Three days after her twentieth birthday, a young woman who grew up in Germany during World War II crosses the Atlantic to start a new life. Outside Is the Ocean traces Heike’s struggle to find love and happiness in America. After two marriages and a troubled relationship with her son, Heike adopts a disabled child from Russia, a strong-willed girl named Galina, who Heike hopes will give her the affection and companionship she craves. As Galina grows up, Heike’s grasp on reality frays, and she writes a series of letters to the son she thinks has abandoned her forever. It isn’t until Heike’s death that her son finds these letters and realizes how skewed his mother’s perceptions actually were.

Lead short story featured in 1993 Best American Short Stories

A wide variety of characters saunter, stalk, run, and sometimes hide in these lively stories about contemporary Southerners. Their experiences revolve around the way life is felt and the way it is lived, reflecting a gap between the plans we make for ourselves and the way things actually turn out. From the jungles of Vietnam to the bayous of Louisiana, from the French countryside to Vicksburg, Mississippi, Ely’s stories reveal how human beings’ unpredictable, unconscious motivations will have their say no matter what steps are taken to silence them.

Certain shadows fall over all the characters—especially the shadows of the Vietnam experience and the struggle between a traditional Southern heritage and the conflicting ideals of contemporary society. The characters in Ely’s stories seem powerless to defend themselves against the ever-changing expectations of a modern life, and yet they gain a new humanity and depth when, with dignity, they embrace their limitations.

What would happen if a feminist Jewish wit and scholar invaded David Lodge’s territory? Marleen S. Barr, herself a pioneer in the feminist criticism of science fiction, provides a giddily entertaining answer in this feisty novel. Oy Pioneer! follows professor Sondra Lear as she makes her inimitable way through a world of learning—at times fantastic, at times all too familiar, often hilarious, and always compulsively interesting.
    As if Mel Brooks and Erica Jong had joined forces to recreate Sex and the City for the intellectual set, the story is a heady mix of Jewish humor, feminist insight, and academic satire. Lear is a tenured radical and a wildly ambitious intellectual, but is subject nonetheless to the husband-hunting imperatives of her Jewish mother. Her adventures expand narrative parameters according to Barr’s term "genre fission."
    Mixing elements of science fiction, fantasy, ethnic comedy, satire, and authentic experience of academic life, Oy Pioneer! is uncommonly fun—a Jewish feminist scholar’s imaginative text boldly going where no academic satire has gone before—and bringing readers along for an exhilarating ride.

Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.

Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.

The Ozark Trilogy (previously published in 1981, Doubleday) is a widely acclaimed fantasy/science fiction story with, as the title suggests, very strong ties to the Ozark region. Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, And Then There’ll Be Fireworks—the books that comprise the trilogy—chronicle life on the planet Ozark and its Confederation of Continents, which are appropriately named Arkansaw, Oklahomah, Mizzurah, Tinaseeh, Kintucky, and Marktwain. However, the story told here involves much more than a mere transplant of Ozark culture and heritage onto a new planet. While this new Ozark culture maintains and even intensifies many of the “real” Ozark traditions and customs (for instance, “Grannys” hold significant, stabilizing social roles and are important sources of wisdom), the planet Ozark combines many new, fantastical elements with traditional ways. Mules on Ozark fly, and the wise “Grannys” also work magic.

The protagonist of The Ozark Trilogy, Responsible of Brightwater, appears at the center of Ozark society, a society she must save from evil magic, civil war, and, ultimately, alien invasion. As Responsible travels from continent to continent in an attempt to discover and squelch the evil magic and calm the civil unrest, we are witness to many dangerous and sometimes comical adventures along the way, including a spectacular flying Mule crash and a magic duel with a Granny gone bad.

Elgin has created a fantastic world infused with the folk traditions, social and familial hierarchies, and traditional dialect of the Ozarks. While parallels might be drawn between, for example, the break-up of the Confederacy of Continents on planet Ozark and the American Civil War, Elgin comments on aspects of Ozark history and tradition in a non didactic way. The trilogy, with its strong heroine and witty engagement of tradition, is a classic of Ozark literature.