Winter 2027 Catalog

Publication date March 2, 2027 poetry

A visionary new collection by former poet laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Tracy K. Smith

The forest in Tracy K. Smith’s brilliant new work is and is not a metaphor. While these poems strive to hear and to heed the voices of the earth and its nations of trees, they also test a discomfiting view of humanity, not as divided and opposing factions but as a vast cacophonous family connected by a single deep root.

The Forest grapples with violence, cynicism, and injustice by tapping into the ecstatic for much-needed insight, humility, and conviction. Enlivened by slow time and spiritual desire, Smith’s poems are political and devotional conduits that bear witness to meditative visions and channeled conversations with ancestors and ascended guides. Several poems honor motherhood and the particular care bound up in mothering Black sons. Others come to terms with grief and a failed marriage now so distant as to be another life. Hovering always near, the divine feminine is a figure called forth to refute the God of War. 

The Forest is a magnificent act of foresight beyond the granular realities of partisan depravity, polarization, and indifference. Smith reaches an exhilarating new height, in contact with the mythic and the rapturous.

Publication date February 16, 2027 fiction

New York is months into yet another police lockdown. Most people have abandoned the city. Stores are shuttered and the streets are empty, except for cops standing on every corner and the stream of drivers delivering packages to holdouts stuck inside.

Agatha—holding out in Brooklyn with Marco, her boyfriend, and Nathan and Emily, their two best friends—cannot sleep. She has tried every therapy and combination of pills, to no avail; with her insomnia only worsening under Marco’s claustrophobic love, she’s taken to squatting in a vacant unit in a high-rise near their home, to be alone with her condition, her phone, her credit card debt, her unfinished freelance work, her ambivalence about having children, and her memories of the catastrophic event that precipitated the lockdown. Then a mysterious telehealth doctor diagnoses her with a new disorder, and things quickly get stranger.

Elvia Wilk’s witty, riveting novel begins in a somewhat familiar milieu before tunneling into an Other World of wounds, portals, doubles, hypnosis, and resurrections. Borrowing from noir, science fiction, and horror, and inflected by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the lives of medieval saints, and contemporary views on sleep, illness, technology, and relationships, A Diagnosis asks: Who is casting the spells that we live under today?

Publication date March 2, 2027 fiction

Wyatt Sardo, washed-up veteran of the last high-flying days of the glossy magazines, has some things he needs to convey to his teenage children. From hiding. 

Written in the form of a letter meant to give a full accounting of his violent acts with something called the Planning Committee, A Nihilist’s Guide to Parenthood is a stinging assessment of the tectonic shifts that technology has wreaked on every aspect of our lives. Wyatt once tried to get with the program, but the program bounced him anyway, and now he knows where he went wrong: “I’d brought this on myself,” he says. “I’d wandered like an idiot into the threshing blades of the internet.” 

Publication date February 2, 2027 fiction

A dark and consuming novel about oil, power, beauty, and the quiet resistance of women in a dystopia where death is not the ultimate harm

My fellow Venezuelans, we’re going to swim in black gold. Remember this year: 1999. We’re not just reclaiming our spring, our Thames, our Seine. We’re reclaiming our country.

In an alternate Caracas, the oil fields have dried up, and executives have implemented a new system for oil production: collecting corpses and processing them into necrofuel.

In four interlocking sections that unfold in reverse chronology, Bloat follows the lives of women who live under this exploitative regime. Mercedita grieves the death of her father and resents the intrusion of investigators into her home. Merced, a sex worker living with an oil executive, struggles to retain her agency amid an increasingly restricted life. After Mamé goes missing, a watchman tries to find her while he and his nephew participate in the paramilitary that enabled her disappearance. And Mercy battles an illness while working at a restaurant frequented by the powerful.

Publication date April 20, 2027 nonfiction

After years of writing about South Asian American trauma and displacement in her acclaimed poetry collections Curb and Kith, Divya Victor turns to the essay to explore eros and sensuousness as shaping forces of subjectivity, political feeling, and aesthetic experience.

Victor imagines Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Chitra Ganesh jousting about nudes, describes how solidarity is learned in childhood games, writes to James Baldwin about Nabila Rehman, a Pakistani girl whose grandmother was killed in a US drone strike, explores what Lou Reed and A. R. Rahman teach us about the American dream, shows how Sylvia Plath and Malcolm X sculpted our vocabulary about racism, and conducts a study on gender and the form of the heap via an unexpected erotic relationship. Victor’s insights on art, film, photography, and music are fused throughout with bold commentary on gender, religion, whiteness and anti-Blackness, geopolitics and war.

Publication date April 20, 2027 fiction

A brilliant and transgressive Peruvian novelist recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize offers up her cracked-mirror version of the great Russian novel

A madcap, disobedient, and brilliant novel about the power struggles and passionate upheavals that have long riven liberation movements, Atusparia follows the turbulent life of a fierce left-wing politician from her upbringing in an indigenous, Soviet-sponsored school in 1980s Peru to a high-security prison in the heart of the Amazon jungle, to her eventual presidential candidacy.

The protagonist calls herself Atusparia to honor both her hero, a nineteenth-century revolutionary, and the school of the same name that she attended in the waning days of the Cold War. When the school finds itself in crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, Atusparia is engulfed in a spiral of drug use and frenzied sexual encounters that lead her astray from the ideals that formed her. Years later, inspired anew by the radical hero of her youth, she embarks on a journey to the edge of Lake Titicaca in southern Peru to try to spark a feminist peasant revolution. 

Publication date February 2, 2027 poetry

Mary Jo Bang’s The Museum of Mary guides the reader through a kaleidoscopic gallery of artworks that each depict a shifting portrait of Mary—the name of the Madonna, the Blessed Virgin, the grieving mother of Christ, the doomed monarch, the author of Frankenstein, the television star, the Grammy-winning singer, and the poet herself. These intimate and alluring poems echo across time to give voices to women who were, who are, foreclosed and silenced. One Mary is told she has no power over her body and what will happen to it. One Mary’s claim leads to her imprisonment and beheading. One Mary is arrested for dressing like a man. One Mary is ignored in her lifetime and forgotten ever since. One Mary looks deeply, imaginatively into artworks and writes down what she sees, what she has lived.

Publication date April 6, 2027 poetry

New fatherhood sends the speaker of Gabriel Antonio Reed’s Reach back to the tenderness and hurt of his own childhood. Moments with his child in the garden elicit memories of his grandmother, and intimate dreams about people outside of his romantic relationship recall his parents’ histories and the queer experiences of his youth. Despite his own mental health struggles, his child becomes a reason to persist, which mirrors the role he played in his own mother’s life.

Even as poems unearth patterns of care and harm, they turn to the sources of pain with radical empathy. Reed challenges the poetic line to reflect this dynamic, using indented pseudocouplets that imply a feeling too large for a margin. Through butterflies and shadows, kind words from friends and wisdom from Reed’s creative influences, this debut collection argues that writing can be part of the way we tend to one another and to ourselves.

Publication date April 20, 2027 fiction

In 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and place them in concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called “loyalty questionnaire.” Question 27 of the form asked the inmates—who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military—whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them—many of whom were American citizens who had never visited Japan—to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.

Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward in time from the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived and sought justice in its aftermath. Karen Tei Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring years of archival research into a chorus of stories. With signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.