Coming February 2026.

Will Brewer is the author of THE RED ARROW (KNOPF 2022) and I KNOW YOUR KIND (Milkweed 2017). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. He’s the recipient of a Silver Medal from the California Book Awards, a National Poetry Series prize, two Bread Loaf Fellowships, and a Stegner Fellowship. He teaches at Stanford and lives in Oakland, CA.

SILVER MEDAL * FIRST FICTION * CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS

THE RED ARROW

[The Red Arrow] is carefully structured, sharply observed and often humorous. Brewer has an understated, melodious style with a confident control of rhythm; one highlight is a description of a cross-country trip in a single two-page sentence . . . This book has eccentricity and vigor, executed with remarkable style.

— DEXTER PALMER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

[An] exceptional debut . . . From the first page, the narrator teases with allusions to a ‘treatment’ he has had that he’ll explain later, ‘because if I do so now, I’ll lose you.’ The therapy is certainly unusual and is bound up with coincidences and confluences that touch on the physicist, theories of time, and references to W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, Geoff Dyer’s book on D.H. Lawrence, and Michael Pollan’s on changing your mind . . . A first-rate work that intrigues and entertains.

— KIRKUS REVIEWS [STARRED REVIEW]

A rollicking bildungsroman meets wellness-through-hallucinogenics debut . . . The Red Arrow is about how to survive a creative life in 21st-century America, and its answer will surprise you. Brewer’s earnest description of psilocybin therapy turns a bravura comic novel into something deeper and stranger: an account of unexpected, hard-won joy

— TAYLOR ANTRIM, VOGUE

Exquisite . . . Brewer’s evocation of the Mist is among the most accurate and insightful depictions of depression I’ve ever read . . . he is often at his best when he is most novelistic, as in his sneakily long sentences, some of which stretch on for more than a page. It’s a testament to his skill, and his transfixing language, that readers may not even register their length . . . As a novel of ideas that also creates a fully fleshed narrator with a convincing inner life, The Red Arrow succeeds. It is a beguiling and ruminative synthesis of strange couplings: art and physics, psychology and psychedelics, characters and ideas.

— JOHNATHAN RUSSELL CLARK, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Brewer skillfully articulate the man’s deep wells of pain and resentment in quick swings . . . Coincidences occur again and again. The narrator meets them with joy and wonder and so the reader does, too. Brewer’s precision in writing these sequences makes them feel more like fate than authorial contrivance. Brewer makes this work with matter of fact and direct prose, indulging only occasionally in an imagistic flourish to remind readers his narrator is a writer . . . The Red Arrow is more about enjoying the mysterious way these events unfold than understanding why things have happened the way they have.

— BRADLEY BABENDIR, THE BOSTON GLOBE

At turns delightful and demanding, William Brewer’s debut novel is a serpentine ride that culminates in a moving encounter between art and science.

— SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

It’s exhilarating to be a passenger on this wild ride . . . it’s to Brewer’s considerable credit that he satirizes pretensions so deftly and so well.”

— PAUL WILNER, ALTA

I KNOW YOUR KIND

NATIONAL POETRY SERIES WINNER * SELECTED BY ADA LIMÓN

Featured In:

Additional Acclaim:

  • Starred review in Publishers Weekly

  • A Notable Book of 2017 by the Academy of American Poets

  • Selected as a 2017 Featured Debut Poet, Poets & Writers

  • Bread Loaf Poetry Fellowship

  • Positive reviews in Booklist, Colorado Review, Frontier Poetry, Guernica, LitHub, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Plume, The Sewanee Review, and Sycamore Review

SELECTED POEMS

SELECTED PROSE

Coming soon . . .

Human Connection?

EMAIL: williambrewerjr [at] gmail [dot] com

INSTAGRAM: @theinteriorparamour

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