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 ...

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...

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...

"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....

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...

One of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st CenturyThe world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.With an introduction from Lydia DavisLucia Berlin’s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fict...

________________'Assured and ambitious' - Guardian'A young writer who succeeds in imagining the world afresh' - Independent'Confirms her as a significant new talent … sharp, illuminating' - Independent on Sunday________________From the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize comes a delicate and startling collection about the ad...

“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 ...

Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties.In their compacted form, which ranges from the murderously short 'The Scarlatti Tilt' to one-page wonders like the sexually poignant poetry of 'An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimetre Film', Brautigan's stories take us into a world where ...

“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.

Charles Bukowski was a man of intensely felt passions. In On Love, we see Bukowski reckoning with the complications of love and desire, as well as its exaltations. Alternating between the tough and the tender, the romantic and the gritty, Bukowski exposes the myriad faces of love in the poems collected here-its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.Whether writing ab...