Illuminating Fiction contains nineteen interviews with fiction-writing luminaries including Edward P. Jones, Julia Glass, Amy Bloom, Jill McCorkle, Margot Livesy, Ron Carlson and Steve Almond. The interviews contain questions about narrative, voice, character, place, point of view, arc of the story/novel plot, and revision; questions about the writing process; questions about the trajectory of the writer's career; questions about the role and importance of writing courses and mentoring; and also questions that Ellis has drawn from the text of the authors' work. Authors describe the challenges they have faced. The reader is able to gain an intimate and specific understanding of the authors' works, and the authors' thought process as they created their novels and short stories.
Queenie Rivers was raised by her grandparents in coastal Los Angeles. As she approaches thirty, her erratic lifestyle is forced back on course by a car accident and her grandmother's intervention. But her recovery is interrupted by a break-in and Gran's death. Gran's last act was to set Queenie up with a job at an upscale seaside bistro with a shady reputation--the owner of which, it turns out, was once a close friend. As Queenie digs into Gran's past for answers about the break-in, the murder, and the unnerving circumstances surrounding the restaurant and her new boss, she discovers that her grandmother, a Romani Holocaust survivor, kept many secrets, some of them otherworldly--secrets that become hers to unravel when she becomes a suspect in Gran's murder case.
"No one knew witnessing their first murder at seven would propel Ben and his twin toward a killing spree in Pennsylvania. Racked with guilt, they vow to take just one more victim. Too bad they snatched the wrong woman . . "--
In her second collection, My Infinity, Didi Jackson continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist.These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson's poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.
"Circle of Animals tells the story of a woman, Sky, grappling with a sexual assault in her workplace and the disappearance of her troubled "hippie" mother the same week. As she searches for and uncovers her mother's story, she also discovers the larger story of the historically situated and gendered bodies of her mother and estranged grandmother. Drawing on ancient myth (the title refers to the zodiac), California counterculture of the last century, and current conversations about sexual violence, this novel asks us to think about how the inability to communicate violence done unto the body is not just a symptom but also a means through which violence spreads collaterally between women as silence and estrangement. As Sky looks for her mother, she must also find her own voice and courage to claim her agency"--
"Kamao is the son of a prominent Ghanaian academic and incumbent minister of health and is devoted to all that America symbolizes. After immigrating to the United States in pursuit of higher education and the American Dream, he becomes unwittingly entangled with American politics when he meets Lindsey McAdams, the daughter of an influential, anti-immigration senator. As the couple's feelings grow, so too does the senator's animosity toward Kamao. Despite support from fellow immigrants Lazo, Ayefumi, and Dania-who follow American Dreams of their own-Kamao soon finds himself drawn into intrigues hidden from the American public that make him question himself and his adopted country. When Kamao is implicated in a murder, Lindsey's loyalties are tested, Dania must decide if she is willing to risk her own future and security for the sake of justice, and Kamao discovers how far he'll go to fulfill his American Dream"--
"Twenty-four-year-old Akosua is easily knocked off her feet. When she falls and hits her head, she's too preoccupied with her latest dramas to fully absorb the shock. In the span of three months, she has broken up with her boyfriend Wisdom, discovered that her deadbeat dad has moved back to the States from Ghana, and dropped so many classes that she believes she's the only history grad student in the history of grad students to be registered for just one partial-credit class. Instead of facing her problems, Akosua seeks distraction in Daniel, a "good Ghanaian man." But as her head injury worsens, she questions whether she can continue to run away from her father any more than she can keep ignoring her brain and its traumas. Vibrant, funny, and bittersweet, Blood on the Brain is a novel about the complications of family, romance, and culture-and how coming of age can feel like a blow to the head"--
"Following up on his landmark collection Hold Me Tight, Jason Schneiderman extends his personal and historical explorations in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Schneiderman's signature sense of humor works as a connective tissue across the book, even as the juxtapositions become more unlikely (Kafka and Hillary Clinton?), the historical scope becomes wider, and the personal revelations cut deeper than ever before. These poems represent Schneiderman's most direct and explicit exploration of Jewish heritage and history, bringing to the surface a theme that has often been missed in his work. The strength of these poems is in their power to trace the wound as a form of healing, to confront the agonizing in order to make way for joy and, yes, love"--
"With all the power of a long-brewing storm, the brilliant poet Jenny Factor finally returns to make public the interior work and spoils of decades in Want, the Lake, her second poetry collection. This book spans twenty years of life-accumulated wisdom, images, and desires-with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time"--
Don't look back.Did Eurydice want to return from the underworld? Did anybody ask?In this brilliant portrait of rage and resilience, a Korean woman tries to connect with her younger brother and grapple with family tragedy through bedtime stories that weave together Greek mythology, neuroscience, and tales from their grandmother's slipping memory.Recasting the myths of Eurydice, Orpheus, Persephone, and Hades through the lens of a Korean American family, Eunice Hong's debut novel offers a moving and darkly funny exploration of grief, love, and the inescapability of death.
"In Keeping Quiet, Pâaramo has collected essays addressing what it is like to live in a world of silence or the absence thereof. This collection covers a wide range of angles and experiences, from an exploration of IBM's anechoic chamber-the world's quietest place- to stories of incest, marriage, sexual harassment, social justice, and first-person accounts of life in the emirate of Qatar. Pâaramo crosses the borders between art (Mozart, Monet, Beethoven, Sheila Chandra, Neruda) and yoga, between research and drunkenness, between despair and triumph, weaving the intimate and personal with what is upsetting in women's health industry. In "Belated Comebacks," Pâaramo is full of righteous anger; in "Teaching Mom Long Division," she explores the oceanic depths of longing; in "Writers of Color," she examines the complexities of being brown and speaking accented English; in "Three Women," she exposes the social underbelly of Qatar during the pandemic, then mixes it all with personal reckonings"--
"Stand astonished at a painting, venerate the mugshot of a poet, riff on a comedian's quip, and recall a mentor persevering through grief. Speak of headhunters, of word origins, of saints and gods stitched into a newfound pantheon, of the multiverse as a source of reincarnation. Visit ancient cities, national parks, a sundry of gardens, and the ruins of a farmhouse. A teacher fails to help a student. A student explains war to her teacher. Seize back the forgotten. Kneel to not knowing. Interrogate ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and know What Monsters You Make of Them. What Monsters You Make of Them interrogates ecology and injustice through shifting landscapes and ancient cities"--
Ribcage of Time, a poetry collection from a woman's point of view, is both intimate and universal in its scope of events-family life, birth, death, rape, abortion, genocide from a poet on the ledge of some eighty years of life with language fresh and unsettling.The poems in Jacqueline Tchakalian's second poetry collection, Ribcage of Time, refer to Armenian genocide, public murder, rape, home abortions, including one outside the home with tragic repercussions for the writer. These poems have an ever-present wish for improvement, a more sane and equitable society for all. They reference family, the joy of having and being around children, the predicted loss of an ill husband, a plan for a different type of god. They are reflective poems that question the future, make strong assertions, and overall are imbued with hope for the future.
AUTHOR OF THE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER, JAMES • AUTHOR OF ERASURE, now adapted for the screen as the OSCAR-WINNING FILM, AMERICAN FICTION • Percival Everett is diving back into poetry with his spellbinding new collection, SONNETS FOR A MISSING KEY"One of the most profoundly talented writers of all time."-Robin Coste Lewis, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry • "VERDICT For enthusiasts of Percival's writing."?Library Journal • ?Your favorite writer's writer.??Entertainment Weekly • ?Percival Everett is poised for a big year.??The Wall Street Journal • Percival Everett puts cherry on top of novels with new book of sonnets.??Pasadena Star-News • ?Wry and epigrammatic.??Publisher's Weekly • ?A mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of conventional poetry.??Amsterdam NewsInspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these sonnets leap and turn through philosophical musings accrued across a life well lived, with inventive language, crystalline imagery, and turns of phrase that lift off the page and glimmer. Everett's sonnets soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerizing feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.
"Nora Tyler returns to Alaska after twenty years in Seattle and finds work on the Lily Langtry, a purse seine fishing boat. Over the course of the long, hard season, Nora reawakens to the beauty of fishing for salmon on the outer coast. Her four crewmates have their own troubled pasts, and she forms a different bond with each one. A rivalry develops with another boat, the Viking Hero. When a woman is lost overboard from the Hero, Nora tries to understand what happened and finds that the Hero was dealing drugs and her crewmate Danny was part of the action. Toby's ex-girlfriend, Sara, takes the place of the missing woman and finds herself in a difficult situation with no easy way out. At the end of the season, Nora and her crewmates go duck hunting on the Stikine River flats. Two of the Hero's crew appear, perhaps not by chance, and the confrontation turns violent"--
A Punishing Breed, the first in a series of novels featuring Detective DJ Arias, is a murder mystery that takes place on a small Los Angeles liberal arts campus, rife with jealousy, racial and sexual tensions, and a hierarchy as real and destructive as a medieval fortress.
Deer Black Out poetically constructs an impossible technology of presencing and presenting gay Southern gothic hauntings.
As the Sky Begins to Change is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin.In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter's gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.
The Bearable Slant of Light asks what the burden and gift of madness brings to a family, to our world.What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion, and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.
In Before the Storm Takes It Away, Gaylord Brewer steps away from poetry in these short explorations in nonfiction—alternately dark, wry, contemplative, and explosive, what begins as a seasonal experiment in genre becomes, when March 2020 brings a suddenly altered world, a whole different beast.
Blue Atlas, the sixth book of poems from award-winning poet Susan Rich, is her most original work to date.
A Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.
Ancient and contemporary myths—including both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby—overlay a coming-of-age story set in remote northern Minnesota.
Mirage artfully juxtaposes the socio-political dynamics of contemporary Iran with a story of the nature of grief and redemption that will take firm hold of your heart.
In The Good Deed, Helen Benedict offers a stark, powerful portrait of women on opposite sides of a refugee camp in Greece: the refugees trapped inside, and the troubled American tourist whose good intentions morph into a dangerous delusion, resulting in a poignant, layered novel on displacement and belonging, love and betrayal, and the jagged space between altruism and egoism.
Another North is a paean to the material world—food, clothing, cars, and houses, of course, but also to wastrel beauty that serves no purpose but to catch at the human heart.
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