Living in the home he inherited from his mother and abandoned by his father, painter and construction worker Cash has never known anything beyond the fields of Johnston, WI--never particularly wanted to, either. Why would he when his friends are there, his work is there, his history is there? He loves Johnston. But when an emerald-eyed stranger named Rose blows into town one summer evening in his favorite local bar, everything changes. It's love at first sight. For Cash, anyway.
What follows is an intimate reflection on the love, faith, and tragedy that courses through the blood of America's backbone. Cash and his closest friends find themselves vital threads in the fabric of their community, the memory of those forgotten, and partners in a new enterprise. A bluesey ode to the Beat generation for the modern era, Blue Graffiti is writer Calahan Skogman's poetic debut brimming with an essential freedom, romance, and longing for a bygone era.
In The Bella Vista Emma Ruth Rundle's sinuous lyric moves deftly between moods, syntax firing across synapses of image and sound, illuminating the pulverizing at-once-ness of daily living, loving, in the new world. --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Pilgrim Bell
rip up this book, my love
i wrote it for you
With The Bella Vista, Emma Ruth Rundle turns to language as the best and perhaps only tool suitable to express, in her words, the tenderness and brutality of romantic love.
Written on the road and in the air between tour locations, the chronological, self-referential poems of The Bella Vista follow a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution; culminating, eventually, with a sort of peace.
The collection is a concept album, an addiction memoir, a family tree, and a love letter all at once--to music, mistakes, and womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.
From Gutenberg to Amazon, Michael Castleman's The Untold Story of Books is the first and only history of publishing told from a veteran author's point of view. Witty, entertaining, and full of remarkable new insights, it is a deeply researched, fascinating history of the idiosyncratic book business-aimed at authors, aspiring authors, booksellers, industry professionals, and everyone who loves to read books.
Organized into three distinct book businesses, all defined by the evolution of printing, The Untold Story of Books explores how each new book business upended its predecessor, forcing authors, publishers, and booksellers to adapt to ever-changing circumstances. It's a story full of surprises: why did books become favored Christmas presents? Because of a poem written in 1823. Why is New York the nation's publishing capital? Because of the Erie Canal. Why are book endorsements called blurbs? Because of a satirist's joke in 1907. And why is copyright often an illusion? Because publishing was founded on book piracy, which today is easier and more rampant than ever.
Arriving at the present day, Castleman paints a compelling portrait of an evolving book business full of new promise and peril.
That was the lesson: that what so often passed for love was mostly a desperate construct of your own vanity, a steamroller with which the self pressed the other flat until a smooth, reflective surface was all that remained...
In the summer of 2015, a young couple--an American and his French wife--undergo fertility treatment in Paris. They settle in to wait for the results as a heatwave paralyzes the city.
As the heat rises, a state of emergency is declared and tempers flare, leaving cracks in the foundation of their marriage. In the months that follow, they find themselves navigating a confluence of world crises and historical forces that affect each in ways the other struggles to understand.
Against this backdrop of existential dread, the fissures in their marriage widen as they confront their everyday apocalypse. An ongoing conversation begins: one that moves backward and forward in time, swings between hope and despair, dry laughter and hard fury, all in an effort toward reconciliation. How will their conflicting ideas about how to build a life together--how to love each other--survive in the face of a future that's collapsing before their eyes?
Strikingly original and wonderfully tender, Open Up is a vivid exploration of the thrills, challenges, and aches of contemporary life. These five stories pulse with a dark strangeness: a boy's first football match is charged with secret magic and complicated by his family situation; a young man's vacation with his partner comes under threat from a dark visitor; a family of seahorses faces growing pains and grief as they fight to come of age and understand their place in the world. Deeply felt and richly rewarding, Open Up is a gorgeous and penetrating examination of human vulnerability, filled with magic and wonder.
Less than three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, three archaeology grad students and their enigmatic adviser arrive at a remote cave in the heart of the Siberian wilderness to carry out the first extensive Western dig on Russian soil since the execution of the czar.
Surrounded by a looming forest with eerie silences and flickering shadows, Valerie, Kit, and Mark begin their dig under the eccentric and charismatic guidance of the venerable George Auberon. The excavation yields fascinating discoveries, and excitement grows among the team, but George's true motivations soon reveal themselves to be less noble than he originally let on.
As each member of the party grapples with the challenges of the dig, going deeper into the cave, a strange feeling sets in. Is there something else in the forest with them? Or has George's paranoid ambition gotten to them?
A powerful debut with vast imaginative range, The Sleeping Land follows a cast of memorable characters as the barriers between past and present collapse around them.
Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both.
But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.
A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.
Bratton's electric debut novel transforms Shakespeare into a modern, queer drama that's as bawdy as it's sharp. --Hugh Ryan, The New York Times
LAUGH NOW. CRY LATER.
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere...
It's London, 2014, and Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, is in a holding pattern: his mother is dead, his father is dying or remarrying or both, his siblings are fighting, his internship is pointless, and nobody will leave him alone.
Everything is as it should be and yet nothing is right. Over the course of a year of partying, drinking, and flirting to dubious consequence, Hal is tested by brutal family legacies, Catholic guilt, and the terrifying possibility of being loved. All of which is complicated by a pattern of abuse that threatens to chase Hal into adulthood. The House of Lancaster will never be the same.
Crackling with intelligence and wit, Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of the Henriad in which Hal Lancaster is a queer protagonist for a new era. Allen Bratton arrives as a successor to Waugh and St. Aubyn with this lush, stylish novel of family, legacy, and what it means to be alive today.
A brutally funny and observant ride through astrology culture, love, and self-discovery. --NYLON's Most Anticipated Books of 2022
Emily Forrest runs Exalted, the hottest astrology account on Instagram, from her studio apartment in Los Angeles. Burned out on meme-making and listicles, Emily's passion for astrology is waning despite her gift for deciphering the signs, until she comes across a birth-chart that could potentially change her mind. Beau Rubidoux's planets are aligned, each paired with its optimum sign--his chart is exalted. She decides that Beau, a well-connected photographer in Echo Park, could potentially be the love of her life and help her fulfill her true destiny: to be a star.
Meanwhile in Riverside, Dawn Webster has been dumped once again. At 48, she is forced to return to the same restaurant where she started waiting tables at 18. With no girlfriend, no career, and her only son gone to Hollywood, the once-vivacious Dawn is aimless and alone. Persona non-grata at the local gay bar, she guzzles cheap champagne and checks Exalted to feel seen. She is a fiery Leo, and one day she will get her due.
Alternating between Emily and Dawn's very different points of view, Exalted is a deliciously dark novel that explores desire, the projection of our need for love, and what we're really searching for when we keep scrolling. Anna Dorn's signature wit and biting social commentary takes readers across Southern California until Emily and Dawn's shocking connection is finally revealed.
In the first installment of Joshua Mohr's Viking Punk saga, a West Oakland musician acquires a new name and new calling. Chasing down a gang of thieves, Saint the Terrifying turns a gritty urban detective story into the stuff of legend.
Saint's an ex-con still coming to terms with his origin story.
Raised in the wilds of Norway by an artisan father famed for his glass-blown birds, Saint trained daily in ancient Norse martial arts with a bear as his sparring partner. One day, his father makes a critical mistake, forcing Saint to leave his home forever, and move to San Francisco.
Years later and fresh out of prison, Saint finds himself immersed in the Oakland punk music scene. On stage, he's struggling to find his identity as a guitar player in a mediocre band. Off stage, his uniquely Norse skillset suddenly turns Saint into a one-eyed punk gumshoe after sinister thieves start targeting local bands' gear. But it is only when Saint meets Trick Wilma, the powerhouse lead singer of another (better) band, that he begins to see the glimmer of salvation in her eyes.
Propelled by a broken Baroque of punk language, Saint the Terrifying examines tensions between community and individual identity, social activism and vigilantism, while taking the reader on a roller coaster ride of hard-boiled twists and hardcore music. Saint is the badass protagonist that answers the question: What if Johnny Rotten had a baby with The Rock?
Introduction by George Easter, Editor and Publisher of Deadly Pleasures Magazine
Legendary LA sleuth Jack Liffey is back, and facing down a changing world, when his brazen daughter Maeve enlists him to help find Benjy--a gay social justice activist gone missing. Meanwhile, a needless act of violence sets off an urban range war between a group of gun-happy poachers and former Soviet paramilitary soldiers in an unlikely location: West Hollywood. Jack, still recovering from heart surgery and grappling with Maeve's aspirations to follow in his footsteps, must save the day before the entire community goes up in flames.
In this latest installment of the Jack Liffey series, John Shannon picks up where he left off, taking readers deep into the many, unexplored communities, enclaves and cultures of Los Angeles that sometimes co-exist, sometimes clash, but always surprise. Fans of Vince Flynn will fall deep into the fast-paced, unpredictable, and dangerous world John Shannon creates.
Widely recognized by mystery authors and critics as one of America's most acclaimed crime fiction writers, John Shannon has authored twenty novels beginning in 1972. His revered Jack Liffey books earned praise from every major publication including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Library Journal.
It is an achievement. --Mary Gaitskill
Clear-sighted and unafraid... this is, simply put, an excellent novel. --Ling Ma, author of Severance and Bliss Montage
Chilling, tender, fierce and sharp... one of the most original novels about sisters and family I've read in some time. --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
You're my sister, but I'm not sure I love you. I'm not sure I love anyone. But if someone hurt you I'd want to kill him. I'd want him to die in pain. And he has hurt you...
After years of estrangement, Minah, Sarah, and Esther have been forced together again. Called to their father's deathbed, the sisters must confront a man little changed by the fact of his mortality. Vicious and pathetic in equal measure, Eugene Kim wants one thing: to see which of his children will abject themselves for his favor-- and more importantly, his fortune. From their childhood in California to the depths of a mid-Atlantic winter, the solitary sisters Kim must face a brutal past colliding with their present. Grasping at their broken bonds of sisterhood, they will do what is necessary to escape the tragedy of their circumstances--whatever the cost.
For Minah, the eldest, the money would be recompense for their father's cruelty. A practicing lawyer with an icy pragmatism, she dreams of a family of her own and sets to work on securing her inheritance. For Sarah, a gifted and embittered academic who wields her intelligence like a weapon, confronting her father again forces her to reckon with the desperation of her present life. It is left to the youngest-- directionless and loving Esther-- to care for their father in her lonely quest to do right by everyone. A fortune pales in comparison to the prospect of finally reuniting with her sisters.
With a legacy of violence haunting their lives, the sisters dare to imagine a better future even as their father's poison courses through their blood. A contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky's dark classic, The Brothers Karamazov, Maureen Sun's brilliant debut is a vivid and visceral exploration of rage, shame, and the betrayals of intimacy.
In her contemplative memoir, Polly Atkin encourages everyone, especially those with chronic illnesses, to look beyond their own history and see the beauty in their world. --The Washington Post
Defiant and dazzling. --Freya Bromley, author of The Tidal Year
Essential reading. --Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning
Long before I knew I was sick, I knew I was breakable...
After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin's perception of her body was rendered fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together what had been happening to her- all the misdiagnoses, the fractures, the dislocations, the bone-crushing exhaustion, and on top of it all, not being believed by the very people who were meant to listen.
Some of Us Just Fall combines memoir, pathography and nature writing to trace a journey through illness- a journey which led Atkins to her cottage in England's Lake District, where every day she turns to the lakes and land that inspire poets old and new to help manage, and purportedly cure, her chronic illness.
Join her as she delves into shimmering waters, selkie dreams, and the history of her two genetic conditions to uncover and learn from how they were managed (or not) in times gone by. Beautiful and deeply personal, Some of Us Just Fall is essential reading on the cost of medical misogyny and gaslighting, the illusion of 'the nature cure', and the dangers of ableism both systematic and internalized.
This is not a book about getting better. This is a book about living better with illness.
A document of not only how to make a poem, but how to live in a world where language often fails us. --Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate
Matthew Zapruder had an idea: to write a poem as slowly and intentionally as possible, to preserve its drafts, and record the painstaking, elusively transcendent stuff of its construction. It would be the end cap to a new collection of poetry, and a means to process modern American life in a time of political turmoil, mega fires, and sobriety. What Zapruder didn't anticipate was that this literary project would reveal a deeply personal aspect as well: a way to resolve the unexplored pain and unexpected joys he was confronting in the wake of his son's diagnosis with autism.The result is a remarkable piece of writing, one that explores not just what it means to be a poet and father, but also what it means to be alive on this planet during this turbulent and extraordinary time. By comparing the writing of a poem with his own tangled evolution as a son, husband and father, Zapruder unfolds moments of his own life in the reflection of an increasingly uncanny world. With a wide range of reference points-- from Celan, Li Bai and Frank O'Hara to Whitman, Merwin and Rupi Kaur--we join Zapruder on a poet's journey; that in some alchemy of literature, becomes a journey of our own.Ultimately, the poet asks us to join with him in the search for a crucial answer. In his words: What world can we imagine, and then make, where we all can live? With Story of a Poem celebrated poet Matthew Zapruder offers a personal, deeply unguarded examination of a poet's eternal struggle to transform a moment of feeling into verse, as well as a subtle and enthralling roadmap to the practice of poetry and finding its threads in everyday life.Story of a Poem is the luminous, lyrical meditation on wringing beauty from suffering and air, threaded with a singular, moving story about parenting an atypical child. I read it in a single gulp, and you will too. --Mary Karr, Bestselling author of The Liars' Club and CherryOne of the most startlingly original writers we've got. --A K Blakemore, Guardian
A collection of singular and viscerally strange short stories from the author of The Doll's Alphabet and Children of Paradise. Brought to you by the publisher of A Certain Hunger.
A custard factory explosion has shocking ramifications for a small community; a book promises three young men enlightenment if they restrain from their most primal of urges; a cursed hotel for ailing girls welcomes a new guest whose period has mysteriously stopped; the exploitative drudgery of work sparks revolt in a damp, putrid spa; and at the Margate museum, the new director curates a venomous garden for public consumption.
In her U.S. debut, Grudova channels Angela Carter, Lemony Snicket, and Ottessa Moshfegh with dreamlike subversiveness and humorously surreal results. The Coiled Serpent excavates the crumbling old-world toxicity of Britain and the sputtering absurdities of late-stage capitalism, all while bringing to life a cast of characters who will haunt you well into the night.
Shortly after flight MAS370 goes missing, scholarship student Girl boards her own mysterious flight from Australia to London to work on a dissertation on Sylvia Plath. Though she is ambivalent toward academia and harbors ideas about writing a post-colonial novel, if only she could work out just what that means, Girl relishes the freedom that has come with distance from the expectations and judgements of her very tight-knit Malaysian-Australian family. At last Girl has an opportunity to live on her own terms.
Unfolding across Girl's time at an artist residency in Scotland as she makes friends and enemies alike in a world far removed from any she's ever known, But the Girl is a wry and playfully philosophical coming of age novel that reveals the joys, embarrassments, pleasures, and agonies of trying to discover and understand who you are. Girl grapples with the long shadow of colonialism, the pressure of expectations in immigrant families, and the sometimes difficult fact that those closest to us remain the most unknowable.
A CBC Hot Off the Press Selection
Kids need funny books - books that fill them with joy and wonder!
Our newest anthology, CLARA'S KOOKY COMPENDIUM OF THIMBLETHOUGHTS AND WONDERFUZZ, is a mashup of a poetry collection and junk journal fused with a graphic novel plus bonus weird and wonderful facts. It features 150+ poems by a variety of engaging, contemporary poets, plus embedded skill notes, fun cartoon art, tons of trivia, and an engaging story about a week in the life of Clara, her family, and friends at school and at play. There's something for every kind of kid reader: the fact nerd, the aspiring writer, the doodling cartoonist, the question asker, and the poetry fan. It will get kids giggling while they absorb language arts skills, historical tidbits, and science knowledge - all with punny poetry!
The voices in this book represent popular names in the children's poetry community and also many new talents, including these poets: Alma Flor Ada, Verrena Diane Anderson, Dolores Andral, Marcie Flinchum Atkins, Kevan Atteberry, Lisa Billa, Robyn Hood Black, Merry Bradshaw, Jay Brazeau, Sandy Brehl, Calef Brown, F. Isabel Campoy, Yangsook Choi, Cynthia Cotten, Mary E. Cronin, Hollie Dagata, Leslie Degnan, Kristy Dempsey, Joanne Emery, Margarita Engle, Janet Clare Fagal, Douglas Florian, Patricia J. Franz, Marilyn Garcia, Van G. Garrett, Charles Ghigna, Avis Harley, David L. Harrison, Jane Heitman Healy, Sara Holbrook, Lyn Jekowsky, Alan Katz, Julie Larios, Irene Latham, Megan Litwin, Molly Lorenz, George Ella Lyon, J. David Martinez, Carmela A. Martino, Sara Matson, Rochelle Melander, Christy Mihaly, Amy Milholland, Kate McCarroll Moore, Kenn Nesbitt, Elisabeth Norton, Eric Ode, Abby Oqueli, Eric E. Peterson, Deborah Reidy, Laura Renauld, Joan Riordan, René Saldaña, Jr., Michael Salinger, Darren Sardelli, Donna JT Smith, Eileen Spinelli, Elizabeth Steinglass, Lynn Street, Suma Subramaniam, Linda Picaro Tarantino, Pamela Taylor, Linda Jean Thomas, Joyce Uglow, Fernanda Valentino, Carol Varsalona, Padma Venkatraman, Charles Waters, April Halprin Wayland, Vicki Wilke, Allan Wolf, Janet Wong, Helen Kemp Zax, and Darcy Day Zoells.
Profits from CLARA'S KOOKY COMPENDIUM OF THIMBLETHOUGHTS AND WONDERFUZZ will benefit charities that bring joy to children in hospitals.