Alone on the moon

May, 1970. A two-person Soviet crew approaches the moon, ready to accomplish the greatest feat in human history—provided they can overcome their own petty jealousies, and the unforgiving harshness of space.Alone on the Moon chronicles a Soviet moon mission through the eyes of Boris Volynov, a bac...

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As a young girl Brooke Randel knew little about the Holocaust—just that it was a catastrophe in which millions were murdered, and that her grandma Golda Indig barely escaped that fate. But her Bubbie never spoke about what happened, and the two spent most of their time together making pleasant me...

Infinite blues

June, 1968. An air force astronaut flies to an orbiting observation platform for a forty-day stint spying on the Soviet Union from space—and discovers a plot that will determine the fate of the world.The fourth book in the Altered Space series, Infinite Blues imagines a militarized Space Race in ...

Tandem

Mike Kovacs is an economics professor who's trying to get over a bitter divorce. He’s barely on speaking terms with his only child. And he’s just killed two bicyclists in an inebriated hit-and-run at a deserted Michigan beach. (In his defense, he hadn’t meant to get that drunk. And what’s the use...

The old neighborhood

Chicago’s Far North Side, a few decades ago—a rough-and-tumble place, awash with racial tensions and petty crime.Joey, the youngest child in a mixed-race family, is pushing his way up through the cracked pavement of a chaotic life: parish festivals and block parties on long summer nights, fistfig...

The beast in aisle 34

Sandy Kurtz has problems. He's got a baby on the way, his wife doesn't love him, and he's struggling to find passion or purpose at his big-box retail job. And, once a month, he turns into a werewolf. In Darrin Doyle's deft hands, Sandy's story is a tall tale for our times, an absurd and darkly co...

Your driver has arrived - discussion edition

A former undocumented immigrant and current American citizen documents his experiences chasing the American Dream through the gig economy years as a rideshare driver in Chicago. By turns heartwarming and hilarious, this book is a valuable reminder of the values we all share. The school edition c...

What we build upon the ruins

Like an arrowhead, the title story in this collection pierces through our tough skin and through to what’s delicate within. It’s the first piece in a triptych that elegantly holds together this stunning collection about love and loss and longing—our feeble human institutions and fragile relations...

The quail who wears the shirt

Tuesday night is trivia night, a night for produce market owner Lee Hubbs to swing by the bar with his cop friend, a night to down a few shots and avoid all the folks who’ve mysteriously been turning into quails. It’s a night to kick back and maybe get some action on the side from his employee/gi...

Meiselman

Meiselman has had enough. After a life spent playing by the rules, this lonely thirty-six-year-old man—"number two" at a suburban Chicago public library, in charge of events and programs, and in no control whatsoever over his fantasies about his domineering boss—is looking to come out on top, at ...

In lieu of flowers (illustrated)

In this surreal series of dreamscapes, bears roam the subway, and fathers become fish. But for all of the fantastic imagery in this stunning debut poetry collection, there are equally memorable explorations of more familiar terrain: the landscapes of our lives and relationships.

The fugue

After over a decade in prison, a young sculptor, Yuri Dilienko, returns to his old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He finds the town stripped of so many places he used to know, while the town's familiar streets, bricks and steeples trigger memories of his traumatic youth. To convalesce, he scul...

Afterward

In an unnamed city, a young woman deals with an unspeakable tragedy, and her boyfriend’s subsequent hospitalization.Torn from her normal routines—coffee, sex, barhopping, and disc golf—she finds herself in an unfamiliar world of hospital visits and doctor’s appointments, all while navigating an u...

All trap no bait

It’s the summer of 2020 in Alabama, and Beverly Jane Ornett is terminally online. To be fair, the real world has lost its charms—thanks to the pandemic, she hasn’t worked in months. Plus, her longtime roommate is moving out of their filthy apartment to live with her wealthy boyfriend, and the onl...

Play, rewind

Wes is stuck. He should be spending his twenties finishing the schooling that will help him land a career in movies, just like he’s always dreamed about. Instead he divides his time between clerking in the most low-rent video store in Queens, and caring for a mom struggling with Alzheimer’s. His ...

The last good halloween

Like most teenagers, Kirby Russo doesn't want much: a calm home life, a couple close friends, a sense of direction and purpose. And a chance to relax with a cocktail now and then. And maybe some privacy whenever fantasy and hormones get the better of him. But his world's upended when he comes hom...

Resistance

In late December of 1941, two parachutists dropped into occupied Europe on a mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, an SS leader whom one contemporary called “the hidden pivot” of Nazi Germany.Six months later, they succeeded.This is the definitive telling of this oft-forgotten story—its fasci...

Adult teeth

A suburban lawyer obsessively searches for her out-of-work husband’s sex doll; a grieving man buys a parrot for the stranger who saved his life; a retired Florida lineman discovers a power more vital than electricity. In his debut collection Adult Teeth, award-winning short story writer Jeremy T....

Scoundrels among us

A mysterious man appears suspended in the air above a major American city. A foul-mouthed posse of machete-wielding scoundrels wreak havoc on a small-town mayor. A cocaine-addled boxer starts a torrid affair with the wife of the Invisible Man—who just might be watching (and enjoying) all the frea...

Forty-five minutes of unstoppable rock

An unadulterated look inside the lives of those hardest hit by the Great Recession, Steve Passey shows with great clarity that when all else fails, it’s our relationships that keep us afloat, even if we’re drifting to nowhere. Narrators shaped by the generation decaying around them proclaim an er...

Upstate

Featuring dark character studies of childhood, middle age, and (lack of) grace under pressure, these stories are among the best work of Tanzer's career, and voracious fans of his writing will surely be pleased and satisfied to have these small masterpieces collected together into one easy-to-read...

American sfumato

American Sfumato consists of nine mesmerizing stories, each designed to function independently and form a unit with the rest. The action is set in several present-time locales (Chicago, the Balkans, New Orleans, Germany, Brazil), and the narrative revolves around a protagonist who's caught up in ...

Tu conductor ha llegado - edición con actividades

Delirium vitae

In 2001, David LeBrun travelled to Costa Rica to reconnect with an old friend. LeBrun, a young writer at the end of a string of dead-end jobs, planned on living cheaply for a winter while finishing the book he thought would make his career. (And, of course, drinking every night and getting stoned...

The adventures of cancer bitch

S.L. Wisenberg, known for writing that is “seriously funny,” proves in this acerbic chronicle that a cancer diary can be at once hilarious, rageful, and feminist.She passes through the expected rites of breast cancer—diagnosis, surgery, and chemotherapy—but her responses are less expected: she th...

The quitters

This hard-hitting collection of creative essays explores the beauty and pain embedded in some of our favorite rough-and-tumble pastimes—roller derby, mixed martial arts, and teaching. Carlo Matos ties it all together with gusto, in a book that will send you reeling to the canvas again and again, ...

Thirty-six fighting holes

The few. The proud. The Marines. Do you have what it takes…not just to join them, but to talk others into joining? Can you occupy an isolated outpost—a strip mall, a small office, a lonely building on a busy street—and work the phones and set appointments and bring people in? Can you dress up in ...

The master is here

An Episcopal priest has a fateful encounter with an Amsterdam teenager who may be a prostitute—or something else entirely. An Iowa supermarket patron repurposes Bible verses for a love note to a handsome cashier, with consequences both tragic and transformational. A disgraced seminarian shows up ...

Me rescató

Néstor Gómez estaba seguro de que había encontrado el amor con su nueva novia. ¿El único problema? Su novia seguía enamorada de un verdadero perro. No, en serio, una mezcla de pitbull de setenta libras. Y después de haber sido... bueno, casi castrado por un perro que lo mordió en el muslo cuando ...

Caves of the rust belt

The natural successor to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg collection, Caves of the Rust Belt: Ohio Stories travels to the Heart of It All, where drowned sailors reminisce over a hot meal, and the rules of the yard sale are law. In his stunning debut, Joe Kapitan captures the modern Midwest in devast...

Jenny in corona

Tyrone has a problem. Several problems, in fact: a girlfriend who sleeps around, a boss he's sleeping with, and various types of guilt (Catholic, Jewish, White) he can’t live without. Plus, there’s his deceased mother, his pill-popping father (who at least shares the good ones), the death metal g...

Rescued me

Nestor Gomez was sure he had found love with his new girlfriend. The only problem? His girlfriend was still in love with a real dog. No, really—a seventy-pound pitbull mix. And after having been…well, nearly emasculated by a dog that bit him high on the thigh when he was a young boy, Nestor had d...

The dark will end the dark

Stunning and visceral in its emotional impact, The Dark Will End The Dark collects 14 stories by veteran author Darrin Doyle. Deftly mixing realism and fabulism, bleakness and hope, sparkling dialogue and unforgettable characters, these literary Midwestern Gothic tales remain in the reader’s mind...

Public loneliness

October, 1967. Yuri Gagarin sits atop a Proton rocket, ready to launch. After several turbulent years in the public eye, he's been chosen in secrecy to captain the Soviet Union's latest space spectacular: the first manned flight around the moon.The second story in the Altered Space series, Public...

She said what?

Radio. It's almost as easy as marriage and motherhood.The excitement of a career on the air! Listeners asking for advice on dressing their girlfriends in leather bustiers; managers who believe every professional woman longs for a bouquet on Secretaries' Day; Saturday nights giving away free T-shi...

Zero phase

May, 1970. After a one-month launch delay, Apollo 13 lands in the Fra Mauro Highlands of the moon—and then the trouble starts.The first in a series of what-if stories from the golden age of space exploration, Zero Phase was written based on meticulous research, and with assistance from two Apollo...

The surge

Larry Chandler knows what his fellow soldiers don’t—that war scars you and haunts you, leaving you with memories you’d prefer not to face. They’re all National Guardsmen serving together in Iraq, but he’s already done a stint in Afghanistan, whereas they’re fresh-faced youngsters on their first t...

The pleasure you suffer

Saudade reportedly has no direct English translation; it’s a Portuguese word describing the nostalgic longing for something that may never return, or may not exist. This feeling can be strangely comforting; author Manuel de Mello calls it “A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” It permeate...

On the way

Cyn Vargas's debut explores the whims and follies of the heart. When a mother disappears in Guatemala, her daughter refuses to accept she's gone; a divorced DMV employee falls in love during a driving lesson; a young girl shares a well-kept family secret; a bad haircut is the last straw in a crum...

Jerks

With Jerks, Sara Lippmann rides the proverbial clutch between wanting and having. Ambivalent mothers, aging suburbanites, restless teens, survivalist parents, and disaffected wives—desire is a live wire, however frayed; a reminder that life, for all its sputtering stall outs, is still worth livin...

Nothing's ever the same

Itzel’s 13th birthday party starts in just about the unluckiest way possible—with her dad having a heart attack. In those frantic moments, the piñata and the frosted sheetcake and the Styrofoam cups of orange soda are forgotten; the day’s highlights end up being CPR, an ambulance ride, and angiop...

Fly over this

These compelling stories offer a detailed look at a part of the country many Americans only glimpse through an airplane window from 30,000 feet—the small towns of the rural Midwest. The characters here—struggling to raise children and build a better future, or just to escape their past; searching...

Stun

In the fictional Chicago suburb of New Lawn, a young woman grows up with a workaholic father and a dysfunctional mother who has a predilection for Stun—a prescription drug prone to abuse. Between Dad’s business trips and Mom’s affairs and overdoses, she grows self-reliant and introverted, possess...