Check out these new literary fiction stories that will linger with you long after the last page!
DOWN TIME by Andrew Martin
9780374617066 | 3/10/26
Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won’t leave him—despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope.
Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There’s Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a nurse with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square—yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they’ve made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end.
DOWN TIME marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics EARLY WORK and COOL FOR AMERICA. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just.
THE RENOVATION by Kenan Orhan
9780374609429 | 2/10/26
In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job—adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.
As she tries and fails to conceal the unfortunate discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants—the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers—and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer . . .
Has she gone mad? Is she the victim of a terrible prank? Is it a portal, a dream, a simulation? As she burrows deeper into her cell, her life beyond it begins to fall apart—her husband disappears, her father’s grip on reality loosens, political dictatorship threatens to destroy everything worth keeping.
In his slender, disquieting first novel, Kenan Orhan tells a story of modern migration like no other. THE RENOVATION is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.
TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner
9780374618599 | 4/7/26
The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, TRANSCRIPTION demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.
ALL FLESH by Ananda Devi, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman
9780374619176 | 4/28/26
Bullied at school with near-hellish doggedness by cold-hearted classmates and fattened at home with increasingly extravagant feasts by an overindulgent father, the voracious narrator of ALL FLESH trudges through her teen years certain that her heft is because she has absorbed her twin sister in utero and is now eating, and living, for two.
As those around her look down on her corpulence, she struggles to see who she might be beyond such narrow-mindedness. When a near-fatal incident unexpectedly brings a man and a heady experience of the body’s other pleasures into her life, she gets a decadent taste of a future she had never dared to imagine. But she is beset once more by sharp tongues and beady eyes until, finally, she devises a drastic way to turn the tables on her tormentors and the whole unjust world. But will her coup de grâce prove self-possessed, or self-destructive?
In ALL FLESH, Ananda Devi’s keenly lyrical prose presents a darkly humorous mirror that bitingly reflects and shatters the double standards around how we talk about bodies, women, beauty, and food, and how society consumes, obsesses over, and vilifies humanity’s excesses.
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