Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson was all too aware that her mother, a practicing physician, had a vision for their future together: Libertie would go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else. As she tries to parse what freedom means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it.

Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father. He never shows up, instead sending her an allowance, care of an older Lebanese man. As the week progresses, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and catastrophic affair, shattering her on the cusp of adulthood. A compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, and the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain.

In these nine pieces, Beard investigates love and betrayal, grief and survival in the precise, searingly personal language for which she is beloved. These genre-defying works capture both the quietly luminous moments of daily existence and those of life-and-death decision, showing a pioneering author at the pinnacle of her talent.

These gripping stories find inspiration in news headlines about recent events. Ordinary people negotiate their tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. As a whole, the collection forms a troubling yet irresistible mirror of our time.

In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive novel, written as a series of  Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness merging volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Yxta Maya Murray shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodes just as she has a breakthrough.

A woman describes a series of encounters in the ordinary course of her life: running into an ex at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with guests, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with cancer. The woman finds each person needs the same thing: an audience for their experiences.

In a nimble dance of lightness and gravity, Likes explores the full range and contradictions of our contemporary moment. Through unexpected visitors, Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, and the Instagram posts of a twelve-year-old, these stories form an engrossing collection that is both otherworldly and suffused with the deceitful humdrum of everyday life.

An old man rages in his nursing home, a rich man is haunted by a hog, an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker, and Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, If I Had Two Wings is a chorus of voices and visions marked by physicality and spirit.

Lilia Liska has outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own version of events.

Thrumming with energy and at once critical and hopeful, The Son of Good Fortune is a big-hearted debut novel following an undocumented Filipino son as he navigates his relationship with his mother, an uncertain future, and the place he calls home.