I am beyond ecstatic to announce the 7.13 Books list for 2018. From the genre-bending to the gritty, from the cities to the suburbs, these are American stories that need to be told now. I’m looking forward to working these new authors to make their first book happen!
-L
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MR. NEUTRON, a novel by Joe Ponepinto
Set in a small, fictional American city, MR. NEUTRON is a genre-bending satire about a dimwitted giant that runs for mayor while a hapless political operative races to solve the mystery behind the giant’s origin. The whimsy and inventiveness of this novel will appeal to fans of Douglas Adams, Jonas Jonasson, and Fredrik Backman.
Joe Ponepinto is the publisher and fiction editor of Tahoma Literary Review, a nationally recognized literary journal that has had selections reproduced in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, and other notable anthologies. He is a former editor for The Los Angeles Review. He is the winner of the Tiferet: Literature, Art & the Creative Spirit 2016 fiction contest, and has had stories published in dozens of literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. A New Yorker by birth, he has lived in a variety of locations around the country, and now resides in Washington State with his wife, Dona, and Henry the coffee-drinking dog.
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LIKE A CHAMPION, stories by Vincent Chu
LIKE A CHAMPION is a collection of eighteen stories that shine a light on people who are far from champions. Funny and heartbreaking like the best shorts of Sherman Alexie, bizarre and familiar, LIKE A CHAMPION tells the stories of men and women, underdogs and long shots, trying to triumph as their notions of love, acceptance, and success unexpectedly change.
Vincent Chu was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction has appeared in East Bay Review, Pithead Chapel, PANK Magazine, Cooper Street, Stockholm Review, WhiskeyPaper and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Sundress Publications Best of the Net as well as the Pushcart Prize. He can be found online at @herrchu.
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THE PLACE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH, a novel by Jenn Rossman
THE PLACE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH is a wise and witty suburban drama that follows the tribulations of the working class, blended Loudermilk family as they tackle issues of race and inequality in the post-bubble Silicon Valley. This novel will appeal to fans of Tom Perrotta, Emma Straub, and Lorrie Moore.
Jenn Stroud Rossmann writes the essay series “An Engineer Reads a Novel” for Public Books. Her stories have appeared in Literary Orphans, Jellyfish Review, Tahoma Literary Review, failbetter, and other magazines. Her work has been a finalist for honors including the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize, the Disquiet Literary Prize, and Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize. She earned her BS and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and has attended workshops at Tin House, One Story, Squaw Valley and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She’s also a professor of mechanical engineering at Lafayette College. She throws right, bats left.
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NIGHTWOLF, a novel by Willie Davis
NIGHTWOLF is a gritty, coming-of-age tale that melds the dark worldview of Denis Johnson and the dialectical authenticity of Jonathan Lethem’s early works. Set in Lexington, Kentucky, a mysterious figure named “Nightwolf” stalks the streets, tagging local businesses, wearing a trash-bag over his head with eyeholes cut out, and makes nonsensical threats to local news outlets. Milo Byers, a seventeen-year-old dropout, is convinced that Nightwolf is his older brother who ran away eight years earlier.
Willie Davis’s work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and storySouth. He is the winner of The Willesden Herald Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He received a Waiter Scholarship from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He teaches English at Kentucky State University.
7.13 Books 