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A young woman falls in love with a biohacked model, a woman with gadgets implanted in various parts of her body. A mother searches for her missing daughter by taking on a hitchhiker in the hopes of finding a restaurant rumored to be a destination for runaways. A man suddenly starts dreaming the dreams of his girlfriend, but is she dreaming his? After a pandemic wipes out modern civilization, a group of survivors must decide whether to merge with the Mother Earthlings, a clan determined to repopulate the Earth.  

A book for lovers of Doris Lessing and Emily St. John Mandel, Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant marks the arrival of a wry and haunting new voice in speculative literary fiction.

“…a promising speculative collection…Yang thoughtfully explores her characters’ needs and emotions, and she effectively conceives surprising and uncomfortable circumstances—up to and including an apocalyptic pandemic in “Your Anger Is a Tiny Bird”—to interrogate the strength of human relationships. Readers will be delighted by Yang’s creative examination of her characters’ psyches.”

— Publishers Weekly

“…well-written, and diverse… The collection evokes a sense of mystery…as if the
stories continue, just not for the readers.”

— Booklist

“Dream-drenched and sinuous, the stories in Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant sing with the weird magic of being alive. Yang conveys both humor and heartache with equal grace-and every glimmering gem of a story reveals another avenue we might take to find ourselves, our shared humanity. This collection is an absolute delight.”

— Allegra Hyde, author of Eleutheria

“Reading The Runaway Restaurant is like sifting through a series of exquisite dreams-these stories are shimmering, inventive, and beautifully layered. Tessa Yang is a bold and gifted writer, and this is a stunning debut.”

— Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

“Through cybernetic implants, weather-bending superpowers, and a world-ending plague, Yang deftly illuminates the contours of fractured childhoods, of human alienation and desire. Yang’s voice is so assured and compelling that, while reading The Runaway Restaurant, I had the rare experience of not wondering if the next story would be good, but assuming it would be. I make the same assumption of her future books. This is a writer to watch.”

— Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

“In The Runaway Restaurant, Tessa Yang writes stories so nimble and sharp you don’t notice how deeply they’ve buried their claws until the last page. Mothers and daughters hurt and love each other in equal measure, teenagers fiercely seek love and freedom, and a world of the marvelous and strange feels, briefly, so very real. A delight of a book, I couldn’t stop after just one story, I wanted to keep living in Yang’s complex and deeply felt worlds.”

— Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw

“Witches, dragons that tell you your flaws, lost princesses, pandemic apocalypses, biohacking, ghosts, and more! Tessa Yang delights with whimsy and bravery, her magical conceits probing the human heart’s quest for love, laying bare how we fumble desperately toward each other.”

— Brenda Peynado, author of The Rock Eaters

Congrats to Namrata Poddar, whose debut was longlisted for The Center of Fiction First Novel Award alongside debuts by Vauhini Vara, Jessamine Chan, Fatima Asghar, and more.

Check out the rest of the list here.

Check out Amnesia of June Bugs, the debut novel from Jackson Bliss, which Booklist calls “real and surprising” and Foreword Reviews calls “exhilarating.”

Congratulations to Namrata Poddar, whose novel BORDER LESS (7.13 Books #21) has been reviewed by the LA Times, NPR, Ms. Magazine, Buzzfeed, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, and Joann Smith, whose story collections A HEAVEN OF THEIR CHOOSING (7.13 Books #20), received a great review from Kirkus Reviews!

Check out all the good press here:

The LA Times

NPR

Ms. Magazine

Buzzfeed

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Congratulations to Caitlin Vance, whose forthcoming debut collection The Paper Garden received a good review from Publishers Weekly. The Paper Garden comes out on June 10.

You can preorder it now at Amazon.

Read the entire review at PW.

Congrats to debut author Jenny Bhatt, whose story collection EACH OF US KILLERS (forthcoming September 8, 2020) was called a “rich debut collection,” “powerful,” and “memorable.”

Read the rest of the review at PW.

Author Wendy J. Fox writes about 21 great small press books to read including Beth Lisick’s EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN, and books by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Jason Teal, Ramiza Koya, and others.

Read the whole list at Buzzfeed Books

“Edie on the Green Screen”
By Beth Lisick
7.13 Books
(244 pages; $19.99)

Edie is in limbo.

“I had recently heard about the idea of a liminal zone and I liked it, probably too much,” writes Beth Lisick, in the voice of the title character in her debut novel, “Edie on the Green Screen.” “I had spent the last twenty-five years thinking that I was there, that I had arrived at my destination and was staying put, but maybe that wasn’t the case.”

When people find themselves in between – in the midst of transition from one mental or circumstantial state to the next – the effect can be disorienting. It can also lead to revelation.

Places can be in between, too. All of San Francisco, of course, has been teetering on a virtual threshold for years now. These two new novels, in very different ways, both have smart, funny and often affecting things to say about our rapidly changing world.

Read the rest of the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Edie was the “It Pal” of 1990s San Francisco, so christened by a weekly paper that didn’t want to appear sexist by naming an It Girl…”

Read the rest of the review at Booklist Online!