“Several years ago it was revealed to me that creative nonfiction was a legitimate literary genre,” writes Phil Crossman. “It was the most liberating experience of my life. All these years I thought I’d been simply lying.” Crossman is a humorist in the Mark Twain mold: wry, satiric, and keenly aware of the shortcomings of human beings, but with a leavening of self-deprecation and underlying sympathy. Though rooted in a regional consciousness (coastal Maine), his humor succeeds in making the local universal. Away Happens considers daily life on an island in Penobscot Bay that supports both a tight-knit local community and a larger seasonal population. Whether he is recounting a debate that happened at the Lions Club over who counts as a “local” or describing his adventures getting the Thanksgiving turkey into the oven, ruminating on how the ferry schedule shapes island life or recalling a local crime spree, Crossman is funny, unsentimental, and authentically Maine. “There are only two places, Here, this island off the coast of Maine, and Away. Here, this place, is a small place and Away, everywhere else, is a big place, but make no mistake about it, Here is Here and Away is not. 1276 people live Here. Billions more live Away than live Here, although increasingly, during the summer, it seems otherwise.” —From the Book

The difference between belief and knowledge and the con­sequences of mistaking one for the other are at the heart of Craig Wright’s play Grace. An evangelical Christian couple, Sara and Steve, leave a dreary life in Minnesota for sunny Florida and the hope of fast money from turn­ing abandoned hotels into a chain of gospel-themed inns. Their new neighbor, Sam, is struggling to emerge from the trauma of a car accident that killed his fiancée and left him badly maimed. And the building’s pest exterminator, Karl, is still tormented by a dark childhood episode. As their stories converge, Wright’s characters find themselves face-to-face with the most eternally vexing questions—the nature of faith, the meaning of suffering, and the possibil­ity of redemption. Acidly funny and relentlessly search­ing, Grace is a trenchant work from an immensely gifted playwright.

We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, n 1970, when she is a nine year old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, she  tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt, running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.

In the course of that season, Lucy comes to realize her love for the hotel's black handyman, Mr. Jefferson -- and  the difficulties she faces in overcoming the barriers between them. She battles her grandmother's not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage her success, her parents' superstitious fear of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling.

On top of all this, Lucy must contend with the Hasid who buys the chicken farm next door, a cell of ancient Jewish Communist who foment a strike among Eden's overworked young staff, and a gay chef and a gay baker who want to prove to the world that kosher cuisine can satisfy the most sophisticated gourmet.

Among the novel's characters are Shirley and Nat Feidel, who barely survived the Holocaust but refuse to allow bitterness to rule their lives; Mami Goshgarian, the Eden's tumeler; and Jimmy Kilcoin, and Irish Catholic insurance adjustor who has earned a reputation as "the Don Juan of the Catskills" and is determined to seduce Lucy before summer's end.