Sarabande Books

“Paul Yoon writes stories the way Fabergé made eggs: with untold craftsmanship, artistry, and delicacy. Again and again another layer of intricacy is revealed, proving that something as small as a story can be as satisfying and moving as a Russian novel.”—Ann Patchett

“These are lovely stories, rendered with a Chekhovian elegance. They span from post–World War II to the new millennium, with characters of different ethnicities, yet each story has a timelessness and relevance that's haunting and unforgettable. Yoon is a sparkling new writer to welcome and celebrate.”—Don Lee

“These are splendid stories, at once lyrical and plain-spoken and full of unusual realities. Once the Shore is a kind of fantastic Korean gazetteer that tours us confidently through unpredictable incidents and often startling conversations—Paul Yoon’s writing is erotic, haunting, original and worldly.”—Howard Norman

Spanning over half a century—from the years just before the Korean War to the present—the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single island in the South Pacific. Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a remarkable new voice in international fiction.

Publishers Weekly starred review: "Yoon's collection of eight richly textured stories explore the themes of family, lost love, silence, alienation and the effects of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War on the poor communities of a small South Korean island. In the namesake story, a lonely young waiter connects with an American widow who has come to find the cave where her husband claimed to have carved their initials during his tour of duty in Korea. The narrator shifts between Jim coping with the loss of his big brother, a fisherman killed by a surfacing American submarine, and the sorrow of the widow. In "Among the Wreckage," aging parents Bey and Soni hope to recover the body of their son, Karo, killed in a U.S. military bombing test on what was thought to be a deserted island. The sad journey provides Bey an opportunity to examine his inability to show affection to his wife and only child. Yoon's stories are introspective and tender while also painting with bold strokes the details of the lives of the invisible."

"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 inspiration from Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Jesus, Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Emily Dickson to explore her subject. The chapbook features original interior illustrations.

Mary Ruefle is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

"Heartfelt, lyrical, and moving, these stories make you feel the texture of your life alter while you're immersed in them. This remarkable book announces the arrival of a brilliant young writer."—Robert Boswell

Stories set in rural Georgia investigate small moments that illuminate life-altering struggles: a man slipping into dementia is abandoned at a diner with his granddaughters; a farmer's son discovers his love of carving wooden birds but buries his creations in shame; bait dogs are left to die, chained in the woods, when they grow too old to fight.

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 the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What's the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What's the difference between empiricism and intuition?

The collection draws together essays that originally appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, All Things Considered and elsewhere, along with new work. Johnson reports from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, from Burning Man, from monasteries near and far. His subject matter ranges from Oscar Wilde to censorship in journalism to Kentucky basketball.

Everywhere Home is the latest title in Sarabande's Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature.

Fenton Johnson is the author of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds, Scissors, Paper, Rock, and Crossing the River, and the nonfiction books Keeping Faith and Geography of the Heart. Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He writes regularly for Harper's, and is a professor in the creative writing programs at the University of Arizona and Spalding University.

[A] haunting novel. . . . This book brims with the poetry of the working class, seldom sung lyrics of working men and women.—from the introduction by Larry Woiwode

“Shepherd is a master craftsman, and the subtlety of his art, the unassuming elegance of its architecture, rendered me spellbound and finally grateful. I don’t think I shall ever forget this fine book, its honest, guileless voice leading me along into the fire.”—Bob Shacochis

“A riveting exploration of what it is to be an outsider even in your own head. Shepherd has written a gripping story of childhood angst—psychologically thrilling, lyrically exact.”—Janet Burroway

Levi Revel is a boy in danger of losing his family and maybe his mind. He’s in awe of his father, Everest, a majestic dreamer, a master builder, a man with a violent, secret past. As the family moves from state to state, Levi hears solace in the voice of God, a voice that sends him preaching from treetops and roofs.

But the family begins to fall apart, and as Levi enters adolescence, he hears more troubling things: other voices, terrifying sounds, warnings. When Everest takes him on a high-speed, cross-country chase to win back Levi’s mother—by force if necessary—Levi realizes how much danger they all are in.

Tender and frightening, this debut novel takes readers across America, through the eyes and ears of a child whose family is haunted by a past they can’t outrun. From a boy lost in a world of imaginary voices and chilling destruction to a young man who can rebuild steeples, the story Levi tells is the triumph of persistence over moments of isolation and despair.

Paul Shepherd lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."—Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret—her husband’s adultery during World War II—is not revealed until the last story. Sandor’s prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.

Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Mark Jarman is the author of ten poetry collections. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Randa Jarrar is the author of a highly successful novel, A Map of Home, which received an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, the Rumpus, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and more. She blogs for Salon, and lives in California.

Mike Scalise's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Agni, Indiewire, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and was the Philip Roth Writer in Residence at Bucknell University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Edie Meidav is the author of three novels—The Far Field, Crawl Space, and Lola, California. Her honors include a Lannan Literary Award, the Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Bard Fiction Prize, a Whiting Award, and a Howard Fellowship. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA program and lives in Amherst.

Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange, darkly funny, and utterly beguiling.

Amelia Martens is the author of the chapbooks Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and lives in Paducah, Kentucky, where she teaches at West Kentucky Community & Technical College.

Set in the author's homeland of West Virginia, this panoramic collection of stories traces the people and animals who live in precarious balance in the mountains of Appalachia over a span of two hundred years, in a disappearing rural world. With omniscient narration, rich detail, and lyrical prose, Matthew Neill Null brings his landscape and characters vividly to life.

"Rich in history, speech, incident, flora, fauna, vernacular, geology, politics—Matthew Neill Null's work is dazzling. . . . If anything ever happened in the state of West Virginia, Null knows the long and short of it, and will make its story sing."—Salvatore Scibona

Matthew Neill Null is the author of the novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, winner of the PEN/O. Henry Award and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his short fiction has appeared in the Oxford American, Ploughshares, the Mississippi Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, and elsewhere. He divides his time between West Virginia and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he coordinates the writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center.

"The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice."—Mary Ruefle, from the introduction

Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, Michael Homolka’s Antiquity offers the present infused with the past, from Ancient Greece to the Holocaust to contemporary battlefields. A haunting and evocative debut.

Michael Homolka lives and works in New York City. Homolka’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

"Reading these poems is an uncanny experience. . . . We enter into this book alert to possibility, and leave knowing how asleep we've been."—Nick Flynn

Of all the meanings of exposed I think my favorite
is the raw nerve shivering bug-like in the lamp light
while the surgeon arranges his dainty knives.
You can get close to that. You can brush
its wriggling limb and hear the scream.
You can lie there on the table, say,
"little nerve oh nerve it'll
be all right; there
there, there there.

That art should once have been marked
with this delicacy: always only one
of each thing made, so that your poem
has its one life on the sheet
you have chosen for it, or the snapshot
of the birthday party, everything
in the room upended by the children's
jubilation, survives only
in the single defended piece of glass.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of The Darker Fall and Want and teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

"Solarium is a completely original gem of a book."—Henri Cole, from the foreword

Bowl of the lake. Bowl of the sky.
Bowl of the lake with the sky in it.

You looked at you in the water.

The blizzard is cold.
And the boy in the blizzard is blue.

Jordan Zandi grew up in the rural Midwest, and in 2011 graduated with an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where he was the recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship to Bolivia. His poetry has appeared in the New Republic and Little Star.

"Amy Gustine's You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection of stories. Gustine can be brutally honest about the murky calculations, secret dreams and suppressed malice to which most of us never admit, not even to ourselves."—Karen Russell

"You Should Pity Us Instead is an unbroken spell from first story to last, despite the enormous range of subjects and landscapes, sufferings and joys it explores."—Laura Kasischke

"Amy Gustine's stories cross impossible borders both physical and moral: a mother looking for her kidnapped son sneaks into Gaza, an Ellis Island inspector mourning his lost love plays God at the boundary between old world and new. Brave, essential, thrilling, each story in You Should Pity Us Instead takes us to those places we've never dared visit before."—Ben Stroud

You Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.

Amy Gustine's short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, North American Review, Black Warrior Review, the Massachusetts Review, and many other places. She lives in Ohio.

The central figures in these stories range in age from a young single ESL teacher in "Todo el Mundo"-Leila, bent on resisting the advances of a fast party set of middle-aged mainland married couples in Puerto Rico-to Rosa of "Banana Boats," a Chicago Czech overheard in the midst of her reflections on a longtime marriage to a vain man of genteel Southern airs and irremediable fakery.

Like the human predicaments delineated in them, the settings of the five stories are memorably rendered. In the title story, Undella defies Baptist opinion in Ellenberg, Kentucky, when she takes up with a yo-yo salesman, an archetypal trickster who both snares and liberates her. In "The World's Room," trekking to a prehistoric hill-fort and along the stony beach of southern England in winter, Gin, a vulnerable young American poet, puzzles her way through two romantic involvements to accept the reality of her own history. Taylor-Hall devotes herself not only to satisfying the reader's hunger for story-for just the right action, gesture, event, saying-but also to the reader's pleasure in interior moments, in idiosyncratic monologue and unforgettable voices.

In portraying women of intelligence and moxie, Taylor-Hall's authorial wit is almost always perched close upon the verge of hilarity. With a wonderfully keen eye and a shrewd ear, Taylor-Hall addresses the strait gate of women's choices, giving a wise, sorrowful, and deeply funny cost-benefit analysis of erotic experience and attachments.

Mary Ann Taylor Hall's short fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Colorado Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and Ploughshares. It has won a PEN/Syndicated Fiction Award and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. Her first novel, Come and Go, Molly Snow, was published in February 1995. Hall lives on a farm on the county line between Harrison and Scott C

In the middle of the night, when the fruit
is scariest. I hold my hand out

and feel your nibbling. Don't worry,
my eyes are still closed. I've only

peeked that once. The cold
that is your breath—these windows

of fog. If I were outside,
I'd read your name backward again and again.

Trey Moody is from San Antonio, Texas. He earned an MFA from Texas State University and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. He is the author of the chapbook How We Remake the World, co-written with Joshua Ware, and winner of the Slope Editions Chapbook Prize.

"David Martinez is like an algebra problem invented by America—he's polynomial, and fractioned, full of identity variables and unsolved narrative coefficients. . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart."—Tony Hoagland

The dark peoples with things:

for keys, coins, pencils
and pens our pockets grieve.

No street lights or signs,
no liquor stores or bars,
only a lighter for a flashlight,

and the same-faced trees,
similar-armed stones
and crooked bushes
staring back at me.

There is no path in the woods for a boy from the city.

I would have set fire to get off this wilderness
but Palomar is no El Camino in an empty lot,

the plastic dripping from the dash
and the paint bubbling like a toad's throat.

If mountains were old pieces of furniture,
I would have lit the fabric and danced.

If mountains were abandoned crack houses,
I would have opened their meanings with flame,

if that would have let the wind and trees lead my eyes
or shown me the moon's tiptoe on the moss—

as you effect my hand,
as we walk into the side of a Sunday night.

David Tomas Martinez has published in San Diego Writer's Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and has been featured in Border Voices. A PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Martinez is also an editor for Gulf Coast.

"You won't want to stop reading this other-worldly good book."—Dara Wier

11 is 2 bodies and these 2 bodies
want to crash into each other,
but there is no ambulance.
It is a nook of totem poles
on a stubby road and also
2 modest giraffes peering
at something unruly in the grass.

Francesca Chabrier is the author of the chapbook The Axioms (Pilot Books, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Action Yes, jubilat, notnostrums, Sixth Finch, and Sink Review. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

For grownups who've begun to wonder whether romance is just for the kids, C. K. Williams has answered with Catherine's Laughter, the short and sweet story of the poet's long love affair with his wife. Is romance still possible, after the excited beginnings? Can a poet find sustaining love in marriage? "Yes," the poet declares, "yes"—even grownups can fall in love, and keep falling.

C. K. Williams has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize, among other honors.

A private eye turned moderately successful poet leads readers on a satiric, hopeful tour of how to make a life in the arts, while still having a life. Revealing, hilarious, and peppered with sly takes on the ins and outs of contemporary American poetry (chapters include "The Silence of the Iambs," "The Revisionarium, Ask Dr. Frankenpoem," and "The Periodic Table of Poetic Elements"), Jeffrey Skinner offers advice, candor, and wit.

Revision is the process a poem endures to become its best self.
Or, if you are the poet, you are the process a poem endures to become its best self.

Endures because a first draft, like all other objects in the universe, has inertia and would prefer to stay where it is. The poet must not collaborate.
Best self because the poem is more like a person than a thing, and does not strenuously object to personification.
Yo, poem.
But let's not get carried away. It's your poem and you can treat it as you wish; sweet talk it; push it around if that's what it takes. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously said of the actors in his movies, "They are cattle."

Jeffrey Skinner is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Salt Water Amnesia (Ausable Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and The Paris Review, and his work has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.

"I was drawn to Michael Jeffrey Lee's line-up of loners and drifters, imperiled children, and haunted psychos neither because I want to hang out with these bad boys, nor because I plan to cross the street when I see them coming, but because the invitation to inhabit their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and to watch their often unsettling stories play out in space and time enables Lee to do all sorts of extremely interesting things with consciousness and language."—Francine Prose, judge for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction

Michael Jeffrey Lee's stories are bizarre and smart and stilted, like dystopic fables told by a redneck Samuel Beckett. Outcasts hunker under bridges, or hole up in bars, waiting for the hurricane to hit. Lee's forests are full of menace too-unseen crowds gather at the tree-line, and bands of petty crooks and marauders bluster their way into suicidal games of one-upmanship. In Something In My Eye, violence and idleness are always in tension, ratcheting up and down with an eerie and effortless force. Diction leaps between registers with the same vertiginous swoops, moving from courtly formality to the funk and texture of a slang that is all the characters' own. It's a masterful performance, and Lee's inventiveness accomplishes that very rare feat-hyper-stylized structure and language that achieve clarity out of turbulence, never allowing technique to obscure what's most important: a direct address that makes visible all those we'd rather not see.

Michael Jeffrey Lee lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he earns his living as a typist, waiter, and nightclub singer. A frequent contributor to Conjunctions, he is also an associate fiction editor at the New Orleans Review. He is at work on a novel.

"T Fleischmann's Syzygy, Beauty shimmers with confidence as it tours the surreal chaos of gender, art, and desire. Its declarative sentences—seductive, abject, caustic, moving, informative, and utterly inventive—herald a new world, one in which we are blessedly 'here with outfits like strings of light and no future.' I hail its weirdness, its 'armpit frankess,' its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music."—Maggie Nelson

Construction becomes quiet, the saw buzz and the bang little white wisps that stop at my edges. We'll get used to most anything, at least enough to keep going. The will of the wisp. I want to poke a hole in my words so that people notice you are not here. Comfortable divots you could fill some day, if you wanted to. My mother sighs, my friends sigh. "You're so sad," they say. I'm not, I'm really not. I'm just trying to breathe fully. The shadow of the mountain turns with the day, encroaching. When it settles on me I put the hammer down and walk to where it is still warm.

In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann builds an essay of prose blocks, weaving together observations on art, the narrator's construction of a house, and a direct address to a lover. Playing with scale and repetition, we are kept off-center, and therefore always looking, as the speaker leads us through an intimate relationship that is complicated and deepened by multiple partners, gender transitions, and itinerancy.

Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks' This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he'll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she's known in her 127 lives. Horrocks' women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

The middle American coming-of-age has found new life in Ryan Van Meter's coming-out, made as strange as it is familiar by acknowledging the role played by gender and sexuality. In fourteen linked essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now reinvents the memoir with all-encompassing empathy—for bully and bullied alike. A father pitches baseballs at his hapless son and a grandmother watches with silent forbearance as the same slim, quiet boy sets the table dressed in a blue satin dress. Another essay explores origins of the word "faggot" and its etymological connection to "flaming queen." This deft collection maps the unremarkable landscapes of childhood with compassion and precision, allowing awkwardness its own beauty. This is essay as an argument for the intimate—not the sensational—and an embrace of all the skinned knees in our stumble toward adulthood.

Ryan Van Meter grew up in Missouri and studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Chicago for ten years and worked in advertising. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.

“Vaswani is a confident writer whose unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane.”San Francisco Chronicle

“Vaswani’s voice is witty, sharp, innovative, unique.”Chitra Banerjee

You Have Given Me a Country is an emotionally powerful exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be multicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author's Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey toward each other and the biracial child they create. Neela Vaswani's second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba's Tatoos, but it is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a brilliant new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.

Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (Sarabande Books, 2004). Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in New York City.

"These [stories] are rust-belt blues, then, a vision of and lament for a past time and a swiftly changing place. They're not showy—the language is plain, the tragedy muted, the comedy low-key and wry—but they stick in the mind. Ray Carver would recognize these characters and situations, as would poet Philip Levine. I like to think that they would share my appreciation for this fine first book, built slowly and carefully over some years, and worth the wait."—Andrea Barrett

Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In "Boys Industrial School," two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella, a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment––set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.

Jerry Gabriel studied at Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has worked as a science writer and taught writing at a number of colleges and universities, including, from 2001 to 2008, Cornell University's Engineering Communications Program. Currently, he is a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

“Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch.”—John D’Agata

“Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without ‘complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Jenny Boully has done it.”—Mary Jo Bang

A book with only beginnings and endings, all invented. Jenny Boully opens and closes more than fifty topics ranging from physics and astronomy to literary theory and love. A brilliant statement on interruption, impermanence, and imperfection.

Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essayand [one love affair]*. Born in Thailand, she currently divides her time between Texas and Brooklyn.

“Like Franklin’s discovery of the electricity we do know, Monson’s luminous, galvanized book represents a paradigm shift. The frequencies of the novel have been scrambled and redefined by this elegant experiment. Other Electricities is a new physics of prose, a lyric string theory of charged and sparkling sentences. What a kite! What a key!”—Michael Martone

“Monson is tuned in to our crackling, chaotic, juiced-up times like no other young writer I know. Other Electricities is necessary reading.”—Robert Olen Butler

Meet “Yr Protagonist”: radio amateur, sometime vandal and “at times, perhaps the author” of Monson’s category-defying collection:

I know about phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, or trying to find his frequency and listen to his voice . . . we would give up and go out in the snow with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others’ conversations. There’s something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors. . . .

The cumulative effect of this stunningly original collection seems to work on the reader in the same way—we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves and electricity are characters in themselves, affecting a community held together by the memories of those they have lost.

Ander Monson is the editor of DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in Michigan. Tupelo Press recently published his poetry collection, Elegies for Descent and Dreams of Weather.

“[Sallie] Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and transgressive.”—Paula Fox

“Restrained and wise, these lovely stories unfold like lavender-scented linens, quieting the fretful mind.”—Joe Ashby Porter

Forty-year veteran of the novel, noted feminist, and author of over ten books, Sallie Bingham returns with Red Car, a collection written in her signature style—discreet, sly prose circling taboo subjects. Her new offering is about love enjoyed, whether alone or with lovers, sensual or familial, comedic or tragic, often with a wry twist.

Sallie Bingham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Purpura is the real deal, and so is every successive sentence in this collection. A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing. . . .”—Albert Goldbarth

“Purpura's prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.”—Sven Birkerts

Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: "I like the silent church before the sermon begins."

In "Autopsy Report," Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the "dripping fruits" of organs and the spine in its "wet, red earth." A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in "On Form," where she notes that "in order to see their particular beauty...we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction." Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual. 

Above all, Purpura's essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror.  As she says: "By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare." This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book.

Lia Purpura is the author of Increase (essays), Stone Sky Lifting (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Agni, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington.

"Fierce and bold, these beautiful stories provide a highly kinetic exploration of sameness and difference in terms of ethnic and racial origin. Through a romp of language—vital, outrageous, unpredictable—the fireworks of Neela Vaswani’s original genius cast shadows and illumine psyches that conventional monovisions never perceive. The stories of Where the Long Grass Bends are for readers willing to view the shape-shifting of both reality and literary form. Vaswani’s characters embrace their fates through such rigorous birthing that what has been internal finally contains and defines them."—Sena Jeter Naslund

"If it is true, as one of Vaswani’s characters claims, that a musical movement is the equivalent of a sentence, then the stories in Where the Long Grass Bends comprise an uncanny and beautiful symphony. This is a luminous collection, where each fiction evolves its own mythology. I want to live in the world of these stories just as I am afraid of this beautiful and often dark world. Neela Vaswani’s Where the Long Grass Bends is lovely, strange, lyrical, full of true mystery."—Victoria Redel

Where the Long Grass Bends is a delight of invention and language. In whirling, catch-me-if-you-can prose, Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narrative by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable, and historical legend. Spare, fierce, and unpredictable, this debut collection is boundless, even boundary-less, because Vaswani has, as David Garnett said of Virginia Woolf, a mind that sticks to nothing.

Neela Vaswani lives in New York. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Global City Review. In 1999, she was awarded the Italo Calvino Prize. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University.

"Bingham writes with an austere and unerring knowledge of what it is to be human and—transgressive."—Paula Fox

"These are marvelous stories of experience and have the ripeness of wry, hard-won wisdom."—Phillip Lopate

"Bingham has the eye to see where a story lives, the heart to understand it, and the voice—and craft—to tell it."—Robin Morgan In her wise and sexy new collection, Sallie Bingham examines modern-day "transgressions" in affairs of the heart. She offers up a ménage à trois, an older woman’s affair with a student, a painter who uses his age as an excuse to behave indecorously. But the reader quickly discovers the real transgressions are those of the self against the self.

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, tells the story of socially adept, 12-year-old Hadley and her protective mother. They live a privileged life in the Chicago neighborhood of Lakeview, but soon find themselves in a state of chaos and flux.

Writing with her signature, edgy prose and ironic humor, Solwitz demonstrates that happiness "isn’t our birthright" and that "we have to work for it and even then we can’t be sure." We are led to consider our own degree of complicity in the hard times that seem to fall from nowhere.

"A flair for dark comedy and the ability to turn on a dime are prized qualities for these unpredictable characters; time and again, their intrepid investigations lead them into uncharted territory where bizarre dramatic action seems to be the only possible move. Solwitz’s fine-toothed examinations of complex emotional states are dead on…."—The New York Times Book Review

Sharon Solwitz's first collection of stories, Blood and Milk, won the 1998 Carl Sandburg Prize from Friends of the Chicago Public Library, the prize for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her short stories, published in such magazines as TriQuarterly, Mademoiselle, and Ploughshares, have won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and grants and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Currently, along with her husband, poet Barry Silesky, she has worked as fiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. She teaches fiction at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana.

"Discipline, humility, kindness. These qualities cohere in the best mentors, bundled into an overarching approach to the art of writing. It is not, I think, coincidence that the writers in this collection remember these qualities best when speaking of their mentors as people, as fellow pilgrims who helped them on the way. In some sense, whether consciously or not, we seek out mentors who learn how to live—as an artist, and as a human being."—from the Introduction by Jeffrey Skinner

Lee Martin is the author of a collection of stories, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande, 1996), a memoir From Our House (Dutton 2000), and a novel Just Enough Haughty, also forthcoming from Dutton. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas where he also edits the American Literary Review.

Jeffrey Skinner is currently Director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville. His published collections of poetry include The Company of Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Late Stars (Wesleyan University Press, 1985), and A Guide to Forgetting (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was a National Poetry Series selection.

Contributors include:
Michael Collier on William Meredith
Jay McInerney on Raymond Carver
Tess Gallagher on Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz
Reginald Shepherd on Alvin Feinman
Dana Gioia on Elizabeth Bishop
Maura Stanton on Vert Rutsala and John Berryman
Elizabeth Graver on Annie Dillard, Angela Carter, Stanley Elkin, and others
Sylvia Watanabe on Dorothy Vella
David Huddle on Peter Taylor
David Wojahn on James L. White
Erin McGraw on John L’Heureux

CONTENTS

PREFACE by Lee Martin, vii

INTRODUCTION: The Scrupulous Philanthropy of Expertise by Jeffrey Skinner, xi

MICHAEL COLLIER
An Exact Ratio, 3
The Farrier, 12

JAY MCINERNEY
Raymond Carver: A Still, Small Voice, 15
Getting in Touch with Your Child, 24

TESS GALLAGHER
Two Mentors: From Orphanhood to Spirit-Companion, 39
Behave, 45

DAVID HUDDLE
What about Those Good People?, 51
Backstory, 57

REGINALD SHEPHERD
T

Heather Seller's unpretentious, vernacular prose allows Georgia a persuasive mix of innocence and experience. These are miraculous stories of survival, perhaps even forgiveness. To some of us Georgia's life would be unthinkable. Sellers makes us believe it is well worth living.

"Heather Sellers writes delicious, dangerous prose. She starts you twenty-three floors up in condo squalor, nips across for dysfunction in Disney country, threatens incest in Hotlanta, and comes to grief on the Gulf. The dead-credible life of Georgia Jackson—ineffably sweet, thoroughly in love with her own luscious body, half in love with her lush of a father—skids at the edge of the surreal. Her story had me laughing through the lump in my throat. An original. A knockout debut."-Janet Burroway

Marketing Plans
Author tour in Sellers' hometowns in Michigan and Florida
Brochure and postcard mailings
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines

Heather Sellers was born and raised in Orlando, Florida and received a Ph.D. in Writing from Florida State University. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, New Virginia Review, The Hawaii Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Women's Review of Books, and Sonora Review. Her story "Fla. Boys" is anthologized in New Stories from the South, 1999: The Year's Best. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1999. She currently lives in Holland, Michigan, where she's an associate professor of English at Hope College.

From the short story, "Spurt"

I spent those days watching myself in every reflective surface known to Daytona Beach.

My knees weren't knobs anymore. My knees were lush transitions. My thighs shone golden-brown; my shins, paler, but long and strong. My ankles were slim, bony in a fetching way, my feet suddenly inches too long for my slaps and sandals. My hair swung in a shiny curtain behind me; my legs were in constant motion, counterpoint.

"You've had a growth spurt," my mother said. "Your shorts are way too short. When did this happen?"

"I think yesterday and/or the day before," I said. We were in

It is June 29, 1927ÑRichard and Clarissa Dalloway's thirtieth anniversary and also a day of historical significance. Richard has arranged a surprise party for his wife. As he leaves their house in Westminster to buy flowers for the party, his thoughts turn to Robert Davies (Robbie), a young editor at Faber with whom he has been having an affair off and on for many years. Because of Richard's efforts to contain their relationship, Robbie has exposed their affair in a letter to Clarissa, who tells her husband that she "understands" And today Richard, despite his misgivings, finds himself on his way to Robbie's house-only to be shaken by the discovery that Robbie is not there.

As does the Woolf novel, Mr. Dalloway takes place within a single day, unfolding prismatically with a simultaneity of events: Clarissa walks in London and remembers her courtship with Richard; their daughter Elizabeth searches for answers about her eccentric history tutor's somewhat mysterious and premature death; and a determined and drunken Robert Davies has decided to crash Richard's party, dressed all in white satin, no less! As the novella moves toward its surprising climax, it revisits several of Woolf's celebrated characters-Sally Seton (now Lady Rosseter), Hugh Whitbread, Lady Bruton-while introducing new ones, such as the Sapphist couple Katherine Truelock and Eleanor Gibson, and the strange and beautiful Sasha Richardson.

Imaginative and formally bold as it refracts Woolf's fiction to invent a story completely Lippincott's own, Mr. Dalloway rides forward on waves of a masterfully complex and musical prose, full of wit, linguistic verve, and startling imagery.

Robin Lippincott is the author of The Real, True Angel, a collection of short stories published in 1996 by Fleur-de-Lis Press. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The American Voice, The Literary Review, Provincetown Arts, and many other magazines; he was awarded fellowships to Yaddo in 1997 and 1998. Born and raised in the South, he has lived in Boston for twenty years. He is curren

"Like emotional spelunkers, the women in Sharon Solwitz's first collection of stories tirelessly explore the dark corners of their personal relationships, bravely feeling their way along the unlighted passageways connecting husbands, wives, lovers, parents, and children. A flair for dark comedy and the ability to turn on a dime are prized qualities for these unpredictable characters; time and again, their intrepid investigations lead them into uncharted territory where bizarre dramatic action seems to be the only possible move. Solwitz's fine-toothed examinations of complex emotional states are dead on, and she has a sharp eye for details. . . . Keeping her narratives at a steady simmer, she ponders the mysteries of human intimacy, turning up the flame at the last minute for a sudden blast of revelatory action. . . . [T]he results are absorbing, a well-wrought reminder that no matter how peculiar the circumstances, we all have more in
common than we think."-The New York Times Book Review

These Hands I Know offers readers the first-ever intimate view of the inner workings of black family life from the point of view of prose and poetry writers. This collection of seventeen essays includes portraits of fathers, mothers, nieces, brothers, grandparents, husbands, wives, and daughters—in short the full spectrum of absolute humanity in contemporary black families. Here, in letter form, a man speaks to his aunt, the family matriarch. A daughter rejects her father’s ideas of African-American identity. A young woman holds her niece in her hands for the very first time. And a son faces his father as an old man and finally comes to terms with his failings. These Hands I Know seeks to gather a resolutely honest picture of family life, however painful or joyous that truth may be.

"Family life is an insistent vessel traveling the space of our struggles to love and to be loved. . . . Africans and their descendants in America have always been nothing more and nothing less than human. If anything is constant and universal, it is suffering—personal, social, and political. If these essays offer anything, it is the affirmation of humanity."—From the Introduction by Afaa Michael Weaver

Marketing Plans:
Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines
Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings
Reader copies available to booksellers through participation in Book Sense Advance Access Program

Contributors include:
Fred D'Aguiar
Tara Betts
Gwendolyn Brooks
Karen Chandler
Edwidge Danticat
Jarvis Q. DeBerry
Gerald Early
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Lise Funderburg
Walter Warren Harper
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Trent Masiki
E. Ethelbert Miller
Marilyn Nelson
Kalamu ya Salaam
Della Scott
Alice Walker

Also available by Afaa Michael Weaver
Multitudes: Poems Selected and New
TC $24.00, 1-889330-40-X • CUSA
TP $14.95, 1-889330-41-8 • CUSA