Set against the backdrop of a remote location in the throes of rapid development, The Scent of Distant Family is a contemporary novel that expands, even across geologic time, our sense of who we choose to consider family.

Thanks for This Riot explores the limits of kindness, the weight of being needed, and the fear of being misunderstood. A group counselor is taunted by a truth-divining piano bench, a voice actor shouts her abortion at the state capitol, a tired caregiver tangles with a pair of stand-up comics, a small-town newspaper office shelters an otherworldly tattletale, a backwoods acupuncturist leans on her least-exciting offspring, a girl in a strapless bra takes a vengeful go-kart ride, and a woman gets surgery to lower her expectations (she thinks it went “okay”). 

Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.

Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist traces the creative coming of age of a mill-town feminist. Sherrie Flick, whose childhood spanned the 1970s rise and 1980s collapse of the steel industry, returned to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, witnessing the region’s before and its after.

In Buffalo Soldiers in California Brian G. Shellum follows the experiences of Captain Young and the Ninth Cavalry in the Golden State, from life at the Presidio and the challenges of army life in a large city to summers patrolling Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks to missions training with the California National Guard. 

Fantastical, sensual, and as beguilingly strange as they are insightful and real, the stories of All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere are centered around intimate familial or romantic relationships, featuring protagonists who make awesome discoveries—from the beautiful to the horrible—in seemingly mundane situations. The protagonists in each story come from marginalized communities, which sometimes exacerbates their problems but always allows for unique perspectives and epiphanies.

Etta Montgomery is a Boston-based labor lawyer coming to terms with the love and loss she experienced as a teenager during a 1988 family reunion in Burma. When Etta’s grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel back to Myanmar (Burma) to explore the complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother’s family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and intricate relationships, The Golden Land seeks to uncover those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.

Dear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility. Exploring relationships between modernism, motherhood, poetry, and privilege, the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious, funny, and wry, Julie Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now, imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. 

Winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, Ben Grossberg’s The Spring before Obergefell is about real guys who have real problems, yet still manage to find connection. Funny, serious, meditative, and hopeful, The Spring before Obergefell is a romance—but not a fairytale.