Archives par étiquette : Neon Literary

OFFSEASON d’Avigayl Sharp

A sharp, darkly funny literary debut about a disillusioned young woman teaching at an all-girls boarding school as she tries—and fails—to make sense of trauma, desire, family, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

OFFSEASON
by Avigayl Sharp
Astra House, May 2026
(via Neon Literary)

In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, OFFSEASON, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.

Though she’s vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, OFFSEASON reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.

★ « Sharp grabs the contemporary fixation on trauma by the horns and rides it to a triumphant and illuminating first-place finish. » — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“One of the sharpest and liveliest debuts of the decade . . . wild, raunchy, upsetting, and very much unpredictable.” — Vulture

“Intensely observant and ineffably askew. It’s a funny, sad, discomfiting, unabashedly weird book that I inhaled and haven’t managed to stop thinking about yet.” — NPR

“To let us see the world reinvented through the eyes of a narrator who makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, to have us laugh at what is painful and feel compassion when the narrator is lighting firecracker sentences to get us to look elsewhere—this is the eternal promise of the literary first novel. In Offseason, Avigayl Sharp fulfills that promise, amply, and with art and wit.” — Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow

Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2023-2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. OFFSEASON is her first novel.

CREATURES OF HABIT de Jennifer Yeh

A warm, generous, and emotional debut novel with a speculative bent for fans of The Correspondent, Shark Heart, and Sandwich.

CREATURES OF HABIT
by Jennifer Yeh
William Morrow, March 2027
(via Neon Literary)

Gina Lee’s life might not have turned out to be terribly exciting, but it’s comfortably predictable—until her husband Mark drops a bomb that upends everything. Ever since the unexpected death of his mother Mark has been drifting out of the family orbit. Now, he has completely escaped their gravitational pull: he’s leaving to start a new relationship with a younger woman.

Reckoning with a future that looks nothing like the one she imagined and a past she now must rewrite, Gina finds herself adrift for the first time in decades. For years she has been the emotional and practical heart of her family, but with the members of that family scattered and the reality of Mark’s engagement party fast approaching, Gina wonders for the first time what she wants for herself.

It’s only when a strange amphibious creature crawls through her window to ask for help that Gina begins to understand that her life is not over. In fact, with the unlikely wisdom of her new friend, she finds that it might be just beginning.

Told with a poignantly observant eye, Jennifer Yeh’s gentle, uplifting debut that speaks to the shifting seasons of life and the deeply human ability to find joy in a few perfect moments.

Jennifer Yeh is a textbook author and a one-time frog biologist. She lives in San Francisco

THE FOOL de Baba Ademoroti

A warm, tender and absolutely heartbeaking debut from a writer to watch.

THE FOOL
by Baba Ademoroti
Henry Holt, 2027
(via Neon Literary)

When Niyi learns that his 30-year-old son is gay, the discovery unmoors him, unlocking a burning need to re-examine his life. In a series of letters to his only son, Niyi lays bare his past, and the (supposed) clarity and wisdom on the page reveals more about Niyi than he has ever cared to acknowledge. Set across Nigeria, from Kano, in the north, to the bustling metropolis of Lagos, to an unnamed quiet war town in the deep south, The Fool asks the question: How can you make sense of a life if you came of age in a time and place without a language to speak your heart or a model to mirror your existence?

In the tradition of Gilead, The Remains of the Day, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, THE FOOL explores themes of place, masculinity and queerness, and the ensuing shockwaves when we are confronted with a starkly different way of being, after a life lived in instructed and familiar ways.

Baba Ademoroti, a Yoruba writer from Lagos, Nigeria, received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Houston. His short fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, AGNI, and in a special literary supplement selected and edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

THE UNHELD de Luke Larkin

A girl sets out to find her father after he is carried off by an otherworldly creature in this atmospheric horror Western.

THE UNHELD
by Luke Larkin
Hyperion Ave, August 2026
(via Neon Literary)

While other twelve-year-olds are in school. Charlie spends her days skinning the animals her father hunts in the wild woods just outside their cabin. Charlie’s life in the Montana Territory is a lonely one, as her father is a mercurial man of few words who mostly ignores her until there’s a chore to be done.

One night, a living nightmare appears, stalking out of the trees. Neither animal nor human, the Beast drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him Charlie enlists the aid of two unlikely allies: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occuIt society and a Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit.

Yet as she and her allies prepare for a confrontation with the Beast, Charlie will need to decide if her father is ultimately worth saving. What does she owe the man who called her daughter yet never showed her love?

THE UNHELD is an unsettling and soulful historical horror novel—perfect for readers of Christopher BuehIman’s Between Two Fires, Andy Davidson’s The Boatman’s Daughter, and T. Kingfisher’s What Maxes the Dead. The novel’s ingeniously conceived monster will set your skin crawling, while the indomitable heroine at the story’s center will capture your heart.

Luke Larkin is a writer who lives in Missoula, Montana, where he earned his MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Iron Horse Literary Review, HAD, and Sonora Review.

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM de Lyz Lenz

From the author of the New York Times-bestseller This American Ex-Wife, comes a new book by Lyz Lenz—a fierce, funny, and deeply reported love letter to the Midwest and a cri de coeur for collective care in our crisis-riddled country.

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
by Lyz Lenz
Dey Street, Spring 2027
(via Neon Literary)

In the decade since Hillbilly Elegy tried to explain America through the lens of white, rural grievance, Lyz Lenz has been living—and writing—a more radical, generous truth from a few hundred miles to the northwest. A proud lowan and nationally recognized journalist, she now blends memoir, political analysis, and biting cultural critique in her signature style: Barbara Ehrenreich by way of Samantha Irby. Through floods, farm bankruptcies, Kum & Go parking lots, hot dish, and butter cows, THE MIDDLE KINGDOM shows how Midwestern communities are improvising survival—even joy— through mutual aid and stubborn care.

THE MIDDLE KINGDOM expands on themes that have made Lenz an essential voice in today’s political discourse: the failures of hyper-individualism, the radical politics of care, and the importance of taking « flyover country » seriously.

Lyz Lenz is a journalist and the author of God Land and Belabored. She has written for Insider, The New York Times, Marie Claire, and The Washington Post. Lenz also writes the newsletter « Men Yell at Me », about the intersection of politics and personhood in red-state America.