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Ambrose Bierce was a well-known and highly admired journalist, short story writer, and satirist. After distinguished Civil War service, Bierce became a journalist, and in 1887 he became a columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s Sunday Examiner. His work for the San Francisco Examiner made his reputation, especially on the West Coast. In 1914 he vanished on a trip to Mexico.

The work for which he is best know, The Devil’s Dictionary, was first published in 1906. Bierce also published volumes of short stories. His Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) represents some of the finest writing to come out of the Civil War. Bierce’s stories of the supernatural, collected in Can Such Things Be? (1893), established him as one of the leading American authors of supernatural fiction.

This volume gathers together for the first time the 850 fables written by Bierce over his forty-year career, including more than 400 fables never reprinted from the magazines and newspapers in which they originally appeared.

Bierce’s fables are distinguished for their biting wit and their cynical reflection of the political and social events of his time. Local and national political figures; corrupt lawyers, judges, and clergymen; and even incidents in the Spanish-American War are all mercilessly lampooned. The fables not only testify to Bierce’s hatred of “hypocrisy, cant, and all sham” but provide a window into late nineteenth-century American society. S. T. Joshi has provided extensive commentary explaining historical and literary references in the fables.

What happened to Ebenezer Scrooge after the night he was visited by the three spirits?

Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been warehoused at "the Manor," a long-eroded home for the forgotten. The men take turns telling stories, stalling death as they relive pivotal parts of their pasts. Outside, the cliff crumbles and a lighthouse slips toward the sea.

John, in particular, enthralls the others with his tale of Tampico, Mexico, where he met an Indian woman named Chepa who owned a house at the edge of a mountain wilderness. She was his first love—and his first lesson in the dangers of foreign intrigue. But his is not the only memory haunted by mysteries born in Mexico. Sick of waiting for death, stirred by the shifting ground beneath their feet, the Manor's residents finally resolve to quit that place and head out for Tampico.

With inexorable pull, and exquisite scenes that could only come from Toby Olson, Tampico celebrates a sublime band of calaveras, "those skeleton messengers of mortality," who seek self-discovery even as their lives are ending.

In a town trapped in endless July, love, resistance, and imagination break the loop

Enter a world where time stands still and summer never ends. In the enchanted town of Tannery Bay, it’s July 37, and then July 2 again, but the year is a mystery. Trapped in an eternal loop, the residents embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery, unity, and defiance against the forces that seek to divide them. 

Otis and Joy, intrepid siblings, work with their family and friends to oppose a formidable adversary: The Owners. These cunning and ruthless old men, driven by insatiable greed, hold the town hostage, exploiting its resources and dividing its people. In this powerful #OwnVoices narrative, Tannery Bay is a captivating tale of Black Joy and Queer Joy and the ways in which family is both biological and chosen, where love transcends boundaries, and where art is a vehicle for change.
 

Tasker Street, winner of the Juniper Prize for poetry, is the second collection of poems by the acclaimed American poet Mark Halliday. Following his debut, Little Star (1987), which was selected for the National Poetry Series, Tasker Street confirmed Halliday as one of the most distinctive and engaging voices in contemporary American poetry.

Halliday's poems are marked by a restless, probing intelligence and a distinctly conversational energy. The poems in Tasker Street are personal in tone, narrative in impulse, and unafraid to range widely across the textures of everyday life: relationships, memory, desire, self-doubt, ambition, and the comic absurdities of being alive. These are poems that think out loud, circling back on themselves with a self-awareness that is at once disarming and deeply serious, even as they entertain with wit, verbal dexterity, and a refusal to settle for easy resolutions.

Drawing on the traditions of Frank O'Hara's personism and the narrative directness of the New York School, yet infused with a philosophical attentiveness honed by Halliday's scholarly engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the poems in Tasker Street balance accessibility with intellectual ambition. They invite readers into a voice that is simultaneously intimate and performative, one that embraces digression, self-interrogation, and the pleasures of language even while confronting questions of mortality, meaning, and the stubborn persistence of the self.

Queer stories about love, loneliness, the surreal, and the self

The stories in Tell Me feature queer men of various ages reckoning with loneliness, selfishness, and the struggle for self-discovery and identity. In “The Vanisher,” a young bisexual man struggling with his own desire to be seen receives a bandana that allows him to become invisible. In “Retreat,” a widower travels to an artists’ colony to seek an audience with his recently deceased husband. And in “We Are Rendered Silent,” people lose their ability to speak when a man they love dies. Through Baumann’s inventive employment of the strange and surreal, these stories set out to explore the bizarre and often confounding experience of navigating modern-day queerness. With his unique voice and magnificent imagination, Baumann fully immerses readers in the queer experience.
 

Tellin’ It Like It Is offers a powerful introduction to Adrian C. Louis (1946–2018), one of the most unflinching Native American literary voices of the twentieth century. Drawing from a half-century of published writing—and including a few previously unpublished pieces—this collection captures the evolution of Louis’s voice, worldview, and craft.

Editor David Pichaske, a close friend of Louis in his later years, curates this volume with deep insight into both the public figure and the private man. Selections are arranged chronologically to trace Louis’s transformation from a Nevada reservation teenager to a California hippie, a sixties hitchhiker, a Boston academic, a South Dakota reservation journalist, and finally, a Midwestern college professor.

Louis’s work immerses readers in reservation life, yet its critique reaches the broadest dimensions of American and human experience. To enrich understanding, the book includes literary reviews, scholarly essays (including one by a noted Polish critic), an interview with Louis, and his own reflections on literature and identity. A foreword by poet Bojan Louis provides further context for this essential collection.

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

In this penultimate volume, Temporary Kings (1973), Nick and his contemporaries are at the height of their various careers in the arts, business, and politics. X. Trapnel is dead, but his mystery continues to draw ghoulish interest from readers and academics alike—as well as from his lover, Pamela Widmerpool. Kenneth Widmerpool, meanwhile, is an MP with mysterious connections beyond the newly dropped Iron Curtain, but he continues to be tormented by Pamela; a spectacular explosion, Nick can’t help but realize, is imminent.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language.

Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions—pragmatic as well as grammatical—that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.

In astronomy, the termination shock is the boundary that marks the outer limits of the sun's influence—the ripple outward of our solar wind and its collision with the interstellar medium. This debut collection of stories evokes those moments when lives are unpredictably shaken and reset by forces beyond their grasp.

Making use of a diverse array of narrative modes, settings, and voices, these stories traverse space and time, moving from Egypt during the Second World War to modern-day Liberia and an unfamiliar Los Angeles. The title story, “Termination Shock,” offers a lyrical exploration of two traumatic moments in a woman's life that occur decades apart and continue to reverberate in humorous and poignant ways. Janice Margolis shows us characters on the precipice of change—including a narrator in fevered quarantine following the death of her mother from Ebola, a cross-cultural love in a swiftly transforming Syria, and the desolation of the Berlin Wall, which from its various sectors and coordinates, confesses its crimes and mourns its destruction.

A haunting, poetic excavation of memory, the nocturnal imagination, and a search for new forms of language to act upon legacies of violence and erasure.

Thanatographies is a genre-defying meditation on disappearance, memory, and the porous boundaries between the living and the dead. In poetic prose, Yanara Friedland weaves together dreamscapes, historical fragments, personal recollections, and philosophical inquiry to explore the afterlives of loss and survival. Moving through rooms, cities, forests, and archives, the text becomes a living document of insomnia, exile, and the spectral presence of women across time, including artists, revolutionaries, caretakers, and ghosts.

Structured in four sections titled Room, Night, Medusas, and Burials, the book traverses inner and outer landscapes, from Berlin’s haunted streets to the intimate terrain of the body. Friedland’s voice is both lyrical and incisive, drawing on figures such as Unica Zürn, Rosa Luxemburg, and Else Lasker-Schüler to illuminate the intersections of gender, violence, and historical erasure. The result is a deeply embodied poetics of wakefulness, where hidden life remembers and speaks.

Thanatographies is written for readers of experimental literature, feminist theory, and contemporary poetics. The book resonates with artists, scholars, and seekers who are compelled by the aesthetics of mourning, the politics of memory, and the radical potential of language to hold what is otherwise unspeakable.

A visionary and profound new collection from innovative author Elizabeth Crane

Throughout her body of work, Elizabeth Crane’s literary vision has always been singular and innovative, twisting form and bending reality into new universes. Her latest collection, That May Not Mean What You Think, explores themes of aging and youth, gender and discrimination, and sex and love. In “Training Module,” Crane takes the structure and protocol of workplace harassment prevention training and turns it on its head; “The Box” tells the story of a woman trying to recover from divorce with the help of a literal unicorn; and “The Youngs” follows a group of teenagers experiencing loss for the first time, clinging to the belief that they’ll live forever. Across these delightfully weird and disarmingly truthful stories, American culture is refracted through humor and heart, asking readers to consider their complicity and to imagine new possibilities of participating in a better future.
 

Cyrus the Lion sends the wolf Dmitri Stepanovich on a diplomatic mission, and in the course of his journey he discovers truths about natural history, war, and politics for which he was unprepared. The subsequent war that breaks out in The Abolition of Species will come to span three planets and thousands of years—encompassing treachery and massacres, music and mathematics, savagery and decadence, as well as the terraformation of Mars and Venus and the manipulation of time itself. By turns grandiose, horrific, erotic, scathing, and visionary, The Abolition of Species is a tale of love and war after the fall of man and an epic meditation on the theory of evolution unlike any other.

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London . Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

The third volume, The Acceptance World (1955), opens with Nick Jenkins, in his late twenties, beginning to make his way in the world of letters: working for a publisher, writing on his own, and establishing connections across the literary landscape. At the same time, he is making his way in love, as a surprise meeting with an old friend’s sister blossoms into an affair. Meanwhile, friends are diving into marriage and careers, and the patterns of life’s dance are starting to take shape—even as the future steps remain shadowy.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis