Online Book Launch: Jonathan Geltner’s “Absolute Music”

Register now for the online book launch of Jonathan Geltner’s Absolute Music. Jonathan will read from the novel, discuss the book with Slant editor Gregory Wolfe, and answer your questions. July 27, 2022, 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, 5 pm Pacific. Via Zoom.

Read an Excerpt from Absolute Music

On an eerily warm October evening in a suburb of Detroit, a new father and struggling fantasy novelist named McPhail gazes at a honey locust tree. The sight triggers a memory of the sudden, inexplicable death of Hannah, whom he loved when they were both fourteen.

Online Book Launch: Paul Mariani’s “All That Will Be New”

Register now for the book launch of Paul Mariani’s “All That Will be New” with special guests National Book Award-winner Martin Espada and Angelo Alaimo O’Donnell. June 14, 2022, 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central, 5 pm Pacific. Via Zoom. Register now!

Read an Excerpt from All That Will Be New

In the poem that opens this, his ninth collection, one of our most celebrated men of letters contemplates the “primordial tensions” felt in the crashing waves of a Northeaster, the glory and terror of the storm as “the real comes crashing finally down on you.”

Read an Excerpt from The Meaning of Birth

In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking….

Read an Excerpt from When the Dead Are Razed

When Teffy Byrne steals a dead sex worker’s coded journal from a local art show, she thinks it might shed light on an unsolved murder committed seven years ago.

Read an Excerpt from Rose Is a Verb

California poet Karen An-hwei Lee, inspired by Virgil, has created her own dense, richly-layered collection of “Neo-Georgics,” constituting an extended exploration of such motifs as happiness, olive groves, vineyards, soil chemistries, the seacoast, and the birth of trees.

Read an Excerpt from Somewhere to Follow

From California coastal redwoods to giant sequoias in the Sierra, from practical jokes of adolescence to unexpected epiphanies marking an academic career, the many poems in Somewhere to Follow range through the life of a poet on the lookout for what comes next.

Gar Anthony Haywood Interviewed

Gar Anthony Haywood has just been interviewed on the Crime Writers of Color podcast. He covers his distinguished career as a crime writer (including his long-running, beloved Aaron Gunner series) but then focuses in on his latest book — the impossible to categorize In Things Unseen (Slant).

Read an Excerpt from The Substance of Things Hoped For

For a brief time in mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, two of the most eccentric and fascinating figures in American history crossed paths when troubled soul and soon-to-be presidential assassin Charles Guiteau threw in his lot with John Humphrey Noyes’s utopian community of “free love” believers.

Read an Excerpt from The Relevance of the Stars

With the exception of a single book published in his lifetime, much of the late Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete’s wisdom has been scattered and hard to find. The Relevance of the Stars fills this vacuum.

Read an Excerpt from Come Shivering to Collect

The poems in John Pleimann’s Come Shivering to Collect live and move and have their being in a world that is both twilit and sacred. Speakers wrestle with memory’s power to obsess and distort, to haunt, and to evoke. They discover that life mocks happiness, and the only thing sacred is to be vulnerable.

God’s Liar Wins Christianity Today Award

We offer our hearty congratulations to Slant author Thom Satterlee, whose novel, God’s Liar, has won the Award of Merit in the 2021 Christianity Today Book Awards.

Read an Excerpt from French Dive

In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d’Azur. They’d bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean.

They were a family with a plan: to live differently.

Read an Excerpt from Into the New World

In the title poem of Into the New World Robert Schultz takes the reader on a walk around the World Trade Center site shortly after its destruction: in response to this event, the book ranges through the extremes of war and peace, as well as backwards and forwards in time, searching for shards out of which to build an enabling, humane perspective.

Read an Excerpt from Love Took the Words

“Love took the words right out of my mouth.” So begins the first line of Christopher Jane Corkery’s poignant and unforgettable new collection of poems. Throughout the  work these two themes—the power and mystery of language, especially the crafted  one of poetry, and what Keats called “the holiness of the heart’s affections”—intertwine, accumulating a rich panoply of associations and meanings.

Read an Excerpt from The Beasts of Belladonna

If the short story collections of John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor had a love child, it would be The Beasts of Belladonna. Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, Gilbert Allen’s collection of fifteen linked stories explores every corner of the suburbanized foothills of South Carolina.

Read an Excerpt from Coyote Fork

A timely, stylishly written, and brilliantly conceived metaphysical thriller, Coyote Fork carries us on an unforgettable journey, before bringing us face to face with the darkness at the heart of Silicon Valley itself.