Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the story collection This Is Not Your City and a recipient of the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Plimpton Prize.
Unbend the River (2024) Devin Murphy "In these powerfully observed, richly detailed stories, Devin Murphy beautifully explores how the places and people we love can shape, strangle, and ultimately sustain each other."
The War Begins in Paris (2023) Theodore Wheeler "This powerful, immersive novel is simultaneously lush and chilling. Theodore Wheeler transports us to a place and time where friendships make it harder, not easier, to chart a moral path forward, and masterfully explores how love and loyalty can, for better and for worse, change what we're willing to do, and who we understand ourselves to be."
Deadlands (2023) Victoria Miluch "I read this book in one sitting, totally gripped by the tense dance between family members and outsiders stranded together in a lethal landscape. The desert and the people in this novel are sources of both sustenance and threat in this suspenseful story where every character has their own voice, their own agenda, and their own secrets to keep."
In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel (2023) Genevieve Plunkett "In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel is a beating heart of flowing paths and urgent questions: how do we tell the difference between our dreams, our fantasies, and our possible futures? How do we step from one life into another, not knowing if the earth under our feet will hold? In this sensitive, suspenseful novel, Genevieve Plunkett fearlessly dances between past and present, between wanting and having, between loves laced with cruelty and loves aching with tenderness and possibility."
How to Care for a Human Girl (2023) Ashley Wurzbacher "Simultaneously funny and poignant, fierce and thoughtful, How to Care for a Human Girl asks questions about our political and social moment, but there are no positions here, just people, deeply human and full of loves both steadfast and uncertain."
The Last Catastrophe (2023) Allegra Hyde "Even the ghosts in this fierce, visionary story collection are vibrantly alive, full of questions about the precarious world we've made, and who we might become as we hurtle forward to uncertain futures. What awaits us there, in Allegra Hyde's rowdy, unsparing imagination, is not just devastation, but sharp humor, delightful strangeness, and flashes of deliverance."
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020) Kathleen Rooney "In this extraordinary novel Kathleen Rooney manages to transport the reader both inside the foxholes of World War I and above them, flying over a landscape grotesquely altered by a war whose logic defies all efforts—both human and animal—to grasp it. Both a gripping tale of survival during and after war, and a contemplation of the ties between human and animal, this is a beautiful, original, deeply empathetic book."
The Devoted (2018) Blair Hurley "In this unique, surprising novel, Hurley writes not just with open eyes, but with open mind and open heart, exploring the ways we try to escape from others and from ourselves. The Devoted fearlessly tackles big questions of belief, identity, love, loss, and transformation."
