New Books in Literature

The seven stories and novella that comprise The Calamity of Desire, Judith Dancoff’s debut collection of short fiction, each focus on a famous painter or well-known work of art. Inspired by the art of Gustav Klimt, John Singer Sargent, Auguste Renoir, Diego Velásquez, Johannes Vermeer, Paul Gauguin, and Roman glass found around the world, these stories explore the imagined desires and dreams of both famous artists and the models they used to express their art. Each story is a gem, but you’ll never forget Dancoff’s tale about Gustav Klimt’s well-known, posthumous portraits of Ria Munk, a young Jewish woman who killed herself over a broken heart. Or the struggling young painter in Paris who poses for Renoir and gets involved in the Dreyfus Affair. As soon as you finish the book, you’ll want to study the paintings again, with new insight. From the time she was very young, Judith Dancoff's first love was painting, before she went to UCLA and was kidnapped by filmmaking and ultimately writing. She holds two MFAs--one from the UCLA Film School and one from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. When she is not working on new writing projects or wandering museums, she takes community art classes, dreams of becoming an artist, and teaches writing and literature at Los Angeles City College. Recently, a part of her dream came true when her video and several small pieces were included in the art exhibit "Atomic Dragons" at Pitzer College in March-April 2026.A Pushcart Prize Nominee, Dancoff's writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Her awards include Best Short Story Collection of 2025 from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and fellowships at Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Djerassi, where she was the McElwee Family Fellow. Her film "Judy Chicago & the California Girls" has screened at and is owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Danny Bradigan survived brutal fighting in Afghanistan and fought as a professional boxer, but a bullet finally puts him in a coma. Part of his recovery involves heading to a small Appalachian town where he’s inherited a property and a car mechanic business. He knows nothing about repairing cars and needs to understand who gave him this chance at another life. He begins mentoring Ryan, the young man who used to help the previous owner, falls in love with Amy, the boy’s older sister, and when he’s not stuck in his memories, spends his free time searching the town records. As he gets closer to discovering the town’s violent secrets, the threats against him and his new friends start festering. A Bunch of Fives (Falling Up Publishing, 2026) is a stunning, literary crime thriller that portrays a town simmering with hate, violence, and racism while Danny Bradigan struggles to overcome violent memories of war and a life built on violence and destruction.William Kely McClung is a novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker whose work is defined by its visceral pacing, atmospheric depth, and raw physical reality. Named as one of the “Top 100 Indie Filmmakers in the World,” McClung has written more than thirty feature screenplays and directed three award-winning feature films, cutting and mixing projects in legendary spaces from London to Berlin. McClung has spent decades learning and teaching martial arts across the United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe—a lifetime of elite combat discipline that directly infuses his prose with authentic, high-velocity stakes and action. He was twice inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Honours for his contributions to martial arts and action cinema.In A Bunch of Fives, as in his three previous thrillers, Loop, Super Ninja, and Black Fire, McClung strives to strip away traditional artifice to create an immersive non-linear experience where the presentation of words on the page becomes an active character. Besides spending seemingly endless time on the computer hammering out stories, McClung travels, trains, and teaches martial arts, and studies graphic design, writing, and photography. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In How to Date a Fanatic (HarperVia, 2026), a novel by Aruni Kashyap, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jaclyn Gilbert's Butter Road (Acre Books, 2026) is a searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence. In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an "English" outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population. At the novel's outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they've accumulated caring for Emma's disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara's husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara's library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars--a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own. Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can't control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one's heart. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Her clothes shredded and disrobed by her own teeth, Lucy finds herself draped over a high tree branch in the quad of her college, naked but unafraid, a wild leopard more than any humankind. So begins Emeline Atwood’s starling debut novel, A Real Animal (Catapult, 2026). We know early on that Lucy will never be able to reach back to that precise feeling of being the leopard, powerful and at one with the natural world. Instead, she will swim in the harsher waters of a society that scorns and shames her, that seems to revel in her abuse, with a family that would prefer that she silence herself.A Real Animal exists in a tremorous first person, the reader watching through Lucy’s eyes her attempts at intimate partnerships, with good men, horrible men, indifferent men, each relationship cast off or dissolved by the incoherence of her interior life. In sexual dramas for which she is but a prop, and family spectacles that treat her like so much wallpaper, Lucy seeks an experience of life that abandons performance for something like the sensuousness of the imminent now. A bildungsroman that throws redemption and assimilation on the trash heap, A Real Animal does what the Russian Formalists hoped literature would do: it shakes you awake and rejects the comforts of your habitual life in favor of something as friction-full as a dirty razor. The waves come hard, and you can but experience the drowning.Emeline Atwood graduated from the Michener Center for Writers in 2023. She writes fiction and poetry and is a recipient of the Thomas T, Hooper Prize, the Louis Begley Prize, the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Prize. A Real Animal was just shortlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize for a debut novel.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.