Literary Fiction (7/7/26)

These new literary fiction stories about women on the verge of existential dread and the dark undercurrents of small towns will linger long after the last page!

FALLOW by Sarah Anderson
9780374621148 | 9/15/26

Natalie knows one truth: There is no such thing as a good job.

As the clock ticks away at the workplace harassment call center, she tries to ignore the increasing pain in her jaw. She has no dental insurance. She has no skills or ambitions. She has student loans. And, minute by minute, she hears the many ways workers are not just not getting by, but actually getting hustled.

Then, at the blood bank where she sells her plasma, a mysterious flyer leads her to The Company. Natalie turns out to be the perfect candidate for their pilot program: in-house surrogate. The Company pitches it as an opportunity to help women access greater gender equity, motherhood without maternity leave. Finally, she will be adequately—generously—compensated.

For years, her every need is met: stacks of healthy meals in the refrigerator of a luxury condo, fitness coaches and nutritionists, around-the-clock healthcare. Between deliveries, she takes time off—no obligations or expectations. For the first time in her life, she is good at her job; for the first time, she feels free.

But just as she’s about to fulfill the terms of her contract, a staffing decision upends everything and drags her deep into another social experiment. There she meets new questions about her future, her freedom, her purpose, and what she can expect from the world.

Woundingly funny and deeply moving, Sarah Anderson’s FALLOW is a tender, hilarious, alarmingly real vision of a woman balancing on the knife-edge of capitalism as she comes to realize who she wants to be.

AGNES LIVES! by Hallie Elizabeth Newton
9781639738564 | 6/23/26

New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer seeks a willing murderer and wonders what she should wear. Candidates include: an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; an eccentric designer from her past; and Agnes’s cruel novelist boyfriend. As she Ubers from Upper East Side shopping to Craigslist gun deals, Agnes’ desperation becomes an exhibition, a swan song of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way.

Newton’s prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of existential despair that culminates in a worthy, intense denouement.

AVALON, RISE by Madeline ffitch
9780374617769 | 9/22/26

Ditched on the side of the road, two friends shelter for the night in a barn. When they wake, one comes face-to-face with his destiny—an antique letterpress, the Vandercook No. 4.

Woody and Leroi have been friends their whole lives. But as Leroi falls in with the collective that cooks every Sunday in the park, learning about traveler symbols and how to slice a cucumber, Woody starts to snort the pills he’s been selling. He makes his art: beautiful letterpress signs for protests, and business cards commissioned by a woman he knows as Stasia but whom others know to be the leader of a white nationalist movement. Stasia bought the barn with the Vandercook in it; she says Woody can use it anytime. What does she want in return?

Woody and Leroi are just two residents of this Appalachian town. Their lives intersect, often at the library, with a cast of delightfully eccentric individuals. Eloise, the town librarian and lifelong activist. The punks at Food Not Bombs. Sharon, a wry social worker. Emma, a mom trying really hard not to take out her anger on her kids. Amber, the health goddess who runs the Discipline Cafe. Sylvester, an unhoused man with a long history in town. Matt Mistelthwaite, a World War II veteran with his own connections to the Vandercook. When Stasia insists on hosting a European Heritage Rug Braiding workshop at the library, everyone’s lives will be upended.

In AVALON, RISE, an ensemble novel genuinely rooted in the collective, Madeline ffitch asks big questions and doesn’t look away from the answers.

HUMPTY DUMPTY by Harold Rogers
9780374620400 | 11/10/26

HUMPTY-DUMPTY SAT ON A WALL . . .
Darius Rodgers is the king of Steubenville, Ohio. Invincible, untouchable: a god among men. He’s the quarterback about to lead his team to their first State Championship in twenty years. And now his mom and his twin sister, Beatriz and Anna, are back from exile in Rio, trying to sew the estranged family back together. Nothing can spoil his glory: Not love. Not loyalty. Nothing. Until he ushers in his own doom.

HUMPTY-DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL . . .
Anna doesn’t even want to be back in Stupidville, but she decides to make the most of it. She’s here to live free and have fun! But her secret romance with Darius’s best friend, Fleet, and the rumors it spawns make the first domino fall in a series of social detonations in one small town’s moral apocalypse: crime, conspiracy, silence, betrayal, hackers, incels, dereliction!

How the hell do you tell a story like this?

Hilarious, bold, and explosively original, Harold Rogers’s HUMPTY DUMPTY is a reckoning with American rot, generational failure, and the brutal question at the heart of every tragedy: Why didn’t you do anything?