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J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold is a gripping tale of post-Civil War battles against racism and systemic injustice. Originally published in 1896, this novel reveals an African American community of individuals dedicated to education, journalism, fraternal organizations, and tireless work serving the needs of those abandoned by the political process of the white world. Jones challenges conventional wisdom by addressing a range of subjects—from interracial relationships to forced labor in coal mines—that virtually no other novelist of the time was willing to approach. With the addition of an introduction and appendix, this new edition reveals the difficult foundations upon which African Americans built a platform to address injustice; generate opportunities; and play a prominent role in American social, economic, and political life.

Growing up, identical twins Paula and Artis speak in one voice—until they can't. After years apart, with lives, partners, and children of their own, they are reunited on the occasion of their father's funeral. Seeking to repair the damage wrought upon their relationship by outside forces, the twins retrace their early lives to uncover what happened—but risk unraveling their carefully constructed cocoons.
Written in spare,lyrical prose,Halfis an achingly beautiful story of intimacy and loss, revealing the complexity—and cost—of sharing your life entirely with someone else. Sharon Harrigan deftly explores how fierce lovecanalso be the very thing that leadsto heartbreak and betrayal.

In Ann Harleman's remarkable debut collection, men and women of extraordinary passions look for and sometimes find the hidden heart of ordinary life. Testing themselves and each other, they search for ways to connect. "Understanding," says the troubled voyeur-narrator of "Imaginary Colors," "is the booby prize"; these characters go for experience. Reckless explorers of inner space, they try the limits of their lives.

A gravely ill woman seeks forgiveness from her grown-up daughters for an adulterous past which she does not really regret. A boy watches anxiously—and enviously—while his brother flaunts an interracial love affair in front of their dangerous father. In strike-torn Warsaw during the rise of Solidarity, an American professor and his Polish housekeeper reach toward each other from their respective cages of loneliness. A girl's determined pursuit of her first sexual experience brings her more, and less, than she bargained for.

Harleman combines a clear eye with a generous heart, revealing her characters-misguided, selfish, loving, brave—through a compassionate, often humorous probing of their inner and outer worlds. In "It Was Humdrum" a system analyst hires a detective to find the mother who left him as an infant, while his young wife leaves him daily for afternoon trysts with her Puerto Rican lover. A woman assaulted by a teenage gang escapes physically unharmed but forever changed. The past overtakes a woman who has married for love, not of her husband, but of his small daughter. A greeting card poet pursued by stereotyped images of happiness flees from the woman he loves and the brother he never knew he had.

The supple language of these twelve stories—wise, funny, delighting in the sensuous—makes us feel the beauty and terror of a fully lived life. Harleman's characters, whether they succeed or fail, show us the way to a deeper exploration of our own lives.

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women—social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers—who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, they look to other women for solidarity, stability, and validation. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don’t. Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

Dark family secrets follow Coe as he drops out of college and attempts to start a new life with fellow outlaws in the mountains of Wyoming. 

“Fleeing a mental illness diagnosis pushed by his family, Coe drops out of college and hits the road, ending up in Wyoming, where he falls in with a group living illegally on the mountain above a resort town. Here he works muscle jobs, climbs mountains, befriends a pair of brothers new to the sport, and slips under the spell of Benny, a Vietnam war vet who sleeps beneath a rocky overhang, ascends cliffs like a mountain goat, and seems to know things he shouldn't about Coe's French grandfather. At Benny's command, the group climbs routes well beyond the brothers' abilities and kicks off a dangerous vandalism war against the resort corporation. An old cook warns Coe away from Benny, suggesting the secret to his identity is encoded in a bible passage. Meanwhile, from letters sent by his great aunt, Coe receives contradictory accounts of his grandfather's past. As those close to Coe meet tragic ends, he is forced to confront the frightful notion that this Wyoming violence may connect to a crime committed a half century before. Is the old cook right about Benny and the biblical mystery? Is Coe slipping into mental illness? High on the mountain, alone with Benny, Coe must cast his lot.

"A very interesting collection . . . both for the way that Henderson's work links the literature of the Harlem Renaissance with the black protest literature of Richard Wright and others, and for Henderson's subject matter and the places that he chose to publish."
--Nellie McKay, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"There is really no other black fiction quite like this that I know of, from the 1920s through the 1930s . . . That Henderson was publishing stories in a newspaper and magazine for the mass market after the period when 'the vogue of the Negro' had allegedly ended is significant in itself. The stories are interesting in relation to both the Negro renaissance and the turn to proletarian fiction."
--George Hutchinson, Indiana University


Harlem Calling collects carefully crafted short stories about life in Alabama, Memphis, and New York City that dramatize the profound ambivalence many blacks felt about their participation in the Great Migration. George Wylie Henderson's tales of the rural South are sometimes nostalgic but also present the hard work and violence of everyday life there, and his stories set in Harlem present the glamour of urban life, while they also are concerned with poverty and social mores.

Henderson enjoyed a widespread popular audience for his periodical fiction in the 1930s and '40s and was a regular contributor to the New York Daily News and Redbook magazine, where the seventeen stories in Harlem Calling were originally published. Until the publication of Harlem Calling, Henderson had been chiefly known for his critically acclaimed 1935 novel about an Alabama farmhand, Ollie Miss, and the 1946 sequel narrating her son's migration to Harlem, Jule. Contemporary critics have favorably compared Henderson's writing to that of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, as it captures the life of the black migrant with a style that embraces simplicity and honesty.

Collected here by literary scholar and editor David G. Nicholls, and contextualized with an informative and insightful introduction, Harlem Calling provides a unique perspective on the Harlem Renaissance and on the African American literary tradition.

George Wylie Henderson (1904-65) was born in Alabama, worked in the printing trade, and began writing fiction shortly after graduating from the Tuskegee Institute. He migrated to Harlem with his wife in the late 1920s and published his first story in the New York Daily News in 1932. He also published two novels, Ollie Miss (1935) and Jule (1946). David G. Nicholls is the Director of Book Publications for the Modern Language Association and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. He is author of Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America.

As he goes about his milking chores on a cold October morning, Bishop Leon Shetler daydreams of escaping the Ohio winter and taking a bus to the Pinecraft Amish community in Florida for a vacation. His reverie is suddenly interrupted when young Crist Burkholder enters the barn, head down, hat in hand, to make a confession. ”I just killed Glenn Spiegle.”

“An Amish murderer?” Sheriff Robertson asks when he arrives on the scene. “Who will believe that?” But Burkholder is adamant about his guilt, fueled by the passion of his love for Vesta Miller, the young woman both he and Spiegle so desperately wanted to marry.

No sooner does the sheriff start his investigation than he learns of two more murders in the Pinecraft community, and a startling connection is made. There’s no way around it — Professor Mike Branden will have to put his research trip on hold and, along with detective Ricky Niell, travel south to investigate. There they discover the disturbing truth about Spiegle’s conversion to the Amish faith and the reason for the long–smoldering hatred that has reached into the secluded pastoral valleys of Holmes County.

In Harmless as Doves, P. L. Gaus takes the action to Florida in one of the most exciting mysteries in this series. This is Gaus at his best.

David Huddle’s twenty-first book, Hazel is a portrait of a woman both ordinary and exceptional, composed in glimpses of her life from child to elder. Hazel is a loner and somewhat of a pill. Although she’s not likeable in the regular ways, she’s rigorously honest in the way she examines her world, and in relationships with a few other people. Hazel’s nephew John Robert is captivated by the mystery of such a uniquely serious person. He assembles episodes from Hazel’s life, and the novel reveals a lifelong struggle by someone whose integrity is absolute. Huddle proves the complete life of almost anyone would be profoundly complex if seen whole.

A cougar attacks a jogger in the suburbs of a western city. Charlie Sayers, facing retirement as a wildlife biologist at a downsized state agency, is drawn into the search for the lion. He gets caught up in the conflict between wildlife habitat and an increasingly developed environment as, teetering between crisis and farce, he tries to piece together the puzzle of his own life.

Winner of the 2002 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize

This story of love and revolution takes place during the Argentine struggle for independence (1810-1820) and focuses on the character of the national hero, Manuel Belgrano. Belgrano's story is told through the voices of the real heroes of the novel—María Kumbá a mulatto healer-priestess, fighter, and nurse to the common soldiers; and Gregorio Rivas, mestizo son of a well-to-do Spanish businessman.

In this novelette, William Gilmore Simms records one of the awful realities of America's early frontier, that of women trapped in ill-fated marriages. Forced into a union with her lover, Helen Halsey is exploited and victimized in a domestic situation from which there is no release.Utilizing the compression of the short novel form, Simms weaves elaborate plot lines of violence, romance, and intrigue to create a fast-moving, action-packed tale of an America just beginning its search for identity, justice, and spiritual truth. Edgar Allan Poe said of Simms that "in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical arrangement of his themes," he surpassed "any of his countrymen."

The newest novel by Elisabeth Sheffield, the award-winning author of Gone and Fort Da

What does it mean to really live? Or not?
 
Set in eastern, upstate New York, Helen Keller Really Lived features a fortyish former barfly and grifter who must make a living in the wake of her wealthy husband’s death, and who finds work in a clinic helping women seeking reproductive assistance. The other main character is the grifter’s dead ex-husband, a Ukrainian hooker-to-healer success story, who prior to his demise was a gynecologist and after, an amateur folklorist, or ghostlorist, who collected and provided scholarly commentary on the stories of his fellow “revenants.”
 
Their intertwined stories explore the mistakes, miscarriages, inadequacies, and defeats that may have led to their divorce, including his failure (according to her) to “fully live.”
 
As it investigates the theme of what it means to “really live” or not, Elisabeth Sheffield’s brilliant new novel is also an exploration of virtual reality in the sense of the experience provided by literature. It is a novel awash in a multitude of voices, from the obscenity-laced, Nabokovian soliloquys of the dead Ukrainian doctor, to the trade-school / midcentury-romance-novel-constrained style of his dead mother-in-law.

Originally published by Gnomon Press in 1995Hell and Ohio: Stories of Southern Appalachia brings together a powerful collection of stories that illuminate the complexities of contemporary Appalachian life. Drawing on the landscapes, communities, and traditions of eastern Kentucky and the greater Southern Appalachian region, Chris Holbrook crafts nuanced portraits of people negotiating family ties, economic hardship, migration, memory, and belonging. His characters confront loss, resilience, and change while remaining deeply rooted in the culture and terrain that shape their lives. Written with remarkable empathy and a keen ear for regional speech, these stories move beyond stereotypes to reveal the richness and contradictions of mountain communities. Holbrook's fiction explores the tensions between home and exile, tradition and modernity, and individual aspiration and communal identity, offering readers an intimate view of a region often misunderstood but rarely rendered with such authenticity. Praised by novelist Robert Morgan for capturing "the voices" and "living vivid details of contemporary life in the mountains," and described in Appalachian Journal as "beautifully crafted, nuanced, empathetic," Hell and Ohio stands as an important contribution to Appalachian literature and the modern American short story.

The characters who populate Jenn Scott’s debut collection are both trapped and adrift. Stuck in dead-end jobs or stagnant relationships or simply caught in the grip of their own inertia, they opt out, act out, and strike out, searching for emotional sustenance in a landscape of pointless patterns and dwindling hopes. Cuttingly clever remarks and excoriating observations act as shields—thrown up to protect an aching vulnerability, a bewildering sense of loss . . . of being lost in a world rife with expectations, where responsibility is ritualistic and meaning elusive.
“The beauty of being young was, in fact, the ability to project all that might happen. She recognizes, suddenly, how less grandiose the projection of her plans has become. It’s like she was once standing looking an expanse of field, but now she’s trapped in a hallway hung with too many pastel prints of landscapes that refuse to interest her. It’s as if she’s moved her entire life inside a dental office, minus the gas that sings a person to sleep while their cavities are filled, their roots fixed.”
Assumed identities, Russian mail-order brides, pie theft, lost (and found) cleavers, coworkers who commit murder, the sudden ballooning of breasts, conversations with the (surprisingly opinionated) vegetables in a restaurant’s walk-in cooler: in stories sharply funny and deeply poignant, situations that delight and discomfit, Scott explores “the complicated, or simple, ways in which we settle.”
 

One of the preeminent authors of the early twentieth century, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) produced fourteen ground-breaking plays, nine novels, and more than fifty short stories. Her work was popular and critically acclaimed during her lifetime, with her novels appearing on best-seller lists and her stories published in major magazines and in The Best American Short Stories. Many of her short works display her remarkable abilities as a humorist, satirizing cultural conventions and the narrowness of small-town life. And yet they also evoke serious questions—relevant as much today as during Glaspell’s lifetime—about society’s values and priorities and about the individual search for self-fulfillment. While the classic “A Jury of Her Peers” has been widely anthologized in the last several decades, the other stories Glaspell wrote between 1915 and 1925 have not been available since their original appearance. This new collection reprints “A Jury of Her Peers”—restoring its original ending—and brings to light eleven other outstanding stories, offering modern readers the chance to appreciate the full range of Glaspell’s literary skills.
       Glaspell was part of a generation of midwestern writers and artists, including Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who migrated first to Chicago and then east to New York. Like these other writers, she retained a deep love for and a deep ambivalence about her native region. She parodied its provincialism and narrow-mindedness, but she also celebrated its pioneering and agricultural traditions and its unpretentious values. Witty, gently humorous, satiric, provocative, and moving, the stories in this timely collection run the gamut from acerbic to laugh-out-loud funny to thought-provoking. In addition, at least five of them provide background to and thematic comparisons with Glaspell’s innovative plays that will be useful to dramatic teachers, students, and producers.
      With its thoughtful introduction by two widely published Glaspell scholars, Her America marks an important contribution to the ongoing critical and scholarly efforts to return Glaspell to her former preeminence as a major writer. The universality and relevance of her work to political and social issues that continue to preoccupy American discourse—free speech, ethics, civic justice, immigration, adoption, and gender—establish her as a direct descendant of the American tradition of short fiction derived from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest literary artists and winner of the Nobel prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello wrote the novel Her Husband in 1911, before he produced any of the well-known plays with which his name is most often associated today. Her Husband—translated here for the first time into English—is a profoundly entertaining work, by turns funny, bitingly satirical, and tinged with anguish. As important as any of the other works in Pirandello’s oeuvre, it portrays the complexities of male/female relations in the context of a newly emerging, small but vocal Italian feminist movement.
Evoking in vivid detail the literary world in Rome at the turn of the century, Her Husband tells the story of Silvia Roncella, a talented young female writer, and her husband Giustino Boggiolo. The novel opens with their arrival in Rome after having left their provincial southern Italian hometown following the success of Silvia’s first novel, the rather humorously titled House of Dwarves. As his wife’s self-appointed (and self-important) promoter, protector, counselor, and manager, Giustino becomes the primary target of Pirandello’s satire. But the couple’s relationship—and their dual career—is also complicated by a lively supporting cast of characters, including literary bohemians with avant-garde pretensions and would-be aristocratic esthetes who are all too aware of the newly acquired power of journalists and the publishing establishment to make or break their careers. Having based many of the characters—including Silvia and Giustino—on actual literary acquaintances of his, Pirandello reacted to the novel’s controversial reception by not allowing it to be reprinted after the first printing sold out. Not until after his death were copies again made available in Italy.
Readers will find Her Husband eerily evocative of the present in myriad ways—not the least of which is contemporary society’s ongoing transformation wrought by the changing roles of men and women, wives and husbands.

Set mainly in the small towns of Alabama, the stories in Her Kind of Want ache with the relentless longing of the poor, struggling, usually discarded southern women who tell us their lives—lives that seem to revolve around men whose only presence is their absence.

Bebe, Luna, Melly, Little Hula, Dena. These are just a few of the women we meet in Jennifer Davis's award-winning collection. Women who married too fast, had children too young, and drink too much. Yet beneath their unpolished exteriors, these women are flesh and blood, and their wants and needs are as severe and deep as any.

Davis's characters relate their stories in voices as complex and raw as their southern environment. Each tale may sound slightly familiar—an unwanted pregnancy, a fast car flying down a country road—but Davis moves beyond the familiar stories of the rural South to expose the gaps that connect these women, creating startlingly real and vibrant characters.

Although often bleak and sometimes disturbing, Her Kind of Want is a celebration of southern people, their perseverance, their spirit, and their determination to make the ugly beautiful.

May 1992. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin is showing millions of communists the specter of capitalism. Yugoslavia is disintegrating. United Germany is uncertain about their next move, and communism is collapsing all around. And in a corner of old Calcutta, Herbert Sarkar, sole proprietor of a company that delivers messages from the dead, decides to give up the ghost. Decides to give up his aunt and uncle, his friends and foes, his fondness for kites, his aching heart that broke for Buki, his top terrace from where he stared up at the sky, his Ulster overcoat with buttons like big black medals, his notebook full of poems, his Park Street every evening when the sun goes down, his memory of a Russian girl running across the great black earth as the soldiers lift their guns and get ready to fire, his fairy who beat her wings against his window and filled his room with blue light .
 
Surreal, haunting, painful, beautiful and astonishing in turn, and sweeping us along from Herbert’s early orphan years to the tumultuous Naxalite times of the 1970s to the explosive events after his death, Bhattacharya’s groundbreaking novel is now available in a daring new translation and holds up before us both a fascinating character and a plaintive city. 
 

The stories in Merrill Feitell’s award-winning collection, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, examine the fleeting and unexpected moments of human connection, reminding us of the indelible impact we have on one another no matter how insignificant or anonymous we might feel under our huge, collective sky.

Feitell’s characters deal with shifting dynamics in relationships—whether they be best friends, lovers, family, or even strangers—that consistently leave them torn between two places or commitments. In the title story, Janie has undergone a painful childbirth experience and her group of friends must pioneer new dynamics while she wonders how to bring her old self back. In “Bike New York!” amid thirty thousand cyclists, a man on the brink of marriage meets a young girl who, in a tiny Brooklyn bakery, affirms both who he has been and who he is going to be. On this short detour from normal life he comes to understand “the funny thing about finding your way in the world. There was a place laid out for you . . . and even as you stepped into it, happy for the chance to rest, you wondered how you ever ended up there.”

Funny, big-hearted, and deft, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes navigates the reader through the life that happens when you’re planning other things. It is a collection of experiences, roads not taken, and the intense and unforeseen sparks of connection we hope for.

How does place impact prose? Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula explores that very question, drawing on the work of Upper Peninsula authors past and present to create a vibrant kaleidoscope of voices and experiences. Bame-wa-wa-ge-zhik-aquay, Janet Loxley Lewis, Lorine Niedecker, Catie Rosemurgy, and thirty-one other authors important to the region appear in this exceptional and diverse volume. In poetry (“Spring” by Beverly Matherne, “For Those Who Dream of Cranes” by Elinor Benedict, and “Skin on Skin” by Sally Brunk), short fiction (“North Country” by Roxane Gay, “For the Healing of All Women” by April Lindala, and “Winter Mines” by Sharon Dilworth), and novel excerpts (from Once on This Island by Gloria Whelan, South of Superior by Ellen Airgood, and Dandelion Cottage by Carroll Watson Rankin), the unique character of the U.P. materializes on the page. The book also shines a spotlight on powerful emerging voices such as Lisa Fay Coutley, Charmi Keranen, and Saara Myrene Raappana. The first of its kind, this is an anthology for all seasons, an homage to the rich literary heritage of the region.

A young woman who lives in Bavaria, Nele is quiet, an introvert, preferring to go unnoticed and keep to herself. That reticence carries over to her relationship with her father, Hero—until, that is, she realizes that he is seriously ill, and in fact may even be dying. That realization prompts her to work up the gumption to introduce him to her boyfriend, a Nigerian immigrant. This new-found courage impresses Hero, who comes to respect his daughter and entrusts her with a secret: a cardboard box whose contents are a mystery. Hero tells her to distribute what she finds inside to her mother and siblings, but only after his death.

Inspired in part by King Lear, this enchanting novel of families, secrets, and love is the first of Root Leeb’s works to be translated into English and is sure to win new fans for this successful German writer.

A timely novel evocative of the biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist by a major American writer

Hugh Helton, a prosperous attorney in a progressive town, has married his brother's ex-wife, Nora. As Hugh negotiates his relationships with his new spouse, her daughter, Jean, and parish priest Father John Riley, Nora’s growing hate for the church into which they were all born and from which they have all lapsed drives her to desperate acts of deceit and manipulation.

Father Riley himself wrestles with his own sense of purpose and mission. But when Nora attempts to discredit him as an authority figure in the minds of both her husband and their community, she uses her devoted daughter as the springboard for a series of accusations against the priest that has catastrophic results for all involved.

Grappling with issues of faith, trust, family loyalty, child molestation, and scandal in the Catholic Church, Herod’s Wife is a timely exploration of subjects from today's headlines. It illuminates the isolation and search for meaning of characters young and old, innocent and experienced, in a rapidly changing and bewildering southern landscape. Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Soul's Rising, writes, “The main plot revolves around a mother pressuring a child to express her will in a more concrete way than she would or could herself—so that the child ultimately commits acts which are both criminal and morally horrifying. . . . [Herod’s Wife] is a morality play set in contemporary conditions, with its eye on eternal verities.”

Madison Jones is the author of 10 previous novels, including An Exile and A Cry of Absence. He has won the T. S. Eliot Award from the Ingersoll Foundation, the Michael Shaara Award from the United States Civil War Center, and the Harper Lee Award.

The debut novel by Sarah Blackman (award-winning author of Mother Box and Other Tales) Hex explores the ways one woman uses language and stories to rebuild her own shattered sense of self.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.
 
The novel is written in blended parts and is crafted as an address to Thingy’s daughter, Ingrid the Second, who is now in Alice’s care. Alice attempts to tell Ingrid the story of her life: her friendship with Thingy; her troubled relationships with her father, a small-town sexual troubadour; her stepmother, a hard-minded business woman who treats all interactions as commerce; her marriage to her husband Jacob, a silent figure of tremendous will; and her growing suspicion that Ingrid is another girl-child around whom disaster accumulates. Simultaneously, Alice tells the child the kind of bedtime stories she herself has used to make sense of her world. For Alice, and thus in Hex, the line between fantasy and reality is nonexistent, the mountain is older than its geology, and the world a limbo in which everything that has ever happened is coming around again.
 
Hex is a novel about violence—the violence of the fist, of the womb, of the story. It is also a novel about language and how we use it to build a world when the one we find around us is irretrievably broken.

Hibernate is a big-hearted and brutal story collection. In these globe-spanning stories, Elizabeth Eslami follows ordinary men and women who slowly awaken to hard choices. A fishing trip forces two Montana brothers to grow up in ways they never could have imagined. A Sudanese immigrant begins a new life with his girlfriend in America, only to find himself pulled toward his mother’s past transgressions. A group of tourists visits an Indian pueblo and realizes their tour guide isn’t at all who they expected. A shipwrecked captain and his men cling to the company of narwhals and Eskimos. And in the unforgettable title story, two lovers trade life as they’ve known it for an escape into the extraordinary.
 
A masterful storyteller as likely to draw blood as to heal, Eslami moves her restless, resilient characters across an uneven landscape toward a hard earned place of peace.

The award-winning stories in David Borofka's Hints of His Mortality focus on the male of the species, on bewildered, guilt-ridden, hypersensitive characters adrift in a sea of changing roles and expectations. Although they yearn for the ideal—whether physical or spiritual—and for that sense of divine connection suggested by Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, they usually end up settling for what seems the next best thing: sex or religion.

The amorous scrimmage between male and female in these taut, intense stories is a contest that leaves no one unmarked. The hapless ministers in Borofka's memorable collection find that their daily grind of professional piety leaves them with more questions than answers. The men and boys in Hints of His Mortality are always aware of their flaws, for Borofka's vital characters have the capacity to register the shadows of their every blemish. Like Ferguson of the title story, haunted for twenty years by his failures of conscience, each protagonist experiences the inexorable fallibility of his own nature, agonizes over his moral weakness, and longs for escape from this life in which “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." Yet each is redeemed by his ongoing struggle for compassion and understanding.

Published in 1993 by Gnomon Press

In His First, Best Country, the sequel to his earlier book Newfound, Jim Wayne Miller delivers an unforgettable Appalachian novel. His lyrical prose captures the pull of home as he explores our ties to land, neighbors, and self, exploring what’s most painful and sustaining about belonging.

Twenty-five hundred scientists have been herded into an isolated site in the Nevada desert. A neutrino message of extraterrestrial origin has been received and the scientists, under the surveillance of the Pentagon, labor on His Master's Voice, the secret program set up to decipher the transmission. Among them is Peter Hogarth, an eminent mathematician. When the project reaches a stalemate, Hogarth pursues clandestine research into the classified TX Effect--another secret breakthrough. But when he discovers, to his horror, that the TX Effect could lead to the construction of a fission bomb, Hogarth decides such knowledge must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the military.

An adoring young woman encounters Adolph Hitler when her youth group sings for him. He demands her company in private, and she becomes pregnant, bearing his child but never being contacted by Hitler again. The plot follows her life as an outcast believed to be lying about the child’s parentage, and the life of her son told through her correspondence, diary entries, and from the point of view of a researcher who writes a generation later. Based on facts and documented history, author Ron Merten tells this tale with just enough creativity to make the story fascinating.

This is the first collection of short stories by W.T. Ballard. This volume is just a sampling of Ballard's most famous character Bill Lennox, a selection for both the connoisseur of crime and the lover of good, fast-moving crime/adventure stories.