My New Orleans, Gone Away

$24.95

Written with humor and telling detail, My New Orleans contains rare insight about the social structure of New Orleans; student life at Exeter, Tulane and Yale; the thrill of original scholarship; around the world travel before jets; medical school trauma; ingrained southern racism, and anti-Semitism; and American students’ role in anti-Vietnam uprisings in Paris. In the background, he traces the rags to riches rise and fall of his city’s and his family’s engagement in the cotton, sugar and retail trades. After a year of medical school at Columbia, and continuing his journey of self-discovery, Wolf returns to New Orleans to work in his father’s cotton brokerage and simultaneously earns a master’s degree at Tulane. In spite of a spicy love affair, his residence in a glorious French Quarter courtyard, his purchase of a dilapidated building he expects to restore, and growing prominence in his community, Wolf returns to the east. He completes doctoral studies at NYU and becomes an architectural historian, a profession in which he earns considerable prominence. The author’s complicated and achingly explored romantic life is slammed to a close by a saucy, waspy, ex-pat from Texas whom he meets in Paris during his year as a Fulbright scholar, and subsequently marries. Reflecting the yearnings and anxieties of a generation that came of age after World War II, this is the iconic journey of a restless man who leaves the hometown he loves to discover the world, and in so doing, to find himself. My New Orleans offers a penetrating and memorable account of a fading period of America’s evolution, turbulence and possibilities, as unique as the city of Wolf’s memory.

Cover image for My New Orleans, Gone Away, isbn: 9781883285562

The Language of Houses

$24.00

In 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie published The Language of Clothes, a meditation on costume and fashion as an expression of history, social status and individual psychology. Amusing, enlightening and full of literary allusion, the book was highly praised and widely anthologized. Now Lurie has returned with a companion book, The Language of Houses, a lucid, provocative and entertaining look at how the architecture of buildings and the spaces within them both reflect and affect the people who inhabit them. Schools, churches, government buildings, museums, prisons, hospitals, restaurants, and of course, houses and apartments, all of them speak to human experience in vital and varied ways. The Language of Houses discusses historical and regional styles and the use of materials such as stone and wood and concrete, as well as contemplating the roles of stairs and mirrors, windows and doors, tiny rooms and cathedral-like expanses, illustrating its conclusions with illuminating literary references as well as the comments of experts in the field. This book, which is accompanied by light-hearted original drawings by Karen Sung, is an essential and highly entertaining new contribution to the literature of modern architecture.

Cover image for The Language of Houses, isbn: 9781883285609

American Stranger

$24.95

Brought up in a secularized Jewish household on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Nancy Green knows little about her parents’ past. She knows they were World War II Jewish refugees who were able to escape Germany with precious family heirlooms that are constant reminders of a lost life and a world about which Nancy knows very little. The longing Nancy has for some kind of spiritual connection first leads her to an encounter with a Hasidic Jewish man who, unable to find meaning in his own religion, has taken vows to become a monk. She then becomes romantically involved with Yvon, a Catholic college student in Boston where she is studying for her master’s degree in English literature. Yvon, trying to escape the clutches of Catholicism and his overbearing mother, finds temporary refuge in Nancy and sees her as an escape from the insular enclave of Franco-Americans where he has spent most of his life. Their highly erotic, tempestuous relationship frightens both of them until a tragedy in Yvon’s life eventually pulls them apart. Devastated by the breakup, Nancy ends up marrying a Jewish man from London, hoping to find herself with a man of her own religion. However, her new relationship pales in comparison to her deep emotional connection with Yvon and, sadly, ends, inspiring Nancy to go back to Boston to track down the man who, she realizes, is the great love of her life.

Cover image for American Stranger, isbn: 9781883285739

Leaving Eastern Parkway a novel

$28.00

Fans of Demon Copperhead will root for Zev Altshul on his cross-country journey across the United States.

Brooklyn’s Hasidic community of Lubavitchers is turned upside down when family tragedy strikes and everyday life changes forever in the life of Zev Altshul.

He is first placed into the care of the closed and close-knit community where he grew up, but soon realizes he can’t stay. His saving grace is handball; it’s his gift from God, and the one thing he can rely on as he is shuttled, chased, and abandoned by trusted elders, family, and friends. Even as Zev never fully escapes from the guilt of his choices, he sets course across the United States to discover where loyalty really lies and what it means.

He seeks out his long-lost sister, only to find himself as unprepared for life outside the Lubavitcher community as he was unwilling to remain. Forced out of his second home, Zev plays handball to support himself in the goyische world, but obligations he doesn’t fully understand still tie him to Crown Heights and follow him to Chicago and New Mexico threatening always to return Zev to life among the Lubavitchers.

Lyrical, vivid, and thoroughly engaging, this is certainly among the first novels of its kind.

Cover image for Leaving Eastern Parkway a novel, isbn: 9781953002174

Underburn A Novel

$27.00

After devastating wildfires force Frank and his young boyfriend, Logan, from their rental home in the California hills, Frank’s mother, Iris, a former B-list actress, offers them temporary shelter as more family trouble beckons from across the country.

Iris Flynn is an acerbic, self-sufficient seventy-three-year-old widow with a minor Hollywood career in her past and some streamlined kitchen cabinets inspired by Marie Kondo. Her composed and simplified existence is disrupted when her son Frank lands on her doorstep after his rental home is destroyed in a wildfire, the latest in a string of personal setbacks for Frank. He arrives with Logan, his young and handsome boyfriend, a featured extra on a teen soap opera with a loyal Instagram following.

Soon, news from her estranged family in Maine forces everyone out of their comfort zone. Iris convinces Frank and Logan to travel with her to the potato farm from where she made a quick getaway fifty years earlier, unleashing a funny and poignant family saga about secrets, forgiveness, and the fluctuating map of the human heart. An extraordinary story about family resilience, missed connections, and second chances that assures us it’s sometimes okay to create our own Hollywood endings.

Cover image for Underburn A Novel, isbn: 9781953002266

The Body Outside the Kremlin A Novel

$28.00

Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor while others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions. With the brutal winter fast approaching, Tolya Bogomolov, a young mathematician serving a three-year sentence, hopes an acquaintance he’s been cultivating will lead to a less brutal work assignment. Knowing Gennady Antonov holds a privileged position restoring the monks’ seized collection of icons ought to improve Tolya’s odds of reassignment. But when Antonov’s body is discovered floating frozen in the bay, their connection turns dangerous. At first the authorities question Tolya, but then he’s mystified when they assign him to assist the elderly detective investigating the case – but better to find the real killer than have the murder pinned on him. To avoid becoming the murderer’s next victim, Tolya must defy Solovetsky’s unforgiving regime and make ruthless use of his fellow prisoners. Putting his story to paper thirty years later at last means reckoning the true cost of his survival.

Cover image for The Body Outside the Kremlin A Novel, isbn: 9781883285845

The Light of Seven Days a novel

$28.00

Dina would be dancing lead roles with the famous Kirov ballet, but growing antisemitism interferes with her career, forcing her to flee to Philadelphia, which seems like her best chance until she finds out that success in her new life is very different than she expected.

Living with her Babby after her parents’ death, 10-year-old Dinah Ash is invited to train at Leningrad’s legendary Vaganova Ballet School. In the world of elite dance, she works hard, falls in love, and weathers the Soviet Union’s ubiquitous antisemitism, but despite an impressive talent, she quickly learns that dancers of her “profile” don’t make prima ballerinas. Love of Leningrad, ballet, friends, family, and books sustain Dinah until history intervenes. The Soviet war in Afghanistan, the rise of perestroika, and a re-emergence of Nazism leave her vulnerable and exposed. Realizing escape is her only option, she applies for refugee status in America. Dinah’s adjustment to life in the US is a test as much of her identity as of her perseverance. Is who she is something Dinah can forge on her own? Or is identity imposed by upbringing, public opinion, and the myths of our cultures? As Dinah struggles with the questions of religion, race, and worth, her choices and the people she encounters will determine whether the dream of a better life can survive the weight of the past.

Cover image for The Light of Seven Days a novel, isbn: 9781953002259

The Unknown Woman of the Seine A Novel

$26.00

In the late autumn of 1889, the body of an unknown woman appeared on the banks of the Seine River in Paris. It was taken to the city morgue behind Notre Dame and put on display for a month, according to protocol. The eerie beauty of the young woman’s expression attracted crowds but no claimant, and so, before the body was dispatched, a mold was taken of the face, yielding a mask which was to become one of the most celebrated cult objects of the 20th century. Set during the final days of the Paris expo of 1889, Brooks Hansen’s captivating The Unknown Woman of the Seine sets out to solve the mystery of who the woman was behind the mask. In charge of that investigation is a former Gendarme and recent prisoner of war just returned from Tonkin, China. Emile Brassard is on his way to Paris, determined to reclaim his place in La Force when he crosses paths with an enigmatic and unnamed young maiden and her gypsy wagon. Detecting villainy, and bent on proving himself to his former superiors, Brassard tracks her into the city and observes from the shadows as, with clear but mysterious purpose, she wends her way into the orbit of several savory and unsavory characters—an Artist, an Impresario, a Madame, a Countess, and one Disciple even—each of whom sees in her some opportunity for profit or redemption; any one of whom may therefore be responsible for her sudden and unexplained disappearance. Brassard’s chase will lead him on a grand tour of the city’s lushest and seamiest venues, from its highest spires down into its darkest catacombs, and past a gallery of equally diverse crimes—the moral, the political, the maniacal. By the end of this enchanting and ominous journey, he will learn the stunning truth of the unknown woman’s true identity, her past and present, but not before unearthing the equally disturbing truth about himself, who he has been, and who he must become.

Cover image for The Unknown Woman of the Seine A Novel, isbn: 9781953002051

A Storm in the Stars

$28.00

In London, early in the nineteenth century, five-year-old Mary Godwin, daughter of philosopher William Godwin, plays with her sister Fanny, mourns her deceased mother, and marvels as a hot air balloon lands not far from the Thames. Nearby, in Sussex, eleven-year-old Percy Shelley entertains his three sisters by telling them stories and performing tricks with chemicals and fire. A few years later Mary and Percy meet and fall in love in the Godwin bookshop near Black Friar’s Bridge. At first their romance seems doomed—Percy is a well-known atheist and already has a wife, and Mary is only seventeen and a under the care of her father and his overbearing second wife. But they consider such impediments trivial and are soon on their way to Ireland, to Switzerland, and across Europe (with Mary’s flighty half-sister Claire in tow). Upon reaching Lake Geneva they find lodgings near where the notorious poet Lord Byron and his peculiar personal physician John Polidori are staying—the same Lord Byron Claire seduced back in London, her reasoning being that if Mary can have a poet, why can’t she? And so begins the summer when Mary Shelley will begin writing her novel about a reanimated corpse, Percy and Lord Byron will debate politics and poetry in the midst of lightning storms, Polidori will begin writing his novel about a man with a taste for human blood, and snow will fall in the middle of July.

Cover image for A Storm in the Stars, isbn: 9781953002167

The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies and Other Stories

$26.00

These ten stories are irresistible because their author is both fearless and ambitious. Newman switches points of view effortlessly, brings us to far-flung regions of the world, and has an uncanny, authentic grasp of cultures. We travel from Varanasi to Tijuana, from Rome to Lhasa, to New Orleans, Valdez, Barcelona and the Isle of Skye. The characters are just as diverse: Maggie, who is taking the ghost of her dead brother and her guilt on a spiritual trek of redemption to the Annapurna Sanctuary in Nepal; Gomez, who has a date with destiny in the syrup aisle at the Tijuana hypermarket, while his friend Chuy carries Jesus on his back through the street vendors at the Mexican/US crossing; a Norwegian preacher relocates to Varanasi India in a valiant effort to convert Hindus and Muslims to Christianity, while his son watches the bodies burn on the banks of the Ganges; and in the title story, the women who run an undercover orphanage in New Orleans don habits by day, but play poker at night. While these fictions occur thousands of miles apart and evince wildly different cultures and situations, they are unified in their portrayal of ordinary citizens of the world struggling against extraordinary events. And they are written with a remarkable mixture of pathos and humor.

Cover image for The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies and Other Stories, isbn: 9781883285968

The The Darling of the Blackrock Desert: Three novellas set in the West

$28.00

From the critically acclaimed short fiction writer Laura Newman, whose first collection of stories, PW effused “with candor and wry wit, and memorable details, these stories shimmer,” come three, thematically-liked, quirky yet resonant novellas that together form an unusual and original view of western American life.

In The Darling of the Black Rock Desert, Julia loves Howi, but never intends to marry him until she realizes she’s pregnant with few options; it is, after all, 1960. Life becomes more complicated and yet richer when their darling daughter, Nia, is born with a physical disability. Despite her infirmity, Nia manages to have a fairly normal, happy childhood, beloved by her best friend Wynona and their male sidekicks until tragedy strikes and family life comes undone.

It’s 1986 in City of Angels when Henri and Simone Bouchard meet in the iconic Los Angeles Central Library. Simone is a college art student, and Lenny is a Viet Nam vet trying to survive extreme PTSD. They strike up an unlikely acquaintance that is interrupted when the great Los Angeles Library fire of 1986 happens, a substantial portion of the books—and their tenuous connection—going up in flames. Will they find one another again?

It's 2006 in The Saints of Death ValleyT, a nun in a San Francisco convent adopts a baby left on the doorstep and in order to raise her must leave the faith. Named Grace, the baby grows up; however, after committing what she fears to be an unforgivable sin, Grace takes her bag of holy cards and hits the road, winding up at the Burning Man Festival and then in Death Valley where she is taken in by a family of pastry chefs and landscapers and tries to reinvent herself in a secular world.

Newman’s trio of novellas about desert misfits are by turns probing, incandescent, and like her shorter fiction, riotously funny and are certain to broaden her readership.

Cover image for The The Darling of the Blackrock Desert: Three novellas set in the West, isbn: 9781953002532

Useful Enemies

$29.95

John “Iwan” Demjanjuk was at the center of one of history’s most complex war crimes trials. But why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to bring him to justice as a Nazi collaborator? The answer lies in the annals of the Cold War, when fear and paranoia drove American politicians and the U.S. military to recruit “useful” Nazi war criminals to work for the United States in Europe as spies and saboteurs, and to slip them into America through loopholes in U.S. immigration policy. During and after the war, that same immigration policy was used to prevent thousands of Jewish refugees from reaching the shores of America. The long and twisted saga of John Demjanjuk, a postwar immigrant and auto mechanic living a quiet life in Cleveland until 1977, is the final piece in the puzzle of American government deceit. The White House, the Departments of War and State, the FBI and the CIA supported policies that harbored Nazi war criminals and actively worked to hide and shelter them from those who dared to investigate and deport them. The heroes in this story are men and women such as Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Justice Department prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum, who worked for decades to hold hearings, find and investigate alleged Nazi war criminals, and successfully prosecute them for visa fraud. But it was not until the conviction of John Demjanjuk in Munich in 2011 as an SS camp guard serving at the Sobibor death camp that this story of deceit can be told for what it is: a shameful chapter in American history. Riveting and deeply researched, Useful Enemies is the account of one man’s criminal past and its devastating consequences, and the story of how America sacrificed its moral authority in the wake of history’s darkest moment.

Cover image for Useful Enemies, isbn: 9781883285517

Limits of the World a novel

$26.95

The Chandaria family—emigrants from the Indian-enclave of Nairobi—have managed to flourish in America. Premchand, the father, is a doctor who has worked doggedly to grow his practice and give his family security; his wife, Urmila, runs a business importing artisanal Kenyan crafts; and their son, Sunil, after quitting the pre-med track, has gotten accepted to a PhD program in philosophy at Harvard. But the parents have kept a very important secret from Sunil: his cousin, Bimal, is actually his older brother. And when this previously hidden history is revealed by an unforeseen accident, and the entire family is forced to return to Nairobi, Sunil reveals his own well-kept, explosive secret: his Jewish-American girlfriend, who has accompanied him to Kenya, is, in fact, already his wife. Spanning four generations and three continents, The Limits of the World illuminates the vast mosaic of cultural divisions and ethical considerations that shape the ways in which we judge one another’s actions. A dazzling debut novel—written with rare empathy and insight—it is a powerful depiction of how we prevent ourselves, unwittingly and otherwise, from understanding the people we are closest to.

Cover image for Limits of the World a novel, isbn: 9781883285777

She Read to Us in theLate Afternoons

$24.00

Into the life of the author, a novel appears, as if by chance, and changes everything. As a child in a music class where a remarkable teacher watches over a classmate marked for tragedy, the author comes across Willa Cather’s novel, Lucy Gayheart, and is prepared by fiction for an actual death by drowning of someone near her. Later, recently married and living in a newly independent Nigeria, a teacher now herself, she assigns Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to her students and is instructed by them in the violent legacy of colonialism, and visits an old slave port where she is made aware of her own benighted American innocence. In Nigeria, too, she is given A Portrait of a Lady and deeply ponders her own new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer’s cautionary fate, remembers her adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. Afterward, spending a year in northern France, she puts Madame Bovary resolutely aside to discover in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest a detailed guide to the town where she is living, the poverty and suffering hidden within its walls. The memoir closes with a tender account of the author’s friendship with the writer Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspires a plan to read aloud Proust’s masterwork, an undertaking that requires six years to complete. Faced with Diana’s approaching death and the mysteries of her own life, the author wonders whether reading, after all, may not be experience at its most ardent, its most transforming.

Cover image for She Read to Us in theLate Afternoons, isbn: 9781883285746

Truthtelling

$24.95

With her new dazzling collection of short fiction Schwartz has propelled herself to the front rank of inventive short story writers such as George Sanders and David Means Her characters are indefatigable New Yorkers whose long-established routines are thwarted by a swerve of fate or a mishap or a time warp. A man generously lends his car to his ex-wife and is bewildered when she neglects to return it and keeps making implausible excuses not to bring it back. A neat and orderly clothing store owner is taken in and manipulated by an ailing elderly neighbor who then leaves her all earthly possessions. A woman who has been left by her husband for a younger woman and forced to visit the couple in order to see her children realizes, with a mixture of fascination and elation, that her former husband has been physically and psychologically debilitated by his recent marriage to a much younger wife. The majority of Schwartz’s characters reflect her many decades of accumulating wisdom and her sharp and fascinating perspective. Reflecting on the past one of her characters muses “Memory is so prone to digression. To sustain a logical or chronological sequence we must keep dragging our minds off their natural course like a cowboy tugging on a calf with a rope around its neck who wants to run off into the fields.” With this sort of nuanced thinking Schwartz’s fiction brings new angles of intelligence to day-to day questions.

Cover image for Truthtelling, isbn: 9781883285920

Queen for a Day

$24.95

We know by page one of Queen for a Day that Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son is autistic, but if we told her, she wouldn’t listen, because she doesn’t want to know—until at last Danny’s behavior becomes so strange even she can’t ignore it. After her son’s diagnosis Mimi finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a world she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach. In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, we meet these women, each a conflicted, complex character totally unsuited for sainthood and dreaming of the day she can just walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants, housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering, competed with each other for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women living under enormous pressure. Rosaler tells their story in ironic, precise and vivid prose, with dark humor and insight born of first-hand experience.

Cover image for Queen for a Day, isbn: 9781883285753

In The Field a novel

$26.95

In 1923, having persuaded her resistant mother to send her to college, Kate Croft falls in love with science. Painfully rebuffed by a girl she longs for, and in flight from her own confusing sexuality, Kate finds refuge in the calm rationality of biology: its vision of a deeply interconnected world, and the promise that the new field of genetics can explain the way people are. But science, too, turns out to be marred by human weakness. Despite her hard work and extraordinary gifts, Kate struggles, facing discrimination, competition, and scientific theft. At the same time, a love affair is threatened by Kate’s obsession with figuring out the meaning of the puzzling changes she sees in her experiments. The novel explores what it takes to triumph in the ruthless world of mid-20th-century genetics, following Kate as she decides what she is—and is not—willing to sacrifice to succeed.

Cover image for In The Field a novel, isbn: 9781953002037

They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir

$26.99

"A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust . . . a poignant memoir." —Kirkus Reviews

In They Were Good Germans Once, author and biographer Evelyn Toynton speaks to a universal immigrant family experience — some embrace a new life, some forge a compromise between their new home and old traditions, while others never fully find their way.

Through her series of essays, Toynton remembers her own relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaping much later.

Her family lost not only their native homeland and their sense of identity but many of the people they loved. Yet each found ways to give meaning to their lives, whether in their own small circles or in the world at large.

Cover image for They Were Good Germans Once: A Memoir, isbn: 9781953002389

The Professor of Immortality A Novel

$25.95

Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, has abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and been out of contact for seven months. Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him, even as she knows she should report her suspicions to the FBI to prevent greater carnage.

Inspired by the true story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and his studies at the University of Michigan, The Professor of Immortality is a gripping, heartfelt look at the way we might or might not choose to respond to recent advances in science and technology, that, despite their positive impact, also threaten to destroy our environment, our privacy, our ability to connect with nature, and our sense of life’s authentic meaning and purpose.

Cover image for The Professor of Immortality A Novel, isbn: 9781883285821

The Gretchen Question

$25.95

The Gretchen Question recounts a day in the life of Roberta Chase, who does not have much time left to make peace with the son who’s punishing her for withholding his father’s true identity. A single mother torn between protecting her only child or revealing herself fully to the people she loves most, Roberta finds herself at war with conflicting loyalties, the increasing betrayal by her own body, the confused love she feels for her oldest friend, and a trauma from her past that casts a deep and possibly permanent shadow not only over her own life, but over the legacy she will bestow upon her son. Portraying the most intense and even shameful moments of motherhood, and the things we leave unsaid even to those we want most to hear them, the novel is also a celebration of one woman’s private reckoning with the source of her life’s most profound pain – as well as its greatest pleasure.

Cover image for The Gretchen Question, isbn: 9781883285890

Maybe It's Me essays

$27.00

Eileen is too smart for the third grade, but when she gets a chance to be skipped ahead, she fails the test. The clownish school psychologist tries to gain her trust with an offer of Oreos, but she refuses. After all, he is a stranger and might try to poison her! This is the start of the author’s love-hate relationship with the rules as they were laid out for a girl in the 1960s and as they persist in some form today. As she ascends through a physics degree at Yale that dashes her hopes for love and romance, to a post-graduate summer that leaves her “peed on, shot at, and kidnapped,” to a marriage of supposed equals in which she is expected to do all the housework, child-rearing, and bill paying and make sure the Roto-Rooter guy arrives on time, Pollack shares with poignant humor the trials of being smart and female in a world in which women are rarely appreciated for both their bodies and their minds. Maybe It’s Me is a question all women have asked themselves. But Pollack’s message will resonate with readers of all genders as a story of the very human search for connection, love, acceptance, and self-respect. The author of the groundbreaking memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, Pollack proves that even in her sixties, wiser and more bruised but no less hilarious, she is still very much in the game.

Cover image for Maybe It's Me essays, isbn: 9781953002075

Blackmailer's Guide to Love a novel

$26.95

One of the many well-educated Ivy League graduates with literary ambitions who flock to New York City every year, 25-year-old Melissa Fleischer has the great fortune to work as the assistant to Austin Bloch, an editor responsible for refining and publishing the work of some of America’s most esteemed writers. But after she begins working at this prestigious magazine in the late 1970’s, Mel soon learns that the extravagantly long lunches her boss indulges in actually belie his affairs with a stream of young women. Mel is left in the distressing position of lying about these never-ending betrayals to Austin’s wife, Hillarie, who often calls while he is out of the office. But then, unexpectedly, the New Yorker begins publishing Mel’s short stories, offering a spectacular start to what she hopes will be a long and fruitful writing career. Unfortunately, the exhilaration of being published by the magazine she reveres most is soon diminished both by Mel’s deeply painful discovery that her own marriage—like Austin’s—is far from idyllic, and by her continuing complicity in Austin’s betrayals. And nothing seems more difficult than the effort it will take to keep her marriage from falling apart.

Cover image for Blackmailer's Guide to Love a novel, isbn: 9781953002006

Without Her A Novel

$25.95

In this probing, Ferrante-esque novel, a disappearance of a life long friend becomes urgent and bewildering. When her old friend Hannah doesn’t show up at her family house in the south of France, everyone assumes that Claudia, who has known Hannah since their shared years at boarding school and Cambridge University, will know where she is, and what has happened. But as Claudia travels from the USA to France to help Hannah’s husband and children conduct their search, she is forced to deal with her old jealousy of Hannah, as well as her own relationship in the present with her French lover of thirty years, Alexandre. As events unfold, Claudia begins to wonder if Hannah and Alexandre may have had an affair and if that affair has had something to do with Hannah’s mysterious disappearance. In this exquisitely written, progressive and deeply thoughtful novel, Brackenbury ponders the bewildering question: if Hannah does not return, what will the lives of her friends and family be without her?

Cover image for Without Her A Novel, isbn: 9781883285791

Water Finds a Way a novel

$28.00

Recently released from prison, reclusive Blake Alvares returns to the only place she ever felt safe, the now derelict Maine town in which she harbored as a teen. Determined to conceal her secrets and losses, she soon finds herself dragged into others’ lives when she rents a room from an ailing widow and takes a job on a boat owned by a notorious young lobsterman named Leland.

Leland Savard is nearly broke, trying to support himself and 9-year-old Quinnie as he wrestles with a dangerous family legacy. Despite all odds, he and Blake forge a successful working partnership, and as she establishes a timid friendship with widowed Nora, Blake glimpses what it might mean to truly belong. But when Leland's rash actions place her and Quinnie in peril, Blake feels forced to run again. On her quest for home, she must confront a daunting question: can she ever again trust in human connection?

- Winner: 2025 IPPY Silver Medal

- Honorable Mention: Eric Hoffer Book Award

- Finalist: Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award

- Finalist: Next Generation Indie Book Award

- Finalist: National Indie Excellence Award

Cover image for Water Finds a Way a novel, isbn: 9781953002419

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU THIS

$28.00

A complex family drama with a Manhattan family court judge at its center.

I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief.

Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel. Equally sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is quintessential Marian Thurm.

Cover image for I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU THIS, isbn: 9781953002570

Infinite Dimensions

$27.50

In Infinite Dimesions, her first collection after winning the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway writes about the themes of fidelity, betrayal, and self-delusion as she portrays what William Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Following in the tradition of Elizabeth Strout and her own mentor, the late Andre Dubus, Treadway mines the internal landscapes of her characters with intimate insight as she shows them trying but often failing to live up to their own moral standards. A female bank executive with a history of psychiatric illness is forced to decide whether to hire her former hospital roommate, whom she fears will expose her past. A college student has to choose between his grandmother and his girlfriend. A recovering alcoholic faces the prospect of self-sabotage during a dinner meeting with an editor who can make or break her career. The stories are loosely linked by character, setting, and the motif of a talking sugar bowl that appears in the work of the Russian author Anya Chaykovskaya who is, in turn, one of Treadway’s own fictional characters. Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth,” Treadway exhibits in her stories both a deft understanding of human psychology and mastery at depicting it in multiple, complex, and intriguing forms.

Cover image for Infinite Dimensions, isbn: 9781953002112

Oriana: A Novel

$27.99

When a Hollywood producer comes to Oriana at the end of her life to propose a movie, the story unfolds of her gutsy career rise as a journalist, her tragic love, and her greatest regret.

Oriana Fallaci was born a rebel. She fought beside her father at age fourteen in Italy’s Resistance against the Nazis and overcame poverty, the lack of a university education, and relentless sexism in the newsroom. By 1973 when she moved to New York, Oriana Fallaci was hailed by Newsweek as the greatest interviewer of her day. She became famous for her courageous and hard-hitting interviews with Kissinger, Arafat, Meir, Khomeini and other world leaders—not to mention the most prominent celebrities and artists of her day.

That same year, 1973, she did what no journalist is supposed to do: she fell in love with one of her subjects, Alexander Panagoulis, the Greek poet and hero. She was 44, he was 34; they lived in different countries. It didn’t matter. Oriana had finally found what she longed for: a full life. But can a woman ever have it all, or does life always exact a price?

Oriana is the first novel about the glamorous and fearless Italian journalist whom Christiane Amanpour has called her role model for asking tough questions—and who holds a place beside Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters when naming world-class interviewers. This biographical novel tells the story of one of the first women to break through the glass ceiling of journalism, a woman who wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power and who revolutionized her field, all while trying to balance her career with love and happiness.

For readers who loved Hidden Figures and stories about women who succeed as women in realms traditionally reserved for men.

Cover image for Oriana: A Novel, isbn: 9781953002365

Before She Sleeps

$25.00

A hyper-realistic dystopian novel set in the future that portrays a society that has arisen from a world decimated by war in which a group of women, greatly outnumbered by men, revolt against being enslaved in multiple marriages.

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment.

This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

Cover image for Before She Sleeps, isbn: 9781883285760

Words and Worlds

$25.00

In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition, the good fortune of forming close relationships with other writers and editors and great thinkers, including Robert Silver of The New York Review of Books, the poet James Merrill, and the illustrator, Edward Gorey. On this fascinating journey, we are amused by her insightful, often delightfully funny meditations on topics such as “deconstruction” and beloved children’s literature series such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harry Potter, and Babar. Words and Worlds is a crowning reminiscence from a much beloved and celebrated writer.

Cover image for Words and Worlds, isbn: 9781883285784

The Missing Kidney and other stories

$27.00

Award-winning author Maxine Rosaler brings wit, heart, and striking originality to literary fiction, offering a poignant exploration of city life and human connection in this timeless short story collection

Set against the vibrant and gritty backdrop of 1970s and 1980s New York City, The Missing Kidney and Other Stories brings to life a kaleidoscope of human experiences with humor, heartbreak, and humanity on every page. This engrossing collection of short stories captures the enchantment in the mundane, exploring how meaning can unexpectedly emerge from everyday moments.

From a girl’s desperate attempt to save the boy she loves from his fixation on his uncle, to a social justice champion rationalizing an imperfect partnership, to a man kneeling by a memorial for his lost love on the busy city sidewalks, Rosaler’s stories spotlight the tangled beauty of human connection and the hidden magic in life’s imperfections.

In this true love letter to NYC, the city’s streets, sounds, and characters come alive, capturing the nostalgic charm of life before the digital age. With sharp, original prose, Rosaler turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, dealing out the fates of a vivid array of complex individuals with unflagging energy, wit and a delight in the details of city life–leaving readers engrossed, reflective, deeply moved, and reminded of what it truly means to be human.

Cover image for The Missing Kidney and other stories, isbn: 9781953002556

The Stager

$27.00

A stylish satire set in pandemic New York City that pokes at capitalism, creativity, loneliness and love all against the background of a frantic modern moment.

Maya is a young freelancer helping to stage ultra-luxury apartments in Manhattan. She’s mastered having a great attitude despite being kind of a mess. She’s good at her job but what she really wants is to be an artist, even if, let’s admit it, her art is making puppets - not that there’s anything wrong with that.

When the Covid lockdown hits, Maya flees her crummy flat in Queens and stows away in a conveniently vacant, brand new super-high rise penthouse, the kind built for oligarchs and billionaires. From her gilded, if empty, perch she recovers from the events of the run up to quarantine: a string of humiliations at work, frustrations with her “ex-with benefits,” her fraught relationship with her sister, as well as several man-children with whom she’s either flirted or slept with on one or two occasions. One after another of these characters seek refuge at the penthouse with Maya, forcing her to finally stake out a territory to call her own. She emerges as the summer of social justice protests captivates the world. Maybe in the grand scheme of things she’s not so messed up after all. (Who are we kidding, of course she is.)

Cover image for The Stager, isbn: 9781953002822

We're So Lucky to Live Here

$28.00

Grief, the transformative power of art, the meaning of family, and housing affordability are the subjects of this story about a young theater director returning to her childhood home after her mother’s unexpected death.

Gwen Rivlin, 27, wants to keep the big, shabby house with a turret in which she and her mother both grew up, but everyone tells her it’s crazy: too expensive and too suburban for her. Her schemes to stay in the house keep running up against single-family zoning laws and the disapproval of the neighbors. To help the town wrestle with the way it’s changing, and to assuage her grief, Gwen stages a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—a play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate—in the turret house, casting friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members, including her estranged-best-friend’s mother. Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself.

Cover image for We're So Lucky to Live Here, isbn: 9781953002778

As Figs in Autumn a memoir

$27.00

In his final college semester, Ben awakens to read on his computer screen of the death of his classmate and childhood friend Avi. Avi’s death is sudden and senseless, killed by a drunk driver on his way back to his dorm. Here begins Ben’s story of coming to terms with loss and finding his way to adulthood. In the fall of 2010, with his new degree in Moral Philosophy, Ben boards a plane to Israel to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Though Ben has never held a gun, before the next summer ends, he is a trained sharpshooter. His service takes him from the Negev Desert to the Occupied Territories and Gazan border, all while finding "home" at a southern kibbutz where he is adopted as a brother and son. From Providence, Rhode Island to California and at last to Israel where Ben joins Mahal, the special set of non-Israeli-born Jews who volunteer in the IDF, he finds family where never expected, a place of his own in the Israeli mosaic. In a memoir that is both a coming-of-age story and epic ballad, Bastomski’s lyrically told story is intensely personal and ultimately universal.

Cover image for As Figs in Autumn a memoir, isbn: 9781953002242

Animals of the Alpine Front

$28.00

From a remote village between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire unrolls the intimate story of Teresa and Carlo, two young people whose paths cross and recross as they are first impelled by parents, then forced by sweeping world events to leave their childhood homes for lives they never imagined.

Having left her mother and cherished dog Allucio, in Ulfano, Teresa works as a domestic servant in a large villa in Trento. She survives the Great War in the occupied city by banding together in a makeshift family with the other servants of the owners who have fled to escape the occupation. Carlo, an American still new to Italy and who speaks barely passable Italian, is just finding his footing in Trento when he’s dragged from bed at his boarding school, along with his classmates, and conscripted by the invading Austrian army. In a comical twist of fate, Carlo’s childhood near the Colorado gold mines motivates his captors to place him with a company of miners tasked with digging entrenchments and bunkers and building a massive fortress out of stone and ice, even as blizzards rage and artillery shells fall from the sky. Out of sheer loneliness, Carlo writes letters to Teresa, the girl he met only once in Trento. After the war, Carlo returns to Trento and reconnects with Teresa. Times are unsettled, as soldiers and those who fled the war flood back to the city and signs of the impending Influenza epidemic appear. With so much chaos, tradition gives way to new ideas, so neither worries about the consequences of their growing attachment. However, the same independence that has them dreaming of a future that didn’t exist when they were children, may pull them apart forever.

Cover image for Animals of the Alpine Front, isbn: 9781953002402

The Opposite of Chance

$26.00

At thirty-two, Betsy is sheltered. Sheltered by a close-knit family, Catholic schools, college in her hometown, and a marriage at 20. It takes the discovery of her husband’s serial philandering to open her eyes and push her out of the nest. It’s the summer of 1981, Betsy grabs a backpack and a few good books and puts distance—geographically and emotionally—between herself and the life she knew in the American Midwest. She begins to make her own decisions: about cities, hotels, and dinner entrées. At airports, on trains, and in pensiones, Betsy takes her first steps into independence as she negotiates the brief, but intense relationships travelers have. Armed with a book of travelers’ phrases and a Swiss Army Knife, she brushes up against possibilities for connection, almost entering the life stories of the strangers she chances upon and whose paths we follow in alternating chapters. We become acquainted with a devout Muslim on a pilgrimage, a French financier raised on a rabbit farm, a lawyer on a solo honeymoon, a Pakistani gambler, a beguiling American threesome en route to Venice, an Italian hotel owner on Lake Como, and a passionate Irish protestor who literally carries her to safety from the streets of Dublin. Finally, back home, Betsy comes to the startling realization that her journey is only just beginning.

Cover image for The Opposite of Chance, isbn: 9781883285951

In the Shadow of the Bridge: A Memoir

$24.00

The bohemian, free-spirited existence that blessed many of Manhattan’s gifted artists and writers in the nineteen fifties and sixties has, with current skyrocketing rents and the high-income requirements of basic living, been nearly extinguished. And only for the likes of an astute observer such as Joseph Caldwell, perhaps be almost forgotten. In his charming, brutally candid memoir, the author describes his tenure working at WQXR, the venerated classical music station, marching in civil protests and being arrested, his accomplished acquaintances, all of it part of the libertine life of a young gay man who becomes a noted playwright and novelist and Rome Prize winner. But then the mantle of the AIDS epidemic falls heavily on the city and exultation in free love and sex is replaced by unrelenting fear. In a twist of fate, a quixotic love that plagues Caldwell his entire life gives him one last chance at a relationship but in a completely unexpected and tragic ways. This memoir is an important chronicle of the changing tide of artistic and gay life in New York City in the shadow of the plague years.

Cover image for In the Shadow of the Bridge: A Memoir, isbn: 9781883285838

You Would Have Told Me Not To

$16.00

These stories (and one novella) arrive in the midst of the #Metoo movement. They examine the fallout from failed relationships between men and women, relationships that have crumbled under the weight of betrayal, misplaced hopes, illness―and in particular, from masculinity at its most toxic and misguided. A man in his mid-thirties receives a call from a woman he barely knew who informs him that a girl he bedded and dumped in high school has died of cancer. Another man who had an affair and left a woman without any warning finds himself working on a demolition job with a younger man who might be their son. Another man, obese for years, is left by his wife, loses weight and, drunk with the power of being finally fit, disastrously tries to reconnect with his former spouse. And in the title story of the collection, a woman summoned to the bedside of her son who has suffered a gunshot wound must finally come to terms with the serial infidelities of her charming ex-husband. These fictions ask very contemporary questions: how do ex-spouses learn to live again in proximity to one another; how do we make peace with our bodies and their own worst impulses; how do we learn to turn and face, full-on, the worst mistakes of our younger selves?

Cover image for You Would Have Told Me Not To, isbn: 9781953002020

The World Between

$22.00

With the breakup of her marriage, a once famous actress of the Yiddish theater travels to Tel-Aviv to revisit the apartment she once shared with her husband, Max.

Soon after, she finds herself at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa, a sanitorium, run by a group of nuns. Unclear as to how she got there, she begins to piece together the events that led her to this moment. From New York to Tel -Aviv, and the Siberian gulag, The World Between explores the landscape of a marriage, friendship, loss, and the way childhood war trauma bleeds into every aspect of the characters’ lives.

Cover image for The World Between, isbn: 9781953002679

Lazarus Rising a novel

$24.95

This dark, propulsive novel, the crowning masterwork by the 92-year-old Caldwell, takes place during 1992, when AIDS was still an incurable scourge and death casualties were every day events. One cold winter night, when the artist, Dempsey Coates, is on the way home to her loft, she encounters a several alarm blaze, water jetting every which way from hydrants and ends up offering several fireman a place to get warm. One of them is Johnny Donegan, a passionate lad who falls madly in love with her and is determined, through prayer and sheer perseverance, to make a life with Dempsey that will be unimpeded by the specter of her illness. But when the couple is finally blessed with an unexpected stroke of good luck, this very twist of fate that promises an enduring future ends up coming between them in a very tragic and unforeseen way.

Cover image for Lazarus Rising a novel, isbn: 9781883285999

The Monsoon War: A Novel

$28.00

In an unnamed Middle Eastern country, government leaders maintain a stranglehold over women’s lives and freedoms. But in a neglected southern province, a secret female resistance movement has been forming for years. Now, the Hamiyat are preparing for battle, as they plan a daring attack on the perpetrators of the central regime. Bina Shah’s widely acclaimed feminist dystopia Before She Sleeps described a futuristic dystopian world where technology and tyranny rob women of their freedom and reproductive rights. The Monsoon War is the story of three courageous women — a Wife, a Fighter and a Commander — and the ambitious gambit they enact in order to free their daughters from the regime’s grasp on their lives.

Cover image for The Monsoon War: A Novel, isbn: 9781953002235

The Anatomy of Exile: A Novel

$28.00

The Abadi Family saga begins when a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story between a Palestinian and a Jew ends in predictable tragedy. The family flees to America to mend, but encounters only more turmoil that threatens to tear the family apart.

In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US. As Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar's determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect.

This powerful debut novel explores Tamar's struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.

Cover image for The Anatomy of Exile: A Novel, isbn: 9781953002464

Love, Death & Rare Books

$26.95

Chas. Johnson & Sons, a venerated rare bookstore in urban Chicago, has been a family operation for three generations―grandfather, father and son. But when it comes time for Gabe Johnson to take the reins of the business, the world of books has changed, and the combination of the Internet and inner city rents forces the store to close. But instead of folding his hand, Gabe decides to risk everything he has and reopen the shop―and, in a sense restart his life―in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. Haunted his entire life by an obsession with a former lover, he finds her again only to be faced with yet another even more difficult challenge that threatens the well-being of the revival of the bookstore as well as the fate of his rekindled relationship. It is rare, indeed, to find fiction that is both passionate and erudite; and in his previous books, Robert Hellenga brought us tales of love, learning and of loss. But now, with Love, Death & Rare Books, he celebrates an industry that has brought us the written word and his novel is a paean to the independent bookseller.

Cover image for Love, Death & Rare Books, isbn: 9781883285852

One of These Things First

$24.95

One of These Things First is a wry and poignant reminiscence of a 15 year old gay Jewish boy in Brooklyn in the early sixties, and his unexpected trajectory from a life behind a rack of dresses in his grandmother’s bra and girdle store, to Manhattan’s fabled Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a fashionable Charenton for wealthy neurotics and Ivy League alcoholics, whose famous alumni include writers, poets, madmen, Marilyn Monroe, and bestselling author Steven Gaines.

Cover image for One of These Things First, isbn: 9781883285692

Surrender

$28.00

A woman retreats from academic life in New York City to manage a family goat farm in New England, a novel that Richard Russo calls “splendid and provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with and a richly rendered place for them to inhabit."

Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her father’s farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once she’s settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health.

Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandy’s employer, a solar energy company. How Lucy contends with the precariousness—at once financial, physical and emotional— of her new life, and with the competing passions and obligations that grow within and around her, is at the heart of this intimate drama of love and loss, of desire and friendship, and of the alluring possibilities of second acts.

Cover image for Surrender, isbn: 9781953002716

Saving the Fourth Generation

$28.00

WHEN 45-YEAR-OLD MARI SARKISIAN WYATT, A FREELANCE COPY EDITOR, DECIDED TO HAVE A THIRD CHILD, SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS GETTING INTO, EXCEPT THAT A WOMAN HER AGE HAD A SUCCESS RATE OF LESS THAN 5% WITHOUT HELP.

MARI wanted to take advantage of her state’s insurance mandate requiring HMO plans offered by large companies to cover infertility treatments (including three cycles of in vitro fertilization). With an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s degree from Stanford, she worked for two years as a grocery bagger for a large supermarket chain in order to receive this coverage. Meanwhile, she interviewed dozens of younger, sometimes desperate women who were willing to sell their eggs in order to their rent. Pregnant at last, she endured months, then years, of ill effects, risking her health and even her life. Along the way, she met other couples who had suffered even worse setbacks and unimaginable tragedies.

MARI SARKISIAN WYATT is a pseudonym for an Armenian-American who received her B.A. from Princeton and her M.A. from Stanford, both in English. After being deemed unemployable by multiple job agencies in her Midwestern hometown, she moved to New York City, where she worked in publishing for over a decade. Deciding that it would be too difficult to raise a family in Manhattan, she and her husband, Wesley, moved back to the Midwest, and she became a freelance copy editor to work from home, not imagining that her first child would be diagnosed with autism, which at the time, the early 1990s, was rare and considered untreatable. She and Wesley spent the first six years of their son’s life inventing therapies for him, then despite being in her forties, Mari decided that he needed a brother to teach him how to be a guy. What began as a nice idea—to have a child using assisted reproductive technology—quickly turned into an all-consuming obsession, and she spent six more years trying to fulfill that goal. Writing under a different name, Mari is the author of four romances and the co-author (with her now adult son) of two self-help guides for the parents of special-needs children.

Cover image for Saving the Fourth Generation, isbn: 9781953002709

Third Girl from the Left a memoir

$28.00

A Chorus Line dancer tracks her evolution from determined small town girl to established artist, living her long-held dream of working on Broadway. But as the AIDS epidemic begins its insidious journey through her worlds—both personal and professional—she must reconcile her career ambitions with her love for those closest to her.

As a middle child in a large military family, Christine just wants to dance. Her parents support her dreams, even if they seem beyond their comprehension. At 20, determined and talented, Christine heads across the country from Santa Fe to New York City and, in a made for-Hollywood story, is chosen for the London cast of A Chorus Line. While unwilling to fully cut ties with the traditional life her parents envision for her, she finds a new family with the dancers and more fluid, open characters that fill the theater world in London, and later New York, in the ‘70s & ‘80s.

Christine learns that one member of her family is equally at home in her new world: Laughlin, her older brother—divorced, a father, ex-military and a corporate lawyer—also makes his way to New York City, where he meets, and begins to build a life, with rising fashion star Perry Ellis. The two men enjoy a partnership and a financial success that Christine both admires. and envies. She spends much of her free time in their Upper West Side brownstone and Water Island retreat. Soon everyone is talking about a mysterious new disease. As deaths of dancers, theater folk, and eventually friends start to mount, Christine realizes she’s in the middle of an epidemic that neither her traditional family nor the public at large is ready to reckon with.

As the AIDS crisis cuts closer and closer, eventually impacting those she loves most, Christine does what she has always done: she strikes her own path. This memoir is an emotional, honest examination of what it takes to succeed in the competitive world of New York theater, how hard-won dreams can be quickly lost, what it means to redefine family, and the devasting toll AIDS exacted on a generation of artists.

Cover image for Third Girl from the Left a memoir, isbn: 9781953002228

Starlight and Moonshine

$22.00

In early 1980s Detroit, during the year following the drunk driving death of their alcoholic mother, a chorus of family voices grapple with haunting memories of the joys, regrets and the strains of love that will reverberate throughout all of their lives.

During a Detroit winter’s final snowfall in 1980, feeling fine after a few too many drinks, Hannah Fallon crashes her car through a cyclone fence and into an elm tree, leaving behind a messy wake of love and grief through which her family must wade in the year following her death. The story of the Fallon family, told in retrograde beginning a year out from Hannah’s death through the family members’ varying viewpoints, explores the humor, love, and rancor of a family grappling to keep their tight-knit bonds from unraveling. This elegy of family life under siege, written with Cheeveresque wit, clarity, and intensity, fulfills the promise of a long-awaited first novel.

Cover image for Starlight and Moonshine, isbn: 9781953002617

The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls

$28.00

A sequel to the author’s critically acclaimed Delphinium title, One of These Things First, The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls is a poison-pen, love letter to the end of an era—Manhattan during the decadent, late 1970s.

Picking up where he left off at the end of his widely praised debut memoir, One of These Things First, Gaines recounts his hilarious, sometimes poignant attempt to forge a writing career and a successful love life in the gay world of the 1970s. He has limited success until he falls in love with an older woman dying of cancer. Meanwhile, he serendipitously begins a career as a writer when he meets a former child evangelist, and with naïve chutzpah, manages to land a book deal that leads to a whirlwind career as a biographer, rock and roll columnist, and roman à clef novelist who writes a book with a Studio 54 bartender that brings the world down around them. From inside the entertainment business in New York and L.A. to inside the publishing world, Gaines narrates a life of escapades and adventures and searching for love in all the wrong places. After hitting rock bottom, he writes a book about the Beatles that ends up on the New York Times bestseller list, leading to popular esteem and a feeling of momentary redemption.

Cover image for The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls, isbn: 9781953002426

Listening for Ghosts

$28.00

Four stories (three of which appeared in the New Yorker) and a novella bring wit, compassion, and dizzying absurdity to facing life and death across generations. In “Things We Worried About When I Was Ten,” carefree boys running in apparent midwestern freedom are revealed to be as uncared for by their overburdened parents as they are carefree. “The Longer Grief” is a slow-motion explosion, as one moment in time propels shards of reckoning through a brother and sister, their shared history, and those they hold dear. In “Uncle Jim Called,” a man cooking stir fry answers his ringing phone to find the dead calling. “Suffocation Theory” slyly depicts our off-kilter and increasingly apocalyptic world. In the novella, “I have to Tell You,” Emma, nearing eighty, along with other elderly tenants in her midwestern apartment complex, seeks fairness from a conniving landlord. When an emergency stay in the hospital brings her face to face with looming injustice, she finds herself suddenly burdened with two mysteries to solve. She may never get to the end of them, but she is determined to do all she can, and maybe more than anyone expected. These stories show the author in top form as an incisive chronicler of the torments, pathos, and sometimes joys of being human. They are full of bite, wit, and ingenuity, and like all his classic work, they are powerful and timely. “Suffocation Theory,” appeared in the October 12th, 2020 issue of the New Yorker. The New Yorker published two other stories, “Uncle Jim Called” and “Things We Worried About When I Was Ten,” the latter a winner of the 2021 O. Henry Prize and is included in the most recent O. Henry collection, published in September 2021 and edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The story “The Longer Grief” was awarded a first prize in the Narrative Story Contest (August 2019).

Cover image for Listening for Ghosts, isbn: 9781953002181

31 Paradiso A Novel

$35.50

Francine Ephesians Didwell struggles to free herself from a controlling and flawed family, whose faith assures them that their wealth is proof of God's approval. It is only with the help of her quirky Venice Beach community that Francine is able to hang onto her freedom.

When Francine Ephesians Didwell loses the love of her life, she is forced to reconnect with her estranged family. She's led two lives up until now, one with her evangelical charismatic family, and another of emancipated rebellion with her lover. Bereaved, Francine relocates to 1990s Venice Beach to start life over. She struggles to make a living doing massages and managing her new real estate of bread-and-butter units in hell. The novel moves between Francine's new home and her family estate just fifty miles inland where, hoping to reconnect, Francine discovers she must confront the truth about dark family secrets or lose herself in the suicidal world of drugs. To her great good luck, throughout her journey, she is assisted and supported by her other family: the yodeler, the sex worker, the local burglar who has taken up residence outside her window, and all the imperfect characters from the mean streets of Venice Beach. Hilarious and painful, Francine's life force and her thirst for freedom illuminate every page.

Cover image for 31 Paradiso A Novel, isbn: 9781953002099

Little Miseries a novel

$27.00

Set in Iowa and Minnesota in the 60s and 70s, Little Miseries is a Midwestern Gothic where sometimes the misery is just that—little—and sometimes it is epic and yawning, capable of swallowing every childhood memory. There are the miseries the Castles will talk about—old family lore about a great, great, great uncle who was split in two by connecting railroad cars—and the misery none of them will face. There are days at the lake, placid except for inexplicable tension the parents won’t address and the three Castle children don’t have names for. There are stories about sex and gore at cocktail parties, around bonfires, at sleepovers, in classrooms, and in the newspaper. Everyday growing pains are shadowed by the abduction of a local girl, reports of a massacre of nurses, and the harm done by strangers and by those who are charged to care for children. To survive childhood is to survive all of these miseries and tragedies, because growing up means waking up to a world that can be random and brutal. With some thematic overlap with Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm or if Sally Draper from Mad Men got to tell her side of the story, Little Miseries is set in a time and place when parents didn’t talk much to their children but they certainly talked around them—while dipping into whiskey or rum punch, whether on a long drive, on the beach, or in the comfort of their own home. Little Miseries is a tribute to what it means to come into awareness, to be a part of a family unit, and to bear responsibility for those you loved and who have been harmed along the way.

Cover image for Little Miseries a novel, isbn: 9781953002204

My Life at the Wheel

$26.00

In this collection of impeccably written essays, Schwartz tells us early on that she never thought of her life as a “continuous line” but rather a series of intertwined interrupted experiences.

Hers is a life that has been bumped, tumbled, and smoothed by an endless stream of travel, fascinating people, and books: writing them, pondering them, translating them. Her essays range from musings about the art of translation, the tribulations of major surgery dissected with biting wit, a quest for recovery from the 9 /11 attacks at a music school, and hours spent with friends arguing, drinking and smoking in a neighborhood bar. Her personal narratives range from humorous childhood (an 8-year-old writer) and troubled revelations to learning to be an adult facing the difficulties of simultaneously writing and raising children. We see her as a daughter struggling to understand her parents through adolescent eyes, a mother startled at the all-consuming demands of motherhood and writing, and as an older adult grappling with mortality. Throughout, she is painfully honest, funny, and unafraid of difficult truths. Relentlessly candid, subjecting herself to her own sharp scrutiny, Schwartz is willing to confront the confusions of maturing in a changing world.

Cover image for My Life at the Wheel, isbn: 9781953002310

While We Were Waiting

$26.00

A vibrant novel that portrays the lives of an American woman fleeing the trauma of abuse in her childhood and an Iraqi refugree fleeing the trauma of war, each in the midst of childbirth, that Joyce Carol Oates praises as” breathtaking, heartrending, and finally uplifting” and Richard Ford exclaims “involved me so thoroughly that I began to anticipate how it would end.”

Lorraine and Will, New Yorkers married for 15 years, are having their first baby, via IVF. They are 40, successful in their careers—finance and music—with pasts that have held each of them back from one another until the day While We Were Waiting unfolds: the day in the middle of Lorraine’s sixth month when she is rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit of Met U Hospital. Over the next hours Lorraine and Will, individually, are compelled to face themselves and their pasts in ways they’d never thought possible.

Into the waiting room where Will struggles with his present and past enters Clement, an archeologist, newly arrived in America—fleeing ISIS in Iraq, plagued by the memories of a terrorist attack, the husband of another patient making his own sense of the extremes that prevail with high-risk births. The agony of this waiting husband stems as much from his own traumatic circumstances as from fear for his wife and unborn child. As the space shared by Will and Clement expands with every hour and revelation. Lorraine’s labor compels her to let go of the terrible harm done to her as a child, making While We Were Waiting a story about the power of acceptance and the resilience of love.