For our twenty-fourth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five writers to introduce this year’s group of debut authors. Read the July/August 2024 issue of the magazine for interviews between ’Pemi Aguda and Laura van den Berg, Jiaming Tang and Jessamine Chan, Michael Deagler and Akil Kumarasamy, Yasmin Zaher and Ayşegül Savaş, and Gina María Balibrera and Julie Buntin. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut books.

Ghostroots (Norton, May) by ’Pemi Aguda
Cinema Love (Dutton, May) by Jiaming Tang
Early Sobrieties (Astra House, May) by Michael Deagler
The Coin (Catapult, July) by Yasmin Zaher
The Volcano Daughters (Pantheon, August) by Gina María Balibrera

Ghostroots
’Pemi Aguda

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’Pemi Aguda, whose debut story collection, Ghostroots, was published by W. W. Norton in May. (Credit: IfeOluwa Nihinlola)

Children can be cruel, you know?

The first man stands at the bedside of his sweating wife. He is watching their baby emerge from inside her. What he does not know is that he is watching their son destroy her insides, shredding, making sure there will be no others to follow. This man’s wife is screaming and screaming, and the sound gives the man a headache, electric like lightning, striking the middle of his forehead. He reaches out to hold her hand, to remind her of his presence. But he is surprised by the power of her latch, this strength born of pain, the way she crushes the bones of his fingers. He has to bite down to prevent himself from crying out.

And here is the baby, bloody and outside for the first time. The first man flinches at the sudden appearance of white eyeballs in the midst of the slimy red of birth.

“Um,” the doctor says, frowning. “You have a son.”

The first man leans down to catch the mumbled words from his wife’s mouth. “Yes, hon. He’s alive,” he reassures her. The whites of the baby’s eyes are imprinted in his mind, behind the headache, like an image from the past, blurred and clouded by time. He looks up to the doctor, who is still holding onto the baby, brows furrowed. “He’s alive, right, doctor? Is everything fine? Isn’t he supposed to cry?”

The doctor looks everywhere but at the first man. They fuss around, the doctor and the nurses, snipping, cleaning, moving.

“Doctor?” the man prompts.

“Mr. Man, you have a son! Congratulations! A living, breathing boy!”

The second man huffs beneath the weight of his wife. The Ikeja General Hospital has sent them home even though his wife is still bleeding from the birth. “Sorry, no space,” the head nurse told him, her attention moving so easily to the next patient. “Take her home; everybody bleeds.”

The second man’s mother holds open the door to their apartment, cradling the baby like an expert. She trails them to the bedroom, where the man gently lowers his wife to their bed—still messy with signs of frantic packing for the hospital. Once his arms are free, the mother transfers the baby to him, as if she has been waiting to rid herself of the infant.

“Maami,” he starts to say, but his mother leaves the room.

The baby is sleeping and his eyeballs move around beneath his thin lids. The second man is repulsed by this movement, this unconscious shifting, like a buried thing digging its way up. The man is then discomfited by this reaction to his child. He deposits his new son in the cradle that smells like wood polish, then goes to find his mother in the kitchen. 

“Maami, will you make black soup for her? Will that help?”

The mother is staring out the kitchen window, her fingers steeping in a bowl of uncleaned tilapia. “That baby is not yours, I’m sure of it.”

“Maami, please. Don’t start this rubbish again.”

“That baby is not yours; I can swear on it! I know it. I feel it.” Her hands move again, lifting a gill flap, gutting the fish with a soft snap.

The third man walks into the dining room to find his wife dozing off while their baby quietly suckles at the feeding bottle’s nib. The image he encounters is this: her neck tilted backward and to the side so that the muscles seem contorted unnaturally, the tendons and veins pushing against skin. For a moment, he is sure she is dead.

She jerks awake when he tries to lift their son from her arms. Her hands instinctively tighten, then loosen. “Thanks,” she whispers, her eyes drifting to close again. The man is impressed at how quickly she seems to have bonded with the baby they accepted from the arms of a teenage mother—whose name they were not allowed to know—only three weeks ago.

The third man rocks the baby the way they were taught at adoption classes. Softly, softly, back and forth. The baby’s eyes flutter open and the man smiles down at his son, his first child, his baby. “Who’s a good boy?” he sings, hoping that a bond will grow between them too. “Who? Who?”

The baby does not smile, but do babies this young even smile? The third man now feels silly because of what seems like a stern look from the infant, as if the voice he has put on is simply ridiculous, beneath him. How does one feel embarrassed in the sight of a three-week-old baby? He frowns at his child, noticing for the first time some flecks of gray in his irises. He blinks, startled, but the gray is gone. A wink, a flash, a warning.

“You’re not a good boy,” the man whispers, queasy, no longer singing, no longer rocking. “Are you?”

There was another boy, once. But that was so long ago.

From Ghostroots: Stories. Copyright © 2024 by ’Pemi Aguda. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.  

Cinema Love
Jiaming Tang

Do you see her? The limping woman with the shopping bags. She walks slowly and stares with hatred in her eyes. Maybe it’s the heat. The sweat dripping from wrist to sidewalk as the carp she bought spoils in its plastic. A shiny tail pokes out from behind a bent bundle of chives, and the ice cream in her other bag is melting. The marchers crowding the streets smell the fish, or at least some imagine they can. Anything to dismiss this glaring woman whom they believe to be an enemy. There’s something haughty about her. An expression matching the crinkling of a nose, like when you see a beggar on the street and decide to cover your face. In the words of one of the youngsters, “You never know with people nowadays.” He’s not wrong, but he’s not right, either. It’s true, this woman doesn’t care for the marchers. She’ll believe in rent cancellation when she sees it, but right now she’s got a carp spoiling below her wrist and all these people in the way. The white ones she pushes, especially if they’re posing for pictures. She’s kinder to the Chinese marchers, but her sympathy lies solely with the old men and women.

A few are her neighbors, two of them illegal. To her, their courage is stupid. What if the cops get you, and what if you are infected with the new illness? It’s better to be safe than sorry, especially in this part of the world. She shakes her head and walks up the stairs of her building. The steps haven’t been swept in weeks, and scraps of paper are scattered everywhere. Receipts, lotto tickets, scratch‑off cards, and a child’s drawing—ugly. Her apartment is on the third floor, a one‑bedroom, and the door opens the moment she shakes out her keys.

“Did you get the shrimp paste?” Old Second asks.

The woman doesn’t respond and instead places her groceries in the fridge. They’ve been married for thirty years and rarely address each other by name. A grunt is greeting enough for them. Instead of calling her Bao Mei, Old Second clears his throat and glances in his wife’s direction. It’s the kind of communication you see in very old couples—ones who’ve gone through things together.

“It’s a million degrees out, and all those people,” Bao Mei says.

“Did you remember the shrimp paste?” Old Second asks again.

“No. Out.”

“Are you sure? They always have it at the big store. Near Canal.”

“Why don’t you go yourself if you have all the answers?”

“It’s one block over. Doesn’t take more than five minutes.”

“Okay,” Bao Mei says, thrusting her shopping bags at him. “Why don’t you go now? Walk through all those people, I dare you. God. It’s so sweaty out there, so sticky. You touch someone and you’re stuck to them like tape.”

“Next time go the other way. The crowd is gathered on one end of the road.”

“I don’t have time to talk to you anymore. I’m going to lie down. With all those people out I haven’t been able to sleep at night.”

“The protests only started this morning.”

“Yeah, well.” She blinks while lying on the futon. “Let’s hope what happened to us doesn’t happen to them.”

Together, Bao Mei and her dreams remember everything. Not just her own memories, but those of others. Asleep, her body twitches and so does her mouth—choking on silent words as they fail to enter waking life. Today, however, a scream exits her lips, mixing with the thick August air. When she wakes, it’s to the loathsome sound of Old Second running from the bedroom. They perform their usual routine. He asks if she’s all right; she tells him she’s had a dream. No, she doesn’t want to talk about it; yes, she’ll take a bowl of water. The warmer, the better so she won’t taste the tap flavor like blood in her mouth. She swishes it. Looks around at this apartment they’ve built together as husband and wife.

From Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Jiaming Tang.  

Early Sobrieties
Michael Deagler

PASSYUNK

News of my sobriety had spread throughout the land, at least among a certain subset of individuals for whom sobriety was a rare and ill-considered state. It was Oktoberfest at the Brauhaus, which, in the name of public merriment, had shut down a block of South Street in order to validate a lot of debased and antisocial behavior. Not that such conduct didn’t occur nightly on South Street, but the Brauhaus had welcomed it into the reputable light of day—to the accompaniment of Schlager and Volksmusik no less—which surely represented, if not an act of outright delinquency, at least some form of civic negligence. I came for a soft pretzel and to reaffirm my own constructive life choices.

Philadelphia was a small town when you got down to it, particularly if you sifted out those people for whom the Brauhaus Oktoberfest held little appeal. I ran into a number of acquaintances. Katie Doran was working the pretzel stand, and I imagine she mentioned my presence to Lilah Noth in the beer tent, who likely tipped off Rob Gill and his troop of inebriates, who accosted me outside the vegan café from which I was contemplating the purchase of a bubble tea. Gill had Sean Culp with him, and Sean Porth, and between the two of them they carried Mildew Hannafey like the crucified Christ, buttressing his slack, skinny arms with their shoulders. They cast the drunk man at me, repeating my name as though they believed it held incantatory properties. “Dennis Monk! Dennis Monk! Dennis Monk!”

“What?” I said. The lax face of Hannafey was pressed against my shirt. His flaccid limbs draped themselves around my neck.

“He’s overserved!” cried Gill. Gill, too, was overserved. The whole group of them was overserved. They continued to overserve themselves from the plastic beer steins germinating from their hands. “You’re sober, Dennis Monk! You need to take him home!”

“Is that Dennis Monk?” muttered Hannafey. “I know Dennis Monk.” 

“I don’t know where he lives,” I said, turning my face away from the semiconscious reveler nuzzling at my sternum. He smelled strongly of beer and slightly of vomit. I knew very little about Hannafey. He was around twenty-two, on the shorter end of average height, with elfin features that suggested intoxication even when he was sober, which he rarely was. I’d only ever encountered him in low-lit bars, where the regulars evolved a sort of cave- blindness toward one another. I was alarmed to see him in daylight.

“He lives way down Passyunk!” Gill had sardine eyes, eyes terrified of ever missing a thing that happened in the world. “Down past Nineteenth!” 

“I’m not going to take him there,” I said. “I don’t even have a car. Just put him on a bench for a while.”

“He’ll get sunstroke and die!” wailed Gill. “He’ll putrefy like a jack-o’-lantern!”

“Jesus, just put him in the shade,” I said, though already the old guilt was revving in my chest. I wanted nothing to do with the chemically impaired—they annoyed the fuck out of me, in a way that only those exhibiting my own inadequacies could—but for that same reason I felt an obligation toward them. They brought to mind all the people who had aided me when I had been in similar states of degeneration. All the people, too, who hadn’t bothered. Part of what impelled a person to substance abuse in the first place was the hope that, if he forfeited his faculties and lay himself before the mercy of his fellow man, some reluctant Samaritan might come along and look after him for a little while. I had once wobbled so discomfitingly before a bar in Callowhill that a woman invited me into her car and dropped me off at a friend’s place in Fairmount, asking nothing of me other than a promise that I would go straight to bed and take better care of myself in the future. Another time, a group of college students five years my junior—not one of whom I’d met before or since—bought me a late-night doughnut in Old City before sticking me in a cab bound for an address I knew in Northern Liberties. One time I stayed on the Blue Line long past my stop, all the way to Upper Darby, just to prove to a girlfriend that I was as proud as I was angry (as I was drunk, as I was baffled by my life) only to get mugged outside the 69th Street station and stumble back to her doorstep, thirty-five shameful blocks on foot, without receiving a single look of  human recognition from a single person who crossed my path. For all of that—the people who’d helped and the ones who hadn’t—I agreed to get Mildew Hannafey to his bed, even though I didn’t want to. He’d become me, there in my arms, and I was someone else.

“Hooray!” cheered the inebriates, Gill and Culp and Porth and all of them, like I had solved something permanent in their lives. “Hooray for Dennis Monk!”

From Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler. Published by Astra House. Copyright © Michael Deagler 2024. All rights reserved.  

The Coin
Yasmin Zaher

It’s strange where we start stories. I might as well have started from my birth if I was going to be proper and methodical. But the dirt is not a metaphor, I really saw it. In my ear canals, inside my nose, around my ankles. Do I disgust you? I don’t look dirty, do I?

One day, I began to notice that my body was dirtier than usual. It was a pleasant day, in late September, and I went for a long walk after Franklin, wandering down some streets that were neither numbered nor lettered. I wasn’t afraid of being lost, there was always a cab around the corner, and when I felt that I’d had enough, the sun was setting, I raised my hand in the air and a taxi took me home. I entered my apartment and decided to take a shower. I did this naturally and with no intentions, I was only doing what felt good.

Before I got in the water, I remembered that I had a Turkish hammam loofah in my suitcase. I brought it out, stepped into the shower, slipped my hand inside the loofah, and began scrubbing. The bathroom was small, the bathtub short.

First, my right hand scrubbed my left arm. It burned. The water was hot, my heart began to race and it gave me the energy to continue. As I said, it was a pleasant day and perhaps in my boredom I had found a way to make it exciting. I closed my eyes and rubbed as hard and fast as I could, until my muscle began to stiffen, which wasn’t long, I’d be exaggerating if I said it took more than thirty seconds. As you can see, I’m a small woman, I wait for others to open doors for me.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the miniature gray snakes. They fell to my feet, three or four of them.

I looked at them and immediately I knew. I mean, I had seen them before, but not like this. A heart-faced woman had once scrubbed me in a Turkish hammam and I saw them there too, wiggling in the splash on marble. But the snakes of New York were scary and ghoulish, like my own voice in the mouth of a total stranger.

I took the dirt to heart. I knew that the snakes were not just a material fact but that they were a sign of something very bad, something terrifying that was happening to my body.

The loofah was a harmless-looking thing that in reality was wicked and rough. I continued, scrubbing my entire body, peeling off the dead skin. I told myself that this was a death that I could manage, if only I worked hard enough, if I stayed clean and organized. But I had no stamina, and when I switched, left to right, I did not see any snakes. My left side is not as strong. And you will see, as I proceed, that this is a condition of asymmetry. The left is cleaner, but it is weak. The right is strong and covered in filth.

The snakes lay there in the bathtub. I bent over, picked them up, and threw them all in the small garbage can in the bathroom. I didn’t like the sight of them, just lying there, so I dug my hand inside the garbage and stirred it, flipping them as one flips a tender risotto.

I got out of the shower and tiptoed back to my bedroom. It must have been dark out, yes, I remember it was. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. I didn’t have a problem with my neighbors seeing me naked from the bedroom window, but the kitchen window faces Fulton Street, and I didn’t walk naked by that window at night. It’s a good area, a great location. But how do I say it? Working class, going to and from work, always tired, and I didn’t want to be seen by them. 

I’m just going to say it. I didn’t want poor people to see my body. Their desperation scared me.

That evening, I went to dinner at Sasha’s. He also lived in the neighborhood. Do you know the tall clock tower, the one that looks like a dick? Sasha was in real estate and a few years back he had even bought the small building across from Kushner’s 666, which, by my advice, he later leased to Salvatore Ferragamo. But Sasha was very humble about it. When people asked him he said he was in real estate, and you wouldn’t know, he could have been just another Eastern European broker.

I wore a dress by McQueen, my arms and legs were like polished bronze, but underneath my dress everything else was dirty, beginning to rot.

I couldn’t sleep at Sasha’s. All night I thought about my dirty body and the place I could not clean. It was behind me, between my shoulder blades, the only part of my body I could not touch, nor fully see, the part of my body which must have been the dirtiest, because I couldn’t get to it with the Turkish hammam loofah. 

From The Coin, copyright © 2024 by Yasmin Zaher. Reprinted by permission of Catapult.