Exploring the nature of family and loss through the derring-do of a Czechoslovakian war hero, Daniel Torday’s novel The Last Flight of Poxl West won the National Jewish Book Award, as did his debut novella The Sensualist. The Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, Torday’s work has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, The New York Times, and other publications. His new novel pits a disaffected and desperate 30-something with no job prospects against his Baby Boomer mother and successful punk bassist ex-girlfriend.

Praised by writer’s writer George Saunders as “strange, crazed, urgent and funny,” Nana Kwamei Adjei-Brenyah’s explosive debut fiction collection, Friday Black, situates characters in extraordinarily surreal, Twilight Zone-esque, yet all-too-familiar positions of oppression within our criminal justice, consumerist, and pop cultural institutions. Adjei-Brenyah’s work has been published in some of the country’s most prestigious publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest.