Drifting through the broken plains of 1820s Texas, Aaron Gwyn's latest venture into the American frontier tells a riveting coming-of-age story. Inspired by the real-life figure Levi English, a settler who ran away to live with the Comanche (Nermernuh) People as a young boy, The Cannibal Owl follows his journey of not quite belonging within a community that is nevertheless kinder to him than his own family. When Levi is eventually forced to confront growing tensions among the tribal leaders, he must make difficult choices about loyalty and self-preservation amidst deep grief and unrelenting violence. A novella of cinematic prose steeped in Native culture, Levi's story evokes reflections on the complexities of identity against a stunning Southern Plains landscape.

Known for her award-winning historical fiction, Askew evokes with resonant period detail the lives of earlier generations in these stories that speak to our current era of fragility and change.

Of Fathers & Gods is a debut collection of short fiction that delves into the relationships between fathers and their children: the good, the bad, and the awful. In these emotionally charged stories, a young expectant father, on the edge of homelessness, loses his religion and duels with a street preacher; fifty-year-old twins, survivors of foster care, war, and prison, fight over the decision to finally meet the father who abandoned them as infants, and hold him to account; and a Pulitzer-winning, ageist professor seeks to quash the writing dreams of an elderly student while coming to terms with how much love he's lost as a result of his career. These nine stories open a window into the most primal elements of the human condition-childhood and parenting-and show us how, try as we might, we can never fully escape the bonds of blood.

In unflinching yet hopeful prose, this debut memoir in essays explores the most animal parts of our human nature. Discussions of various creatures in the natural world serve as portals to the painful realities Kirsten Reneau confronts in the process of breaking-and remaking-a home. Honest in their descriptions of sexual assault and its traumatic effects, these essays are at once clinical and lyrical reflections on the ways that desire can permeate our lives for better or worse, as well as how it can be channeled into a lifegiving force for women in a world often hostile to their basic needs. Sensitive Creatures ultimately is a story of darkness, resilience, and the light that still manages to crack through.

What does it mean to belong when all the foundations are cracked? This debut poetry collection works toward many answers, attempting to shape a life inside deep loss and abiding love. Todd Osborne navigates questions of home and family amidst the complexities of Southern culture and personal grief. At its heart, Gatherer seeks solace in a faith that eludes without entirely fading. In every setting, the poet quietly lets us into a world in which each day we survive feels like a miracle-and we are left more attuned to its ordinary wonder.

True Grit meets Twin Peaks in this genre-bending debut novel by Chase Dearinger. This New Dark explores the haunted, broken hills of eastern Oklahoma, where over the course of just two cold days in November, the residents of Seven Suns will each face their own kind of weird. There's Wyatt, a dope-growing Muscogee whose obsession with a black cougar that shouldn't exist begins to uproot his life. The teenager who lives with him-Randy-is outraged at the world, confused about his sexuality, and haunted by the bones of his mother. And there's Esther-a dutiful, God-fearing court bailiff who finds herself thrust into the position of county sheriff, forced to find the missing girl whose disappearance sets everything in motion. Inexorably bringing them all together is a nameless cowboy junky who may or may not be some ancient shape-shifting evil. All of them must overcome this new dark while dealing with the violent undercurrents of family, religion, addiction, and death.

Whitewash explores the civil rights era and its lingering tensions in Shreveport, Louisiana. Narrative and lyrical poetry weave an intricate collection of voices struggling to come to terms with racism, complicity, and hypocrisy. Deeply researched, Frances Victory Schenkkan's poems also confront her own religious and family histories alongside these portraits of a fractured city-layering them into a broader examination of the ways that American culture, like The Great Raft that once stymied Shreveport growth, still bears many griefs in need of healing.

From the author of The World and the Zoo comes a new coming-of-age story as powerful as the Southern Plains landscape that surrounds it. With echoes of The Moviegoer, In the Morning, the City Is the Prairie follows Matt Bennet, a soulful yet aimless twenty-something who has little more to offer than a Costco discount while living with his parents in Oklahoma City.

Confronted by a family health crisis, Matt becomes more attuned to the needs of those he loves-and how he can best fit himself into the world-largely inspired by the more passionate and ambitious young women in his life: his girlfriend, a public school teacher participating in the Oklahoma teachers' strike of 2018, and his younger sister, a teenage idealist determined to make a difference. Throughout the novel, Rob Roensch raises the question of what we can see if we learn how to look.