Andrew Motion brings all his lyricism and inventiveness to bear in this fictional autobiography of the great swindler, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. A painter, writer, and friend of Blake, Byron, and Keats, Wainewright was almost certainly a murderer. When he died in a penal colony in Tasmania, he left behind fragments of documents and a beguiling legend which Motion uses to create an imagined confession laced with facts, telling the story as no straightforward history could.

"Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is a dream subject for either novelist or biographer. . . . Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate, clearly felt that neither straight biography nor pure fiction would do Wainewright's complexities justice, and so he combined the two genres. The result is stunning. The central voice is that of Wainewright himself, reflecting back on his life. After each chapter Mr. Motion has added detailed notes that inform and flesh out the narrative, giving not only his own informed opinion of Wainewright's actions but also those of Wainewright's contemporaries and the scholars and writers who have studied him over the past two centuries."—Lucy Moore, Washington Times

"Brilliantly innovative, gripping, intricately researched, Motion's biography does justice to its subject at last."—John Carey, The Sunday Times

"Engaging and convincing. . . . The trajectory of this character-from neglected and resentful child to arrogant and envious London dandy to sociopathic murderer on to an enfeebled, frightened prisoner-is indelibly imagined and drawn."—Edmund White, Financial Times

"[A] fascinating look at an evil artist, a charmer still having his way with us. We can hear him being economical with the truth, telling us and himself just what he wants to hear."—Michael Olmert, New Jersey Star Ledger

"Motion crafts a fascinating tale as complex and compelling as if Wainewright himself had written it."—Michael Spinella, Booklist

"Did he kill his servant, and possibly others as well? . . . The footnotes seem to say yes, but Wainewright adamantly argues his own case. Motion's prose is flawless, and Wainewright's voice is convincing. But in the long run, it's this ambiguity that makes Wainewright the Poisoner a fascinating and memorable read."—R.V. Schelde, Sacramento News and Review

"Who could as for a better Romantic villain than Thomas Griffiths Wainewright? . . . [The book] succeeds on many levels: as an act of ventriloquism, a work of scholarship, a psychological study, as a set of sharp portraits of famous men and an engrossing read. . . ."—Polly Shulman, Newsday

"Instead of a straightforward biography, Andrew Motion gives us Wainewright's first person, fictionalized "confession."—a document as circumspect, slyly reticent, and oeaginously smooth as the man himself. Splendid."—John Banville, Literary Review

"A genuine tour de force, and on a non-fictional level, a telling portrait of a strange, intriguing and repellant man."—Brian Fallon, Irish Times

"A marvelous literary hybrid that totters with one foot in the world of nonfiction, the other in the land of make-believe. One is alternatively swept up in Motion's dizzy imaginative pastiche, or sent crashing into a dusty stack of scholarly cogitations. . . ."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"As true a portrait of a liar as its subject could wish. Rich and strange. . . ."—Glasgow Herald

"R.K. Narayan . . . has been compared to Gogol in England, where he has acquired a well-deserved reputation. The comparison is apt, for Narayan, an Indian, is a writer of Gogol's stature, with the same gift for creating a provincial atmosphere in a time of change. . . . One is convincingly involved in this alien world without ever being aware of the technical devices Narayan so brilliantly employs."—Anthony West, The New Yorker

"The experience of reading one of his novels is . . . comparable to one's first reaction to the great Russian novels: the fresh realization of the common humanity of all peoples, underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness—like one's own reflection seen in a green twilight."—Margaret Parton, New Herald Tribune Book Review

"The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness. . . . Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them."—Francis King, Spectator

"The novels of R.K. Narayan are the best I have read in any language for a long time."—Amit Roy, Daily Telegraph

Set aboard a ship carrying troops home from India at the end of World War II, Edward Lueders’ autobiographical novel opens with the dramatic events that ensue when the call goes out, 'Man overboard!' As the vessel drifts, engines stopped, in search of the lost man, the story begins to delve deeper into the paradox at the center of our lives, as irreducible isolation is juxtaposed with inevitable coexistence.

The ship becomes a complex metaphor for the thousands of men aboard and, by extension, for all of us who exist both as individuals and as parts of the human community. These motifs are developed through the interplay of three men aboard ship, Staff Sgt. LeRoy Warner, Sgt. Mark Reiter, and Sgt. Stanley Norman, who entertain troops as a jazz trio. These GI musicians improvise through solo sections in which each reflects hauntingly on his past and dreams of his future. As they search for meaning beyond subjectivism, beyond suffering and randomness, their music is about the possibilities for harmony.

Although miscues, counterbeats, and dissonance apparently mock our efforts to break out of ourselves, sometimes, however fleetingly, everything falls into place. Then the prose of our lives turns unexpectedly to poetry and we experience an exhilarating unity.

In the title story, in a Cape Town shantytown called District Six in the 1960s, Michael Adonis has lost his job at a metal sheet factory after an argument with a white supervisor. Illuminating the toxic effects of poverty, police brutality, and violence, the book paints a stark and unforgettable portrait of Adonis's emotional and physical destruction in apartheid South Africa. These works reveal the plight of non-whites in apartheid South Africa, laying bare the lives of the poor and the outcasts who filled the ghettoes and shantytowns.
 

Although Walker Percy named many influences on his work and critics have zeroed in on Kierkegaard in particular, no one has considered his intentional influence: the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a study that revives and complicates notions of adaptation and influence, Jessica Hooten Wilson details the long career of Walker Percy. Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence demonstrates—through close reading of both writers’ works, examination of archival materials, and biographical criticism—not only how pervasive and inescapable Dostoevsky’s influence was but also how necessary it was to the distinctive strengths of Percy’s fiction.
 
 
From Dostoevsky, Percy learned how to captivate his non-Christian readership with fiction saturated by a Christian vision of reality. Not only was his method of imitation in line with this Christian faith but also the aesthetic mode and very content of his narratives centered on his knowledge of Christ. The influence of Dostoevsky on Percy, then, becomes significant as a modern case study for showing the illusion of artistic autonomy and long-held, Romantic assumptions about artistic originality. Ultimately, Wilson suggests, only by studying the good that came before can one translate it in a new voice for the here and now.
 

Thomas Bernhard is “one of the masters of contemporary European fiction” (George Steiner); “one of the century’s most gifted writers” (Newsday); “a virtuoso of rancor and rage” (Bookforum). And although he is favorably compared with Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Musil, it is only in recent years that he has gained a devoted cult following in America.

A powerful, compact novella, Walking provides a perfect introduction to the absurd, dark, and uncommonly comic world of Bernhard, showing a preoccupation with themes—illness and madness, isolation, tragic friendships—that would obsess Bernhard throughout his career. Walking records the conversations of the unnamed narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical work in Bernhard’s highly philosophical oeuvre, Walking provides a penetrating meditation on the impossibility of truly thinking.

"Schneider's characters, like Kundera's, are sentient and sophisticated figures at a time when the constraints of Communist rule persist but its energy has entirely vanished."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

When the Berlin Wall was still the most tangible representation of the Cold War, Peter Schneider made this political and ideological symbol into something personal, that could be perceived on a human level, from more than one side. In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country.

"An honest, rich book. . . . It is one those rare books that come back at odd moments to intrude on your comfortable conclusions and easy images."—Robert Houston, Nation

Scandalous divorcée. Nazi sympathizer. Style icon. Her Grace the Duchess of Windsor. Such are the many—and many times questionable—monikers of the infamous Wallis Simpson. And with Wallis’s War, Kate Auspitz adds another to this list: unwitting heroine.

The facts: reviled by the British as a social-climbing seductress even as Time magazine named her its 1936 Woman of the Year, Simpson was the American socialite whose affair with King Edward VIII led him to abdicate the throne on the eve of WWII. In this fanciful novel written in the form of a fictional memoir, Auspitz imagines an alternative history in which Simpson was encouraged by Allied statesmen to remove defeatist, pro-German Edward from the throne, forever altering the course of the war. A comically unreliable narrator who knows more than she realizes, and reveals more than she knows, Simpson leads us from historic treaties and military campaigns to dinner parties and cruises as she describes encounters with everyone from Duff and Diana Cooper to Charles Lindbergh, Coco Chanel, and Hitler—all the while acting as a willing but seemingly oblivious pawn of international intrigue.

A rare blend of diplomacy and dalliance, fashion and fascists, this meticulously researched satire offers witty and erudite entertainment and leaves us speculating: who really brought about the abdication and—always—what were they wearing?

Written with razor-sharp wit and keen psychological insight, this compelling novel explores the way people—husbands, wives, parents, children, lovers—use and abuse each other. Under the meticulously maintained social conventions of the wealthy Warner family lie more primitive impulses and desires. As each character faces a crisis, we start to see the fascinating ways in which they make moral choices.

"Philipson gives us a very believable portrait of a marriage. He also gives us no easy answers . . . and best of all, real storytelling." —Publishers Weekly

"This solid and serious novel emerges as not just an expose of what really goes on behind the well-groomed facades of the affluent, but a thoughtful exploration of character and the efficacy of moral action in forming and reforming it." —Jane Larkin Crain, New York Times Book Review

"A swift, no-fudging narrative by a writer it is always rewarding to rediscover." —Sophie Wilkins, National Review

"An extraordinary novel, fascinating, compelling, and totally disconcerting." —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Has the drama, intelligence and moral force of an American Howards End."-Cynthia Ozick

"One of the key texts of Malraux's work . . . [its] pages must be counted among the most haunting in all of twentieth century literature."—Victor Brombert

"The description of the gas attack on the Russian front in 1915 will never be forgotten by anyone who has read it. . . . [Malraux] writes with the precision, the certitude and the authority of an obsessed person who knows that he has found the essence of what he has been looking for."—Conor Cruise O'Brien, from the Foreword

Malraux's greatest novel, Man's Fate, gave a grim, lurid picture of human suffering. [The Walnut Trees of Altenburg], written by a life-long observer of violent upheaval and within the shadows of World War II, gives a calm, thoughtful vision of humanistic endeavor that can transcend the absurdity of existence. Mature readers will find this a rewarding visit to one of the most accomplished writers of our time."—Choice

What might a spirit feel on first awakening in the afterlife? Fear, confusion, denial?

When Maggie Stevens, a former world-class gymnast, first awakens in a hospital bed, she is amazed that her body is pain-free. After all, she fell off a balance beam during a competition and crashed head-first onto the auditorium floor. What Maggie doesn't at first realize is that the hospital is like no place on earth. She meets other newly arrived "patients": Kate Douglas, a no-nonsense academic who suffered a heart attack; Ryan James, a handsome musician, who is recovering from a motorcycle crash; Frank Chambers, an ex-cop from Chicago, and Patrick Riley, a church organist, both of whom arrived from a Swiss cancer clinic; and Claire and Swen, a young couple running away from the army. When they all learn that they didn't recover from their illnesses and injuries, they go on an adventure to discover the nature of their new reality. Each must discover that their earthly choices and intentions paved the way for their final destination.

From the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, Wandering Star is the story of two young women, one uprooted by the Holocaust and the other by the founding of the state of Israel.  Bearing witness to the boundless strength of the spirit, and based on his own experience as a child in World War II, J.M.G. Le Clézio chronicles the saga of a young girl, Esther, who, in a small mountain village north of Nice occupied by Italian forces, learns what it means to be Jewish in wartime Europe. A quiet young teenager, she suffers the loss of her beloved father and, with her mother, is forced to flee advancing German troops.

At war’s end, Esther and her mother make an arduous journey to Jerusalem, where their path crosses with a group of displaced refugees, including Nejma, a Palestinian girl whose story of life in the camps balances Esther’s own tale of suffering and survival. Esther and Nejma never meet again, but in their respective exiles, they are forever haunted by the memory of one another. Wandering Star is a powerful coming-of-age story and, as Le Figaro notes, truly “a luminous lesson in humanity.”

In "The War of the Fatties," a campy, tongue-in-cheek retelling of an episode from the Mexican "Trojan War," naked fat women from Tlatelolco discombobulate Tenochtitlan’s invading army by squirting them with breast milk. Told with satiric allusions to the policies and tactics used by Mexico’s current ruling party, PRI, to consolidate its power, the play unfolds a history of vain rivalry and decadence, intricate political maneuvers, corruption, and unchecked ambition that determined the course of Mexican history for two centuries before the Spanish conquest. Novo’s other works in this collection—"A Few Aspects of Sex among the Nahuas," "Ahuítzotl and the Magic Water," "Cuauhtémoc: Play in One Act," "Cuauhtémoc and Eulalia: A Dialogue," "Malinche and Carlota: A Dialogue," and "In Ticitézcatl or The Enchanted Mirror: Opera in Two Acts"—represent nearly all of his Aztec-related writings. Taken together, they provide a delightful introduction to Novo’s later works and a light-hearted, historically accurate introduction to Aztec culture. The text is supplemented by a glossary of Nahuatl terms, notes on the historical characters, and an introduction that provides historical background and places Novo’s works within their cultural context.

In ten provocative stories, Ethan Chatagnier presents us with characters in crisis, people grappling with their own and others’ darkness as they search for glimmers to carry them through difficult times, untenable tasks, uncertain futures. The collection explores with unflinching eloquence the quandaries of conscience posed by the present, but also plunges us into a startlingly prescient “what if?” world, exploring in both realms questions concerning the value of perseverance, art, hope, and heart.

The conflict that ravaged seventeeth-century Europe, as seen in a classic German novel—freshly translated
The Thirty Years War, fought between 1618 and 1648, was a ruthless struggle for political and religious control of central Europe. Engulfing most of present-day Germany, the war claimed at least ten million lives. The lengthy conflict was particularly hard on the general population, as thousands of undisciplined mercenaries serving Sweden, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and various German principalities, robbed, murdered, and pillaged communities; disease spread out of control and starvation became commonplace. In The Warwolf, Hermann Löns's acclaimed historical novel, the tragedy and horrors of war in general, and these times in particular are revealed. The Warwolf, based on the author's careful research, traces the life of Harm Wulf, a land-owning peasant farmer of the northern German heath who realizes after witnessing the murder of neighbours and family at the hands of marauding troops that he has a choice between compromising his morals or succumbing to inevitable torture and death. Despite his desire for peace, Wulf decides to band with his fellow farmers and live like "wolves," fiercely protecting their isolated communities from all intruders. Löns's brilliant portrayal of the two sides faced by any person in a moral crisis—in Harm Wulf's case, whether to kill or be killed—continues to resonate. Originally published in 1910 and still in print in Germany, The Warwolf is available for first time in English.

Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in France, the stories collected in Waste of Timelessness contain many elements familiar to those who know her later work as well as revelatory, early clues to themes developed in those more mature stories and novels. Seeded with details remembered from childhood and from life in Paris, the wistful tales portray artists, writers, strangers who meet in the night, and above all, women and their desires.

These experimental and deeply introspective missives lay out a central theme of Nin’s writing: the contrast between the public and private self. The stories are taut with unrealized sexual tension and articulate the ways that language and art can shape reality. Nin’s deft humor, ironic wit, and ecstatic prose display not only superb craftsmanship but also the author’s own constant balancing act between feeling and rationality, vulnerability and strength. Perhaps more than any other writer of the twentieth century, she mastered that act and wrote about it on her own terms, defying the literary and social norms of the time.

These stories precede all of Nin’s published work to date. In them are many sources of the more mature work that collectors and growing writers can appreciate.

Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in Louveciennes, France, these stories contain many elements that will delight her readers: details remembered from childhood, of life in Paris, the cafés, theatres; characters including dancers, artists, writers, women who devote themselves to their work and visions as well as romance, strangers met in the night; themes such as the scruples of lovers, the search for brilliant, imaginative living; the writer’s experimentation with exotic words like “sybaritic” and “violaceous”. In the craft of these stories readers are treated to a deft sense of humor, ironic wit, much conversation as well as ecstatic prose, and surprise endings. Throughout all, the Nin personality shines, a wonderful mixture of feeling and rationality, of vulnerability and strength.

Upon its original publication in 1983, Wasted Morning catapulted Gabriela Adamesteanu to the first rank of Romanian novelists. She has since been translated into many languages, and now her most famous novel is available in English for the first time. At the center of Wasted Morning is Vica Delca, a simple, poor woman in her seventies who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century. 

She's a born storyteller, chatting and gossiping tirelessly. But she also listens, so it is through her that Adamesteanu is able to show us a panoramic portrait of Romanian society as the fortunes of its various strata shift violently. Rich or poor, honest (more or less) or deceitful, all of the characters in this polyphonic novel are brought vividly to life. From Bucharest's aspirations to be the Paris of Eastern Europe to the darkest days of dictatorship, the novel presents a sweeping vision of the personal and collective costs of a turbulent century.

This edition of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s collection of short stories—which includes “Hook,” Clark’s most renowned story—makes these pieces available again to a new generation of readers.

Critic John R. Milton once said that Walter Van Tilburg Clark "did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western." In 1950, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the acclaimed novel The Ox-Bow Incident, published a collection of short stories that had already won distinction in various national magazines. The collection was well received by reviewers, and subsequent critics have noted that these stories reflect both Clark’s literary power and the major concerns of his novels: the interior and intuitive complexities of good and evil, and the fragile, intricate web that connects humankind to the rest of the natural world.

A foreword by Ann Ronald, one of the West’s most astute literary critics, sets the stories into the context of Clark’s oeuvre and illuminates the way they reveal crucial characteristics of this writer’s imagination.

In this thought-provoking collection, Sri Lankan immigrants grapple with events that challenge perspectives and alter lives. A volunteer faces memories of wartime violence when she meets a cantankerous old lady on a Meals on Wheels route. A lonely widow obsessed with an impending apocalypse meets an oddly inspiring man. A maidservant challenges class divisions when she becomes an American professor’s wife. An angry tenant fights suspicion when her landlord is burgled. Hardened inmates challenge a young jail psychiatrist’s competence. A father wonders whether to expose his young son’s bully at a basketball game. A student facing poverty courts a benefactor. And in the depths of an isolated Wyoming winter, a woman tries to resist a con artist. These and other tales explore the immigrant experience with a piercing authenticity. 

Vermont is drying up. The normally lush, green countryside is in the grip of the worst drought in years: stunted cornstalks rasp in the hot July breeze, parched vegetable gardens wither and die, the Chittenden River shrinks to a trickle, and the drilling trucks are booked solid as one by one the wells give out. Patience Avery, known nationwide as a gifted "water witch," is having a busy summer, too. Using the tools of the dowser's trade -- divining sticks, metal rods, bobbers, and pendulums -- she can locate, among other things, aquifers deep within the earth. In the midst of this crisis, Scottie Winston lobbies for permits to expand Powder Peak, a local ski area that's his law firm's principal client. As part of the expansion, the resort seeks to draw water for snowmaking from the beleaguered Chittenden, despite opposition from environmentalists who fear that the already weakened river will be damaged beyond repair. What ensues in Chris Bohjalian's fourth novel is a struggle between conservation and development, rugged tradition versus inevitable progress. But it is also a tale of the clash between science and mystery, a chronicle of one man's transformation from cynic to believer. Vivid with the texture of New England ways, alive with characters both quirky and real, informed by the ongoing, real-life battles between environmentalism and economic expansion in Vermont, Water Witches is a story of ineffable forces, tenuous balances, "and perhaps something about our abilities as a people to heal and forgive and to love."

A wide-ranging consideration of water’s plenitude and paucity—and of our relationship to its many forms

Water is quotidian, ubiquitous, precious, and precarious. With their roots in this element, the authors of Water’s Edge reflect on our natural environment: its forms, textures, and stewardship. Born from a colloquium organized by the editors at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the anthology features a diverse group of writers and artists from half a dozen countries, from different fields of scholarship and practice: artists, biologists, geologists, poets, ecocritics, actors, and anthropologists. The contributors explore and celebrate water while reflecting on its disturbances and pollution, and their texts and art play with the boundaries by which we differentiate literary forms.

In the creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art collected here, water moves from backdrop to subject. Ashley Dawson examines the effects of industrial farming on the health of local ecosystems and economies. Painter Kulvinder Kaur Dhew captures water’s brilliance and multifaceted reflections through a series of charcoal pieces that interlace the collection. Poet Arthur Sze describes the responsibility involved in the careful management of irrigation ditches in New Mexico. Rather than concentrating their thoughts into a singular, overwhelming argument, the authors circulate moments of apprehension, intimation, and felt experience. They are like tributaries, each carrying, in a distinctive style, exigent and often intimate reports concerning a substance upon which all living organisms depend.

Newly widowed Natalie Waters expects only nostalgia and solitude at her quiet, rustic cabin. But the wilderness conceals more than one perilous mystery. Where in Wisconsin’s Northwoods did the notorious gangster John Dillinger hide $210,000 following a violent FBI shootout? And why do the local timberwolves incite so much rage among Natalie’s neighbors?
    As predators circle and howl in the dark, Ginger, the bartender at the nearby Star Lake Saloon, draws Natalie deep into the secrets not only of Dillinger but of the ecologies of family, forest, and heart. With the reluctant support of her granddaughter and advice from a handsome wolf biologist, Natalie is forced to choose between adversity and adventure.
    Sara Rath continues her popular Northwoods saga in this affirming and often humorous tale of romance, betrayal, and danger.

Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to readers of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it. In the title story an obsessive consciousness folds back on itself, creating a vertiginous mélange of Poe and Borges, both horrific and metaphysical. Here, as in "Moran's Mexico," and "Greenhouse," the solitary nature of reading and writing leads characters beyond human limits, making the act of putting words to paper a monstrous violation opening onto madness. In "White Square" the representation of humans by dimly colored shapes confirms our feeling that something lies behind these words, while seeming to mock us with the futility of seeking it. Evenson's enigmatic names-Thurm, Bein, Hatcher, Burlun-placeable landscapes, and barren rooms all combine to create a semblance of conceptual abstraction, as though the material universe had come to exist inside someone's head.

Small wonder that Evenson's work has attracted so much attention among philosophers, literary critics, and other speculative intelligences, for it continuously projects a tantalizing absence, as though there were some key or code that, if only we knew it, would illuminate everything. However, the blade of discernment wavers, and we are left to our own groping interpretations.

In his debut short-fiction collection, The Way Things Always Happen Here, Kevin C. Stewart takes his readers to the scene of a heinous murder, to the home of an alcoholic single mother, to the 1960s election campaign of JFK through West Virginia, and off the side of the New River Gorge Bridge. In these eight stories set in fictional Oak County in southern West Virginia, and one novella set in the Arkansas Ozarks, Stewart gives us characters who all love and hate where they’re from.

The stories in Victoria Lancelotta’s Ways to Disappear excavate the unexamined places between dread and desire, promise and threat, where the body is both prison and salvation. Populated by the grieving and the exultant and those who see no difference between the two, by men and women who are only a little bit broken and boys and girls who can’t wait to be, by souls untethered, rootless, yet bound by blood and flesh, Lancelotta’s characters are driven by the irresistible need to be a bigger part of the worlds they each inhabit, by turns strange and commonplace. In language lush and jagged, never sentimental, these stories scrutinize the exhaustion and enchantment of the everyday: houses seething with resentment and devotion, cars dream-full and hurtling the children in them into a world they think they know but can’t imagine; front porches, back yards, luxury hotels, and truck stops. Lancelotta understands that sometimes people check their wounds not to see if they’ve healed, but to be sure they’re still there.

 

 

We Are All Zimbabweans Now is a political thriller set in Zimbabwe in the hopeful, early days of Robert Mugabe’s rise to power in the late 1980s. When Ben Dabney, a Wisconsin graduate student, arrives in the country, he is enamored with Mugabe and the promises of his government’s model of racial reconciliation. But as Ben begins his research and delves more deeply into his hero’s life, he finds fatal flaws. Ultimately Ben reconsiders not only his understanding of Mugabe, but his own professional and personal life. James Kilgore brings an authentic voice to a work of youthful hope, disillusionment, and unsettling resolution.

 

Abdelkrim Ghallab’s postcolonial We Buried the Past, originally published in 1966, was the first breakthrough Moroccan novel written in Arabic instead of French. Newly translated into English, this edition brings Ghallab’s most widely read and lauded work to a new audience.

Written after the country gained independence, the historical novel follows two generations of al-Tihamis, a well-to-do family residing in Fez’s ancient medina. The family members’ lives reflect the profound social changes taking place in Morocco during that time. Bridging two worlds, We Buried the Past begins during the quieter days of the late colonial period, a world of seemingly timeless tradition, in which the patriarch, al-Haj Muhammad, proudly presides over the family. Here, religion is unquestioned and permeates all aspects of daily life. But the coming upheaval and imminent social transition are reflected in al-Haj’s three sons, particularly his second son, Abderrahman, who eventually defies his father and comes to symbolize the break between the old ways and the new.

Noted for marrying classical Arabic style and European literary form, this book also offers insight into the life of Ghallab himself, who was deeply involved in the nationalist movement that led to Moroccan independence. A pioneering work, We Buried the Past beautifully characterizes an influential period in the history of Morocco.

A favorite work of Czech humor, We Were a Handful depicts the adventures of five boys from a small Czech town through the diary of Petr Bajza, the grocer’s son. Written by Karel Poláček at the height of World War II before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, this book draws on the happier years of Poláček’s own childhood as inspiration. As we look upon the world through Petr’s eyes, we, too, marvel at the incomprehensible world of grownups; join in fights between gangs of neighborhood kids; and laugh at the charming language of boys, a major source of the book’s humor. This translation at last offers English-language readers the opportunity to share in Petr’s (and Poláček’s) childhood and reminds us that joy and laughter are possible even in the darkest times.

A favorite work of Czech humor, We Were a Handful depicts the adventures of five boys from a small Czech town through the diary of Petr Bajza, the grocer’s son. Written by Karel Poláček at the height of World War II before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, this book draws on the happier years of Poláček’s own childhood as inspiration. As we look upon the world through Petr’s eyes, we, too, marvel at the incomprehensible world of grownups; join in fights between gangs of neighborhood kids; and laugh at the charming language of boys, a major source of the book’s humor. This translation at last offers English-language readers the opportunity to share in Petr’s (and Poláček’s) childhood and reminds us that joy and laughter are possible even in the darkest times.

Johnny is from New Jersey, and Kari is from Oslo. They meet in New York in the late 1950s and soon fall in love, get married, and move to Asbury Park, where their life unfolds like a dream: Kari gives birth to two beautiful daughters, and Johnny is a wildly successful entrepreneur. Everything begins to unravel, though, when Johnny’s business partner commits suicide and their company plunges into bankruptcy. Then a deadly accident claims their daughters. Reeling from the tragedy and seeking a new beginning, Johnny and Kari move to Norway. But they can’t escape their trauma as it continues to take a toll on their marriage, especially as Johnny struggles to find his place in a foreign country.
            The Weather Changed, Summer Came and So On is a haunting novel about love, loss, and identity that focuses on the survival of trauma. Translated beautifully from its original Norwegian by Diane Oatley, it constructs and inhabits a liminal world as the protagonists seek to stay afloat amid grief and estrangement. This is a gripping, heartbreaking story that will move readers with its timelessness and universal relevance.

The Web of Iniquity is a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War and World War II. Refuting the idea that no American detective fiction of substance was produced between the times of Edgar Allan Poe and Dashiell Hammett, Catherine Ross Nickerson shows how these women writers blended Gothic elements into domestic fiction to create a unique and all-but-ignored subgenre that she labels “domestic detective fiction.”
This subgenre allowed women writers to participate in postbellum culture and to critique other aspects of a rapidly changing society. Domestic detective fiction combined elements of sensationalist papers, popular nonfiction crime stories, and the domestic novel. Nickerson shows how it also incorporated the gothic tropes found in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Brontë and influenced the work of Pauline Hopkins. Mid-nineteenth-century writer Metta Fuller Victor, who represented such important areas of cultural conflict as the role of professions in the formation of class identity and the possibility of women's independence and self-determination, paved the way for the appearance of women detectives in the late-nineteenth-century fiction of Anna Katharine Green. Nickerson credits Mary Roberts Rinehart, in particular, for bringing sophistication to the subgenre by amplifying the humorous, terrifying, and feminist elements inherent in earlier detective novels by women. Throughout the volume, Nickerson focuses on the narrative qualities of the domestic novel tradition and the ways in which it reflected ideologies of domesticity and gender. Also included are a discussion of various rewritings of the Lizzie Borden scandal in this tradition and an afterword on the relation of domestic detective fiction to the hard-boiled style.
The Web of Iniquity places the detective fiction written by women between 1850 and 1940 into ongoing discussions regarding women, culture, and literature and will appeal to scholars and students of women's studies, American studies, and literary history.

 These finely wrought stories unfold in the Dakotas during the struggling pioneer days and bone-dry landscape of the thirties as well as the verdant years that followed, where the nighttime plains are bathed by softly radiant harvest moons shining down from dazzling northern skies. Young's absorbing narratives begin with the pleasant sense of “Once upon a time…” anticipation, but the firmly sketched details, warm humor, and vivid characterizations reveal an unanticipated and satisfying realism.

The haunting title story is about a beautiful and tragic pioneer woman and her wedding dress; her gown takes on a life of its own and turns into an enduring symbol for the grace and compassion of homesteading women on the plains. In “Bank Night,” a hired hand working during the midst of the Depression wins $250 at the movies, careening him into a single night of notoriety that becomes a legend in its time. “The Nights of Ragna Rundhaug” tells the tale of a woman who wants only to be left alone with her white dog, Vittehund, and her crocheting but instead is propelled into a life of midwifery “because there was no one else to do it.” The babies have predilection for arriving during blizzards and always at night, when she must be transported across the dark plains by frantic husbands who have fortified themselves with strong drink and headstrong horses.

All the stories in The Wedding Dress are linked by the enigmatic Nordic characters who people them and by the skill with which Young draws them. Emotions run so deep that they are seldom able to surface; when they do the interaction is extraordinarily luminous, both for the characters themselves and for the fortunate reader. The Wedding Dress is for all readers, young and old.

Finalist, 2019 Weatherford Award (Fiction)

A finalist for the 2019 Weatherford Award in Fiction, Weedeater  is a contemporary story of love and loss told by a pair of eastern Kentucky mountaineers: Gene, the lovelorn landscaper who bears witness to the misadventures of a family entangled in drugs, artmaking, and politics, a family beset by both environmental and self-destruction; and Dawn Jewell, a young mother  searching—for lost family members, lost youth, lost community, and lost heart.

Picking up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s acclaimed first novel, Trampoline, in Weedeater,  the reader finds Canard County living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and the most turbulent and deadly phase of the community’s battle with opioid abuse. The events Gipe chronicles are frantic. They are told through a voice by turns taciturn and angry, yet also balanced with humor and stoic grace. Weedeater  is a story about how we put our lives back together when we lose the things we thought we couldn’t bear losing, how we find new purpose in what we thought were scraps and trash caught in the weeds.

As compelling as it is turbulent, The Weedkiller’s Daughter captures a family at the center of the rapidly changing society of midcentury Detroit. Fifteen-year-old Susie greets this new era with a sense of curiosity, while her father rages against it, approaching anything and everything foreign, unconventional, or unfortunate as he does the weeds he perpetually removes from his garden. As Susie seeks escape from her parents’ increasingly restrictive world of order and monotony, she ventures deeper and deeper into a dangerously new territory. The Weedkiller’s Daughter is a gripping psychological exploration of a generation on the brink of indelible—and irreversible—transformation.

Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbingride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche. Everythingis there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people’s lives, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner-city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong, and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow—living with the same energy and intimate knowledge with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.

How to live with difference—not necessarily in peace, but with resilience, engagement, and a lack of vitriol—is a defining worry in America at this moment. The poets, fiction writers, and essayists (plus one graphic novelist) who contributed to Welcome to the Neighborhood don’t necessarily offer roadmaps to harmonious neighboring. Some of their narrators don’t even want to be neighbors. Maybe they grieve, or rage. Maybe they briefly find resolution or community. But they do approach the question of what it means to be neighbors, and how we should do it, with open minds and nuance.

The many diverse contributors give this collection a depth beyond easy answers. Their attentions to the theme of neighborliness as an ongoing evolution offer hope to readers: possible pathways for rediscovering community, even just by way of a shared wish for it. The result is an enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, and how place and community play a part.

Contributors include Leila Chatti, Rita Dove, Jonathan Escoffery, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Amina Gautier, Ross Gay, Mark Halliday, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Sonya Larson, Dinty W. Moore, Robert Pinsky, Christine Schutt, and many more.

In 1814, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read the poems of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz in a newly published translation by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. For Goethe, the book was a revelation. He felt a deep connection with Hafiz and Persian poetic traditions, and was immediately inspired to create his own West-Eastern Divan as a lyrical conversation between the poetry and history of his native Germany and that of Persia. The resulting collection engages with the idea of the other and unearths lyrical connections between cultures.
 
The West-Eastern Divan is one of the world’s great works of literature, an inspired masterpiece, and a poetic linking of European and Persian traditions. This new bilingual edition expertly presents the wit, intelligence, humor, and technical mastery of the poetry in Goethe’s Divan. In order to preserve the work’s original power, Eric Ormsby has created this translation in clear contemporary prose rather than in rhymed verse, which tends to obscure the works sharpness. This edition is also accompanied by explanatory notes of the verse in German and in English and a translation of Goethe’s own commentary, the “Notes and Essays for a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.” This edition not only bring this classic collection to English-language readers, but also, at a time of renewed Western unease about the other, to open up the rich cultural world of Islam.

Ranging from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, Mitchell shows how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark study shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man.

"Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."—J. Hoberman, London Review of Books

"[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."—The Observer

"Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."—Aaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review

Abbott's community is pure Americana, a wild world inhabited by gloriously street-smart smartasses: overeducated, underemployed men mourning for the confident women who have left them—or have they?—but knowing that equally confident women are just around the corner—or are they? His urgent, maximalist style allows their exhilarating voices to be heard and remembered.

At the heart of What Could Be Saved is the culture of the violin world—its beauty, myth-making, magic, romance and deceit, as well as its history and ethos of perfection at any cost. In stories and novellas matched end-to-end like the twinned or “bookmatched” pieces of tonewood that separately comprise a violin, What Could Be Saved winds its way through the hopes and dreams of builders, dealers and players caught up in the violin trade, a trade that is so unlike any other in the world. From the story of a young man who refuses to follow in his father’s footsteps as a violin builder, to the magical realism of the story told in the point of view of forgotten, abused and ordinary violins, What Could Be Saved transports you into the world of the violin, compelling you to witness its most tragic, comic and thoroughly human dramas. Blending viewpoints and storytelling techniques, including magical and psychological realism, moving from novella to story and back again, there is a sustained musicality that thrums through these beautiful, almost dream-like tales. Spatz’s language is precise and powerful, his fiction elegantly wrought. A book that echoes long after its music ends.

In these nine stories, Marian Crotty inhabits the lives of people searching for human connection. Her characters, most often young women, are honest, troubled, and filled with longing. In the title story, a young woman begins a job on a construction site after leaving an abusive marriage. In “Crazy for You,” two girls spy on a neighbor’s sex life, while their own sexuality hovers in the distance. In “A Real Marriage,” a college student marries a boyfriend to help him stay in the United States. In “The Fourth Fattest Girl at Cutting Horse Ranch,” the daily life of a residential treatment center for eating disorders is disrupted by the arrival of a celebrity. The stories are set in Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Persian Gulf, and often touch on themes of addiction, class, sexuality, and gender. What Counts as Love is a poignant, often funny collection that asks us to take it and its characters seriously. 

Close to death, an old man collapses and struggles to his bed. The sounds of the endless night unsettle him, triggering images, questions, and memories. In What Darkness Was, Inka Parei, author of The Shadow-Boxing Woman, allows the reader to inhabit a singular German mind. Precise and observant—but uncomprehending and on the brink of hysteria—the old man wracks his brain as the questions flow like water: why did he inherit the building he now lives in? Why did he leave the city that was his home for so long? Is he even here voluntarily? And who was that suspicious stranger on the stairs? Lying in bed, the old man is aware that these questions may be the last puzzles he ever solves.

Combining tight prose with a compulsive delight in detail, Parei’s second novel in English presents a dynamic portrait of the West German soul from World War II through the German Autumn of 1977.

 

This edition of What Diantha Did makes newly available Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s first novel, complete with an in-depth introduction. First published serially in Gilman’s magazine The Forerunner in 1909–10, the novel tells the story of Diantha Bell, a young woman who leaves her home and her fiancé to start a housecleaning business. A resourceful heroine, Diantha quickly expands her business into an enterprise that includes a maid service, cooked food delivery service, restaurant, and hotel. By assigning a cash value to women’s “invisible” work, providing a means for the well-being and moral uplift of working girls, and releasing middle-class and leisure-class women from the burden of conventional domestic chores, Diantha proves to her family and community the benefits of professionalized housekeeping.

In her introduction to the novel, Charlotte J. Rich highlights Gilman’s engagement with such hotly debated Progressive Era issues as the “servant question,” the rise of domestic science, and middle-class efforts to protect and aid the working girl. She illuminates the novel’s connections to Gilman’s other feminist works, including “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Herland; to her personal life; and to her commitment to women’s social and economic freedom. Rich contends that the novel’s engagement with class and race makes it particularly significant to the newly complex understanding of Gilman that has emerged in recent scholarship. What Diantha Did provides essential insight into Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s important legacy of social thought.

What Remains collects Christa Wolf's short fiction, from early work in the sixties to the widely debated title story, first published in Germany in 1990. Addressing a wide range of topics, from sexual politics to the nature of memory, these powerful and often very personal stories offer a fascinating introduction to Wolf's work.
What Remains and Other Stories . . . is clear and farsighted. The eight heartfelt stories in the book show why she has been respected as a serious author since her 1968 novel, The Quest for Christa T. . . . Wolf uses her own experiences and observations to create universal themes about the controls upon human freedom.—Herbert Mitgang, New York Times
Christa Wolf has set herself nothing less than the task of exploring what it is to be a conscious human being alive in a moment of history.—Mary Gordon, New York Times Book Review
The simultaneous publication of these two volumes offers readers here a generous sampling of the short fiction, speeches and essays that Wolf has produced over the last three decades.—Mark Harman, Boston Globe

Philip Garrison says his book of essays is “in praise of mixed feelings,” particularly the mixed feelings he and his neighbors have toward the places they came from. His neighborhood is the Columbia Plateau, one of many North American nodes of immigration. Following a meandering, though purposeful trail, Garrison catches hillbillies and newer Mexican arrivals in ambiguous, wary encounters on a set four hundred years in the making, built on a foundation of Native American displacement. Garrison is the product of the earlier surge of new arrivals: from the 1930s to the 1970s, those he calls hillbillies left such mid-nation states as Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Dakotas for the West. The more recent wave, from 1990 to 2010, came mostly from the central plateau of Mexico. These are folks with whom Garrison communes in multiple ways. Anecdotes from sources as varied as pioneer diaries, railroad promotions, family Bibles, Wikipedia, and local gossip “portray the region's immigration as a kind of identity makeover, one that takes the form first of breakdown, then of reassembly, and finally of renewal.” Garrison’s mix of slangy memoir and anthropological field notes shines light on the human condition in today’s West. 

Martin Mosebach’s novel What Was Before opens with a young couple enjoying a moment of carefree intimacy. Then the young woman, turning slightly more serious, asks her lover that fateful question, one that sounds so innocent but carries toxic seeds of jealousy: What was your life like before you met me? The answer grows into an entire book, an elaborate house of cards, filled with intrigue, sex, betrayal, exotic birds, and far-flung locations.

Set against the backdrop of Frankfurt’s affluent suburbs, this elliptical tale of coincidence and necessity unfolds through a series of masterly constructed vignettes, which gradually come together to form a scintillating portrait of the funny, tender, and destructive guises that love between two people can assume and the effect it has on everyone around them. Hailed in Germany as the first great social novel of the twenty-first century, What Was Before is an Elective Affinities for our time.

In this first story collection, Gerkensmeyer crafts broken fairy tales that reimagine the life of women.

Populated by characters as frank as their midwestern settings, What You’ve Been Missing, Janet Desaulniers’s debut collection, explores the unsettling moments when ordinary life ceases to exist. Parents, confused by their five-year-old’s refusal to sit up in her chair, lift her blouse to find she’s been beaten. A woman returns from a shopping trip just in time to see her husband kissing a young co-worker. A young husband constructs an elaborate and romanticized version of his new marriage and then ruins it in one gesture. These singular moments propel each person on a journey beyond the realm of everyday existence.

Vividly portraying the possible horrors and detours that can mark anyone’s life, Desaulniers beautifully captures the vast and often conflicting emotions that humans endure at times of loss and sorrow—loneliness, pain, desperation, desire. Yet this balletic push and pull of emotions will challenge, wound, and ultimately enlighten her characters, transporting them to a place beyond individual sorrow.

At times unbearably heartbreaking, What You’ve Been Missing is not just another set of stories about bad things happening to good people. At its heart, this award-winning collection is about people continuing to talk—rather than shutting down—as bad things happen to them. As the recently divorced Liza thinks in “The Good Fight”: “Words do ease us. They comfort us. Maybe they protect us in a way, rescue us from the agony of what our bodies feel.”

Unsavory artists, titled boobs, and charlatans with an affinity for Freud—such are the oddballs whose antics animate the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell. A genius of social satire delivered with a very dry wit, Powell builds his comedies on the foibles of British high society between the wars, delving into subjects as various as psychoanalysis, the film industry, publishing, and (of course) sex. More explorations of relationships and vanity than plot-driven narratives, these slim novels reveal the early stirrings of the unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony that would reach their caustic peak in Powell’s epic A Dance to the Music of Time.
 
In What’s Become of Waring, Powell lampoons a world with which he was intimately acquainted: the inner workings of a small London publisher. But even as Powell eviscerates the publishers’ less than scrupulous plotting in his tale of wild coincidences, mistaken identity, and romance, he never strays to the far side of farce. 
 
Written from a vantage point both high and necessarily narrow, Powell’s early novels nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would become a substantial part of his oeuvre: pride, greed, and what makes people behave as they do. Filled with eccentric characters and piercing insights, Powell’s work is achingly hilarious, human, and true.

In When Mystical Creatures Attack!, Ms. Freedman’s high school English class writes essays in which mystical creatures resolve the greatest sociopolitical problems of our time. Students include Janice Gibbs, “a feral child with excessive eyeliner and an anti-authoritarian complex that would be interesting were it not so ill-informed,” and Cody Splunk, an aspiring writer working on a time machine. Following a nervous breakdown, Ms. Freedman corresponds with Janice and Cody from an insane asylum run on the capitalist model of cognitive-behavioral therapy, where inmates practice water aerobics to rebuild their Psychiatric Credit Scores.
 
The lives of Janice, Cody, and Ms. Freedman are revealed through in-class essays, letters, therapeutic journal exercises, an advice column, a reality show television transcript, a diary, and a Methodist women’s fundraising cookbook. (Recipes include “Dark Night of the Soul Food,” “Render Unto Caesar Salad,” and “Valley of the Shadow of Death by Chocolate Cake.”) In “Virtue of the Month,” the ghost of Ms. Freedman’s mother argues that suicide is not a choice. In “The Un-Game,” Janice’s chain-smoking nursing home charge composes a dirty limerick. In “The Hall of Old-Testament Miracles,” wax figures of Bible characters come to life, hungry for Cody’s flesh.
 
Set against a South Texas landscape where cicadas hum and the air smells of taco stands and jasmine flowers, these stories range from laugh-out-loud funny to achingly poignant. This surreal, exuberant collection mines the dark recesses of the soul while illuminating the human heart.

A bull’s heart simmers in a crockpot, echoing the household’s tension in a retelling of Biblical Jacob’s trials. A priest observes his congregation’s descent into madness and wonders at his own role. An elderly woman imagines herself into her boomtown’s history and eventual abandonment at the height of the Gold Rush. Towns and people vanish, daughters return, women prepare escapes, and animals invade. In this collection of stories situated within the mythology of the Midwest, the past is always present, tangible and unrelenting, constantly asking these characters whether they will be a sacrifice or a martyr, daring them to give in without a fight. Here, transcendence is a tonic hard-earned by the battered soul.
The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.
 

Michele Campo is living the bourgeois Italian dream. Now a speech pathologist in his forties, he resides in an expensive Naples home with his partner, Costanza, daughter of an upper-class family. Michele’s own family origins, however, are murkier. When he is assigned to work with five-year-old foster child Martina, he grows increasingly engrossed by her case, as his own buried family history slowly claws its way back to the surface. The first novel by acclaimed Italian writer Angelo Cannavacciuolo to be translated into English, When Things Happen tells a powerful and intriguing story of what we lose when we leave our origins behind. It presents a panoramic view of Neapolitan society unlike any in literature, revealing a city of extreme contrasts, with a glamorous center ringed by suburban squalor. Above all, it is a psychologically nuanced portrait of a man struggling to locate what he values in life and the poor vulnerable child who helps him find it. 
 

     In this stunning debut novel, a child dissects the darkness at the heart of her British diplomatic family. Living in Nigeria on the brink of civil war, Anna—also known as Jake—becomes blood brothers with Dave, the Korean American daughter of a C.I.A. operative. They do push-ups, collect pornography, and plot lives of unmarried freedom while around them a country disintegrates. Luscious, terrifying, and raw, Nigeria itself becomes a lesson in endurance, suffering, love. 
     Stories are layered upon stories: Anna's grandmother tells stories about life as a white woman on the Gold Coast; the clairvoyant and closeted "Aunt" Elsie gives Anna a story of transformation to hold onto in the coming tumult of adolescence. Yet Where Bones Dance also spirals down to the stories that are not told—sexual abuse, the myth of benign colonialism, the chaos of postcolonial Africa. Sensual and fantastical by turns, this moving, funny, immensely readable book delivers an understanding of the interplay of sexuality, gender, race, and war that is sophisticated beyond the years of its intrepid narrator.

 

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association

 These nine superbly crafted stories, set primarily in Pittsburgh's Italian American neighborhoods, concentrate on families, on the poignant nature of father-daughter relationships, and on the fate of those who are refugees from their physical or spiritual communities. “Love is born only out of wreckage,” Manfredi's characters declare bravely. Her vigorous families are both the wrecking crews and the architects of the human foundation.

In “The Projectionist,” a displaced Sicilian is forced to confront the family he lost in war-torn Italy at the same time that his current family is disintegrating; his disillusionment with the American dream overwhelms him when his oldest daughter exchanges Old World values for the hippie-inspired climate of permissiveness. Ten-year-old Elena, in “Bocci,” takes the teachings of her strict Catholic upbringing to the extreme, and it is her devoutness that is cruelly used against her when violence compels her to reject becoming “a nun or a saint.” The father in “Tall Pittsburgh” sends his daughter to charm school at Sears, then enters her in a beauty pageant for tall women. Distraught in spite of her second-place win, he begins to relive his grief over the death of his beautiful wife.

Many of Manfredi's vital, luminous characters are outsiders, dispossessed by their inability to bridge the gap between the self and others, forced to deal with loss through death and lapse of faith, yet always managing to survive despite their place on the bewildering margins. Manfredi reveals an affirmation, finally, that hope is a permanent possession of every human spirit.

Dr. Maya Summer works at Arizona Public Health, overseeing and researching a myriad of public health issues. A passionate advocate for a motorcycle helmet law, she also monitors disease-bearing mosquitoes, rabid bobcats, and the opioid epidemic—along with many other concerns. To maintain her clinical skills, she spends time at the nearby family medicine residency, seeing patients and teaching new physicians. Maya also navigates a complicated personal life: a somewhat troubled romantic relationship with a cardiologist; a retired physician-friend searching for new meaning; an undocumented neighbor raising a young son; and a cherished ailing old horse. A new danger looms when she sparks the anger of local biker gangs who want to stop her helmet campaign. As the intimidating warnings reach an unsettling highpoint, a past trauma that had been fueling her work now starts to haunt her—threatening to derail her carefully choreographed life.

Dr. Alex Reddish, a faculty member at the residency, enjoys Maya’s company every week. He longs to know her better but also knows she is involved with a prominent cardiologist. A former shy chess champion, Alex has worked to remake himself into a more socially engaged person, though he cannot completely shed his reclusive past. His professional life is complicated by two resident physician advisees: a depressed and poorly performing man, and a seductive woman. And now someone seems determined to harm him. 

Maya and Alex turn accomplices when they try to unravel a spate of unusual illnesses afflicting residency staff, and discover disturbing trends. As Maya and Alex become closer, they must also tackle their personal pasts and individual demons, and find the courage to move forward. 

This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names—and many traits—of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession.
 

The stories of Where the Rivers Flow North are “superior work, rich in texture and character,” says the Wall Street Journal; “the novella is brilliantly done.” That novella, the title story of the collection, was also made into a feature film starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox. These six stories, available again in this new edition, continue Mosher’s career-long exploration of Kingdom County, Vermont. “Within the borders of his fictional kingdom,” the Providence Journal has noted, “Mosher has created mountains and rivers, timber forests and crossroads villages, history and language. And he has peopled the landscape with some of the truest, most memorable characters in contemporary literature.”

Despite her strong associations with Massachusetts—her upbringing in Roxbury, her lifelong connection with Martha's Vineyard, and two novels documenting the Great Migration and the rise and decline of Boston's African American community—Dorothy West (1907–1998) is perhaps best known as a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Between 1927 and 1947, West and her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson, lived in New York City where West attended Columbia University, worked as a welfare investigator, wrote for the WPA, traveled to Russia, and established a literary magazine for young black writers.

During these years, West and Johnson knew virtually everyone in New York's artistic, intellectual, and political circles. Their friends included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and many others. West moved easily between the bohemian milieu of her artistic soul mates and the bourgeois, respectable soirees of prominent social and political figures.

In this book, Professors Mitchell and Davis provide a carefully researched profile of West and her circle that serves as an introduction to a well-edited, representative collection of her out-of-print, little-known, or unpublished writings, supplemented by many family photographs. The editors document West's "womanist" upbringing and her relationships with her mother, Rachel Benson West, and other strong-minded women, including her longtime companion Marian Minus.

The volume includes examples of West's probing social criticism in the form of WPA essays and stories, as well as her interviews with Southern migrants. A centerpiece of the book is her unpublished novella, Where the Wild Grape Grows, which explores with grace and gentle irony the complex relationship of three retired women living on Martha's Vineyard. Several of West's exquisitely observed nature pieces, published over a span of twenty years in the Vineyard Gazette, are also reprinted.

These stories are funny and serious, outrageous and completely familiar. Readers will meet a cast of characters ranging from a woman who cleans her soon-to-be ex-husband’s house to a woman who seduces her paper boy. These stories are short, but leave readers completely satisfied and reveling in the complexity of our strange lives.