If you are interested in relationships, love (the shortcomings of), portals, exits, motherhood, and/or short stories, you might like this book. 

Coming 5.13.25. Pre-order now from: 
Bookshop.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon.com
Simon & Schuster 

“Debbie Urbanski writes fantasy the way Margaret Atwood does, or Ray Bradbury—fantasy that directs its gaze firmly at reality. The stories in Portalmania are often horrifying and always invigorating, and together they add up to a collection that’s considerably more cohesive than you might expect, as if not just every story but every character in every story were in intimate conversation with every other. “Transporting”: that’s the word I want to use for the book, but not as a synonym for “diverting.” Portalmania definitely casts a spell, but it’s not the kind that spins a field of bewitchments around us; it’s the kind that dispels the bewitchments that have dazzled us for so long.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

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.

“Urbanski (After World) delivers a quietly haunting collection of nine speculative shorts that employ the recurring motif of portals to other worlds to explore themes of loss, longing, and transformation. The narrator of “The Promise of a Portal,” a chilling meditation on desire and consent, revisits childhood memories of girls from her neighborhood who vanished into mysterious vans and returned changed. “A Few Personal Observations on Portals” follows a woman as she navigates her disintegrating family’s obsession with portals, probing the tension between responsibility and escape. In “Hysteria,” a less obviously portal-centric story, a woman’s therapy session spirals into a surreal interrogation of trauma, repression, and the monstrous within. Urbanski’s prose is both clinical and intimate, grounding high-concept ideas in emotionally precise psychological realism. Throughout, portals function less as escapes than as mirrors, revealing each character’s private ache. The result is a sharp, off-kilter collection that uses the uncanny as a lens for deeply human concerns. ”  – Publisher’s Weekly

“Exceedingly dark, with unflinching portrayals of intimate partner violence and the isolating weight of otherness, Urbanski’s prose nonetheless shines as a compulsively readable beacon, propelling us from one uncanny world to the next…a bold and satisfying collection.” – The Speculative Shelf

“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

“The stories [in Portalmania] investigate not only what might be on the other side of the portal but what might keep us here, alongside big questions about monsters, bodies, gender, relationships, and family. Urbanski uses all the tools in her toolbox to craft these weird little wonders…Pick this one up if you’re curious and willing to risk it all to see worlds beyond.”—Reactor

“Debbie Urbanski is a very surprising and original writer; the stories in Portalmania are evocative and provocative as they engage and expand fundamental ideas of love, normalcy and basic human identity. Urbanski’s vision is at times desolate and even violent—but her voice is gentle, her call is for mercy. It’s a wonderful book.”—Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior and This is Pleasure

“Some writers push boundaries with their fiction. With Portalmania, Debbie Urbanski tears holes between worlds, leaving them—and us—irrevocably changed. The results are sometimes dark, sometimes funny, and always revelatory.”—Jedediah Berry, author of The Manual of Detection and The Naming Song

“Immediately sent me off in search of a portal of my own.”—Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City