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Preorder the book Kirkus Reviews calls “[a] taut, incisive look at two lives as they slowly implode.” 

THE MISSING, a novel by Ben Tanzer (publication date: March 21, 2024)
(ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9891214-2-7, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9891214-3-4)

Preorder from Amazon or Bookshop today.

Gabriel and Hannah’s daughter Christa is missing. Has she run away with her older boyfriend or has something worse happened to her? As Gabriel and Hannah wait for the police to find her, they’re forced to confront the fissures in their marriage and who they’ve become as parents and individuals. With Gabriel’s alcoholism and womanizing always lurking and Hannah’s guilt over possibly pushing her daughter away taking a toll on her mental health, they must decide if they can be better people for each other…whether Christa comes home or not. From the Emmy-award-winning author of Upstate and Orphans, The Missing is a deeply psychological portrait of a marriage that is both full of pathos and frighteningly real.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Ben Tanzer’s latest novel, The Missing, combines master storytelling with an impeccable understanding of the human condition. It’s an unflinching look at the way our frailties and failings cause ripples that reach out through space and time, and harm the ones we love most. Tanzer, in his own inimitable way, shows us that learning how something happened is the only way to fix what’s broken, and heal the parts of ourselves that are not whole.”

–Giano Cromley, author of American Mythology and The Last Good Halloween

“The Missing is a hold-your-breath story exploring the many layers of love in a life, in a marriage, in a family. Vices and regret frozen in thin ice, nostalgia comforts and chokes. Ben Tanzer has written a book like a cigarette—smoke blurring out and swirling around what it means to be married, what it means to be a parent, what it means to be human…sinking, sinking into the mystery of what’s truly missing. How and where to find it?”

–Leesa Cross-Smith, author Goodbye Earl, Half-Blown Rose and This Close to Okay

“The Missing is a lightning strike of a book–one moment Hannah and Gabriel’s only child is with them; in the next, she’s gone. This he-said, she-said psychological excavation of a marriage and a disappearance makes clear that above all, we are the product of our childhoods, of our torments and obsessions. In his propulsive new novel, Ben Tanzer writes with haunting insight and sympathy about the human heart and its implacable, inexplicable contradictions.”

–Christine Sneed, author of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos and The Virginity of Famous Men

“In this heady story of unwilling empty nesters, Ben Tanzer surfaces sharp insights about family, middle age, and the skins that people shed—and regrow—as they crash through the lake of life. If twenty years has ever felt like a blink, you will feel very seen by The Missing.”

–Chris L. Terry, author of Black Card and Zero Fade, co-editor of Black Punk Now

TRANSITORY, stories by Tobias Carroll (originally published by CCM)
(ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9877471-6-2, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9877471-7-9)

Order at Bookshop or Amazon

The stories in Transitory consist of familiar locations turned bizarre and longstanding relationships sacrificed to singular obsessions. Unearthly figures appear on a city street, the crew of a vessel in the North Atlantic see disquieting visions in the sky, and students become fixated on a film with mysterious origins. Tobias Carroll introduces us to a perspective of the world as uncanny as it is erudite, as revealing as it is hidden, where the absurd is often the most preferable of outcomes.

Originally published in 2016 by Civil Coping Mechanisms, Transitory is a wry cult classic that recalls the work of Cesar Aira — by way of New Jersey.

PRAISE

“Ingenious and mysterious, the stories of Tobias Carroll are spun with quiet loneliness and wild surprise. Transitory is that rare kind of collection where each story stands shining alone and, in the end, forms a beautifully melancholic whole. Tobias Carroll is an original and deeply exciting talent.”
– Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and Find Me

“The stories in Tobias Carroll’s Transitory sneak up on you. They wear their inventions lightly, casually exploring an impressive range of styles and effects. Filled with haunting mysteries, sly humor, and tender melancholy, these companionable tales promise to lodge themselves in your memory. You’ll want to revisit them again and again, right down to the liner notes.”
– Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters and Mira Corpora

“This enthusiasm for language is in keeping with the other preoccupation of the collection, which is the lingering nature of art. The stories are full of remembered songs and VHS tapes, indie films and student paintings. People may be transitory, but through the years a work of art retains its emotional weight. Even art we no longer like.”
– The Rumpus

At Take Creek, one of the most prestigious art schools in the United States, an unnamed photography major attends to study under Salter, a famous and perhaps out-of-his-mind professor whose works rivals that of Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand. When Salter asks his protégé to surveil Manning, the new transfer, as his final project, what follows is a wild, unpredictable last year of college full of drugs, nudity, shifting viewpoints, and the occasional making of art.

Like a novelized version of Art School Confidential, Chris Rugeley’s Take Creek, For Example is a wry and empathic coming-of-age comedy about a young man finding himself through the lens of a camera, only to discover that the world around him is a carnival of absurdities.

Order it at Bookshop today.

THE MOTH FOR THE STAR, a novel by James Reich
(ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9877471-2-4, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9877471-3-1)

ORDER AT BOOKSHOP OR AMAZON.

Distribution: Ingram

At once a gripping metaphysical mystery of Depression-era New York and a tender ode to our dying future, James Reich’s The Moth for the Star is by turns horrifying and poignant, coldly thrilling and richly evocative. Charles Varnas is a murderer who cannot recall his victim. His cool, androgynous conspirator Campbell may hold the secret. Haunted and dissolute, they struggle to come to terms with the psychic weight of their crime. With a control of language and rhythm few can match, Reich transports his readers from the streets of Cairo to the canals of Venice, from the heights of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building to the shadow of the Sphinx. The Moth for the Star is a dark, sprawling romance, riddled with paranormal drama, a singular work destined to remain with you long after reading.

PRAISE

“An interrogation of the nature of evil set against the backdrop of a thrilling murder mystery, The Moth for the Star’s nuanced evocations of the beautiful and the damned accumulate in a terrifyingly relevant fiction, one that will keep you guessing to the last page and beyond.”

–Jonathan Evison, author of Small World

“Hypnotic, brooding, and ultimately spellbinding, The Moth for the Star is a marvel of psychological suspense rendered in prose as polished and shining as the novel’s twin protagonists, who slice through space and time with the cold detachment of a steel razor.”

–Chuck Greaves, author of The Chimera Club

“A Depression-era murder ballad as sung by a high modernist, an amnesiac’s love story as told by the Devil, The Moth for the Star is above all a sentence-by-sentence pleasure of maximalist prose used to hypnotically readable effect. Stunning and strange, Reich’s latest whisks you up with the serious power of language into a compelling and utterly memorable world.”

–Constance E. Squires, author of Hit Your Brights and Along the Watchtower

“The Moth for the Star is a triumph. It evokes the Depression era with a stylized, enervated elegance, and argues that the past is another planet: exotic, alien and inhospitable. The exquisite writing shines with diamond-cut brilliance, and the cumulative effect is uncanny, revealing a damaged world where reality has been fatally upended.”

–Simon Sellars, author of Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe and Code Beast

“In The Moth for the Star, James Reich grips the reader from the first page and doesn’t let go. Across sweeping landscapes and eras, from the 1929 market crash to post-apocalyptic environmental ruin, Reich builds a narrative storm that is menacing, inventive, and beautifully blade-sharp.” –Anne Valente, author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

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.