Gabriel and Hannah's daughter Christa is missing. Has she run away with her older boyfriend or has something worse happened to her? As Gabriel and Hannah wait for the police to find her, they're forced to confront the fissures in their marriage and who they've become as parents and individuals. With Gabriel's alcoholism and womanizing always lurking and Hannah's guilt over possibly pushing her daughter away taking a toll on her mental health, they must decide if they can be better people for each other...whether Christa comes home or not. From the Emmy-award-winning author of Upstate and Orphans, The Missing is a deeply psychological portrait of a marriage that is both full of pathos and frighteningly real.
When she is seven years old, Anna witnesses the tragic drowning of her younger sister, Megan. The tragedy haunts her and her parents, and in the aftermath, Anna becomes convinced she can communicate with her sister through sign language. Thirty years later, Anna, now a teacher of deaf children, adopts Adrea, a young deaf girl who forces her to face the trauma she's carried inside her since she lost her sister so long ago. The result is a transformation of heart and soul that Anna never dared to hope for. With this debut novel, originally published by Trumpeter in 2008, Rachel Stolzman Gullo has crafted a moving and poetic testament to love's power to transcend grief, pain and the limits of human language.
The stories in Transitory consist of familiar locations turned bizarre and longstanding relationships sacrificed to singular obsessions. Unearthly figures appear on a city street, the crew of a vessel in the North Atlantic see disquieting visions in the sky, and students become fixated on a film with mysterious origins. Tobias Carroll introduces us to a perspective of the world as uncanny as it is erudite, as revealing as it is hidden, where the absurd is often the most preferable of outcomes. Originally published in 2016 by Civil Coping Mechanisms, Transitory is a wry cult classic that recalls the work of Cesar Aira - by way of New Jersey.
In The Children of this Madness, Gemini Wahhaj pens a complex tale of modern Bengalis, one that illuminates the recent histories not only of Bangladesh, but America and Iraq. Told in multiple voices over successive eras, this is the story of Nasir Uddin and his daughter Beena, and the intersection of their distant, vastly different lives.As the US war in Iraq plays out a world away, and Beena struggles to belong to Houston's tony Bengali American community-many of whom serve the same corporate masters she sees destroying Iraq-recently widowed engineering professor Nasir Uddin journeys to America not only to see Beena and her new husband but the many former students who make up the immigrant community Beena has come to view with ambivalence. With subtlety, grace, and love, Wahhaj dramatizes this mingling of generations and cultures, and the search for an ever-elusive home that define the Bengali American experience.
At Take Creek, one of the most prestigious art schools in the United States, an unnamed photography major attends to study under Salter, a famous and perhaps out-of-his-mind professor whose works rivals that of Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand. When Salter asks his protégé to surveil Manning, the new transfer, as his final project, what follows is a wild, unpredictable last year of college full of drugs, nudity, shifting viewpoints, and the occasional making of art. Like a novelized version of Art School Confidential, Chris Rugeley's Take Creek, For Example is a wry and empathic coming-of-age comedy about a young man finding himself through the lens of a camera, only to discover that the world around him is a carnival of absurdities.
At once a gripping metaphysical mystery of Depression-era New York and a tender ode to our dying future, James Reich's The Moth for the Star is by turns horrifying and poignant, coldly thrilling and richly evocative. Charles Varnas is a murderer who cannot recall his victim. His cool, androgynous conspirator Campbell may hold the secret. Haunted and dissolute, they struggle to come to terms with the psychic weight of their crime. With a control of language and rhythm few can match, Reich transports his readers from the streets of Cairo to the canals of Venice, from the heights of Manhattan's Chrysler Building to the shadow of the Sphinx. The Moth for the Star is a dark, sprawling romance, riddled with paranormal drama, a singular work destined to remain with you long after reading.
From an automaton navigating a forbidden relationship with a man in post-apocalyptic Australia to a reimagining of a friendship between Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nawrocki's short fiction ranges from futuristic to historical and everywhere in between. House Fire, the winner of the 2009 James White Poetry Prize, judged by Mark Doty-a book that was never published-blazes with poems that are erudite and precise, even when confronting the messiness of love, grief, and mortality.The work of the late Jim Nawrocki, who died of cancer in 2018, is poignant, rangy, and genre-bending, and House Fire is a debut collection from a literary voice gone far too soon."e;These poems are the work of a hungry ghost, a gifted young man with a keen eye and silver tongue, who felt in the keenest, most intimate way the transience of all things. Jim Nawrocki alternates between a Buddhist calm and the ferocious appetite for the life of those condemned to know they will die young. In these splendid verses only Jim's art is resolute and invariably mature."e;-Edmund White"e;An unsung genius in life, Jim Nawrocki's poems and stories left me wanting much more and knowing my hunger wouldn't be satisfied. Alternating between the domestic, the postapocalyptic, and the cosmic, House Fire marks not only the beginning, but also the end, of Jim's vision. This ironic circularity perfectly encapsulates his erotics. If we are lucky, more posthumous work will grace us with his peculiar wisdom."e;-Michael Walsh, editor of Queer Nature and author of Creep Love.
Jackson Bliss's brilliant and moving debut novel redefines what a novel can be. Hurricane Sandy has just smashed into the Eastern Seaboard, trapping four passengers on the C train: a Chinese American graffiti artist grieving his father's death, a mixed-race graphic designer struggling to become a mom, a Moroccan French translator escaping his heartache in Paris, and an Indian American traveler leaving Chicago to regain control of her life. Amnesia of June Bugs is an ambitious, infatuated, and furious book about the time we lost and the people we could have loved."Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world."-REGINA KING, Emmy-award-winning actress & director"Amnesia of June Bugs is a lush, kaleidoscopic love song to the city. Jackson Bliss's voice is original, and intricately wrought. It is cerebral and tender. There is so much passion and love in these pages. I love how central a role identity and mixed race experience play here, and how this thrilling story keeps you gripped all the while, like a train underground in a storm, headed for what you can't know but can't stop reading to find out." -TOMMY ORANGE, Pulitzer Prize winning author of There There"In Amnesia of June Bugs, Jackson Bliss has written a bold, innovative masterpiece. I luxuriated over every sentence of this smart, zeitgeisty novel. At once tender and acute, Bliss deftly captures the multifaceted lives of his diverse cast of characters. The amalgamation of honest characters, stylistic feats, and shrewd social commentary makes this singular novel a must-read. -AMY MEYERSON, author of The Bookshop of Yesterdays and The Imperfects"In Amnesia of June Bugs, Jackson Bliss delivers a hip, intimate, and heartfelt exploration of our multicultural, cosmopolitan world, one full of promise and yet under threat. He is one of the great advocates and defenders of such a world, so urgently embodied in this very necessary novel."-VIET THANH NGUYEN, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer"A virtuosic feat of storytelling with fire on every page. It feels prophetic, like a meditation on aspects of identity and pop culture that haven't even been invented yet."-JAMIE FORD, NYT bestselling author of books not as well written as this one"In Amnesia of June Bugs, Ginger Lin, Winnie Yu, Aziz Al-Wahnan, and Suzanne Gupta are trapped on the C-train in the NYC underground. Hurricane Sandy swirls above. In this brief rupture in time, their rebellious metamorphoses intersect, stories emerging from hybrid bodies, woven cultures, translingual narratives at play with graffiti, screenplay, questionnaire, lyric lists. Jackson Bliss, diasporic hapa-Whitman, has written protest poem, manifesto, and anthem-a 21st century love song to America.-KAREN TEI YAMASHITA, author of Sansei & Sensibility: Stories"Jackson Bliss is as verbally exuberant as any writer I've come across in years. Amnesia of June Bugs is beautifully conceived, powerful, affecting, hip, comedic, and as close to being of-the-moment as it is possible for a novel to be."-T.C. BOYLE, award-winning author of The Terranauts
A widow plans her husband's funeral feeling as much resentment towards him as grief. A mother believes her young son has the DNA of a long-dead ex-boyfriend. A woman becomes obsessed with a drifter who stands in the same spot every day in her neighborhood. A couple grieving a series of miscarriages set out to adopt in China, only to get pregnant again. In thirteen stories that explore the complexities and messiness of faith, marriage, illness, and grief, Joann Smith's A Heaven of Their Choosing is a wise debut collection for fans of Grace Paley or Alice Munro."e;Reading A Heaven of Their Choosing is like touring a set of rooms inside the enormous house of fiction. At the center of each sits a character, often isolated and regretful, whose interior is revealed with a candor and dead-pan irony reminiscent of the stories of John McGahern and even Joyce. Like them, Smith knows how to invade people's privacy while keeping a steady eye on the everyday world around them. And sometimes, lives defined by boredom and limitation are lifted by event into insight and wonder. She is a writerly writer, whose stories will appeal to readers who wish to experience not just what happens next but how, sentence by sentence, it manages to happen at all."e; --Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States 2001-3"e;Joann Smith's A Heaven of Their Choosing is a collection of authentic, gut-wrenching, raw, hold-your-breath, can't-put-them-down, stories. There is a miracle in these pages that transports the reader to the place where art transcends us, a place where it is possible to simultaneously feel pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, and reach an epiphany: there is hope for us all. It is a collection one will return to again and again and again."e; --Patricia Dunn, author of Rebels By Accident and Last Stop on the 6. "e;I was riveted by A Heaven of Their Choosing. With a flair for mesmerizing irony inside of unerring truths, Smith delves into the power of language in our lives. From a wife's correspondence hidden in a honeymoon suitcase to a young employee at a gun shop's curiosity about a customer's choice of target, Smith delivers a collection of exquisite stories that will make you look at yourself and the choices in your life anew."e; --Jimin Han, author of A Small Revolution and The Apology, forthcoming in 2023.
THE PAPER GARDEN is a debut story collection of darkly humorous, gothic, speculative and feminist tales that will remind readers of Carmen Maria Machado and Samantha Schweblin. From the answers on a patient intake from a woman awaiting treatment to reimagined fairy tales or myths about troubled couples, these inventive stories are an introduction to a startlingly original literary voice.Caitlin Vance is the author of the poetry book Think of the World as a Mirror Maze (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019) and the chapbook The Little Cloud (dancing girl press, 2018). Her stories and poems have appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, The Rupture, Washington Square Review, and others."e;Vance's stories, at their best, are immersive and gripping."e; -Publishers Weekly"e;Vance's stellar debut is a beautiful original offering. These stories find power in their strangeness, in their unwillingness to be easily reduced. There is blood and there is also tenderness and healing, this is a special work."e;-Nana Kwama Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black"e;I loved Caitlin Vance's debut collection of stories and fractured fairy tales for its sensibility, which is simultaneously strange, angry, funny, tender, and wisely (and wryly) perceptive. Her characters (so often abandoned by parents or struggling with unreliable partners or the mentally ill) are compelling in their survival strategies. Without being Pollyanna-or slipping too wholly into the ever-present darkness of the world-they come out on top simply by making it to the end of their own remarkable stories."e;-Debra Spark, author of The Pretty Girl"e;These haunting and hilarious tales expose the fissures, absurdities, and inconsistencies in the stories we're told and the stories we tell ourselves. Whether the subject is an old parable, the haunted home of a troubled couple, the digressive answers penned into an intake form by a woman anxiously awaiting treatment, Vance's strange and often brutal worlds are signed with human, horror, and beauty."e;-Jessica Alexander, author of Dear Enemy
Failed academic Joshua Schulman is in a bad way. Grieving his mother''s death and the end of his marriage, he turns his avocation of retro video game collecting into a full-blown addiction. When a prep school in Eastern Iowa recruits him for a teaching job on the strength of a long-ago published online article from his grad school days, Joshua claims to still be chasing his PhD and gets hired. Moving from Brooklyn to Roll, Iowa (population 1,412), he finds that his troubles are just beginning.From Joshua''s pursuit of a married faculty member to the school''s cultic obsession with a cat-and-mouse playground game called Splat, The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone is a hilarious romp steeped in strange places, where frenetic anxieties, secrets, and obsessions intersect.
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