Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay hits the backroads with singer-songwriter Rudy Pauver as he navigates a conflicted relationship with a successful protégé and the unexpected arrival of his spirited young niece.

In the doldrums of a career as a cult figure, Rudy has been overshadowed by Ryan Orland, to the point where Rudy is now identified as an imitator of the younger man. Ryan is generous and supportive, but Rudy finds it hard to be grateful, especially as a sordid confrontation results in their estrangement. When his sister’s daughter, a teenage runaway, turns up asking to join him on the road, Rudy has to come to terms with the limits of his ambition and the nature of his obligation to family.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain is an exploration of the nature of creativity and popular success; artistic and ethical influence; the pathos of the middle-aged artist; changing standards of sexual morality; and guilt and penance in a post-religious society.

Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

Named one of Rolling Stone's "Best Music Books of 2021."

Eleanor is bored with her two sons and a husband who ignores her when she reconnects with Phil, a man she knew in high school. Phil's wife is leaving him because of his philandering, most recently with the younger Sarayu. Eleanor's friend Kaye doesn't approve of Phil, but she has her own problems: too much drinking and a fraught relationship with her husband and daughter, who are building a boat together.

Poignant and acutely observed, We Have Everything Before Us is unsparing yet sympathetic as it details the unsettling junction of illusions and reality.

Howard Wright finds his skin turning transparent, revealing the bloody workings of musculature beneath. His body becomes otherworldly and insistent, spinning him into visions that echo trauma from his childhood.

Sarah Turnsfield is living under an assumed identity, on the run from her past as a meteoric scientific prodigy. Content to work as a grocery clerk, she is determined to live a life on her own terms, where the landscape of her mind is hers alone.

Jo Breckmier seeks a new start in Duluth after a bitter divorce. She moves into the apartment unit across from Howard’s, leaning on alcohol and a stubborn will to reinvent herself. The woods and the lake seem to call to her as she laments her shipwrecked life.

When instinct, the swiftly warming spring, and Howard’s monstrous body conspire to bring the three together, each will discover how long they can hide—Jo from her loneliness, Sarah from her rising paranoia, and Howard from his intensifying transformation.

On one remarkable night along the rugged shore of Lake Superior, the lines between reality and legend intersect. Identities are broken and remade.

In this contemporary monster story, the earth itself amplifies both the grotesque and the beautiful.

Reading group guide available to download from publisher's website.

A progressive, alternative university is targeted for takeover by conservative forces in this satiric tale. 

Aaron Motherway is a Hollywood screenwriter who, while recovering from a traffic accident, is tapped to run the arts program at Parami University, located in Pearl Handle, Wyoming.

What Aaron doesn’t know is that he is being set up to fail by various duplicitous forces, and he finds himself immersed in a culture war infused with sexual misconduct, embezzlement, political opportunism, and potential mass murder, played out in a climate of comedic dysfunction and absurdity.

His charming and able assistant has his back, fending off a demented poet and venomous colleagues. And he gains the loyalty of some very challenged students—a murderer, a lobster wrangler, and an apostate.

But there are surprises in store for Aaron before the story reaches a dramatic conclusion.

Buddha Was a Cowboy is a metaphor for many of the issues engulfing and dividing America today, and a darkly humorous take on the current cultural landscape.

Tomas lives in an apartment above the bike shop owned by his father, Ernst Zimmermann, a war refugee from Germany and a former professional bike racer who is escaping a life of bitter disappointment.

Through high school graduation and over a last summer at home on an island in Lake Superior, Tomas keeps company with Grey and Callie, his best friends since childhood, as they contemplate what will happen next.

In the fall, Tomas leaves the island of Saint Raphael, where he has lived since age of six, and heads south by bike toward an uncertain future.

At school Tom is befriended by a charismatic history professor and through him meets the members of an eccentric guerilla theater group, who are in the midst of a bold theatrical production. As Simple Machines approaches a climax, Grey and Callie reappear with trouble of their own, and Tom is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends and father at home and the college world in which he feels a new sense of belonging.