Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
When Paris Whispers by Marianne C. Bohr
Twenty-two-year-old Catrine arrives in Paris, the city she’s dreamed of since childhood, and it speaks back-but not in ways she expected. Drifting through the streets of 1981 Paris, the voices of French writers she once read in solitude whisper back, intimate and insistent. Rather than reassure her, they unsettle her, exposing cracks in the person she believed herself to be.
When a brief romance ends in abrupt eviction, Catrine is left broke and unmoored, suspended between a city that won’t release her and a past she refuses to reclaim. An unlikely friendship with a widowed Sorbonne professor leads to an impulsive road trip to Normandy and everything begins to unravel. What follows is not the Paris she expected, but something more unsettling-and more honest.
Is the City of Light rescuing her, haunting her, or revealing something she’s been too afraid to see?
The Hummingbird by Matt Longabucco
From flower to flower goes the hummingbird, heart pounding, in search of anything sweet. This poet’s attention, meanwhile, hovers and darts toward ever-more attenuated spaces of enlivenment and connection in New York City and beyond, filching lyric possibilities from the shadows of indignity and dread. On riverbanks and in dive bars, hospices and deserted libraries, or “in my coffin/reposting mentions,” Longabucco’s gift is to articulate the specific moment when abjection and edification, shame and satisfaction, banality and profundity tip into one another, only to reveal they were always, inevitably intertwined.
Delete Me Kindly by Katherine Martin
Revealed through corrupted memory files, corporate audit logs, and recursive system reports, Delete Me Kindly is a found-fiction/sci-fi novella about a grieving data technician unraveling inside the machine he helped build. As fragments of his missing wife’s consciousness bleed into the harvested human memories he is tasked to compile and implant, his own neural chip corrupts and malfunctions. Reality fractures and hallucinations accumulate. Memories loop and mutate. A lost cat and a shadowy teenage girl lead him toward an underground lab of black-market android shells, where he must choose whether to restore himself or disappear. Part corporate dystopia, part psychological noir, Delete Me Kindly excavates what happens when grief, memory, and technology collide in a system designed to churn human lives into raw data.
VAGABOND CITY 