Search results for ""Autumn House Press""

Winner of the 2010 COAL HILL REVIEW Chapbook Contest. Marks explores the nature of parenthood, of what it means to be sheltered and to shelter. These are quiet poems, filled with intelligence and grace.

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Winner of the 2008 Autumn House Poetry Contest, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Crockett considers the intimacies of daily life and what it means to be interconnected.

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The third poetry collection of Anne Marie Macari.

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The story of a failed poet struggling with vision loss, personal crises, and what it means to be an arms dealer in a quasi-dystopian Mexico City. This debut novel is set in a vaguely dystopian, yet also realistic, Mexico City—endless traffic jams, relentless clouds of pollution, economic hardships, and the ever-present threat of drug cartels. The unnamed narrator of the novel, at times referred to as Arthur—in part because of the growing similarity of his life with Arthur Rimbaud’s—struggles with the dissonance of leading an artistic life while providing for his family. A failed, penniless poet with a child on the way, he is forced to take a job in his family’s weapons dealing enterprise, which he soon discovers is connected to the corrupt Mexican armed forces and drug cartels, who are responsible for the increasing death toll in the country. All the while, the narrator struggles with a growing condition in his right eye, a pterygium, that is slowly taking over his vision, blurring the events of his life, including his wife’s complicated pregnancy, extortions by the drug cartels, and his own relationship to his writing. As the narrator gradually finds his life spiraling out of control, the novel moves quickly to a startling conclusion.Myth of Pterygium is the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Fiction, selected by Maryse Meijer.

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Cho A.’s poetry wonders at small everyday delights. Sean Cho A.’s debut poetry chapbook directs a keen eye on everyday occurrences and how these small events shape us as individuals. This collection is filled with longing for love, understanding, and simplicity. But these poems also express great pleasure in continued desire. With exuberant energy that flows through the collection, the speaker announces: “I won’t apologize for the smallness of my delights.” Filled with questions and wonder, these poems revel in the unknowing and liminal spaces, and we as readers are invited to join in this revelry. Cho A.’s poetry reminds and allows us to pause, to wonder, and enjoy our many pleasures. American Home was selected by Danusha Laméris for the 2020 Autumn House Chapbook Prize.

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Winner of the 2015 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Sharon Dilworth.

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Winner of the 2014 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, selected by Alicia Ostriker.

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Winner of the 2014 Autumn House Press Fiction Contest, selected by Sharon Dilworth.

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Winner of the 2010 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Sharon Dilworth.

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The debut literary novel of Andrew Bourelle, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Press Fiction Contest

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Lyrical poetry offering multilayered examinations of injustices—from mass incarceration to failing schools and right-wing fascism. Richard Hamilton’s second poetry collection, Discordant, is a searing examination of injustice both within the United States and abroad, from criticisms of the US military-industrial complex and failing healthcare system to multilayered observations of marginalization through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Hamilton’s poems look closely at increased austerity measures, commitment to mass incarceration and private prisons, disdain for workers and labor resistance, the expansion of the US military budget, the disappearance of federal subsidies for the working poor, failing schools and teacher shortages, market inflation and price gouging, and the rising tide of right-wing fascism. Hamilton’s lyrical writing brings together free-form essays and personal narratives full of keen-eyed and urgent observations. Told from the perspective of a speaker who is unemployed and pensive, Hamilton shows how history haunts us while keeping the present in the foreground, constantly challenging oppression that has long been commonplace.Discordant won the 2022 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Evie Shockley.

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A memoir of addiction, body image, and healing, through the lens of a long-distance runner. Emily Pifer’s debut memoir, The Running Body, wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture. Pifer tells her story alongside the stories of her teammates, competitors, and others as they all face trouble regarding their bodies. Through the lens of long-distance running, Pifer examines the effects of idolization and obsession, revealing the porous boundaries between what counts as success and what is considered failure. While grounded in truth, The Running Body interrogates its relationship to magical thinking, the stories we tell ourselves, and the faultiness of memory. Fractures, figurative and literal, run through the narrative as Pifer explores the ways bodies become entangled in stories. The Running Body was selected by Steve Almond as the winner of the 2021 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.

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A firsthand account of the 2014 Ferguson uprising that challenges how we document and report on political unrest. Jacqui Germain’s debut collection, Bittering the Wound, is a first-person retelling of the 2014 Ferguson uprising. Part documentation, part conjuring, this collection works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Throughout the book, Germain also grapples with navigating the impacts of sustained protest-related trauma on mental health as it relates to activism and organizing. The book also takes occasional aim at the media that sensationalized these scenes into a spectacle and at the faceless public that witnessed them. Bittering the Wound challenges the way we discuss, write about, and document political unrest. It offers fresh language and perspective on a historic period that reverberated around the world. Germain takes the reader through poems that depict a range of scenes—from mid-protest to post-protest—and personifies St. Louis with a keen and loving eye. Bittering the Wound was selected by Douglas Kearney as the winner of the 2021 CAAP Book Prize.

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A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity. Nicholas Ward’s debut essay collection, All Who Belong May Enter, centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine whiteness, masculinity, and a Midwest upbringing through tales of sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. With a storyteller’s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Ward’s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into one’s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable. All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira Díaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.

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M. Randal O’Wain’s debut short story collection, Hallelujah Station and Other Stories, introduces readers to a wide and diverse cast of characters struggling with and responding to changes and loss. These gritty and poignant stories follow the tragic parts of life, the pieces that may neither start nor end in comfortable resolution and the pieces that make up complex realities. In the first story, a former drug dealer reflects on a life-changing decision he made years ago that ended up hurting the person he most wanted to protect. Later in the collection, we meet a would-be robber who turns out, in strange ways, to be the hero. O’Wain’s characters are often deeply flawed or totally lost, but in each instance, these traits serve to reveal the characters as real, compassionate, and, ultimately, human. Sprinkled with humor and heartache, O’Wain’s stories bring us into contact with the curious, the tragic, and the authentic.

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Winner of the 2017 Autumn House Fiction Contest, selected by Amina Gautier

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Winner of the 2017 Autumn House Nonfiction Contest, selected by Alison Hawthorne Deming

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The third edition of the Autumn House poetry anthology.

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Winner of the 2013 COAL HILL REVIEW Chapbook Contest. Poems interested in human connection, these consise and wise creations ask how we are both intimate and unknown to those who matter most.

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Potter's anthology is a wealth of knowledge on three thousand years' worth of perspectives on poetry writing and offers a personalized history of the poetic craft.

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St. Germain and Whitford's collaborative anthology expertly portrays the contemporary essay's vast possibilities in the range of lyric to narrative, giving any writer a firm grounding in both the craft and form of contemporary essays.

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Winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Contest, selected by Claudia Emerson. In her fifth collection of poetry, Hales mines the layers of grief and discovers how to surive in a broken world.

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Kirschner's fourth collection of poetry is a narrative of an abused childhood. It explores the inner landscapes of memory through stunning imagery and voice.

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Winner of the 2004 Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by Alicia Ostriker

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The author says in his introduction: "These aphorisms, petite narratives, whatever they are, were written over a period of two weeks in the Spring of 2002. They represent my feelings during that time, feelings that were angry, arch, focused, political, and unified. They also reflect both my reading and the sheer accident of my experience."

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A personal lyrical essay collection by a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. “I am a butterfly at half-mast. Muscles coiled like springs. I have not unwound yet,” writes Julie Marie Wade in Otherwise. In this series of intimate, braided essays written throughout her 30s, Wade traces her own unwinding and becoming through probing lyricism. As a daughter, lover, lesbian, and writer, she invites readers on a journey of self-discovery framed by memory, literature, and popular culture. Touching and tender, empathic and insightful, Otherwise revels in its author's self-acceptance at the threshold of mid-life.

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Stories of characters who face tragedies alongside their canine companions. Noley Reid’s fourth book, Origami Dogs, is a testament to her mastery of the form. Here, dogs rove the grounds of their companions’ emotions. The creatures in this short story collection often act subtly, serving as witnesses without language, exacerbating tension and providing relief to the human characters. Sometimes they are central to the stories’ plots, such as in the lead story, “Origami Dogs,” which focuses on Iris Garr, a dog breeder’s teenage daughter, as she begins noticing odd birth defects in new litters and realizes she must confront her mother, whom she loves yet cannot help but resent. In some stories, teens struggle toward womanhood or wrestle with sexuality and queerness, confronting parents who are unable to provide the care or support they need. In other stories, Reid’s characters are adults striving to be better spouses, parents, or both, and are often grappling with life-changing events—like a new disability or the loss of a child. Despite the gravitas of these tragedies, with Reid’s touch, they feel alive, present, and painfully close. Reid brings us to her characters in the fierce damp aftermath of calamity and asks us to dwell with them until new possibilities arrive. At these tipping points, the characters of Origami Dogs stand ready with their dogs (or memories of them), to take the next step. By turns tender, moving, and devastating, this story collection is a celebration of the bond of devotion possible between humans and dogs, and it presents an intimate rendering of the lives we share.

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Poems that imagine a world beyond the prevailing public speculation on Black death. Shayla Lawz’s debut collection, speculation, n., brings together poetry, sound, and performance to challenge our spectatorship and the reproduction of the Black body. It revolves around a central question: what does it mean—in the digital age, amidst an inundation of media—to be a witness? Calling attention to the images we see in the news and beyond, these poems explore what it means to be alive and Black when the world regularly speculates on your death. The speaker, a queer Black woman, considers how often her body is coupled with images of death and violence, resulting in difficultly moving toward life. Lawz becomes the speculator by imagining what might exist beyond these harmful structures, seeking ways to reclaim the Black psyche through music, typography, and other pronunciations of the body, where expressions of sexuality and the freedom to actively reimagine is made possible. speculation, n. contends with the real—a refracted past and present—through grief, love, and loss, and it speculates on what could be real if we open ourselves to expanded possibilities. speculation, n. won the 2020 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.

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After her adoptive mother’s death, Lori Jakiela, at the age of forty, begins to seek the identity of her birth parents. In the midst of this loss, Jakiela also finds herself with a need to uncover her family’s medical history to gather answers for her daughter’s newly revealed medical ailments. This memoir brings together these parallel searches while chronicling intergenerational questions of family. Through her work, Jakiela examines both the lives we are born with and the lives we create for ourselves. Desires for emotional resolution comingle with concerns of medical inheritance and loss in this honest, humorous, and heartbreaking memoir.

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Winner of the 2012 Autumn House Press Fiction Contest, selected by Stewart O'Nan.

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Winner of the 2009 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, selected by Sharon Dilworth.

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Winner of the 2006 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, selected by Tim Seibles. Her first collection evaluates desire through the lens of obesity and body consciousness. A smart and darkly humored debut.

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This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator’s gender skips and changes, and the characters’ self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney’s poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever. The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world.In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.

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Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang’s debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Violence enters the pastoral when Chinese villagers are flung down a well by Japanese soldiers and forced to abandon their crops and families to work in the coal mines, a tugboat driver dredges up something more than garbage polluting the Suzhou River, and rural and urban landscapes are pitted against each other when young villagers are promised high-paying work in the city but face violent persecution instead. In this world where China has regressed back to its imperial days, we meet an emperor who demands total servitude and swift punishment for attempts at revolution, and we follow a father who immigrates to the United States for a better life and loses everything in a tragic accident—aside from his estranged son—with whom he stubbornly refuses to make amends. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history—such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival. Further News of Defeat is the winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize.

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A debut collection of poems that question gender and embrace queerness through the natural world of North Carolina. A tender imagining and devastating reckoning, Jennifer Conlon’s debut presents a poetry collection of gender questioning, concerned with the survival of trans and nonbinary kids who live in places that do not allow them to thrive. The speaker of these poems wrestles with and envisions a life beyond their traumatic childhood as a genderqueer child in a small Southern Bible Belt town. Through retelling and reinterpreting moments of sexual shame and religious oppression, while navigating impossible expectations from a gender-binary society, Conlon shows readers that queerness and the natural world are inseparable. In their poems, Conlon comes to reject oppressive patriarchal figures, turning their gaze toward the natural world that catalyzes dreams of possibility, transformation, and safety—wasps protect them, an oak tree contains a new god, and flathead catfish guide them to a newly imagined body. Through thick North Carolina woods, Conlon searches for a language to celebrate queerness, finding it in ponds, hillsides, and within themselves.Taking to Water was selected by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Poetry Prize.

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Eleven short stories following Italian characters exploring life in an era of media oversaturation. Salvatore Pane’s The Neorealist in Winter is a collection of eleven short stories that explore what it means to be human in an age of media oversaturation. Utilizing methods of speculative, historical, and postmodern storytelling, Pane grapples with legacies of immigration, poverty, toxic masculinity, and moral failures, while focusing on working-class issues, family drama, and PTSD. Following eleven Italian narrators, Pane builds a cast of cinematic characters across disparate times and places—a struggling director attends a house party in the la dolce vita of 1960s Rome, gangsters chase a low-level lottery runner in coal valley Scranton, a woman contemplates experimental surgery to purge memories of her childhood trauma in Minnesota, and a pro wrestling promoter descends into self-denial through his autobiography.The Neorealist in Winter was selected by Venita Blackburn as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Fiction Prize.

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In Skull Cathedral, Melissa Wiley pulls stories from the vestigial remnants of the creatures we were or could have become. The appendix, pinky toes, tonsils, male nipples, wisdom teeth, and coccyx are starting points through which Wiley explores exaltation, eroticism, grief, and desire. Using the slow evolution and odd disintegration of vestigial organs to enter the braided stories of the lives we establish for ourselves, the people we grieve, and the mysteries of youth, memory, and longing, Wiley’s lens is deeply feminist and compassionate. Turning to these mysterious anatomical remnants, she finds insight into the lingering questions of loss and the nagging sensations of being incomplete. For instance, in considering the appendix, Wiley finds herself working through her grief after the loss of her father, a sensation that again resurfaces in the face of the moon as she looks to the sky. Testing the boundaries of genre and fighting to expand the limits of perception, the stylized essays of Skull Cathedral embrace the strangeness of life through the lingering peculiarities of the human body. Skull Cathedral, Wiley’s second book of nonfiction, won the 2019 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize.

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Not Dead Yet studies the uncertainties of loss, turning a gaze toward the often-silenced voices of the infirm, elderly, and adolescent. Rich in humor and honesty, Hadley Moore’s debut collection of short stories presents a contemporary set of narratives from a lush cast of characters. We find the protagonists of her stories tenderly revealing their pain after the loss of loved ones and coping with the voids left by the passing of youth, happiness, and fulfilment. Moore invites us into the lives of characters like Morley, who struggles to adapt to new cultural norms, and Salmon, who confronts the loss of her husband while feeling isolated from his family’s Judaism. The character-driven prose of Not Dead Yet offers striking detail as it dives into moments of absurdity and tragedy.

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Praise Song for My Children celebrates twenty-one years of poetry by one of the most significant African poets of this century. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley guides us through the complex and intertwined highs and lows of motherhood and all the roles that it encompasses: parent, woman, wife, sister, friend. Her work is deeply personal, drawing from her own life and surroundings to convey grief, the bleakness of war, humor, deep devotion, and the hope of possibility. These poems lend an international voice to the tales of motherhood, as Wesley speaks both to the African and to the Western experience of motherhood, particularly black motherhood. She pulls from African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to enrich her striking emotional range. Leading us to the depths of mourning and the heights of tender love, she responds to American police brutality, writing “To be a black woman is to be a woman, / ready to mourn,” and remembers a dear friend who is at once “mother and wife and friend and pillar / and warrior woman all in one.” Wesley writes poetry that moves with her through life, land, and love, seeing with eyes that have witnessed both national and personal tragedy and redemption. Born in Tugbakeh, Liberia and raised in Monrovia, Wesley immigrated to the United States in 1991 to escape the Liberian civil war. In this moving collection, she invites us to join her as she buries loved ones, explores long-distance connections through social media, and sings bittersweet praises of the women around her, of mothers, and of Africa.

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Jennifer Renee Blevins’s debut memoir, Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story, sheds light on her experiences living with the emotional and psychological struggles of taking up space in a fat-phobic world. Bringing together experiences of personal and national trauma, Blevins adeptly weaves the tale of her father’s gastric bypass surgery and subsequent prolonged health crisis with the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Blevins looks to each of these events as a “leak” of American society’s pitfalls and shortcomings. These intertwined narratives, both disasters that could have been avoided, reveal points of failure in our systems of healthcare and environmental conservation. Incorporating pieces from her life, such as medical transcripts and quotes from news programs, Blevins composes a mosaic of our modern anxieties. Even through despair, she finds hope in mending broken relationships and shows us how we can flourish as individuals and as a nation despite our struggles. Fierce and haunting, this memoir creates a space of narrative through body, selfhood, family, and country.

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The second memoir from Katherine McCord, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Nonfiction Contest

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Co-winner of the 2012 COAL HILL REVIEW Chapbook Contest. Martin captures some of the most endearing aspects of life -- family, unity, food, and nature.

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Winner of the 2012 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, selected by Phillip Lopate.

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Blair's third collection documents the author's experiences living in Thailand. A lyric and insightful collection that explores travel, identity, and memory.

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In this wide-ranging collection of stories, Derek Green takes readers on a tour of the world as America’s military-industrial complex reels into a new century. Written with grace, masterful precision and brutal honesty, New World Order shows us characters stripped of the familiar and forced to face the world on its own harsh terms. By turns frightening and comical, fierce and suspenseful, these eleven stories turn our attention outward, to a world where our role as Americans is no longer as clear and secure as it once seemed.

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In Philip Terman's third major collection, he writes of his Jewish ancestry and his current home in rural Pennsylvania, combining a fine lyric sensibility with an awareness of history and mystical tradition.

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