Jerry Renfrow runs an innovative freelance business. He helps others to be nice—for a price. Jerry deals in dreams and affections. A ferocious comedy and love story, Nice offers a rollercoaster of a read, a straight-on look at human foibles, and a sharp portrait of contemporary America.

Rod Gass is accused of being a criminal. He’s failed at careers that people didn’t know existed. Now a custodian at the Van Allen School of Mortuary Science, he is enjoying himself immensely.His niece, Judy, wants to know why. She is the only one ready to unveil this man, and to challenge him on his own terms. Rich in humor and with an acute sense of the absurdities of everyday life, Apology for Big Rod is an American success story of an altogether different sort.

Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth's cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein's secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven?From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination.

When an ex-basketball star and poetry aficionado discovers lost love letters from Emily Dickinson to an unknown Irish lover, she must confront academic conformism and risk embarrassing exposure in order to defend larger truths about American culture in a nation still divided by war.Meet Holly Winegarten, a campus celebrity and painfully self-conscious young woman trying to come to terms with being six feet, nine inches tall. Sidelined by injury from a basketball career, she develop...

Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us–entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment o...

A portable collection of polemical bedtime stories for adults, addressing such timely topics as: erectile dysfunction during the national anthem, what happens when Nancy Pelosi comes calling, and what Model A Fords say under certain conditions.

In a time of global environmental crisis, pastoralism may seem beside the point. Yet pastoral ideals are still alive even though they often manifest themselves by ironic indirection. What can the pastoral tradition teach us about our ties to particular places?The contributors to this volume attempt to lay the groundwork for the ongoing concern with pastoral and with its critical revision.This volume brings together new essays that focus on painting, photography, poetry, essay...

George Saunders’ Pastoralia is an exaggerated dystopia of late capitalist America, merging the spirit of James Thurber with the world of the Simpsons. In his entry in Ig’s acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-winning author Charles Holdefer addresses how Saunders captures the pain and absurdity of the American service sector, and does justice to the dignity of the people who struggle there.Charles Holdefer has published four novels with the Permanent Press. ...

A special 10th anniversary edition of Roy Peter Clark's bestselling guide to writing, featuring five bonus tools.Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the...

In this deeply smart and sneakily poignant collection of essays, the bestselling author of Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable makes an inspired case for always assuming the worst—because then you’ll never be disappointed.Whether he’s taking on pop culture phenomena with Oscar Wilde-worthy wit or dealing with personal tragedy, Rakoff’s sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the untapped power of negativity.

Discover a more lighthearted side of the funeral industry in this collection of real-life stories from the authors of Mortuary Confidential.Not knowing what to do, I sat on the church steps and waited. As the gravity of my failure began to well up in me, I began to cry . . . I Had Lost The Hearse!Funerals and the all the things that accompany them are traditionally somber, contemplative events in which the bereaved look to their undertaker...

“Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear.” –Oprah.comThe New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation.The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in...