ARCANA - Masha Shukovich
Arcana is a collection of 22 braided short stories, each corresponding to one of the named cards in a Tarot deck. The stories speak of suffering, hope, resilience, survival, and everyday magic lived by the people of the Balkans, a contested, war-torn land, perpetually caught between post-colonial and post-communist reckoning.
“When the bombs started to fall, and her grandchildren began to dream about dark staircases and rawboned black dogs howling into the night and lost needles and broken brandy glasses, Baba Lena made a sign of the cross over each of their glistening brown foreheads as they slept, and she began to eat their fear. She plucked the wisps of fear out of the air around the children’s heads like smoky feathers, her thumb and forefinger turned into pincers, like a slender beak, her soft mouth open to swallow what was never meant to be ingested, by any living thing, however small.”
Bio: Masha Shukovich (she/they) is a writer, storyteller, folklorist, neurodivergent person, and a brown immigrant from a country that no longer exists. Masha’s ancestral and indigenous roots are in the Balkans; the Mediterranean; and West, Central, and Northeast Asia. Masha lives and writes on the land colonially known as the Salt Lake Valley and online at www.mashashukovich.com - Instagram: @mashawrites
Isaac’s Rebellion - Katherine Moore
Isaac’s Rebellion is coming-of-age story set in post-war Zimbabwe about a group of children from vastly different backgrounds who band together to survive a brutal government crackdown.
Bulawayo, 1984 - GEORGIA
“Don’t ride the clutch, move quickly from second to third, go back to second when the road goes soft.” Pop’s words are in my ears and his hand is over mine, and I am nine again, sitting on his lap as he holds his foot on the Land Rover’s pedals and I with two small fists move the gears east to west, north to south, and back again. He smells of Stella’s buttermilk pancakes and tobacco, the rollup fags leaving their scent under his fingernails, and we are driving down a small kopje to the farmhouse where mum stands behind the barred window – there is a war going on after all – waving encouragement through steel spikes that cut her smile in half.”
Bio: Katherine Moore (she/her) is a communications strategist turned writer living in Geneva, Switzerland. She writes screenplays and short stories, some based on her early days working in southern Africa, and is currently revising a novel. Her short story Burma Valley was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Fiction Prize, spring 2022.
A LEGACY OF CRANES - Heidi Marjamäki
A Legacy of Cranes is a horror story inspired by Finnish folklore of a woman with Alzheimer’s who must get her daughter to complete a ritual to keep an ancient evil at bay. Before it’s too late. Before she forgets.
“Hettie began to turn her head, inch by slow inch. There was a dark mass in the corner of her eye. And the feeling of a presence, that was still there too.”
Bio: Heidi Marjamäki (she/her) grew up in Finland, studied in Scotland, and worked in Oxford and London before making her home in Berlin. Her short stories have been published by Tangled Web Magazine, Crow & Cross Keys, and others. She won the Fall 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award. Read more at https://www.heidimarjamaki.com/.
*SHORTLIST* SUBTRACTION - Kirk Wilson
Subtraction is a story told by the Holy Ghost of Time. Billy Nugget and his love Dolores, accompanied by her dead twin Saint Deborah, embark on a road trip across 1950’s America, where old gods are being replaced by new gods.
“Atomic Age, now. The highways are long and smooth, the bridges bright and new, and Billy’s lives are happening. In Life 1, teachers taught Billy to turtle down under his school desk, so the Bomb couldn’t find him. He lived then inside a sagging house on the outskirts of the Age, with his mother and his father and the Holy Ghost of Time.”
Bio: Kirk Wilson’s (he/him) books include the story collection OUT OF SEASON, the poetry collection SONGBOX, and the poetry chapbook THE EARLY WORD. Kirk’s work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. His awards include an NEA Fellowship and prizes in fiction,nonfiction, and poetry. Kirk’s website is www.KirkWilsonBooks.com.
OF ROSARIES AND TAROT - LM Bocalan
Of Rosaries and Tarot time travels through the interwoven narratives of three generations of Filipinas living under one roof. Whether it's in the stars, prayer, or a weathered tarot deck, coming of age as a Filipina matriarch is never linear, and the role of who is caretaking for whom is constantly shifting.
"No one knew where the cards had come from. She would never tell in fear that they would lose their magic. The edges were worn from use, and the celestial images creased and browned from age- much like Apung Myrna herself."
Bio: LM Bocalan (she/they/siya) is a storyteller, activist, and queer mama. Her works focus on decolonization and the intersectionality of first-generation POC in the diaspora. She has spent over a decade working at the intersection of Arts & Activism and is currently the Assoc. Director of Operations for The Center for Cultural Power. Instagram: @thepeopleslbo
PURGATORY CHASM - Erin Lawler
Purgatory Chasm explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual aftermath of a fire in an abandoned warehouse that kills six firefighters in a working-class Massachusetts city. The story centers on a daughter’s quest to understand who she is in relation to the memory of her emotionally distant firefighter father.
“You are suspended seventy feet above the rocks in the center of the chasm. You think about the last conversation you had with your father two weeks after the fire that took his best friend. How he asked you if you believe there is a God in the middle of a crowded restaurant. “
Bio: Erin Lawler (she/her) teaches English at a boarding school in Massachusetts. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Lasell University and an M.A. in English Literature from Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
HOW TO COOK A WOLF - Kathleen Jorgenson
HOW TO COOK A WOLF is the story of a sensible woman with a quietly psychic streak whose uncanny compass leads her into a troubled marriage. A layered look at the power of the stories we tell ourselves, it wrestles with magical thinking, addiction, motherhood, and the alchemy of art.
“As the pastor prattled on endlessly, the meandering blather of the unprepared, I looked left, at the pallbearers sitting up front on the other side of the aisle. My brother, Bobby, and six male cousins—Olaf, Thor, Stretch, and the rest. Scattered kernels of the farming diaspora tucked back into a row, smelling of soap and sensibility in earnest slacks and button-down shirts they probably ironed themselves at the Holiday Inn.”
Bio: Kathleen Jorgenson (she/her) is a mother and writer based in Seattle. Her fiction has been featured in Source Paper’s Leaping Fool Winter Writers Series, and her nonfiction has been published by Rachael Ray In Season.
*SHORTLIST* CITIES OF REFUGE - Tanya Rey
Cities of Refuge centers on a young Cuban-American man wanted for murder in 1995 Miami, and the mother and sister who must wade through the family’s troubled past to find him.
"They hear it coming down the long hallway leading to the warehouse. It’s the same hallway the children had been led through, blind to their fate, when one of their mother’s new friends from the botanica—a woman with eyebrows penciled into upside down Vs—had taken them by the hand and told them they were participating in something special for their mother. A party, she said with her whole face. The most beautiful, funnest party they could ever imagine."
Bio: Tanya Rey (she/her) is a queer Cuban-American writer based in Oakland, CA. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Granta, The Sun, The Georgia Review, Roads & Kingdoms, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Catapult, among others. www.tanya-rey.com
HOW WE LIVE WITH OURSELVES - Victoria Hulbert
In 2007, Veronika DeMarco is sent home from a reality TV dating show without explanation. Watching herself on television a year later, she can’t shake the feeling that something terrible might have happened on set, but what? How We Live With Ourselves is a novel about social surveillance, femininity as spectacle, and the voyeurist cruelty inherent in our present age.
"Whenever I thought of my mother, I pictured her looking at herself in the mirror. She’d been in pageants since she was a child, resigned to that particular spectacle of examination, and standing in front of the mirror was the only place I ever saw her let her guard down. As if it was the only time she could be certain the only person looking at her was herself."
Bio: Victoria Hulbert (she/her) is a writer from Los Angeles. She is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, where she also received her MFA in fiction. Her work has appeared in Boulevard, The Offing,The Barcelona Review and is forthcoming from Witness.
*SHORTLIST* LIFE WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS - Adam Ryan
Set in post-9/11 New York, Life Without Instructions follows Charlie Devine as he struggles with death, addiction, dead-end jobs, and failed relationships. When he falls for his late friend's girlfriend, he faces a crucial decision: enter the real-world as slick and bewildered as a newborn, or surrender to the depraved abyss. A melancholic and darkly humorous coming-of-age story.
“Sometimes when you black out and come to it’s as routine as flicking on a light switch. And sometimes when you black out and come to, you’re standing on the northwest corner of Perry and Hudson Street covered in blood, smoking a cigarette with a homeless man.”
Bio: Adam Ryan (he/him) has been published by several pop-culture websites that are now defunct (not his fault). In January, he lost his job (also not his fault), and now spends his days trying to write the next chapter of his professional career. He enjoys life with his wife, children, mutts, and scratching that relentless itch to put pen to paper. (Instagram: @arrwriting)
*SHORTLIST* NINETEEN - Angela Boyd
Three generations of a multiethnic, working-class family are each 19 years old, wrestling with events and decisions that will determine the course of their lives. They are on the brink of seismic change as America is also – of the 60s, the Reagan era, a post-9/11 world, a country without Roe.
"Today is Amanda’s last day at home before beginning her sophomore year at Gilman. Gilman, a near-Ivy – Amanda’s confidence shook before she could mail the Yale application – is bricked and austere, its buildings consecrated for presidents and billionaires, one of whom has funded her tuition. She has nearly flunked out but no one knows this."
Bio: Angela Boyd (she/her) is a Mexican-American writer from Wichita. Her work has been supported by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Bread Loaf, and the Macondo Writers Workshop. Angela is fiction editor at The Rumpus and writes the Literary Citizen newsletter, where literature and politics meet.
TRAVEL RED - Elissa Field
When London detective Cara Madsen’s elite murder unit is at risk of disbanding, she takes on a minor missing person case to keep the unit afloat. But what started as a bog standard “misper” develops like a hydra, uncovering the ritual disposal of a series of young adults in red suitcases in London waterways, linked to the lab of an elite institute, and the murder that started it all.
“Our father once asked us, sitting around the fire beneath the apple trees in his vast back garden, “Have you ever had a mortal fear?” None of us knew what he meant. We all wanted to. These times so rare that we had his attention. “A mortal fear,” he told us, in his booming, fatherly voice, “is a sense that you know how it is you will die.”
Bio: Elissa Field (she/her) worked for twelve years in a major court system. She has won fellowships with SmokeLong Quarterly and Story Studio Chicago, and was finalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and the Heekin Foundation for novel. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications. Find her @elissafield or elissafieldthompson.com.
*SHORTLIST* THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT LOVE - Katherine Hurst
Things They Don’t Tell You About Love captures the moment Frieda Weekley elopes with the writer D.H. Lawrence, not realising she may never see her children again. As his affection becomes increasingly coercive, she steps from his shadow to tell her story.
“They say it’s the easiest way, drowning, the easiest way of ending it all. There’s a point at which nothing seems to matter; when life’s scaffolding tilts and creaks and crumbles, and all the pain is smoothed away. It’s not quick, but it’s gentler than leaning into the wind at the cliff edge and seeing the sharp crags rush up to meet you with the sudden sound of skull on stone, cleaner than a blade drawn crimson across a wrist.”
Bio: Katherine Hurst (she/her) is a freelance journalist specialising in homes and interiors. She has a BA and DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford where she was also employed as a non-stipendiary lecturer. Earlier this year, she graduated with an MA in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Bath Spa.
HOPE THIS SIDE - Sarah Elgatian
Through vignettes and raw emotional honesty, Hope This Side follows Riley as she copes with the fallout of her brother’s suicide. Rewriting her story in his wake leads to partying, complicated relationships, and exploration of her identity. With some humor and very little grace, Riley finds new reasons to hope.
“Then we did what we could, when we could, with whatever fervor we could muster.”
Bio: Sarah Elgatian (she/her) is a mixed-identity writer whose work has appeared in, among other places, Crab Fat, Beholder Magazine, and the Iowa Writers’ House print anthology We The Interwoven. She works at the Midwest Writing Center and likes bright colors, dark coffee, loud music, and long sentences.
Instagram: @rahelgatian Twitter: @rahthesungod
*SHORTLIST* EDISON - Pallavi Dixit
Edison is the story of Prem, a gas-station attendant who must earn $1 million before his true love’s father will allow them to marry. It’s a Bollywood-style love story brimming with song, dance, action, comedy, a love-triangle, an angry parent, an evil villain, and cameos by real stars – a typical masala film in the guise of literary fiction.
“Before leaving, Amitabh Bachchan pulled his wallet from the pocket of his impossibly long, white slacks. “For you to add upon,” he said and presented Prem with a stiff dollar bill on which he scribbled his signature before handing it over. In that instant, with an Amitabh Bachchan dollar in his hand, Prem was overcome with the suddenly renewed possibility of building himself into someone in this country, a man worthy of Leena Engineer, a man of action, an entrepreneur, a success story, a suitable boy, a viable suitor, an extraordinary immigrant in a town of immigrants, a visionary, a husband, a real American hero.”
Bio: Pallavi Sharma Dixit’s (she/her) work has been supported by the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Program, Intermedia Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Literary Center, and the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program. She is a winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Pages in Progress contest and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, two children and dog, Tiffin.
*SHORTLIST* THE RUSTICATED - Lu Han
The Rusticated is the story of Ling, a young girl in Northeast China during the Cultural Revolution. Strong-willed and resourceful, Ling navigates a violent childhood, brutal work conditions, and rapidly shifting political winds. When her younger sister is radicalized, her greatest threat is now the person she sought most to protect. This is a story of family and finding meaning in one the darkest periods of human history.
"The smile Ling wrestled earlier from her sister had long faded. Lan’s lips were dry, her cheeks tender and salt-streaked in the moonlight. Ling wrenched her eyes away from her sister’s face, so small and perfectly oval. There was nothing she could do for her now."
Bio: Lu Han (she/her) is a Chinese-American writer based in New York. Her work highlights the undervoiced through fiction and nonfiction, and can be found in The Margins, Lost Balloon, HAD, The Jarnal, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from Lewis Latimer House Museum and Guernica. Find more at www.helloluhan.com
*SHORTLIST* MOLDED BLUE - Julian Iralu
Homeschooled sisters Chess, Mariposa and Lu Nil live in an isolated desert ghost town hiding a secret: their skin festers with miniature psychedelic mushrooms that their parents sell for profit. As her physical and mental health declines, Lu attempts escape to the nearest city, leaving her beloved sisters behind.
“They will come armed with letter openers and potato peelers and scrape my sister's mold off her back like slivers of artichokes. They will smoke her mold in bongs and pipes or season it with dill and lime, chewing long strips like dried jerky.”
Bio: Julian Iralu (she/her) is Naga-American from the Angami Meyase clan in Nagaland India. She was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, 2022 Gish Jen Writers’ Room of Boston Fellow, and a 2020 GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in Mixed Asian Media.
*SHORTLIST* THE CALIFORNIA STORIES - Tracy Haught
The California Stories: Sleepless nights. Squat houses. Shady motels. Surprising connections. One eye always open. Two young women on the streets of California, crushing stratospheric highs and cavernous lows as they sink further into addiction, running from one trauma into the next, during the last vestiges of early nineties Grateful Dead counterculture.
"At fifteen, Story had already been to rehab three times. Expelled from her high school because of the sixty-five days she’d spent in rehab, in addition to all the days she’d skipped school, she had to enroll in a small, alternative high school for misfit kids."
Bio: Just turned sixteen, with a change of clothes, $37 dollars, and a copy of On the Road in her backpack, Tracy Haught (she/her) left home to follow the Grateful Dead. That was 1991; she never went back. Read her stories in Barzakh, Isele, The Lumiere Review, SLAB, Sugar Mule, and elsewhere.
*SHORTLIST* MAYBE, PROBABLY - Scott Hunter
Coming of age in the summer of 1985, Benjamin flees New York for Japan, trying to salvage his academic career and escape AIDS. He doesn’t imagine falling in love, finding friendship, and reckoning with his idea that love and death are intertwined.
“You reached to shake hands as I bowed, which was awkward, and I took you in: you in your high-water khaki trousers, tight; sockless in your black penny loafers, shined; your motorcycle jacket open, leather sleeve straps flapping their buckles; your side-parted hair flopped down not quite blocking the chisel of your cheekbones, two perfect ruddy squares, as if someone had faintly marked you with a fat kanji brush dipped lightly in blood.”
Bio: Scott Hunter’s (he/him) short fiction has appeared in Hong Kong Review, Kyoto Journal, Blood Orange Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Maybe, Probably is his first novel. A 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers fellow, he studies and teaches at the Writers Studio in New York.
THE MANNEQUIN - Gillian Esquivia-Cohen
A bullet-riddled mannequin-turned-golem leads Chava, a recent transplant to a hostile town in Alabama, to witness events in her dreams whose significance she cannot grasp, until one day her waking self stumbles upon the home of a terrifying man.
“Only when she got closer did she see it was a woman’s torso, signified by breasts like grapefruit halves. Armless, legless past mid-thigh, a hook rising from its headless neck, it hung at human-height from a tree. A Venus with a question mark in lieu of a head, her body sieved with bullet holes.”
Bio: Gillian Esquivia-Cohen (US/Colombia)(she/her) is a writer, translator, and educator. She holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is Contributing Editor at the hispanophone journal Polis Poesía. Her writing in English has appeared in Guernica, The Kenyon Review Online, and Latin American Literature Today
DUNBAR GOETHE - Caprice Gray
Black academic Dunbar Goethe is awaiting trial in mid-20th century for an unnamed crime — while plagued with guilt for a separate, secret death. Told as a corrupted Bildungsroman, Dunbar, flawed and fated, survives a tragedy in childhood that leads him on a journey to his own improbable fate.
“In the years since the murder I find myself trapped there often among the sun-dappled spring daisies, mud and marigolds, the impressionist blur of color and light, and in my dreams I’m always struck by the shuddering poetry of the scene despite the arched spray of blood, the slash of my pistol in the grass, the beautiful epicene face long-lashed as a child’s or a sleeping saint’s. Let’s search for gods, a youth I loved once beseeched me, wild and beautiful on a battered bluff above the sea, and oh, somehow, godless, irredeemable, I found to my surprise I have been ever since.”
Bio: Caprice Gray (she/her) has a BA from Yale, a Master of Science from Harvard, and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is a lifelong New Yorker.