EXCERPT
Because of course she feels what he feels. . . . People their age natter along not copping to it but the awareness is billboarded all over their faces—a wavering, a hesitation, even those who used to crow and jab the air. The tablecloth of certainty, with all its sparkly settings, has been yanked, and not artfully. It's why people drink.

All The News I Need probes the modern American response to inevitable, ancient riddles—of love and sex and mortality.

Frances Ferguson is a lonely, sharp-tongued widow who lives in the wine country. Oliver Gaffney is a painfully shy gay man who guards a secret and lives out equally lonely days in San Francisco. Friends by default, Fran and Ollie nurse the deep anomie of loss and the creeping, animal betrayal of aging. Each loves routine but is anxious that life might be passing by. To crack open this stalemate, Fran insists the two travel together to Paris. The aftermath of their funny, bittersweet journey suggests those small changes, within our reach, that may help us save ourselves—somewhere toward the end.

A fifteen-year-old widow runs across a bridge to catch a train bound for Trichi. Sowmya is running away to make sense of the events that had seized her body and her mind, and had ripped apart her world. She is determined to flee her destiny of numbing isolation within her community, the Brahmins of the Thanjavur district in South India. Her plans pivot when she meets a devadasi--an aging dancer--in her compartment. When the woman Mallika opens her drawstring bag and buys Sowmya her dinner, Sowmya recognizes what she needs to overcome her own condition, that of a young woman in possession of a thin cotton sari, a head shorn clean, and little else. She asks Mallika how she too can achieve that kind of power--the power to open a bag and pull out money. Thus begins Sowmya's transformation in the city by the sea, Madras, which is in the grip of its own political and social changes while India is struggling to seize its independence from the imperial British raj. Here she learns the beauty of dance from Mallika, and the sweetness and agony of falling in love with a married man. The cinema brings unimagined opportunities and all the power and riches that she could desire, but it also consumes her relentlessly. When a letter arrives, Sowmya begins her quest to regain everything that had been lost when she once lived in that small village tucked into a little bend of the Kaveri River.

Hear Champa Bilwakesh reading from Desire of the Moth here: http://voicethread.com/myvoice/#thread/5863247/30058528/31699244

A teen’s life is complicated.  Add an overworked dad, a distraught mom.
Enter an old man from the wrong side of the tracks.
He knows things.  He’s there when you need him.
 
This happens to someone; it’s not a maybe thing.  People get hurt.  People die.  There’s a dad who loves his kid but works all the time.  When he doesn’t work, he drinks.  When he drinks he’s out of control.

There’s a mom.  She knows dad is overworked, a good man carrying too much responsibility. 

The kid turns to the handy man to learn a man’s skills.  In the old man from the wrong side of the tracks, the kid finds unusual skills and terrible—but true—lessons.  He finds that his own safety comes at a cost to his unfortunate friend.  He finds growing up comes at a cost to himself.  This is the story of such a kid, told by himself after he has lived much of his life, come to terms with his parents’ weaknesses, and learned that seemingly insignificant people carry more pain than he can imagine, though he has already seen plenty.

Mike  Moran  first  attended  Little  Rock  Catholic  High  School  for  Boys-all four years.  On  the  basketball  team,  he  was  a  point  guard.  Then,  as "Mr. Moran,"  he taught  English  for forty years, also at Little  Rock  Catholic  High School for  Boys.  Recently  retired,  Moran  wrote  the  boys  a  novel. The tale revolves  around  a  struggling  small-town  basketball  team  with  a  nerdy manager  and  a  Walter  Mittyesque  coach.  Presented  with  too  few  players  to  scrimmage  in  practice,  the  manager  takes  it upon  himself   to  spread the word throughout the school: "We need you on the team." Three young  students  appear,  diminutive  in  stature  and  with  scrawny  chests, unimpressive  at first sight.  But  with  the  trio,  and  their  fleet  leader  Jesse Crosse,  the  team  first  experiences  shock,  then  inspiration   and  constant surprises.  The team  bonds,  leading  to stories that will  be  retold  a very  long time  in  a  small, out-of-the-way  town.  It's not a  long  novel;  like one's high school  years,  it goes  by  before  you  know  it. Only the  message  is eternal.

Ruth Farley is a stubbornly independent, free-spirited woman who homesteaded a piece of land at Glory Springs, deep in a beautiful, remote canyon in the Southern California Mojave Desert. At the end of the 1930s she is still there, raising her two children and struggling to preserve her solitude. But the world is intruding. Her Indian friend Martha has been arrested for a murder she didn’t commit, and Ruth must join the Yuiatei tribe in trying to free her. In this final volume of Susan Lang’s Ruth Farley trilogy, Ruth discovers the limits of her autonomy and struggles to make peace with her painful past. As the story comes to a dramatic conclusion and the world descends into the madness of another war, Ruth finally understands that she is inextricably part of the human community and that her hard-won independence will not be sacrificed if she accepts and cherishes the bonds of love and friendship. Ruth Farley is one of the most memorable characters in recent fiction, a perplexing, sometimes exasperating, and utterly sympathetic modern woman torn between her desire for freedom and her need for love, her determination to live life on her own terms and the pressures that society places on a single woman. In this trilogy of novels, Susan Lang has achieved her place among our best contemporary fiction writers.

Set in the 1980s, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, this Flaggesque exploration of Southern characters is filled with plot twists, character surprises, New Orleans parties and true love. The second volume in the Peavine Chronicles Series, Hankins undergirds the narrative with a whimsical spirituality and delivers belly-laugh reading enjoyment with an afterglow.