Results by title

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time

A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver.

As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.
 

WINNER OF THE FC2 CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE 

Double-Check for Sleeping Children is the newest work by award-winning writer Kirstin Allio

At once formal and tidal, damning and dreaming, Kirstin Allio’s Double-Check for Sleeping Children is charged with prayer, curse, redemption and abasement. Does truth come from reason, or beauty, or suffering? It takes the inner lives of outsiders, dark mirrors, and false ceilings to find an answer.

Families split by social class, a wealthy young widow, addicts, hunters, poor whites, a green card bride and a nursing mother: in twenty poetically and morally propulsive short stories, Allio disquiets the sublimated and palpates shadows. She leads us through the sometimes flooded, other times flood-lit halls of the human soul.

Part menacing, macabre Mary Gaitskill, part Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, and with the taut, wry, tell-all detail of Elizabeth Hardwick, Double-Check for Sleeping Children deals in codedness and transgression. The stories explore coming of age in middle age, anxiety about time and technology, inverted revelation. “What was I supposed to do with Basho and Mosie?” Sheila asks herself about her children in “Uncollected Territories.” “Be my real self? Hand myself over, do what you will with me, plant your strange selves in my private soil?”

It’s the year 2039, and Lake Michigan is mysteriously emptied of water. The planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field are failing, and fires burn ominously throughout the empty lake bed. In this seemingly endless desert east of Chicago, three factions are locked in conflict: the original end-of-times cultist settlers who follow religious visionary Fulcrum Maneuvers and worship a giant World Worm they deem responsible for the drained lake; the megacorporation Quadrilateral, a mega-consumerist, planned-community combine of bourgeois city planners developing what is now called the Wildland-Urban Interface; and the Blackout Angels, landlocked punk pirates raised in Quadrilateral cities, who oppose everything and everyone.

In Davis Schneiderman’s shocking novel, Drain, freedom, creativity, and transgression wage war with forces of control, censorship, and conformity. The wordscapes of William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, the dystopic nightmares of Philip K. Dick, and the transgressive punch of Chuck Palahniuk and Georges Bataille together convene in this stunning and thrilling work.

A stark, hypnotic exploration of memory, identity, and the fractured stories we inherit, and invent, to survive

Driscoe is a stylistically daring novel that plunges deep into the unstable terrain of memory, identity, and the stories we tell to endure collapse. Hypnotic and recursive, it moves through contradiction as both method and meaning, tracing how belief hardens, fractures, and reforms under pressure. The prose hums with unease, balancing precision and disorientation as certainty dissolves into overlapping versions of the same events.

At its center is Jouska, a man suspended between narratives of success and failure, loyalty and betrayal, progress and ruin. He is pursued by obsessive memories of his ex-wife, his brother, and the elusive figure of Driscoe, by turns entrepreneur, fraud, chemist, builder, trickster. Everyone claims a story about Driscoe. None align, yet all insist on their authority. Entangled in familial conflict and his own faltering recollections, Jouska can neither trust nor abandon any version of the truth.

When Jouska receives an email announcing the death of his superior, the already fragile architecture of his life splinters further. What follows is a journey through a bureaucratic labyrinth where death is both confirmed and denied, and where greed, doubt, presence, and absence pulse relentlessly. Driscoe emerges as a narrative dirge for a collapsing American middle class and the myths that sustained it, tracing the impossibility of aligning personal loss with cultural unraveling. This novel will resonate with readers drawn to literary fiction that is intellectually demanding, formally inventive, and attuned to the psychic costs of living amid social and economic decay.
 

This powerful collection of essays and short stories provides a unique perspective on the black civil rights movement over the past twenty-five years. A long-time activist, Michael Thelwell was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the early 1960s, a founder of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in 1970, author of the widely praised novel The Harder They Come published in 1980, and an organizer for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign in 1984. Thelwell is a writer of rare grace, integrity, and strong political convictions.

The collection begins with three stories. Set in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s, the stories explore how individuals manage to preserve their dignity in a world of racism and violence. The next six essays, also written in the 1960s, are historical and journalistic. They discuss the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the situation in the South as seen by SNCC workers, the political challenges in Mississippi, the articulation of the Black Power movement, the causes of the black student revolt at Cornell, and the need for Black Studies as the intellectual offensive in the struggle for black liberation.

The section that follows is composed of literary pieces: two appreciative essays on James Baldwin, two critical reviews of William Styron and his treatment of Nat Turner, an excoriating assessment of V. S. Naipaul, a profile of Amos Tutuola, and a thoughtful analysis of the social responsibility of the black writer.

The final essay examines the history of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and comments on the political climate of the 1980s.