Results by title

In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—a stretch of land generally referred to as the Pimería Alta—an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it.

Ríos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.

A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history—now available in paperback
 

When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.

Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget. 

As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family’s land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor—much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing

In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.

Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.

A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.

Agni and Effie, identical twins, are inseparable until Agni is sent to Greece one summer to visit their grandmother after their grandfather’s sudden death. Until now the more conventional and accommodating of the two, Agni refuses to return to college, choosing instead to remain in their family’s Greek village.

She is drawn into the daily routines and rural traditions that her parents left behind in exchange for the American dream. But the haunting presence of her grandfather’s ghost is a sign of unresolved family grief.

Without her sister’s companionship, Effie abruptly abandons the stability of her life so far and moves to the East Village to live as an artist. But when Agni’s absence become unbearable for her, a personal crisis brings the sisters together again, this time even closer than before.

Alternating between the sisters’ points of view, letters between them, and stories Agni writes in secret, Another Kind of Symmetry explores the sometimes uneasy relationship that children of immigrants have with their parents’ version of the American dream. It reflects on the challenges of living with cross-cultural traditions and how individuals’ different responses to them can disrupt even the closest of relationships.

A landmark work of contemporary Russian literature, now in English for the first time

Set in a fictitious town in North Kazakhstan settled by political and ethnic exiles, this panoramic narrative follows the relationship between the titular character Anton, a Moscow historian of the vital “1960s generation,” and his grandfather, Leonid, a titan of physical and intellectual rigor who is now on the verge of death. As Anton contemplates the fading away of that once-powerful vitality, he lets his thoughts plunge deep into the past, presented in a series of fine-grained sketches, scattered reminiscences, and subtly interconnected episodes, back and forth from childhood to present day. The resulting novel is a “Soviet family Robinson”: the history of rugged and free-thinking intellectuals eking out a tolerable, even enviable homestead existence despite the difficulties of the Stalin years. One of the most vibrant works of literary fiction created since the fall of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Chudakov’s Anton is a testament to humanity's tenacity and tenderness.