The Gold Before Us - Megan Lui
The Gold Before Us is a novel-slash-cookbook that follows Em, a Chinese-American Wall Street rat-racer living in COVID-19 pandemic-stricken NYC, after she discovers that she has both cancer and the power to time-travel to meet her Transcontinental Railroad, Angel Island and WWII ancestors, each of whom have powers of their own.
"Louis loved pointing out that Rachmaninoff and Lou Gehrig too had simple tombstones nearby, boasting that he could afford for his parents to be able to rub elbows with musical and athletic luminaries in the afterlife, if not during their earthly lives. Maamaa and Yeye rested at the top of the hill, where earth kissed the sky, overlooking a glassy pond, far away from the clang of the MetroNorth below – optimal feng shui. After summiting the top of the hill, Em’s family would fall out of the minivan, one by one, and then tiptoe gently around neighboring graves, whispering sorry or ng goi, bowing their heads each time, before arriving at Maamaa and Yeye’s grave.”
Bio: A native New Yorker, Megan Lui (she/her) is a sixth-generation Chinese-American writer and food photographer, and a daughter of immigrants. She previously worked on Wall Street and has an AB in History of Art from Princeton. She has received support from Tin House and The Kenyon Review, and has been a finalist for fellowships from One Story and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
It's Different When They're Yours - Joanna Theiss
Rebecca knows the girl is lab-grown and artificially-intelligent, yet she can't help loving Deirdre as if she were her own daughter. When Rebecca wants to keep Deirdre after the radical experiment in mothering ends, the founder forces her to choose: Deirdre, or his biological child which Rebecca has just conceived.
“Her stomach twisted at the closeness of the girl, who looked so much like Rebecca had at seven. She was so vulnerable, knees poking out from her thin legs, uneven terry cloth shorts, eyes skittering between the van, the handler, and the house. The handler checked her signature, nodded, and walked back to the van, leaving the daughter on Rebecca’s doorstep, fiddling with a plastic bracelet on her skinny wrist.”
Bio: Joanna Theiss is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her writing has appeared in Chautauqua, Milk Candy Review, Peatsmoke, Best Microfiction, and elsewhere. Previously, Joanna worked as an attorney, practicing international trade and criminal defense. Read her reviews and check out the collages she makes from tiny squares at www.joannatheiss.com.
Alignment - Prachi Kamble
Alignment is about the coming of age of a brown woman in North America. It examines themes of identity, displacement, race, class, and femininity. It is interested in the ideas of danger, fear, and the complexities of travel, all through the lens of marginalization.
“Kavi fights her design. In broken sleep she dreams of rest. She dreams of dreams. The vertebrae in her back reposition themselves into a question mark. Calcifying into potential permanence.”
Bio: Prachi Kamble was born in India and raised in Rome, Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, and Canada. She has been published in Five South Journal, The Indianapolis Review, South Carolina Review and Weave, a Kundiman zine. She was shortlisted for the 2024 Disquiet International Literary Prize. She is completing her MFA at New York University.
ALL ANIMALS - Megan Ritchie
ALL ANIMALS follows failed child actress Anna Walker, who's spent her childhood caring for her mother and pretending to be other people. But when Anna learns her mother is dying, she's forced to decide what new role she'll play.
"I flew on a plane for fourteen hours, stopping in New Jersey and sleeping with my cheek pressed against the window. For the entire flight a toddler wailed beside me, and when its parents murmured kind words in its ears, I pretended they were talking to me."
Bio: Megan Ritchie has been published in Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, HAD, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Her work has previously been shortlisted in Northwest Review and Carve's fiction contests. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a Michener Fellow.
Black River - Sandy Nietling
For Josie Briggs in 1927, marriage is the key to financial security and respectability. She might even fall in love if she’s lucky. But when her new husband abruptly disappears, she must search for him with the help of his lawless brother. Black River explores the intersections of loyalty and sacrifice.
“It’s the kind of brilliantly lit night my mother used to call washed because that was her first frame of reference for things. Was it washed and clean, or was it dirty? This was to help her figure out how much work something was going to be for her, but once you start looking at the world that way, all manner of objects and people sort themselves into a clean pile and a dirty pile.”
Bio: Sandy Nietling is a writer and communications professional based in West Michigan. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Quarter After Eight, and New Ohio Review. She is currently at work on two novels.
(Middle) Eastern Standard Time - K.D. Walker
(Middle) Eastern Standard Time integrates the embedded narrative and oral folkloric tradition of One Thousand and One Nights with a modern-day narrator, telling her twenties as bedtime stories to her six-year-old daughter. The story begins with Deniz as a 27-year-old Turkish schoolteacher who moves to Manhattan in 1994 to escape an arranged marriage. On the Lower East Side, she works as a movie theater usher, falls deeply in love with American cinema, and eventually loses sense of which of her lives has become most real.
“Wine overflowed, booksellers shared cigarettes and beds with beggars, and men sunbathed on the banks of the Seine as if the world would never not be theirs. I hated that painting. All the women in the frame were only seen from behind, walking away, somehow becoming more defined by their silhouettes, the streets that surrounded them, and the careful memories the men carried of them rather than their near-perfect figures or their strategic goodbyes.”
Bio: K.D. Walker is a Turkish-American and Creole writer. Her writing has been published in the LA Times, Electric Literature, and the Threepenny Review. In 2023, she was chosen as a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar and PERIPLUS Collective Fellow. Currently, K.D. is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. More of her work can be found at kd-walker.com.
The Creation of Audrey - Hope Kokot
The Creation of Audrey centers on a young autistic woman's coming-of-age as she survives childhood sexual abuse, the death of her mother, an abusive relationship, and early motherhood. As she fights for daily survival, she gradually discovers her own identity.
"I never quite became human, but I became visible, which is better. When my titties invaded, my body stopped being mine–but then I had never been mine in the first place."
Bio: Hope Kokot lives in New York City. Her short story "Bill Rainey Park" was a finalist for Pleiades Magazine's Kinder-Crump Award for New Fiction, and she has performed in poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Bowery Powery Club, and the Busboys & Poets Cafe, among others. She is autistic.
Moreneta - Charisse J. Tubianosa
Moving between Barcelona and Manila, Moreneta is Vicky’s coming of age story. Haunted by the broken relationship with her mother, a harrowing past and a baby ghost, Vicky weaves the present with her mother's memory. Moreneta explores longing and loneliness, and the thin veil sometimes separating mothers and monsters.
"She’d already imagined a baby with light-colored skin, eyes and hair, taking pleasure picturing what would’ve been Carol’s look of disbelief at Vicky’s beautiful mestiza child. Even though up until this morning, she still wasn’t sure about keeping the baby. Or how to tell her family in Manila. Now, these questions have been taken from her, leaving her only—like any good Catholic—with guilt feelings."
Bio: Charisse J. Tubianosa is a writer from Manila now based in Barcelona. She’s an alumna of VONA and the Tin House summer workshops. Her short stories are in Spanglishvoces, Litbreak, Sunspot Lit, and another forthcoming in The Offing. She was a flash fiction finalist for the LISP 2022.
Everywhen and the Dark Entanglement - Jan Kaneen
When dark energy seeps from one multiverse into another, twisting and souring cultural narratives, the truth that was always holding everything together starts to degrade and fragment. Can non-binary versions of Margaret Thatcher and that-universe’s female iteration of Schrodinger save their hard-won freedoms from slipping into oblivion?
“27th August 1939 18.31 – the moment that changes everything. Time is short. We’ve only minutes to do this. So when we’re sure there’s no-one in the world as can see, we proper yomp the last one-hundred yards, climbing, climbing quick as we dare, chins down, strides wide and wild, our Sunday-best skirts clinging to our legs in the brisk and blustery hot summer wind.”
Bio: Jan Kaneen writes sometimes prize-winning fictions from her cottage in the Cambridgeshire Fens, the most recent being her Bath prizewinning novella-in-flash, A Learning Curve, published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Her unsettling short story collection, Hostile Environments is forthcoming from Northodox Press in August 25. She blogs at http://jankaneen.com/ and tweets @JanKaneen1
That Night at the Jubilee Hotel - Stephanie Ramlogan
One year after a spectacular wedding takes place at the Jubilee Hotel, the narrator, a charismatic spirit who has lived there for about a century, excitedly recounts the mysterious events surrounding that night to a new spirit that he meets wandering around the hallways.
"Some part of the Living does still hear spirits even when they not paying attention. They does hear what they need to hear when they need to hear it. We does keep talking either way."
Bio: Stephanie Ramlogan is a Caribbean writer whose fiction is built around the people, culture and folklore of Trinidad and Tobago. She is the recipient of the 2022 Iowa Review Fiction Award, and the 2020 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer's Prize, among others. Stephanie has an MFA in Creative Writing.