“Powerfully unique and thoughtfully written, with the ability to carry you to places you’ve yet to imagine and return you to places you’ve tried to escape.” —Chicago Review of Books “Every story in Portalmania is distinctive, vital, and sophisticated; the whole is an almost perfectly constructed debut collection that brings into sharp focus an impressively cohesive project.” — Locus If you could go anywhere, where would you go? And what happens to the people you leave behind? From the author of After World comes a genre-busting collection of stories that reveal our lives in a startling new light, perfect for fans of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado In Portalmania , Debbie Urbanski wields sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and realism to build a dark mirror that she holds up to the ordinary world. Within the sharply imagined landscape of this collection, portals appear in linen closets, planetary gateways materialize in boarding schools, monsters wait in bathroom vents, and transformations of women’s bodies are an everyday occurrence. Political division causes physical rifts that break apart the Earth’s crust. A son on another planet sends dispatches home to the mother who failed him, and a wife turns to the supernatural to escape her abusive marriage. Portals are not only doorways found in children’s classics, but separations, escapes, dead ends, desertions, and choices that will change these characters’ lives forever. Against a fantastical backdrop, these stories dive bravely into the shadowy depths of betrayal, parenthood, revenge, murder, coercive sex, open marriages, asexuality, neurodiversity, and second chances. What if we’re not the ideal parents for our children? What if we’re not the ideal person to live our own life? Portalmania questions why we love as we do and asks if we have enough courage to reimagine desire. A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Reactor , Autostraddle, and The Millions Best New Horror of 2025 from the NYPL "Urbanski...[takes] the reader in creative and intriguing directions that mirror our ‘real’ world while carefully avoiding flat allegory. Her stories are sci-fi, surrealist, speculative, and whatever Frankenstein genres a book-tokker might conjure up, each plot a collision-course between the portals themselves and the quotidian lives of the characters as they navigate feelings of anxiety and uncertainty in their relationships...that is ultimately what makes the stories of Portalmania so enjoyable, each offering an entry to another world." — The Massachusetts Review "The thematic and narrative layering in Portalmania is brilliant but sometimes out of control. Ms. Urbanski is fearless, unconventional and perhaps a touch obsessive...Possessing a talent that needs reining in is a good problem to have." —The Wall Street Journal "Powerfully unique and thoughtfully written, with the ability to carry you to places you’ve yet to imagine and return you to places you’ve tried to escape... Portalmania offers no easy answers, but it does present myriad possibilities." —Chicago Review of Books "Every story in Portalmania is distinctive, vital, and sophisticated; the whole is an almost perfectly constructed debut collection that brings into sharp focus an impressively cohesive project.” — Locus “Quietly haunting…a sharp, off-kilter collection that uses the uncanny as a lens for deeply human concerns.” — Publishers Weekly "These stories dwell in the knotty, ambiguous spaces surrounding their portals, similar to the works of contemporary fantasists such as [Kelly] Link or Karen Russell...[an] eye for heartbreaking details is a common feature of Urbanski’s stories." —Strange Horizons "A metatextual tangle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror...angry, self-aware, and emotionally scorching." —Biblioklept "I absolutely love Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania , a story collection about the irresistible allure of portals and the infinite possibilities compressed into our finite lives. Urbanski resists easy allegorizing while nevertheless giving us a set of brilliant speculative conceits that illuminate so much of what is mysterious, cruel, incomprehensible, unsettling, beautiful, ridiculous, and hilarious about human relationships, human lifetimes. Every story here is an utter surprise and delight, an escape and a revelation." —Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of The Antidote "Despite its darkness, Portalmania is a luminous collection that opens us up to other worlds, other possibilities. Even while carefully, meticulously studying elements of compulsory sexuality and rape culture as artefacts, Urbanski also creates portals for us, as readers, to dream different worlds, and sometimes to step through a portal into them." —Ela Przybylo, author of Asexual Erotics "Urbanski’s prose...shines as a compulsively readable beacon, propelling us from one uncanny world to the next...a bold and satisfying collection." —The