Fiction

The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time. 

Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood.

Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

Lauren Elkin is the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, a New York Times Book Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London.

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation.

A children’s book without a specific age category, offering a glimpse into the small rituals and shared moments that shape a day with Fifi Paris.

Fifi, a Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, came into the lives of Angelica and Kris a few years ago. Taking care of a puppy is taking responsibility for building their world and letting the small animal transform yours. As her human caretakers, the authors created Fifi’s world with toys, cuddles, rules, snacks and walks in the park. In return, she transforms our world by bringing our community together and reminding us of the importance of caring for one another. In this book, Kris and Angelica narrate a day in the life of Fifi, from the moment she wakes up to when she falls asleep at night. Along the way, they share how they connect with her, how they see her understanding her surroundings and what she has taught them about companionship.

Design by Amy Suo Wu
Copy-editing by Clem Edwards
Photography by Lili Huston-Hertreich

East Pakistan, 1971. On their way to visit their mother, two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, are captured by Pakistani soldiers and thrown into a world of horror.

Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.

As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.

Nathan Alexander Moore is a Black transfemme writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions and temporality. Their debut chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021, and their fiction was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry.

A partly autobiographical novel that the German surrealist artist and author Unica Zürn (1916-1970) wrote for her ten-year-old daughter in 1953, although it would never be published in her lifetime. This is the first translation of the tale from German into English.

Unica Zürn tells the story of fifteen-year-old motherless Katrin, an aspiring writer, who lives with her father, also a writer. The novel is set in an imaginary world, a metropolis called Linit, split into three levels: Oberstadt (Hightown), Mittelstadt (Middletown) and Unterstadt (Lowtown), overlooked by a Volcano where the artists live and crossed by the river Emil. Presented as a book for children, apparently written for her own daughter (named Katrin), Katrin also draws on the personal biography of Zürn herself, in terms of her relationship with her father and the city of Berlin after WWII, and her experience with people on the margins of a society characterised by great tensions.

About Unica Zürn 
Nora Berta "Unika" Ruth Zürn, originally known as Ruth, was born on 6 July 1916 in Berlin. Raised in Berlin, Zürn had a contentious relationship with her mother, while she idolized her absent father. While at school she published her first short stories in magazines for young people, and in 1933 she began to work at the UFA film studios in Berlin (acronym for Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, a major German film company producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 until the end of the Nazi era). In 1942 she married and had two children, Katrin and Christian. Shortly after, she lost the custody of her children. For the next few years she survived by writing short stories for newspapers and radio plays. After the war, she became part of the Bohemian group of Berlin and began to call herself Unika (after her aunt Unika Pudor). She frequented the artistic milieu revolving around the DADA-surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne ("The Bathtub"). In 1953, Zürn met the artist Hans Bellmer, best known for his disassembled dolls in unconventional poses directed at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany, and became his muse. They lived together in Paris for many years, albeit in a conflictual relationship. Zürn concentrated on producing poetic anagrams supplemented by drawings, thus developing her own multidimensional surreal style. From the late 1950s, she suffered from forms of anxiety, later diagnosed as schizophrenia, and produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material while in psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. From 1956 to 1964, Zürn had four solo exhibitions of her drawings, and her work was included in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. The exploration of the unconscious dimension would increasingly lose its liberating, positive aspect and turn into a fixation on a narrow space, one in which the self is tormented by distressing visions. Her psychological difficulties inspired much of her writing, especially Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, published in English in 1971). Other published texts by Zürn include Hexentexte (1954) and Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring, 1967). Zürn died on 19 October 1970 in Paris, throwing herself from the sixth floor.

In Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

There was a sleigh: jet black and gleaming.

The long steel runners curved at their termini like arabesques of ice. It was too dark to clearly discern the design on its side, but it was intricate, ornate, suggestive of cuneiform and the minarets of Cairo. Two orange lanterns mounted above the driver’s chair were each encircled by a cloud of gnats and moths. Draped in fabulously embroidered saddlecloths, Ajax and Hector stomped the earth.

Given that the only exit from the cellar was the door, hardly wider and taller than a man, I marveled at how father could have extracted his creation from his smithy and pointed it at the forest. But I said nothing as I climbed unaided onto the purple velvet couch.

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space—all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz’s most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections—”Into the Drift and Sway,” “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” “Spiral,” and “Memories that Smell like Gasoline”—are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

In Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action. 

Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain—sex and democratic theory—Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. 

Claire Star Finch is a Paris-based experimental writer & performer. Their literary performances and hybrid ficto-theories are regularly presented in art spaces, both as part of their solo work and with the collective RER Q. Their research centers on themes like dildos and vomit, defining these objects as forms of emancipatory literary technologies.

They published in French the experimental fiction Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche (Les Petits Matins, 2024).

Design by Victoire Le Bars

Highly acclaimed in Denmark, Girlbeast is a fearless, unsettling, and poetic reimagining of the Lolita narrative, where power shifts unpredictably, and desire and coercion become indistinguishable. In a world that fetishises girlhood, it asks whether a girl be blamed for internalising the roles imposed upon her? Can she wield her youth as power in a system designed to render her powerless?

With sharp, fast-paced prose and an addictive plot, Cecilie Lind crafts a daring examination of female agency, sexuality, and the complexities of consent. The novel evokes the idea of the girl as animal – a creature conditioned to be both docile pet and wild beast, torn between submission and rebellion, innocence and desire.

Brave, provocative, and unflinching, Girlbeast is a gripping, vital novel for our times.

WINNER OF THE 2023 DANISH CRITICS PRIZE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE DR NOVEL PRIZE, MONTANA’S LITERATURE PRIZE & THE JYLLANDS-POSTEN FICTION PRIZE

Cecilie Lind (b. 1991) studied at Forfatterskolen (The Danish Academy of Creative Writing), and debuted in 2010 with The Wolf Ate My Eyeliner. Lind’s breakthrough in Denmark came with the publication of the highly acclaimed book-length poem My Child, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Critic’s Prize and the Politiken’s Literary Award. She was awarded The Native Language Prize in 2020, and Girlbeast won the Danish Critics Prize in 2023. Lind’s most recent novel, Bristefærdig (Ripe), was published to critical acclaim in 2025.

Hazel Evans (b. 1994) is an artist, writer and literary translator based near Aarhus, Denmark. She was the 2022/23 emerging translator for Danish to English at the National Centre for Writing, and her debut translation, Into a Star by Puk Qvortrup, was published by Hamish Hamilton. In 2024, she received The Inger and Jens Bruun Translation Prize for her translation of Rasmus Daugbjerg’s Troll, forthcoming from Penguin Press.

The narrator of Information Age is a journalist at an online news site reporting on technology, the economy, and politics in the late 2010s. The rate of increasingly short news cycles shapes her working life and her personal life, as she assumes the role of reporter while talking with engineers, analysts, wonks, artists, writers, musicians, friends, family, and lovers. Told in vignettes and dialogue—overheard and divulged—Information Age is spare, funny, and attentive, a playful blurring of public and private life.

Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared at The Yale Review, Joyland Magazine, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She currently works at the Associated Press in New York, and she previously worked at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn near Sunset Park.

An erotic novel in disguise, Willa Smart’s Switch Wish dwells in the tension between pause and play. From water striders and spiders to webs, stems, and stalks—the natural world abounds and is amplified through this narrator’s attention which moves via associative flow, inquiring into the power of spells, names, and their role in transformation.

Willa Smart was born in Idaho and is the author of numerous fantasies, insofar as one can claim to be the author of their own fantasies.

The Activist begins in the middle of a revolution. There is a protesting group of commuters with a missing leader. There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the midst of all this, the language of news reporters mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize. The book is full of entrances and exist, alternate routes and incommensurate geographies. The Activist does not analyze or explain the hopeful desires of protest at the turn of the century, but it does enable us to see them differently. — Juliana Spahr

"Whether this is a dream in which I'm captured or I've been captured and made to think I'm in a dream, I can't figure." Apropos to the rapturous tension The Activist evokes. A covert narrative operating as an event disguised as a repot. A grass trap glimpsed through the lashes of a sleepwalker. Topography of disrupted positionality, reflection girders flaccid memory against the romantic high up. Flea-bitten news and neuralgic placards. You are here**. Is dreaming the medium for crossing the ambiguous borders of talk, responsibility, collectivity, solitude? Or does reading anatomize a phantom bridge that carries you over to an unmappable reality and calls you by your secret name? Root, plan and faction, armed with tongue-tied intensity. You may ask how Renee Gladman knows that this city of slippage is your city, how she holds you within it, riveted. And therein lies the magic of this book. — Tisa Bryant

Ben is adrift. A fact-checker at a New York gossip magazine, he is well-versed in the breezy cruelty that makes the modern world go and yet hopelessly drawn to the wonders that world continues to turn up. The hypnotic asymmetry of escalators. A perfectly chilled water fountain. The essential freedom of dogs. Into the stream of this private joy steps a young woman whose general impertinence leads him back to questions about art, ambition, and intimacy he’d misplaced in the scatter that he—when pressed—calls his life.

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Balthus, bildungsroman, BINGO!, bullshit jobs, clumsy beauty, dumb luck, killed time, the lives of others, mundane surrealism, only in New York, rare victory, shaggy dogs, supposedly fun things, unscripted life, vulnerable worlds, young and broke

The first English translation of Leslie Kaplan's crystalline novella Miss Nobody Knows, about the lived aftermath of May '68: its hopes and failures and how they continue to resonate today.

“Ostensibly about the May '68 strike and a man who cannot deal with its aftermath, but really a love story to these moments when suddenly the utopian comes into view and no longer feels impossible. It’s a book to read right now so as to remember that there have been moments when people come together in the name of possibility, rather than in rage.” —Juliana Spahr

“Thank you for sending Leslie Kaplan's book, so strong and graceful, so… so… so… as if the novel were suspended between the animal and the human.” —Jean-Luc Godard, letter to Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens

“One thought he understood it all, the other wanted to see it all. Through two opposing characters, Leslie Kaplan brings to life something of May '68 … This novel breaks an opening out of the infinitely mad universe that was captured by Leslie Kaplan's first book, Excess-The Factory.” —Claire Devarrieux, Libération

Frances Bethune is desperate to lose weight before her husband’s return from India―in just two weeks. On the advice of a bad-breathed spirit, Frances undertakes a slenderizing séance. While she succeeds in her quest for thinness, she is horrified to discover that her discarded weight has taken on a new life of its own. Of this chilling, revolting tale, H.P. Lovecraft raved that Everett "reaches singular heights of spiritual terror." This new edition from Mandylion Press restores Everett’s 1907 masterpiece. It features an original introduction written by Mandylion cofounder Madeline Porsella, as well as a glossary that provides visual, material and affective image footnotes.

Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851–1923) was born in Kent, England. Between 1896 and 1920, she published 22 books under the pen name Theo Douglas. She was an influential figure in the early days of science fiction and fantasy writing, and was cited in H.P. Lovecraft’s extended 1927 essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."

Virginia Woolf described "Orlando" as "an escapade, half-laughing, half-serious; with great splashes of exaggeration, " but many think Woolf's escapade is one of the most wickedly imaginative and sharply observed considerations of androgyny that this century will see.

Orlando is, in fact, a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, he is a young male aristocrat at the beginning of the story - and a modern woman four centuries later. The hero-heroine sees monarchs come and go, hobnobs with great literary figures, and slips in and out of each new fashion. Woolf presents a brilliant pageant of history, society, and literature as well as subtle appreciation of the interplay between endings and beginnings, past and present, male and female.

Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels, including Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando.

A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.

Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize.

A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss. 

Anne Garréta, author of the groundbreaking novel Sphinx (Deep Vellum, 2015), is a member of the renowned Oulipo literary group. Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.” Garréta is also the author of In Concrete, translated by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, 2021).

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator of poetry and prose from France, the Middle East, and North Africa. She is the recipient of a Fulbright, an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and the 2018 Albertine Prize. Her translations for Deep Vellum include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and In Concrete, Fouad Laroui's The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers, and Brice Matthieussent's Revenge of the Translator.

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s coming-of-age tale about finding a community among fellow outcasts.

Born in the small Argentine town of Mina Clavero, Camila is designated male but begins to identify from an early age as a girl. She is well aware that she’s different from other children and reacts to her oppressive, poverty-stricken home life, with a cowed mother and abusive, alcoholic father, by acting out—with swift consequences. Deeply intelligent, she eventually leaves for the city to attend university, slipping into prostitution to make ends meet. And in Sarmiento Park, in the heart of Córdoba, she discovers the strange, wonderful world of the trans sex workers who dwell there.

Taken under the wing of Auntie Encarna, the 178-year-old eternal whose house shelters this unconventional extended family, Camila becomes a part of their stories—of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars, a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, an abandoned baby boy who brings a twinkle to your eye.

Camila Sosa Villada’s extraordinary first novel is a rich, nuanced portrait of a marginalized community: their romantic relationships, friendships and squabbles, difficulties at work, aspirations and disappointments. It bears witness to these lives constantly haunted by the specter of death—by disease or more violent means at the hands of customers, boyfriends, or the police—yet full of passion, empathy, and insight.

A searing collection of true stories from “one of Mexico’s most exciting new voices” (The Guardian) 

Set in and around the Mexican city of Veracruz, This Is Not Miami delivers a series of devastating stories—spiraling from real events—that bleed together reportage and the author’s rich and rigorous imagination.

These narrative nonfiction pieces probe deeply into the motivations of murderers and misfits, into their desires and circumstances, forcing us to understand them—and even empathize—despite our wish to simply label them monsters. As in her hugely acclaimed novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, Fernanda Melchor’s masterful stories show how the violent and shocking aberrations that make the headlines are only the surface ruptures of a society on the brink of chaos.