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"Rachel's Tomb is a deftly ambitious novel about young soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces and the loved ones they've left behind. It brings to life with great artistry a diverse cast of secular and religious Jews, Arabs, Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, soldiers and civilians--a complex image of Israel. The book's absurdist humor gracefully counterpoints the waste, loss, and early sorrow faced by its indelibly drawn characters."--Zachary Lazar "Rachel's Tomb is at once profound, moving and deeply engaging, a novel that puts you right in the middle of one of the world's most ancient and intractable conflicts." --T. C. Boyle "There's no shortage of complexity in Bernstein's book--politically and emotionally--but the writing is so clear and engaging that it allows the layers to emerge with a beautiful lucidity, and for the reader to live and think alongside them. There is a deep thoughtfulness on every page of this notable debut."--Aimee Bender "From the commander's seat (a toilet) at Rachel's Tomb Outpost, Joshua Bernstein creates a multi-narrational novel that plumbs the nature of war with humor, compassion, and an astounding historical depth, one that ricochets from the sacred to the profane in a trigger's stroke. He writes about war from the inside and creates complex characters that are often as joyously imperiled as an e.e. cummings line: 'death's clever enormous voice which hides in a fragility / of poppies...' --A complex and moving novel that confronts the loss of innocence and profoundly questions notions of temporality."--Mark Irwin "Rachel's Tomb marks the arrival of an important new voice in American letters. J. A. Bernstein writes with power and sympathy and an unerring eye, in prose of crackling intensity. This is a magnificent first novel. I eagerly await the next."--Steve Yarbrough

"When I first read Khaled Mattawa's Tocqueville some years ago, it rewired my brain and pummeled my heart. A daring meditation on what it means to be a poet and a citizen at the center of American empire, Tocqueville was an astonishing departure from Mattawa's previous lyrically driven work, declaring that it no longer suffices to sing-- even to sing of dark times, as Bertolt Brecht proposed. Reading these poems today, in this timely second edition, we become witnesses to our implicatedness, the vulnerable privilege of a first world existence on a planet in political, economic, and ecological crisis."--Philip Metres "Khaled Mattawa continues to write a global poetry . . . his voice clearly evolved into one of daring necessity that does not demand national identity." --Bloomsbury Review "Mattawa's Tocqueville is not a mere revision of that historical document, but poetry based on motion, where narrative doesn't construct a story--it is more a screenplay that metamorphoses into a democratic account, a lyric slide show that disrupts conventional time into 'the befores that follow the first before.' Tocqueville is a major present in (and to) American poetry." --Fady Joudah, Ploughshares "A poetry in which politics are considered through both potent emotion and exacting investigation, a work haunting in its scope and, most of all, in its critical self-awareness."--Hilary Plum, Kenyon Review

Fiction. Winner of the 2006 AWP Award for the Novel. Nicholas Delbanco, Judge. In his debut novel, THE TRUTH, Geoff Rips creates a moral universe in a series of tales narrated by the palsied hunchback Chuy Pingarron who spends his days on the front porch of a San Antonio whorehouse and is proud to be dubbed "the standard of perversion" by those whose stories he tells. Through his twisted perspective we meet the Midwife who is also the house's madam, the philosopher Don Apolo who lives in an iron lung, and Angelita, famous for her hands. Chuy relates the sad story of the impenetrable Soledad, deemed by her mother to be a saint; of la Ramona, whose one eye looks into your soul while the other looks away; and of the enigmatic la Verdad, whose customers seek her out to learn their fortunes. At turns comic and tragic, Chuy's story meditates on the most ancient questions: how do you live a life and what does it mean?

Poetry. Foreword by Harold Bloom "Lucid, yet luscious; rich, yet modest; full of spiritual insight, yet empty of bossy certainty, Serpas's book of love and death in a Louisiana landscape is as savory and abundant as the rhythms she employs" - Molly Peacock "Like Elizabeth Bishop, her strong precursor, Martha Serpas practices a severely chastened art of poetry . . . I am moved to prophesy a considerable poetic development for her"- from the Foreword by Harold Bloom.

Poetry. "An American original and even stronger than that, these last four decades, till these poems anchored by their extreme facts and debris-like assembling remind us of who this man Seidman has always been becoming, this maker made by his irreducible materials"--Joseph McElroy.

Fiction. Asian Studies. In ONE TRIBE, the death of Isabel Manalo's unborn child stirs wide spread speculation in her small Midwestern suburb. Fed up with the noise of local tsismosas (gossips), she moves to Virginia Beach to teach myth and history to Filipino American youth. Isa Manalo walks into the chaos of drive by shootings, beauty pageants, and community politicking. At every turn she butts heads with youth gangs who distrust her, community elders who disapprove of her loose outsider ways, and a Filipino boyfriend who accuses her of acting too white. Eventually Isa fights back. As Hurricane Emilia brews at the edge of the east coast, Isa opens her house to a local girl gang and nourishes their troubled spirits, instigating change sudden as the shift of tropical winds. ONE TRIBE is the winner of an AWP Award Series in the Novel, judged by Elizabeth McCracken.

Fiction. "If you think we don't need another heavily footnoted Mormon road trip basketball novel, think again. With this unorthodox gem, Darren DeFrain creates a genre of his own, with the athletic ease of the Angel Moroni going in for a lay-up. Thoughtful, deadpan, shot through with comic inspiration, it's a debut worth doing the wave for"--J. Robert Lennon.

Fiction. Short Stories. "Like Jean Stafford, Edna O'Brien and Shena Mackay, Sarah Smith reminds us that the turmoil of family and self is the short story's terrain, a complex space that is most fully seen in the clarity with which a highly focused, personal prose can detail the world. These are wonderfully vivid, well-crafted stories - sometimes raucous, always strangely disconcerting" - Michael Anania.

Fiction. This is a story that tracks a father whose wish is to die in the open, open to the elements. He's a Mennonite, a pacifist, obsessed with Stalin and other tyrants, and he's determined to redefine power, rethink what it is to be good. With his daughter, and with his friend Irene, he finds collaborators in his passion for trespass. This book has moments where the writing is both beautiful and grotesque: fitting, as the book itself tackles the fantastic contradictions of the human experience. Janet Kauffman writes with a clarity of voice that cuts clean through the brush of language but leaves no trail we couldn't turn back even if we wanted to.