Fiction

Set in 1973 Greece during the military dictatorship, Shades of Resistance follows thirty-year-old American Jonas Korda as he stumbles blindly into the islands of the Aegean.

Attempting to physically escape from a life—a disillusioned engagement with 1960s politics and an ill-fated sort-of-marriage—that he has long since emotionally fled, Jonas is instead faced with the question of his capacity for true human connections.

Unwittingly he becomes involved with two expatriate Greek musicians who had self-exiled from their homeland six years before, when the military junta took power, but are now returning to create oppositional energy through the form they know best: traditional Greek poetry set to the music of a composer who’s been banned by the brutal and surreal junta. Through the force of their commitment and sacrifice, Jonas is reacquainted with the relation between the heart and the larger world.

Jonas is also confronted, sequentially, by two women who in very different ways bring his emotional struggles into focus. One—a Greek-Canadian searching for her father lost somewhere to the depredations of the dictatorship—who seeks to draw him in. The other—an alienated Belgian painter turning her back on a life of artistic and gender frustrations—who holds him away.

The novel’s lyrically evoked Greek islands are counterpoint to political terror captured with both shuddering intensity and mordant black humor. Shades of Resistance is that rare work of fiction that explores the relationship between the personal and the political, the heightened responses of a man trapped in a moment of history.

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow.

This collection compiles his intensely personal thoughts on the most interesting and deplorable topics in post-postmodern America. It moves from original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and canonical authors, and problematic people.

Plus…

“David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction” is a personal true adventure, as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way into literary respectability. “The Collapsing Frontier” and “In Mugwump Four” are fictions mapping ominous new realms. “Calvino’s 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History” is an intimate encounter with a legendary author. In “My Year of Reading Lemmishly” and “Snowden in the Labyrinth” he explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different results.

And Featuring: Our usual Outspoken Interview, in which Lethem reveals the secret subtext of his books, how he spent his MacArthur award money, and how a Toyota he owned was used in the robbery of a fast-food restaurant.

From Sun to Sun presents two parallel stories separated by twenty-five centuries: The first, set in modern New York City, features a hardworking, smart-mouthed Latina investigator, Felicity Ortega Pérez, as she hunts for a missing person who holds the clue to an ancient mystery. Little does she realize how deep the criminality goes and what she will learn about her own hidden past.

The ancient story is a radical revision of the biblical Book of Ruth: When her husband dies under strange circumstances, Ruth must join the exiles returning to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple in order to secure a future for herself and her grieving mother-in-law, Naomi. Unfortunately, the returning exiles include religious leaders who plan to "purify" the land by expelling all the foreign women.

From Sun to Sun is a tale of love, devotion, and sacrifice depicting the challenges facing two determined women as they confront ignorance, hatred, and indifference in their pursuit of justice—a seemingly endless struggle in a time of social upheaval, fluid identities, and diverse cross-cultural complexities. This novel is about who gets to decide who’s one of us and who’s a foreigner, and what it takes to prove you belong.

Clay Blackburn—poet, book scout, and sometimes detective—cruises the mean, and sometimes not so mean, streets of Berkeley. With his accomplices, a soldier of fortune, a “defrocked” FBI agent, and a smooth and sexy con man, he lives a life of bisexual sensation with a little crime solving on the side. As such, Blackburn is a sly, witty, and more or less reliable raconteur of the last thirty something years of the Bay Area’s radical bohemia and bookselling. And in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles, bears uncomfortable witness to Berkeley’s descent from countercultural paradise to neoliberal inferno.

This omnibus collection collects the novels The Chandler Apartments (2002), The Incredible Double (2010), and the previously unpublished Mayakovsky's Bugatti (2025), and includes the Blackburn short story “Righteous Kill” (2021).

“Yet the more we get to know him, the more we’re persuaded Blackburn is a Pure Product of Berkeley. He’s not only queer, but a queer sort of all else he declares himself to be: a queer sort of detective, a queer sort of Communist or Anarchist, and beyond—a queer sort of gourmet, ethical thinker, cat owner, and—for certain—a queer sort of narrator.”—Jonathan Lethem, from the Foreword

James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create.

This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman’s mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian dialect or the dull menace of bureaucratic babble. Everyday tragedy and bleak humor color these marvels of narrative efficiency, yet at their core they are tender and full of human truth.

James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create.

This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman’s mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian dialect or the dull menace of bureaucratic babble. Everyday tragedy and bleak humor color these marvels of narrative efficiency, yet at their core they are tender and full of human truth.

Anyone who thinks that, at an early age, they can plan their entire life is mistaken.

Nancy Kress has been exploring the possibilities of genetic engineering, human evolution, alien contact, artificial intelligence, and the future of the species for over forty years, with one eye on the bleeding edge of science and the other on the human soul and what makes it bleed. These stories, and the essays that explain her own history and worldview, compose a brief tourist’s guide for the world to come.

In the title memoir, “Not What I Intended,” Kress discusses a childhood and community life where no young girl ever dreams of becoming a writer, and how she made those nondreams come true.

“Patent Infringement” is a short piece inspired by Kress’s own time writing corporate copy that managed to predict COVID, COVID vaccines, and the patenting of genes for profit.

“Laws of Survival” is a tale of first contact in which humanity is hardly the species the aliens are interested in—can an amateur dog trainer save the world the aliens have trashed, or at least herself?

“Amy Lowell, Cixin Liu, Jane Austen, and the Art of Fiction” is a compelling essay about the human drive to create patterns, and what the cognitive limitations of patternmaking means for fiction … and for politics.

“Machine Learning” is science fiction but might also be a work of psychological realism about the creation of AI and the healing of a scientist’s grief over the loss of his daughter.

And featuring an in-depth Q&A with new Outspoken Authors series coeditor Nick Mamatas, who traveled up to Seattle to talk to Nancy about the future of plagues, sleepless nights, teaching science fiction writing, and dogs dogs dogs!