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EXCERPTS

Excerpt from 1989 by Vince Omni

January 12, 2026

Order 1989 here! Red Mare Press Barnes & Noble Bookshop.org Amazon Leave a review! Goodreads Church called me a pussy six weeks before tryouts. That’s what I tell his granddaughter, Raquel, who’s sitting across from me in the apartment above…

Water Baby by Amy Widmoyer Hanson

December 19, 2025

  CHAPTER ONE — MIMI You might think I came to Africa as a humanitarian, dispensing medicine to babies so malnourished their delicate rib cages threatened to snap, rib after rib, in a glissando of tiny broken bones. You wouldn’t…

As the Lord Hangs Around Her Neck by Lauren Barbato

December 12, 2025

  Notes on This Manuscript The following manuscript, printed here for the first time, came to light on the eve of November 4, 2024. While on a self-directed silent retreat at the Riverdale Center in the Hudson Valley, a Franciscan sister…

The Drowning Mothers by Aishatu Ado

December 5, 2025

  CHAPTER ONE — INTERMENT The sky should hold its breath while we give you back to the ground. Instead, it breaks open, spilling a gray so heavy our heads bow without meaning to. Rain stripes the casket, beads along…

Happiness House by Hadley Franklin

December 20, 2024

  Preface We almost hit a deer, the night we drove up. We had the high beams on, and they broke through the darkness of the long dirt road that led to Happiness House, but we mostly saw encroaching leaves…

What Empties as It Fills by Taylor Leatrice Werner

December 13, 2024

  Chapter One I. At dawn, Mom says not to wake the others, but I don’t think anyone’s sleeping. We crouch beneath the low tarp shelter that’s tied to a fence post with the wire of someone’s earbuds. It is…

A Tremendous Thing by Susan Morehouse

December 6, 2024

  Chapter One When Lena climbs off the bus in the predawn dark of a small mountain town she doesn’t know the name of, she’s not thinking about her home now some seven hundred miles behind her; she’s not thinking…

Excerpt from Landing in Andonia by Philip Anderson

December 4, 2024

Order Landing in Andonia here! Barnes & Noble Amazon Red Mare Press 18. Lily’s Ghost She doesn’t know why she’s attracted to him. He’s not bad-looking, he’s just a big guy with small-guy energy. Nervous energy. He’s combustible, she feels…

The Bad One by Sonny Buttar

December 15, 2023

  Prologue   There is a story our parents told us, only once. When they received their immigration papers from America, they considered leaving one of us behind in Pakistan to live with relatives, believing that one child would be…

The Golden Suicides by Melissa Yancy

December 8, 2023

  “It is possible to control Los Angeles by being the one with the most vivid fantasy about it.” —Theresa Duncan, The Wit of the Staircase   1992 My brother joined the world’s smallest cult. There were precisely two members:…