Hub City Press to publish Austyn Wohlers's debut novel, HOTHOUSE BLOOM

Hub City Press is pleased to announce that it will publish Austyn Wohlers's debut novel, Hothouse Bloom, in Spring 2026.

In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard. 

Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it. 

As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot.

Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world. 

Austyn says, “Thanks to Meg and the other editors at Hub City for their passion and enthusiasm for Hothouse Bloom. I'm happy to be working with them to bring it into the world."

Austyn Wohlers is from Atlanta and lives in Baltimore, where she runs the Near Future reading series and plays in the band Tomato Flower. Her writing has previously appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Guernica, Asymptote, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been supported by Tin House and Sewanee. In 2022, she was the winner of the University of Notre Dame's Sparks Prize Fellowship, selected by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint. Hothouse Bloom is her first novel.