Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh

While reading Fools for Love, the new collection of short stories from New School MFA professor Helen Schulman, it won’t take long until you see names begin to reappear between stories.

While comprised of separate, standalone tales, the full collection blends together into a much more interconnected world, and follows a number of different New Yorkers from different corners of the city over multiple generations. As hinted by the collection’s name, unsustainable relationships and characters with dysfunctional ideas of love abound. The title story follows a web of bohemian partnerships in the heyday of the East Village,

Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh

Like plenty of great ghost stories, Stuart Pennebaker’s debut novel Ghost Fish begins as an extremely grounded tale. That it continues to feel realistic in its natural, interior way, even when a spirit entrenches itself into the story, is what makes it especially unique.

Ghost Fish follows a young twenty-something named Alison, who recently arrived in New York in hopes of a fresh start after a series of family tragedies left her isolated and entirely on her own. In particular, Alison is heavy with memories of her nearly twin sister — they were almost a year apart,

Interview by Mal Ward

In Laurie Sheck’s, Cyborg Fever, she transports readers into a meditative state of profound thinking, focused on humanness and its complexity in the age of technology and AI. The novel centers around Erwin, an orphan named after the physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. After a year-long fever dream, he experiences hallucinatory-like visions that begin by observing Funes (of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Funes and the Memorious”) meticulously researching on a computer.

The array of facts that Funes discovers introduces us to Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, and the theory of entropy,

by LIT Nonfiction Editors, Vicky Oliver and Sarah Persons

LIT nonfiction editors Vicky Oliver and Sarah Persons recently sat down with distinguished memoirist, playwright, and poet Honor Moore to discuss her new memoir, A Termination (August 2024, A Public Space). The memoir details the author’s reckoning with an abortion she had in 1969—four years before Roe v. Wade—and is told in a fragmented, poetic style. A Termination has drawn rave reviews from the New York Times and Kirkus Reviews, among others.

Vicky and Sarah first met in Honor’s “The Uses of Memory” class in the MFA program at the New School during 2022 when Honor was first drafting A Termination.

by LIT Books Editor, Jonathan Kesh

Equal parts historical and fantastical, The Witches of El Paso is a spirited exploration of the many ways we try and often fail to control the world around us, and it’s the debut novel from New School professor (and former director of the Creative Writing Program) Luis Jaramillo.

The story begins as a classic family saga, but quickly grows stranger: in the present day, bustling lawyer Marta cares for her elderly great aunt Nena, all while the old woman insists both of them have La Vista,