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Following desperate characters in desperate circumstances in the rural Midwest

In these colorful, darkly comic stories, veteran journalist and crime reporter John Counts takes readers to an often-ignored part of the country: a fictional Great Lakes coastal town in northern Michigan defined by beauty and bleakness. The cast of characters in these connected stories ranges from addicts to backwoods misfits to ruined lumber families, all bound together by their desire to obtain something just out of reach. Big Frank breaks out of a rehab facility trying to outrun grief. The women in the village of Brotherhood grapple with sterility resulting from an environmental calamity. A local politician must convince her mother to leave a nudist colony. And in the final, sweeping story, a splinter group from the local tribe attempts to reclaim its ancestral land by force. The people of Bear County and their predicaments encompass the wildly original and yet totally ordinary truths about American life off the beaten track.

It is 1979 and patriarch Bud relocates his family to his conservative hometown of Greenhill, Connecticut. Despite dubious restaurant experience, he uses his wife’s inheritance to purchase a diner in hopes of proving himself. Things begin to fall apart when police find an all-too-literal skeleton in the family’s basement. A series of misfortunes, accidents, and comedic events follow, including the creation of a vending-machine-sandwich/drug-dealing business and a protest-turned-siege at the local hospital.

Charting one family’s rise to subversive glory in a genteel New England town, this colonial gothic novel is told through found documents and multiple perspectives, including those of Bud; Victor, the middle son; and Herman, the ahead-of-their time, nonbinary, eldest child whose journal entries serve as a kind of Greek chorus throughout. In this breathless, exuberant work, Keith Stahl brilliantly captures the foundational dichotomies at the heart of the American experience: a puritanical distrust of anything fun and a nearly anarchic love of pleasure and freedom. Moving and bitterly humorous, Dear Future Occupants is a paean to the working class and the diversity that holds a family together.

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.
 

This debut collection turns the ordinary into sweeping tragicomedy, probing the small, daily confrontations that shape a life well lived.

In a debut collection at once deeply felt and delightfully playful, Ernie Wang presents ordinary people struggling with challenges that confront many today: how to find steady, meaningful work; how to manage when our healthcare system fails us; how to navigate thorny relationships with lovers, with friends, with children; how to keep one’s dreams alive, and how to let them go. The thirteen stories in Manual for How to Live Magnificently are intriguingly linked, with narrators becoming players and players becoming narrators. Several stories feature cameos by the irrepressible seventy-something Mabel Rogerson, who serves by turns as catalyst, comic relief, and means to catharsis. The book toggles among dramatically different locales—Dayton, Ohio; Las Vegas; Disneyland; Kamisoshigaya, Japan—drawing them thematically into a shared orbit. 

Though each of Wang’s offerings has heft and poignancy, the stories also serve up superb comic set pieces. A fake fortuneteller forgoes his crystal ball in favor of a snow globe; a priest moonlights as a professional wrestler named the Grim Preacher; a troubled lawyer who reluctantly cat-sits for a friend winds up finding solace with Killer and Hoedaddy. Revelations are reached at the male strip club Dayton Dix, or during a ritual spanking at Hofbräuhaus just off the Las Vegas Strip, or on Captain Hook’s flying galleon during a theme park ride. And almost everyone eventually ends up at Applebee’s. When storylines converge in a terrifying tragedy, Wang takes the opportunity to explore the complexity of family, to deepen our understanding of sacrifice and the many ways people demonstrate love for one another.

Heir to the FIBA button factory in Lombardy, Augustus is profiting from Italy’s postwar industrial boom. Yet the dreamy young man is far from your stereotypical industrialist. He is less interested in making money than in talking to the birds in the surrounding garden and in making love to a beautiful factory worker named Palmira. But when the money-hungry Palmira schemes to have him institutionalized, Augustus finds a new love among his fellow mental patients: flute-playing flower child Serafina. Can Augustus and Serafina find a way to break free and express their love of each other and of nature in this crazy world? 
 
Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s charming 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! was one of the first works of Italian literature to deal with ecological themes while also questioning the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness. This translation includes a foreword from literary scholar Matteo Gilebbi that provides biographical, historical, and philosophical context for appreciating this whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love. 
 

A trippy and darkly funny portrait of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is the tragicomic yarn of one troubled college dropout’s desperate attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed working man.

In the wake of his father’s death, Garrett Deaver washes up at a salmon processing plant in his dad’s old stomping grounds of Alaska. There, he renames himself Beaver—because just like a beaver, he’s “an industrious motherfucker”— and vows to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC. But moving up within the industry’s seasonal underclass is anything but simple, and soon he finds himself with real, and imagined, enemies at the plant. As amphetamines scramble his sense of reality, and secrets about his father’s life are revealed, the job he’d hoped would bring him salvation threatens to leave him broke, alone, and—maybe even literally—underwater.

With his tenth book, celebrated author Brock Clarke once again demonstrates his mastery of the story form.

In Special Election, ingenious fictions target our all-too-familiar preoccupations and vulnerabilities—belonging, (dis)engagement, the struggle for self-worth, the difficulty of loving and being loved, the banality and absurdity of existence. Brock Clarke’s rapier wit, inexhaustible imagination, and brilliant leaps of illogic transform his characters’ desperation and distress into tragicomic delight. In the title story, Lawrence Welk is ousted from heaven to run for governor in present-day North Dakota. In “One Goes Where One Is Needed,” we follow the former Provisional Coalition Administrator of post-liberation Iraq, now a youth ski instructor at Okemo Mountain in Vermont. In “The Slim Jim,” the protagonist finds himself (literally and figuratively) very slowly choking to death on a frozen microwavable burrito.

“There is something wrong with me,” states the narrator of “The Big Book of Useless Saturdays.” This could be said of all the characters in Special Election, and through loopy misdirection and mordant observation, Clarke devotes himself to showing his characters and his readers exactly what is wrong. Yet the sharpness of his attention and lavish ludicrousness of his storylines belie a sneaking affection for this imperfect, disappointing world filled with imperfect, disappointing humans. Though Clarke has been compared to such greats as Barthelme, Bellow, and Saunders, the nine stories in Special Election vibrate at a frequency all his own, showcasing the strengths of one of our most gifted comic writers.

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.

On Thursday nights, the players assemble in the back of Readmore Comix and Games. Celeste is the dungeon master; Valerie, who works at the store, was roped in by default; Mooneyham, the banker, likes to argue; and Ben, sensitive, unemployed, and living at home, is still recovering from an unrequited love. In the real world they go about their days falling in love, coming out at work, and dealing with their family lives all with varying degrees of success. But in the world of their fantasy game, they are heroes and wizards fighting to stop an evil cult from waking a sleeping god.

But then a sexy new guy, Albert, joins the club, Ben’s character is killed, and Mooneyham’s boyfriend is accosted on the street. The connections and parallels between the real world and the fantasy one become stronger and more important than ever as Ben struggles to bring his character back to life and win Albert’s affection, and the group unites to organize a protest at a neighborhood bar. All the while the slighted and competing vampire role playing club, working secretly in the shadows, begins to make its move.

A sharp, witty send-up of the literary world, set in the world of book publishing—a must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamt of (or dreaded) getting published. 

Cyril Cordouan is the beleaguered editor at Fulmen, a distinguished publishing house known for its solid but not particularly popular literary titles. Every day, Cyril faces an avalanche of subpar manuscripts, struggling to find a glimmer of quality amid the piles of drivel. Rejections are a routine part of his job, but aspiring authors don’t take kindly to their works being dismissed, and one distraught writer tragically ends his life after his manuscript is declined. 

Devastated, Cyril decides to create an outlet for these rejected writers. Can group therapy for the hopelessly hopeful cure Cyril’s woes? Not quite. Between vengeful widows, surprise bestsellers, and a crippling crisis of conscience, Cyril’s life is a hilarious disaster. 

With sharp wit and keen insight, Laclavetine, himself an industry insider, offers a satirical look at the literary world along with thought-provoking commentary on the nature of literary ambition, rejection, and the often ridiculous realities of the publishing industry.

A budding journalist and a housing advocate join forces to investigate a series of crimes spurred by an act of vandalism at the Boston Holocaust Memorial. 

On the eve of the “Summer of Hate,” Mark Bergman, a young struggling Bar Mitzvah photographer trying to break into serious journalism, meets fellow tenant Annie Holt, a Catholic housing activist. The same night, across town, someone vandalizes the Boston Holocaust Memorial, which at first appears to be an isolated event, but when Mark joins Annie at an eviction protest across town, they soon discover it was a part of a more sinister and coordinated series of attacks. From the Vilna Shul in Beacon Hill down to South Carolina low country, Mark and Annie’s relationship deepens as they hunt the perpetrators and ultimately reach a point, both with each other and the crimes they’re investigating, where they must make the most difficult decisions they ever faced. Told from alternating points of view, Last People follows both Mark and Annie and a series of humorous minor characters, all of whom are searching for identity and a place in a fractured, volatile, and dangerous America. Part love story, part mystery, part coming of age, Last People is a novel about homelessness—literally, metaphorically—and the ways in which people grasp onto labels in order to find meaning and purpose in their lives even when those labels fail to adequately define them.

The Perturbation of O tells the comic story of how a loser became a winner with the publication of his memoir, Gideon’s Confession, and the chaotic aftermath that the book and an encounter with Oprah Winfrey have had on two people: Gideon Anderson and Regina Blast, a woman about whom Gideon wrote intimately in his memoir.
        Told mostly in a single conversation between Gideon and Regina as they sit on a spring morning drinking coffee and eating pastries, The Perturbation of O deals with concepts of fame and intimacy, and who has the right to speak about whom.
 

The first English-language translation of an eccentric, unclassifiable classic 
 
An unnamed narrator embarks on a rambling journey across the diverse borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman Empires—all without leaving his divan. Drawing on his own experiences in Bessarabia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29, A. F. Veltman describes our Romantic narrator poring over a map and traversing distant, contested regions—at once imperial backwaters and cosmopolitan crossroads—where Romanians, Ruthenians, Jews, Bulgarians, Germans, and Turks comingle. 

Meandering and motley in form and language, this lost classic of the early nineteenth century deploys metafictional innovations that anticipate postmodernist literature. The novel is speckled with dictionary entries, multiplication tables, philosophical digressions, and love poetry as Veltman swings from Gothic horror to antiquarian commentary to burlesque comedy. Past, present, and fantasy blend together, as Alexander the Great, Ovid, and Augustus join the narrator on his daydreamed journey of self-discovery. 

Hugely popular in its day, The Wanderer is a remarkable tale that depicts the extraordinary places and peoples that met along the fault lines of once-great empires.