New Voices Festival Guide

Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry--Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima. "An astounding new voice." --ERIC LaROCCA * "I love it so much." --KELLY LINK * "Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound." --JOHN KEENE * "Incredible. Truly wondrous." --KEVIN WILSON * "Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny." --GWEN KIRBY * "Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built." --JULIA FINE At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they'll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences-of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging--and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as "singular and wise and fresh" (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: "Rapture," "Ghost Story," "Tropicália," "Antropógaga," "Idle Hands," "Rent," "Porcelain," "Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory," and "Hasselblad."A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves? In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Ling Ma's Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters - Bo, Brandon and Blue - who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control. After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family. 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls. 48-year-old Blue participates in a television expose of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech start-up whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length. Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic 80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

"Sometimes surreal, sometimes horrifying, always startling . . . Mouth introduces readers to Puloma Ghosh's unmatched ability to probe the visceral depths of female pain, desire, and grief." -Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness "A unique set of stories that show the promise of a bold new voice." -Kirkus Reviews "Ghosh has offered us a masterclass in surrealist short fiction, bound to haunt its readers long after they've put down the book." -Olivia Gatwood, author of Whoever You Are, Honey "Mouth is a work that will leave you forever changed." -Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare BESTIARY MEETS THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED IN THIS COLLECTION OF 11 EERIE, UNCANNY, AND SURREAL SHORT STORIES In this debut collection, Puloma Ghosh spins tales of creatures and gore to explore grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Embracing the bizarre and absurd, Mouth stretches reality to reach for truth. "Desiccation" follows a teen figure skater with necrophiliac fantasies who is convinced the other Indian girl at the rink is a vampire. When a woman returns to Kolkata in "The Fig Tree," she can't tell if she is haunted by her dead mother or a shakchunni - or both. "Nip" bottles up the consuming and addictive nature of infatuation, while "Natalya" is a hair-raising autopsy of an ex-lover. In "Persimmons," a girl comes to terms with her own community sacrifice. Full of fangs and talons, Mouth lays bare the otherwise awkward and unmentionable with a singular sharpness. Through surreal and captivating prose, Puloma Ghosh delves into otherworldly spaces to reimagine ordinary struggles of isolation, longing, and the aching desires of our flesh.

MOTHER/LAND is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker's relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland. Poetry. Latinx Studies.

"A surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and off the page."--New York Times Combining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queen's Gambit, a renowned puzzle creator's compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of women's work and feminist protest. The indisputable "queen of crosswords," Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, helped to spearhead the The New Yorker's popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse. In this fascinating work--part memoir, part cultural analysis--she excavates the hidden history of the crossword and the overlooked women who have been central to its creation and evolution, from the "Crossword Craze" of the 1920s to the role of digital technology today. As she tells the story of her own experience in the CrossWorld, she analyzes the roles assigned to women in American culture, the boxes they've been allowed to fill, and the ways that they've used puzzles to negotiate the constraints and play of desire under patriarchy. The result is an unforgettable and engrossing work of art, a loving and revealing homage to one of our most treasured, entertaining, and ultimately political pastimes.