At once an ode to birds, an elegy to space, and a journey into the most haunted and uncanny corners of the human mind, The Avian Hourglass showcases Lindsey Drager's signature brilliance in a stunning, surrealist novel for fans of Jesse Ball, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, and Shirley Jackson
The birds have disappeared. The stars are no longer visible. The Crisis is growing worse. In a town as isolated as a snowglobe, a woman who dreams of becoming a radio astronomer struggles to raise the triplets she gave birth to as a gestational surrogate, whose parents were killed in a car accident. Surrounded by characters who wear wings, memorize etymologies, and build gigantic bird nests, and bound to this town in which young adults must decide between two binary worldviews--either YES or NO--the woman is haunted by the old fable of the Girl in Glass Vessel, a cautionary tale about prying back the façade of one's world.
When events begin to unfold that suggest a local legend about the town being the whole of the universe might be true, the woman finds her understanding of her own life-and her reality-slipping through her fingers. A reflection on mental health, the climate emergency, political polarization, and the growing reliance on technology, The Avian Hourglass asks readers to reframe how they conceive of a series of concentric understandings of home: the globe, one's country, one's town, one's family, and one's own body.
May you braid back the hair of the girl who asks you to; may your lips brush other lips in an almost-kiss; when the chickens are gone, may you sow the coop in arugula; may the fogged-in mountain roads thread through your apocalyptic dreams and the cornbread and beans round your belly; may you always give away the thing you love most, like the dollar-store bracelet, or a picture of the sea.
In this stunning collection of braided essays, Yoke & Feather invites the reader into an exploration of the everyday sacred: blessings for the demolition derby and the public-school lice check, a canoe trip through Boquillas Canyon along the Rio Grande, and a visit to the kitchen of the biblical sisters, Mary and Martha, as they welcome their improbable foster daughter.
In this special anniversary edition, Mark Dunn is joined by talented illustrator Brittany Worsham in an illuminating, beloved story relating to language and freedom and human dignity in an era of political oppression.
First published by MacAdam/Cage in 2001, Mark Dunn's novel Ella Minnow Pea celebrates its twentieth anniversary under the roof of Penguin/Random House and the British publisher Methuen. Over the years it has become a mainstay of book clubs and middle-school and high-school English classes, has inspired a stage musical LMNOP, and is the recipient of multiple accolades, including winning the 2001 Borders Original Voices competition for fiction.
Set on a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina, Ella Minnow Pea takes readers to the homeland of the late Nevin Nollop, the inventor of the pangram The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Lionized for this achievement, he's been honored with a monument featuring this famous phrase. But life for Nollopians drastically changes when the tile containing the letter z topples from the statue and island authorities interpret the fall as a message from Nollop from beyond the grave. They waste no time in banning this letter from all use. As other tiles fall, additional laws are passed which put increasing communicational constraints on the islanders, and ultimately undermine all the freedoms they had heretofore taken for granted. It is up to a young woman named Ella to restore order and sanity to the nation of Nollop, using the very tools used by Mr. Nollop to win the day.
Readers, both longtime fans of the book and those newly discovering its power and literary merit, will cherish this special keepsake edition.
In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg's sister uses the tale as a surrogate for sharing a family secret only her brother believes. In 1835, The Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm revise the tale to bury a truth about Jacob even he can't come to face. In 1986, a folklore scholar and her brother come to find the record is wrong about the figurative witch in the woods, while in 2211, twin space probes aiming to find earth's sister planet disseminate the narrative in binary code. Breadcrumbing back in time from 2365 to 1378, siblings reimagine, reinvent, and recycle the narrative of Hansel and Gretel to articulate personal, regional, and ultimately cosmic experiences of tragedy.
Through a relay of speculative pieces that oscillate between eco-fiction and psychological horror, The Archive of Alternate Endings explores sibling love in the face of trauma over the course of a millennium, in the vein of Richard McGuire's Here and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.
In prose that is both unflinching and lyrical, Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh presents Zan, a collection of stories that provide a deep and nuanced view of contemporary Iranian women as they navigate a crucial moment in their nation's history.
A university student strips off her hijab in the streets of Tehran and films herself as part of a daring protest movement. A wealthy Iranian woman living in Atlanta maintains a secret life as a burlesque dancer. A teenager slips out of a hotel room at night to skinny dip in the toxic Caspian Sea. An Iranian lesbian agonizes over her coming out and her father's subsequent attempts to re-educate her. These are some of the many windows Zan opens into the complex lives of Iranian women today-those who continue to suffer oppression under the Islamic Republic, those who are crafting new identities in America, and those who hover somewhere in between.
In True Believer, Jeff Kass intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of good
Through lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass's poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer--attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son's baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass's understanding of his own identity.
An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers, True Believer is a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can't be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.
Nash writes with psychological precision, capturing Lilith's volatile shifts between directionless frustration, self-destructiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerable need. A complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In this stunning and powerful debut, a girl with no name embarks on a fraught three-way relationship with Matt, a Satanist and a tattoo artist, and his girlfriend Frances, a new mom. The liaison is caged by strict rules and rigid emotional distance. Nonetheless, it's all too easy to surrender to an attraction so powerful she finds herself erased, abandoning even her own name in favor of a new one: Lilith.
As Lilith grows closer to Matt, she begins to recognize the dark undertow of obsession and jealousy that her presence has created between Matt and Frances, and finds herself balancing on a knife's edge between pain and pleasure, the promise of the future and the crushing isolation of the present. With stripped-down prose and unflinching clarity, Nash examines madness in the wreckage of love, and the loss of self that accompanies it.
With this book, the author opens up a new dimension to the best-loved fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm - so familiar to us and yet so full of unfamiliar imagery and inexplicable plot twists. He reminds us that these are stories originally aimed at adults, and that they carry in their imagery a symbolic understanding and a worldview that can offer us a key to overcoming our otherwise insoluble challenges. For centuries, these myth-like stories have been retold and spread across generations. When the people in the countryside had finished their work in the fields and in the kitchen, they came together and tried to fathom the secrets of life by sharing their experiences and immersing themselves in symbolic images. At a time when the rational view of life has almost completely suppressed the mysteries of existence between earth and heaven, perhaps this is the time for us to perceive the cosmic archetypes on which these tales rest.