The Tavern at the End of History
Forthcoming from Dzanc Books February, 10 2026
Over five summer days, a group of strangers find themselves in a sea-rocked sanitarium on the coast of Maine where, as they gather to auction a piece of art stolen in the Second World War, they must reckon with the wounds of inheritance: shame, displacement, and the longing of exiles.
Jacob, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, son of refugees, has lived his life overshadowed by the grief of others. Rachel, an art historian, carries grief of her own. She’s mourning her husband, a young Jew trying to separate himself from his ultra-orthodox community, and instead of living the life she dreamed—as an artist and critic—she’s working in a museum basement answering questions on the phone about paintings she can’t see. Across the city, Baer, an elderly Holocaust survivor, alone and haunted, faces eviction.
Binding them all is a piece of art that was given to Baer as a boy in Ukraine—and disappeared during the War. Now it’s resurfaced and is about to go up for auction in a secluded sanitarium for Holocaust survivors and their families on an island off the coast of Maine. Running the sanitarium is Baruch, a disgraced writer and Kabbalist whose memoir about surviving the Holocaust has been denounced as fraudulent.
Here, this community of odd and broken souls converges to remember and finally claim what they have lost. But two nights before the auction, in the midst of a storm, a stranger appears—an old man, a ghost or a dybbuk, or just a survivor from the European catastrophe—bearing a secret he will force them to confront. As the line between forgery and authenticity blurs, Rachel and Jacob, Baruch and his followers, must face the claims the dead make on the living in a surreal reckoning with the past where no one is who they say they are, but everyone may be telling the truth.
Recalling the warmth and humor of Nicole Krauss and Joshua Cohen and the wild collage of history and fantasy of Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokarczuk, The Tavern at the End of History is a deeply felt exploration of grief, love, and identity in the long shadow of twentieth-century calamity.
PRAISE FOR THE TAVERN AT THE END OF HISTORY
“The Tavern at the End of History begins with a gesture of kindness and from that small aperture it leads you steadily onwards into places of exhilarating, wonderful strangeness. This is a novel of ideas, arguments, identity, angels–and yes, history. I loved it.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble and Magic for Beginners
“I was dazzled by this book: its inventiveness, its sometimes devastating force, its sense of wild and glorious freedom. It is so smart and ambitious it should feel heavy–yet somehow it remains light on its feet and is very, very funny. I read it in a state of wonder.”
—Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others and Strangers and Cousins
“The Tavern at the End of History is a mysterious tale of angels and dybbuks in modern America. Morris Collins has written a novel that delights and disturbs us at the same time, plunging the reader into a world of fanatics, frauds and escapees. The novel weaves a spell around a work of art that holds us captive from the very first page.”
—Jerome Charyn, author of Maria La Divina
In this annual story anthology, Morris Collins’ “The Home Visit” runs alongside stories by Kate DiCamillo, Jess Walter, Dave Eggers, Allegra Goodman, Jai Chakrabarti, Francisco Gonzalez, and more.
Continuing a century-long tradition of cutting-edge literary excellence, this year’s edition contains twenty prizewinning stories chosen from the thousands published in magazines over the previous year. Guest editor Amor Towles has brought his own refreshing perspective to the prize, selecting stories by an engaging mix of celebrated names and emerging voices. The winning stories are accompanied by an introduction by Towles, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines that publish short fiction.
Horse Latitudes
“When your life vanishes, how do you do anything but follow it?”
Haunted by guilt and reeling from his shattered marriage, New York photographer Ethan flees south to a Central American country on the brink of revolution. Ethan doesn’t know if he’s seeking redemption or punishment, but—one bad choice after another—he finds himself indebted to Yolanda, who gives him a chance, if anything she’s saying is true, to find both.
Yolanda’s sister is deep in the country’s interior, waiting for a man named Soto—a slave trafficker posing as a migrant guide. The journey to find her plunges Ethan into a feverish world of demented expatriates, intelligence officers, mystics and lunatics, where loyalties are uncertain and ghosts unshakable.
A harrowing examination of post-colonial blight, Horse Latitudes is a lushly written tropical gothic—part thriller, part nightmarish journey into the corruption at the heart of US intervention in Central America.
PRAISE FOR HORSE LATITUDES
“Morris Collins’ Horse Latitudes is one of the most impressive debuts I’ve read. A hybrid narrative that’s part thriller, part surreal noir, and part tropical gothic, it reads like a collaboration between William Faulkner, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Hunter S. Thompson, as directed by David Lynch.”
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“Vivid in the visual detail a photographer would gather, Collins’s politically complex and psychologically intense tale demands the reader’s complete submersion in a decaying world in which the lines between good and evil sway and vanish…Though the plot twists like that of a thriller and authentic characters keep the story moving, Collins’s underlying theme of why choices are made and their consequences makes for a philosophically compelling read.”
—Booklist
“Violent, heartbreaking, and starkly real … a historically attuned novel for a world that has lost its way … Details here are realistic, and their warnings are somber … a novel with the edge of the thriller and the bleak rawness of a documentary—feral, needful, and unapologetic about the dark underbellies it reveals.”
—Forward Reviews
“This highly interior novel, told along several chronologies, follows a man who faces a series of moral failures…the writing is that kind where you feel like every word was placed by the writing gods rather than a fallible human.”
—Katharine Coldiron, Book and Film Globe
“an impressive work, and early notices have made comparisons to Graham Greene, to Malcom Lowry, and to Joseph Conrad. In fact there are allusions to Heart of Darkness in the book, though I would have to say that the darkness Collins’s protagonist moves into makes the darkness Conrad’s Marlow encounters seem stylized, a sort of literary conceit, by comparison…The writing is powerful, often descriptive in a darkly poetic way, and I was compelled by the narrative throughout.”
—John Teel, Professional Culture Association
“This is the best debut novel of the year, hands down. Comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry practically write themselves, but Horse Latitudes also calls to mind such modern noir greats as James Crumley and Kem Nunn. Ethan’s story is a febrile journey into an unknown landscape, a table-side seat at a game of Russian roulette that has no winners. It’s also erudite, funny and sexy as hell.”
—Rebecca Oppenheimer, Kramerbooks
“In the best tradition of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Morris Collins’s Horse Latitudes is a remarkable debut novel, detailing one man’s quest for redemption through a quixotic adventure in Central America, couched in brilliant, bold lyricism, flavored with heartbreak and danger. Fast-paced and hypnotic, it holds you in its spell and won’t let go, leaving images like exotic souvenirs in its wake.”
—William J. Cobb, author of The Bird Saviors
“Morris Collins’s Horse Latitudes reads like a Graham Greene novel for the twenty-first century, reinventing the citizen abroad for a new global age, one where the quest for redemption and righteousness still rarely leads to clarity, only cloudier choices, unfair outcomes, darker ambiguities. Ambitious and striking, Horse Latitudes delivers, offering readers an adventurous moral thriller–and a truly powerful debut.”
—Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
Morris Collins 