Hattertown, Connecticut. Leo " Half" Napoli mourns his dead hat factory worker father while daydreaming of being the first man on the moon and thereby " partaking of something of the infinite." Meanwhile, he and his fellow Back Shop Boys (their fathers all worked in the dangerous, mercury-fume-laden back shops of hat factories) seek to learn the identity of the mysterious Man in Blue, who wanders the town collecting odd items in his rucksack. Elected to spy on him, Half ...

WINNER: 2021 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARD Dispatched by their mother to learn why his estranged twin brother Gregory (or "Brock Jones, PhD," as he's known to fans of his bestselling self-help book Coffee, Black) has disappeared, Stewart Detweiler drives 1,500 miles to find his twin hanging from a ceiling beam in their deceased father's lakeside A-frame. But instead of reporting him dead, Stewart decides to become him. As he sees it, he's not taking his brother's life; he's saving it. In...

Dispatched by their mother to learn why his estranged twin brother Gregory (or "Brock Jones, PhD," as he's known to fans of his bestselling self-help book Coffee, Black) has disappeared, Stewart Detweiler drives 1,500 miles to find his twin hanging from a ceiling beam in their deceased father's lakeside A-frame. But instead of reporting him dead, Stewart decides to become him. As he sees it, he's not taking his brother's life; he's saving it. In turn he will at last gain an audience for hi...

A tour de force, Life Goes to the Movies is the love story of two straight men: a dark devil of a Vietnam vet-turned-filmmaker, and the naive Italian American innocent who follows him to the edge of madness and beyond. Funny, engaging, and entertaining, this is just a great story told well.Peter Selgin's short story collection Drowning Lessons won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He's also published book-length nonfiction and an awar...

"A superb work of memory that unfolds like a great suspense novel." —Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan SontagFall, 1970. At the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford in Frye boots, with long hair, and a passion for his students that was intense and unorthodox. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin with a burning need to feel unique....

Your First Page is unlike any other craft book on writing. It is based on the premise that practically everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page. Those first 300 or so words function like canaries in coal mines, forecasting success or predicting trouble. They establish the crucial bond between writer and reader, setting them off together on a path toward the heart or climax of a story—or they fail to do so. From first pages w...

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month. Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations. Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory. More generally, holidays are days of observance, and...

The stories in Drowning Lessons engage water as both a vital and a potentially hazardous presence in our lives. "You can touch water," says Peter Selgin, "you can taste it and feel its temperature, you can even hold it in your hands. Still it remains elusive, ill-defined, shaped only by what surrounds or contains it."With empathy and wit Selgin introduces us to characters navigating the choppy waters of human relationships. In "Swimming" an avid swimmer fights the stasis i...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterThe Pleasures of the Damned features selected later poetry of Charles Bukowski, America’s most influential and imitated American poet.To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski was—and remains—a counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature, a stubborn ou...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterBurning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.From the horse track to the flophouse, these are dispatches from the edge.Gritty Poetry: Raw, unflinching, and darkly funny poems ...

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriterMockingbird Wish Me Luck captures glimpses of Charles Bukowski's view on life through his poignant poetry: the pain, the hate, the love, and the beauty. He writes of lechery and pain while finding still being able to find its beauty.This is the gutter and the stars, seen through the bottom of a glass.

“Futurist wunderkind Womack concludes his heralded Ambient series with this intriguing, clever novel set in an alternate, semi-historical 1968” (Publishers Weekly).It’s 1968, and Walter Bullitt, part-time US government freelancer and collector of “race records,” stays busy testing new psychotropics on himself and unsuspecting citizens. Walter’s conscience never interferes with his work—until he’s asked to help sabotage Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign...