From award-winning author Nora Lange comes a ransacking of the house of motherhood and matrimony.

Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the “Great American Novel” by Molly Young in The New York Times, and “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. Now, she turns her eye toward the daily exercise of getting by.

In “Heart Beats,” Carol and David arrive late to a Boston dinner party for a night of “messy socializing” with other couples, including a former cult-leader turned financial-advisor and a woman who learned of a “kinky sort of game” while riding public transit, details that she will reveal after the peach crumble. In “Island of Phaetons,” an expatriate living in Istanbul is called away from her daily life with “the husband” and “the friend who wanted more than friendship” to visit her mother, who notoriously makes bad decisions, and who has just arrived in Greece “with news” for her daughter, a tantalizing invitation that has her daughter immediately on a plane. In “Dog Star,” two figurines live out their dreams before succumbing to the truth that they have been assembled inside of a snow globe and will never go anywhere. In the title story, a new mother in Los Angeles navigates a job, a long-distance relationship with her husband, and her visiting mother, while hoping to find relief in daytime app sex.

These stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation are at once hilarious and savage. Day Care is a biting reflection on economic precarity, love, and peeing your pants.

Nora Lange’s debut novel Us Fools was awarded the The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, was named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. An earlier iteration of it was shortlisted for The Novel Prize from New Directions Press. Nora’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer , BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGIANT and is forthcoming in Granta. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family. 

Brian Evenson is the author of two dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Good Night, Sleep Tight (2024). His collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019) won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Ray Bradbury Prize. His novel Last Days won the ALA-RUSA award for Best Horror Novel (2009). A sequel to Last Days, Phantom Limb, will be published in October of 2026. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Award. His work has been translated into two dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles.

Aiden Arata is a writer and artist from Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in publications including BOMB, Mask, NYLON, The Rumpus, The Fanzine, Oprah Daily, Wonderland, Hobart, and others, as well as NDA: An Autofiction Anthology (Archways Editions 2022). She writes the monthly-ish newsletter, under the influence, about being extremely online during the heat death of the planet. Her first essay collection, YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY (Grand Central Publishing 2025) was an instant USA Today Bestseller and is available in English and Italian. Arata’s visual and video work has been featured on platforms including Vice, The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Mashable, NBC, Seventeen, and The Washington Post. She’s shown in galleries across America and was a featured artist in Kunsthalle Bremen’s bicentennial exhibition Generation.