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“In this strong debut novel, Schwartz takes a hard look at the dark secrets hiding within a marriage. Depressed over the death of her mother six months before, Jane Rosen, a stay-at-home mom of three girls and longtime wife to busy, self-absorbed rabbi Saul, finally flies down to her mother’s long-empty Florida house to put her affairs in order. There, Jane finds evidence of a mother she never knew, while Saul contends with the girls—in particular unhappy, fragile 16-year-old Malkah—and a dying congregant’s bombshell confession, that he had an affair with Jane 10 years before. Shocked and wounded, Saul tells Jane not to come home, leaving her to pursue her mother’s secret life. Soon, Jane’s caught up with a gardener who traps her in a spider web of drugs, sex and secrets. At home, Malkah’s descent into depression and Saul’s compounding fury push the family toward tragedy. Though readers may feel the couple is let too easily off the hook, Schwartz pursues both threads of the story unflinchingly to the end.”—Publishers Weekly -
Quick Kills chronicles the desperate longing to belong as well as the effects of neglect, familial absence, and the nature of secrets. The young female narrator is seduced by an older man who convinces her that she is the perfect subject for his photographs. Meanwhile, the narrator’s sister embarks on an equally precarious journey. Never clearly delineating the border between art and pornography, the narrator’s escalating disquiet is evidence that lines have been crossed. "Quick Kills is a chronicle of bewilderment sprung from the terrible want to be wanted, the paralyzing flux of allegiances that keeps us pinned where we ought not be. Girls go missing as readily as shoes in this darkly suggestive novel; nobody’s paying much attention but the predators, who are everywhere and swift. The reader is left to navigate by images, flashes in the dark—a drawer stuffed with frogs, a spatter of blood, a child in an empty swimming pool. Lurie insists that we look, keep looking, make beauty from the ruin, and live." —Noy Holland, author of Swim for the Little One First Read the Quick Kills Kirkus Review Here » -
Aaron Poochigian’s Mr. Either/Or is an ingenious debut, a verse novel melding American mythology, noir thriller and classical epic in language in which gritty rhythms, foreboding overtones and groovy jams surround you like an atmosphere. Imagine Byron’s Don Juan on a high-stakes romp through a Raymond Chandler novel. Think Hamlet in Manhattan with a license to kill. Mr. Either/Or is now available for download on Audible.
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Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage is high-thrills poetry; set in a funhouse Manhattan apocalypse; a mixture of pregnancy, sleep-training and violence. A sequel to Mr. Either/Or (Etruscan Press, 2017), this verse-novel features “you” the reader as a secret agent in Manhattan in which poetic rhythms cue and accompany action-scenes. “You” and your girlfriend Li-ling Levine save the world from villains fighting for anarchy and the end of the human race. -
Set simultaneously in the farm country of Wisconsin and a small mining town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado during the nineteenth century, the new novel by Peter Grandbois follows the lives of three brothers as each strives to re-create himself despite the forces that work to determine his identity. Though told from the point-of-view of many characters, the novel revolves around Killian, the oldest of the three, as he attempts to recapture a childhood as ephemeral as a dream. While Killian’s brother Henry strives to make the town prosperous and his brother Eli prays to maintain the town’s spiritual center, it becomes clear as the novel progresses that the center will not hold. Violence, lust, and greed tear at the fabric of the town until the only possibility for healing arrives in the form of a snowfall that lasts for three months, burying the town. It is here events take a surreal turn as individual identity collapses. Nahoonkara, an Ute Indian word that means, “land of the rising blue,” offers a place outside our preconceived notions of reality and identity, a place where we are free to re-imagine ourselves. “The amazing and masterful thing [in Nahoonkara] is the way that Grandbois ties this very personal, family story to the larger narrative of American expansion; it’s not overt, but we see clearly how individual pain leads to national empire.”—Kel Munger, Colorado Springs Independent NewspaperAward
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ]Winner of the Gold Medal for Best Literary Fiction of the Year (ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards) -
Zarathustra Must Die is Dorian Alexander’s first work of fiction and traverses several genres as it follows the odyssey of a graduate student grappling with Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence.” Part fictional memoir, part novel, part philosophical exposition, the work explores the nature of time and its relationship to our existence. However, Zarathustra Must Die finds a home not only in the high art of philosophy, but also in the low art of sex and drugs. Never taking the journey too seriously, Alexander’s humor ranges from high-brow wit to pure burlesque. Zarathustra Must Die is a thought-provoking fiction experience that defies easy classification. -
An American expatriate hopes to quell his grief for a long lost son in the stillness of his photographs of the Dodecanese Islands. But soon friendship and then love for a woman wounded in her own family-born grief propel him toward life again, where stillness is set into motion and identity might be recovered, against odds, in a foreign place. “. . . Oderman has a knack for keeping things moving and bringing the vibrant colors of the island to life.”—Publishers Weekly “In language as clear and beautiful as the Aegean Sea itself, Oderman seamlessly weaves the tales of three Americans, each fleeing to a remote Greek island to escape the past that haunts them. White Vespa takes the reader on a journey of the senses: the smells and tastes of the Greek isles; the thrumming heat; the languid stroll of life; the sometimes painful stabs of memory when all you want to do is forget.”—Jeff Talarigo, author of The Pearl Diver -
The world in Sara Pritchard's book is a known world and yet a strange place, with a cast of homeless characters who wander in and out of the stories of the collection, all set in the same university town. The linked stories take place during the time when gender discrimination in the American workplace was blatant, and when classified ads were labeled "male" or "female" accordingly.
“Sara Pritchard sees everything . . . and looks at it with such tenderness, clarity, and good humor that all of it begins to glow.” —Rebecca Barry, author of Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories.
“Survival stories from the liminal edge of Americana, delivered in Pritchard’s wry, observant voice.” —Lenore Hart, author of Becky and The Raven’s Bride
“Sara Pritchard can make you laugh in the same sentence that just made you cry.” —Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys and Astonished -
The Arsonist’s Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire, a highly compressed prose poem of a novel, explores the loneliness of three misfits as they attempt to reconnect to the modern world: Vivian, the wallflower who’s obsessed with death; Ronny, the arsonist, who’s resisting the urge to burn the whole town down, and The Doctor, who struggles to glorify his legacy with a brilliant and reckless vision: human flight. -
The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down is a collection of flash fiction that conveys entire worlds that are haunting, sad, funny, touching, and strange in the most enlivening, beautiful ways. This collection of tiny, intimate truffles is as powerful as soul-chocolate infused with caffeine. Each story contains bite-sized glimpses into the lives of everyday people, leaving readers with the long and lasting effects of a full-length novel. Each chapter dives into relevant life events that require further contemplation. These 50 stories reveal the dark truth and reality of the world. Direct, brave, funny, achingly personal, darkly humorous and sad, these stories linger and pull, begging to be reread many times. Pokrass is a trickster, a shape-shifter, a writer who chronicles the maladies of the modern world, and makes us laugh. Named a finalist for the 2017 Saboteur Awards
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Museum of Stones is a magnificent and bracing trek through motherhood. In a series of wellplaced stones of urgent prose poetry, Museum of Stones reveals the fates in store for this newborn boy: wrists “no wider than a straw” and sternum sporting a tiny tower of gauze, hospital monitors aglow in their wide range of numbers and, later, “neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of [the boy’s] numerical codes.” The book illumines the mutable states of the mother: the means by which she must carve herself, with “no distortions or duplications,” from what precious daily clay is left.—Diane Raptosh, National Book Award Semi-Finalist, American Amnesiac
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$19.00$17.71In the tradition of Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector, Searching for Anthony Love is a daring, lyrical novel that follows a woman grappling with the presence of a beloved who has died.
Told through fragments, meditations, and moments of startling clarity, the book traces how love continues to shape consciousness long after its object is gone. Searching for Anthony Love explores the interior spaces where longing, embodiment, and spiritual inquiry collide--where sadness becomes a location, vulnerability a form of knowledge, and the body both a shelter and a site of fracture.
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$18.00$16.78When a vision disorder stole his ability to read, Will Dowd found himself exiled from the world of books—until he discovered an unusual path back through the landscape of dreams. Armed with an experimental dream-inception device from MIT, Dowd embarked on a yearlong odyssey into his own unconscious.
The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires chronicles twenty extraordinary dream narratives born from this first-of-its-kind experiment. A service dog navigates grief after his owner's death. A time-travel tour guide loses tourists across centuries. An alien researcher falls in love with Earth despite himself. The stories in this collection emerge from a mind at its most unguarded, each one intimate, strange, and deeply human.
Part literary experiment, part exploration of consciousness, The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires reveals how dreams, like books, can become portals to other worlds—wild, untamable places where the impossible is married to the everyday and even exile can become a form of homecoming.
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$22.00
Your undercover operation is blown before you get to San Francisco. What next? If you're Orpen, you join the cops. Sort of. It's the Fall of 1883. Irish revolutionaries are changing the face of London with American dynamite, and not in a good way. Irish-born London Metropolitan Police Sergeant, Robert Emmet Orpen is sent, badly disguised as a tourist, to San Francisco to prevent at least some of the explosives getting into the wrong hands. He realizes that he may be out of his depth when his cover is blown before he even gets as far as the west coast. Now what does he do? First, he charms his way onto the San Francisco police force, where he is assigned to the coattails of a cynical, 'larger than life' Civil War veteran (from the losing side). Then he finds himself caught up in a murder involving one of the two violent Irish factions vying for supremacy in one of the most Irish of American cities. Orpen is going to wish he never heard of the murderous Knights of the Red Branch.Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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$17.67
Dostoyevsky said, Beauty saves, and in Jacqueline Gay Walley’s The Waw, a woman leaves her New York life to follow an image she has seen of a small town of great beauty by the sea in England. She does not quite know why she does this and is frequently asked and gives different answers. There she encounters remarkable people of strength with whom she explores music, love, dignity, and the gifts of solitude coupled with the gifts of community. She finds herself in love and more open than ever before. All of this put together strips her down to her essence, where the beauty of the place and people are able to transform her to a better self.Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
