June 12, 2025
The Center for Fiction hosted the literary party of the season with co-hosts John Manuel Arias (Where There Was Fire) and Isle McElroy (People Collide) alongside this year’s incredible lineup of featured authors:
- Lydi Conklin (Songs of No Provenance)
- Emma Copley Eisenberg (Housemates)
- Rob Franklin (Great Black Hope)
- Dylin Hardcastle (A Language of Limbs)
- Roya Marsh (savings time)
- Phil Melanson (Florenzer)
- Lori Ostlund (Are You Happy?)
- Jonathan Parks-Ramage (It’s Not the End of the World)
- Erica Peplin (Work Nights)
- Marie Rutkoski (Ordinary Love)
- Joe Westmoreland (Tramps Like Us)
Featured Books
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Songs of No Provenance
By Lydi Conklin
Published by Catapult
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she’s forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.
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Housemates
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Published by Random House Publishing Group
Four housemates, looking for a fifth, the ad read. Queer preferred (we all are).
This is how Bernie, a film photographer, meets writer Leah, and from opposite sides of a thin bedroom wall in West Philadelphia the two become closer than they ever could have imagined. When Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie on a road trip to her former professor’s home in rural Pennsylvania to settle a complicated inheritance, what ensues is an unexpected road trip into the heart of America as the duo try to make sense of the times they are living in – falling in love with each other and rediscovering the power of making art along the way.
With humor, warmth, and beautifully observed characters, and told through the lens of two generations of queer creatives reflecting on questions of “how should a person be?”, Housemates is a glorious celebration of creativity, body liberation, chosen family–and of finding your place in an uncertain world.
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Great Black Hope
By Rob Franklin
Published by S&S/Summit Books
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.
It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, only to buckle under the weight of expectations from his family of doctors and lawyers and their history in America. But when Smith returns to New York, it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life—drawn back into the city’s underworld, where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.
Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.
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A Language of Limbs
By Dylin Hardcastle
Published by Penguin Publishing Group
Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow.
In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her family. Meanwhile, in the second, a teenage girl pushes down her lustful dreams of her best friend and eventually makes her way to a university in Sydney to study English literature.
During pivotal moments, the physical space between these two women closes—like when they each meet the first great loves of their lives in 1977 at a protest, or when, almost a decade later, they are both rushed to the hospital with only a curtain between them. Through the AIDS crisis—and from classrooms to art galleries, beds to bars and hospitals to homes—we witness these two lives shadow each other until, finally and poignantly, they collide.
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savings time
By Roya Marsh
Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux
what will come of what you leave behind?
do you
remember that time
you survived?
The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time, wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention.
In poems flitting between breathless prose and measured lyricism, Marsh contemplates the contradictions and challenges of Black life in America, tackling everything from police brutality and urban gentrification to queer identity, presidential elections, and pop culture, all while calling for a world where self-care, especially for Black women, is not just encouraged but mandated. “no one told the Black girl,” she writes, “‘see you later’ was a prayer / begging us survive our own erasure.”
As unforgettable on the page as when recited in Marsh’s legendary spoken-word performances, the poems in savings time are focused on both revolution and self-love, at once holding society accountable for its exploitation of Black life and honoring the joy of persisting nonetheless.
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Florenzer
By Phil Melanson
Published by Liveright
Leonardo da Vinci, twelve years old and a bastard, leaves the Tuscan countryside to join his father in Florence with dreams of becoming a painter. Francesco Salviati, also a bastard and scorned for his too-dark skin, dedicates himself to the Catholic Church with grand hopes of salvation. Towering above them both is Lorenzo de’ Medici, barely a man, yet soon to be the patriarch of the world’s wealthiest and most influential bank. Each of these young men harbors profound ambition, anxious to prove their potential to their superiors—and to themselves. Each is, in his own way, a son of Florence. Each will, when their paths cross, shed blood on Florence’s streets.
Fifteenth-century Florence flourishes as a haven of breathtaking artistic, cultural, and technological innovation, but discord churns below the surface: the Medici’s bank exacerbates the city’s staggering wealth inequality, and rumors swirl of a rift between Lorenzo and the new pope. Meanwhile, the city has become Europe’s preeminent destination for gay men—or “florenzers,” as they come to be crudely called. For Leonardo, an astonishingly gifted painter’s apprentice, being a florenzer might feel like personal liberation—but risk lingers around every corner.
Brash and breathtaking, this lush historical drama unfolds the machinations of a city on the brink of a new age as it contends with the tensions between public and private lives, the entanglement of erotic and creative impulse, the sacrifices of the determinedly pious, and the risks of fantastic power. With his “unforgettable characters and an ever-twisting plot, all told with style, skill, and wry black humor” (Tim Leach), Phil Melanson emerges as an enthralling new voice in contemporary fiction.
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Are You Happy?
By Lori Ostlund
Published by Astra Publishing House
An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend’s innocence and rethinks justice. A queer teacher’s sense of safety in the classroom is destroyed. With settings ranging from small-town Minnesota to New Mexico, from bars and bedrooms to a furniture store and a community college, Are You Happy? casts a spotlight on people who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. In prose that is evocative and restrained, unpredictable and masterful, Lori Ostlund offers a darkly humorous and compassionate examination of America’s preoccupation with loneliness, happiness, guns, and violence.
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It's Not the End of the World
By Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
It’s 2044 and life is bleak for many Americans, but not for Mason Daunt. Safe in his Los Angeles mansion, Mason can remain blissfully unaware of the relentless wildfires engulfing California, the proliferation of violent right-wing militias, and the rampant authoritarianism destroying American society. He’s so rich, in fact, that he and his partner Yunho Kim are throwing a 100-person, $100,000 baby shower to celebrate their newborn-on-the-way. When a potentially apocalyptic event hits Los Angeles on the day of their celebration, though, the wealthy gay couple refuses to cancel their party. Surely it’s not the end of the world? But as Mason runs a few last-minute errands, a staggering twist thrusts him into the mounting chaos, and threatens the lives of everyone he holds dear.
Shot through with biting wit, brutal gore, primal sex, and unexpected catharsis, It’s Not the End of the World is a nerve-shredding roller coaster of a novel that will leave readers shocked, heartbroken, and inspired to question their most firmly held convictions. What happens when our current battles with climate change, capitalism, and white supremacy are pushed to their breaking points? And how can we find hope?
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Work Nights
By Erica Peplin
Published by Gallery Books
Jane Grabowski hauls herself to her nine to five office job at New York City’s most acclaimed newspaper to sit in stale air under severe florescent lights and mask her rage by sending emails with too many exclamation points.
Luckily, Jane has a reason to keep coming into the office: Madeline, the distractingly beautiful intern. Madeline has never dated a woman and is uncomfortable with labels but with carefully timed lunch breaks and painstakingly crafted texts, Jane works her way into her life. Meanwhile, Jane’s free-spirited artist roommate tries to keep her from falling for a straight girl by dragging Jane to gay bars and queer Shabbat dinners, where she meets the decidedly uncool and morally righteous musician, Addy.
Caught between Addy’s readiness to commit and Madeline’s alluring unpredictability, Jane is pulled down a slippery path of lies and deceit, leading to a plane ticket that threatens to take everything down in one fell swoop.
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Ordinary Love
By Marie Rutkoski
Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Emily has, by all appearances, a perfect life: a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, two healthy children, and a husband who showers her with attention. But the truth is more complicated: Emily’s marriage is in trouble, her relationship with her parents is fraught, and she is still nursing a heartbreak from long ago. When Emily runs into her high school girlfriend at a cocktail party, that heartbreak comes roaring back. But Gen Hall is no longer the lanky, hungry kid with holes in her shoes who Emily loved in her youth. Instead, Gen is now a famous Olympic athlete with sponsorship deals and a string of high-profile ex-girlfriends.
Emily and Gen circle one another cautiously, drawn together by a magnetic attraction and scarred by their shared history. Once upon a time, Gen knew everything about Emily. And yet, she still abandoned her. Can Emily trust Gen again? Can they forgive each other for the mistakes they made in their past? Should Emily risk her children, her privacy, and the fragile peace she has found to be with a woman she loved long ago?
A sweeping romance, Ordinary Love is the beautiful, wrenching, completely seductive story of two people trying to forge a path toward hope, bound by a love they discovered when they were too young to understand its power.
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Tramps Like Us
By Joe Westmoreland
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Abused by his father and stifled by closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn’t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown’s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music, a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.
Told with openhearted frankness, Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth—all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive. As Eileen Myles writes, “I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.”
Back in print after two decades and with an introduction by Myles and an afterword by the author, Tramps Like Us is an ode to a nearly lost generation, an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.
Featuring
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Lydi Conklin
Lydi Conklin
Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for the Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in June 2025 from Catapult in the US and Vintage in the UK.
Photo Credit: Emily April Allen
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Emma Copley Eisenburg
Emma Copley Eisenburg
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the novel Housemates and the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, which was a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice of 2020, as well as a finalist for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Award, among other honors. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Granta, Esquire, The New Republic, Lux, The Washington Post Magazine, VQR, and many other publications. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her short story collection, Fat Swim, is forthcoming from Hogarth in 2026.
Photo Credit: Kenzi Crash
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Rob Franklin
Rob Franklin
Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus among others. Franklin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope is his first novel.
Photo Credit: Emma Trim
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Dylin Hardcastle
Dylin Hardcastle
Dylin Hardcastle (they/them) is an award-winning author, artist, and screenwriter. They are the author of Below Deck (2020), Breathing Under Water (2016), and Running Like China (2015). Their work has been published to critical acclaim in eleven territories and translated into eight languages. A Language of Limbs won the Kathleen Mitchell Award through Creative Australia. The novel has been optioned by Curio (Sony Pictures) and is in development.
Photo Credit: Rosa Spring Voss
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Roya Marsh
Roya Marsh
Roya Marsh is a Bronx, New York, native and a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection dayliGht, which was nominated for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. The former Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC, Marsh’s work has been featured on NBC, BET, and Def Jam’s All Def Digital, and published in Poetry, the Village Voice, Nylon, Huffington Post, and in the collection The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic. Her second collection, savings time, was published in February 2025.
Photo Credit: Tamara Van Lesberghe
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Phil Melanson
Phil Melanson
Raised in New Hampshire, Phil Melanson is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the University of Warwick. Prior to writing Florenzer, he was a digital marketer for Hollywood film studios, working on campaigns for movies such as Little Women, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Once Upon on a Time… in Hollywood. He now lives in London with his husband.
Photo Credit: Jess Rose
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Lori Ostlund
Lori Ostlund
Lori Ostlund is the author of Are You Happy? (Astra House, May 2025). Her novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was a B&N Discover pick, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first book, The Bigness of the World (UGA, 2009; Scribner, 2016), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, and New England Review, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has served as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award since 2022 and is on the board of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff.
Photo Credit: Dennis Hearne
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Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Jonathan Parks-Ramage is a Los Angeles based novelist, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. His critically acclaimed debut novel Yes, Daddy (HarperCollins) was named one of the best queer books of 2021 by Entertainment Weekly, NBC News, the Advocate, Lambda Literary, Bustle, Goodreads, and more. Yes, Daddy was also optioned for television by Amazon Studios. His second novel, It’s Not the End of the World (Bloomsbury), will be released in the summer of 2025.
Photo Credit: Luke Fontana
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Erica Peplin
Erica Peplin
Erica Peplin is a writer from Detroit, Michigan, now based in Brooklyn. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Joyland, The Millions, McSweeney’s, The Village Voice, and more. From 2015 to 2016, she worked in the advertising department of The New York Times. Since then, she’s worked as a shipping clerk, a high school custodian, and a restaurant server. Her debut novel Work Nights will be published by Gallery Books on June 17, 2025. Find out more at EricaPeplin.com.
Photo Credit: Rebecca Siegelman
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Marie Rutkoski
Marie Rutkoski
Marie Rutkoski is New York Times bestselling author of books for children and young adults, including The Winner’s Curse. She published her first novel for adults, Real Easy, in 2022. Rutkoski is a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
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Joe Westmoreland
Joe Westmoreland
Joe Westmoreland is the author of the novel Tramps Like Us, originally published in 2001. His writing has appeared in several anthologies, zines, and catalogues for art exhibitions. He lives with his partner, the artist Charles Atlas, in New York City.
Photo Credit: Lori E. Seid
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John Manuel Arias
John Manuel Arias
John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer, and the National Bestselling author of Where There Was Fire. His work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, The Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus. His sophomore novel Crocodilopolis will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Nichols
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Isle McElroy
Isle McElroy
Isle McElroy is the author of the novels The Atmospherians and People Collide, named a best book of 2023 by Vulture, Vogue, Them, and the New York Times Critics. They will be the 2025-26 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Photo Credit: Jih-E Peng
