Portalmania - by Debbie Urbanski (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

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

"Urbanski's prose...shines as a compulsively readable beacon, propelling us from one uncanny world to the next...a bold and satisfying collection."--The Speculative Shelf

"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

"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

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

About the Author

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World. Her stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York. She is still looking for her portal.