In recent years, LySandra Vuong‘s fantasy series Covenant has found a dedicated audience with its take on fantasy adventures, musings on religion, and romance. A crowdfunding/preorder campaign for the sixth volume is now on Kickstarter; among the incentives is an enamel bookmark, which we have a preview of below.
In recollections of her friendship with Kathy Acker, Avital Ronell writes, “Derrida locates in surviving the origin and essence of friendship. Not empirically or chronologically clocked but fundamental, the structure of surviving means that one of you will be left behind, responsible and responsive to the intemporal, irretrievably mute other.”
We’re pleased to debut the cover art for Matthew Wong Foreman’s forthcoming novel Sunset at Lion Rock, set to be published by 7.13 Books on September 15, 2026. The novel, set in Hong Kong in the early 21st century, follows a young man experiencing a dramatic change in his beliefs about religion and politics. The author explained the significance of the cover:
Dostoyevsky had a roulette system. Fine-tuning his method in Baden-Baden, he wrote to his brother in 1863 confidently laying down the fundamentals of his infallible method, which, once you weed out the giddiness and guff, amounts to this: bet more, and if you lose, bet even more. Pile on more money, eventually you’ll hit a winning streak. Of course, as might’ve been expected, Dostoyevsky never retired on his roulette winnings, instead finding himself broke and forced to write his sketchy novella The Gambler in a few days to get out of debt. The Gambler is Dostoyevsky’s casino hangover, but the Russian giant’s ego being what it was, even so soon after his losing bouts at the tables in those European spa towns, he still glorified a little in the casino world that’d almost destroyed him.
So I sat down with Charlene Elsby‘s Poor Damned Souls one evening and found myself reading a book about a relationship about to collapse. That quickly turned into something much bleaker, which evolved into a scenario that left me wondering how much worse things could get. It’s transgressive fiction at its best, and I chatted with Elsby to learn more about this book’s genesis.
Hello and welcome to the month of June. We hope that you started out the month with the traditional utterance of “rabbit rabbit.” We are currently immersing ourselves in Ibrahim Alfa Jnr.’s Infinite Black Inside (thanks for the recommendation, Hearing Things) and planning out our June reading. Here are some of the books we’re most excited to explore.
The Swedish Cookbook by Niklas Ekstedt is a beautifully crafted celebration of Nordic simplicity, balance and flavor — a book that feels both timeless and refreshingly modern. Ekstedt brings his signature philosophy of lagom — “just the right amount” — to every page, offering home cooks a warm, confident guide into the heart of Swedish culinary tradition.
For more than three decades, the literary world has waited for a definitive, fresh examination of one of the 20th century’s most vital voices. In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs delivers not just a biography, but a literary event. By exploring James Baldwin’s life through the prism of deep, complex love, Boggs offers a mesmerizing, deeply humane portrait of a man whose personal connections shaped the conscience of a generation.