Unbound Edition Press today announced the results of its 2025 open call for “Fiction Resisting Conventions.” The editors are thrilled to have chosen three outstanding titles, scheduled for publication in spring 2028. They are:
Can I Speak to a Real Person? Short Stories by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya
Socially charged and effervescent with imagination, these stories traffic in surrealism, ghostly identities, displacement, and lost languages. Can I Speak to a Real Person? is the author’s first book in English and it introduces a sensibility of tremendous depth and originality. Before moving to the United States in 2015, Zamirovskaya worked as a cultural critic for independent Belarusian media. Her Russophone books, including the breakthrough metaphysical sci-fi novel The Deadnet (2021), have been recognized with multiple literary awards. She is a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her essays and short stories appeared in U.S. and international publications, including World Literature Today and Esquire Russia.
Sellers of Chaos by Moikom Zeqo (trans. Wayne Miller)
This riveting collection of multi-genre prose introduces readers to an essential author of modern and contemporary Albania, Moikom Zeqo (1949-2020). A poet, editor, historian, and underwater archeologist sometimes called “the Albanian Jacques Cousteau”—Zeqo chose Sellers of Chaos as a favorite among his short prose books and singled it out for translation given its range of subject matter. Collecting work from throughout his career, these stories and essays are beguiling in their moments of spontaneous invention, even as they remain rooted in the pain and splendor of history. Stories such as “The Cry,” “Two Romes,” and “The Testament of Gjon Muzaka” reveal a major figure in international literature. This translation is the work of the eminent American poet Wayne Miller, who worked directly with the author. Miller chairs the English department at the University of Colorado Denver, edits Copper Nickel, and has served as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing.
Obbligato: The Life and Times of Mrs. Charlotte Home by Adria Bernardi
This fascinating and absorbing hybrid novel by the author of Benefit Street plunges the reader into 18th century Edinburgh—and into a thrilling experiment with the capacities of language itself. The book centers around the historical figure of Dr. Francis Home, a man who has dedicated his long life to medicine, scientific inquiry, and education, and who has witnessed the traumas of his century, including as a surgeon for seven years in the European continental wars. Obbligato unfolds not from Dr. Home’s perspective, but from the mind of his companion, Charlotte Home (née Charlotte Odette Seneca Craig). Like its characters, Obbligato steadfastly celebrates the endurance and vigilance required to prevent the destruction, and the sequela of spiraling destruction, caused by the forces of ignorance.
Scheduled for publication in 2028, these titles represent the longstanding and forward-looking commitment of the press to contemporary fiction. According to executive editor, Peter Campion, “These three books together prove what wonders we can discover when we look a little to the side of the mainstream. There is such vivacity, passion, engagement with history, and sheer imaginative splendor in all three collections.”
Publisher and editor in chief Patrick Davis writes, “My own literary life began with an immersion into groundbreaking, experimental fiction. That makes selecting these titles especially meaningful to me. We are here to lift the voices of authors daring to write in bold, new ways.”
