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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 -
In his latest novel, Matthews returns to the 1850s, the time of his novel, Sassafras (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983). In The Gambler’s Nephew, the reader will enter a world of slavery, abolitionist passion, murder, hypocrisy, grave-robbery, chicanery, holiness, memory, guilt and plain old-fashioned cussedness. It’s a politically incorrect world of unrepentant capital punishment, when there were plenty of scoundrels just asking to be hanged by the neck until dead, thus coming as close as they could ever get to being civilized. In contrast, however, the reader will come upon the beauty and grandeur of the old steamboats plying the Ohio River, along with people troubled by such grand irrelevancies as love and tenderness. In short, The Gambler’s Nephew brings us a world as richly confused as our own—familiar yet different . . . and as alive as living can get. -
Blumenthal draws both a humorous and heartrending portrait of expatriate life in Europe and Central Europe, as well as the hazards and confusions that confront a European sensibility living in contemporary America. In venues as diverse as Israel, Hungary, Paris, Cambridge and, even, Texas, the stories testify to the work of an American in an increasingly connected and globalized world. -
$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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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 -
A book of provocative ideas, about art and artists, Variations In The Key of K is an artfully constructed collection of stories. Franz Kafka, Pablo Picasso, and William Blake are among the many artist lives reconceived here. A book of cautionary histories, on one hand. An irreverent celebration of the graces of the creative life, on the other. -
The world of Wattle & daub is inhabited by mysterious and peculiar creatures. A woman who fears the living thing in her apartment walls. An office-based streaker with an axe to grind. Automatons that finally recognize their creator. A terminally ill man resorting to hypnotism to quit smoking. The couple who conceive an alarm clock. A dying brain unspooling receding memories of a funfair… With ear-dizzying force, the stories in this debut collection meld and stretch into truly new directions. Every page is mined with humor, sympathy, and blistering language that mark Brian Coughlan as a unique fabricator of short tales.Award
[icon color="#dbb95c" size="16" type="icon-star" unit="px" ]2018 Finalist – Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award -
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 -
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.