Amber Sparks is the author of a previous collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, and her fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.
A Lesser Light (2025) Peter Geye "Reading this book felt like watching some rare celestial event: sky-big, beautiful and strangely tender, and full of a kind of magic at the edge of things that's impossible to describe and changes you forever to witness."
King Nyx (2024) Kirsten Bakis "I don't generally believe in page-turners, but King Nyx actually is a page-turner, and I couldn't stop thinking about it long after I turned the last page. Opulent, haunting, riveting, and centered around a great gothic mystery-it's like a Wilkie Collins novel for modern feminists."
Hestia Strikes a Match (2023) Christine Grillo "A rom-com about the ups and downs of dating, but it's set during the next American civil war in the very near future. Right?! This very funny, very sad and sweet, and very Baltimore book is about finding connection in a world where everything has been turned inside out. Sound familiar? Just read it: it's wonderful, it's relevant, it's so good."
One's Company (2022) Ashley Hutson "This book is such a savvy, deadpan, moving meditation-unto-absurdity on obsession and trauma and throwaway television and the ways that our hobbies can hurt us and heal us and sometimes overwhelm us. I absolutely loved it."
Fruiting Bodies (2022) Kathryn Harlan "Oh my gosh Kathryn Harlan's stories are so good-they're feral and formal and funny and exactly what you want when you turn to a person you love and say 'tell me a story.'"
Maria, Maria (2022) Marytza K Rubio "About halfway through every story in this startling, brilliant collection, I found myself shouting 'HOW DARE THIS STORY BE SO WILD?!' Read if you love deeply original tales filled with magic and worldbuilding, read if you love lush and evocative prose-but be warned, if you read this book in public, you might just start yelling out loud in delight, too."
Mrs. March (2021) Virginia Feito "This crisp, delicious portrait of a woman coming apart is a brutal, darkly funny, sharp blade of a book. I loved it."
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead (2021) Emily Austin "My god - this book starts with a literal bang and keeps on going, straight through the heart of American anxiety, exploring the self-imposed experience of being a terrified human in a world with other terrified humans. It's so vivid and so good."
(Tuesday Mooney, book 1) Kate Racculia "Shirley Jackson by way of Henry James by way of The Westing Game—but pure hilariously wry and witty Kate Racculia. This book was so engrossing and so delightful that I actually yelped when it ended—I wish every book was as much pure fun as Tuesday Mooney."
How to Be Safe (2018) Tom McAllister "This is one of those books you don't know if you can read, and then after you don't know how you lived in a world without it. It's chock full of the things that are killing us: mass shootings, misogyny, the internet, media frenzies, tribalism. And it's so wonderful - so furious and so funny and urgent and needed in this mad ugly space we're sharing with each other. I can't believe this book was written by a man - but I'm so happy Tom McAllister wrote it."
