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FAMILY NIGHT is by turns a lyrical celebration of queerness and an exploration of family and loss, often through a lens of magical realism. Ani King's collected flash fiction stories explore relationships and connections: a teen girl attempting to summon her missing mother home with cigarette smoke and yacht rock songs; two sisters disputing how to care for an unhealthy elderly unicorn; a woman accidentally raising two daughters from the bones of her long-dead pet rabbits. Throughout FAMILY NIGHT, there is a sense of yearning for connection, be it with family, old friends, lovers, or community.

Praise for FAMILY NIGHT:‍ ‍

“Mercurial and mellifluous, ecstatic and ephemeral, FAMILY NIGHT will carry you in the backseat of a 1976 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, through the labyrinth of the Minotaur, on the wings of a wasp-mother, through town on a porch pontoon as Ani King unravels, unveils, unfolds the lives of the liminal, the tangible and intangible who find themselves in the in between spaces, on the edges, and in the seams.” --Melissa Llanes Brownlee, author of Bitter Over Sweet and Hard Skin

"FAMILY NIGHT is a lyrical gut-punch, like being kicked below the belt by a prima ballerina. Ani King invites you to have a seat at the table and engage with a cast of outcasts and upstarts, misfits and outsiders, as they share their stories of broken hearts and broken dreams. Exploring themes of identity, connection, and vulnerability with an unmatched urgency, from magic rabbit daughters to wasp mothers to coyote girls, King's collection renders the human condition bare in undeniable poetic prose." --Mario Aliberto III, author of All the Dead We Have Yet to Bury

“FAMILY NIGHT is a vivid kaleidoscope of visceral detail that animates surreal stories of transformation, love, and grief. Family is slippery here, squirming from the reader’s damp, sweaty fingers: fathers are absent-present, mothers are sometimes-absent, sometimes-bloody. Grandmothers and aunts do the real work of parenting. We get lost in the intricacies of buildings that are mazes of the past, and mazes that are metaphors for love. There are awakenings. There is so much blue in sky and water. There are cars that shelter, cars that harm, and fire, fire, fire everywhere. And the best werewolf sex you’ll ever read.” — Fiona McKay, author of The Lives of the Dead

“Ani King’s stunning debut, FAMILY NIGHT, is a triumph of the short form. Their prose sparks and bleeds off every page, riddled with the hard, tender truths of the very relationships that fill us with love and send us spinning all in the same breath. A masterful queering of narrative in every sense, FAMILY NIGHT blends what we think we know to be real with what we can barely hold onto: worlds where mothers are wolves, sisters raise unicorns, and daughters piss on walls like rabbits. ‘I am used to no warning, used to hitting the surface hard, and used to sinking to the bottom…’ says one narrator, evoking the necessary gut-punch of King’s unforgettable collection.” --Allison Field Bell, author of All That Blue and Bodies of Other Women

“Ani King makes wise gems from the mess and marvel of life. Sharply observed and stunningly lyrical, each story in FAMILY NIGHT is quietly luminous and blaring with talent.” --Megan Milks, author of Slug and Other Stories

"Unicorns living in the backyard. A ceramic fish diving into the living room carpet. Houses giving birth. Kissing. Parenting. Loving, imperfectly, painfully, humanly. Ani King’s first book, FAMILY NIGHT, is an exuberant celebration of imagination and queer diversity. It’s wildly imaginative. It’s deep. And it’s impeccably well-crafted. We who are lucky enough to read them have in King a storyteller with an uncanny imagination and a precise realization of dreamed-up worlds such that we live and breathe each moment and each beat of each story. King is a virtuoso craftsperson, wielding nouns like nails, verbs like screwdrivers, and adjectives like varnish. A precious and intimate gift to queer culture delivered imaginatively, delicately, and astutely, with great heart and profound intelligence." --Gail Marlene Schwartz, author of Falling Through the Night, winner of NIE, IPNE and Readers’ Choice awards.

"In every home, a family portrait hangs just a little crooked. An image capturing that one family member who never smiles. Another with their eyes closed, and someone undoubtedly doing something inappropriate in an attempt to bring the whole thing crashing down. Yet, an outsider takes the whole thing in and calls the image 'perfection.' King's collection of stories captures all of these moments and pairs each with familiar familial moments of chaos and humor. Stories that highlight a lover's imperfections, the stress levels of a flock of extended family members bursting through the front door, and the all knowing (but still uncomfortable) inappropriate comments made at the dinner table. Readers will undoubtedly find themselves, their partners, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents, and grandparents in the pages of these wry and unapologetically candid family portraits." -- Avitus B. Carle, author of These Worn Bodies

Release Date: October 20, 2026

Check out Ani’s bio here.

Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty, The Understudy's Handbook, and Low Parish, brings together shining, insightful voices from every part of the publishing world in his interview series, Tough Questions. Asking perceptive questions, Steven helps his readers find truth, guidance, and connection with his interviewees, regardless of the role they play within the literary community. With a fun and familiar cadence and Steven's capability to quench our inquisitiveness, these conversations feel as though you're there hanging out with Steven and his guest in person. Tough Questions is the way we get comfortable with the uncomfortable topics, inside and outside the writing world, while centering ourselves in genuine care and curiosity.

Includes interviews with Tara Betts, Aubrey Hirsch, David Housley, Dan Brady, Phillip B. Williams, and DeMisty Bellinger.

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Told through the men and women—and aliens—who experienced it firsthand, Dave Housley's sci-fi novel ALIENS ATTACK! presses us with the big question: what would you do at the end of the world? Intertwining the depth of sonder with the honesty of reality, Housley brings us the truth of what an alien invasion would look like in each of our lives. From a woman who realizes the man she’s about to marry has a dark secret to a priest addicted to oxycontin holed up with a choir he despises, ALIENS ATTACK! is pockmarked with wry humor, pop culture references, and authenticity. Housley holds the mirror up for us and tells us to behold what we cannot run away from—ourselves.

Advance praise for ALIENS ATTACK!:

“This book won’t just break your heart. It will burn it, blow it up, zap it like the titular aliens attacking. It happened to me - but I’ve also never been more grateful to an author for introducing me to characters—aliens, dads, clergymen, kids—who in the midst of crisis behave in such a poignantly, perfect human way that I’m still thinking about them, long after leaving them back on that burned out earth.” —Amber Sparks, author of Happy People Don't Live Here

“Dave Housley is one of my favorite writers, in general, and almost certainly my favorite within the genre of the Dumb Idea™ (complimentary). By which I mean taking a premise that is on its surface too silly, or one-note, or gimmicky for Literature, and infusing it with humanity—the beauty and complications and bullshit and warmth and everything else that makes up being a real person in this world. In Aliens Attack!, Housley turns those talents toward perhaps the very Dumb Idea™ he was most meant to write, and the result is everything I could have wanted it to be and more.” —Aaron Burch, author of A Kind of In Between, and Year of the Buffalo

“When the shit hits the fan, you’ll still be you and what about that? ALIENS ATTACK! is an existential coming-of-age, the truest, realist thing I’ve read in a hundred years. It should be terrifying but I found it to be enormously comforting. I don’t know why. Worthy of mention in the same breath as Ursula Le Guin but better because it’s an expression of the keen, funny, perceptive mind of Your Friend Dave.” —Laura Scalzo, author of American Arcadia

“What would you do—really do—in an emergency of planetary proportions? How capable, ethical, and heroic would you be? In this novel about an alien invasion of earth, Housley smuggles uneasy questions like this into our brains with wry humor and cleverly intertwining narratives. Multiple perspectives from both sides of the invasion equation show us calamity from the perspectives of everyday people (and aliens) who are vulnerable, fallible, and feel refreshingly real, reflecting ourselves back to ourselves.” —Tara Campbell, author of City of Dancing Gargoyles and TreeVolution

Looking for an eBook edition? Click here.

Check out Dave’s bio here.

A journal featuring poets, essayists, artists and writers of fiction from all over the United States and the world.

Work featured in Volume 4 by Maureen Alsop, Stephanie Anderson, Stephanie Barber, Vikki C., Hank Cherry, Laura Cherry, Will Cole, Seth Copeland, Angelica Davila, Adefemi Fagite, Don Farrell, Carlene M. Gadapee, Dan Garner, Bronson Lemer, Jane Lewty, Terri McCord, nat raum, Andrew Ronstadt, Sheri Rysdam, Alex Shapiro, Chloe Webb, Jack Whaler, Myfanwy Williams, Gerald Yelle, and Joseph Young.

Release date: November 30, 2025