NEW: ISLE OF DOGS, Part 1 by Jon Frankel

It’s 2500—proprietary genetic enhancements are ruthlessly guarded by a caste of aristocratic Rulers who preside over the burnt-out husk of American democracy, and the imperious Sargon 3 is on the brink of achieving a lifetime’s worth of ambitions: he’s the Ruler of New York, master of the US Senate, and mere steps away from the presidency itself.

The birth of his cloned successor, Sargon 4, is an occasion for national celebration. But Sargon harbors a potentially deadly secret: an illegal bastard daughter, Phaedra, who was conceived the old-fashioned way—through love.

Rival Rulers—including the mad, decrepit incumbent President Iocle and the savage religious extremist Senator Everest from Texas (who believes bastards should be dissolved in acid)—will stop at nothing to expose Phaedra and destroy Sargon, who must try to protect his children and defend his city against a backdrop of mounting political discord and civil unrest.

At once a family saga, a sophisticated political thriller, and a briskly paced sci-fi fever dream, Isle of Dogs: Part One is the most ambitious installment yet in Jon Frankel’s acclaimed Drift series (which includes GAHA: Babes of the Abyss and The Man Who Can’t Die).

Jon Frankel is a poet and novelist, the author of Gaha: Babes of the Abyss and The Man Who Can’t Die, and writing as Buzz Callaway, Specimen Tank (Manic D. Press, 1993). Isle of Dogs, a prequel to GAHA: Babes of the Abyss, will be published by Whiskey Tit in four parts.

NEW: THE WAY RAIN FALLS by Mathew Michael Hodges

It’s 1998, and Jim Diffin is a charming, reckless, college sophomore with a unique moral code, a crew of wild friends, and no interest in serious relationships. That is, until he meets Diana Huntington, a precocious teenager who doesn’t fall for him so easily and embodies everything he’s ever wanted. The longer they date, the more her cool aloofness entrances him.

His friends, a memorably eclectic mix of social outcasts offer no shortage of dubious advice and the usual relief of tea with his mother will lose its typical solace once he learns she has worse troubles herself.

And while comforting his mother, weighing the insights of his friends, and agonizing over Diana, his mindset opens to a new way, but can his compassion, patience and burgeoning enlightenment ever win him the girl?

In the course of The Way Rain Falls, blind hope and frenzied despair send Jim careening from candle-lit dinners to street fights, intimate camp-outs to a drug fueled road trip to Canada, and an indiscretion Jim may never live down.

Mathew Michael Hodges lives and writes in Providence, RI. His fiction has appeared in Superstition Review, The Opiate, West Trade Review, and Jumbelbook. He earned his MFA from San Diego State University and teaches writing and Literature at Dean College, The Community College of Rhode Island, Bristol Community College, and Roger Williams University.

RAGE IS A WOLF by kt Mather

Sixteen-year-old Elaine Archer thinks the Earth might really be screwed. And she’s pretty sure sitting in a classroom memorizing Civil War battle dates isn’t gonna save it.

Desperate to do something meaningful, but not sure it will do any good, Elaine talks her moms into letting her drop out of school to write a novel. Spending her days circling Chicago in search of her story, she discovers a universe of people and ideas she’d never have encountered behind the doors of D.B. High. As her understanding of the complexity of the world and relationships deepens, so does her fear that she might not have what it takes to make any difference at all.

kt mather grew up in Alaska with a respect for two things—nature and the power of a good story. She was a high school English teacher and soccer coach for years and misses being around teenagers' humor and authenticity. She lives in Vermont with her family, where she writes, hosts the podcast “Out of Curiosity with kt mather,” and is busy converting her lawn into an edible forest and pollinator garden.

NEW ROSES by Stefan O. Rak

New Roses is a work of experimental prose that explores the relationships between madness and addiction, consciousness and language. Written by an anonymous drug-addled paranoid schizophrenic, New Roses offers a window into the shattered mind of a young man doomed to a lifetime of persecution.

Stefan O. Rak lives in New York City, because it makes sense. In the 1940s, his grandparents fled Ukraine for NYC, otherwise he may have never been born. As a child, some neurologists suspected that he had hypergraphia, but it turned out that he had other issues.

HOUSE OF APOLLO by Maxwell Olin Maxwell

If you could know exactly how and when calamity would strike, would you want to? And more importantly, would you tell your insurance company? What if it was something smaller, like the next time you were going to get a bad case of athlete’s foot… would you let them know then? In House of Apollo, they already know. The actuaries have won: Big Data predicts it all. At Longshot Insurance, it’s been years since the last claim, and HR has happily eliminated every department but Marketing. But fate cannot be so easily conquered, and when a priest in this temple of rationality meets his Dionysian match, comic chaos ensues. Like a thought experiment where Orwell drinks with Bukowski and Mervyn Peake transcribes, this novel of ideas is anything but predictable.

Maxwell Massa spent five years in China (including a year-long stint as a Mandarin TV star), only to return to the U.S. and find that — surprise! — intellectualism isn’t really a thing here.

NEWBORN by Agustín Maes

Shafts of afternoon light rained through oak and willow and eucalyptus, the boys’ small faces stippled with fine golden sunspots as though behind lacework mourning veils knitted from shadow. They stood side-by-side at the edge of a broad yawn of creekbed, eyes bound to what they had discovered there amongst sedge and blackberry and wild rye. Neither spoke.

What a gift, what a glorious incantation! Each sentence, each segment in Newborn is a stone dropped in a pond of still, deep water awash in quiet reverberation. Like Chekhov or the legendary German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, Maes writes with uncommon lyricism and precision as he traverses the rugged emotional terrain.

– Gina Ochsner, author of The Hidden Letters of Velta B., The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight, Pleased to Be Otherwise, and People I Wanted to Be