Parker Young's short stories and flash fictions combine humor, anxiety, and pathos as they walk a razor's edge between the absurd and compelling human stakes.

Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane is a debut collection of stories that announces a startling new talent in American storytelling. Parker Young's short stories and flash fictions combine humor, anxiety, and pathos as they walk a razor's edge between the absurd and compelling human stakes. Young's total command of voice and style makes for stories sure to linger in the haunted air of your subconscious.

Fiction.

Funeral for Flaca is an exploration of things lost and found-love, identity, family-and the traumas that transcend bodies, borders, cultures, and generations.

Emilly Prado retraces her experience coming of age as a prep-turned-chola-turned-punk in this collection that is one-part memoir-in-essays, and one-part playlist, zigzagging across genres and decades, much like the rapidly changing and varied tastes of her youth. Emilly spends the late 90's and early aughts looking for acceptance as a young Chicana growing up in the mostly-white suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to Portland, Oregon in 2008. Ni de aquí, ni de allá, she tries to find her place in the in between.

Growing up, the boys reject her, her father cheats on her mother, then the boys cheat on her and she cheats on them. At 21-years-old, Emilly checks herself into a psychiatric ward after a mental breakdown. One year later, she becomes a survivor of sexual assault. A few years after that, she survives another attempted assault. She searches for the antidote that will cure her, cycling through love, heartbreak, sex, an eating disorder, alcohol, an ever-evolving style, and, of course, music.

She captures the painful reality of what it means to lose and find your identity, many times over again. For anyone who has ever lost their way as a child or as an adult, Funeral for Flaca unravels the complex layers of an unpredictable life, inviting us into an intimate and honest journey profoundly told with humor and heart by Emilly Prado.

I felt these essays deep in my heart. Funeral for Flaca is like a Chicana punk rock ballad in prose. Soulful and brave, these essays of Prado's life made me feel less lonely, less outcasted, and more seen-and isn't that why we come to books in the first place? -Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina

Once I started reading Funeral for Flaca, I could not stop. The series of essays traverses Prado's life and weaves a narrative that is gripping and beautifully told. Each essay is a finely crafted tribute to periods in Prado's labyrinthine path, intersecting trauma, pathology, loss and, ultimately, perseverance and healing. -Lisa Congdon, artist and author of Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic

This book is brilliant. It tells the unique stories of what it means to grow up Latina in the U.S. and the universal experiences of love, coming of age and finding your own voice and self. Prado weaves personal stories that make you laugh, cry and give you hope for the future. -Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, author and co-editor of Presente!

Emilly Prado's Funeral For Flaca is fierce, funny, intelligent, and vulnerable. This memoir-in-essays speaks with ease and honesty about the ferociously hard, isolating moments of youth, and Prado's matter-of-fact tone reads like a friend's voice talking us through the worst of it. Funeral for Flaca is here to remind us: there is a woman lying dormant inside every girl. -Margaret Malone, author of People Like You

Like a cracked crystal ball tagged with black spray paint, these discomforting and darkly hilarious stories unveil a past, present, and future of unexplainable yet bizarrely poetic prophesies and moods. In ninety-five flash fictions, Shane Kowalski's SMALL MOODS presents lovers, dogs, bathtubs, hands, jewels, bananas, peasant boys, cuckolds, Jesus, dildoes, shoes, nudes, cults, sadness, the movie Carrie, and much much more. Can you imagine a love child of Lydia Davis and Richard Brautigan? How about Russell Edson's ghost having tea with Diane Williams? Reading SMALL MOODS is like entering a weird and private room of reject fairy tales and goofball fables. It's a room that belongs to Shane Kowalski, and he is welcoming you with strong, open, sweat-drenched arms. Don't be afraid. He made you something.

I am in love with this weird, gross, hilarious, beautiful book, and with Shane Kowalski's cursed sentences, which enchant you, seduce you, then drop you off in hell. Every story is a perfect little snow globe of sidesplitting misery.--J. Robert Lennon, author of Pieces for the Left Hand and Let Me Think

Fiction.

An innovative work of fiction, Jeff Alessandrelli's And Yet interrogates contemporary shyness, selfhood and sexual mores, drawing out the particulars of each through historical references, cultural commentary, and the author's own restless imagination. And Yet builds off the work of authors as disparate as Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras, and Kobo Abe, while alluding to the work of Susan Sontag, Young Thug, Young Jean Lee, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück, among others. With its nameless protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his daunting interiority, And Yet's form morphs, cracks, and continuously tries to repair itself while becoming a nuanced story of our times. Love is a thing full of anxious fear. Especially when what you ultimately love and fear is your self, writes Alessandrelli, and And Yet draws such a notion down, out and around again, arriving at its own idiosyncratic answers by the end of the book.

AURA is more than a memoir-- it's a spell book for survival, a powerful promise from mother to son, and an intimate examination of power, spirituality, and the abuse of both.

AURA is more than a memoir-- it's a spell book for survival, a powerful promise from mother to son, and an intimate examination of power, spirituality, and the abuse of both. Hillary Leftwich weaves together the stories of her life to create startlingly raw memories that are both personal and profoundly universal. She explores the devastating impact of patriarchy in her own life while searching for answers in witchcraft, womanhood, and motherhood. Urgently portrayed and deeply felt, AURA is a complex tapestry of letters, spells, and memories. Her story is a vivid confrontation against an unforgiving world that traps women and children in the systems meant to save them. This is a story for seekers, searchers, and anyone in the process of saving themselves and their loved ones.

There were seven of us in our writing group reading pieces of AURA, and at times we'd all be stuck in tears and had to get ourselves together to try to give feedback. I'm doing the same while trying to write this blurb, and now I realize that was/is the feedback: stuck in tears and awe of Hillary's vulnerability and shadows, and she's gracious enough to offer us protection and strength while doing so. Even my crying while reading feels protected. Hillary Leftwich admits to having resistance to writing about her childhood because it feels dirty and secretive. But AURA engages with resistance by pushing into the dirt and secrecy and writing from those places because it feels necessary for survival and healing.--Steven Dunn, Whiting Award Winner, author of water & power

A Psalm for AURA: I include this book in the care package I'm curating for my dead (Mother, this book is for you, too); I believe in the sort of grace that erupts while standing in line at the E-Zee Check 24hr Payday Loan; I affirm the power of whatever you have on hand to save your ass; I uphold writing as a potential site of transformative magic. Fuck the Patriarchy. Let the visionaries to the front of the line. Let Hillary Leftwich to the front and may her remarkable memoir be read and celebrated far and wide.--Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab

Unfortunately both trauma and spousal abuse are common experiences, but there is nothing common about Leftwich's approach to writing down her bones. When she writes about the careless words doctors use, we see it as the motivation behind her own meticulously careful compositions. As she finds control upon the page, she finds control in life. As epilepsy seizes the body of her son, again and again, Leftwich's story seizes us, and through the fractured narrative, we learn it's not reliability the author's aiming for when she makes this montage of clinical paperwork and Hail Mary's, but alchemy. The form recollects the hermit crab shell narratives Susanna Kaysen employed when she wrote her own memoir, Girl, Interrupted while the storyline summons to mind Stephanie Land's Maid, but AURA is indeed a love letter. Written to her child, but also to and for herself, and to and for all of us. Hillary Leftwich writes a way forward in which she rescues herself and teaches us how to do the same.--Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, author of Fig

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Women's Studies. Hybrid.

We're not sure what to call Sean the Stick. Is it an existential children's tale? A weird book for all ages? Is it a story about a person who becomes best friends with a stick? Is it a love story about nature? Nature versus nurture? This beautiful hardcover book combines a Kevin Sampsell short story told in simple (yet emotionally vast) short sentences with colorful drawings by Emma Jon-Michael Frank, an artist whose celebrated works of vulnerability, humor, and empathy have garnered their work an enthusiastic and growing audience over the years.

Where did this book come from?

About two years ago, Kevin asked Em if they would make some art for the story, Sean (which was originally published in Diagram). Wanting to keep the project a secret, Kevin finished other projects in the meantime until finally putting the book together to drop on unsuspecting readers. This is the first book on Future Tense published with full color art. We hope it makes you smile.

Fiction. Novella. Essay. I DON'T THINK OF YOU (UNTIL I DO) is a needed novella of our time. It explores the narcissism inherent in infatuation, exposing the awkward, disorienting state of passion, and articulating the comic nature that permeates the melodrama of our existence. Tatiana Ryckman chronicles the struggles of a long- distance relationship, forming a series of unsent musings to the beloved by the unnamed lover--all while keeping names and gender anonymous. At times funny, this sexy, charged, and deeply felt novella captures what loving from a distance can bring upon all of us.

An elegiac and dirty and horribly beautiful examination of love and the lack of it; Ryckman has written the anti-love story within all of us. A book so earnest and sharp in its examination of heartbreak, it will make you ache for all the people you haven't even loved yet.--T Kira Madden

The short vignette-style tales in Troy James Weaver's literary debut, Witchita Stories, combine to make an evocative brew of small town melancholy, working class gloom, and coming of age charm. Told through the eyes of a young man who yearns to find excitement, truth, and a deeper family bond in his life, Weaver's approachable and revealing stories, lists, fragments, and memories delve into the weird, funny, and sometimes unsettling world of a midwest kid finding his own path. Thank god you can come across a writer like Troy James Weaver. In the future people will just say these stories are like Troy James Weaver stories and you'll know exactly what they mean. --Scott McClanahan There are moments, reading Witchita Stories, where everything dropped away, and I was speechless, or at least whatever the equivalent of speechless is when you're not talking in the first place. There is a deep sadness to these stories, and humor, but most importantly, honesty. This feels real and heavy and it's just about the best thing I've read in a long time. --J. David Osborne I loved Witchita Stories. Teenage boys, first kisses and what girls smell like. Fishing and skateboarding and fights. An alert and dirty little collection of stories with the good kind of stink to them. Troy James Weaver writes 'this was happening' after the bottle lands on the girl and she kisses the boy and I found myself thinking that as I read this book. THIS IS HAPPENING-these stories, these moments-THIS HAS HAPPENED, THIS WILL HAPPEN. Absolutely.--Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Every Kiss A War

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. When Rob Roberge learns that he's likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he is terrified by the prospect of becoming a walking shadow. In a desperate attempt to preserve his identity, he sets out to (somewhat faithfully) record the most formative moments of his life. But the process of trying to remember his past only exposes just how fragile the stories that lay at the heart of our self-conception really are. As LIAR twists and turns through Roberge's life, it turns the familiar story of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll on its head. Darkly funny and brutally frank, it offers a remarkable portrait of a down and out existence cobbled together across the country, from musicians' crashpads around Boston to a painful moment of reckoning in the scorched Wonder Valley desert of California. As Roberge struggles to keep addiction and mental illness from destroying the good life he has built in his better moments, he is forced to acknowledge the increasingly blurred line between the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves.

In RUNAWAYS: A WRITER'S DILEMMA, author Michael J. Seidlinger centers a magnifying glass on the creative journey, with an honest and unabashed search into how and why someone would want to be accepted as a writer in a world that might not care. The book's breezy narrative contrasts with the despair that is often triggered by the wasteland of social media and the Internet. This is a story that reminds the reader that they aren't alone in a culture that pressures us to measure our work on a purely capitalistic level, driven by likes, hearts, and money. Like a darker and more skewed literary version of the metaphysical classic, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Seidlinger's RUNAWAYS: A WRITER'S DILEMMA shows us how our art, often made in solitary, can be the more important and inspiring part of living.

Fiction.