A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner
Winner, 2022 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Prize for Best Fiction
In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
“Who knows if there’s a God? There’s us, now, and caterpillars and other insects and mulch. So thinks Stephen Wirth as he watches his marriage collapse. Between bouts of alcoholism and attempts to restore a fleet of decrepit boats, Stephen does his best to help his daughters cope with their mother having fallen in love with another woman. But growing up and making sense of the world is something the girls must do on their own, just as for their mother there is no easy way around building a new life. Set on Long Island, The Agnostics follows the Wirths through several decades as they struggle to redefine themselves and their idea of family.
Painting with a fine and delicate brush, Wendy Rawlings reveals her characters’ lives as a series of discrete moments, illuminating the intimate story of one American middle-class family.
What follows is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities—as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce—never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.
All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.
All the Tiny Beauties begins with a kitchen fire that sends the reclusive Webster Jackson to the home of his new neighbor, Colleen, who discovers him on her doorstep wearing a lacy peignoir, his house in flames. Unwilling to take responsibility for the lonely eccentric, Colleen reaches out to Webb’s estranged daughter, Debra. She also helps him find a live-in companion, a young adult reeling from the loss of her childhood friend.
Moving among perspectives and generations, we see the longings and vulnerabilities that drive and impede these characters as their stories intertwine—Webb’s first love clashing with his last; Colleen embarking on a secret affair with Debra; the older Webb and his young housemate, Hannah, forming a bond over tragedy, guilt, and his passion for baking.
Confronting the many ways they’ve failed others as well as themselves, Webb, Colleen, Hannah, and Debra slowly find ways forward and ways out. While exploring the fragile nature of our connections to one another, All the Tiny Beauties asks larger questions about the constraints society imposes that warp and wound, leading us to deny those things that make us wholly ourselves.
Winner of the American Literary Translators Association 2010 National Translation Award
Petra Hůlová became an overnight sensation when All This Belongs to Me was originally published in Czech in 2002, when the author was just twenty-three years old. She has since established herself as one of the most exciting young novelists in Europe today. Writings from an Unbound Europe is proud to publish the first translation of her work in English.
All This Belongs to Me chronicles the lives of three generations of women in a Mongolian family. Told from the point of view of a mother, three sisters, and the daughter of one of the sisters, this story of secrets and betrayals takes us from the daily rhythms of nomadic life on the steppe to the harsh realities of urban alcoholism and prostitution in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. All This Belongs to Me is a sweeping family saga that showcases Hůlová's genius.
Of Elaine Ford’s novel, Missed Connections, the Washington Post wrote that it is a work “of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity.” That same clarity proves an unsettling force in Ford’s stories, where precision of prose often belies uncertainties hidden beneath. In the title piece, an American woman in England, embroiled in a relationship doomed to fail, discovers how little she understands about her own desires and impulses. In another story, another American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed.
Throughout her stories Ford touches on the mysteries that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece of such detail and power as to transform the way we see the world.
Hyperaware of her own childhood losses and the challenges posed by Rick’s PTSD and heavy drinking, Charlie strives to build a stable home for Lucy. Her degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin gives her a leg up, and the quiet joys of working at the cheese vat provide a deep, healing peace that points the way toward happiness.
But Falls River is too narrow-minded to accept a female business owner, and Charlie is ill-prepared for the pettiness and conventions of small-town life. When debts come due, including a lien against her family’s land, she must quickly figure out who is on her side—and how to keep her dreams alive.
A Vulture Best Book of 2024
In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.
Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man.
By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines, social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.
Following desperate characters in desperate circumstances in the rural Midwest
In these colorful, darkly comic stories, veteran journalist and crime reporter John Counts takes readers to an often-ignored part of the country: a fictional Great Lakes coastal town in northern Michigan defined by beauty and bleakness. The cast of characters in these connected stories ranges from addicts to backwoods misfits to ruined lumber families, all bound together by their desire to obtain something just out of reach. Big Frank breaks out of a rehab facility trying to outrun grief. The women in the village of Brotherhood grapple with sterility resulting from an environmental calamity. A local politician must convince her mother to leave a nudist colony. And in the final, sweeping story, a splinter group from the local tribe attempts to reclaim its ancestral land by force. The people of Bear County and their predicaments encompass the wildly original and yet totally ordinary truths about American life off the beaten track.
Winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination.
For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son’s ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident.
Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.
The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
One of John Green's "favorite books ever," a powerful, moving novel of family, parenthood, and loss
The most poignant of all Peter De Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also the most autobiographical. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter-a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with a remarkableblend of grief, love, wit, and fury.
Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.
One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.
Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.
A poignant and graceful story collection about the clash and harmony of finding one’s place in an adult world that feels “other”
Brown Girls, Grown Up shines a light on the nuances of modern womanhood with grace, honesty, and charm. The stories in Qadeer’s debut collection delve into the subtleties and blatant struggles of navigating shifting identities as one matures, into the joys and challenges of intimacy and aging, and into the changing tides of motherhood. Middle-aged Amira takes radical action after meeting a new friend who lulls her into feeling safe and accepted; Hanna enrolls her biracial children in a local Sunday school after worrying they have no real connection to her Muslim heritage; betrayals and secrets come to light when a group of college friends reunite to take stock and compare achievements. Filled with humor and heartache, this collection offers a fresh and profoundly relatable perspective on the lifelong search for belonging in a world shaped by tradition, modernity, and individual ambition.
In the late 1970s, Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, marries Salma, a Lebanese refugee escaping the war in Beirut. Resolving to start over for the very last time, the couple opens a corner store in Toledo, Ohio, across from the General Motors factory, where Toledo’s Arab community intermingles with the working class. Over the decades, whether it’s bigotry (pre- and post-9/11), financial ruin, or terminal illness, the Idilbis find themselves on life’s outskirts, attempting to build something new.
Achingly poignant and slyly funny, the linked stories in Carryout follow the Idilbis and their children as they teeter on the brink of catastrophe. Walid, the youngest child of Ziad and Salma, navigates the heartbreaks of youth as well as the colorful characters who haunt his parents’ corner store. As he grows up into a writer, Walid’s gaze fixes on his father and the long shadow of displacement and occupation. Mustafa, the eldest son, is forever trying to outrun the disasters that seem to seek him out, while Nawal, the only daughter, is dumped by a friend and hatches a scheme to win her back. Unsure whether to run toward each other or away from each other, the characters in Dudar’s exquisite debut suffer the absurdities and indignities of life in America with wry obstinance and striking wisdom.
IndieReader Approved!
Renowned—albeit washed-up—author Peter Zemeckis (“Z”) is relishing the sunset of a life spent single when Dr. Nancy Chu crash-lands in the bungalow next door. As Nancy’s family drags him into deeper water, Z must rethink the ending to his own story.
Spanning from Amarillo, Texas, in 1977 to La Jolla, California, in 2012, The Daughters is a kaleidoscopic meditation on family, memory, and the invisible forces that bind us. Z’s narrative interweaves small-town rodeos with amateur radios, teen angst with parental love. Shard by shard, he pieces together the story of a fractured family struggling to reassemble itself.
Like particles, Z’s characters (and neighbors) are both small and singular, but their stories ripple like waves—colliding, refracting, and reshaping one another across generations. Elegant, intricate, and deeply moving, The Daughters reverberates long after its final page is turned.
James Stewart III’s powerful debut novel documents the life of a working-class interracial couple and their children in a Chicago suburb in the early 1990s. The father, Jim, is a Black man married to Connie, a white woman with two white sons from a previous marriage. Connie and Jim have three more children together, and the entire family lives in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a well-to-do, predominantly white community.
Defiant Acts follows the Stewarts through a year in which Jim fights to earn a promotion, the adolescent boys struggle to find themselves, one of the younger children becomes gravely ill, and the parents try to stay afloat in a shaky economy. Within the walls of the Stewarts’ home, race doesn’t factor, but when the family interacts with the outside world, it is inescapable, a basis for identity and inclusion as well as a spur for exclusion and abuse.
Rooted in the tradition of Black authors from Chicago and drawing on the author’s own experiences, Defiant Acts eschews a conventional plot, presenting a series of captured moments—past and present—and multiple perspectives to build a mosaic of the family’s lives. In clear, concise prose, Stewart focuses on the complexities of human relationships and on race relations both in and outside the domestic space, placing emphasis on the values that bind this tight-knit family together: solidarity, care, and hope.
This volume includes new studies of minority and immigrant families, school achievement, culture, race and gender, poverty, identity, and experiments and interventions meant to improve family and child contexts. Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development will be of enormous value to everyone interested in the issues of human development, education, and social welfare, and among professionals charged with the task of improving the lives of children in our communities.
-Katherine S. Newman
"Doing Time on the Outside brings to life in a compelling way the human drama, and tragedy, of our incarceration policies. Donald Braman documents the profound economic and social consequences of the American policy of massive imprisonment of young African American males. He shows us the link between the broad-scale policy changes of recent decades and the isolation and stigma that these bring to family members who have a loved one in prison. If we want to understand fully the impact of current criminal justice policies, this book should be required reading."
-Mark Mauer, Assistant Director, The Sentencing Project
"Through compelling stories and thoughtful analysis, this book describes how our nation's punishment policies have caused incalculable damage to the fabric of family and community life. Anyone concerned about the future of urban America should read this book."
-Jeremy Travis, The Urban Institute
In the tradition of Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game, this startling new ethnography by Donald Braman uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on the prisoners' families.
Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled, and in many cities-urban centers such as Washington, D.C.-it has increased over five-fold. Today, one out of every ten adult black men in the District is in prison and three out of every four can expect to spend some time behind bars. But the numbers don't reveal what it's like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on life in the inner city.
Author Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside-reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. Braman gives us the personal stories of what happens to the families and communities that prisoners are taken from and return to. Carefully documenting the effects of incarceration on the material and emotional lives of families, this groundbreaking ethnography reveals how criminal justice policies are furthering rather than abating the problem of social disorder. Braman also delivers a number of genuinely new arguments.
Among these is the compelling assertion that incarceration is holding offenders unaccountable to victims, communities, and families. The author gives the first detailed account of incarceration's corrosive effect on social capital in the inner city and describes in poignant detail how the stigma of prison pits family and community members against one another. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.
The University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, 1997
In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowman of the glance.
Helima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?
Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned lives.
Dot is caring but hides hurtful secrets. Ralfie’s gruffness masks the physical and emotional pain she endures. Friends and relatives don’t necessarily offer appealing role models for their third act. Dot’s sister Susan is pushing them toward a stuffy “55 or better” community out in the ’burbs, populated by aging straights who mistake the butch Ralfie for a frumpy old man. Eighty-year-old Viola—Dot’s friend and sometime lover—lives alone and refuses help, even as she experiences a devastating fall. Rife with Hoffman’s characteristic wit, Dot & Ralfie takes a hard, sometimes painful look at elder care in the LGBTQ+ community, and the unique struggles that come with getting older outside of heteronormative structures.
An American literary take on the Nordic noir genre
Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, we follow Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the prison’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The prison warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.
After a decade of miscarriages, Brooke Jensen is finally pregnant—with quadruplets. When she goes into labor after twenty-three weeks, Brooke and her husband rush to the hospital in the small town of Hanover, Wisconsin. For the 203 days that follow, they’re plunged into the terrifying and mysterious netherworld of the neonatal intensive care unit.
As the babies grow and struggle, fall turns to stark upper-Midwest winter. Brooke bonds with Dash, a senior nurse whose son, Landon, had been a patient in the NICU years earlier and is now straining his parents’ abilities to care for him. Both families bend and edge closer to breaking, and the questions mount: What does love look like? What does it mean to save a life?
A fiercely honest portrait of American parenthood, the American healthcare system, and Rust Belt communities, Everything We Could Do lays bare the ways that families are formed and remade in times of crisis.
“With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.”
—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in unforgettable variations across countries and cultures.
“Fascinating…A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all?…Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale…a feast of rich thoughts…An exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.”
—Marina Warner
“The inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’”
—Honor Moore
“Shocking yet familiar, these stories…retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book.”
—Literary Review
From the divergent paths of triplet brothers to a grieving father confronting his mistreatment of his son, these stories interweave a recurring cast of neighborhood characters, many of them in search of escape or release. Lauded for its empathetic portrayals of communities often ignored, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue won a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award; it was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award as one of the best collections published in English worldwide. A new foreword by author and activist Cherríe Moraga gives testament to Muñoz’s status as “the cartographer of a people.”
Food is fundamental, yet food poverty has increased in the Global North. Adopting a comparative case approach, Food and Families in Hard Times addresses the global problem of economic retrenchment and the burden it places on the most vulnerable. This timely book examines food poverty in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Norway following the 2008 financial crisis, examining the resources available to families in relation to the intersection of public policies, local institutions, and kinship networks. The book explores the ways that low income impacts household food provisioning, formal and informal support for struggling families, the provision and role of school meals, and constraints upon families’ social participation. Drawing upon extensive and intensive knowledge on the conditions and experiences of low-income families, the book also draws upon current research in European social science literature to shed light on the causes and consequences of food poverty in austerity-era Europe.
To support his contentions, Clark offers ten intimate portraits of Black families in Chicago. Visiting the homes of poor one- and two-parent families of high and low achievers, Clark made detailed observations on the quality of home life, noting how family habits and interactions affect school success and what characteristics of family life provide children with "school survival skills," a complex of behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge that are the essential elements in academic success.
Clark's conclusions lead to exciting implications for educational policy. If school achievement is not dependent on family structure or income, parents can learn to inculcate school survival skills in their children. Clark offers specific suggestions and strategies for use by teachers, parents, school administrators, and social service policy makers, but his work will also find an audience in urban anthropology, family studies, and Black studies.
Recovering a lost feminist story of scandal and strength for a new generation
Out of print in the United States since its original publication in 1915, Susan Glaspell’s largely forgotten novel Fidelity tells the story of Ruth Holland, a young woman who returns to her small Midwestern hometown after eleven years’ absence. Forced home by the death of her father, Ruth must face a family and community that have largely turned against her following her affair with a married man.
Glaspell, mostly known as a playwright and for her founding of the Provincetown Players, was also an accomplished novelist. Inspired by events in Glaspell’s own life, Fidelity portrays Ruth’s struggle to find fulfillment, love, and purpose in a society that imposes rigid expectations and limitations on how a woman should live. Ruth is a woman torn between love and commitment to her family—and between love and commitment to herself. Glaspell’s narrative shifts between characters, offering glimpses through the community’s eyes of the ways that Ruth’s return forces residents to confront their beliefs and the impact that they have. In the vein of Chopin’s The Awakening and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Glaspell’s Fidelity holds an important place in the history of early twentieth-century feminist literature and is long overdue to be back in print.
Students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, under the guidance of Kevin McMullen, project manager of the Walt Whitman Archive, have resurrected this neglected novel. The text includes contemporary photographs of Susan Glaspell, a new introduction, and annotations throughout, which provide useful commentary for students and general readers alike.
Set in Bosnia in the late 1700s, the novel sometimes functions as an artful metaphor for the communist Yugoslavia of Selimovic's day. At other times, the author explores the nuances of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Muslim Ahmet's sustaining marriage to a young Christian woman provides a multicultural tension that strongly resonates with contemporary readers and sensibilities.
As a young, deaf Jewish woman living in a small town in Michigan in 1942, Sandra Horowitz felt deeply frustrated by her limited prospects. Even though she had just graduated from junior college, she knew that she had two strikes against her in fulfilling her dream to become a veterinarian. Better to marry Jacob Winter, her parents urged her, a deaf Jewish man who made a good living. Then, Sandra met Rudy Townsend, a hearing soldier on leave before shipping out to the war in Europe.
In just four days, both Sandra and Rudy’s worlds were turned upside down. Sandra’s parents feared him for being hearing and a Gentile, while Rudy’s parents expressed openly their bias against her ethnic background and her deafness. Even so, Sandra and Rudy soon realized that they had fallen in love, deeply and passionately. As they shared the brief time they had together, they learned about each other’s dreams for the future — Sandra’s desire to be a vet and Rudy’s determination to serve in Congress. Then, Rudy had to leave for the war.
Philip Zazove’s novel Four Days in Michigan captures perfectly the power of irrepressible love between two individuals from opposite backgrounds. The struggles they encounter in an era when such differences were never more sharply drawn also reveal great detail about deaf and hearing life. Despite all, their triumph comes ultimately because of their long-lasting individual respect and love.
A teen’s life is complicated. Add an overworked dad, a distraught mom.
Enter an old man from the wrong side of the tracks.
He knows things. He’s there when you need him.
This happens to someone; it’s not a maybe thing. People get hurt. People die. There’s a dad who loves his kid but works all the time. When he doesn’t work, he drinks. When he drinks he’s out of control.
There’s a mom. She knows dad is overworked, a good man carrying too much responsibility.
The kid turns to the handy man to learn a man’s skills. In the old man from the wrong side of the tracks, the kid finds unusual skills and terrible—but true—lessons. He finds that his own safety comes at a cost to his unfortunate friend. He finds growing up comes at a cost to himself. This is the story of such a kid, told by himself after he has lived much of his life, come to terms with his parents’ weaknesses, and learned that seemingly insignificant people carry more pain than he can imagine, though he has already seen plenty.
An eerie coming-of-age story of a young girl’s quest for her absent mother across the frozen terrain of Lake Superior
One December evening, when 13-year-old Marta crosses the frozen Lake Superior and reaches the home she shares with her father, she finds a woman standing at their door. As Marta approaches, she realizes the woman, who looks like a tropical bird caught in the snow, is her mother who’d abruptly left them six years before. Marta hopes this is a turning point, that her mother will stay this time—despite hating this town, this island, and their creaky, towering Victorian house. But not everyone in town is thrilled with her mother’s arrival, least of all her dad.
Almost as soon as she arrives, however, Marta’s mother abruptly vanishes again, nowhere to be found, leaving Marta with more questions than answers. Her father denies her mother was ever there and Marta is left with the mystery of her mother’s homecoming. She begins to wonder if he is lying, or if there is a deeper secret being kept from her by the entire tight-knit community. As Marta delves into her mother's sudden reappearance and subsequent disappearance, she seeks answers, visiting places that were significant to her mother and questioning people she knew. Desperate for answers that will shed light on the mystery, this quest leads her to uncover a web of secrets that threaten to unravel everything she thought she knew about her family and herself.
Gichigami is an eerie coming-of-age novel, weaving between Marta and the person desperately trying to keep Marta and her mother apart. This poignant exploration of the lives of women and girls of the Midwest shines a light on the struggles of absent mothers, runaway daughters, and those who yearn for more than life has offered them. With rich prose and vivid imagery, Lindsey Steffes spins a tale of loss, longing, and betrayal set against the backdrop of the harsh yet beautiful landscape of Lake Superior.
As he drifts through the countryside, Stephen struggles to resolve the trauma and sorrow of losing his son, and soon the landscape begins to mirror his own inner battles. After a return trip to America fails to heal the rift between himself and the mother of his child, Stephen returns to Sarajevo, where he begins a project to document images of the Bosnian people—not war images, but personal portraits of an embattled nation. There he finds himself falling in love with a German journalist, who helps to heal his ailing body and to overcome his tragic loss.
The Goat Bridge is an unforgettable tale of memory and oblivion, a probing story of loss and redemption, of letting go and holding on, and of the universal human search for meaning. In the end, it is also a love story about finding the wisdom and courage to surrender to one’s own and another’s heart.
When Etta's grandmother dies, she is compelled to travel to Myanmar to explore complicated adolescent memories of her grandmother's family and the violence she witnessed there. Full of rich detail and complex relationships, The Golden Land explores those personal narratives that might lie beneath the surface of historical accounts.
In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—a stretch of land generally referred to as the Pimería Alta—an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it.
Ríos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.
It’s 1970, and on the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota, amidst the rise of AIM in neighboring Pine Ridge, a baby boy appears nestled in a box of Styrofoam peanuts on the doorstep of St. Rose Catholic Church. His appearance disrupts the predictable, lonely life of longtime reservation priest Father Joe Kreitzer. The child, whom they name Bear, finds refuge under the care of Father Joe’s closest friend and ally, Alice Nighthawk.
Thirteen years pass without event, when Alice’s older son, Albert, is mysteriously murdered outside a bar in Rapid City, and Bear is accused of attempting to kill the only person who knows what happened that night. At the same time, Father Joe receives a letter from a person from his past, the only woman who made him question the path of priesthood. She has reached out to Father Joe as one of the few who might help her.
To keep Bear’s case from federal prosecution, Father Joe and Alice begin a search for Bear’s long-lost mother. But their journey unearths more than they bargained for, plunging Father Joe into a labyrinth of secrets and revelations. He is forced not only to confront the choices he’s made and the secrets he keeps, but also to see the truth of the lives of the people around him.
High Hawk is a rich tapestry of love and history, delving into the delicate intricacies of the past and the redemptive power of second chances. Through evocative prose, the lives of those on the fringes of American culture come alive, navigating adversity and forging
connections against all odds.
Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.
When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history—his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis.
In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."
A riveting story about parenthood, substance abuse, and the strength it takes to come back from our mistakes
Foster care is a disaster in Rockford, Illinois. Meredith, a social worker and single mom, is stretched beyond thin but determined to protect her kids: not only her son, but those on her caseload too. When the stress of the job has her breaking her sobriety, the foundations of her life begin to tremble. After drinking too much, she makes a mistake that puts her preschooler in jeopardy, and Meredith finds herself in a situation that mirrors her clients’ as she loses custody of her son. In her fight to get him back, Meredith experiences the system from the outside—while still working for the kids inside of it. Set over the course of a year, this riveting documentary-esque novel is told from multiple perspectives, including those of case workers, birth parents, foster parents, and foster children. Written with the working-class humor and heart that defines the Midwest, How We See the Gray is a story about mistakes, second chances, and trying to do better in a system that seems doomed to fail.
A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing
In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.
Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.
A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.
Now, a new edition of the classic novel Islay promises to entertain a contemporary audience with its Deaf American dream first conceived by Douglas Bullard in 1986. Islay is the name of an imaginary island state coveted by Lyson Sulla, a Deaf man who is tired of feeling that “hearing think deaf means dumb, pat head.” Sulla signs this to his wife Mary in explanation of his desire to tum Islay into a state solely for Deaf people, with himself as governor. From there, his peripatetic quest begins.
Sulla initiates his plan by driving to Islay to survey the lay of the land. There, he meets Gene Owls, another Deaf man who also has designs on the island. Sulla then embarks on travels around the nation recruiting Deaf people to join his crusade. Along the way, he meets a Deaf doctor, a bowling alley owner, a family of peddlers, a Deaf minister, and a willing businessman. Far from a heroic character, Sulla engages in each encounter in an earthy, self-sewing fashion that sends up all parties involved, hearing and Deaf.
Islay uniquely blends classic English forms of satire with the direct, down-to-earth expression of American Sign Language ingenuously rendered throughout. Deaf himself, Bullard has created a wonderfully amusing story that features Deaf people seeking their American dream in a manner both serious and joyous at the same time.
Roley’s work has been praised by everyone from New York Times literary critics to APIA author Helen Zia for his bare, poetic style and raw emotionalism. In the collection’s title story, a woman living with her daughter and her daughter’s American husband fears the loss of Filipino tradition, especially Catholicism, as she tries to secretly permeate her granddaughter’s existence with elements of her ancestry. In "New Relations," an American-born son introduces his mother to his Caucasian bride and her family, only to experience his first marital discord around issues of politesse, the perception of culture, and post-colonial legacies. Roley’s delicately nuanced collection often leaves the audience with the awkwardness that comes from things lost in translation or entangled in generational divides.
Winner of the Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize
Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book
In the insular Portuguese fishing community of Provincetown, Josie Carvalho’s life has been shaped by the annual influx of summer tourists and his great aunt’s fervent, if idiosyncratic, Catholicism. The counterweight to these forces has always been Josie’s relationship with his grandfather John Joseph, a drunk, clam-poaching old man who is nevertheless a sly and masterful storyteller.
After a stranger starts dating Josie’s mother and upsets the family’s equilibrium, John Joseph heals the rift with the colorful and adventurous stories of their ancestor, Francisco Carvalho, a Portuguese explorer who just may have beaten Columbus to the New World. With the guidance of these obscure but inspired tales, Josie begins to find new ways of understanding his family and the outside world. This new edition of Leaving Pico makes Frank X. Gaspar’s award-winning coming-of-age novel accessible to a new generation of readers.
Published as the siege of Sarajevo ended, Lodgers is a hilarious, unsentimental report from the front lines of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Detergent mixed with flour, museum relics sold to U.N. peacekeepers, the magic power of laminated accreditation-all of the folly and the horror of that time are revealed in the sarcastic report of the novel's teenage would-be authoress.
Maja lives in the basement of a Sarajevo museum, enduring with equal annoyance Serb artillery and vegetarian meals that taste like fried sponge. Her father, the museum director, zealously guards the treasures upstairs while their aged co-lodger Julio plots to trade them away. Maja's mother copes with yoga while dour stepbrother Davor endures the endless crying and cravings of his pregnant wife. Floating amidst it all is Maja's grandmother, blind and deaf, yet drawn to any conversation involving food.
Need and crisis propel Maja and her companions from one humorous situation to another. Yet her pitch-perfect gallows humor makes it clear that the brutalities of war penetrate these small moments of life-and even the self-centeredness of a teenaged girl. A best seller in the Balkans and widely translated in Europe, Lodgers is an uncompromising novel about a modern tragedy.
Marcoré, first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1957, won the coveted prize for fiction awarded by the Brazilian Academy of Letters and has been praised by leading critics and writers in Brazil. The novel has maintained favor with the Brazilian public and has also been published and received with enthusiasm in Portugal.
Adopting the intimist, introspective approach characteristic of such writers as Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos, Pereira tells a moving, bittersweet tale of personal problems and family relationships. The central character of Marcoré is the narrator, a modest, introverted individual who, aware of his own human condition, tends to view life with pessimism tempered with compassion.
As the narrator reflects on his life and relationships in a small town in the state of São Paulo, an unobtrusive document of Brazilian family life unfolds. The novel contains several highly dramatic scenes as well as many tender and entertaining ones and introduces a set of very human, very credible characters, including a most irascible mother-in-law and a wife who makes a strange vow.
The reactions, thoughts, and hidden motivations of the characters are revealed in precise and economical language—evidence of the author's powers of observation and knowledge of human nature.
Rachel de Queiroz has described Marcoré as "a beautiful and tormented book." It has become a modern Brazilian classic.
Mickey Dunmore’s story begins with the sinking of his father’s merchant sailing ship and ends with a cliffhanger in World War I. In school, after an illness caused his deafness, Mickey finds himself constantly fighting the hearing boys and later competing with the signing students when he attends a residential school for deaf students. In college, he and his best friend Dick Wagner leave early to travel the nation with the hobos, carnies, and grifters. In one town, they outfox a barker who was using a deaf girl to “read” the minds of their marks. Further on, they meet Bunny, the Mighty Mite deaf man who helps expose a hearing woman posing as deaf to scam sympathetic people. Mickey faces his greatest challenge when he falls in love with Marion Carrel, a deaf girl whose hearing father forbids their romance on eugenics grounds.
Terry, who became deaf at the age of 11, states from the outset that he means for his novel to reveal the biases confronting deaf people at the time. As a tonic, he populates Mickey’s Harvest with artistic, talented deaf individuals who engage readers in an earlier, colorful time as they “show their stuff.”
Moira is becoming obsessed with starting a family; Andy is becoming obsessed by thoughts of her friend Patsy. An unwinnable domestic dispute involving his shady tenant (and former classmate) Frankie “The Pin” Pignatano takes over more and more of his life. As tensions rise at home, at work, and in the duplex, Andy is forced to decide which vows he can honor.
This slow-burning, finely textured portrait of family dynamics pivots on secrets between generations and how the shadows of the past can darken the future.
A remarkable young woman flees India to chase the dream of self-reinvention in America
The orphaned girls of St. Ursula’s convent are destined to be nuns or servants, but seventeen-year-old Savi dreams of escape. She is chosen to work as a governess for the wealthy Nandiyar family at their country estate in Tamil Nadu, where she falls for a lively and carefree apprentice sculptor. After the violent and horrific events of a single night, they are forced to flee, leaving their homeland forever in the rearview.
Decades later, Savi has become known to all as “Missy” and runs a successful driving school in Chicago. She is a pillar of the South Asian community and the mother of two brilliant, stubborn young women, Mansi and Shilpa. But when Varun, a charming doctor with mysterious connections to her past, enters their lives, a chain of events is set off that puts Missy’s carefully constructed world in jeopardy. Can Missy outrun her secrets? And, if she is forced to face them, what will become of those she loves?
During the German occupation of Belgrade, a family—including an alarmist mother, an eternally drunk father, two young aunts who swoon over American movie stars, and a playboy uncle—attempt to find any kind of work they can do at home. When the postwar Socialist society is being ushered in after the war, the narrator becomes the slogan-spouting ideological leader of the household, while his family tries—and often fails miserably—to take part in the "great change."
This volume also includes several Ćosić short stories, and recent essays on the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Showing both the drama of familial intimacy and the ups and downs of the everyday, My Old Faithful introduces readers to a close-knit Chinese family. These ten interconnected short stories, which take place in China and the United States over a thirty-year period, merge to paint a nuanced portrait of family life, full of pain, surprises, and subtle acts of courage. Richly textured narratives from the mother, the father, the son, and the daughters play out against the backdrop of China's social and economic change.
With quiet humor and sharp insight into the ordinary, Yang Huang writes of a father who spanks his son out of love, a brother who betrays his sister, and a woman who returns to China after many years to find her country changed in ways both expected and startling.
Kirby is a young woman attempting to come to terms with a failed bout of therapy and the truth about her identical twin, Kendra. Since girlhood, Kirby both idolized and envied Kendra, a fearless and charismatic ballet dancer who commanded the attention of everyone in their orbit. In the aftermath of tragedy, Kirby is sent a case study by a former psychiatrist intent on publishing a distorted version of her family’s secrets. She responds by using Kendra’s private and revealing journals to reconstruct their final months together, as well as her own “disastrous” time in therapy, to voice her own truth.
Freud’s “Dora,” a young woman whose mysterious symptoms he contentiously chalked up to “hysteria,” appears at turns in the faces of each twin as they navigate a world of sexuality, familial dysfunction, and possibly-psychosomatic ailments. Reissued with a new foreword by Lidia Yuknavitch, Frangello’s groundbreaking early novel brings “Dora” into a new era.
Chicagoan Helen Price, a dying woman, recounts her life while driving toward an oncology appointment. She attempts to take her own life, survives, then dies under tragic circumstances.
In death, Helen bequeaths the family home to her only son, gay playwright Norman Price. Father to an adopted Chinese child, and recently broken up with his partner, Norman’s life is in crisis. Helen also bequeaths a series of tapes to Nate Feldman, a Vietnam draft dodger ensconced in the far reaches of Canada, and the son of Helen’s former boss, Theodore Feldman. Nate’s return to America to claim the tapes occasions confronting a history of animus between father and son, but also the nature of the relationship between Helen Price and Theodore Feldman.
Told from moving cars, the journeys of Norman Price and Nate Feldman converge toward unexpected mysteries and revelations that uncover not so much lies as understandings of life that no longer hold under the scrutiny of the present
Set in a sleepy village north of Budapest in 1968, this touching, unsettling novel paints a richly wrought portrait of mid-twentieth-century Hungary. The narrator is the ninth child of a family distinguished by its size, poverty, faith, and abundance of physical and psychological disabilities. His confusion is exacerbated by the strict, secretive Catholic household his parents keep in the face of a Communist system. These dual oppressions propel him toward an inevitable realization of his guilt and desire that speaks to his struggle with a fateful, seamless beauty.
This beautiful facsimile of the 1791 edition includes the original illustrations by William Blake. A commentary by Eileen Hunt Botting puts the text in context and hints at influences on Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Shelley and the pedagogical philosophy behind Shelley's novel Frankenstein.
Like all volumes in the Women in Print series, Original Stories from Real Life is provided as an open access book and downloads to a wide variety of platforms and online e-readers.
From critically acclaimed author Maceo Montoya comes an inventive and adventurous satirical novel about a Mexican-American artist’s efforts to fulfill his vision: to paint masterful works of art. His plans include a move to Paris to join the ranks of his artistic hero, Gustave Courbet—except it’s 1943, and he’s stuck in the backwoods of New Mexico. Penniless and prone to epileptic fits, even his mother thinks he’s crazy.
Ernie Lobato has just inherited his deceased uncle’s manuscript and drawings. At the urging of his colleague, an activist and history buff (Lorraine Rios), Ernie sends the materials to a professor of Chicanx literature (Dr. Samuel Pizarro). Throughout the novel, Dr. Pizarro shares his insights and comments on the uncle’s legacy in a series of annotations to his text and illustrations.
As Ernie’s uncle battles a world that is unkind to “starving artists,” he runs into other tormented twentieth-century artists, writers, and activists with ambitions to match his own: a young itinerant preacher (Reies López Tijerina); the “greatest insane artist” (Martín Ramirez); and Oscar Zeta Acosta who is hellbent on self-destruction. Will the fortuitous encounters with these prophetic figures result in his own genius being recognized? Or will his
uncompromising nature consign him to what he fears most?
Told through a combination of words and images in the tradition of classic works such as Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland, Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces features fifty-one vivid black-and-white pen drawings. This complex and engaging story also doubles as literary criticism, commenting on how outsiders’ stories fit into the larger context of the Chicanx literary canon. A unique and multilayered story that embraces both contradiction and possibility, it also sheds new light on the current state of Chicanx literature while, at the same time, contributing to it.
Propulsive, humorous, and full of life, this candid novel will be loved not only by Beat fiction fans but by contemporary fiction lovers as well.
Based on the true story of a shameful episode in north Texas history, Quakertown draws on the rich texture of the South—the Pecan Creek running along the edges of Quakertown, the remarkable and rare white lilac, and the rising tensions marking each nod and greeting. With strength and a deep wisdom of heart, Martin carves out the delicate story of two families—one white and one black—and the child whose birth brought a gift of forgiveness.
Suffused with Martin’s deep compassion and profound humanity, Quakertown is an unforgettable novel from a master of American prose.
Twin A and Twin B. That’s what Michael and Sal’s neuroscientist father irreverently calls them. The boys are born moments apart, but baby Sal’s brain scan shows a bleed. He has severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.
Told through multiple perspectives—Gabe, the boys’ father; Hannah, their mother; and Michael—this debut novel follows the Mitchell family from the boys’ infancy to the cusp of adulthood as they all try to interpret what Sal, who speaks only eight words, is thinking and feeling. The twins’ upbringing in suburban Ohio is familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary, as this middle-class family navigates the challenges and rewards of nurturing a special-needs human with a killer dimple who is utterly and winningly himself: sweet, stubborn, mischievous, impenetrable, and above all, very funny.
Michael feels that he alone understands Sal and devotes himself to giving his brother a voice in the “normal” world until he grows up and can’t “hear” his twin anymore—his worst fear. Their mother, a teacher who has given up her career for caregiving, and their father, who is determined to succeed in his research, also struggle with the balance of sacrifice and duty and love, especially as Sal’s health deteriorates. Before Michael leaves for college, the twins spend a final week together at a summer camp for people with disabilities, and Sal does something that changes their lives forever.
Transforming perceptions of disability and interdependence through tender attention to detail, Range of Motion is wrenching, beautiful, and sharply comic.
In Reading History Sideways, leading family scholar Arland Thornton demonstrates how this approach, though long since discredited, has permeated Western ideas and values about the family. Further, its domination of social science for centuries caused the misinterpretation of Western trends in family structure, marriage, fertility, and parent-child relations. Revisiting the "developmental fallacy," Thornton here traces its central role in changes in the Western world, from marriage to gender roles to adolescent sexuality. Through public policies, aid programs, and colonialism, it continues to reshape families in non-Western societies as well.
Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”
Inside Half Moon Bay, a sparkling California coastal town, Ester Prynn is dulled and diminished by struggles with work, money, marriage, her senile father, a troubled teenage son, and old guilt she can’t assuage. When a masked gunman robs the convenience store where Ester works, he upends her fraught life and propels her toward passions buried, like singing; desires discovered, like a same-sex infatuation; and wrongs righted, like bringing the violent assailant to justice. But as the armed robber commits new crimes and continues to evade capture, the trauma from the holdup climbs, threatening Ester’s newfound delights and longings and forcing her to contend with her burning regrets and what-ifs. In the reckoning between Ester and these growing, molten upsets, she’s faced with enormous choices and must determine what and who can bring her to her best life.
Helena showed early musical talent and, trained by her father, was a gifted singer. She lived in Paris for a time and enjoyed popular success. She fell in love with a musician but was plunged into despair when he died from cholera. Her father persuaded her to give up singing and marry a cold industrialist, who was one of the wealthiest men in Sweden, in order to provide financial support for the family. Helena struggled in the loveless marriage and battled depression throughout her life.
Despite their disparate lives, Albert and Helena faced similar struggles with communication, autonomy, and self-determination. Albert’s story traces the development of his own sense of identity as well as the development of Swedish Deaf culture, while Helena’s life reflects the silencing and oppression endured by women. In Sister and Brother, Pleijel’s literary treatment of their lives sheds light on the cultural and social norms that shaped the experiences of deaf people and women in the 19th century.
Now in paperback: a writer and former ski jumper facing a terminal diagnosis takes one more leap—into a past of soaring flights and broken family bonds
A brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless—Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might be the key to the book he’s always wanted to write: a novel about his family, beginning with Pops, once a champion ski jumper himself, who also took Jon and his younger brother Anton to the heights. But Jon has never been able to get past the next, ruinous episode of their history, and now that he has received a terrible diagnosis, he’s afraid he never will.
In a bravura performance, Peter Geye follows Jon deep into the past he tried so hard to leave behind, telling the story he spent his life escaping. It begins with a flourish, his father and his hard-won sweetheart fleeing Chicago, and a notoriously ruthless gangster, to land in North Minneapolis. That, at least, was the tale Jon heard, one that becomes more and more suspect as he revisits the events that eventually tore the family in two, sending his father to prison, his mother to the state hospital, and placing himself, a teenager, in charge of thirteen-year-old Anton. Traveling back and forth in time, Jon tells his family’s story—perhaps his last chance to share it—to his beloved wife Ingrid, circling ever closer to the truth about those events and his own part in them, and revealing the perhaps unforgivable violence done to the brothers’ bond.
The dream of ski jumping haunts Jon as his tale unfolds, daring time to stop just long enough to stick the landing. As thrilling as those soaring flights, as precarious as the Bargaard family’s complicated love, as tender as Jon’s backward gaze while disease takes him inexorably forward, Peter Geye’s gorgeous prose brings the brothers to the precipice of their relationship, where they have to choose: each other, or the secrets they’ve held so tightly for so long.
Cover alt text: Lightly gradiented periwinkle sky background with white cloud in upper right corner and snow in lower left. At top, a cutout black-and-white image of a ski jumper appears and is cut off at the neck. Foreground: Book title in all-caps red, with author name beneath in all-caps white and “A Novel” beneath in all-cap dark grey. All text reads at a motion slant.
A robust trade in human lives thrived throughout North China during the late Qing and Republican periods. Whether to acquire servants, slaves, concubines, or children—or dispose of unwanted household members—families at all levels of society addressed various domestic needs by participating in this market. Sold People brings into focus the complicit dynamic of human trafficking, including the social and legal networks that sustained it. Johanna Ransmeier reveals the extent to which the structure of the Chinese family not only influenced but encouraged the buying and selling of men, women, and children.
For centuries, human trafficking had an ambiguous status in Chinese society. Prohibited in principle during the Qing period, it was nevertheless widely accepted as part of family life, despite the frequent involvement of criminals. In 1910, Qing reformers, hoping to usher China into the community of modern nations, officially abolished the trade. But police and other judicial officials found the new law extremely difficult to enforce. Industrialization, urbanization, and the development of modern transportation systems created a breeding ground for continued commerce in people. The Republican government that came to power after the 1911 revolution similarly struggled to root out the entrenched practice.
Ransmeier draws from untapped archival sources to recreate the lived experience of human trafficking in turn-of-the-century North China. Not always a measure of last resort reserved for times of extreme hardship, the sale of people was a commonplace transaction that built and restructured families as often as it broke them apart.
A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history—now available in paperback
When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.
Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget.
As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family’s land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor—much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
In this freewheeling debut collection, Daniel A. Hoyt takes us from the swamps of Florida to the streets of Dresden, to the skies above America, to the tourist hotels of Acapulco, to the southwest corner of Nebraska. Along the way, we encounter a remarkable group of characters all struggling to find their footing in an unsettling world.
Sometimes magical, sometimes realistic, sometimes absurd, these stories reveal people teetering on the dangerous edge of their lives. In “Amar,” a Turkish restaurant owner deals with skinheads and the specter of violence that haunts his family. In “Boy, Sea, Boy,” a shipwrecked sailor receives a surreal visitor, a version of himself as a child. In “The Collection,” a father and son squander a trove of bizarre and fanciful objects. And in “The Kids,” a suburban couple grasp for meaning after discovering children eating from their trash.
In each of these stories, characters find themselves challenged by the political, cultural, and spiritual forces that define their lives. With a clear eye and a steady hand, Hoyt explores a fragile balance: the flames—fueled by love, loss, hope, and family—shed new light on us. Sometimes we feel warmth, and sometimes we simply burn.
In rural late-nineteenth-century New England, Wilhelmina Sylte is a settler starting a family with her Norwegian immigrant husband. When she forms an inexplicable connection with a mountain lion and her cubs living near their farm, Mina grapples with divided loyalties and the mysterious bond she shares with the animals.
In 1927 in southern Colorado, Josepa is accused of witchcraft by a local priest for using the healing practices passed down from her Native mother. Fighting for her family’s reputation and way of life, Sepa finds strength in worldly and otherworldly sources.
When Magdalena, an ecologist, inherits her great-grandmother Wilhelmina’s Vermont property, she and her astrophysicist husband decide to turn the old farm into a summer science camp for teens. As Magda struggles with both personal and professional responsibilities, the boundary between science and myth begins to blur.
Rich in historical and cultural detail, This Fierce Blood combines magical realism with themes of maternal ancestral inheritance, and also explores the ways Hispano/Indigenous traditions both conflicted and wove together, shaping the distinctive character of the American Southwest. Readers of Téa Obreht and Ruth Ozeki will find much to admire in this debut novel.
Catching sight of the village of Neptune nestled in a remote Vermont valley, a traveler likens it to “a lost kingdom.” The fourteen stories in Catherine Tudish’s gorgeously crafted volume interweave the lives of three generations in this “embarrassingly pretty town” of “upward of a thousand souls” as they inevitably touch the outside world. A boy born of a secret affair travels by train to South Carolina for a first-time meeting with his respected father. A recent widow and Boston transplant solves the mystery of a teen girl gone missing. A beloved sheriff breaks up a drug operation, only to get busted himself for helping undocumented workers evade ICE. The disappointed wife of a rural mail driver presents him with a nude portrait—of herself. A shy girl with a speech impediment loses her stutter when she befriends and speaks to a black bear. Another boy has nightmares that seem to be the memories of a distant stranger’s tragedy.
Even as their loyalties and traditions are tested through loss, betrayal, and startling discovery, the characters in A Thousand Souls embody the belonging that comes from a close-knit community. Sharply observed, wry, and deeply tender, these stories resonate with both the intricacy and cost of interconnection as the years pass, and ordinary lives take unexpected turns.
2025 Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY Awards) gold medalist, Best Regional Fiction: West-Pacific
This is the story of the Garrison family, who live in Lents, an outer neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. At the heart of it all, there are the three Garrison sisters: Sara, the eldest, a fiery soccer star on the precipice of pulling herself out of the life of poverty she’s always known; Elaine, shy and struggling with the weight she carries both physically and mentally; and Rachel, a reader and poet whose imagination stalls at trying to picture a better life.
As the Garrisons struggle to communicate with each other, as they battle self-doubts and self-sabotage, they too draw on a fierce shared strength that allows them to push back at the reality that’s been handed to them. Each Garrison fights to hold on to their dignity—often through daily acts of grace and good humor, to say nothing of quiet perseverance—and to prove to themselves and each other that they shouldn’t be underestimated.
A contemporary gothic delving into the power of unmoored lust and familial bonds
When Baxter, a young writer and recent college graduate, accepts a live-in nanny position for an affluent professor’s family in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, she rapidly becomes aware of strange happenings orbiting the family and their children, Quinn and Thebes. After the father becomes estranged and the mother disappears into the night with only one child, Baxter is left utterly lost and in charge of the baby, Thebes, as she struggles to make sense of the bizarre occurrences within the family, the house, and even her own body. But the unnatural occurrences are far from over, and as Baxter stumbles in the dark to protect the child, something sinister stalks the night, looking to sink in its teeth.
For fans of gothic classics such as The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla, The Turn is an eerie and magnificent modern gothic tale about the monstrous bond of love between caregiver and child.
Winner of the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award in Multicultural Fiction
Winner of the 2022 Forward INDIES Silver Award for Literary Fiction
Finalist of the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award in New Fiction
Finalist of the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award
Barb Matheson doesn’t fit in: not on the Standing Rock Reservation where her mother was born; not at the mission in rural Ethiopia where she grew up; and certainly not at the Pennsylvania church where her husband preaches. Expansive and lyrical, Unfollowers is a tale of religious angst, unrequited love, and the upheaval of racial and economic privilege. Equally adrift on both sides of the Atlantic, Barb must negotiate the distance between white America and Africa, between the spirituality of her ancestors and the straight tones of evangelicalism, and between rules and grace. When a former lover crashes her daughter’s third birthday party, she’s offered the chance to find her way home to Ethiopia, leaving her to choose between a rote life in America and an improvised life abroad.
It’s the summer of 2008, and thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, reeling from the breakup of a bad marriage, has abandoned her career as a botanist and moved home to the family farm to start a wholesale garden-plant greenhouse, and, perhaps more importantly, to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, now that a shoulder injury has ended his NFL career, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm to Camas Valley State University, which has promised to create a research facility on the land, but Bodie and his idealistic wife, Fleece, are committed to farming.
Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the Tunder farm. Nu gets pressed into service helping Bodie with farm chores and taking care of Joe, so Ursula seizes the opportunity to get away from the farm, accepting a temporary job surveying native plants in the Cascades. But when Joe’s health plummets and Bodie’s finances crash, Ursula abandons her summer job to return home once again.
Facing bankruptcy, Ursula, Bodie, and Nu enlist a ragtag troupe of land-defenders in a festival of resistance in a last-ditch effort to save a way of life that may disappear forever.
Here is a lively study of marriage and the family during the Reformation, primarily in Gemany and Switzerland, that dispels the commonly held notion of fathers as tyrannical and families as loveless.
Did husbands and wives love one another in Reformation Europe? Did the home and family life matter to most people? In this wide-ranging work, Steven Ozment has gathered the answers of contemporaries to these questions. His subject is the patriarchal family in Germany and Switzerland, primarily among Protestants. But unlike modern scholars from Philippe Ariès to Lawrence Stone, Ozment finds the fathers of early modern Europe sympathetic and even admirable. They were not domineering or loveless men, nor were their homes the training ground for passive citizenry in an age of political absolutism. From prenatal care to graveside grief, they expressed deep love for their wives and children. Rather than a place where women and children were bullied by male chauvinists, the Protestant home was the center of a domestic reform movement against Renaissance antifeminism and was an attempt to resolve the crises of family life. Demanding proper marriages for all women, Martin Luther and his followers suppressed convents and cloisters as the chief institutions of womankind’s sexual repression, cultural deprivation, and male clerical domination. Consent, companionship, and mutual respect became the watchwords of marriage. And because they did, genuine divorce and remarriage became possible among Christians for the first time.
This graceful book restores humanity to the Reformation family and to family history.
The atmospheric stories in When illuminate the customs of rural America, a part of this country that’s been asked to risk the best of itself in order to survive, revealing with humor and weight fears about wealth, worth, and the dignity of home.
Where No Gods Came is a powerful look at assimilation and resilience and the sacrifices we all make to adapt. It's a potent reminder, too, of the tenacity and courage required of fragile families who endure on the edge. Faina McCoy triumphs as an unlikely—and unforgettable—heroine, a stubborn child who will survive to tell the tale.
A professor of Jewish literature buys a lake house in the countryside with the aim of enjoying it with her husband, dogs, and grown sons, only to discover that her new neighbor is a sexist, dog-hating, and deeply antisemitic bully. The editor of a magazine devoted to lost languages resents the popularity of a younger, less sophisticated novelist, who happens to have been her student. A young woman tries to find her way after her fiancé calls off their wedding. With the contradictions, yearnings, imperfections, and longing for grace that beset all of us, these characters reach their own epiphanies—with results that are by turns breathtaking and heartbreaking.
Manuel Muñoz’s first collection of stories goes beyond the traditional family myths of Mexican American literature and the image of California’s Central Valley as a lush world of rural tranquility, instead exploring the constant struggle of characters against their physical and personal surroundings. A teenage boy learns the consequences of succumbing to the lure of a town outsider; a young farm worker attempts to hide his supervision of a group of children from the town police; a father must expose his own secrets after his son is found murdered in a highway motel. Experiencing conflicts of family and sexuality and the pain of loss and memory, the characters in Zigzagger seek to reconcile themselves with the rural towns of their upbringing—places that, by nature, are bordered by loneliness.
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