticat is an irresistible presence on the page: full of heart, outrage, humor, clear thinking, and moral questioning, while reminding us of the possibilities of community. We’re Alone asks us to think through seemingly intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of Everything Inside, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, and The Art of Death, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She teaches at Columbia University.
We're Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat
Season of the Swamp
by Yuri Herrera; Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Publication date September 16, 2025 fiction
A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings these immigrants witness as they attempt to shape their future.
With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Yuri Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history.
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera; Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman