From one of America’s most original voices comes a profound and singular story about a young woman searching for her place in the world.
AVALON
by Nell Zink
Knopf, June 2022
(via Writers House)
After her mother joins a Buddhist colony and dies, Bran’s southern California upbringing is anything but traditional. Raised by her “common-law-stepfather” on Bourdon Farms—a plant nursery that doubles as a cover for a biker gang—Bran spends her days tending plants, slogging through high school, and imagining what life could be if she were born to a different family. And then she meets Peter—a beautiful, troubled, and charming trainwreck of a college student from the east coast—who launches his teaching career by initiating her into the world of literature and aesthetics. As the two begin a volatile and ostensibly doomed long-distance relationship, she searches for meaning in her own surroundings—attending disastrous dance recitals, house-sitting for strangers, and writing scripts for student films. She knows how to survive, but her happiness depends on learning to call the shots.
Exceedingly rich, brilliantly observed, and delivered with Zink’s masterful humor, AVALON is the irresistible story of one teenager’s reckoning with society at large, and the ways art and desire can clarify all that goes overlooked and cast aside.
Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, Nicotine, and Doxology, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s. She lives near Berlin, Germany.
LOVE is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to negotiate her life under the gaze of men. After long nights of slipping in and out of the beds of strangers, in a shocking moment of violence, she seizes control of her narrative and then labors to construct a life that resembles normalcy. But as she pursues love, it continually eludes her. She discovers that her past nights in cheap hotel rooms eerily resemble the more conventional life she’s trying to forge. 
In this lush, lyrical debut, Teresa Cepeda is staring down old age alone, estranged from her eldest daughter, Lyra. With her husband missing and her youngest dead, Teresa’s only companion is the petulant ghost of her mother, Amarga. But when an aberrant hurricane makes landfall in San Jose’s Valley, an unexpected visitor—the grandson she love but was never permitted to meet—arrives on her doorstep. Thirty years ago, when Teresa’s husband murdered Amarga and burned the American Fruit Corporation to the ground, Teresa was forced to flee Costa Rica. Now that her grandson is asking questions, will the Cepedas learn why their patriarch committed these shocking acts of violence? Will Lyra finally forgive Teresa for abandoning her and her late sister when they were children? As the hurricane wreaks havoc, the Cepedas will need to reconcile soon—if at all. Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, Where There Was Fire weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption. John Manuel Arias chronicles the rich history of Costa Rica from the civil war in 1948 through the mid-1990s and shows how the lives of one family are intertwined with the tides of history and international politics.
On an early-April dawn in 2003, in a Portland hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, a stillborn baby girl comes back to life and turns a vibrant cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rumanni’s beloved soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in a bombing. To Nuha, the girl’s great-aunt, there’s no question that this inexplicable child somehow embodies their sacred family history, when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a famous, unlikely love.
In the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Daniel Lavery, and born of the author’s experience in and between genders, these stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, between the lives we wish for and the ones we actually lead, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Ranging from a tornado survivor grappling with a new identity, to a trans teen psychic that can only read undecided minds, from a woman telling her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body, to con artists, runaways, and lost souls returning home, Blue’s characters all share an insistence on forging their own realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and always tender, PRETEND IT’S MY BODY is a collection bound together by the act of searching – for a story of one’s own, for a glimpse of certainty, and for a spark of recognition in others.