MISSION
Founded in 2020, Astra House’s mission is to advocate for authors who experience their subject deeply and personally, and who have a strong point of view; writers who represent multifaceted expressions of intellectual thought and personal experience, and who can introduce readers to new perspectives about their everyday lives as well as the lives of others.
We value works that are authentic, ask new questions, present counter-narratives and original thinking, challenge our assumptions, and broaden and deepen our understanding of the world.
SPRING 2025
Barbara Joni Murphy
9781662602870
DATE: March 25, 2025
Like Nolan’s Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin, a radiant novel tracking the lifecycle of a silver screen starlet rising against the backdrop of the mid-20th century.
Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.
As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.
Joni Murphy’s Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres—from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics—glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th century.
PRAISE FOR Joni Murphy
“[Talking Animals] is weird yet engrossing and hard to forget.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Joni Murphy’s second novel, Talking Animals, is as remarkable as her first, Double Teenage . . . The result is devilishly funny and sharply prescient, an Animal Farm for our times.” —The Millions
JONI MURPHY is a writer from New Mexico who lives in New York. Her debut novel, Double Teenage, was published in 2016. It was named one of the Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2016. Her second novel, Talking Animals was published in 2020 from FSG Originals.
“Absurd and irreverent, Talking Animals is a wild love letter to all bureaucrats, academics, and alpacas of the anthropocene. Joni Murphy, rightful zookeeperheir to Kafka’s animal kingdom, speaks for us all.” —Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
“Joni Murphy’s inventive and beautiful allegory depicts a city enmeshed in climate collapse, blinded to the signs of its imminent destruction by petty hatreds and monstrous greed: that is, the world we are living in now. Talking Animals is an Orwellian tale of totalitarianism in action, but the animals on this farm are much cuter, and they make better puns.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker
Fireweed Lauren Haddad
| THRILLERS | INDIGENOUS
ISBN: 9781662602900
PUB DATE: April 29, 2025 288pp
Price: $27.00 US / $37.00 CAN
For readers of Samatha Hunt and Mona Awad, a literary thriller that subverts the missing woman plot, following a white housewife’s misguided investigation into the disappearance of her Indigenous neighbor.
In the mowed down industrial north of Prince George, “white trash” housewife Jenny Hayes shares a fence with the only First Nations woman in the cul-de-Sac. To Jenny, in her sheltered and dull life, it’s not fair that Rachelle, whose yard is trash-pocked and overgrown with fireweed, should have what Jenny wants most in the world, and doesn’t. All too eagerly volunteering herself to babysit, brush hair, and fold laundry, Jenny tries to shutter judgments about the way her neighbor—no, her friend—lives, with stilettos tucked under the bed and the house in disarray.
When at once Beth Tremblay—Prince George’s “first” missing girl—and Rachelle are disappeared along Highway 16, only Beth’s name is plastered on billboards and broadcasted over the air. Rachelle’s daughters carted off by the state, Jenny answers an unwarranted call to investigate. After all, Jenny thinks, who else is looking?
Fireweed disrupts the question of what we take from a character who isn’t bad, but who does no good. Who does not know enough to ask: who are these white crosses for? Why are these women marching? And instead joins them, in an attempt to parade. With a reveal that is intentionally true to our constant mythologizing of marginalized communities, Haddad guides readers into their own discomfort— acknowledging that while in stark settings all women are at risk of violence, there are structures that uphold danger in tiers.
LAUREN HADDAD is a writer, herbalist, and mother. Born in metro-Detroit, she currently lives in a small village in Switzerland with her family. Her writing on Prince George has appeared in Medicine Tree, and her first novel, Fireweed was born out of years of relationship to that place, owing itself to the people there.
Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory Iddo Gefen
NOVEL
TRANSLATED
BY
DANIELLA ZAMIR
FICTION | SATIRE | JEWISH
HARDCOVER
ISBN: 9781662600876
PUB DATE: April 1, 2025
288pp Price: $27.00 US / $37.00 CAN
A comic novel for fans of Adelle Waldman about a tech startup that turns sand into rain clouds from Sami Rohr prize winner Iddo Gefen.
Here’s a sweet comic novel for fans of Etgar Keret and Aimee Bender about a family’s tech startup that’s based on a miracle invention (it’s a souped up vacuum cleaner) that turns sand into rain clouds and creates family havoc and possible love for Eli Lilienblum, Sarai Lilienblum’s twenty-something son.
Our story opens with Mrs. Lilienblum discovered drinking a martini in a crater in the Israeli desert. Eli, her adult son, tries to understand what happened to his wacky mother, while he also tackles the legend of a missing hiker named McMurphy, and whether he might be in love with Tamara, a visitor to his family’s hostel on the edge of a crater. The story races forward as the Lilienblum family builds a company around Eli’s mother’s invention and makes comedy out of startup culture, the obsession with company valuation and funding, the secrets families keep, romantic and family love—all with humor, warmth and compassion.
PRAISE FOR Iddo Gefen
“Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory [is] a tour de force by a very talented author whose mark on the Israeli literary scene is just getting started. The book is a pleasure to read and highly recommended.” —Ellis Schuman, The Times of Israel
“This vigorous, inventive work will surely fire up readers’ neurons.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Jerusalem Beach
“Gefen proves adept at taking readers into very dark places while offering quiet notes of compassion and consolation.” —Ranen Omer-Sherman, Jewish Book Council on Jerusalem Beach
THE AUTHOR
IDDO GEFEN was born in Tel Aviv and is currently based in NYC. He is an author and a Ph.D. student in cognitive psychology at Columbia University and the Zuckerman Institute for Neuroscience, researching the relationship between narrative understanding, human memory, and decision-making. His first book, Jerusalem Beach, was the recipient of the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
DANIELLA ZAMIR is a literary translator of contemporary Israeli fiction. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in literature from Tel Aviv University, and her master’s degree in creative writing from City University in London. She currently lives in Tel Aviv with her husband and daughter.
Are You Happy? Lori Ostlund
ISBN: 9781662603020
PUB DATE: May 6, 2025
Price: $26.00 US / $36.00 CAN
LORI OSTLUND is the author of the story collection, The Bigness of the World (University of Georgia Press, reissued by Scribner), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lamda Finalist. Lori is the Series Editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Filled with surprise, dark humor, and deep compassion, these masterful stories explore class, desire, identity, and the spectrum of violence in America—and in American families—against women and the LGBTQ+ community.
In Lori Ostlund’s exquisite collection, Are You Happy?, she examines the lives of people who have left their place and culture of origin behind. Set in Minnesota, New Mexico, and California, we watch Ostlund’s characters as they try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and responsibilities. In deceptively straightforward prose Ostlund delves deep into the interpersonal and grapples with the compulsion to make others happy—and the elusiveness of being happy oneself.
Richly layered and structurally complex, these stories have a novelistic feel. Lori Ostlund is a master of the form and Are You Happy? showcases her best work to date.
PRAISE FOR Lori Ostlund
“After the Parade is about leave-taking and homecoming, two instrumental actions that shape the life of every one of us. So rare does one see a wise writer like Lori Ostlund. Her insight comes from understanding her characters yet not dissecting them with a mental scalpel, and portraying life with its most complex and wondrous dynamics in time and space rather than inventing a static canvas. A new talent to celebrate!” —Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
“Lori Ostlund’s wonderful novel After the Parade should come with a set of instructions: Be perfectly still. Listen carefully. Peer beneath every placid surface. Be alive to the possibility of wonder.” —Richard Russo, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Empire Falls
“[Ostlund] is a writer to watch . . . [In The Bigness of the World,] she constantly delights the reader with the subtlety of her insights as well as the carefulness of her prose, as we find that beneath the comic observations of cultural misunderstanding, or a couple’s quirky habits, lies a genuine melancholy—and the sense that while there is absurdity in reticence, there is sadness in it too.” San Francisco Chronicle
“Ostlund’s stories are so freakishly focused and darkly atmospheric that you may find yourself especially noticing your fellow human animals’ oddities in the days after you read them, then stepping back for perspective. Ostlund could ask for no better indicator of [The Bigness of the World’s] success.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
Foreclosure Gothic Harris Lahti
FICTION | OCCULT & SUPERNATURAL HARDCOVER
ISBN: 9781662602825
PUB DATE: June 10, 2025
224pp
Price: $26.00 US / $36.00 CAN
A multi-generational and deeply autobiographical gothic tale of Hollywood dreams and upstate New York reality that feels like Andre Dubus III meets Chantal V. Johnson.
Foreclosure Gothic reimagines the American Gothic against the backdrop of today’s Hudson Valley. The story tells of ex-Hollywood actor Vic Greener as he falls in love with the elusive Heather Roswell and the couple, following in the footsteps of Vic’s father, resolves to make a life restoring one foreclosed home after another. Then comes the uncanny, destabilizing arrival of new tenants in their duplex, and the Greeners’ shocking discovery upon their departure.
This debut novel is at once a skewed portrait of three generations of Greener men, an intimate look at both childhood and parenthood, and an examination of the friction between making art and working to make money.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HARRIS LAHTI‘s short stories have appeared in BOMB, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Southwest Review, Forever Magazine and elsewhere. He co-founded the new press, Cash 4 Gold Books, and edits fiction for FENCE. For a living, he paints and renovates houses in New York’s Hudson Valley. Read more: harrislahti.com.
Dengue Boy
Michel Nieva
BY RAHUL BERY
ISBN: 9781662602658
PUB DATE: February 4, 2025
$25.00 US
MICHEL NIEVA has published several novels, poetry collections, and essays. His prose mixes science fiction and speculative genres with Argentinean historical and literary traditions, a blend dubbed gaucho-punk. In 2021 Nieva was named among the best young Spanish writers by Granta magazine. His short story “Dengue Boy” won the O. Henry Award in 2022.
Close to Cronenberg and deeply indebted to Kafka, this gaucho-punk novel offers an explosive interpretation of an ultra-capitalistic society at the grips with climate collapse.
The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words “winter,” “cold,” or “snow” because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We find ourselves in Victorica, a province of La Pampa, Argentina, some time after 2197— the year in which the last of the Antarctic ice caps melted and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensued, radically transforming the landscape of the region into a Caribbean Pampas. It is here that the Dengue Child grows up, a mutant mix of child and mosquito, the result of crazy experimenting driven by ultra-capitalistic corporations racing against each other to own viruses and their cures, destroying even their very own children’s existence to cash in on the stock exchange.
Another of the surprising effects of the thaw is the appearance of powerful telepathic pebbles from the bowels of the earth that seem to encapsulate the world’s original wisdom, and which are the subject of lucrative smuggling. Meanwhile, the wealthy of the region chose to cruise around on ships where they can experience ice-skating and hand carve ice from valuable remains of glaciers. In their ultra-air conditioned homes, their kids play Indians vs Christians, a brutal video game set in the historical 19th century.
The future according to Michel Nieva looks frenetic and shocking. His is one of the most exciting literary voices emerging from Argentina, packing punches in a deeply intelligent, informed, and humorful prose which takes root in Latin American storytelling and sci-fi tradition.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
RAHUL BERY translates from Spanish and Portuguese to English, and is based in Cardiff. He has translated books by David Trueba, Afonso Cruz, Simone Campos, and Vicente Luis Mora and his translations have also appeared in Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the Stinging Fly, Words Without Borders Freeman’s, the White Review, and elsewhere.
Blowfish Kyung-ran Jo
NOVEL
TRANSLATED BY
CHI-YOUNG KIM
FICTION | FEMINIST | PSYCHOLOGICAL HARDCOVER
ISBN: 9781662601781
PUB DATE: July 15, 2025
208pp
Price: $25.00 US / $34.00 CAN
For readers of Han Kang and Sheila Heti, an atmospheric, melancholic novel about a successful sculptor who decides to commit suicide by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish.
Blowfish is a postmodern novel in four parts, alternating between the respective stories of a female sculptor and a male architect. Death is the motif connecting these parallel lives. The sculptor’s grandmother killed herself by eating poisonous blowfish in front of her husband and child, while the architect’s elder brother leapt to his death from the fifth floor of an apartment building. Now, both protagonists are contemplating their own suicides. The sculptor and architect cross paths once in Seoul, and meet again in Tokyo, while the sculptor is learning to prepare a fatal serving of blowfish.
The narrative loosely approximates a love story, but this is no romance in the normal sense. For the woman, the man is a pitstop on the road to her own suicide. For the man, the woman forestalls death and offers him a final chance. Through the conflicting impressions they have of one another, the characters look back on their lives; it is only the desire to create art that calls them back from death.
Evoking the heterogeneous urban spaces of Seoul and Tokyo, Blowfish delves into the inner life of a woman contemplating her failures in love and art. Jo’s fierce will to write animates the novel; the lethal taste of blowfish, which one cannot help but eat even though one may die in doing so, approximates the inexorable pains of writing a novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KYUNG-RAN JO made her literary debut in 1996 when her short story “The French Optical” won the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer’s Contest. She is the author of five story collections and three novels. Her novel Tongue was published in English by Bloomsbury in 2009. She is also the recipient of the Hyundae MunhakAward and the Dongin Prize, among others.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
CHI-YOUNG KIM is an award-winning literary translator and editor based in Los Angeles. A recipient of the Man Asian Literary Prize (2011), she has translated works by You-jeong Jeong, Sun-mi Hwang, Young-ha Kim, Kyung Ran Jo, J.M. Lee, and Kyung-sook Shin, among others.
Early Sobrieties
Michael Deagler
“‘Just give me one more day,’ Monk says, and Early Sobrieties is such a wise and piercing book that we believe him.”
—Charlie Lee, The New York Times Book Review
Don’t worry about what Dennis Monk did when he was drinking. He’s sober now, ready to rejoin the world of leases and paychecks, reciprocal friendships and healthy romances—if only the world would agree to take him back. When his workingstiff parents kick him out of their suburban home, mere months into his frangible sobriety, the 26-year-old spends his first dry summer couch surfing through South Philadelphia, struggling to find a place for himself in the throng of adulthood.
Monk’s haphazard pilgrimage leads him through a city in flux: growing, gentrifying, haunted by its history and its unrealized potential. Everyone he knew from college seems to be doing better than him—and most of them aren’t even doing that well. His run-ins with former classmates, estranged drinking buddies, and prospective lovers challenge his version of events past and present, revealing that recovery is not the happy ending he’d expected, only a fraught next chapter.
Like a sober, millennial Jesus’ Son, Michael Deagler’s debut novel is the poignant confession of a recovering addict adrift in the fragmenting landscape of America’s middle class. Shot through with humor, hubris, and hard-earned insight, Early Sobrieties charts the limbos that exist between our better and worst selves, offering a portrait of a stifled generation collectively slouching towards grace.
PRAISE FOR Early Sobrieties
“Sharp and self-aware, with deep insight packed into no-fuss prose: a quarterlife-crisis tale for the ages.” —Bustle, “Most Anticipated Book” of Spring 2024
“[Monk] has a recovering addict’s sense of the near-religious profundity of the day-to-day, the wry humor of a sober man among drunks, and a newly cleareyed view of familiar people and places (or nearly familiar: the blackouts of his drinking days, their unknowability, haunt Monk’s newfound sober ones).”
—Meghan Racklin, The Brooklyn Rail
“Grimly funny.” —Philadelphia Magazine
MICHAEL DEAGLER’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s McSweeneys’ Quarterly Concern Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City.
“A young man surfaces from the depths of alcoholism in Deagler’s pitchperfect debut novel . . . This is a standout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Mood Swings Frankie Barnet
ISBN: 9781662603129
PUB DATE: May 20, 2025
“Yes, Mood Swings is a novel about tech moguls and the collapse of society. Yes, maybe it’s an ‘internet novel.’ But it’s also so much more than that. And isn’t that lovely, to find a book that transcends its buzzwords? Isn’t it beautiful for a work of art to prove you wrong?”
—Sarah Rose Etter, The New York Times Book Review
In a pre-apocalyptic world not unlike our own, a young Instagram poet starts an affair with a California billionaire who’s promised a time machine that will make everything normal again—whatever that means.
Everyone knows something’s off, but nobody can agree on just what it is. Maybe it’s the weather; maybe everyone’s just so damn sensitive these days. Or maybe it’s because the animals of the world have finally had enough, besieging towns and cities and terrorizing their human residents.
Jenlena and her best friend Daphne are two humanities grads in their early 20s, trying to find their way in a society that has just eradicated all animals for the safety of humanity. In the post-fauna world, Jenlena transforms from an aspiring poet to a gig worker, capitalizing on other people’s grief by selling house plants that have come to replace pets and cosplaying as dogs for pay. Meanwhile Daphne, a oncepromising student, flounders in a deep depression, smoking weed and ditching work to hang out with her once famous, now canceled boyfriend. When Jenlena meets the California billionaire Roderick Maeve, and the two become romantically entangled, she is exposed to a new understanding of wealth, power, and the gender economy—just as the world hurtles toward its alleged salvation.
Marked with Frankie Barnet’s poignant intelligence and sly sense of humor, Mood Swings is a stand-out debut novel that imagines with pitch-perfect absurdity what comes after life as we know it.
PRAISE FOR Mood Swings
“For fans of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021). An offkilter, hauntingly hilarious debut novel.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A] bonkers story . . . Despite the sobering material, this is a hoot.”
FRANKIE BARNET is the author of a story collection, An Indoor Kind of Girl. Her fiction has been published in places such as Joyland, Event Magazine PRISM International, Washington Square Review, and the Best Canadian Stories anthology of both 2016 and 2019. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and lives in Montréal.
Publishers Weekly
“A delicious satire that gripped me from the first sentence. Frankie Barnet is not only an architect of the surreal and the absurd, but something of an anthropologist keenly observing society’s unique derangement. Mood Swings whips from devastation to euphoria with the same fluidity it takes to doomscroll until the sun rises.” —NYLON
The Rent Collectors Jesse Katz
|
9781662603112
July 15, 2025
Baby-faced teen Giovanni Macedo is desperate to find belonging in one of LA’s most predatory gangs, the Columbia Lil Cycos—so desperate that he agrees to kill an undocumented Mexican street vendor. The vendor, Francisco Clemente, had been refusing to give in to the gang’s shakedown demands. But Giovanni botches the hit, accidentally killing a newborn instead. The overlords who rule the Lil Cycos from a Supermax prison 1,000 miles away must be placated and Giovanni is lured across the border where, in turn, the gang botches his killing. And so, incredibly, Giovanni rises from the dead, determined to both seek redemption for his unforgivable crime and take down the gang who drove him to do it.
With The Rent Collectors, Jesse Katz has built a teeth clenching and breathless narrative that explicates the difficult and proud lives of undocumented black market workers who are being extorted by the gangs and fined by the city of LA—in other words, exploited by two sets of rent collectors.
PRAISE FOR The Rent Collectors
“For a tough-guy book about tough guys, this is a work of almost unerring tenderness. If its subtitle promises “redemption,” the book itself delivers something more honest: stories about people broken by powers larger than they are and who nonetheless find the will to fight on.” Ben Ehrenreich, The New York Times Book Review
“Katz has constructed a riveting and masterful urban narrative.” —Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times
“The experience of reading The Rent Collectors is white-knuckle and, ultimately, wholly transformative.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A masterful work of true crime—and, to be sure, true punishment.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Relentless, multi-faceted, and incisive.” —Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness (starred review)
JESSE KATZ is a former Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine writer whose honors include the James Beard Foundation’s M. F. K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, PEN Center USA’s Literary Journalism Award, a National Magazine Award nomination, and two shared Pulitzer Prizes.
Systemic Layal
9781662603105
In the spirit of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body; A science-based, data-driven, and global exploration of racial disparities in health care access by virologist, immunologist, and science journalist Layal Liverpool.
Layal Liverpool spent years as a teen bouncing from doctor to doctor, each one failing to diagnose her dermatological complaint. Just when she’d grown used to the idea that she had an extremely rare and untreatable skin condition, one dermatologist, after a quick exam, told her that she had a classic (and common) case of eczema and explained that it often appears differently on darker skin. Her experience stuck with her, making her wonder whether other medical conditions might be going undiagnosed in darker-skinned people and whether racism could, in fact, make people sick.
The pandemic taught us that diseases like Covid disproportionately affect people of color. Here, Liverpool goes a step further to show that this disparity exists for all types of illness and that it is caused by racism. In Systemic, Liverpool shares her journey to show how racism, woven into our societies, as well as into the structures of medicine and science, is harmful to our health. Refuting the false belief that there are biological differences between races, Liverpool goes on to show that racism-related stress and trauma can however, lead to biological changes that make people of color more vulnerable to illness, debunking the myth of illness as the great equalizer.
From the problem of racial bias in medicine where the default human subject is white, to the dangerous health consequences of systemic racism, from the physical and psychological effects of daily microaggressions to intergenerational trauma and data gaps, Liverpool reveals the fatal stereotypes that keep people of color undiagnosed, untreated, and unsafe, and tells us what we can do about it.
PRAISE FOR Systemic
“Systemic is a wide-ranging, inquisitive book about health care and society— and ultimately a call for change. Liverpool makes available a plethora of resources and advocacy groups that should help everyone to get involved in anti-racism efforts.” —Sirry Alang, Nature
LAYAL LIVERPOOL is a science journalist with expertise in biomedical science, particularly virology and immunology. Her PhD research at Oxford focused on investigating how invading viruses are detected by the body’s immune system. Her writing has appeared in Nature New Scientist Wired and the Guardian. Currently, she is a journalist at Nature.
“Systemic is an important new book about the relationship between racism, illness, and manufactured disability. Global in scope, Layal Liverpool takes us from Europe to the Americas, from Africa to Australia, illustrating the transnational scourge racism has on the health of the public the world over. Scientifically and technically masterful but never lacking heart, Liverpool draws upon her own lived experiences with vulnerability and grace, so that readers may better understand their own.” —Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, author of The Viral Underclass