Marisa Kashino
As a journalist who covered real estate for Washingtonian magazine, Marisa Kashino was familiar with the notoriously competitive Beltway market. “People used to joke, ‘What if I included the naming rights to my first child in the offer letter?’ ” she says. The real estate mania turbocharged by the pandemic inspired Kashino’s debut novel, Best Offer Wins (Celadon, Nov.), about 30-something Margo Miyake, who’s desperately searching for her dream home in Bethesda, Md. When Margo, a successful publicist, gets wind of a not-yet-listed house, she insinuates her way into the lives of its departing owners to gain an advantage. Unlike housing prices, things plummet spectacularly from there.
In pursuing the property, Margo makes ethically dubious choices, to put it mildly. But behind its satiric excess, the novel contains a critical assessment of the American dream, a core component of which is home ownership. “I wanted to make this novel fun,” Kashino says, “but there is a lot of commentary in there about class.”
Unlike her house-hunting competitors, Margo doesn’t come from money and succeeded with few connections in a city built on them. “She feels like she has had to work 10 times as hard for what comes very easily, in her view, to a lot of people around her,” explains Kashino, who grew up in a suburb of Seattle and began her career reporting for a legal newspaper before migrating to the real estate beat. During her years in journalism, the thought of becoming a novelist seemed “about as realistic as saying I wanted to be a mermaid,” she says.
But after becoming an editor at the Washington Post in 2022, she missed long-form writing and, wanting to get what she thought was a winning idea on paper, signed up for a fiction class at the Writing Center in Bethesda. “I was pretty sure somebody else would write this book if I didn’t first,” Kashino says. Now she can rest assured, as her comic real estate thriller is set to be the first to market.
Pulpit Fiction
Church was central to Addie E. Citchens’s upbringing in Clarksdale, Miss. Her mother, a devout school principal, brought her “anytime the doors were open,” Citchens recalls. She was particularly struck by a series of sermons on the seven seals from the Book of Revelation, whose cataclysmic tone she draws on in her striking debut, Dominion (FSG, Aug.).
Emmanuel is the athletic, angelic-voiced teenage son of Rev. Sabre Winfrey Jr., a prosperous businessman and philandering leader of Seven Seals Baptist Church, one of the largest congregations in the Mississippi Delta. Known as Wonderboy, Emmanuel has a violent streak, and his dutiful mother, Priscilla, and his girlfriend, Diamond, gradually realize he poses a grave danger to the community.
In the novel, Citchens looks behind the hypocritical facades that Emmanuel and his father have erected and questions the patriarchal double standards she noticed in her youth, highlighting, for instance, how Priscilla writes her husband’s sermons. “Where I came from, the pulpits were all male, but the congregations were mostly female,” she says. “And boys were handed power while girls were handed responsibility for every damn thing that happened to them.”
Citchens attended Jackson State University in Mississippi before taking a series of teaching jobs in Memphis, Dallas, and back home, including at a middle school run by her mother. Currently residing in New Orleans, Citchens received the inaugural FSG Writer’s Fellowship in 2022, which provides funding and mentorship to an emerging writer from an underrepresented community. Citchens credits FSG editor-in-chief Jenna Johnson with asking her a crucial question to help her find a way forward: Was the book saying what Citchens wanted it to say? “A light bulb went off,” she recalls. The manuscript wasn’t, and in reworking it with Johnson, Citchens strengthened the novel’s feminist themes.
The prose in Dominion is suffused with biblical rhythms; the “heartache and pain and sensuality” of blues music, as Citchens describes it; and Black Southern vernacular. “We’re gonna zhuzh this English language up a little bit,” she jokes.
Max Delsohn
“There are a lot of trans guys on TikTok talking about their experiences, but it’s something else to publish a book,” Max Delsohn says about his debut collection, Crawl (Graywolf, Oct.). The stories are set in Seattle and mostly feature trans men adjusting to the sometimes bewildering codes of queer communities. Whether the characters are navigating a bathhouse, a tricky situation with a tactless boss, or a glorious day at a nude beach, Delsohn zooms in on the particularities—and absurdities—of the day-to-day trans experience. “Absurdity is something that a lot of trans people come to very naturally, because you are born into a gender where you’re expected to do and enjoy certain things you don’t want to do,” he explains.
Delsohn, who currently lives with his wife in Santa Monica, Calif., knows how to mine his experiences as a trans man for laughs, having dished on them as a stand-up comedian in Seattle. Ultimately, though, he felt that the need to get a laugh every five seconds was limiting compared to the possibilities for humor in literary fiction. (He points to Lorrie Moore, arguing that her writing is “funnier than half the stand-ups out there.”)
After graduating from high school in Thousand Oaks, Calif., Delsohn sought a “radical queer college experience.” Seattle University fit the bill, and he lived in the city for 10 years. After a year studying creative nonfiction in OSU’s MFA program,
he transferred to Syracuse University to study fiction. The switch liberated him artistically from “writing defensively against the many tropes and clichés and received language of trans memoir,” he says.
With his stories, Delsohn dances to his own tune. He conceived the collection, which is divided into “Side A” and “Side B” stories, as an album. “I wish I could have been a musician,” he says. “I see my stories as the closest I can get to making music.”
Brian Schaefer
After making a career writing about dance, Brian Schaefer has tackled an entirely different kind of choreography for his debut novel, Town & Country (Atria, Nov.): that of a culture clash in a thinly veiled Hudson Valley. Set in the fictional Griffin, N.Y., the novel chronicles a heated congressional race between Chip Riley, a longtime local pub owner whose son has recently come out as gay, and Paul Banks, one of the affluent gay Manhattanites who have bought up second homes in the region.
Schaefer, who has been living with his husband between New York City and the Hudson Valley for 12 years, describes in the novel how the Upstate region’s mottled mix of “wealthy pockets” and “vast rural communities” makes for perennially contested elections.
Originally from Pasadena, Calif., Schaeffer developed an interest in dance at UC San Diego (“Once the teachers see a tall guy, they just grab you and throw you on stage,” he says) and spent an undergraduate year abroad in Copenhagen seeing “every single performance” of the Royal Danish ballet. After working in arts administration for several years, he secured a fellowship to study the Israeli dance community in Tel Aviv. During his three years in Israel, he began a long-distance relationship with his now husband, completed an MFA, and began writing dance and culture pieces for the New York Times, where he continues to publish a weekly dance roundup.
Schaefer says Town & Country was inspired by the tradition of queer novels such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. He wanted to write about what happens when a robust gay community has obtained a degree of political power, but felt he needed to bring in another perspective to capture both the comedy and complexity of the situation. Enter Diane, Chip’s real estate agent wife, a conservative religious woman who sells houses to people whose lifestyle she might not wholly endorse, including her husband’s political opponent. “She becomes my lens through which to try and make sense of who these gay invaders are to the locals,” Schaeffer says.
Phoebe Greenwood
London-based journalist Phoebe Greenwood recounts a saying she heard about foreign correspondents like her who fly to the Middle East to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “The first year you’re in Jerusalem, you come to loathe the Israelis. The second year, the Palestinians. And the third year, you come to loathe yourself.” There is plenty of loathing to go around in Vulture (Europa, Aug.), Greenwood’s mordant satire of war journalism that is equal parts Evelyn Waugh and Fleabag.
On site in Gaza during a flare-up in the early 2010s, Sara Byrne is a brash, hard-living, and cynical stringer dealing with the recent death of her emotionally withholding father. She has little empathy for the war-torn population she’s covering—at one point, she complains that reporting on bombed families “was all getting a bit samey”—and recklessly pursues access to Hamas’s tunnels, endangering the Gazan fixers in her paper’s employ. With the novel, Greenwood sought to explore the consequences of people working through their unprocessed issues in a war zone. “Sara was a metaphor for this unregulated industry where some of the most dysfunctional people in our society are being shipped in,” she says.
As for why Greenwood turned to fiction, she believes journalism’s adherence to objectivity and balance can be limiting. “It became clear to me that some horrible truths and tragedies were just better told through fiction,” she explains, noting that she is nonetheless “a huge believer in journalism and its democratic function.”
Greenwood has covered stories around the globe, including the 2012 Gaza War for the Daily Telegraph. Early in her career, she encountered the stereotype that “women got into news through fashion and the party pages,” and she did indeed become editor of the party pages at Grazia magazine. However, she had no intention of sticking to that beat. “By the time I left Grazia, I’d convinced them to send me to do a story about honor killings,” she recalls.
Carson Faust
Growing up in Wisconsin, Carson Faust didn’t know much about the Native American side of his family from South Carolina until his grandmother showed him a box of papers that laid out the family’s genealogy. The box, which also contained interviews with tribal members and non-Native townsfolk, became the origin for If the Dead Belong Here (Viking, Oct.), Faust’s haunting mystery about a missing Native American girl.
“It was almost like an anthropological study,” says Faust, an enrolled member of the Edisto-Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He spent hours poring over the documents in his grandmother’s attic and began writing a story, interspersing sections that mirrored these archival documents, until he lost interest in the “idea of outsiders describing my culture in the form of affidavits or census records.” He explains that “it became important to me to center the voice of a community.”
In the novel, Ayita Taylor, a Native woman living in Wisconsin, is raising two daughters by herself after her abusive husband abandoned the family. When the youngest, Laurel, disappears from her tree house without a trace, her older sister Nadine turns to her family elders in South Carolina for answers. They suspect that capricious spirits called ucv’ske might have claimed Laurel for themselves, taking her to the “in-between” realm in which the ucv’ske and other ancestral ghosts reside.
Nadine spearheads the effort to rescue her sister from the potentially malevolent spirits, but in playing with the horror genre, Faust says he wanted to avoid the “final girl or final survivor” trope. Instead, he “tried to reimagine this as a survivalist collective action” about a family coming together, be they living relatives or ghosts. Though many people associate ghosts with terror, it’s not that way for Faust. “To be haunted by family to me actually feels like love,” he notes. It’s not easy, after all, to get one’s message across from the beyond. “A ghost is just like a person with communication issues,” he adds, laughing.
Capital Pains
The central theme of Agri Ismaïl’s sprawling Hyper (Coffee House, Jan. 2026) is, to quote from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, “money, money, money, and what money can make of life.” Now a lawyer for a Swedish education company, Ismaïl first conceived of his novel while living in London, where he had moved from Dubai to look for a job in banking on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. “My timing was just fantastic,” he says.
He did land a job, but during the industry’s upheaval, Ismaïl felt the stirrings of a novel about increasingly exotic financial instruments and their effect on people during the global financial crisis. “I really wanted to write about money in a way that would make the picture clearer for me,” he remembers. “I’m not entirely sure that the end result did make it clearer, but I did radicalize myself a little in the process.”
Set in the lead-up to the 2011 Occupy protests, Hyper follows the literal and figurative fortunes of an illustrious Kurdish family. The patriarch is the founder of the Communist Party of Kurdistan, but his three children are drawn across the globe to capitalism’s hot spots: London, where Mohammed works in finance; New York City, where Laika attempts to rig his own high-frequency stock trading system; and Dubai, where Siver struggles to make ends meet in high-end retail after leaving her wealthy husband in Iraq.
The family’s dispersion reflects the “rootlessness of global society,” says Ismaïl, who was born in Sweden to Kurdish émigrés and currently resides in Stockholm after stints living in France, Iraq, the U.A.E., and the U.K. Each sibling’s section has a distinct style, and the whole composes a historical snapshot of capital’s quickly evolving nature. “You have to just pick a point in time,” Ismaïl says, “and during the x number of years you write about it, you can’t let anything new bleed into it.”
Befitting a novel about an interconnected global society, Hyper’s U.K. edition and the Swedish translation, done by Ismaïl himself, appeared on the same day last year. “Only Dan Brown gets to do that,” he jokes.
SenLinYu
Discussing how they felt before they began writing, SenLinYu brings up a line from Maria Semple’s novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette?: “If you don’t create, you will become a menace to society.” Thankfully for society, SenLinYu (a pen name), took preventative measures, beginning to tap out fan fiction several years ago on their phone while rocking their youngest child to sleep and posting regularly at a fan works website. “Once I posted, I would feel obligated to keep going, and if it’s terrible, I thought, the internet will tell me,” they say.
The internet told them something different, and in 2018 SenLinYu posted the massively popular Manacled, a 900-page tale of a tumultuous romance between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter universe. Despite the millions of downloads, SenLinYu had little recourse when people churned out merchandise to profit off their work. They thought about washing their hands of Manacled and taking it offline, but then they had an idea. What if they could transmute the novel’s core relationship and thematic elements into an original work?
The result is Alchemised (Del Rey, Sept.), an equally massive saga in which evil necromancers are threatening to topple a ruling regime of powerful alchemists. SenLinYu, who lives in Portland, Ore., did copious research on medical history and the Industrial Revolution to replace Harry Potter’s magic universe with one governed by metallic energies.
As the novel opens, Helena, a prized healer and member of the besieged alchemist regime, wakes to find herself the prisoner of a sinister necromancer with no memory of how she got there. An unstable and fraught chemistry develops between captor and captive,
and their budding relationship is one of many thorny ethical situations depicted in this epic tale of love and war. SenLinYu says they drew on novels like Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights for inspiration in handling the complex themes. “I feel like gothic literature leans the hardest into the fact that humans are messy and we have taboo desires.”
Sam Sussman
“Literature was a love language between my mother and me,” Sam Sussman says, recounting how he grew up without TV in Goshen, N.Y., and read Harry Potter novels with his mother. He obtained a master’s degree in English at Oxford and spent the following years living and writing in Berlin, London, and Jerusalem. Back then, he would have scoffed at the notion that his first book would center on his hometown. “It was only by traveling far away from my origins that I came to appreciate how unique it was,” he says.
His origins were unique in other ways as well. Sussman, as he recounts in a 2021 essay for Harper’s, is the spitting image of Bob Dylan, who began a relationship with Sussman’s mother after meeting in the artist Norman Raban’s painting class in 1970s New York City. As a teenager, Sussman often wondered if Dylan was his father.
In the autobiographical novel Boy from the North Country (Penguin Press, Sept.), Sussman’s narrator Evan, an aspiring writer, returns to Goshen from London to care for his mother, June, during her cancer treatments. With some prodding from her son, June unspools the stories of her time as an acting student of Stella Adler, the affair with Dylan that she had long been reluctant to discuss, and the mysterious identity of Evan’s father.
Genealogical mystery aside, Boy from the North Country is a portrait of the artist as a young man in mourning. “There is so little space in our culture for male vulnerability around grief and loss, and so that had to be the spiritual center of the book,” Sussman says of his protagonist’s attempts to reckon with his mother’s illness. The novel also adds new insights into the real Dylan’s work, basing
its depictions of the writing of the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks on Sussman’s mother’s recollections.
While Dylan appears in the novel, the star is Evan’s mother, a talented actor and painter who modeled her own version of the good life for her son. Reflecting on his own mother’s commitment to a life of creativity, Sussman says, “My mother had her own deep beliefs about what made people happy, and she structured her life around that.”
Eshani Surya
While enrolled in the University of Arizona’s MFA program, Eshani Surya wrote a work of flash fiction in which the characters peel off their skin with razors as an extreme form of cosmetic enhancement. She eventually worked the theme into a novel, Ravishing (Grove/Gay, Nov.), whose less gory conceit still associates beauty products with violence.
Ravishing explores the profound effects of people’s obsession with appearances. Evolvoir, a cosmetics and wellness startup, claims that its lotion, which can temporarily lighten skin and alter facial features, will do wonders for its users’ mental health: facial alteration as self-care. Kashmira, an Indian American teen, embraces the product because she wishes to look less like her father, who abandoned the family. She continues even after the treatment has debilitating effects on her health.
Surya’s background in short fiction helped her capture the experience of being ill. “It’s really hard to get someone who’s not sick to understand,” she says. “You have to slow down and unpack the moment, and writing flash fiction makes that possible.”
Sura, a program coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania, has long ruminated on illness and caregiving. She has been hospitalized numerous times following an adverse reaction to a medication for her ulcerative colitis, which caused her white blood cell count to plummet and her hair to fall out. “When I was first diagnosed with colitis, I was under the impression that you take some medicine, you get better,” she remembers. “Hospitalization made me realize that this was going to be a longer-term journey for me.”
In tracking Kashmira’s self-destructive path, the novel delves into her complex feelings about both her appearance and her Indian roots. “I’ve always found that the identity of being Indian American feels really malleable,” says Surya, who grew up in an overwhelmingly white Connecticut neighborhood. She sensed that she lacked a “clear mold” to fit into and sees a parallel with the way chronically ill people
don’t fit neatly into the prevailing healthy-sick binary. For that reason, she says, “it would be hard for me to write about the sick body without writing about the racialized body as well.”
This article has been updated.
Matt Seidel is a writer and translator living in Massachusetts.
