In his debut collection of stories, Jensen Beach’s characters discover what it means to be individuals, colleagues, husbands and fathers in a world that too often complicates the best intentions with sabotage and subterfuge. What’s most striking about these narratives is the protagonists’ ability to continually make right, difficult decisions despite being placed in challenging, dangerous situations. Readers will delight in Beach’s powerful, deft prose, and the surprising warmth that radia...

The intricate, interlocking stories of Jensen Beach's extraordinarily poised story collection are set in a Swedish village on the Baltic Sea as well as in Stockholm over the course of two eventful years.In Swallowed by the Cold, people are besieged and haunted by disasters both personal and national: a fatal cycling accident, a drowned mother, a fire on a ferry, a mysterious arson, the assassination of the Swedish foreign minister, and, decades earlier, the Soviet bombing ...

An unforgettable chronicle of a year of minor-league baseball in a small Iowa town that follows not only the travails of the players of the Clinton LumberKings but also the lives of their dedicated fans and of the town itself.Award-winning essayist Lucas Mann delivers a powerful debut in his telling of the story of the 2010 season of the Clinton LumberKings. Along the Mississippi River, in a Depression-era stadium, young prospects from all over the world compete for a chance to mov...

"Dermont's short story collection, which follows her debut novel ( The Starboard Sea, 2012), demonstrates the author's versatility and sardonic humor…Dermont delivers strong prose and intriguing characters who frequently defy stereotypical ideals…the overall effect is a tight collection that takes the reader in unexpected, often disconcerting, directions. Full of irony and contradictions, this compilation of contemporary short stories is a worthwhile effort."– Kirkus R...

From Jerusalem to Ghana to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, a woman reclaims her history in a "beautifully written and thought-provoking" memoir (Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and Zeitoun).A biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, Emily Raboteau never felt at home in America. As the daughter of an African American religious historian, she understood the Promised Land as the spiritual realm black people yearned ...

"Dan Josefson is a writer of astounding promise . . . A bold, funny, mordant, and deeply intelligent debut." **—David Foster Wallace, **author of *Infinite JestWINNER OF THE 2015 WHITING AWARD FOR FICTIONNew York Times Editors’ Choice***Benjamin arrives with his parents for a tour of Roaring Orchards, a therapeutic boarding school tucked away in upstate New York. Suddenly, his parents are gone and Benjamin learns that he is there to stay. Sixteen ye...

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet’s materials—words, objects, phenomena—are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed...

"Ruthlessly frank. . . . Recalls Holden Caulfield by way of John Hughes."— The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind of redemption in her school's contrived class rituals; and a woman looking to rent a house is sucked into a strangely inappropriate correspondence with one of the landlords. T...

Masterfully told, marked by irony and humor as well as outrage and a barely contained sadness, Jerald Walker’s Street Shadows is the story of a young man’s descent into the “thug life” and the wake-up call that led to his finding himself again.Walker was born in a Chicago housing project and raised, along with his six brothers and sisters, by blind parents of modest means but middle-class aspirations. A boy of great promise whose parents and teachers saw success in his future, he s...

We first met Avery in two of the stories featured in Dana Johnson's awardwinning collection Break Any Woman Down. As a young girl, she and her family escape the violent streets of Los Angeles to a more gentrified existence in suburban West Covina. This average life, filled with school, trips to 7Eleven to gawk at Tiger Beat magazine, and family outings to Dodger Stadium, is soon interrupted by a past she cannot escape, personified in the guise of her violent cousin Keith.When Kei...

Winner of the 2009 Bakeless Fiction Prize, a confident debut collection from Belle Boggs about life on and around the Mattaponi Indian ReservationSet on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in its surrounding counties, the stories in this linked collection detail the lives of rural men and women with stark realism and plainspoken humor. A young military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his est...

"Passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable" stories of the American South, "like some franker, modernized Flannery O'Connor" ( The New Yorker).Welcome to Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee. Mixing white-hot yearning with daring humor, this short-story collection of infidelity, spirituality, sexuality, and family is at once "strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest . . . the closet thing I've seen in years to Donald Barth...