Search results for ""Regal House Publishing""

That brief, blinding dazzle? The blue smudge and lingering stink? The Flash Gang has struck again! They are the most notorious thieves in Pittsburgh, food-stealing crooks the police and newspapers say are highly trained and very dangerous. But eleven-year-old Lewis Carter isn’t a thief, he’s just homeless and hungry. The Flash is a recipe he invented from bits of his missing father’s scientific research. He uses it to pinch his dinners. It’s been going pretty well, until now…Now his recipe is stolen, and he is in the clutches of some rather nasty people. Enter tutu-wearing, starry-eyed, and all around extraordinary (she will tell you) Pearl Alice Clavell. She is on a mission to uncover a Nefarious Deed she’s convinced involves the Flash Gang. Rescuing Lewis is right up her alley. Truth is, a Nefarious Deed is afoot, one that threatens the entire country. It will take Lewis and Pearl joining forces to save the recipe and themselves against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including kidnapping, and, very possibly, murder.

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"Past and present, love and loss intertwine in a magical mountain hollow. Holderfield’s love of place shines in his sensitive descriptions while his storytelling enthralls the reader." —Vicki Lane, author of And the Crows Took Their EyesCaroline McAlister, college professor and life-long skeptic, is reeling from the loss of her father and her marriage. Her once promising career has come to a standstill. When her father bequeaths the family cabin to her, it comes with a ghost who haunted her childhood. When she discovers a century-old journal in the attic, she awakens the voice of Carson Quinn. The journal reveals Carson’s love for the same hollow that enthralled Caroline growing up. A little sleuthing uncovers rumors that the kind, curious boy in the journal grew up to murder his brother. Caroline plunges into the project of exonerating Carson, only to find herself in the throes of a personal past she’s spent her life trying to avoid. Hemlock Hollow is about how we forever haunt the places we love and how they haunt us in return.

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Journalist Rags Goldner is battle-scarred and heartbroken after covering a devastating pandemic that rages in Baltimore for five years. She leaves the city with her partner in search of a simpler life in small-town Maryland—only to discover nothing in Canary is simple. A teenager is missing, and it falls to Rags to fight the forces of apathy, paranoia, and creeping fascism to learn the shocking truth about Effie Rutter’s fate—and the fate of thousands like her.

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“Funny, sad, and tender… Mimi Herman has written a novel that possesses a true and hard won understanding of the South.” —David Sedaris, author of Happy-Go-Lucky Fifteen-year-old Mattie Lee Watson dreams of men, not boys. So when James T. Cullowee, the Kudzu King, arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina in 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu—claiming that it will improve the soil, feed cattle at almost no cost, even cure headaches—Mattie is ready. Mr. Cullowee is determined to sell the entire county on the future of kudzu, and organizes a kudzu festival, complete with a beauty pageant. Mattie is determined to be crowned Kudzu Queen and capture the attentions of the Kudzu King. As she learns more about Cullowee, however, she discovers that he, like the kudzu he promotes, has a dark and predatory side. When she finds she is not the only one threatened, she devises a plan to bring him down. Based on historical facts, The Kudzu Queen unravels a tangle of sexuality, power, race, and kudzu through the voice of an irresistibly delightful (and mostly honest) narrator.

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After losing her beloved grandmother, Shay Napier turns to art for comfort and begins to draw the wild, fantastic beasts—everything from delicate fairies to a monstrous black bear with golden antlers. Inspired by her surroundings in beautiful Silver Hollow, Kentucky, Shay soon has an entire sketchbook full of drawings. When Shay’s cousins Brenna and Jayson come for a visit, their arrival coincides with the news that a developer is buying up land in the area to build a shopping center, leading to worries that the coal mine that employs Shay’s father will be shut down. When one neighbor goes missing and another narrowly escapes an explosion, it becomes clear that the developers are after more than just the land. After a terrifying run-in with one of her mythical creatures, Shay discovers that her drawings have come to life. Now she must determine if they are friend or foe.

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Things don’t usually come to a screeching halt at the RAT, also known as Ridgewood Arts & Technical School, Ridgewood City’s most prestigious progressive institution. But that’s what happens when Headmistress Hardaway interrupts class and announces, “A scandal has rocked the fundraising committee!” Everyone’s a suspect and Hunter Jackson, student council special investigator, vows to root out the student who’s heartless enough to steal donation money or die a death of a thousand forensic notes trying. He’s not alone. Ridgewood Roar news editor, Anthony Ravello, and the rogue, indie-press pioneer, Liberty Lennon, plan to do some journalistic digging of their own in a race against each other to scoop the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to their faithful readers...or at least their versions of it. With the truth getting murkier by the day, all students at the RAT can do is gobble up news bytes and wash them down with locker-side gossip as they try to unmask the classmate responsible for the missing funds.

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Pere is living the life in central Florida. Money is tight, but odd jobs at the marina keep him in mac ‘n’ cheese and Chesterfields and pay the few bills that can’t be put off. His good buddy Clyde, who lives in an identical condo across the street, can always be relied upon for bait and swapping lies. One day is the same as the next, until his girlfriend, Missy, is sentenced to two-years at Lowell Correctional in Ocala for methamphetamine possession. In Ohio, Missy’s ex-husband puts their ten-year-old daughter Tammy on a Greyhound direct to Florida.Skinny and blonde and small for her age, Tammy steps off the bus with only a pack of colored markers and a black trash-bag of dirty clothes. Pere is suddenly a reluctant surrogate father, trying to survive on a shrinking income, and struggling to maintain his own fragile sobriety. Together, Pere and Tammy are an accidental family wandering lost in the land of temporary tags and disability checks, where the smell of caustic chemicals and fried food hangs in the air like wet laundry, and in the course of a single day they find out who needs taking care of, and who, exactly, is taking care of them.

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A ghost is not what you think it is, says Raven. A ghost is a commitment. When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips further and further underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven. Raven says, It will be a cast of only four: you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us. And then you can decide the ending. Tick, tock, write.A Constellation of Ghosts takes the reader into the liminal spaces between one world and another, where choices unspool into lives, and the stories we’ve told ourselves fall apart under the scrutiny of multiple perspectives like flesh from bone, reminding us that grief is the unexpected ferryman who can usher all of us back together again.

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Just Maria is the story of Maria Romero, a blind sixth-grader who is trying her hardest to be normal. Not amazing. Not inspiring. Not helpless. Not weird. Just normal. Normal is hard enough with her white cane, glass eyes, and bumpy books, but Maria’s task is complicated by her neighbor and classmate JJ Munson, an asthmatic overweight oddball known in the halls of Marble City Middle as a double-dork paste-eater. When JJ draws Maria into his latest hare-brained scheme—a series of public challenges to prove their worth as gumshoes for his Twinnoggin Detective Agency—she fears she’s lost her last chance to go unnoticed. When a young girl goes missing on the streets of Marble City, Maria’s new-found confidence is tested in ways she never anticipated. Use your cane and your brain, and figure it out . . . Aimed at middle-grade readers, Just Maria explores difference and disability without resorting to the saccharine and engages universal themes about the price of popularity and the meaning of independence.

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Eighty-two-year-old Mish Atkinson from Fair Valley, West Virginia, is determined she’s going to make something of the time she has left on this earth. When a text message on her new smart phone leads to an encounter with a woman she believes is Jesus, Mish is eager to obey the woman’s instructions to follow the love. She knows that Jeff, the gay pastor at her church, think she’s lost her marbles, but now that her husband is gone, she’s not going to let anyone put a damper on her sunshine. And when a pregnant teen needs her help, it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know the difference between STDs and DVDs, she follows the love—in for a penny, in for a dollar, as she always says. Following the love is exciting and meaningful… until it costs much more than dollars and cents.

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She, along with her unusual mother and sisters, live at the Hospitality Inn. A dilapidated hotel they own and operate which tends to mysteriously attract misfit wayfarers instead of actual paying guests. Trying to keep her family fed and a roof over their heads is hard enough for Darcy without having to fend off the obsessive attentions of the local sinister minister's son. Into Darcy's precarious life steps Luca D'Angeli, a handsome young Italian immigrant with no idea that loving Darcy may well destroy them both...

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As Hurricane Che cuts a swathe through the Gulf, Julia Calaway, a clothing designer for a famous Italian fashion house, prepares for the storm’s impact. Together with her daughter, nine-year-old Gracie, Julia intends to hunker down and ride out the storm in her childhood home in Houston—a house which has survived years of hurricanes and witnessed years of violence and desolation, dark secrets that continue to haunt the Calaway sisters. As the coast braces for destruction, Julia’s dying father is thrown out of his nursing home and delivered to her doorstep, her abusive ex-husband commits an act of violent vandalism, and her estranged sister confides a terrible secret that sheds further light on their childhood trauma.

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Thirteen-year-old Amy McDougall is worried about Travis, the single gay guy who adopted her when she was a kid. He wants a boyfriend, yet isn’t having any luck finding one himself. Amy decides the solution is for someone else to do the finding. Someone like her! Amy’s first attempts at matchmaking are embarrassing flops, despite advice from her hyper-smart best friend Grace. Soon Amy makes not only a match for Dad, but for other people she knows. Now no one can deny that she’s Amy McDougall, Master Matchmaker. Still, she finds there's a price to pay for her meddling when all three matches cause problems she hadn’t foreseen. Amy McDougall, Master Matchmaker is a fun and engaging tale that takes a fresh look at important subjects like love and friendship.

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In 1910, the two sisters, eleven- and twelve-year-old Maud and Addie, are eagerly anticipating their Summer Social in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. However, the event does not quite go according to plan, and the two girls are swept out to sea as they are rowing home at the day’s end. They find themselves adrift in the unforgiving North Atlantic with only the contents of a picnic hamper to sustain them and a carriage blanket to keep them warm. Finding their way through stormy seas, the girls finally make landfall on a deserted island. With string and a jackknife recovered from Maud’s pockets and a parasol and novel contributed by Addie, the girls create a world for themselves among the island dunes, keeping company with sea birds and other sea creatures. Their ensuing adventures test their wits and, in the process, forge a bond that enables them to survive.

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West Coast-based Aunt K (the author) writes to niece DeeDee, ostensibly to bring her up to speed on family history and share anecdotes about their North Carolina relatives, past and present. The letters soon evolve into broader discussions of community, loss, love, ambition, leaving the South (in body, if not mind) and what it means to negotiate life as a female. Integral to the correspondence are books and writers (from Burroughs to Woolf), landscapes and cityscapes in North Carolina, California, New Mexico, New York, East Sussex and elsewhere. A persistent theme: the inter-weavings of person and place. It is also, in the sum of its parts, deeply concerned with the question of which elements (genetic and circumstantial) conspire to make us who we are.

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When Mark Cladis embarks, he is spiritually lost, shaken by a failed marriage, and disillusioned by the academic life he has chosen. This is how Paul Kane and Mark Cladis, two Vassar professors, find themselves on a road trip through the Southwest desert. During the trip, Cladis encounters several teachers—Native American educators, local artists, Paul, and the desert itself—who inspire revelations about the land, education, friendship, and the ways of love. Cladis returns considerably healed, spiritually revived, and possessed of a new hope for his life and vocation. On this journey, equally thrilling and healing, he encounters dangers and seeming miracles. From these experiences he receives a distinct feeling of belonging—to the earth, to a spiritual and intellectual ancestry, to a friendship. In Search of a Course is a memoir about those days in the desert that saved his life. It discusses the emotional and embodied strategies he learned in the desert to mitigate suffering, find peace, and repair his life.

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Named after a hurricane, Camille is the rebellious sixteen-year-old daughter of a New Orleans bar-owner who grows up in the shadow of Bourbon Street, raised on stories of hauntings, lusty encounters and voodoo magic. And even though her family loses their home in a hurricane, she counts herself among the lucky until she discovers that her eighteen-year-old neighbor whom she secretly loves goes missing in the storm. In Camille's own words: "This is the story of what happened to me on Fat Tuesday, how I ended up on the steps of St. Mary’s, the hem of my pirate’s petticoat soaked in somebody’s else’s blood. Although I know the story to be true, I don’t totally believe it myself. Like all good tales born out of the bayou, mine involves the dead, the living and the one trapped in the brackish waters between heaven and hell. It is the story of true love and true disaster, and at the end of it, I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is the harder to survive."

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In bitterly divided western North Carolina, Confederate troops execute thirteen men and boys suspected of Unionism. The Shelton Laurel Massacre, as it came to be known, is a microcosm of the horrors of civil war—neighbor against neighbor and violence at one’s own front door. Told by those who lived it—the colonel’s wife, a helpless witness; the jealous second-in-command who gives the fatal order; the canny mountain woman who cares only for her people and her land; the conscript, a haunted man seeking redemption; and the mute girl, whose folk magic yields an unexpected result—these voices offer an intimate glimpse into the lives of five people tangled in history’s web, caught up together in love and hate.

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Ophelia, a professor of Dante, is stricken when she discovers that her husband Andy has been cheating on her with a winsome colleague. What follows is Ophelia's figurative descent into hell as she obsessively tracks her subjects, performs surveillance in her beat-up Volvo, and moves into the property next door to Amber's, which has gone into foreclosure. She spies on the lovers, growing more and more estranged from reality. Andy's betrayal reawakens the earlier trauma of abandonment by her mother at the age of eight. When Andy and Amber become engaged, Ophelia snaps. The story is a jailhouse confessional, a dark comedy, an oeuvre of women's rage, a suspenseful revenge fantasy, and a moving portrait of one woman's psychological breakdown.

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Sex and death consume much of thirty-seven-year-old Brett Catlin's life. Cole, ten years her junior, takes care of the former while her job disposing of roadkill addresses the latter. A cancer diagnosis causes her to question her worth, suspecting the illness is payback for the deaths of her father and sister. Thus begins a challenging journey of alternative healing that she doubts she deserves. Just as Brett surrenders to the prescribed cure, a startling discovery sends her on a more profound exploration of cause and effect. Encounters with animals, both living and dead, help her answer the question: who is worth saving?

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After thirteen-year-old Imhotep's architect father, Kaneferw, is inexplicably killed on a construction site, Imhotep learns that his father's business profits have gone missing. Forced to work in a grisly abattoir to make ends meet, Imhotep discovers that Ahmose, his father's apprentice, is mysteriously connected not only to the missing funds but also to a grandiose plot orchestrated by the terrorist Sons of Atum to overthrow the king. When a family friend, in whom he has confided, is suddenly poisoned, Imhotep knows that time is running outboth to seek justice for his murdered father and to save the royal family from a bloody coup. Threatened at every turn, Imhotep must use all of his wiles to outwit his enemies, protect his family, and save the realm. Deftly navigating the twists and turns of ancient Egypt, Murder in Mennefer is a timeless tale of deceit, devotion, and intrigue.

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Juana MÉndez and Diane Conrad are going to save each other’s lives. Not with super heroics, but with a friendship that gets them through everything. And those girls are always up to something--eating goat burritos on July 4th, sneaking up on a garage roof to watch a couple kiss and wonder about romance, and surviving the meanest kid in school. Then another summer arrives, and ends in heartbreak and hope for the best amigas.

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Where is the Flash Gang? Pittsburgh's most notorious thieves haven't struck for a year, not since a devastating fire resulted in the supposed death of two streeters. Pearl and Lewis along with their pals, Duck and Mac are alive and well, just in hiding. But now, their hideout is crumbling under the relentless rain. It's been a winter of bitter winds and slim pickings, and their friendship is starting to fray. To make matters worse, streeters are disappearing. Are they skipping town or is something more nefarious afoot? When one of their own vanishes, the gang goes all out to unravel the mystery, which once again points to enemy #1: the steel tycoon who had Lewis's father killed. But Pittsburgh is flooding and the tycoon's plans are in motion. If they want to save their friends, they're running out of time.

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A widowed young woman, her leg broken during an abusive, sexually charged incident with her brutal second husband, attends a child’s birthday party at a seedy indoor play rink. A retired cop can’t stop fixing a brain-damaged war vet’s problems. The Critical List tangles with fraying family ties, while anticipating disasters about to erupt on what Wenke calls “the post-contemporary tundra.” In this world, people teeter on the edge—a former jailbird under house arrest; a would-be teenage parricide; a former philosophy professor, now homeless, mind blown, living in the subway underground.

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This is a bravura performance.” ~Robin Lippincott, author of Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan MitchellTHE WAR ENDS AT FOUR explores the quest of a perpetual outsider looking for a true home while coming to terms with the Italy she left behind and the America she found. Renata, an Italian acupuncturist in Minneapolis, falls madly in love with a charismatic actor. Once married, she discovers his passion is not focused on her alone. With her marriage and her small acupuncture clinic in crisis, she is called to her father's deathbed in Milan. There Renata again faces the slights she suffered in childhood as the daughter of an immigrant from Naples. Gripped by grief and anxiety over her future, she discovers that her father, a survivor of WWII, believed until the end in risk-taking as a life-affirming necessity. With newfound courage, Renata stumbles into the lure of an old love and the magic of a new one.

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“Beautifully written and satisfyingly creepy, this is one of the most poignant and original ghost stories I've ever read.” —Mark Haskell Smith, author of BlownIn a small, secluded town that thrives on gossip and superstition, Dottie offers plenty of both when the scandal breaks about a missing girl, a ghost, and the affair that started it all. Having suffered a history of miscarriages, reclusive Dottie develops a strange motherly interest in her 15-year-old neighbor, Magdalena. Somewhere between fantasy and reality, Dottie finds new life in her relationship with the mysterious girl. But Dottie’s entanglements with Magdalena, a curious centenarian, a compelling stranger, an ex-mobster, and a murder of crows thrusts this once cloistered woman into a frenzy of public scrutiny. To quell the rumors, Dottie puts pen to paper and discovers something as frightening as it is liberating—her voice.

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In this poetry collection, Sunu P. Chandy includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ community. These poems cover themes ranging from immigration, social justice activism, friendship loss, fertility challenges, adoption, caregiving, and life during a pandemic. Sunu’s poems provide some resolve, some peace, some community, amidst the competing notions of how we are expected to be in the world, especially when facing a range of barriers. Sunu’s poems provide company for many who may be experiencing isolation through any one of these experiences and remind us that we are not, in fact, going it alone. Whether the experience is being disregarded as a woman of color attorney, being rejected for being queer, losing a most treasured friendship, doubting one’s romantic partner or any other form of heartbreak, Sunu’s poems highlight the human requirement of continually starting anew. These poems remind us that we can, and we will, rebuild.

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"...Artemis Sparke is pure energy! ...Kenna’s well-crafted debut is a timely gift.” —Leslie Connor, National Book Award finalist and author of The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle and Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?When Artemis Sparke has had it with humans, she heads to the nearby salt marsh to hang out with the birds, plants, and mollusks who don’t make a big deal of her stutter. The shoreline sanctuary is predictable, unlike her family and friends, and the data in her science journal proves it. But one day that data goes haywire, and her bird friend RT confirms it: the salt marsh is dying. Artemis discovers that the historic hotel where she lives with her mom may be part of the problem, but speaking up would mean confronting the cranky hotel owner who happens to be her mom’s boyfriend and boss. Artemis conjures up help from deceased ecologists, and as she works to untangle their clues, she finds family secrets that could be the key to saving the salt marsh but also may destroy her life as she knows it.

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The year is 1665. Fourteen-year-old Gwendoline Riston lives in the village of Letchlade on the upper reaches of the River Thames. Her puritan neighbors have long whispered about Gwendoline – her way with animals, her skill with plants, especially her pale skin and white hair. They believe she is a witch. But her father says she looks like an angel here on earth, and her friend Jack is a loyal companion when the village folk shun her.When a terrible plague hits London, threatening the countryside, no one is safe. The villagers blame Gwendoline. “Purge the pale one!” they cry. If that weren’t cause enough to be frightened, Gwendoline’s friend goes missing and her father sets out to search for him, leaving her hidden away in a secret chamber above the porch at St. Giles Church to keep her safe. With only a meager supply of food, Gwendoline must summon all her courage to survive through the long, hot summer.

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On an ordinary Monday, Rill Kruse left for third grade with a dad, but when she came home, he’d been stolen. By a river. One year and thirteen days later—on the first morning of summer vacation—Rill still insists he’s trudging home. Her mom has become a practical woman. Her older brother, Eddy, now calls her baby and dork. Gus, second-in-command at Kruse Whitewater Adventures, Rill’s family’s rafting company, has gone from being her dad’s “risk bro” to her mom’s guardian angel. Joyce, company secretary, arm-wrestler, and mechanic, still calls Rill a fingerling, but, after learning what a cheater water is, Rill wishes she’d stop. When Rill’s cat, Clifford, leads her to the family tree fort on the mountainside behind home, she discovers a stowaway, Perla. To help Perla, Rill embarks on an adventure that tests her understanding of the world, of loss, and of what it means to be a friend. In the end, what Rill discovers will nudge her—and all those she loves—toward healing.

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London, 1913. Fourteen-year-old Billy Bean is a thief. He’s also a talented street performer, and he’s picked up by Fred Karno’s music hall company, that features Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin leaves Karno for the movies, and Billy is sent to America to replace him. Billy also wants to work in movies, and soon he gets his lucky break. When his luck runs out and the movie career goes badly, he finds himself back on the streets, with nothing but his childhood skills and a cheeky grin to keep him from starvation.

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Twelve-year-old Amber has the ordinary problems of a seventh grader: strained friendships, an annoying younger brother and, ugh, why can’t her unconventional mother just act normal for once? When her wish comes true, Amber suspects it’s not just her mother’s behavior that’s changed, but her actual mother! So where did her real mother go? Amber puts her best investigative efforts to work and discovers that one of her mother’s silly claims—that they can view a parallel world in the window of an old industrial building—might not be so silly after all. Amber reminds us that everyone, including mathematically-challenged tweens with friend and family issues, has within them the power to effect change.

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Down to the River is a family saga set in the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Twin brothers, Nash and Remi Potts, have grown up as entitled, Harvard-educated, golden boys, heirs to an old, but dwindling family fortune. With the passage of time, the gold veneer of prosperity begins to chip away, and their lives begin to falter. We meet Remi and Nash in 1968, in their mid-forties and partners in a sporting goods store in Harvard Square. The twins’ marriages are in trouble. Their youngest children, Chickie and Hen (mistakes, they’re often called….), are coming of age during the turbulent urban wilderness of the late 1960s— school bomb threats, racial tensions, war protests and demonstrations at Harvard and beyond. With all hell breaking loose at home, and any semblance of “parenting” hanging ragged in the wind, the two cousins are left largely to their own devices. Suddenly freed from old rules and restrictions, they head out onto the streets of Cambridge, which become their concrete playground, tumbling headlong into a world of politics, sex, drugs, rock and roll.

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From F. Scott Fitzgerald to John Cheever, the swimming pool has long held a unique place in the mythos of the American idyll, by turns status symbol and respite. The fourteen stories that comprise NO DIVING ALLOWED fearlessly plunge the depths of the human condition as award-winning author Louise Marburg freights her narratives with the often unfathomable pressure of what lies beneath. In “Identical,” sibling rivalry between brothers exposes lingering resentments of men who never made peace with boyhood animosities; “Let Me Stay With You” follows a man whose innocent attention to a child is gravely misunderstood. The trials of a fractured family come to the fore in the trenchant, unapologetic “Minor Thefts.” Siblings, friends, parents, couples, children: the characters in these stories ask how much any of us can bear before we break. Marburg’s writing is agile, witty, and crisply spare. These are tales of regret and mercy, of bonds forged and frayed, and most of all our individual capacity to love even that which damns us. As readers of these pages will learn, the difference between swimming and drowning is often nothing more than the will to live.

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Featured in The Millions "Most Anticipated" 2022 Book PreviewWeary of rundown motels and long nights sleeping in her mother’s car, Olya wants nothing more than a home. It seems she might finally find one with Jack, her mother’s cousin who lives in a tumbledown ranch in Southern California’s Inland Empire. But safety is not all that it seems.Away to Stay burns with the urgency of its young narrator who bears witness to a world of desperate people flailing inside a broken system. Olya’s mother Irina is a Russian ÉmigrÉ and self-serving liar, obsessed with becoming a prima ballerina and stalking Mikhail Baryshnikov. Cousin Jack is haunted by demons from the Afghanistan war—and the oft-absent Irina. Jack turns his obsession onto his untrainable dog named Bird that he kidnapped from the Riverside Police Department. To Olya, Bird is Job on four legs. Away to Stay is an off-beat and probing exploration of the precarity of shelter and home in the life of an immigrant and American working family.

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Kenyon Saint Claire is the son of a distinguished literary family, a keeper and teacher of the written word, but his America is a land of small screens, moving images, big pharma, high-tech distraction, and endless advertising. False impressions are the stock-in-trade, and big metrics matter, especially onscreen. That’s where Kenyon finds himself, drawn into the electronic environs of primetime television. The year is 1956. Inspired by true events, employing a groundbreaking form that evokes our agitated, media-soaked century, M. Allen Cunningham’s Q&A urgently animates America’s misunderstood quiz show scandals in light of our own time, as a moment of cultural reckoning whose reverberations we feel all around us today: in reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence, and the pandemic problem of how to be real in a world of screen-induced self-deception.

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Is the ordinary really so ordinary? Or illuminated in different light, does it reveal something far beyond what we previously imagined? In The Purpose of Things, poet Peter Serchuk and photographer Pieter de Koninck pair fresh language and images to create a landscape of new possibilities filled with insight and humor.

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When Kese, just out of college, starts his summer job in a small New England town, he finds himself trying to unravel a mystery. Charlotte West, rich and imperious, has been baffling the locals since she arrived in the town more than twenty years ago. Does she have a dark past—or is she just an excuse for Kese to indulge an obsession, or to avoid the encroaching boredom of his days? His investigation takes him back through the history of the town and of America itself, with its borders of class and race and bloodline.

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In this whimsical, often funny, Depression-era tale, young Connor O’Halloran decides to share a treasure he’s discovered on an isolated stretch of Northern California beach. Almost overnight, his sleepy seaside village is comically transformed into a bastion of consumerism, home to a commode with a jeweled seat cover, a pair of genuinely fake rare documents, a mail-order bride, and an organ-grinder’s monkey named Mr. Sprinkles. But when it turns out that the treasure is not real, Connor must conspire with Miss Lizzie Fryberg and a handful of town leaders he’s dubbed The Ambergrisians to save their friends and neighbors from financial ruin. Along the way, he discovers other treasures in the sometimes languid, sometimes exciting days of that long-ago season. He is rich and then he isn’t. He learns to sail a boat and about sex. He meets a real actor. He sneaks into villainous Cyrus Dinkle’s house and steals his letter opener. He almost goes to jail. He loves Fiona Littleleaf. He finds a father. And best of all, he and little brother, Alex, reclaim their mother from the darkness of mental illness.

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Fleeting fragrances, fragments of dream and memory, secrets whispered in the night, painful collisions with reality, consolations drawn from music and clouds: these poems move relentlessly through shadow and light as they circle, question, and confront the turbulence of being human. They stretch sensitive drumskins over frames of close observation, resonant understatement, and silences rich with insight. Ultimately, the poems are exhortations—for heaven to "rest your head on my knees"—and invitations for the reader to enter a space where the ineffable dwells.

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When Rachel and Rubiat meet in art school, they are surprised by a sudden passion. But it is tested, right away, when Rubiat gives in to a reckless, self-destructive impulse that sets him adrift. Rachel has no choice but to resume her studies even though she doesn't know what happened to him or if he survived. After graduation, she moves to Queens, New York, where she begins a career as a painter while supporting herself by teaching ESL classes to immigrants. When she gets together with another man and things become serious, she realizes she can't go forward until she solves the mystery of Rubiat's disappearance. Told in shifting points of view, The Causative Factor explores the power of art and love in a story that asserts the complexities of human nature.

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Poems, like politics, can be local and global, personal and cultural. In Daniel Bourne's Talking Back to the Exterminator, we see this interplay at work in these ruminations on placeour connections and disconnections to itfrom Bourne's upbringing in southern Illinois to his later homes in Ohio, Poland, or the American Southwest. This connection certainly involves a sense of celebration, but also of anxiety and tension in realizing the fragility and impermanence of both self and surroundings. Yet, despite the opportunity as well as the challenge of memorythe way it is continually erased yet also continues to scribble in the brainthese poems also bear witness to how we push back against all the exterminations in our lives.

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"The novel is a quiet but strong tour de force."~Marly Swick, author of Evening News: A Novel1992. Tyler Manning— high school teacher, part-time farmer, bachelor of 38—is planning his first day of summer vacation when a strange car approaches his Kansas farmhouse. By the time the battered Ford departs, Tyler is holding a three-week-old infant. The baby’s father is his estranged brother. Woven throughout the narrative of May Manning’s upbringing—assisted by long-time neighbors and school colleagues—is the parallel story of Tyler and his younger brother, the charming but deceitful Mickey Manning. The possibility of Mickey’s return haunts Tyler throughout May’s childhood. When Mickey does reappear, he brings unexpected danger into their lives. The Manning Girl reimagines George Eliot’s 1860 fable, Silas Marner, and places it in a contemporary Midwestern frame, following the girl and her uncle/father from May’s unexpected arrival to her 21st year. The Manning Girl explores, with tenderness and humor, the unique situation of a single father, supported by a surprising community.

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"What exquisite stories these are, each of them immaculately composed, each of them powerfully transporting... This book deserves prizes." —Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They CarriedEach of the ten stories in Have Mercy on Us is an illuminating window into a human life. In the way of all the best fiction, these stories enlarge our understanding of what it means to be alive and to love, with characters who leap off the page. In this award-winning collection, the people are varied in age, race, and origin. An old man travels to a village in Kenya in an attempt to bring his estranged son home; against her mother’s wishes, a young woman attends the funeral of the father she never met, hoping to forge a relationship with her eight siblings; a woman long married to a renowned artist whose infidelity is nearly blatant, takes things into her own hands in a brilliantly realized moment of independence; in an imagined, loving portrait, the writer Zora Neale Hurston is shown near the end of her life in 1948, working as a maid in a motel in Ft. Pierce, Florida. These stories are spare and romantic without being sentimental.

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After performing a perilous service for the future Emperor, the peasant Chen Hsi-wei turns down the customary rewards in favor of receiving an education. The Court is astonished by this unheard-of request, but orders the strict teacher Shen Kuo to do what he can with the boy. In the course of copying out the words of the ancient masters, Hsi-wei begins writing poems of his own. As a young man, Hsi-wei leaves the capital for a vagabond life, supporting himself by making straw sandals. He encounters people of all stations and occupations, trekking through landscapes both flat and mountainous. He learns of the terrible price of building the Grand Canal, the miseries caused by floods, droughts, and endless wars. To his astonishment, Hsi-wei gains a degree of fame, first as a curiosity, then as a writer whose poems are beloved by the people and pass into the vast life of China.

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Ming, born in a bleak outpost of Sichuan province, finds an unexpected glimpse of the world beyond when she meets a talking monkey with golden eyes and supernatural abilities—the immortal Monkey King, with whom Ming’s destiny is inextricably intertwined. Determined to become a writer, Ming finds her way to New York, but to make ends meet she goes to work for a crime ring and returns to China on the lam. Hope arrives in the form of her American friend Zoe. Together, they travel to the village of Ming’s birth, where the clouds writhe like phantoms and the rain never stops, where Ming and Zoe join forces with a certain down-and-out immortal who has an ambitious plan to save the world from capitalism run amok. When a nation of tycoons and financiers suddenly and inexplicably decide that the key to happiness lies in sharing one’s wealth and pursuing a contemplative life, nobody suspects the newly formed tech company run by Ming, Zoe, and William Sun. Hyper-capitalist China rapidly becomes a paradise for artists, thinkers, and lovers—a rollicking playground where the air is clean and the strangest words you can hear are, “I can’t afford it!” But it’s a short-lived Xanadu once human nature begins to intervene. In Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization, as in life and politics, every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction.

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"The Sound of Rabbits is a deeply affecting and powerful novel." —Lynn Sloan, author of Midstream, Principles of Navigation, and This Far Isn’t Far EnoughThe Sound of Rabbits tells the story of Ruby, a bright woman with a love of music who thought that leaving the small town where she grew up would ensure her happiness. But her life in Chicago is not going the way she’d planned. At 41, she’s drifted away from music, and a long-term relationship with a boyfriend has ended badly. Everything changes with one phone call from her sister, Val, who cares for their mother, Barbara, in the hardscrabble Midwestern town where Ruby grew up. Ruby returns to confront some harsh truths about her family and herself as she tries to find meaning in her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s disease. Written as an homage to the classic archetype of the Hero’s Journey, The Sound of Rabbits relies on different points of view to explore themes of change and death, and considers the role that the past—and acceptance of that past—can play in one’s current and future happiness.

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