A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres--from video games to fan fiction, avant-garde theater to choose-your-own-adventure--as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral, gross, and absurd. "This book is fucking weird," wrote Brit Mandelo in 2015. It's only gotten weirder since. Slug and Other Stories is a revised and expanded edition of a contemporary cult classic. Finally back in print, this collection is a testament to the messy anti-logic of queer feelings by a revelatory new voice.

A remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance from celebrated author Yiyun Li as she considers the loss of her son James. 'There is no good way to say this,' Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. 'There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.' There is no good way to say this – because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, 'a single point in a timeline'. Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, 'The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.' Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.

From the acclaimed author of Chef's Kiss, a groundbreaking trans Regency romance that's both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic. The notoriously eccentric Lord Christopher Eden is a “man of unusual make” and even more unusual habits: he prefers to live as far from the prying eyes and ears of the ton as possible, and would rather have the comfortable company of his childhood cook and his aged butler, Plinkton, than the swarm of servants and hangers-on befitting a man of his station. But Christopher's pleasant, if occasionally lonely life is upended when he receives word from his lawyers that, according to his late father’s will, he must find a wife by the end of the Season if he intends to keep his family's fortune and the Eden's End estate. Christopher cannot imagine a worse fate: as he isn't attracted to women, his chances of making a wife happy are slim. Furthermore, if his quest to marry has any hope of succeeding, he must move to London posthaste and acquire some more suitable staff. Enter James Harding, Christopher's new, distractingly handsome—if rigidly traditional—valet. After a rocky start, the two strike up a fragile friendship amid the throes of the London Season . . . a friendship that threatens to shatter under the looming shadow of Christopher’s impending nuptials—and the secrets both men are keeping. With its heady combination of dry wit, slow-burn romance, and a nuanced, complex portrait of trans identity and relationships that’s as relevant now as it was during the Regency era, A Gentleman's Gentleman stands to transform the historical romance genre as we know it.

A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest. At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

A true original. In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.

A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of Reality Kahn, a young woman on a quest to be the greatest girlfriend of all time.It was decreed from the moment she was born. Twenty-three-year-old Reality Kahn would embark on a quest so great, so bold. She would become the greatest girlfriend of all time. She would be a zine maker, an aspiring notary, the greatest waterslide commercial actress on the Eastern Seaboard. She would receive messages from the beyond in the form of advice from the esteemed and ancient ladies magazine, Girlfriend Weekly. When she attends a party in Gowanus at a punk venue known as “Paradise,” Reality meets Ariel, who will become her boyfriend. She bravely works for his everlasting affection and joins a clinical trial created by Dr. Zweig Altmann to help her become a more perfect girlfriend. She stars in a new commercial. She learns how to become an indelible host. But Reality will also learn that sheer will and determination, and a very open heart, are not always enough to make true love manifest. At turns laugh-out-loud funny, tragic, and jarring, Reality’s quest grows ever complicated as the men in her Ariel, her waterpark commercial agent Jethro, and Dr. Altmann himself prove treacherous. Paradise Logic is a thrilling, psychosexual breakdown of our obsession with authentic true love, asking whether that is even possible in a patriarchal world, and announces Sophie Kemp as a wholly original, transformative, and brilliant new voice in fiction.

Is there anyone you wish to see? When Hirase, a young woman from Tokyo, arranges an appointment with the Go-Between, she doesn't expect a teenager to show up. Dressed preppily in a duffel coat and carrying a scuffed notebook, he arranges for the dead to meet the living. At least, this is what Hirase has been told. He ushers his clients into a chilly hospital courtyard where he lays down the rules: the reunion is at full moon; the deceased can be summoned only once; they can refuse; the service is entirely free. - Hirase asks to see the TV star who once helped her; - A stubborn family man asks his deceased mother where the deeds are to some land; - A young woman gets a horrible shock when she receives a message from the best friend whose death she caused; - A weary salary man explores why his girlfriend went missing days after he proposed. With each heartbreaking reunion, clues are scattered for readers to piece together the mindblowing truth behind the boy in the duffel coat, as Tsujimura shows with astonishing empathy and insight how the power of memory can give our lives meaning.