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A gripping, world-spanning drama of crime, art, and our shared cultural heritage

This unforgettable novel tells the story of an Austrian nobleman who as a young man at the end of World War I, finds himself irresistibly drawn to thievery. Forty years later, living in Mexico, he has made stealing his trade, pillaging Mayan tombs to illicitly secure pre-Columbian art, which he sells on the black market. At the same time, he creates his own sculptures, which the market refuses to reward. Eventually, his activities catch the eye of a dedicated, solitary Mexican police detective, and a reckoning--one that has its roots in the long history of European plunder of the riches of the New World--is set in violent motion.

Praised on publication by Cynthia Ozick, the Washington Post, and more, this unforgettable novel harks back to the great nineteenth-century social novels while still being fully of its late-twentieth-century time.

In this first general theory for the analysis of popular literary formulas, John G. Cawelti reveals the artistry that underlies the best in formulaic literature. Cawelti discusses such seemingly diverse works as Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Dorothy Sayers's The Nine Tailors, and Owen Wister's The Virginian in the light of his hypotheses about the cultural function of formula literature. He describes the most important artistic characteristics of popular formula stories and the differences between this literature and that commonly labeled "high" or "serious" literature. He also defines the archetypal patterns of adventure, mystery, romance, melodrama, and fantasy, and offers a tentative account of their basis in human psychology.

Originally published in 1845, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs is a series of sketches written in part to parody some the campaign literature of the era. The character, Simon Suggs, with his motto, “it is good to be shifty in a new country,” fully incarnates a backwoods version of the national archetypes now know as the confidence man, the grafter, the professional flim-flam artist supremely skilled in the arts by which a man gets along in the world. This classic volume of good humor is set in the rough-and-tumble world of frontier life and politics.

The most engaging and authoritative translation of some of the foundational works of Western culture

This volume collects careful, readable translations of some of the key works of Aeschylus by experts in the language and culture of the ancient Greek world in which he lived and wrote. Aeschylus I contains “The Persians,” translated by Seth Benardete; “The Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene; “The Suppliant Maidens,” translated by Seth Benardete; and “Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene.

For this edition, series editors Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous.New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.

For twenty-five centuries, the animal stories that go by the name of Aesop's Fables have amused and instructed generations of children and adults alike. The tales are still as fresh and poignant today as they were to the ancient Greeks who composed them. This beautifully illustrated edition contains some of the best-loved fables, including "The Boy who Cried Wolf," "The Lion and the Mouse," "The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg," "The Hare and the Tortoise," and "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse," alongside many of the lesser-known tales.  These timeless stories are illustrated with thirty-seven woodcuts by Agnes Miller Parker (1895–1980), one of the greatest British wood engraving artists of the twentieth century. Parker's distinctive work is strikingly stylized and deceptively simple. Commissioned in the 1930s by the fine press publisher Gregynog Press for their edition of the work, these exquisite engravings are among Parker's finest work. 

Seeks to bring present-day philosophy principles into the history of aesthetics

Before the publication of Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present there were three histories of aesthetics in English—Bosanquet's pioneering work, the second part of Croce's Aesthetic in the Ainsle translation, and the comprehensive volume by Gilbert and Kuhn. While each of these is interesting in its own ways, and together they cover a good deal of ground, none of them is very new. Thus none could take advantage of recent work on many important philosophers and periods and bring into a consideration of the past the best concepts and principles that have been developed by present-day philosophy.

Robert Frost has long dominated the public's image of New England poetry, but who are the poets who follow him in time and how have they expressed their visions of the landscape, the individual, and the community? This volume brings together the work of thirty distinguished poets to convey the vitality and variety of the region's poetic creation during much of the twentieth century.

After Frost is published in association with the New England Foundation for the Humanities, which has sponsored a program of reading and discussion groups with poets across the region using this anthology.

Bruna Veríssimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds.

Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Veríssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. In Veríssimo’s recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist’s tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices.

With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of Veríssimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn’t happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words.

A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.

Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His uncle calls him “Advo,” short for Advocate, and his mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. In a community that thrives on imagined realities, Bafana decides that it’s easiest to create a lie that allows him to put off the truth indefinitely. Soon he’s in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.

In her fiction, Jessie Brown Pounds preserved the flavor of Ohio’s rural village culture as the nineteenth century drew to a close. This anthology rediscovers Pounds’s varied works and reminds modern students that Middle-Western culture included women writers as social critics and mythmakers. Included are short stories, sketches, one undated short story published posthumously in 1921, and Rachael Sylvestre, a first-person historical novel written in 1904.

Written from a vantage point both high and deliberately narrow, the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell nevertheless deal in the universal themes that would become a substantial part of his oeuvre: pride, greed, and the strange drivers of human behavior.
More explorations of relationships and vanity than plot-driven narratives, Powell’s early works reveal the stirrings of the unequaled style, ear for dialogue, and eye for irony that would reach their caustic peak in his epic, A Dance to the Music of Time.

In Afternoon Men, the earliest and perhaps most acid of Powell’s novels, we meet the museum clerk William Atwater, a young man stymied in both his professional and romantic endeavors. Immersed in Atwater’s coterie of acquaintances—a similarly unsatisfied cast of rootless, cocktail-swilling London sophisticates—we learn of the conflict between his humdrum work life and louche social scene, of his unrequited love, and, during a trip to the country, of the absurd contrivances of proper manners.

A satire that verges on nihilism and a story touched with sexism and equal doses self-loathing and self-medication, AfternoonMen has a grim edge to it. But its dialogue sparks and its scenes grip, and for aficionados of Powell, this first installment in his literary canon will be a welcome window onto the mind of a great artist learning his craft.

“One of the most beautiful, most important books I've read for years.”—Klassekampen

 

“Espedal has written an amazingly rich novel, which will assuredly stand out as one of the year’s best and will also further fortify the quality of Norwegian literature abroad.”— Adresseavisen

 

“Against Art attacks literature while at the same time being intensely literary. Our greatest sorrows and torments, the individual experiences often so anemic in art, find a voice of their own.”—Morgenbladet

 

“Against Art moves me with its maternal history and proves yet again that Tomas Espedal writes great novels.”—Dag og Tid

The companion volume to Espedal's Against Art, written in his characteristic poetic prose.

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal’s work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal’s own experiences. Against Nature, a companion volume to Espedal's earlier Against Art, is an examination of factory work, love’s labor, and the work of writing. Espedal dwells on the notion that working is required in order to live in compliance with society, but is this natural? And how can it be natural when he is drawn toward impossible things—impossible love, books, myths, and taboos? He is drawn into the stories of Abélard and Héloïse, of young Marguerite Duras and her Chinese lover, and soon realizes that he, too, is turning into a person who must choose to live against nature.

“A masterpiece of literary understatement. Everybody who has recently been thirsting for a new, unexhausted realism, like water in the desert, will love this book.”—Die Zeit, on the Norwegian edition

Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.

Scottish by birth, but long a resident of America, Mary Perrault is married to a Swiss-French gardener. Their life in South Encina, though anything but lavish, is gay, serene, and friendly. As their children mature and the world outside, less peaceful and secure than the Perrault home, begins to threaten the equilibrium of their tranquil lives, Mrs. Perrault becomes increasingly aware of a moral wilderness rising from the physical wilderness which her generation has barely conquered.

Her struggle to influence, while not invading the lives of her children, is the focus of this novel of family life during the Depression years.

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 Agents and Patients, we return to London with the newly wealthy, memorably named Blore-Smith: an innocent, decent enough chap . . . and a drip. Vulnerable to the machinations of those with less money and more lust, Blore-Smith falls victim to two con artists whose ploys carry him through to the art galleries and whorehouses of Paris, Berlin, and beyond.
 
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.

Incorporating photographs, diagrams, and drawings, Kluge captures the overwhelming rapidity and totality of the organized destruction of his town from numerous perspectives, bringing to life both the strategy from above and the futility of the response on the ground. Originally published in German in 1977, this exquisite report, fragmentary and unfinished, is one of Kluge’s most personal works and one of the best examples of his literary technique.

 

The English edition of Air Rair includes additional new stories by the author and features an appreciation of the work by W. G. Sebald.

 

“More than a few of Kluge’s many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest.”—Susan Sontag

Don Morales tells stories. He tells lots of stories. About Chimbote, the Peruvian town where he lives. About fishing, the lifeblood of the town. And about change, which is not always the same as progress. Stories about the first people to inhabit the region and stories about the people who live there now. Stories about the early people’s love of the land and more recent people’s destruction of it. Stories about how people used to get along with one another and stories about how things got to be so bad that the government began to murder its own citizens.

Don Morales is a wise man. But he is also a sad man, mourning the loss of the past, of better times, of brotherhood. With his short, evocative stories—told with simplicity and beauty—he pulls his readers closer to him, as if he were speaking directly to us. For the good fishermen of Tancay, life was better yesterday than it is today. It was better to live in harmony with the sea. When they lived in harmony with the natural world, there was harmony in the human world, too.

With a nostalgic feel, yet reflecting Peru’s current political instability, this is a delightful book with an important message. When the natural order is disrupted, it is not only fish that die. When nature dies, so might we all.

Nikos Kazantzakis is no stranger to the heroes of Greek antiquity. In this historical novel based on the life of Alexander the Great, Kazantzakis has drawn on both the rich tradition of Greek legend and the documented manuscripts from the archives of history to recreate an Alexander in all his many-faceted images—Alexander the god; Alexander the descendant of Heracles performing the twelve labors; Alexander the mystic, the daring visionary destined to carry out a divine mission; Alexander the flesh-and-blood mortal who, on occasion, is not above the common soldier’s brawling and drinking.

The novel, which resists the temptation to portray Alexander in the mantle of purely romantic legend, covers his life from age fifteen to his death at age thirty-two. It opens with Alexander’s first exploit, the taming of the horse, Bucephalas, and is seen in great part through the eyes of his young neighbor who eventually becomes an officer in his army and follows him on his campaign to conquer the world.

The book, which was written primarily as an educational adjunct for young readers, is intended for the adult mind as well, and like the legends of old, is entertaining as well as instructive for readers of all ages. It was originally published in Greece in serial form in 1940, and was republished in a complete volume in 1979.

Newly translated, this classic novel is sure to delight readers of all ages as it explores the legendary conqueror’s life, ambitions, and humanity.

Nikos Kazantzakis’s Alexander the Great is a biographical novel about one of antiquity’s greatest political and military leaders. In Kazantzakis’s story, Alexander of Macedonia does not conquer for conquest’s sake; instead, he seeks to spread the light of Hellenism to the known world, unite humanity through Greek ideals and culture, and bring together East and West.

The story begins in Pella, the lavish capital of Macedonia, in the fourth century BCE. A teenager named Stefanos rushes to the royal stadium for a remarkable event that has drawn every male citizen of this capital city: the taming of a wild and uniquely powerful horse named Bucephalus. Relying on raw strength and force, even seasoned generals fail to subdue Bucephalus; but through skill, kindness, and insight, the fifteen-year-old Alexander is able to befriend the beast. Alexander’s symbolic taming of chaos foretells his rise to power and demonstrates the qualities he will carry with him throughout his lifelong campaign of conquest.

Through the eyes of Stefanos, who becomes Alexander’s personal attendant and most trusted companion, Kazantzakis follows the Macedonian army through triumphant campaigns across Persia, Egypt, and India, greatly expanding the boundaries of the ancient Hellenic world. Kazantzakis presents Alexander not only as an ingenious military strategist but also as a reflective human being. Alexander oscillates between the human and the divine but will ultimately be betrayed by the former. Kazantzakis narrates Alexander’s struggles and conquests all the way to Babylon, where he meets his untimely death at just thirty-three years of age.

This iconic novel also explores Alexander’s profound relationship with his mentor, Aristotle, who instills in him a lifelong thirst for knowledge. Alexander the Great offers a compelling blend of history, myth, and philosophy and will appeal to readers fascinated by ancient Greece, epic heroes, and humanity’s timeless quest for the meaning of life.

Jack and Annie Fallon had been living what seemed the ideal life with their son Riley, spending the school year in Portland, where Jack was a professor of Native American history, and summers at Jack’s family ranch in northeastern Oregon, on land surrounded by the Umatilla Indian Reservation. But a good way of life can disappear almost overnight, as the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla peoples already know. Now the teenage Riley is in rehab, Jack has disappeared without a trace into the remote wilderness, and Annie is recovering from her own hospitalization following a mental health crisis.

Still fragile, a bereft Annie returns to the ranch, where she is befriended by Leona, a Umatilla-Cayuse neighbor. Leona, as it turns out, has a long connection to the family that even Jack never knew about. At the time of his disappearance, Jack had been grappling with his family’s legacy—with the conflicts and consequences of white settlement of native ground. Three generations before he was born, the family ranch was taken from the Umatilla reservation through the Allotment Act. Jack’s mother died when he was six, but his father’s stern presence still cast a shadow on the land.

“Survival is hard sometimes,” Leona says, but with her help, Annie is able to bring Riley home from rehab and begin the work of healing their small family, learning, season by season, how to go on living without Jack. Leona, Riley’s friends Alex and Mattie, and old neighbors Gus and Audrey become a larger family for Annie as they share the stories that connect them—long-silenced stories from both cultures that could solve the mystery of Jack’s disappearance.

In prose that is lyrical and clear-eyed, All Coyote’s Children weaves an unforgettable tale of cultures and families caught in the inescapable web of who they are and what they have inherited.

"All is true," realist writers would say of their work, to which critics now respond: All is art and artifice. Offering a new approach to reading nineteenth-century realist fiction, Lilian R. Furst seeks to reconcile these contradictory claims. In doing so, she clarifies the deceptions, appropriations, intentions, and ultimately the power of literary realism.
In close textual analyses of works ranging across European and American literature, including paradigmatic texts by Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Thomas Mann, Furst shows how the handling of time, the presentation of place, and certain narrational strategies have served the realists’ claim. She demonstrates how readers today, like those a hundred years ago, are convinced of the authenticity of the created illusion by such means as framing, voice, perspective, and the slippage from metonymy to metaphor. Further, Furst reveals the pains the realists took to conceal these devices, and thus to protect their claim to be employing a simple form. Taking into account both the claims and the covert strategies of these writers, All Is True puts forward an alternative to the conventional polarized reading of the realist text—which emerges here as neither strictly an imitation of an extraneous model nor simply a web of words but a brilliantly complex imbrication of the two.
A major statement on one of the most enduring forms in cultural history, this book promises to alter not only our view of realist fiction but our understanding of how we read it.

An irreverent picaresque, All Night Movie follows the adventures of a young woman determined to conquer the world. A rogues' gallery of labor union leaders, cultists, lesbians, murderers, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, and visitors to a disconcertingly erotic telephone booth accompany the picara as she pushes the limits established in patriarchal postdictatorship Argentina. With lyric prose, Alicia Borinsky creates a hypnotic kaleidoscope of voices--a tantalizing and illuminating mix of the pop culture, politics, sexuality, tango, and cinema of an enigmatic society that celebrates its own demise.

The fourteen stories in All Roads explore childhood trauma, addiction, and the reckless materialism of mainstream American culture. Set mostly in Chicago, the stories range from the perspective of a nine-year-old girl intensely observing her new stepmother to a woman trying to make sense of her body after cancer surgery. The collection offers a complex and candid view of class privilege, gender oppression, and the idiosyncratic forms of refuge we take in a culture that demands our self-objectification.
 
In “Charlie,” a new mother tells the story of her confusing attachment to a former mentor, uncovering the deep pain that has largely defined her life. In “The Fathers,” an awkward bachelor party leads to an unexpected moment of overdue connection between the bride’s father and brothers. The title story tracks the drunken monologue of a nihilistic middle-aged man attempting to seduce a young woman into a threesome, while “The Deal” alternates perspectives between a cynical divorced woman and her adult son, the only person with whom she’s been able to sustain a lasting relationship. Relentlessly self-revealing, these characters vacillate between vulnerability and self-protection, exposing the necessity of both. Dark, comic, and altogether unforgettable, All Roads introduces an original voice attuned to the docility of the stingray as well as the ancient spear of its tail.

In the middle of the night, somewhere in Oklahoma—or is it Missouri?—a bus hurtles down an anonymous American highway. Its passengers, among them two children traveling on their own, a retired salesman, an unwed teenage mother, an unemployed chemist, and the driver who ferries and broods over all of them, are in the middle of their journeys. Soon, two of the passengers will be lost, and then the bus itself will lose its way.

The open road and, before that, the open frontier have long been part of the American romance, cherished features of the nation's traditional vision of itself. In her latest novel, A. G. Mojtabai stands this tradition on its head. Instead of the expansive thrust into unknown territory, the camaraderie of the open road, adventure, and the joys of vagabondage, we witness constriction, isolation, and fear. Instead of freedom, we find people fleeing from coast to coast in search of home and the ever-beckoning, ever-retreating promise of a better life. Richly drawn, evocative, and thought-provoking, All That Road Going is a challenging new departure from the road novel canon. 

How do we survive our family, stay bound to our community, and keep from losing ourselves?  In All That Work and Still No Boys, Kathryn Ma exposes the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observes the long shadows cast by history and displacement. 

Here are ten stories that wound and satisfy in equal measure. Ma probes the immigrant experience, most particularly among northern California’s Chinese Americans, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss.  A boy exposed to racial hatred finds out the true difference between his mother and his father.  Two old rivals briefly lay down their weapons, but loneliness and despair won’t let them forget the past.  A young Beijing tour guide with a terrible family secret must take an adopted Chinese girl and her American family to visit an orphanage. And in the prize-winning title story, a mother refuses to let her son save her life, insisting instead on a sacrifice by her daughter. 

Intimate in detail and universal in theme, these stories give us the compelling voice of an exciting new author whose intelligence, insight, and wit impart a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love. Even through the tensions Ma creates so deftly, the peace and security that come from building and belonging to one’s own community shine forth.

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.

Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, award-winning author Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a captivating narrative from testimony, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, reconstructing the incident and the lives behind the legendary song. This singularly original account pushes narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, but more importantly, it renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.

The enigmatic stories in this haunting collection deal with individuals striving to live outside the dominant American culture—people who do not want to be incorporated, appropriated, or consumed. Their battles are waged on interior and external landscapes, pitting clarity against confusion, faith against fear, the marginalized against the powerful, the passive against the aggressive.

In one story, a Mennonite mother leaves her alcoholic husband and moves with her three children into an abandoned house and back to a life of faith, though a new faith, one of her own making. In another story, a teenager living in the darkness of a failing rust-belt city holds before her the only light she sees, her child, to guide the way as she moves across the border and beyond.

A young artist in New York City pursues a simple life, a passive life, the yielding life of a Mennonite, even as she immerses herself in the gritty urban culture of the East Village. Another woman, given a short time to live, sets up ant farms on her stoop in Alphabet City and is determined to discover how worlds are made by watching the ants and only the ants. A Vietnam veteran finds meaning as a dishwasher at the Catholic Worker, where he circles on his stump of a leg, aware that the thing that is missing, that cannot be seen, is most present.

Many of these stories experiment with the form of writing itself. They reflect the vision of an artist who remains separate—in the world, but not of the world—and whose goal is not to dazzle or entertain, but simply, humbly to be present for each word.

All about Skin features twenty-seven stories by women writers of color whose short fiction has earned them a range of honors, including John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and inclusion in the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry anthologies. The prose in this multicultural anthology addresses such themes as racial prejudice, media portrayal of beauty, and family relationships and spans genres from the comic and the surreal to startling realism. It demonstrates the power and range of some of the most exciting women writing short fiction today.
            The stories are by American writers Aracelis González Asendorf, Jacqueline Bishop, Glendaliz Camacho, Learkana Chong, Jennine Capó Crucet, Ramola D., Patricia Engel, Amina Gautier, Manjula Menon, ZZ Packer, Princess Joy L. Perry, Toni Margarita Plummer, Emily Raboteau, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Metta Sáma, Joshunda Sanders, Renee Simms, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Hope Wabuke, and Ashley Young; Nigerian writers Unoma Azuah and Chinelo Okparanta; and Chinese writer Xu Xi.

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

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers  

These poems remind us that we are all in the thick of things, the rich and complicated givens. Moving fluently from subjects as diverse as the surface of Europa to a tiny spider in a tear of wallpaper, from Pythagoras at Tyre to the wings of a dragonfly, they are in love with the world and the deep seriousness of living. Often lavish themselves, they reflect that fact that the author is a visual artist as well as a poet of insightful and sustained imagination.

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 new collection of stories from celebrated Kentucky author Gurney Norman “A beautiful book” … “A remarkable, eye-opening set of stories” … “Brilliantly arranged” … “An exhilarating mirroring of consciousness itself” … “Grand and important, funny and heartbreaking” … “An act of grace” Allegiance is a brilliant and original set of stories by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Gurney Norman. Spanning forty years of work, Allegiance is an autobiography told through stories—a rich personal journey into Norman’s life, place, and consciousness. In classic short stories, lyrical meditations, folktales, dreamscapes, and stream-of-consciousness writing, Norman imaginatively weaves together the threads of his life. Each story builds on what has come before, “prisms enlarging the effect of the whole …” The stories are humorous and heartbreaking, told mainly in the voice of Norman’s fictional narrator, Wilgus Collier. From his working-class childhood in the coalfields of Appalachia to the center of the 1960s counterculture and back again to Kentucky, Norman’s journey has been a life of many movements. This is a jacketed hardcover edition of Allegiance, featuring a foreword by poet Leatha Kendrick, an author’s note, and an original cover painting by Appalachian artist Pam Oldfield Meade. A selection of nonfiction pieces comprises the book’s epilogue. Published by Old Cove Press

While many Jews have picked Florida as the perfect place to retire, Matt Glassman has chosen it as the place to begin his adulthood. Perhaps that's because the pressures of life have always reminded him about his grandfather who mysteriously disappeared from the family twenty years ago. Now, while he tries to begin a family of his own, he also builds a relationship with the one person who might know the truth about his grandfather?s disappearance: his grandmother. She's remained stubbornly reticent on the topic all these years, but when a familiar old man shows up at Glassman's office he thinks he may finally get some answers.

Honorable Mention, 2006 The Society of Midland Authors Adult Fiction Award

For decades, Richard Stern has been acclaimed as one of the American masters of the short story. Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories brings together for the first time forty-nine of Stern's best short works and novellas-from "Dr. Cahn's Visit," which The New Republic praised as "the very best very short story in the English language," to classics like "Teeth" and "Wanderers."

Stern's stories-witty, moving, always full of energy-never sacrifice storytelling to mere elegance or wandering wisdom. This collection demonstrates Stern's astonishing ability to portray people from all walks of life, their flawed relationships to ideas, their sometimes bizarre relationships with lovers and friends, their often brilliant, if skewed, appraisals of themselves. The stories always reflect an abiding compassion for his characters whoever they are and whatever their origins. All exist within the politics and workplaces and bedrooms of the real world. All are incorrigibly human.

Brian Sousa leaves sentiment and saudade behind in Almost Gone, a linked collection spanning four generations of a Portuguese immigrant family. In this hardscrabble world, the youth struggle with the secrets left behind by their elders, as their parents fought through the pain and joy of assimilation. Told through various perspectives, Almost Gone is a working-class tale of survival that finds no easy answers, but cuts straight to the bone.