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Walking on thin ice: on Rainy Lake, in the northern reaches of Minnesota, it’s more than a saying. And for Owen Jensen, nineteen and suddenly responsible for keeping his mother and five brothers alive, the ice is thin indeed.

Ice-Out returns to the frigid and often brutal Prohibition-era borderland of Mary Casanova’s beloved novel Frozen, and to the characters who made it a favorite among readers of all ages. Owen, smitten with Frozen’s Sadie Rose, is struggling to make something of himself at a time when no one seems to hold the moral high ground. Bootlegging is rife, corruption is rampant, and lumber barons run roughshod over the people and the land. As hard as things seem when his father dies, stranding his impoverished family, they get considerably tougher—and more complicated—when Owen gets caught up in the suspicious deaths of a sheriff and deputy on the border.

Inspired by real events in early 1920s Minnesota, and by Mary Casanova’s own family history, Ice-Out is at once a story of young romance against terrible odds and true grit on the border between license and responsibility, rich and poor, and right and wrong in early twentieth-century America.

In 1921 Solomon Orlovski, a Russian Jew born in 1904, emigrated to America and transformed himself into Robert Orlove, a pattern maker in two senses of the term: during the day, he worked in the fur trade in New York and Chicago, making patterns for toys and hats; in his private life he became a self-taught artist who created prints, sketches, and collages in his study. More than sixty years later his son Ben—an anthropologist educated at Harvard and Berkeley—walked through the doorway of the deceased Robert's study and began to explore more than a half century of his father's experiences, thoughts, and emotions as well as his own very different life. His wry, sensitive combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography taps a remarkably rich vein of individual and collective experience in our diverse society.

Ben Orlove's dual narrative constitutes a family history of notable breadth and immediacy. By turns passionate and cool, dramatic and analytic, he excavates his father Robert's lifetime accumulation of diaries, letters, clippings, photographs, and artworks to create a convincing, deeply satisfying portrait that link both father and son.

Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation—the Atlas Portland Cement Company.

In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal—home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue influence.

To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight.

Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender, class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.

Now, a new edition of the classic novel Islay promises to entertain a contemporary audience with its Deaf American dream first conceived by Douglas Bullard in 1986. Islay is the name of an imaginary island state coveted by Lyson Sulla, a Deaf man who is tired of feeling that “hearing think deaf means dumb, pat head.” Sulla signs this to his wife Mary in explanation of his desire to tum Islay into a state solely for Deaf people, with himself as governor. From there, his peripatetic quest begins.

       Sulla initiates his plan by driving to Islay to survey the lay of the land. There, he meets Gene Owls, another Deaf man who also has designs on the island. Sulla then embarks on travels around the nation recruiting Deaf people to join his crusade. Along the way, he meets a Deaf doctor, a bowling alley owner, a family of peddlers, a Deaf minister, and a willing businessman. Far from a heroic character, Sulla engages in each encounter in an earthy, self-sewing fashion that sends up all parties involved, hearing and Deaf.

       Islay uniquely blends classic English forms of satire with the direct, down-to-earth expression of American Sign Language ingenuously rendered throughout. Deaf himself, Bullard has created a wonderfully amusing story that features Deaf people seeking their American dream in a manner both serious and joyous at the same time.

From the preface by Carmen Kenya Wadley:

“Is it good to be black? To Ruby Berkley Goodwin it was....The black she writes about has nothing to do with skin color, but it does have a great deal to do with self images, values, spiritual strength, and most of all love. Unlike the contradicting definitions of blackness we see reflected in today's crime statistics, movies, television, newspapers, political speeches, advertisements, and sociological reports, Ruby Berkley Goodwin's definition of blackness is simple and to the point: black is good. It's Good to be Black is more than the story (history) of a black family living in Du Quoin, Illinois, during the early 1900s; it is a reaffirmation for all of us who know in our hearts that there is still good in the world and that some of that good is black.”