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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) -
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 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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$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.
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$17.67
What begins as tragedy trips into farce, the realistic somehow turns mystical, and viewed through a prism of irony these delightfully off kilter stories off er surprising, often skewed and witfully unsettling impressions. Don’t Mind Me is a collection that follows no rules and leaves no tracks.Please note: you will be transferred to an outside website to make this purchase.
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American Fugue (Amerikaniki Fouga) is Stamatis’s first book published in America and available to U.S. readers. The book, which was translated by Etruscan author Diane Thiel and by Constantine Hadjilambrinos, follows a Greek protagonist who visits America, travels across the country, and has a strange and compelling adventure. American Fugue examines the basic themes that are persistent in all of Stamatis’s works of fiction: an all-consuming past, the flight to escape one’s personal demons, and, most importantly, the search for personal identity that is ultimately revealed only through what is unknown to the self. The treatment of these themes is also characteristic of the author’s other novels—travel narrative on the surface, mystery or thriller with an existential dimension at another level, but ultimately a quest for self-discovery and personal redemption. “One of the most gifted writers of his generation.” —Francoise Noiville, journalist at Le Monde “Alexis Stamatis always starts his books smoothly, seductively so, but one chapter in you find yourself rushing the pages, intrigued, amazed, surprised. . . ”—Nicholas Papandreou, author of A Crowded HeartAward
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ] 2007 Winner – NEA 1st International Translation Award -
When Isidore Mirsky’s sister-in-law Joan loses her apartment, she moves in. Mirsky’s world is already in flux—his job lost, his bayside town under siege by developers—and now he must struggle with his bewildering attraction to Joan, who evokes for him all the qualities that once drew him to his wife. How can a warm, unpredictable man remain true to himself and to the woman he loves? Desire, and the renewal it brings, might just be the thing that causes damage. Outrageous, tender, and alive with the sound of Isidore’s voice, The Burning House captures a man at his most vulnerable moment, on the brink of something new. "A vigorous, interior-driven narrative... Lisicky is a beautiful and powerful writer; his prose has a palpable energy that demands close attention...."—Publishers Weekly "An extraordinary fiction in that it sustains a believable poetic voice throughout... Lisicky's longer prose piece...often feels like a long, beautiful narrative poem about what it is to be flawed and human in a world that often seems, at best, indifferent."—The Boston Globe “Paul Lisicky’s The Burning House smolders with muscular, beautiful language, and shines with love for two sisters as each blossoms darkly into her own future. Lisicky’s odd man out finds his way deeply inside the reader’s desires and hopes. The answer to the question, ‘what do (good) men want?’ may well be answered in this elliptical, pitch-perfect gem of a novel.” — Jayne Anne Phillips -
The Widening is a poetic novel, presenting from the inside a portrait of a young woman’s volatile mix of passivity and wildness. Preoccupied with issues of female sexuality and alienation, and by turns picaresque, dark, and edgily erotic, it takes an unnamed girl in the mid-1970s from high school in California through travels in Spain and into college. The Widening is Moldaw’s first novel. “In an age when literature often hinges on authorial self-construction, Moldaw’s work is a fascinating act of exploration. The world she discovers is dazzling and scary, haunted and generous, ‘flagrant with expectancy.’”—Dennis Nurkse
