For Now, We’re New
a novel by
Jennifer Blake
~270 pages, $18.95 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: Sept/Oct 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $12 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $16.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. This only applies to orders shipping within the US.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Jennifer Blake was raised in LA but grew up in San Francisco. Archaeology is her day job, but writing is her dangerous and exciting side piece. Her short stories have appeared in Sky Island Journal, The Writing Disorder, The Collidescope, and The Main Street Rag. This is her first novel.
Reaching across time, space, and the grave, Manette, Fin, and their friends help one another come to terms with their mistakes and their gifts. Every one of them is weird and they love each other for it. Jennifer Blake captures San Francisco and my hometown of New Castle, PA in little bottles you can open and sniff. Reading this book brought my Italian-American upbringing roaring back. Pass the mopeen. ~David Lee Marks, original founding member of The Beach Boys
Blake has depicted characters that you are sure to love. You will be filled with a genuine curiosity about their future. The settings are so descriptive that you will feel like you’re actually there. There isn’t a sense that she has left out. The uniquely fascinating storyline will keep you flipping pages. This book will keep you disconnected from devices and connected to a truly timeless tale. ~LeAnna Heinrich, MS, CCC-SLP
2002
She’s Not One of Us
Since she had spoken to herself in a not-quite-dream, Manette had known that she was her own great grandfather.
He’d handed her an apple that she was already eating.
“An apple?” she’d asked, crunching. “What is this, the Bible?”
Everything was a dull pastel, like a black and white photograph tinted in later. She usually dreamed vividly.
“This time, the lions will do it,” he said to her.
“What?”
They were then in a vivid grassy field. He began to talk sense, but now he was hanging by his knees from a tree limb. “The veil, you nitwit.”
She had forgotten how she loved to hang from trees and railings and anything else that might hold her when she was small. And earnestly she tried to, but could not, forget that she had been born with that awful thing on her face. The retained sac, the codependent membrane, a little girl unsure whether her father was referring to it or her when he whispered that awful thing.
Manette had no facts to support the knowledge that she was here, again. She woke up taking it for granted that she was Pierre hanging from the tree talking nonsense about lions. She woke up knowing that she and he—or that iteration of her, or him—were ostracized by default.
Normal people, those without the thing, had within them an instinct against people like her and Pierre. People sensed the exposure that came with knowing her. Manette had seen and dreamed enough of Pierre to know what was in store for her. While she’d never intentionally weaponized her burden, she’d already proven to be powerless against herself, against the hyper-empathy that consumed her.
She just couldn’t figure out why she had come back basically the same. Wasn’t the point to be someone new every time?
1927
New
“Name?”
“Salvatore,” said Salvatore. He brushed a fabricated fly off his sleeve with the pinky side of his hand, brusque and annoyed, like an American.
“Salvatore, what?”
“Figlioni.” He rolled the name from his tongue and flung it off his chest. He was landed. His feet rearranged the dust on the ground of New York territory. Since tumbling queasily down the gangplank five hours ago, he’d breathed five hours’ worth of his essence into America’s current. America knew him now.
Another long wait to hand over his lire in exchange for the apocryphal dollars. His face burned with panic as his bag of coins clanked onto the counter and his few notes were taken from his fingertips. He wanted to snatch it back and swim home—he thought of how stupid he was, taking chances, believing in adventure and chasing the horizon, always needing more. All he needed was Gianna.
The exchange agent, after her hundredth bag of coins for the day, still had the verve to glare hatefully at Salvatore’s bag and then at Salvatore. Her fingers flashed through the pile and punched militantly at an adding machine. Salvatore pretended to scratch his ear so he might covertly assess the impatience his bag of coins was breeding in the dozens of ill and spat-out travelers behind him. No one paid him mind; they tended to children, who wailed or had been startled quiet; they read books in their native languages or books in English, practicing the words aloud; they lost themselves in the dappled waves of the harbor. He followed them to the waves, greenish gray with a chunky citrus translucence. They sloshed languidly, so diligent in getting him here, now teasing him back.
Salvatore shook the dangerous fantasy and watched the bills now thrust toward him, a slap on the counter marking the last one. “Next.” She seemed hostile to the prospect of his standing there to verify the accuracy of the exchange. He snatched the pile and bounded to the nearest clearing in the crowd so he could think.
Unwatched and untouched for the first time in days, he stashed his new money in his bag, stood tall, and swung both arms in a great pinwheel.
1219 Hemlock Lane, New Castle, PA. America. Trees and castles, trees that were as tall as castles, castles of one’s own. This castle belonged to his uncle Andy and his Zi, Angelina. It was the family castle, and ownership was family-fed. By blood, they owned one another, one another’s achievements, and the liabilities and repairs thereof. With this certainty he dived back into the hot flurry to wait for a train ticket.
More than the peeling of miles away from Napoli, more than the invasion of the inside of him by stench and stethoscope, the part of the journey trapped in his cells was the shining hour in Manhattan, waiting for his train. He nailed it to his heart. On the rail journey to Andy and Angelina, still encased in Manhattan’s armor, he prepared himself to be yanked from the sanctity of travel and to start whatever it was he’d come for.
He owed Uncle Andy he knew not what, but the effort would be effusive and extortionary. Andy had fronted him enough money for a second-class ticket on the SS Philadelphia; Salvatore had purchased a steerage ticket and given the excess to Gianna. They had been at some precipice, he knew, when he’d held both her cheeks and soaked in her green-dusted eyes to the point that he’d laughed aloud with the force of it, in momentum that would throw them over in one freefall or another. Inexorable stagnation in a lost, fragmented land that offered them mere survival, or a brand-new universe? Hand in hand they plummeted into the unknown, in the only true rest, that of falling.
Now, he had to create the universe.
If you like these samples of Jennifer Blake’s upcoming book, For Now, We’re New, place your order now and have it delivered to your door when it’s published this fall.
