Charlaine Harris, whose Sookie Stackhouse books inspired the television series "True Blood," will release the first book in a new trilogy next year. Harris' novel "Texoma" will be published in fall 2018 by Saga Press, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Simon & Schuster, the publisher announced in a news release. The first installment in the trilogy is based on Harris' short story "The Gunnie," which first appeared in the 2016 anthology "Unfettered II: New Tales by Masters of Fantasy." "Texoma" will be a work of speculative fiction that takes place in "an alternate history of a broken America weakened by the Great Depression and the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt." In the novel, what was the United States is now five territories, including New America, an area of the Pacific Northwest under the control of Canada, and the Holy Russian Empire, formerly the states of California and Oregon.

In a short time, Viet Thanh Nguyen has encircled the American literary consciousness: first with his mind-bending 2015 novel "The Sympathizer," then last year's cultural history "Nothing Ever Dies" and now with eight short stories entitled "The Refugees." Nguyen, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at USC, has called refugees "the zombies of the world" because they are haunted, unwanted at home and abroad. In "Black-Eyed Women," the first tale in his new collection, his characters do share such qualities with the undead. The narrator is a 38-year-old Vietnamese refugee, working as a ghostwriter and living in near silence with her mother. She leads a denatured American life -- her gender unclear until the ninth page.