A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Reactor, Autostraddle, and The Millions
"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
"Powerfully unique and thoughtfully written, with the ability to carry you to places youve yet to imagine and return you to places youve 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 hauntinga sharp, off-kilter collection that uses the uncanny as a lens for deeply human concerns.Publishers Weekly
"I absolutely love Debbie Urbanskis 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
"Urbanskis 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 youre 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 violentbut 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 themand usirrevocably 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 Bradburyfantasy 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
