Results by title

Hammer of the Dogs

Jarret Keene

University of Nevada Press, 2023

Har Mar

Hilal Isler

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Journeying through the emotional migrations of women living in the in-between

In Hilal Isler’s gripping debut story collection, Har Mar, women in the early twenty-first century navigate the complex spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves. Isler’s characters are all on the verge of something—success, rebellion, revelation—and they want to disappear as much as they want to be seen. Moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States, these stories trace migrations both physical and emotional: a nanny plots to flee the wealthy family she cares for in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul; in Har Mar, a quiet mall tucked in the suburbs of Minneapolis, a bookseller escapes her grief in a complicated relationship with a wig retailer; an actress is hired by a famous American novelist to portray her at public events.

The women in Har Mar don’t always make sound decisions, and they’re not trying to be heroes. But they are reaching—imperfectly, but fiercely—for connection, truth, and home. With moving prose and a deep sense of longing, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the margins, to live in translation, and to build a life at the edge of belonging.

Hart Island has served as a potter’s field for more than a century, holding over a million indigent, unclaimed, or unknown New Yorkers’ bodies—and yet it is little-known even among locals. In this absorbing and elegiac story, on this island shaped like a miniature boot of Italy, Gary Zebrun explores overlapping connections of family, crime, sexuality, and human decency.

Driven out of the Coast Guard during the days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Sal Cusumano hauls coffins to Hart Island with a burial crew of Rikers Island inmates and guards. Only there can he fully leave his family troubles on Staten Island behind: Justin, his adopted brother and lover; his mother, Ida, slipping rapidly into dementia; the memory of Francesco, his father, a bookie gunned down on his stoop; and his brother Antony, a Manhattan homicide detective moonlighting with the mob. But the island ceases to be his sanctuary after Antony ensnares him—and others—in a crime that involves a nocturnal visit to the potter’s field.

This compelling and intricately plotted novel moves through the shadows as its characters yearn for belonging and forgiveness. Set on the eve of the COVID pandemic, it is part love story, part crime novel, and part mystery.

Hart Island

Gary Zebrun

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

Helen Keller Really Lived

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.

Elisabeth Sheffield

University of Alabama Press, 2014

Hellé

Marcelle Tinayre

Swan Isle Press, 2026

The first major English translation of Marcelle Tinayre’s Belle Époque novel that interrogates the struggle of coming of age as a young woman in a changing modern world.

Raised in the countryside by her reclusive classicist uncle, Hellé’s ideals are put to the test when she encounters the decadence and frivolity of Parisian society. Yet there she also meets the young political theorist and resolute socialist Antoine Genesvrier, who urges Hellé and her uncle to join him in supporting the city’s poor and advocating for social justice. Meanwhile, Hellé’s head is turned by the poet Maurice Clairmont, hailed by Parisian society as “the new Byron” and eager to win over Hellé with his beauty and charm. Caught between her love of beauty and her burgeoning social concern, Hellé must choose between two men, two ideals, and two worlds, while also staying true to herself. Tinayre infuses Hellé’s voice with the classical allusions of her uncle’s education and her love for the natural world, creating a fresh, engaging narrative that awakens both the mind and heart.

In this first major English translation, Grace Ashton brings exquisite resonance of tone, register, and spirit to Marcelle Tinayre’s perennially relevant novel.

Ernest Hemingway is most often associated with Spain and Cuba, but Italy was equally important in his life and work. Hemingway in Italy, the first full-length book exploring Hemmingway’s penchant for Italy, offers a lively account of the many visits Hemingway made throughout his life to Italian locales, including Sicily, Genoa, Rapallo, Cortina, and Venice.

In evocative prose, complemented by a rich selection of historical images, Richard Owen takes us on a tour through Hemingway’s Italy. He describes how Hemingway first visited the country of the Latins during World War I, an experience that set the scene for A Farewell to Arms. Then after World War II, it was in Italy that he found inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees. Again and again, the Italian landscape—from the Venetian lagoon to the Dolomites and beyond—deeply affected one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway in Italy demonstrates that Italy stands alongside Spain as a key influence on Hemingway’s work—and why the Italians themselves hold Hemingway and his writing close to their hearts.

Hemingway in Italy

Richard Owen

Haus Publishing, 2017

Her Adult Life

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.”

Jenn Scott

Acre Books, 2017

Her Name That Day

Pietro Spirito

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Giuliana Striano is forty years old and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the daughter of Italian emigrants with a daughter of her own, Renata, now five years old. Upon the death of her mother, Giuliana learns that she had been adopted and given a new identity with a different name and a different date and place of birth. So Giuliana determines to find out who she really is, what is hidden in her past, and who her birth parents were.

Her Name That Day the story of “another” Italy set in a region that only recently became Italian and whose characters are Croatian, Slovenian, Australian, and South African, as well as Italians, precariously perched in a border community filled with secrets and scores to settle with History. Against this backdrop, the narrator endeavors to save a woman encountered by chance on the internet from becoming still another name without a history, another deracinated and disenchanted individual. In prose that is precise and engaging, as though shot through by a sense of pain both silent and inescapable, Pietro Spirito gives shape to an existential thriller in which there are neither guilty parties nor heroes, only victims and survivors.

Here Is a Game We Could Play

A dreamlike novel set in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Here Is a Game We Could Play is the story of Claudia, an intelligent eccentric trapped in the rundown industrial town she grew up in—a place plagued with troubling memories and hidden threats. Seeking escape from tedium, loneliness, and her obsessive fear of poisoning, Claudia retreats into books. . . and into a fantasy life with her perfect lover, to whom she addresses letters about her life, all the while imagining outlandish sexual scenarios.

In each fantasy, her lover takes a different form, ranging from a prison guard in a world where metaphor is forbidden, to a more-than-brotherly Hansel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, to a tentacled mind-reading space alien. All share a desire for a deep intimacy that eludes Claudia, even as she forms new real-life relationships and reconsiders her sexual identity—building a rapport with an elderly volunteer at the library, striking up a friendship with a wily temp at her dead-end job, and embarking on a passionate affair with Rose, the town’s new librarian. When paranoia threatens to ruin her relationship with Rose, Claudia is forced not only to combat her anxiety but to face the unresolved trauma in her past—the disappearance of her father on a night she has long repressed.

Funny, dark, inventive, and moving, Here Is a Game We Could Play is an original debut novel recalling the work of Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Rebecca Brown, and Margaret Atwood.

Jenny Bitner

Acre Books, 2021

PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel 2025, Longlist
It’s 1970, and on the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota, amidst the rise of AIM in neighboring Pine Ridge, a baby boy appears nestled in a box of Styrofoam peanuts on the doorstep of St. Rose Catholic Church. His appearance disrupts the predictable, lonely life of longtime reservation priest Father Joe Kreitzer. The child, whom they name Bear, finds refuge under the care of Father Joe’s closest friend and ally, Alice Nighthawk.
Thirteen years pass without event, when Alice’s older son, Albert, is mysteriously murdered outside a bar in Rapid City, and Bear is accused of attempting to kill the only person who knows what happened that night. At the same time, Father Joe receives a letter from a person from his past, the only woman who made him question the path of priesthood. She has reached out to Father Joe as one of the few who might help her.
To keep Bear’s case from federal prosecution, Father Joe and Alice begin a search for Bear’s long-lost mother. But their journey unearths more than they bargained for, plunging Father Joe into a labyrinth of secrets and revelations. He is forced not only to confront the choices he’s made and the secrets he keeps, but also to see the truth of the lives of the people around him.
High Hawk is a rich tapestry of love and history, delving into the delicate intricacies of the past and the redemptive power of second chances. Through evocative prose, the lives of those on the fringes of American culture come alive, navigating adversity and forging
connections against all odds.

High Hawk

Amy Frykholm

University of Iowa Press, 2024

Pawel Kohoutek, veterinarian and womanizer, looks out the window one morning to see his mistress approaching his house. That's bad. She is hauling her suitcase (containing her books) and her backpack (containing everything else she owns). That's worse. So Kohoutek does the only thing he can: He hides his current woman in the attic of the family slaughterhouse. Farce ensues as Kohoutek attempts to hide the woman from his eccentric family, their lodgers, and various offbeat visitors. A best-seller in Jerzy Pilch's native Poland, His Current Woman is an enjoyable literary send-up of what often passes for love.

His Current Woman

Jerzy Pilch

Northwestern University Press, 2002

A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Holy Week

Jerzy Andrzejewski

Ohio University Press, 2006

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasingly traumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brother reside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the final moments of its existence.

Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.

Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.

This translation of Andrzejewski’s Holy Week began as a group project in an advanced Polish language course at the University of Pittsburgh. Class members Daniel M. Pennell, Anna M. Poukish, and Matthew J. Russin contributed to the translation; the instructor, Oscar E. Swan, was responsible for the overall accuracy and stylistic unity of the translation as well as for the biographical and critical notes and essays.

Homefront

Winner of the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Best Academic Press!
Foreword INDIES 2024 Silver Winner for War & Military (Adult Fiction)!

Inspired by Victoria Kelly’s experiences as the wife of a fighter pilot during three wartime deployments, this collection follows women whose lives have been impacted by war and military service as they struggle with their fragile ideas of home.

In “Prayers of an American Wife,” a Navy wife grapples with loneliness when she discovers that her neighbor, also a Navy wife, is having an affair while their husbands are deployed on the same aircraft carrier. Tensions rise in “The Strangers of Dubai” as a soldier on leave tries to buy his wife a souvenir from an Afghan vendor. After attending eight funerals with fellow military wives whose husbands died in the Iraq war, the protagonist in “Finding the Good Light” divorces her Navy husband and tries to start a new life as a movie star. These, along with the eleven other stories in this collection, explore the emotional landscape of the resilient women who remain on the homefront.

Kelly’s stories offer readers an intimate, eye-opening look into the sacrifices and steadfastness of military family members.

Victoria Kelly

University of Nevada Press, 2024

Honeymoons in Temporary Locations

Ashley Shelby

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed

Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby’s collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange.

Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette “Muri,” Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change.

Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.

Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts

Hope Leslie

Sedgwick, Catherine M

Rutgers University Press, 1987

Hope Leslie (1827), set in the seventeenth-century New England, is a novel that forced readers to confront the consequences of the Puritans’ subjugation and displacement of the indigenous Indian population at a time when contemporaries were demanding still more land from the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws.

"This handsome reprint ... makes available after many decades the New Englander's tale of seventeeth-century Puritans, and their relations with the indigenous Indian population." -- Nineteeth-Century Literature

" A splendidly conceived edition of Sedwick's historical romance. Highly recommended." --Choice

"Develop(s) the connections between patriarchal authority within the Puritan state and its policy of dispossessing and exterminating Indians. The different heritage it envisions explicitly link white women and Indians and elaborates a communal concept of liberty at odds with the individualistic concept which predominated in American culture." -- Legacy

Horses Dream of Money

Angela Buck

University of Alabama Press, 2021

2021 Big Other Book Award Fiction Finalist

A visceral, stark, and deadpan collection of stories that brilliantly fuse humor with horror

Horses Dream of Money is a daring collection of tales, darkly humorous, that eerily channels the surreal and sinister mood of the times. Preoccupied with the fault lines between life and death, and veering often into horror, Angela Buck brings a raw energy and witty sobriety to these accounts of human life and connection with the intimacy of fireside-storytelling, gimlet-eyed revelry in bloodletting, and a masterful sleight of hand between the fantastical and the quotidian.

“The Solicitor” reinvents the coming-of-age story as a romance-for-hire between a girl and her “solicitor,” a man whose services are demanded by her mother and enforced by a cruel master. “Coffin-Testament” is a fabulous futuristic account of the extinction of human life on earth written 1,667 years later by a group of lady robots channeling Sir Thomas Browne to muse on their own mortality. “The Bears at Bedtime” documents a compound of cuddly kind worker-bears and their ruthless doings. “Bisquit” imagines today’s precariat as a lovable horse who is traded from one master to another until a horse race brings his maddeningly repetitive adventures to a violent conclusion.

When Lucy is little something happens to her brother. He disappears for months and when he returns he’s not the same. He’s not her brother. At least this is what Lucy believes. But what actually happened?

Comic, melancholy, haunted, and endlessly inventive, Gregory Howard’s debut novel Hospice follows Lucy later in life as she drifts from job to job caring for dogs, children, and older women—all the while trying to escape the questions of her past only to find herself confronting them again and again.

In the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighborhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found.

Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.

Hospice

Gregory Howard

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Danilo Kiš was one of the most artful and eloquent writers of postwar Europe. Of all his books, Hourglass, the account of the final months in one man's life before he is sent to a concentration camp, is considered to be his masterpiece.

Hourglass

Danilo Kis

Northwestern University Press, 1997

The English translation of the prize-winning international bestseller
Winner of the Gunter Grass Prize

Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she and discovers everyone-and everything-has its own story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish side, the other on the Czech side. Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.

Richly imagined, weaving in anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk's novel is an epic of a small place. Since its original publication in 1998 it has remained a bestseller in Poland. House of Day, House of Night is the English-language debut of one of Europe's best young writers.

House of Day, House of Night

Olga Tokarczuk

Northwestern University Press, 2003

How Like an Angel

"How Like an Angel is a powerfully imagined, lyrically wrought novel, overflowing with the senses. Jack Driscoll is a marvel."
---Rick Bass

"How Like an Angel is a lyrical, lonely ode to fatherhood, an aria in words that looks forward and backward at once. Jack Driscoll is a writer of deep heart, relentless honesty, uncanny gentleness, and irresistible spirit."
---Pam Houston

How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. With his career going nowhere and a marriage in decline, Angel retreats to a rustic cabin in northern Michigan to make a new life for himself.

In spite of his forward thinking, Angel's move is in many ways a journey into the past. Besides lacking modern comforts, the cabin conjures the ghost of Angel's troubled childhood, when his undertaker father took the cabin in trade as payment from a widow who couldn't otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. After Angel's mother subsequently fled, abandoning her family to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son.

While Archibald Angel revisits his knotted and difficult past, his ex-wife and young son contemplate their future. Slowly, with unexpected help from an unpredictable woman, Angel realizes he too must find a way to begin again or risk failing his son as his own father failed him.

With pathos, humor, and unflagging generosity of spirit, How Like an Angel takes us deep into the hinterland of the human heart and discovers there the source of the love that keeps us holding on against all odds.

Jack Driscoll

University of Michigan Press, 2005

How We See the Gray

Rachel León

Northwestern University Press, 2026

A riveting story about parenthood, substance abuse, and the strength it takes to come back from our mistakes

Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.

How to Court Disaster

Blakinger, Kate

University of Iowa Press, 2026

How to Court Disaster takes us from wide expanses of open ocean to the enclosed spaces of grimy dive bars, echoing caves, and the holds of a musty ship. A grieving mother explores the secret chambers of a cave system. A stranded sailor joins the crew of a movie being filmed on a remote tropical island. A pregnant teenager finds herself on foot in the middle of a whiteout snowstorm with a stranger’s baby in her arms. A bed-and-breakfast owner struggles to rekindle her bond with the husband who no longer fully remembers their life together. Moving headlong into trouble, the characters in these stories discover they possess the inner resources they need to carry them beyond it: pluck, grit, fierceness, hope, and a growing sense of who they are becoming.