The leaves are crisping, the air is cooling, and we turn our attention from the books we carried in our beach bags and on airplanes to distant vacations, to the reads that will keep us warm in the coming months, stacked up as insulation along drafty windowsills, their colorful jackets bright against the graying sky. Here are five fall debuts from Bloomers.
by Andy Shi
“It’s the story of a young woman who learns, and is excited to learn, that her heritage is more complicated than she knew. And she heavily romanticizes the whole thing. That’s me, but hopefully with a level of self-awareness that I am romanticizing. I live in fear of Orientalizing myself.”
by Jen Lue
“As human beings, we live in relation to each other. One person’s story never exists in isolation.”
by Lisa Peet
“In every phase, certain lessons have presented themselves intensely in my own life, and I wanted to show them honestly before reporting other stories. I wanted the reader to understand just how I’m able to see what’s happening in these other lives in moments of silence, secrecy, or heartbreaking posturing.”
by Joan Schweighardt
“Certain horrors exceed our capacity to understand. Their concrete reality mocks theory, and language itself falters before such towering monstrosity.”
By Susan Sechrist
The perception is that the underpinnings of science, numbers and math, are rigid and dull and anything that comes from them is rigid and dull. The basic underpinning of realistic fiction is that people must behave in ways that humans behave in real life… that underpinning is rigid and dull, too, but what comes from it can be glorious and inspiring. The same is true for what comes from numbers and math…
by Alice Stephens
“My hope lies in the youth who are politically active, who are much more open-minded, who see all people as human beings.”
“I haven’t felt any pressure to produce writing achievements by a certain arbitrary age. I’ve always been confident that, if anything, aging adds perspective and nuance to my work.”
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by Nancy Koerbel
“that was Patty’s kind of thing, the ordinarily beautiful, and she cooed over all that—she had a way of expressing delight that was genuine and infectious.” Continue reading
by Evelyn Somers
“I also wanted to write about the women who never show up in historical writing more generally. Sometimes in our histories the women disappear altogether. This mysterious—actually ridiculous—absence of women at key historical moments became crucial to me.” Continue reading
by Annie Kim
“Every voice in The Out-of-Body Shop is I, even if the story, the body, isn’t.” Continue reading
by Caitlin Hamilton Summie
I gave the process three years and decided that if I hadn’t found a publisher by then, I would consider that particular project done. Continue reading
by Mollie Weisenfeld
This collection of Bloomers was inspired by my reading of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I wanted to explore more in the world of Latin American writers. Continue reading
by Maddie King
“I wanted to focus on … the fascinating yet paradoxical idea that work is at the same time a place where one is dominated and exploited, and a way to find personal fulfillment.” Continue reading
