By Corinna Kloth
A Compilation of Newly Released Indie Reads.
1. The Opposites Game
In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.
The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.
Brendan Constantine
Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in many standards, including Poetry, The Nation, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Ploughshares, and Poem-a-Day. A popular performer, Brendan has presented his work to audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe, also appearing on NPR’s All Things Considered, TED ED, numerous podcasts, and YouTube.
2. Yellow
It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature—until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.
Amy Pence
Amy Pence is the author of the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely and Armor, Amour, two chapbooks, Skin’s Dark Night and Your Posthumous Dress, as well as the award-winning hybrid [It] Incandescent. Her poetry, short fiction, reviews, and interviews have appeared in over 100 literary magazines. Raised in New Orleans and Las Vegas, Amy studied poetry at the University of Arizona.
3. Morning Leaves
An award-winning fusion of poetry and nature-inspired art, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy is a tender, soul-stirring meditation on grief, healing, and the quiet rediscovery of wonder, one morning at a time.
Through movement, creativity, and a deep reverence for the natural world, Rikkers offers a compassionate path forward in difficult times. Her honesty and vulnerability invite reflection, while opening space for joy, connection, and renewal.
Infused with luminous art and verse, Morning Leaves is the perfect gift for anyone seeking healing, resilience, and hope. Step with her among the trees and find your way through the shadows back into the sunlight.
Laing F. Rikkers
Laing F. Rikkers was raised in New York City and earned her BA from Harvard College, followed by an MA in psychology from Columbia University. She spent most of her career as a medical device investor and co-founded ProSomnus Sleep Technologies. Currently, she works as an executive coach and public speaker, supporting leaders through periods of transition and growth. Laing lives in Southern California with her husband and their spirited dog and is the proud mother of two adult children.
4. Cold Fire
David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.
David Mason
David Mason grew up in Bellingham, Washington and has lived in many parts of the world, including Greece and Colorado, where he served as poet laureate for four years. His books of poems began with The Buried Houses, The Country I Remember, and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
5. Walking Wheel
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.
Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California’s Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie’s baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple’s first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.
Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.
Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk is the author of the poetry collections The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter (#4 in the California Poetry Series), Terrain (coauthor), and Salt Water Poems (letterpress), as well as five collections of radio commentary.
6. Daughter of Mother-Of-Pearl
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong wonders: What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like “invasive” and “endling” in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a “vampire squid from hell.”
Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Mandy-Suzanne Wong is the author of The Box, a novel, shortlisted for the US/Canada Republic of Consciousness Prize; the novel Drafts of a Suicide Note, a PEN Open Book Award nominee; the essay collection Listen, we all bleed, a nominee for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; the chapbooks Awabi and Artificial Wilderness; and the exhibition catalogue Animals Across Discipline, Time, and Space. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her work appears in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Literary Hub, and Necessary Fiction.
7. City Like Water
Your city is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until they’re turned into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home. But soon he is absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, and you can only see him in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister? When the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth, where does it all leave you? Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.
Dorothy Tse
Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Owlish, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and her short story collection, Snow and Shadow, was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award.
8. Hide
Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid’s Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory.
Hide is a restless innovation of form and multimodal expression breaking open words across Arabic, English, and Spanish to release hidden meanings. Poems trace the letter M back to the Phoenician pictograph of waves, while technological “glitches” are portals that summon oracular voices across the family archive. In swirling “spell” poems, Ebeid conjures Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas write the human shape upon the earth.
Carolina Ebeid
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior. She edits poetry at The Rumpus and Visible Binary and is the 2023–2025 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.
9. Charlottesville
In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far-right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.
Deborah Baker
Deborah Baker is the author of A Blue Hand and The Last Englishmen. Her biography In Extremis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her book The Convert was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York and Charlottesville.
10. The Spoil
In a rambling split-level house on the outskirts of Tacoma in the 1970s, a young girl is preoccupied by the anomalous phenomena she reads about in magazines: alien visitations, ESP, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle. Meanwhile, she and her stepbrother, thrown uneasily together by disaster and divorce, grow increasingly convinced that a malevolent presence resides in their house, and they develop elaborate strategies to live with it.
Years later, Mandy is living in Las Vegas in a modern townhouse caring for her mother who is in a terminal decline from Alzheimer’s. She works for a real estate company but struggles to focus on her tasks. She takes medication to manage her ADHD, which has her zagging between distraction and obsession, always halfway through some home renovation project. Then, while digging through a box of her mother’s things hoarded in her garage, she sets something loose. Something old and baleful: a demon that soon possesses one of her neighbors, an affable semiretired house flipper and handyman named TK. What follows is a gripping and often terrifying story of familial grief in which the past is both elusive and paralyzing, and questions of science and spirit become urgent.
Maile Chapman
Maile Chapman is the author of Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto. Her stories have appeared in A Public Space, the Literary Review, the Mississippi Review, and Post Road. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and teaches at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
11. The Memory Museum
Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China’s One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.
The collection begins with “Scenes from Childhood,” in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. “You Won’t Read This in the News” features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In “Tough Egg,” a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world.
M Lin
M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
12. Crisis Communications
Crises happen. But how they are handled makes all the difference in the world.
It’s 2019. A gunman enters Trask International, a suburban Washington, D.C. office, leaving three people dead and dozens injured. One of the biggest differences between this tragedy and the many others that have unfortunately occurred recently? They were ready for this. Trask International had a comprehensive Crisis Communications plan.
No, the plan didn’t deploy bulletproof shields, nor did it call upon a secret superhero to fight off the gunman. But the plan did spell out how the business should respond in public to what happened, keep the focus on the true victims and not position the business as one, and how the business could—and would—get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
Joe Diorio
Joe Diorio has been a writer all his life. As a grade schooler he wrote and illustrated his own comic books, in high school he was a stringer for a local weekly newspaper, in college he was a reporter and editorial writer for the school newspaper, and later he worked as a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, corporate speech writer, and as a public relations professional for agencies and colleges.
13. Whispered Word
Those words are whispered to Joe, but from who? He only hears the voice.
Joe is an out-of-work investigative reporter drowning in drink, prescription drugs, and a disgrace not of his own making. In the bleakness, he stumbles across the case of Maggie, an inmate who has always maintained her innocence, even after being convicted of child neglect.
Spurred on by the inexplicable voice, Joe sets out to uncover the truth of Maggie’s mysterious case. Joe corresponds with Maggie from prison along the way, and they develop a connection as he journeys from his antiseptic apartment in New York, to a quiet corner of Oklahoma, to a dusty Texas border town, finally finding himself in the hardscrabble countryside of Mexico.
Ultimately, Joe must contend with a looming threat, seeking to guard a long-held secret in Whispered Word, a work of fiction based on a true story.
Alec Klein
Alec Klein is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist formerly of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. His groundbreaking investigations have uncovered a wide array of wrongdoing and set free many prisoners who were wrongfully convicted of murder and falsely accused of other crimes. His work has helped free several people who were unjustly sentenced to life in prison. He also has helped dozens of excessively sentenced inmates gain their freedom through parole and commutation. Alec’s first book, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner, was a national bestseller published by Simon & Schuster.
14. White Nights
Translated from Polish by Kate Webster. With an introduction by Jennifer Croft.
In a village in the remote countryside of southern Poland, it’s as if poverty and brutality emanate like mist from the cursed dirt. The thirteen interconnected stories in White Nights tell of families scarred by tragedy, but also by each other. Whether by digging a pond deep in the woods, taking a lover, raising a family, or simply trying to get ahead of the endless work as the thunder rolls over their home, Urszula Honek’s characters share, with the sincerest care and honesty, a local—yet so clearly universal—story of ruin and hope.
Urszula Honek
In addition to White Nights, Urszula Honek is the author of three poetry books, each of which received numerous awards. She has held scholarships from the Maria Anna Siemieńska Grazella Foundation (2016), as well as from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2017). Urszula also received the Kraków UNESCO City of Literature Prize, in 2020, and the Adam Włodek Prize, in 2021.
15. The Queen of Swords
In what was at first meant to be a short essay about the influential Mexican writer Elena Garro (1916-1988), Jazmina Barrera’s deep curiosity and exploration give us a singular portrait of a complex life.
Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work.Who was Elena Garro, really?
She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism”, a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and theI Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.
Jazmina Barrera
Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City in 1988. She was a fellow at the Foundation for Mexican Letters and at Mexico’s Fonca’s Program for young writers. She was a beneficiary of the residencies at Casa Estudio Cien años de Soledad. She has published work in various print and digital media, such as The Paris Review, El Malpensante, Words Without Borders, El País, The New York Times and Electric Literature.
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Article originally Published in the Spring 2026 Issue: Indie Fiction From Across the Globe.