—Carol Potter

ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS, CO-WRITER OF EILEEN

RECIPIENT OF PRESTIGIOUS RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE AND JOAN SCOTT MEMORIAL FICTION AWARD

“If this book were any better I’d cut my own head off.”—Ottessa Moshfegh

“Kill Dick is a fever dream.”––Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies

A fever dream, Kill Dick is a literary thriller that plunges into the chaos of Los Angeles where addiction, privilege, and corruption combust. 

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

Then there’s Peter Holiday, a disgraced professor running a rehab scam so audacious it’s almost admirable. When their lives collide, Susie and Peter are dragged into a web of privilege, corruption, and violence, where every escape leads deeper into the rot.

Dark, satirical, and razor-sharp, Kill Dick is a modern literary thriller that unflinchingly dissects wealth, exploitation, and the perilous line between survival and self-destruction.

AUTHOR OF FIVE POETRY COLLECTIONS • NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED AUTHOR, Brendan Constantine presents his newest collection, The Opposites Game.

A playful and profound meditation on language, binaries, and the radical act of seeing each other more clearly.

In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.

The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.

“An unprecedented breakthrough novel about life after war.”—Cara Hoffman, author of Running, Be Safe, I Love You and So Much Pretty 

“This is not only a massively good book, it is absolutely necessary.”—Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The Storyteller of Marrakesh and The Watch

A bold and compassionate novel about war’s aftermath, The Soldier’s House confronts the uneasy truths of rescue, redemption, and what it means to share a home and future with a former enemy.

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow and child by bringing them to his home in upstate New York. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends for his interpreter’s death. But the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. Like Benedict’s related novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, both of which feature some of the same characters that appear in The Soldier’s House, this book breaks new ground. No novel has yet been written about soldiers rescuing refugees (although many soldiers have) and no other American novelist has written as Benedict has from the point of view of an Iraqi woman. In the light of the increasing influx of refugees from all over the world into the United States, The Soldier’s House is particularly timely and poignant.

“In this brilliant bilingual anthology, William Archila creates a powerful and fiery poetics of exile, war, and, ultimately and brilliantly, survival.”—Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner

From war-torn El Salvador to the streets of East LA, Canícula / Dog Days is a bold, bilingual collection chronicling exile, memory, and resilience across borders.

William Archila’s Canícula / Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latin Poetry. Canícula, which means “dog days” in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile’s return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila’s poetry for the Spanish reader.

A haunting, lyrical reckoning with war’s aftermath, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester confronts the brutality of Vietnam’s reeducation camps while illuminating the enduring power of memory, loyalty, and the human will to survive. 

Centering on a Vietnamese intelligence officer’s years-long ordeal in communist reeducation camps, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester offers a heartrending and an illuminating look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. War, literature, religion, politics, loyalty—they are all expertly interrogated through the protagonist’s compelling voice and the memorable cast of characters he encounters. Despite the struggle and suffering, the story never veers into the sentimental or cynical. Instead, it returns again and again to the complexities of the human heart and its will to endure. This is not a novel of ism excoriation; it is, in fact, a story that seeks questions to the truths of life and asks the question: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” A moving, unforgettable, and enlightening must-read.

“The anthology dares to hold the face of this country, its long history and structural realities, for the possibility of a new kind of existence.”—E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others.

Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times is a luminous collection blending poetry, reflection, and intergenerational conversation that offers young women the courage to trust themselves, embrace uncertainty, and step boldly into adulthood.

Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times is an anthology that encourages young women launching into adulthood to imagine deeply, create bravely, and find the confidence to build a meaningful life in this uncertain and chaotic world. Each one of the forty contributors brings their voice and experience to reflect on a poem that has held particular significance in their life, sharing words of wisdom, vulnerable admissions, and life lessons. Reflections range from practical advice to philosophical musings, from stories of triumph to somber tellings of the tougher days, while the selected poems fill in the gaps, offering access to invaluable, timeless wisdom. Interwoven between the poems and essays are snippets of conversation between a mother and her daughter, who is beginning her own launch into adulthood, held over the course of a year.

“It’s a story about how our ideas of success change over time, and the mysterious ways that our deepest friendships both hold us and release us.”—Rene Steinke, novelist and National Book Award finalist

Talking to the Wolf is a poignant and haunting exploration of female friendship that unearths the past and the ghosts we carry into the present.

Four women. Thirty-five years. A lyrical and unsettling look at female friendship across time. 

A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship across decades.

Like a Meg Wolitzer novel shot by filmmaker Nicole Holofcener and blessed by Virginia Woolf, Talking to the Wolf pole-vaults over the Bechdel Test.

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR

“Mysterious and mesmerizing.”––Claire Stanford, Author of Happy for You 

Yellow is a luminous, genre-defying debut that fuses cosmic mystery, trauma, and transformation. It will take you on a journey through time, space, and the inner wilderness of one girl’s mind.

It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature—until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.

“Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek

Walking Wheel is a tender, lyrical portrait of pioneer love and labor that revives the quiet heroism of everyday life in 1875, where intimacy, resilience, and devotion shape the story of home.

In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we've almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.

Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California's Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie's baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple's first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.

Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.

FORMER COLORADO POET LAUREATE

From the volcanic landscapes of the Pacific Rim to the mythic echoes of Greece and India, Cold Fire is a radiant meditation on memory, nature, and the enduring sparks of love and creation.

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

“The poems within Morning Leaves are tender, compassionate and full of wonder. Laing's writing and Kelly's illustrations are conduits for healing and hope.”—Kristin A. Meekhof, co-author of A Widow's Guide to Healing 

“Morning Leaves is a gift to all who open their eyes to its images and their hearts to its whispers and exhortations.”—Faith Salie, Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and author of Approval Junkie

A radiant fusion of poetry and nature art, Morning Leaves: Cultivating a Life of Beauty, Meaning, and Joy is a tender, soul-stirring meditation on grief, healing, and the quiet joy of rediscovering beauty one morning at a time.

Steeped in beautiful art and verse that invites reflection, Morning Leaves is the perfect gift book or self-purchase.

Morning Leaves is an invitation to dream of a life where you are moving away from whatever has stopped you. It might be a death, trauma, loss of a relationship, some wild dark night of the soul is upon you and you enter this book, these poems and Kelly Leahy Radding’s magnificent nature art.

You enter the possibility: Walk it. Talk it. Write it. Create it. Keep moving forward. Find your joy. Find your blessing. Find who you are going to be in your wild and precious life - one butterfly flight, one mourning dove wing, one frog leap at a time. This is a book that invites a journey into wholeness through creativity and conversation and writing and movement.

Healing isn’t static. It’s energetic! I am here to take your hand. Morning Leaves is a love letter to the growing soul who wants to move on to the next place and find joy. 

AWARD WINS FOR MORNING LEAVES:
2023 FOREWORD INDIES AWARDS WINNER
2023 PUBWEST DESIGN AWARDS WINNER
2024 FEATHERED QUILL BOOK AWARDS WINNER | GOLD
2024 IBPA BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AWARDS WINNER | GOLD

MORE PRAISE FOR MORNING LEAVES:
“The poems within Morning Leaves are tender, compassionate and full of wonder. Laing's writing and Kelly's illustrations are conduits for healing and hope.”—Kristin A. Meekhof, co-author of A Widow's Guide to Healing

“So beautifully written and thoughtfully constructed. Visceral. Visual. Vulnerable. The passages cracked open my heart.”—Amy K. Hutchens, award-winning speaker and bestselling author of Get It and The Secrets Leaders Keep

“An unprecedented breakthrough novel about life after war.”—Cara Hoffman, author of Running, Be Safe, I Love You and So Much Pretty 

“This is not only a massively good book, it is absolutely necessary.”—Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, author of The Storyteller of Marrakesh and The Watch

A bold and compassionate novel about war’s aftermath, The Soldier’s House confronts the uneasy truths of rescue, redemption, and what it means to share a home and future with a former enemy.

In The Soldier’s House, Helen Benedict tells the story of an Iraq War veteran who saves the lives of his assassinated Iraqi interpreter’s widow and child by bringing them to his home in upstate New York. For the soldier, this is a way of making amends for his interpreter’s death. But the widow finds being rescued by the enemy both humiliating and compromising. This is a compassionate tale that examines whether redemption and forgiveness are even possible in the wake of war. Like Benedict’s related novels, Wolf Season and Sand Queen, both of which feature some of the same characters that appear in The Soldier’s House, this book breaks new ground. No novel has yet been written about soldiers rescuing refugees (although many soldiers have) and no other American novelist has written as Benedict has from the point of view of an Iraqi woman. In the light of the increasing influx of refugees from all over the world into the United States, The Soldier’s House is particularly timely and poignant.

A haunting, lyrical reckoning with war’s aftermath, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester confronts the brutality of Vietnam’s reeducation camps while illuminating the enduring power of memory, loyalty, and the human will to survive. 

Centering on a Vietnamese intelligence officer’s years-long ordeal in communist reeducation camps, The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester offers a heartrending and an illuminating look at the Vietnam War and its aftermath. War, literature, religion, politics, loyalty—they are all expertly interrogated through the protagonist’s compelling voice and the memorable cast of characters he encounters. Despite the struggle and suffering, the story never veers into the sentimental or cynical. Instead, it returns again and again to the complexities of the human heart and its will to endure. This is not a novel of ism excoriation; it is, in fact, a story that seeks questions to the truths of life and asks the question: “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” A moving, unforgettable, and enlightening must-read.

“In this brilliant bilingual anthology, William Archila creates a powerful and fiery poetics of exile, war, and, ultimately and brilliantly, survival.”—Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner

From war-torn El Salvador to the streets of East LA, Canícula / Dog Days is a bold, bilingual collection chronicling exile, memory, and resilience across borders.

William Archila’s Canícula / Dog Days is a bilingual selection of his first two books of poetry, The Art of Exile and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology, two collections that chart the emergence of a newcomer in the chorus of Latin Poetry. Canícula, which means “dog days” in English, takes the reader on a poignant journey from the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s to the urban landscape of the US immigrant, revealing the turmoil and memory of the disempowered, the impoverished, and the displaced who struggle back home in Central America. In lyrical and often harrowing language, Archila unearths the vestiges of war and the exile’s return in an elegy, the fragments of a myth, or a jazz riff. They come together like the bilateral symmetry of a volcano, and the result is the introduction to Archila’s poetry for the Spanish reader.

AUTHOR OF FIVE POETRY COLLECTIONS • NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED AUTHOR, Brendan Constantine presents his newest collection, The Opposites Game.

A playful and profound meditation on language, binaries, and the radical act of seeing each other more clearly.

In his fifth collection of verse, The Opposites Game, poet Brendan Constantine inspires us to revel in the abundance of life by reckoning its many astonishments (and antonyms). Through a simple yet profound framework of odes, lists, memoirs, and classroom assignments, Constantine asks us to think critically about how we define and understand each other, urging us to look beyond simplistic binaries and engage with the deeper nuances of meaning.

The Opposites Game is a powerful reminder of the intricate relationship between words and the realities they represent, and an invitation to explore the rich, beautiful, and often perilous terrain of human thought and emotion.

FORMER COLORADO POET LAUREATE

From the volcanic landscapes of the Pacific Rim to the mythic echoes of Greece and India, Cold Fire is a radiant meditation on memory, nature, and the enduring sparks of love and creation.

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

“Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story.”—Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek

Walking Wheel is a tender, lyrical portrait of pioneer love and labor that revives the quiet heroism of everyday life in 1875, where intimacy, resilience, and devotion shape the story of home.

In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we've almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.

Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California's Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie's baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple's first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.

Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.

“It’s a story about how our ideas of success change over time, and the mysterious ways that our deepest friendships both hold us and release us.”—Rene Steinke, novelist and National Book Award finalist

Talking to the Wolf is a poignant and haunting exploration of female friendship that unearths the past and the ghosts we carry into the present.

Four women. Thirty-five years. A lyrical and unsettling look at female friendship across time. 

A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship across decades.

Like a Meg Wolitzer novel shot by filmmaker Nicole Holofcener and blessed by Virginia Woolf, Talking to the Wolf pole-vaults over the Bechdel Test.

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR

“Mysterious and mesmerizing.”––Claire Stanford, Author of Happy for You 

Yellow is a luminous, genre-defying debut that fuses cosmic mystery, trauma, and transformation. It will take you on a journey through time, space, and the inner wilderness of one girl’s mind.

It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature—until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.

But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from. —William Faulkner, Light in August

There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING, ANIMAL WIFE • WINNER OF CAI EMMONS FICTION AWARD, ERIC HOFFER AWARD, AND FOREWORD INDIE AWARD FINALIST • Lara Ehrlich presents her debut novel, BIND ME TIGHTER STILL 

“A gorgeous, playful, thoughtful novel for feminists, for mothers and daughters, for those of us who grew up on the *other* version of mermaids, and who’ve thought from time to time that we might prefer to join the sirens rather than tie ourselves to the mast."
—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

The youngest of three siren sisters, Ceto is weary of an existence driven by hunger, no better than a fish. She trades her tail for life on land, marries the first man she meets, and bears a daughter, only to discover that domesticity is just as mundane as sirenhood.

In search of something more, she flees with her daughter Naia to the ocean, where she establishes a mermaid burlesque and recreates herself, performing as a siren in a tank built into the limestone cliffs overlooking the sea. She trains more sirens, expanding Sirenland from a roadside attraction to a national sensation she rules without opposition—until Naia, at 15, begins to push back against the world Ceto has created and the role she performs in her mother’s shows. A death at Sirenland threatens Ceto's authority and leads Naia to question whether this women-ruled kingdom is truly as empowering as her mother would have her believe. Bind Me Tighter Still explores power and hunger, sacrifice and motherhood, and celebrates the fierceness of female strength in a male-dominated world.

A Spanish woman trying to retire as an assassin, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar, a mysterious (perhaps CIA) woman from America, a billionaire military contractor, and a man wandering the seas alone on a sailing ship bump into each other in the Indian Ocean, and not all of them survive.

Mónica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes—he doesn’t know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank’s past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious. Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

A Spanish woman trying to retire as an assassin, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar, a mysterious (perhaps CIA) woman from America, a billionaire military contractor, and a man wandering the seas alone on a sailing ship bump into each other in the Indian Ocean, and not all of them survive.

Mónica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes—he doesn’t know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank’s past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help.

AWARD-WINNING CO-AUTHORS

PEN OPEN BOOKS AWARD WINNER

PEN USA NONFICTION BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Ten short stories written by Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào explore a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales.

In this inventive collaboration, Hoàng and Nào blend Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish, creating a fresh, dynamic voice that captures the complexity of the Vietnamese-American experience. Their stories dive into themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering everything from love stories pieced together from memory, to folklore and fantasy, to post-apocalyptic worlds where Vietnamese-American identities are reimagined.

Timber and Lụa is playful, moving, and full of surprises. The authors experiment with language and translation, showing how meaning can shift and change between cultures. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this collection is both a celebration of diasporic voices and a tribute to the power of storytelling across generations.

AWARD-WINNING CO-AUTHORS

PEN OPEN BOOKS AWARD WINNER

PEN USA NONFICTION BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Ten short stories written by Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào explore a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales.

In this inventive collaboration, Hoàng and Nào blend Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish, creating a fresh, dynamic voice that captures the complexity of the Vietnamese-American experience. Their stories dive into themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering everything from love stories pieced together from memory, to folklore and fantasy, to post-apocalyptic worlds where Vietnamese-American identities are reimagined.

Timber and Lụa is playful, moving, and full of surprises. The authors experiment with language and translation, showing how meaning can shift and change between cultures. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this collection is both a celebration of diasporic voices and a tribute to the power of storytelling across generations.

This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious. Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.

AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF HUSH NOW, DON’T EXPLAIN • 2014 USA BEST BOOK AWARD LITERARY FICTION FINALIST • Dennis Must explores the boundaries of reality and myth in his final book in a series, CIRCLING TOWARD NIGHTFALL

Circling Toward Nightfall is a lyrical rendering of the myth of blood and duality, an attempt to reconcile the body and innermost self in a search for origins. Jeremiah Coombs, its narrator, may be the only man on earth who has two fathers.

AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF HUSH NOW, DON’T EXPLAIN • 2014 USA BEST BOOK AWARD LITERARY FICTION FINALIST • Dennis Must explores the boundaries of reality and myth in his final book in a series, CIRCLING TOWARD NIGHTFALL

Circling Toward Nightfall is a lyrical rendering of the myth of blood and duality, an attempt to reconcile the body and innermost self in a search for origins. Jeremiah Coombs, its narrator, may be the only man on earth who has two fathers.

Blood Flower is a masterful exploration of resilience, love, and the echoes of history, set against the stark beauty of nature and the sharp edges of human conflict. Pamela Uschuk’s poetry weaves a tapestry of intimate personal struggles and broader societal turmoil. Her vivid language captures the visceral textures of life—from the Siberian tundra to family kitchens—and transforms pain, loss, and longing into transcendent art.

With themes ranging from the oppressive silences of political exile to the haunting legacies of war, Blood Flower is a poignant tribute to the enduring power of the human spirit. Uschuk’s voice, sharp as a wolf’s howl and tender as a lover’s whisper, invites readers to confront both the scars of the past and the fragile hope of renewal. This is a collection for anyone who dares to seek beauty in the ashes and strength in vulnerability.

The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces chronicles one man’s journey as he attempts to lead a balanced life as a father, husband, friend, and literary citizen during traumatic times.

Written as a mosaic of ‘flash’ encounters, meditations, memories, and travel pieces, The Patient Body explores the ways the past resides inside the present and the present points to an uncertain future. An abecedary lies at the center of the book, composed for a former self, the twenty-six ‘micro’ sections create a dialogue that plays out across the divide created by a devastating car accident that changed everything.

The re in refuge is a collection of linked essays joined with photographs that investigate ideas of refuge, broadly defined, from the intimacies of romance to the promises of the nation state.

Written over the span of a decade, the collection shapes experiences and events that interrogate their larger political and social contexts. The emerging European refugee crisis, yet to become headline news, frames the opening essays, with stories of those lost in their passage across the Mediterranean. In 2014 Italy and the United Kingdom ended funding for naval rescue operations in the Mediterranean Sea, and the influx of refugees into Greece reconfigures some of Athens' neighborhoods. A once abandoned school building becomes a squat where Kalfopoulou and other volunteers engage with refugee communities that include families from Afghanistan, Syria, and Kurdistan. As Kalfopoulou notes in “The Parts Don’t Add Up” a visual essay, “Embedded in the word refugee is refuge,” suggesting that the vectors of shelter have as much to do with what one carries of culture and place as they are about a tangible home.

AUTHOR OF 2024 INT’L LATINO BOOK AWARD HONORABLE MENTION, VOLCANIC INTERRUPTIONS • CALIFORNIA ARTS COUNCIL RECOGNIZED ESTABLISHED ARTIST FOR CENTRAL CALIFORNIA REGION

“This poetry collection is heart-led, a feast for the eyes, ears, and soul.”—Odilia Galván Rodríguez • “Myths and loss, yearnings and magic”—Cristina García

The poems in Variations in Blue address the aftermath of domestic violence through the transformative power of language, leading to healing and empowerment via the author’s journey into her Latine/x culture. 

The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.

Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika’s mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.

Dear Edna Sloane is a funny, fast-paced epistolary novel about fame, writers, ambition, and the ups and downs of a creative life.

Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the "next big thing" does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.

A Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. A Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.

Set in 2018 against the backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret.

When the tourist does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.

Ribcage of Time, a poetry collection from a woman’s point of view, is both intimate and universal in its scope of events—family life, birth, death, rape, abortion, genocide from a poet on the ledge of some eighty years of life with language fresh and unsettling.

The poems in Jacqueline Tchakalian’s second poetry collection, Ribcage of Time, refer to Armenian genocide, public murder, rape, home abortions, including one outside the home with tragic repercussions for the writer. These poems have an ever-present wish for improvement, a more sane and equitable society for all. They reference family, the joy of having and being around children, the predicted loss of an ill husband, a plan for a different type of god. They are reflective poems that question the future, make strong assertions, and overall are imbued with hope for the future.

When her hippie mother Edi goes missing the same week Sky Richard is assaulted at work—Sky wants to run away from everything. Instead, Sky goes looking for her mother and finds an estranged grandmother, the cult she was born in, and an unlikely ally. But the most important thing she discovers in her mother’s past is the strength she needs to face her own life.

Circle of Animals tells the story of a woman, Sky, grappling with a sexual assault in her workplace and the disappearance of her troubled "hippie" mother the same week. As she searches for and uncovers her mother’s story, she also discovers the larger story of the historically situated and gendered bodies of her mother and estranged grandmother. Drawing on ancient myth (the title refers to the zodiac), California counterculture of the last century, and current conversations about sexual violence, this novel asks us to think about how the inability to communicate violence done unto the body is not just a symptom but also a means through which violence spreads collaterally between women as silence and estrangement. As Sky looks for her mother, she must also find her own voice and courage to claim her agency.

Ben and Corinthia spent years abducting college coeds, until one night they took the wrong victim.

No one knew witnessing their first murder at seven would propel Ben and his twin toward a killing spree in Pennsylvania. Racked with guilt, they vow to take just one more victim. Too bad they snatched the wrong woman . . .

A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.

Last November, I found a dead body inside the freezer that my roommate keeps inside the garage. My first thought was to call the police, but Jignesh hadn’t paid his share of the rent just yet. It wasn’t due until the thirtieth, and you know how difficult it is to find people who pay on time. Jignesh always does. Also, he had season tickets for the LA Opera, and well . . . Madame Butterfly. Tosca. The Flying Dutchman . . . at the Dorothy Chandler . . . you cannot say no to that, can you? Well, it’s been a few good months now—Madame Butterfly was just superb, thank you. However, last Friday, I found a second body inside that stupid freezer in the garage. This time I’m evicting Jignesh. My house isn’t a mortuary . . . alas, I need to come up with some money first. You’ll understand, therefore, that I desperately need to sell this novel. Just enough copies to help me survive until I find a job . . . what could I do that doesn’t demand too much effort? We have a real treasure here, anyhow. Some chapters are almost but not quite pornographic. You could safely lend this to nana afterward!

In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook.

Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems is a new collection that delves into the current raw state of the country and the world, and both new and older poems that explore interpersonal relationships.

In Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe, Jim Tilley draws on his experience as a poet and mathematician to fix a lens on the current raw state of the country and the world and on interpersonal relationships. At times, his mood is merely contemplative, especially while expressing his fondness for nostalgia and in his testaments to family and friends, but as he delves relentlessly into matters political, ecological, and environmental, that mood turns darker, even ominous, infused occasionally with humor to present a more optimistic outlook.

Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika’s mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.

In Before the Storm Takes It Away, Gaylord Brewer steps away from poetry in these short explorations in nonfiction—alternately dark, wry, contemplative, and explosive, what begins as a seasonal experiment in genre becomes, when March 2020 brings a suddenly altered world, a whole different beast.

Baking a cake for Armageddon? Choosing the proper superpower? Finding solace in the imposed isolation of a world plague? In Before the Storm Takes It Away, Gaylord Brewer offers the answers. With topics as far-ranging as fondly recalled feasts in Italy to Charlton Heston’s Holy Bible, the pleasures of home birding to cooking with blood, simple bucolic pleasures to the deafening silence of lost friends, tales of beloved dogs to homoeroticism in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, to solar eclipses, gardening, and the rising death toll, Brewer steps away from poetry in these explosive and surprising explorations in brief nonfiction. What begins as a one-year experiment in genre becomes—when March 2020 arrives with its altered world—the author’s pandemic book. And more. From whence that trepidation throughout the winter, so unnerving at the time? Those dark prophecies? First scent of the storm. Nothing ever the same again.

Set in 2018 against the backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful Greek island of Samos, The Good Deed follows the stories of four women living in the camp and an American tourist who comes to Samos to escape her own dark secret.

When the tourist does a “good deed,” she triggers a crisis that brings her and the refugee women into a conflict that escalates dramatically as each character struggles for what she needs.

As Gertrude Stein might have put it, a cento is a collage is a mix tape is a video montage.

This hypothetical description is fitting in a number of ways. Although the cento form is ancient—in existence since at least the days of Virgil and Homer—it was also used to striking effect in the Modern era: consider, for example, T. S. EliotÆs The Waste Land and Ezra PoundÆs Cantos.

More recent centos include John AshberyÆs \u201cThe Dong with the Luminous Nose,\u201d Peter GizziÆs \u201cOde: Salute to The New York School 1950-1970\u201d (a libretto), Connie HersheyÆs \u201cEcstatic Permutations,\u201d and the \u201cSplit This Rock Poetry Festival—Cento, March 23, 2008\u201d (a collaborative protest poem delivered in front of the White House).

The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems, edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford and with an introduction by David Lehman, features an extensive sampling of centos, collage poems, and patchwork poems written by Nicole Andonov, Lorna Blake, Alex Cigale, Allan Douglass Coleman, Philip Dacey, Sharon Dolin, Annie Finch, Jack Foley, Kate Gale, Dana Gioia, Sam Gwynn, H. L. Hix, David Lehman, Eric Nelson, Catherine Tufariello, and many others.

Brynn Saito takes her readers on a journey with her father to the desert prison at Gila River where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life together. Born of an unquenchable desire to animate the shadow archive, Saito’s poetry sings a song of rage, confusion, and, ultimately, love; descendants of wartime incarceration exchange dreams, mothers become water goddesses, and a modern daughter haunts future ruins. Mystical inclinations, yellow cedars, and sisterhood make a balm for trauma’s scars. This work opens a dialogue between the past and present, radical ancestor and future child, desert prison and family garden.

I discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.

A grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes. Amid the devastation, the fragile peace between father and son is tested as long-buried family secrets at the heart of Hector’s identity are unearthed. Hector faces down his failed marriage, shipwrecked career, and his own failures as a father, while Winston, after three decades of striving as an immigrant in Boston, seeks to reclaim the losses from a painful childhood and the bloody betrayal by his one true love. In Island Man, the ruins of past and present are reconciled and shattered generational bonds are restored.

The Rumpus Book Club Pick, May 2022

Most Anticipated Books of 2022, The Rumpus

16 Upcoming Books from Indie Presses You’ll Love, BuzzFeed

Best Books of the Summer, Powell’s

Saul doesn't get why he's misunderstood. At his high-tech day job, he hides in the bathroom writing a novel about his dead grandfather and wonders why his boss wants to fire him. He tells his almost ex-wife about a blind date and wonders why she slams the door in his face. He aches with worry for his seven-year-old son, who seems happier living with his mom and her new man.

When the blind date becomes a complicated relationship, and Saul’s blunders at work threaten the survival of the company, Saul has to wake up and confront his fears.

I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnected—even when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicate—and an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.

When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his show’s toxic producers to a “gentleman's club” that’s just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth.

Enchanted by her both playful and serious ideas exploring love, limerence, power, monkey behavior, paintball combat, creativity, and the dilemma of a rational mind compelled to serve an animal’s body by feeding it fantasies, Will falls in love—and his ever more troubled love-struck behavior and the acidly destructive battles among his producers and network executives during the production of his show soon begin to illustrate Nicole’s theories.

Nicole is charmingly romantic on a cruise up the Space Coast, but nothing about her seems authentic. After she warns she’ll soon leave and his producers are humbled by an uncanny encounter with the police, Will begins to wonder, is Nicole staging real world events with him and the producers as her experimental subjects? And if so, can he discover her true identity, learn the lessons she’s trying to teach, and earn her love before he loses her forever?

In Epilogue: Selected and Last Poems, Frederick Morgan reworks and amplifies, in his extraordinary poetic range, the fundamental human themes that preoccupied him—love, death, pain, the nature and transcendence of the Self. In interweaving his many themes, he recaptures the past, the confrontation with the external world of nature and the internal world of dream, the oppositions and ambiguities of body and spirit, and the reduplications of meaning in legend and fable. Assembled from eight previous collections, and including his final poems, this profoundly moving book transcends individual expression to provide a powerful insight into universal human experience.

Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering—how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain—is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.

The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author’s older son when he was 21, a horror that was compounded by her younger son’s drug use, the country’s slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. Weight is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. Weight is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.

This anthology brings together one hundred contemporary Indian poets and fiction writers working in English as well as translating from other Indian languages. Located anywhere from Michigan to Mumbai, the sources of their creativity range from the ancient epics to twentieth-century world literature, with themes suggesting a modernist individuality and sense of displacement as well as an ironic, postmodern embracing of multiple disjunctions. The editors present a historical background to the various Englishes apparent in this collection, while also identifying the shared traditions and contexts that hold together their uniquely diverse selection. In aiming at coherence rather than unity, Hasan and Chattarji reveal that the idea of Indianness is as much a means of exploring difference as finding common ground.

In his debut collection, Josh Sapan guides us through a lifetime of love and loss as he navigates death-of loved ones, of crickets, of houseplants-in an American landscape teeming with wonder and the promise of rebirth-in the stars, the wind, the minnows in the bay. In Rx, the prescription is literal ("blue-fog medicine breath") and figurative ("Love so big,/ it comes in a gigantic red box."). Sapan offers a glimpse into the sometimes painfully delicate and beautiful parts of life.

Grennan's new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. Whether his gaze falls on the dash of a hare, dive of a gannet, heavy stillness of a rain-flecked cow, the song of a lark, or the scurry of an ant across a page of Celan, the poem that emerges is a celebration of the momentary fact, how a particular detail can, when sufficiently attended to, glow with the truth of its own unrepeatable self. Set mostly in the landscape of coastal Connemara, these poems can also bring to vivid life a painting by Bonnard, a family walk, a childhood memory, a chance encounter, a man scything a field, or a brief probing of the work of Beckett. Paying attention is this poet's credo, coaxing his simple but layered, often interrogative language into revealing shapes. Grennan also chooses the repeated format of the poems themselves (justified right and left margins of different widths), aligning accident with design, choice with chance, to articulate his sense of the world as an energy poised dynamically between fact and form, between the time-anchored data of the world and the shaping rapture of art. These are poems that serve—through their intensely observed details and the rich, patient exactitudes of Grennan's language—to sharpen our own habits of attention, renewing our sense of the often unnoticed worlds around us.

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, “a movie star without a movie to star in,” whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

Diane Thiel’s eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist! Kim Dower’s poetry has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” and by O Magazine as “unexpected and sublime.” Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, her poems about motherhood are some of her most moving and disarmingly candid.  I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom is an anthology of her poems on being a mother—childbirth to empty nest—as well as being a daughter with all the teenaged messiness, drama and conflict, to finally caring for one's mother suffering from dementia. Culled from her four collections as well as a selection of new work, these poems, heartbreaking, funny, surprising, and touching, explore the quirky, unexpected observations, and bittersweet moments mothers and daughters share. These evocative poems do not glorify mothers, but rather look under the hood of motherhood and explore the deep crevices and emotions of these impenetrable relationships: the love, despair, joy, humor and gratitude that fills our lives.

Former best friends Scott and Errol meet unexpectedly at Oso Lake, a remote Canadian fly-fishing paradise where, five years before, fresh out of college, they had the time of their lives. Their situations, though, have changed, their high hopes quashed by workaday realities and, in Errol’s case, marriage to Claire, who has come with him trying to stave off divorce. But Oso Lake has changed. The fall before, a woman’s severed head was left in a campfire pit beside the lake. The shadow cast by her murder is darkened further by a fire-scarred white truck driver who claims to be a long-dead Native shaman and has plans to eradicate not only Scott, Errol, and Claire, but all of Western civilization. The beauty of the wilderness becomes, every day, more threatening and perverse. But the worst danger the vacationers face may be themselves.

From the Introduction: “The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres—poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts which mix and match and blur all of these modes . . . the trajectories between the pieces—like that of kismet—will be multiple, nonlinear, abstract. The Muslim community is plural and contradictory. This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.”—Kazim Ali

*SILVER MEDALIST in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for Best Popular Fiction - English*

Happily married, backed by a powerful mentor, and with career prospects that would take him abroad, Serguey has more than any young Cuban lawyer could ask for. But when his estranged brother Victor appears with news that their father—famed theater director Felipe Blanco—has been detained for what he suspects are political reasons, Serguey’s privileged life is suddenly shaken.

A return to his childhood home in Havana’s decaying suburbs—a place filled with art, politics, and the remnants of a dissolving family—reconnects Serguey with his troubled past. He learns of an elusive dramaturge’s link to Felipe, a man who could be key to his father’s release. With the help of a social media activist and his wife’s ties with the Catholic Church, Serguey sets out to unlock the mystery of Felipe’s arrest and, in the process, is forced to confront the reasons for the hostility between him and Victor: two violent childhood episodes that scarred them in unforgettable ways. On the verge of imprisonment, Serguey realizes he must make a decision regarding not just his father, but his family and his own future, a decision which, under the harsh shadow of a communist state, he cannot afford to regret.

In a polygamist commune in the desert, a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in love and consummate that love, breaking religious law. They are caught, and a year later, she gives birth to his father’s child while the boy commits murder four hundred miles away—a crime that will slowly unravel the community.

Told by eight adolescent narrators, this is a story of how people use faith to justify cruelty, and how redemption can come from unexpected places. Though seemingly powerless in the face of their fundamentalist religion, these “strange children” shift into the central framework of their world as they come of age.

*WINNER of the 2021 Foreword Indie Book Award in Literature*

Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller’s injured leg and the danger of Tie’s imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. From the Caves presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings.

Sinking Islands continues the story of Bronwyn Artair, a scientist who possesses the power to influence the natural forces of the Earth. After several successful interventions, including one in Siberia, she has gone into hiding, worried about unintended consequences of her actions, as well as about the ethics of operating solo. But circumstances call her to action again, and an idea takes shape: What if she could impart her skill to other people? Gathering a few kindred souls from climate-troubled places around the world—Felipe from São Paulo, where drought conditions are creating strains on day-to-day life; Analu and his daughter Penina from a sinking island in the South Pacific; and Patty from the tornado-ridden plains of Kansas—she takes them to the wilds of Northern New Hampshire where she tries to teach them her skill. The novel, realistic but for the single fantastical element, explores how we might become more attuned to the Earth and act more collaboratively to solve the enormity of our climate problem.

The Sadness of Whirlwinds explores the world as we know it but tinged with magical possibilities that challenge our expectations. A small dog leads a man into the backyard of a blind woman who has drawn him forth from a forgotten past. A man becomes trapped between walls in his favorite restaurant. The author of a book of questions meets the author of a book that has the answers. An encounter with Mr. Death offers insights into Mrs. Birth. A woman unhappy with her life enters into an exploration of the world of whirlwinds. A man decides he must leave his dog lying beside him on the couch in order to enter the Inward City. A man travels to the remote and eccentric country of Fallada and meets the beautiful, bewildering woman known as Keeva. A woman must break through the boundaries of her comfortable grief in order to face an irascible man and unravel the mystery of her stolen dog. These and other explorations into the unknown make up the character of this new collection by Jim Peterson. Mysterious and challenging, these tales invite readers to their own inquiries into the nature of reality.

Jane is a Los Angeles nurse who grew up in a Christian cult that puts celebrities on trial for their sins. Daniel is a has-been actor whose career ended when the cult family members nearly killed him for flirting with her. Eight years after a romantic meet-cute in Battery Park, both search for someone to fill the gap they imagine the other could’ve filled if given the chance. Jane compulsively goes on dates with every self-professed expert in art, music, and food hoping they will teach her the nuances of the culture she couldn’t access in her youth. Daniel looks for a girlfriend who will accept the disabilities left from the cult attack. A loving woman will prove to Daniel’s blockbuster star brother, Steve, that he’s capable of a supporting role in Steve’s upcoming movie and relaunching Daniel’s career. When a chance encounter unexpectedly reunites them, Jane and Daniel not only see another chance at the love they lost, but an opportunity to create the lives they’ve always wanted. The only question is whether their families will let them.

In 2011, my family was in a major car accident. We were hit head-on by a man in the throes of a heart attack. It took three years to recover from our injuries, and a couple more to deal with the aftereffects of trauma. When I finally returned to the world — as father and husband, friend and brother, writer and citizen — it became clear that our society was in its own traumatized state — reeling from the string of police shootings of unarmed African Americans, stunned by yet one more mass shooting. The people around me were displaying all the signs of PTSD — jumpiness, irritability, numbness — and, concordantly, my interactions out in daily life were becoming more dysfunctional, at times downright hostile. Us against them. Red vs. blue. Black vs. white. Rich vs. poor. That we were living in a progressive town inside a conservative county in the Mountain South only made things more volatile. I decided that if we were all living in a fractured society no longer recognizable, then it was up to me to re-engage in it. I would enter into encounters with people as conscious as possible of the potential divides and misunderstandings between us. I started with my neighborhood and town, then moved out into the counties around us, then traveled further out into the country. My goal: to connect.

*HONORABLE MENTION for the 2022 International Latino Book Awards, Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English*

American Quasar is a visual-textual collaboration between poet David Campos and artist Maceo Montoya. What began as an exploration of the precipice of violence evolved into an excavation of self, a deep meditation on how country, family, and trauma affect the ability to love. The images and words build a poetic space where the body is understood in both physical and celestial terms, giving a spiritual dimension to the collection's larger claim that the political is personal.