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Tracking the evolution of Hansel and Gretel at seventy-five-year intervals that correspond with earth’s visits by Halley...
06/15/2026

Tracking the evolution of Hansel and Gretel at seventy-five-year intervals that correspond with earth’s visits by Halley’s Comet, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores how stories are disseminated and shared, edited and censored, voiced and left untold.

In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg’s sister uses the tale as a surrogate for sharing a family secret only her brother believes. In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can’t come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth’s sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy.

Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire’s Here and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

***rbooks

Huge congratulations to Gaar Adams on winning the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction! Dzanc is so grateful to ha...
06/13/2026

Huge congratulations to Gaar Adams on winning the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction! Dzanc is so grateful to have published this poignant, necessary book.

Weaving memoir with unprecedented reportage, Guest Privileges is a decade-long journey of discovery through the clandestine q***r communities of the Gulf States, and into the very nature of home and belonging.

Head to our website to get your copy of this Lammy Award Winner!

Sheila’s life is built of little thievings. Adrift in her mid-thirties, she sleeps in fragments, ditches her temp jobs,...
06/11/2026

Sheila’s life is built of little thievings. Adrift in her mid-thirties, she sleeps in fragments, ditches her temp jobs, eavesdrops on her neighbor’s Skype calls, and keeps a stolen letter in her nightstand, penned by a UPS driver she barely knows. Her mother is stifling and her father is a bad memory. Her only friends are her mysterious, slovenly neighbor Vinnie and his daughter Torrey, a quirky twelve-year-old coping with a recent tragedy.

When her grandmother Rosamond dies, Sheila inherits a box of secret love letters from Harold C. Carr—a man who is not her grandfather. In spite of herself, Sheila gets caught up in the legacy of the affair, piecing together her grandmother’s past and forging bonds with Torrey and Vinnie as intense and fragile as the crumbling pages in Rosamond’s shoebox.

As they get closer to unraveling the truth, Sheila grows almost as obsessed with the letters as the man who wrote them. Somewhere, there’s an answering stack of letters—written in Rosamond’s hand—and Sheila can’t stop until she uncovers the rest of the story. Threaded with wry humor and the ache of love lost or left behind, How to Set Yourself on Fire establishes Julia Dixon Evans as a rising talent in the vein of Shirley Jackson and Lindsay Hunter.

All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, Robert Fanning’s fifth collection of poetry, bravely traverses wide vistas of personal ...
06/09/2026

All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, Robert Fanning’s fifth collection of poetry, bravely traverses wide vistas of personal and universal terrain, exploring coast and horizon for what holds us and for what we cannot hold.

Exploring boundaries of love, identity and desire, of marriage and family, of human compassion and enmity, of what is given us and what we make, the journey ends with elegies for the poet’s mother, looking through her death toward what in us is boundless, toward where the infinite begins. For fans of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, this is a lyric collection not to be missed—a core sample from the middle of life, with all of its comings and goings and grievings.

06/05/2026

Winner of the 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards

A BBC Book Club pick

In a village in rural Pakistan, Tara is watching and waiting. The smell of dung and dust hangs over her world. She is desperate to leave her petty life in the village and escape the iron grip of her violent, unpredictable brother.

Marrying a middle-class accountant allows her to escape to the capital, but she soon finds that life as a respectable housewife is not enough. She wants what the rich mothers at her children’s school have. Her desire for wealth and freedom becomes an obsession—one for which she’ll push her marriage and herself to the brink. When her brother comes back into her life, dragging the specter of all she’s escaped, Tara must decide if there are any lines she won’t cross to live the life she deserves.

Set against a hypnotic, oppressive backdrop of political violence and natural disaster, A Splintering traces the class struggle of a woman stuck between province and metropolis, between motherhood and ambition. Disquieting and utterly gripping, it is an extraordinary achievement by Dur e Aziz Amna, an exploration of a complex and unforgettable character who will risk everything to carve out a life of her own.

WINNER OF THE IPPY GOLD MEDAL AWARD IN ANTHOLOGIESA follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Uns...
06/03/2026

WINNER OF THE IPPY GOLD MEDAL AWARD IN ANTHOLOGIES

A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of q***r chaos from an all-q***r author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and Francesca Ekwuyasi

A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she’s had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging q***rs turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers’ homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.

In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why q***r people turn to crime–unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.

***rbooks 🌈

Stegosaurus Moon explores heartbreak, divorce, parenthood and the discovery of new, often unexpected, ways forward. Poem...
06/02/2026

Stegosaurus Moon explores heartbreak, divorce, parenthood and the discovery of new, often unexpected, ways forward. Poem by poem, the speakers puzzle through how one love comes apart and how a new life comes together in its wake.

Through encounters with everything from dinosaurs and scorpionflies, Britney Spears and the Rock, birthdays, deaths, pets, teenagers, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Rupaul’s Drag Race, the sequence builds into an examination of how the language of q***r identity can be weaponized or can open space for more expansive ways to live and love. A tender accounting of the poet peering into a mirror that morphs and warps with language that consistently astounds, these pieces walk in step with the work of Ross Gay, Jeffrey McDaniel, Denise Duhamel, and Jennifer L. Knox.

06/01/2026

Mark your calendars for this exciting summer release!

Award-winning author Curt Leviant delivers a joyful reimagining of the classic tale of Don Quixote through the eyes of his long-overlooked sidekick, Sancho Panza

In a dusty old second-hand bookshop in a side street in Sevilla, an unnamed narrator discovers a 1751 edition of Don Quixote—one that is narrated, most unusually, by Sancho Panza. With Curt Leviant’s signature whimsy, this audaciously titled novel reimagines Cervantes’s classic tale through Sancho’s eyes, as he and the Don revisit the sites of their former adventures, embark on new ones, and finally go their separate ways when Sancho sets out to write an epic tale of his own, accompanied by a playfully-out-of-place hero from Arthurian romances, Sir Gawain.

Rich with literary history and yet utterly original, My Adventures With, and Without, the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, His Grace, Don Quixote, as told by Sancho Panza, Ex-Squire is a reader’s romp from the first page.

We’re so excited to share that Sarah Yahm’s Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation has been named the winning novel in the Eri...
05/28/2026

We’re so excited to share that Sarah Yahm’s Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation has been named the winning novel in the Eric Hoffer Award’s general fiction category!

A finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and The Republic of Consciousness Prize, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation follows a tight-knit, eccentric Jewish family, the Rosenbergs, over four decades, combining the madness of motherhood with the manic absurdity of grief in a stunning tale for fans of Allegra Goodman and Rebecca Makkai. This novel, Sarah Yahm’s debut, also won the Dzanc Prize for Fiction.

The Eric Hoffer Book Award honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small publishers. Since its inception, the Hoffer has become one of the largest international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses.

Check out the full list of Eric Hoffer Award winners at hofferaward.com

05/27/2026

Fresh off the press!

An Indies Introduce Selection

Winner of the 2024 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize, Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl delivers a terrific play on the “monstrous feminine”—captivating stories of women shedding their skins and exoskeletons and blurring the boundaries between predator and prey.

A dissatisfied wife wraps herself in a silk cocoon. Teenage girls declare decay as the newest fashion trend. A new religion emerges from blood-sucking moths. And Grete Samsa wakes to find herself transformed—not into a cockroach, but a monstrous camel spider, famished and salivating for the man at the door.

A surreal exploration of nature, sexuality, disaster and desire, Lauren Osborn’s stunning debut isa must-read for fans of Lidia Yuknavitch, Aimee Bender, and K-Ming Chang. The final edition will include six full-page, black-and-white illustrations by brilliant artist Jenny Eickbush.

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