Judith Slater's debut collection, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, was selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories i
Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my r
Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating i
"Fridlund writes of families, marriage, and childhood as if our received wisdomwhat we thought we knew about life and love and familyneeds reparation. This is fiction as excavation, peelin
Selected by Dean Young as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Fludde draws on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to critique and dismantle contemporary American values and co
Mothers Over Nangarhar is an unusual and powerful war narrative, focusing less on the front lines of combat and more on the home front, a perspective our American cultural canon has largely ignored af
Sandra Cisneros has a fondness for animals and this little gem of a story makes that abundantly clear. “La casa azul,” the cobalt blue residence of Mister and Missus Rivera, overflows with hairless do
"What Louisa Ermelino knows about the heart could fill a book and has. The unadorned authenticity of her prose is so powerful, it gave me whiplash. I readMalafemmena in one sitting and wanted mor
“Keep watching for Yolanda Barnes and her work. Her voice is her own and will be heard.”—George GarrettInspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, When It Burned to the Ground is an impressionistic vis
A pantoum about a child touching the smallpox-scarred face of an aunt; a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate in the form of a nursery rhyme; Joseph and Mary sleeping on the Sphinx's stone paw: these are
Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson's collection Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson's wanderings take him from th
"Ambitious, original, deliciously philosophical. Kingdom of the Young invites comparison to the crônicas of Clarice Lispector and the fabulas of Italo Calvino." ?Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of
Readers familiar with Lia Purpura’s highly praised essay collections—Becoming, On Looking, and Rough Likeness—will know she’s a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between huma
The stories of ‘Make/Shift' land athletes, actors, musicians, and grievers at the center of more dire spectacles than they’d anticipated—hanging poolside with parents while their hockey player sons de
Karyna MyGlynn takes readers on tour through the half-haunted house of the contemporary American psyche with wit, whimsy, and candid confession. Disappointing lovers surface in the bedroom; in the bat
In Brood, Kimiko Hahn trains her eye on the commonplace—clothespins, bees, papaya, perfume, poached eggs, a sponge, fire, sand dollars—and reveals their very essence in concise evocative l
"Threading the subtle seam between what lives and what remains, A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause succeeds in conjuring the poetry of Marcel Marceau's performance as both a character on sta
The poems in Antiquity stage meeting grounds for the irreconcilable, as Homolka gives us the present infused with the past. Heroes of ancient Greece and Rome puzzle over contemporary war atrocities; a
In Reenactments, poet Hai-Dang Phan explores the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Woven throughout the poems is a narra
Winner of the Center for Fiction's Doheny PrizeMike Scalise hits his stride in this page-turner of a memoir featuring a sudden and strange sequence of medical disasters. From its gripping ruptured-bra
The Lake on Fire is an epic narrative that begins among 19th century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm. Dazzled by lore of the American dream, Chaya and her strange, brilliant, young broth
"One of the most exciting and visceral poets of his generation." Tony Hoagland"Look at homie on the beach picking shells in dress shoes," David Tomas Martinez writes in his raw, electrifying sec
After her debut with the widely praised stories in Blood and Milk, Sharon Solwitz offers us her first, darkly radiant, full-length novel. Bloody Mary, which takes its title from the childhood game, te
In these five luxuriant short stories, the acclaimed author of Come and Go, Molly Snow searches out the complex truth of critical moments in the lives of five women.The central figures in these storie
In Love Drones, Noam Dorr explores the decidedly strange experience of a century-old war driven in part by cutting-edge technology. Born and raised on a Kibbutz in Israel, Dorr served a compulsory mil
In her first story collection, Jarrar employs a particular, rather than rhetorical approach to race and gender. Thus we have "How Can I Be of Use to You," with its complicated relationship b
"It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea," Mary Ruefle announces at the start of her essay. With wit and intellectual abandon, Ruefle draws
"Nystrom’s gift as a poet is that she doesn’t stop looking, and her poems make sure it is all still there for us to see."—Eamon GrennanThe landscape of Torn Sky is South Dakota, a place of extremes, w
