Critic John Lahr calls Victoria Shorr’s debut novel a “dashing and vivid” and “lyrical, pithy” take on a legendary outlaw and his paramour. In Backlands, the real-life yet nearly mythical Lampiao and Maria Bonita, the Robin Hood and Maid Marian of Brazil, travel their country’s shifting 20th-century landscapes amid emotional cultural upheavals. Together they would become the most celebrated—and wanted—folk heroes in Brazilian history. Shorr also writes for Ms. and Adbusters and is currently working to establish a college-prep school on a Native American reservation.

Nomi Eve is the author of the National Jewish Book Award-nominated The Family Orchard, the decades-spanning story of a family whose fortunes ebb and flow with the creation and evolution of the Israeli state. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times and Glimmer Train, and she has published book reviews in The Village Voice and Newsday. Eve’s new novel portrays the life of a young woman living in a mid-20th-century community of Yemenite Jews.

The patriarch of a Greek American family who believes he has only days to live sends a scathing email to his ex-wife and three grown daughters in Annie Liontas’s “hilarious, fascinating, poetic” debut novel (Mary Karr). An advocate for urban education, Liontas works with teachers and students in the Philadelphia area. Her numerous stories and poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Night Train, and Lit. The recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant and a runner-up in BOMB Magazine’s 2013 Fiction Prize Contest, Liontas co-hosts the TireFire Reading Series.