Support Our Publishers Who Lost Their NEA Funding

Two misfits embark on a journey to realize their dreams in this timeless tale.

Cosmos and Niner live on the street. It’s not such a bad life, they think, but they dream of going to the sea, where it’s always summer. And to do that they need to raise money. Cosmos knows a woman who might be able to help them. When she asks them to exchange something precious for the money, Niner and Cosmos agree to trade her the most valuable thing either of them possesses—Niner’s guardian angel.

After the deal is struck, Cosmos and Niner quickly set out for the shore. But when Niner’s health takes a turn for the worse, Cosmos realizes he needs to get Niner’s guardian angel back. Can he act quickly enough to save his young friend’s life?

Moving from the mundane to the profound, first through observation of fact and matter, then shifting perspective, engaging a deeper sense of self, these poems re-imagine things great and small, making us care deeply about the world around us.

In this cultivated and intricately crafted collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Force by which a line unfurls—as in Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty—or leads with forward motion—a train hurdling along the west-reaching railroad; Edweard Muybridge’s photographic reels charting animal and human locomotion.

With poems remarkable in their clarity, captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world, meanwhile negotiating an inexorable pull toward the places we call home—one we alternately try and fail to resist.

Seventeen-year-old Alice Marie Krayenbraak is beautiful, witty, a star student, and a gifted athlete. On the surface, she has it all. But in Alice’s hometown of Dutch Center, Iowa, nothing is as it seems. Behind the façade of order and tidiness, the family farm is failing. Alice’s mother is behaving strangely amid apocalyptic fears of Y2K. And her parents have announced their plans to send her special-needs sister Aldah away. On top of it all, the uniformly Dutch Calvinist town has been rattled by an influx of foreign farm workers.

It’s the fall of senior year, and Alice now finds herself at odds with both family and cultural norms when she befriends and soon falls in love with Nickson Vang, the son of Hmong immigrants. Caught in a period of personal and community transformation, Alice and Nickson must navigate their way through vastly different traditions while fighting to create new ones of their own. Funny and provocative, amusing and unsettling, The Fall of Alice K. marks a watershed moment in the publishing career of author, Jim Heynen.

In her highly ambitious second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg takes her inspiration from the alphabet.

A meditation on the hump of a camel, and what it hides. A reminder that tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and a vision of the plant as Adam’s downfall. The Book of Kells, gold-leafed and extravagantly decorated by monks. Titled for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are richly grounded in objects both humble and exotic. Vandenberg explores the intersection of power and forgiveness, and deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in emotionally poignant ways. “What will protect us?” one poem asks. “The words will be our weapons. In the end.”

Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning—with astonishing beauty—from the pain of loss and separation.

"Here childhood innocence and dreams meet the reality of day-to-day survival and violence, during Hindu-Muslim riots, forcing choices that should never have to be made. Irani (The Cripple and His Talismans, 2005) is a gifted storyteller, and this book, Dickensian in its plot and its vivid prose, is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking." - Booklist

Abandoned as an infant, ten-year-old Chamdi has spent his entire life in a Bombay orphanage. There he has learned to find solace in his everyday surroundings: the smell of the first rains, the vibrant pinks and reds of the bougainvilleas that blossom in the courtyard, the life-size statue of Jesus, the "beautiful giant," to whom he confides his hopes and fears in the prayer room. Though he rarely ventures outside the orphanage, he entertains an idyllic fantasy of what the city is like – a paradise he calls Kahunsha, "the city of no sadness," where children play cricket in the streets and where people will become one with all the colours known to man.

Chamdi’s quiet life takes a sudden turn, however, when he learns that the orphanage will be shut down by land developers. He decides that he must run away in search of his long-lost father, taking nothing with him but the blood-stained white cloth he was left in as a baby.

Outside the walls of the orphanage, Chamdi quickly discovers that Bombay is nothing like Kahunsha. The streets are filthy and devoid of colour, and no one shows him an ounce of kindness. Just as he’s about to faint from hunger, two seasoned street children offer help: the lovely, sarcastic Guddi and her brother, the charming, scarred, and crippled Sumdi. After their father was crushed by a car before their eyes, the children were left to care for their insane mother and their infant brother. They soon initiate Chamdi into the brutal life of the city’s homeless, begging all day and handing over most of his earnings to Anand Bhai, a vicious underworld don who will happily mutilate or kill whoever dares to defy him.

Determined to escape the desperation, filth, and violence of their lives, Guddi and Sumdi recruit Chamdi into their plot to steal from a temple. But when the robbery goes terribly awry, Chamdi finds himself in an even worse situation. The city has erupted in Hindu-Muslim violence and, held in Anand Bhai’s fierce grip, Chamdi is presented with a choice that threatens to rob him of his innocence forever.

Moving, poignant, and wonderfully rich in the sights and sounds of Bombay, this novel is the story of Chamdi's struggle for survival on the city's dangerous streets.

In Blood of the Sun, Salgado Maranhão—one of the most celebrated poets in Brazil today—weds the powerfully socio-political to the metaphysical.

Masterfully translated by Alexis Levitin and presented in both Portuguese and English, this collection plunges into the concrete and the conceptual. Butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. Cannibalism offers an opportunity to reflect on random killings and the plight of modern man. The resulting poems are varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered. Maranhão’s language sings in forms fixed and free, filled with a jazzlike musicality and fluted rhymes. “In paining me my pain makes me a dean,” one poem reads. “Whose vice is claiming virtue as his own. / Am I saint or devil, or in between? / Am I a killer who is yet unknown?”

Sensually provocative, defined by an aesthetic at once traditional and postmodern, Blood of the Sun introduces a thrilling new voice to the English language.

An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century.

A family curse—a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship—causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants’ line, exploring Jude Hervé’s career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man. Book Two traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François seeks the identity of his missing father for years, while his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves.

In assured and mystically powerful prose, Deni Y. Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming landscape. Imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy — in our lives, and in our history.

“A monumental contribution to international literature.” —BLOOMSBURY REVIEW

Vietnam—the very word raises many associations for Westerners. Yet while the country has been ravaged by a modern history of colonialism and war, its ancient culture is rich and multilayered, and within it poetry has long had a special place.

In this groundbreaking anthology, coeditors and translators Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover present a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the geographical and historical crossroads of Vietnam in the modern era. Reflecting influences as diverse as traditional folk stories and American Modernism, the twenty-one poets included in Black Dog, Black Night, many of whom have never before been published in English, introduce readers to a fresh, uncensored, and utterly unique poetic vision.

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Ellis Béchard believes his charismatic father is infallible. Wild, unpredictable, even dangerous, André is worshipped by his young son, who believes that his father can do no wrong.

But when Deni’s mother leaves his father and decamps with her three children to Virginia, the boy learns of his father’s true identity. André Béchard was once a bank robber—and so Deni’s imagination is set on fire. Boyish rebelliousness gives way to fantasies of a life of crime. At once attracted and repelled, Deni can’t escape the sense that his father’s life holds the key to understanding himself, and to making sense of his own passions and longings. Only when he goes off to college, however, does Deni begin to unravel the story of his father’s life, eventually finding the Quebecois family that André left behind long ago.

At once a highly unconventional portrait of the artist as a young man and an extraordinary family story, Cures for Hunger is a deeply affecting memoir by one of the most acclaimed young writers in the world today.

The haunting and crystalline poems in Adam Clay’s A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World examine the moment when solitude slips into separation, when a person realizes he can barely see the place he set out from, and must make his way back to the present.

Imagining the return to daily life as a negotiation between an inner world and the natural one, this collection tracks the subtly shifting tenors of thought that occur as the landscape around the speaker changes. In this journey, reverie can be a siren’s song, and Thoreau’s “border life” between civilization and wildness is realized in all its possibilities and difficulties. The resulting poems live somewhere between those of James Wright and John Ashbery: they seek wholeness even as they acknowledge that “a fragment is as complete as thought can be.”

Thoughtful and subtly complex, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World is a collection filled with a generous gentleness—an attention to the world so careful it’s as if the mind is “washing each grain of sand.”

Lauren, a Korean American adoptee, is best friends with the prettiest girl in school. Julie has an endless amount of confidence. Lauren doesn’t. It’s not that she wants to look like everyone else in her suburban Connecticut school—she’d just be happy if Sean, the cutest boy in her class, noticed her. And she could do without the names, too. Like “Slant.”

When Sean slips one day and calls her by the taunt, she knows she has to take matters into her own hands. Using her life savings, Lauren decides to undergo a special eye surgery that will deepen the crease of her eyelid so she just blends in. After she convinces her father to agree, Lauren learns a secret about her dead mother and finds herself faced with a dilemma: should she get the operation that might make her more confident and well-liked, or can she find that confidence within?

Sensitive and beautifully written, Laura E. Williams’s novel offers a powerful lesson to young readers whose self-esteem depends too much on how they look.

Elegant, learned, sensual, The Book of Props offers mesmerizing images of the scrim of the world, capturing both representation and inspiration.

Mediating claims between the attention objects demand of us and the effects of perception on time, these poems diagram the shifting geometries of human relationships. A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers—the speakers in The Book of Props often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience. These poems—including a series presented in an innovative film script format—constitute an imaginative yet authentic inquiry into the varied constructs in which we define love.

Inventive and engaging, The Book of Props is a poetic and philosophical endeavor to place oneself in the world.

At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away.

A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnick’s story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are.

The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of people’s relationship to a world in transition.

The 1947 Partition of India is the backdrop for this powerful novel, narrated by a precocious child who describes the brutal transition with chilling veracity.

Young Lenny Sethi is kept out of school because she suffers from polio. She spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, visiting with the large group of admirers that Ayah draws. It is in the company of these working class characters that Lenny learns about religious differences, religious intolerance, and the blossoming genocidal strife on the eve of Partition.

As she matures, Lenny begins to identify the differences between the Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs engaging in political arguments all around her. Lenny enjoys a happy, privileged life in Lahore, but the kidnapping of her beloved Ayah signals a dramatic change. Soon Lenny’s world erupts in religious, ethnic, and racial violence.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this domestic drama serves as a microcosm for a profound political upheaval.

From the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood comes a story of family, geography, and home.

Janisse Ray is known for her passion for the virgin longleaf pine forests that once covered the South. But she is also passionate about conserving the richness and complexity of rural communities. In these short pieces—sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking—Ray chronicles her return to a hometown in need of repair, physical and otherwise, after seventeen years away. Whether celebrating local characters and traditions, like syrup boils and alligator trapping; fighting to save the town’s school; or spending time with her extended family, Ray dares to hope that such fragments—once saved—can pattern a vibrant, sustainable future for both people and the land.

Colorful and affectionate, Wild Cart Quilt crafts a compelling argument for the possibilities of rural community.

Winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction. “An admirable, steely-eyed collection of stories and vignettes featuring a family of ranchers.”—Publishers Weekly

On Hell’s Bottom Ranch, a section of land below the Front Range, there are women like Renny who prefer a “little Hell swirled with their Heaven” and men like Ben, her husband, who’s “gotten used to smoothing over Renny’s excesses.” There is a daughter who maybe plays it too safe and a daughter plagued by only “half-wanting” what life has to offer. The ranch has been the site of births and deaths of both cattle and children, as well as moments of amazing harmony and clear vision.

“Set in the unpredictable West, these stories remind us that we cannot escape the messiness and obsessions of ordinary life.”—Patricia Henley, author of Hummingbird House

“Displays the talent of a brilliant, new writer.”—The Rocky Mountain News

“With the rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains as backdrop, Pritchett’s spare yet richly evocative stories portray the stark reality of life on a Colorado cattle ranch, where three generations of one family tend the land and animals, devoting and losing themselves to an existence few would understand or choose to follow . . . Regardless of whether the songs she hears are sung by a meadowlark or a jailbird, Pritchett excels at juxtaposing the sensuous with the severe, the rapturous with the repugnant.”—Booklist

“The stories jump back and forth in time, but their message is clear: this family’s ties are as quixotic, fierce, and enduring as the land that binds them together.”—School Library Journal

It is 1942. Korinna, a thirteen-year-old girl in Germany, is an active member of the local Jungmadel, a Nazi youth group, along with many of her friends. She believes that Hitler is helping Germany by dealing with what he calls the “Jewish problem,” a campaign that she witnesses as her Jewish neighbors are attacked and taken from their homes.

When Korinna discovers that her parents—who are secretly members of an underground resistance group—are sheltering a family of Jewish refugees behind her bedroom wall, she is shocked. As she comes to know the family her sympathies begin to turn, and when someone tips off the Gestapo, Korinna’s loyalties are put to the test. She must decide what she really believes and whom she really trusts.

An exciting novel for middle-grade readers, Behind the Bedroom Wall teaches tolerance and understanding while exploring why Nazism held so many in its deadly thrall.

“Short, sharp, devastating, The Farther Shore is a literary machine gun . . . a winning debut that happens to be a war novel.” —Kansas City Star

A small unit of soldiers from the US Army is separated from their command and left for dead. Their only option is to keep moving, in hope that they’ll escape the marauding gangs and clansmen who appear to rule the city. Josh, a young soldier, and his “battle buddies” are left to wander in this hostile territory. A series of nightmarish, often violent encounters leaves only a few of them alive. The Farther Shore is a short, stark war novel in which the characters are both haunting and inhuman, natives and invaders alike. The emerging story reflects a new kind of military engagement, with all the attendant horrors and difficulties of fighting in a strange new postmodern battlefield. In his unforgettable debut novel, Matthew Eck puts readers inside the mind of a confused young soldier caught in the fog of unexpected warfare.

“Bold, profane, hallucinatory.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Haunting . . . goes beyond the on-the-ground chaos of battle to capture the physical and psychological disorientation of modern war.” —Publishers Weekly

“Every word in Eck’s first novel is as solid as a stone. Every moment of crisis feels authentic in its terror and tragedy; indeed, Eck served as a soldier in Somalia at age eighteen. Heir to Hemingway, and damn near as powerful as Cormac McCarthy in The Road, Eck has created a contemporary version of The Red Badge of Courage in this tale of one young man’s trial by fire in the pandemonium of war in an age of high-tech weaponry and low-grade morality.” —Booklist (starred review)

“The first great war novel of our generation.” —Salon

From “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian), an exceptional book of nonfiction and fables that provides a walking tour of the creative mind.

In Wonderful Investigations, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary” between our daily world and one rich with wonder; a magical world in which, through his work as a writer, he participates with a singular combination of critical intelligence and lyricism. Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, and Plato, among others, Beachy-Quick outlines the problem of duality in modern thought—the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery, human and natural—and makes the case for a fuller kind of nature poetry, one that strives to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that “wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real.

Luminous, generous, and unceasingly curious, Wonderful Investigations is a rich investigation of what it means to think, read, write, and learn.

Founded nearly four decades ago by a group of young writers, the Loft has become our nation’s largest independent literary center. The dream animating its inception—to build a community of writers and readers—has borne remarkable fruit, and today the Loft’s community extends from its home in Minneapolis to writers and readers around the world.

Gathering the collected wisdom of that community—from practical tips and suggestions to ruminations on the mystery of the writing process—this invaluable book provides writers everywhere with the tools and inspiration they need to thrive. Invigorating, insightful, and illuminating throughout, this portable workshop is essential for writers of all levels.

Views from the Loft collects more than sixty essays, including those from luminaries including: Grace Paley on the writer’s responsibility in the world. Rick Bass on keeping your schedule open for the muse. Marilyn Chin on grandfathers, cowlicks, and shoe glue in first drafts of poems. Lewis Hyde on embracing the mythology of wholeness in nonfiction. Ted Kooser on fostering a poetic life. And Susan Straight on writing through clogged toilets, broken windows, and the other charms of single-motherhood.

FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE

Christopher Howell’s haunted and haunting Gaze is a collection of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we live in the physical world around us, and he reminds us how loss releases us into the present—how in the process of living, “everybody pays.”

Gaze is divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of the inner life, and finally on the “other world” of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures, coming together to question and explore our perception of the world. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility, offering a bewitching and deeply felt wisdom.

Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? In her latest book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate.

Moore's essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends—of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter's arrest for protesting the war in Iraq—affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane.

Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family.

A young woman who offers to raise her teenage sister’s baby gets more than she bargained for in “a moving story about love, duty, and family” (Publishers Weekly).

A supermarket clerk in a small dusty Colorado town, twenty-two-year-old Libby is full of dreams but lacks the means to pursue them. When her younger sister Tess becomes pregnant, Libby convinces her not to have an abortion by promising to raise the child herself. But then Tess takes off after the baby is born and Libby finds that her new role puts her dreams that much further away.

Her already haphazard life becomes ever more chaotic. The baby’s father, a Christian rodeo rider, suddenly demands custody. Libby loses her job, her boyfriend abandons her, and her own mother harps on how stupid she was to make that promise to Tess. Worse, her sister’s reckless new life could put Libby herself in danger. Not just a story of a single mother overcoming obstacles, Sky Bridge is a complex novel from a PEN Award winner that leaves readers with a fresh understanding of what it means to inhabit a world in which dreams die, and are sometimes reborn.

“In this spare yet haunting portrait of the American West, Pritchett’s powerful, poetic voice speaks with clarity, wisdom, and passion about country, family, and one young woman’s majestic spirit.” —Booklist

“A superb writer.” —Library Journal

"This is familial redemption at its finest, which is to say agonizingly complex and wholly engaging." - Booklist

Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey watches the meteor showers in northern Minnesota. On the long haul from Texas to Minnesota, Tommy encounters a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo. When the Japanese tourist dies of exposure in Tommy Jack’s care, a media storm erupts and sets off a series of journeys into Tommy Jack’s past as he remembers the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend, Fred Howkowski.

Exploring with great insight and wit the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions intersect, Extra Indians offers a powerful glimpse into contemporary Native American life.

The tragic tale of a Montana family ripped apart by scandal and murder: “a significant and elegant addition to the fiction of the American West” (Washington Post).

In the summer of 1948, twelve-year-old David Hayden witnessed and experienced a series of cataclysmic events that would forever change the way he saw his family. The Haydens had been pillars of their small Montana town: David’s father was the town sheriff; his uncle Frank was a war hero and respected doctor. But the family’s solid foundation was suddenly shattered by a bombshell revelation.

The Hayden’s Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, tells them that Frank has been sexually assaulting his female Indian patients for years—and that she herself was his latest victim. As the tragic fallout unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between loyalty and justice.

Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize

“An authentically great American novel” that follows a young man’s descent into darkness after a tragic loss, and his struggle to find renewal (Booklist, starred review).

Raised in an idyllic Iowa town, young July Montgomery is rocked by the tragic death of his parents. Fleeing to Philadelphia, he fashions a ghostly existence in an underground train station. When a young woman appears to free him from his malaise, they return together to the Iowa heartland, where the novel soars to its heartrending climax. First published to enormous acclaim in 1975, Rock Island Line brings David Rhodes’s striking characterizations and unparalleled eye for the telling detail to this tale of paradise lost—and possibly regained.

“Beautiful and haunting . . . I read the book when it first came out over thirty years ago and it has lived in both my heart and head ever since.” —Jonathan Carroll, author of Teaching the Dog to Read

A priest struggling with temptation moves back into his working-class childhood home in this “suspenseful, illuminating, and highly readable saga” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Let me begin today, illumined by Thy light, to destroy this part of the natural man which lives in me in its entirety, the obstacle that constantly keeps me from Thy Love . . .

Taught this prayer as a boy by his grandfather, James Dressler recites it each time he’s tempted by earthly desires. Originally drawn to the priesthood by the mystery, purity, and sensual fabric of the Church, as well as by its promise of a safe harbor from his tempestuous home, James nevertheless finds himself — just a few years after his ordination — living at home: saying Mass for his mother at the dining room table; avoiding his pugilistic father; playing basketball; preparing to officiate at his brother’s wedding, and becoming attracted again to his first love, Betty García.

Torn between these opposing desires, and haunted by his familial heritage, James finds himself at a crossroads. Exploring age-old yet urgently contemporary issues in the Catholic Church, and infused throughout with a rich sense of the history and vibrant texture of St. Paul, Minnesota, this is an utterly honest novel filled with “thoughtful themes and lyrical prose” (Booklist).

“Deeply rooted in history, burning with family furies, and told by a narrator-priest you find yourself rooting for (and wondering about), this is a captivating novel, scene by scene.” —Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist’s Daughter

Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist—Bill Holm is one of kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing material for a number of rich and memorable books.

In this, his most ambitious work to date—a book “as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever” (Los Angeles Times)—Holm travels to Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. Looking west from this place of seemingly endless and kaleidoscopic light, and surrounded by little more than the sound of the sea and the birds beyond his windows, he considers America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden.”

In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, The Windows of Brimnes offers a singular perspective that is at once incisive and amusing, provocative and congenial.

This novel from the acclaimed author of Driftless is “an arresting work about the salvation of a disintegrating Iowa family” (The New York Times).

Survival has been the Sledge way since Reuben Sledge’s father first moved to Des Moines. Yet the family seems cursed, and one by one the Sledges are slipping away. Reuben’s oldest brother is hanged for the murder of his wife. Then another brother is committed to an asylum for spying on the woman he loves. But it’s the rape and disgrace of his beloved sister Nellie that drives Reuben into a deep despair.

Into the depths of this depression wanders Tabor, lovely and vulnerable, who sets Reuben alive with the promise of her love. When Reuben learns that Tabor has descended into the City, he determines, in a moment of panic, to enter and bring her out. Thus begins the novel's second act, a harrowing journey through the horrors of the City and among a ghastly assemblage of dwellers who've crafted new lives for themselves in the underworld.

“In my fourteenth year the influenza infected my whole world. . . . Seems as though just as the Great War came to a close, the folks of Downeast Maine set to fighting a war of their own.”

Born into an artistic and eccentric family, Lyza laments that her only talent is carving letters into wood. At least, that is, until the devastating loss of her mother to influenza during the pandemic of 1918. The illness has settled on their small coastal town in Maine, and the funeral marches pass Lyza’s house almost daily. When her unconventional father begins to prepare for the return of his dead wife, Lyza is the only one to protect him from being committed to a nearby work farm. Awash with grief and longing for her mother, Lyza journeys into the thin territory that divides the living from the dead.

Relying on her courage and an undiscovered talent, Lyza must save her father and find her own path. From the celebrated author of Worth, this is a powerful story of love that persists beyond the grave.

California wildfires, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism—in Fancy Beasts, Alex Lemon takes on American media culture, the obscene foil for personal legacies of violence and violation.

The poems of this collection are a workout: vigorous and raw, frenetic and fearless. Yet they are also composed and controlled, pared down and sculpted, with a disarming narrative simplicity and directness. Even when dealing with toxic content—including the turning point in a life of abuse, in which the recovering victim/perpetrator puzzles through the paradigm of son-to-husband-to-father—Lemon’s point of view is always genuine and trustworthy.

A frank, funny, and inimitably frenetic vision of post-millennial America, Fancy Beasts is a stunning achievement from Alex Lemon.

This acclaimed short story collection “veers between whimsical postmodern playfulness and a darker realism [with] sophisticated comic flare” (Publishers Weekly).

Distinguished by black comedy and an international perspective, Ken Kalfus’ stories demonstrate the author’s chameleon-like ability to change mode, manner, and voice. They often concern the abrupt dislocation of people bumping into different cultures, be they real, hallucinated, dreamed, or desired.

“A book for people who piss and moan about the unpromising future of American fiction.” —David Foster Wallace

Since her father remarried, Nissa feels like a stranger in her own home. When her new stepmother moves in and rearranges everything, it’s almost as if her free-spirited mother never even lived there. Hoping to restore the life she knew, Nissa accepts an invitation from her mother and moves to Chicago.

But life in the big city is overwhelming, and Nissa misses her home and her father. She’s thrilled to help her mother sew costumes and plant a rooftop flower garden, but how can she fit in when people talk so fast and don’t even care to wish her a good day? After a revelation in the Chicago library, the willful Nissa discovers a way to stake her independence and find her place in her family and life in Louisiana.

Told with the lyricism that marked The Year of the Sawdust Man, Nissa’s Place is a beautiful continuation of Nissa’s story. Once you meet Nissa Bergen, you’ll never forget her.

In the world of thirteen-year-old girls, everything’s fine—at least on the surface.

Isabelle Lee is a typical, wisecracking, middle-of-the-pack girl who just happens to be dealing with some big issues. Her father has died and no one—especially her mother—wants to talk about it. Meanwhile, Isabelle’s sister, who “used to be nine and charming,” has messed everything up by ratting Isabelle out to their mom about her eating disorder.

At school, there’s Mr. Minx, the self-important (but really not bad) English teacher; Ashley Barnum, the prettiest girl around; and the lunchroom, where tables are turf in an all-eyes-open battle for social status. Isabelle has measured the distance to being cool and she thinks it’s long shiny hair, a toothpaste smile, and perfectly broken-in size-zero jeans.

Perfect is the story of one girl’s attempt to cope with loss, define true friendship, and figure out the difference between appearances and reality.

Composed in the key of terror, The Tree of the Doves offers an engaging account of Christopher Merrill’s travels to distant parts of the world. From jungle to desert to sea, from cities to ruins, he explores how history is shaped by ceremonies, expeditions, and wars.

He observes the performance of a banned ritual in Malaysia, retraces Saint-John Perse’s epic journey from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, and tours the Levant in the wake of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Encountering a wide range of people along the way—artists and politicians, soldiers and refugees—Merrill is as attentive to their individuality as he is attuned to the historical, social, and cultural situations in which they find themselves.

In three extended essays, he poses fundamental but nonetheless provocative questions­­—Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do?—which lead him to conclude that the changes we are witnessing now presage the end of one order and the creation of another.

Lively and insightful, empathetic and illuminating, The Tree of the Doves is an important book, as contemporary as it is timeless.

In My Green Manifesto, David Gessner embarks on a rough-and-tumble journey down Boston’s Charles River, searching for the soul of a new environmentalism.

With a tragically leaky canoe, a broken cell phone, a cooler of beer, and environmental planner Dan Driscoll in tow, Gessner grapples with the stereotype of the environmentalist as an overzealous, puritanical mess. But as Dan recounts his own story of transforming the famously polluted Charles into an urban haven for wildlife and wild people, the vision of a new sort of eco-champion begins to emerge: someone who falls in love with a forgotten space, and then fights like hell for it.

Considering everything from Edward Abbey’s legacy to Jimmy Carter’s sweater, weaving his intellectual quest with real adventure, Gessner points toward a scrappy environmentalism that, despite all odds, just might change the world. “Heartfelt and informed” (Boston Globe), My Green Manifesto is a spirited call to arms by a major figure on the vanguard of a new environmentalism.

“A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.”—The Wall Street Journal

The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America.

“[Rhodes’s] finest work yet . . . Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”—Chicago Tribune

“Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology’ in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life.”—The New Yorker

“Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”—Booklist (starred review)

“A welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction . . . A quiet novel of depth and simplicity.”—Kirkus Reviews

“It takes a while for all these stories to kick in, but once they do, Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. Add a blizzard, a marauding cougar and some rabble-rousing militiamen, and the result is a novel that is as affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”—Publishers Weekly

In Calli, prize-winning author Jessica Lee Anderson explores the perils of adolescence with the humor and compassion of a writer who knows growing up doesn’t always come with easy answers.

Calli has almost everything she could want in life—two loving moms, a good-looking boyfriend, and a best friend who has always been there for her. As an only child, Calli is excited when her parents announce that they want to foster a girl her own age, but Cherish, her foster sister, is not at all what she expected. Cherish lies, steals, kisses Calli’s boyfriend, and seems to get away with just about everything. Determined to get even, Calli takes matters into her own hands, but her plan for revenge goes horribly awry. Isolated from her friends and family, she looks for ways to undo the damage she’s caused.

Funny, moving, and emotionally rich, Calli is a portrait of an endearing young woman caught between adolescence and adulthood, striving to do the right thing even when all of her options seem wrong.

The author of the acclaimed Montana 1948 “spins charm and melancholy” in this novel of youth and romantic rivalry in 1960s rural Minnesota (Denver Post).

Willow Falls, Minnesota, 1962. The shooting of a young woman on Thanksgiving Day sets off a chain of unsettling events in the life of seventeen-year-old Matthew Garth. A close friend of the prosperous Dunbar family, Matthew is present in Dr. Dunbar’s home office when the victim is brought in. The sight of Louisa Lindahl—beautiful and mortally wounded—makes an indelible impression on the young man.

Fueled by his feverish desire for this mysterious woman and a deep longing for the comfort and affluence that appears to surround the Dunbars, Matthew finds himself drawn into a vortex of greed, manipulation, and ultimately betrayal. Larry Watson’s tale heart-breaking tale “resonates with language as clear and images as crisp as the spare, flat prairie of its Minnesota setting” (Kirkus Reviews).

An Esquire Best Book of 2011

WINNER OF THE PHILLIP D. REED MEMORIAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING ON THE SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENT

Beyond the oil-soaked pelican, beyond the oil-soaked beach, beyond the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entirely, there is a deeper story of sacrifice unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Reporters and government officials focused on the smallest part of it: oil gushed into the water for 153 days, then, on September 19, 2010, the well was capped. The story was over. But for David Gessner the unimaginable amount of oil spilled into the ocean was only the beginning.

In The Tarball Chronicles, Gessner eats, drinks, and talks his way into the heart of Gulf country—exploring the region’s birds, sea life, and ecosystems with the oceanographers, activists, and subsistence fishermen who call it home. Just how much, he asks, are we willing to sacrifice to keep living the way we do? Part absurdist travelogue, part manifesto, The Tarball Chronicles is a love song for the Gulf from an author who has “redefined what it means to write about the natural world” (Washington Post).

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD

In her stunning debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and thus exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration—the abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the forked paths where these narratives meet and diverge.

Sharing ground with Randall Jarrell’s later poems, and drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, Turkish proverbs, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Antonin Dvorak’s letters, and the numerous fictions we script across the inscrutabilities of the natural world—Kim reveals how a homesickness for the self is universal. It is this persistent and incurable longing that drives us as we make our way through the dark woods of our lives, following what might or might not be a trail of breadcrumbs, discovering, finally, that “we are the only path.”

This tale of two Iowa brothers trying to escape the long shadow of their notorious father is “an almost impossible book to put down” (The Plain Dealer).

This gripping novel tells the tale of the Easter family of Ontarion, Iowa. Ansel Easter was a favored minister until he rescued a grotesque creature from a carnival sideshow. His sons, C and Sam, suffer in the shadow of their outcast father until his violent death. C and Sam leave the home their father built for a new beginning, and find fortune building a lucrative business called the Associates — but when a rash of deaths has the townspeople looking at C and Sam as suspects, they find their father’s legacy reaches further than they expect.

Taut, dark, and engrossing, The Easter House is a brilliant work of fiction by the acclaimed author of Driftless and Jewelweed.

“David Rhodes’s writing is smooth and wry, combining Richard Russo’s genius for the details of small-town thinking and Flannery O’Connor’s flair for shading things toward the weird side of normal.” —Mpls.St. Paul Magazine

From the author of A Cure for Suicide and Census comes a philosophical recasting of myth and legend, folklore and popular culture: a fabulist’s compendium of poetry and prose.

Jesse Ball—long-listed for the National Book Award, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and named one of Granta’s best young American novelists—is one of the most interesting, lyrical, fanciful, and “disturbingly original” (Chicago Tribune) writers working today. And The Village on Horseback is one of his most dazzling and varied works. These experimental pieces—including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize–winning novella “The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr”—ask the reader not to imagine the world for what it is, but for what it could be: a blank tableau on which a spirited imagination can conjure tales out of, seemingly, nothing.

The Village on Horseback is an unmissable treat, a book of voyages to be taken on journeys far and wide.

A wealthy man’s bitter decline takes a sinister turn in this “slow-burn noir” of love, greed, and deceit in 1970s New York (Washington Post Book World).

Neil Fox has made a fortune off the “head we win / tails you lose” venture capital deals negotiated by his brother, costing him almost everything but money. His ex-wife and daughter spurn him, and he lost his young son years ago. Now he spends his days working as a lawyer at a small investment-banking firm and his nights at home with a drink.

When the affable Bud Younger moves in next door—on a parcel that Neil had sold off—Neil takes an almost instant dislike to him. Bud is nearly everything Neil is not—a gregarious, energetic striver loved by his family. When Bud asks Neil to fund a new business venture, it sets in motion events that hurtle to a startling and haunting conclusion.

Named a Booklist Top 10 First Novel of 2011, The Arriviste delves into the psyche of avarice and envy, presenting a portrait of a man both ordinary and monstrous.

FINALIST FOR THE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AWARD

A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City”—an unnamed, crowded place filled with gunmen, lovers, children, neighbors, builders, soldiers, professors, bouncers, and widowers.

In this series of semi-mythologized, symbolic narratives interspersed with dramatic monologues, Wayne Miller presents a city laden with “kisses in doorways, weapons / and sculptures, concerts / and fistfights, sex toys and votives, / engines and metaphors.” And yet the City, both unidentifiable and readily familiar, is also a place where the human questions and observations found in almost any city—past, present, and future—ring out with urgency.

These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to all those caught up in the City’s immensity.

Stately oaks, ivy-covered walls, the opposite sex—these are the things that likely come to mind for most Americans when they think about the "nature" of college. But the real nature of college is hidden in plain sight: it’s flowing out of the keg, it’s woven into the mascots on our T-shirts.

Engaging in a deep and richly entertaining study of "campus ecology," The Nature of College explores one day in the life of the average student, questioning what "natural" is and what "common sense" is really good for and weighing the collective impacts of the everyday. In the end, this fascinating, highly original book rediscovers and repurposes the great and timeless opportunity presented by college: to study the American way of life, and to develop a more sustainable, better way to live.

From African American to Asian American, indigenous to immigrant, “multiracial” to “mixedblood,” the diversity of cultures in today’s world is reflected in our richly various stories—stories of creation and destruction, displacement and heartbreak, hope and mystery. For centuries, this richness has been widely overlooked by readers of environmental literature.

Featuring work from more than thirty contributors of widely diverse backgrounds—including Jamaica Kincaid on the fallacies of national myths; Robin Wall Kimmerer on the language of the natural world; Yusef Komunyakaa connecting the toxic legacy of his Louisiana hometown to a blind faith in capitalism; and bell hooks relating the quashing of multiculturalism to the destruction of “unpredictable” nature—The Colors of Nature works against the grain of this traditional blind spot by exploring the relationship between culture and place, emphasizing the lasting value of cultural heritage, and revealing how this wealth of perspectives is essential to building a livable future.

Bracing, provocative, and profoundly illuminating, The Colors of Nature provides an antidote to the despair so often accompanying the intersection of cultural diversity and ecological awareness.

The acclaimed short story and novella collection by “a virtuoso of the dismal comedy of Soviet life”—and the basis for the HBO film PU-239 (The New York Times). A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist.

Ken Kalfus traverses a century of Russian history in tales that range from hair-raising to comic to fabulous. The astonishing title story follows a doomed nuclear power plant worker as he attempts to hawk plutonium in Moscow’s black market. In “Budyonnovsk,” a young man hopes that the takeover of his town by Chechen rebels will somehow save his marriage. "Salt" is an economic fairy tale, featuring kings, princesses, and swiftly melting currencies. 

Set in the 1920s, “Birobidzhan” is the bittersweet story of a Jewish couple journeying to the Soviet Far East, where they intend to establish the modern world’s first Jewish state. The novella, “Peredelkino,” which closes the book, traces the fortunes of a 1960s literary apparatchik whose romantic intrigues inadvertently become political.

Together, these works of fiction capture the famously enigmatic Russian psyche. They display Kalfus’ ability to imagine a variety of believable yet wholly singular characters whose lives percolate against a backdrop of momentous events.

In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers.

The questions that have informed much of Kwasny’s previous work—how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?—find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. “Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it—as resolution of the real and the dream,” Kwasny writes in the title poem.

Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?