Short stories that follow unexpected connections and tell of queer life in America. Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Fiction Prize, Near Strangers is a collection of eight tightly crafted short stories filled with unexpected connections and set against the backdrop of everyday life. These stories center on resilient female protagonists and offer a view into queer life in America outside of its major coastal cities. The characters in Marian Crotty's collection are searching--for understanding, acceptance, or forgiveness. In the title story, an elderly rape crisis volunteer's advocacy for a survivor leads her to reexamine her role in estrangement from her son; in "Halloween," a queer teen is counseled through heartbreak by her unlucky-in-love grandmother; and in "Family Resemblance," a group of families whose children share the same sperm donor is disrupted by the arrival of a minor celebrity. While marginalization, loneliness, and bigotry hover in the distance of Near Strangers, the book's tone is hopeful and invites readers to reflect on our shared human experience with empathy.
Essays chronicling the beauty and awe of Appalachia through the eyes of a lifelong West Virginian. Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, Deep & Wild is the debut essay collection of Laura Jackson. Jackson, a lifelong West Virginian, employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia as it actually is while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson's collection revels in joy, family, and nature. Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia's rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver's famous song, "Take Me Home, Country Roads."
A debut collection that draws on the poet's Iranian heritage to process life-altering loss and grief. Darius Atefat-Peckham's debut poetry collection follows a boy's coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead. Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother's poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one's beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory "like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue." Book of Kin won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
Tender poetry chronicling a son's relationship with his mother through her battle with cancer and his move from his homeland of Nigeria to the United States. Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh's Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa's debut poetry collection serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a Nigerian mother and son. Throughout the book, Nebeolisa navigates the guilt of starting a new life in the United States, far away from his home country and from his mother, who is battling cancer. Depicting tender moments between mother and son, Terminal Maladies highlights how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical and emotional distance between them. He reflects on the reasons behind his Nigerian mother's withholding, questioning her need to act bravely alongside his own assumed role as her protector.
A playful debut short story collection imagining women's lives in a world free of social limitations. Amid heightened restrictions about what women can and cannot do with their bodies, Lynn Schmeidler's debut short story collection, Half-Lives, is a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women's bodies and psyches. Playful and experimental, these sixteen stories explore girlhood, sexuality, motherhood, identity, and aging in a world where structures of societal norms, narrative, gender, and sometimes even physics do not apply. The protagonists grapple with the roles they choose and with those that are thrust upon them as they navigate their ever-evolving emotional lives. A woman lists her vagina on Airbnb, Sleeping Beauty is a yoga teacher who lies in state on the dais of her mother's studio, and a museum intern writes a confession of her affair in the form of a hijacked museum audio guide. Half-Lives is the 2023 Rising Writer Prize winner, selected by Matt Bell.
"Amie Whittemore's Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore's third collection explores the complexities of love - romantic, familial, and love for place - and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: "Every habit / even love-strangest / of them all-offers exhaustion / and renewal." Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon's phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore's work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies-grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity-and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche"--
"Erica Reid's debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter's search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, "It's hard to feel at home unless I'm aching." Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid's stories create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms-including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels-containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid's active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there"--
"The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man's lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet's infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, "like too many Black men," if "a heart is not enough to keep me alive.""--
"I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet," writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author's self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life"--
"In Ishmael Mask, Charles Kell reminds us that identity is precarious. Kell's collection is a collage of the journeys and interior lives of various wanderers-from Ishmael, the son of Hagar, to Melville's Ishmael, and from Pierre of The Ambiguities to Pierre Guyotat. Each poem strips back the mask and beckons us to witness humanity in its barest forms. Captain Ahab's leg, Ishmael's arm, and Pierre's severed head serve as invitations to consider hunger and hope. The inspirations behind these poems-the Bible, Heraclitus, Melville, Guyotat, Tomaéz éSalamun-are transformed by Kell, conjuring dreamscapes both dazzling and haunting. Ishmael Mask masterfully allows a glimpse into the human experience of feeling lost-even when right at home, even in our own bodies"--
"In this poetry collection, J.D. Debris focuses on characters who live on society's outskirts and demand greater visibility in the face of marginalization. At the book's heart are extended narrative elegies for two musicians. First, the poet follows Mexican singer and songwriter Chalino Sâanchez as he avenges his sister's sexual assault, and then he turns to Gato Barbieri, an influential Argentine tenor saxophonist who is haunted by a shadowy 'man in dusk-colored glasses.' As these musicians question their purpose, we as readers are invited to reflect on our lives, our legacies, and ourselves. The Scorpion's Question Mark is personal and mythological, representational and abstract. These formally inventive and metrically attuned poems compose a range of contrasts-boxers Manny Pacquiao and Marvelous Marvin Hagler appear alongside Tupac and Herman Melville, and apparitions of the Virgin Mary manifest in both human and mirage-like forms on public beachfronts. Looking to the scorpion's tail that forms the shape of a question mark, Debris seeks to occupy uncertain space within the poems, bending forms to find both expansiveness and tension"--
"Liza Katz Duncan's debut collection is a poignant exploration of the unpredictable shifts that shape our lives. Given considers the notions of home and family and how to survive the changes and losses associated with both. Duncan conjures her home, the New Jersey Shore, in clear and unsentimental lines: "Call of the grackle, / whine of the turkey vulture. Blighted clams, // raw and red in their half-shells." Duncan's poems also explore the devastation brought to this place and its community by Superstorm Sandy and the continued impacts of climate change. Interwoven into this thread is the narrator's miscarriage; the parallels between the desecrated landscape and the personal catastrophe further contribute to the layers of tenderness in this collection, as Duncan urges us to remember and to witness. Despite tragedy and loss, Given is imbued with persistent, dogged hope, showing how survival persists amongst the wreckage, and from this debris is a path towards healing our grief"--
"Noley Reid's fourth book, Origami Dogs, is a testament to her mastery of the form. Here, dogs rove the grounds of their companion's emotions. These creatures in this short story collection often act subtly, serving as witnesses without language, exacerbating tension and providing relief to the human characters"--
Includes text: The caging of America: why do we lock so many people up? / by Adam Gopnik.
Ayres's first collection of essays ponders the family Ursidae, drawing from folklore, research, and her own imaginings.
Winner of the 2013 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, selected by Phillip Lopate.
Fiction. Short Stories. "Schwartz appreciates that a compelling plotline can contribute intensity to the brief life of a short story. All of these 11 stories arrest the reader from their opening paragraphs; their fully engaging plots include a western farmer allowing a hippie-dippie couple the temporary use of a cabin on his property but finding peace and love quickly turning to violence; a young person's crush on a cousin turns very provocative when the cousin, years later, shows up for a reunion no longer her original gender; a high-school teacher holds a gun to his head in front of his class with the full intention of using it; and a married man faces, under stressful circumstances, his own competitiveness with both his former girlfriend and his wife. But Schwartz is careful to use his strong, even page-turning plots to service the short story form's primary responsibility: to capture a character's most salient traits. His easy, unpretentious writing style not only adds to the stories' accessibility and resonance but also supplies the solid amalgam between plot and character, resulting in a collection to be held up as evidence that the short story not only endures but also flourishes."--Brad Hooper
Hoerr's first novel but fourth book paints a vivid portrait of labor relations in industrial McKeesport.
Winner of the 2012 Autumn House Press Fiction Contest, selected by Stewart O'Nan.
Isenberg's travelogue explores an intimate view of the Balkans through the eyes of a young American adventurer.
"Wendy Wimmer's debut short story collection, Entry Level, contains a range of characters who are trying to find, assert, or salvage their identities. These fifteen stories center around the experience of being underemployed--whether by circumstance, class, gender, race, or other prevailing factors--and the toll this takes on an individual. Wimmer pushes the boundaries of reality, creating stories that are funny, fantastic, and at times terrifying. Her characters undergo feats of endurance, heartbreak, and loneliness, all while trying to succeed in a world that so often undervalues them. From a young marine biologist suffering from imposter syndrome and a haunting to a bingo caller facing another brutal snowstorm and a creature that may or not be an angel, Wimmer's characters are all confronting an oppressive universe that seemingly operates against them or is, at best, indifferent to them. These stories reflect on the difficulties of modern-day survival and remind us that piecing together a life demands both hope and resilience."--
Winner of the 2010 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Sharon Dilworth.
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