Margins
Portalmania book cover
Portalmania
Stories
2025
First Published
3.80
Average Rating
313
Number of Pages

For fans of Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado, a genre-busting collection of stories that transgresses taboos and reveals our lives in a startling new light. If you could be anything, what would you be? And what happens to the people you leave behind? 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, marital rape, 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.

Avg Rating
3.80
Number of Ratings
377
5 STARS
28%
4 STARS
36%
3 STARS
27%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads

Author

Debbie Urbanski
Debbie Urbanski
Author · 3 books
Over the past two decades Debbie Urbanski has published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. Her favorite organisms are Green Wood Cups and Pixie Cup Lichens, her favorite forest is Morgan Hill State Forest, and her favorite hike is the Onondaga Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail. She's eternally grateful to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s forest rangers for not only protecting New York’s natural areas but also for airlifting her from Algonquin Mountain after a hiking accident. Her first novel, After World, comes out from Simon & Schuster on December 5, 2023.
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