Böcker utgivna av Unsolicited Press

In the desolate woods of northern Wisconsin, there is a cabin. Inside the cabin is a figure of evil, a witch performing an unknown ritual. There is also a young boy, Ryan Amherst, who is part of this strange ceremony: a pattern of sacrifice and resurrection known only to the residents of the tiny town of Grange.Nearby in the village, a man named Nathan Amherst - Ryan's father - meets with a middleman named John Linden. Nathan asks when his side of the "contract" will be fulfilled. John can only assure Nathan that he will be compensated for his troubles. Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, a police officer named Ben Dmitrovich has a tense confrontation with his superiors. After beating a suspect in a domestic violence case, Ben is placed on a mandatory suspension - another in a long line of heinous police scandals. Ben, who is struggling to overcome his own personal demons, decides to retreat to his family's cabin up north.By coincidence or a morbid twist of fate, he ends up in Grange and meets a woman named Maria Amherst - Nathan's wife, who apparently died seven months ago. As he unlocks the mystery of Maria's reappearance, Ben discovers a shocking pattern of child disappearances and strange resurrections. A young piano prodigy named Amy Dorian may be the town's next victim, but Ben races to rescue her before it's too late. Hurtling towards a cosmic judgment, Ben has a final shot at redemption or damnation.

In this moving, sophisticated, and often humorous novel, Gary M. Almeter artfully crafts a group portrait of several families using the finest of details in seemingly mundane encounters and everyday events. It's 1982 and Gloria Winegar, a Brown University librarian, discovers that there aren't many drawbacks to having an affair with JFK, Jr., a Brown senior. When she learns she's pregnant with his baby, she tells no one but her best friend who shepherds through childbirth. They leave the baby, a son, on the steps of a convent. The novel chronicles the next few decades of both Gloria and her son, who gets adopted by the most normal family in Massachusetts. How he learns who he is; how he discovers his mother; and what they each should or must do with their new knowledge is masterfully and beautifully written in a story that is a little bit espionage novel; a little bit bildungsroman; and a little bit historical fiction; all culminating in a beautiful literary sketch of a family. The book imagines the pre-public life of JFK Jr. and examines how much we know about him, and people in general, is illusory. It is the story of identity, pedigree, blue collar versus Ivy League sensibilities, celebrity, authenticity, family, and self-care. It's about how small things evolve into big things. It is a novel about nature versus nurture. It is a modern telling story of Arthurian legend and the mythic doomed (and triumphant) heroes who populate our world.

Hunting Geese by Sarah Rau Peterson is a short story collection that features characters as multi-layered as Montana herself. The unnamed protagonist in "Hunting Geese" grapples with life choices and his just out-of-reach family while positioned on the banks of the frigid Yellowstone River awaiting the descent of geese. "She Would Have and The Needing Place" addresses the dynamics of a complicated father-daughter relationship told from each perspective while skirting the issues of generational gaps and aging. "Wednesday's Child's" narrator wonders what she, as a mother, did to push her daughter away, and "Chickens" is about, well, it's about chickens.

SELF PORTRAIT WITH THE RADIO ONLast night I might have had Retsinaand not cut myself shaving before bedhad it not been for wishing to be elsewhere,goaded by the mirror to hurry, to clearits view of the room. Tonightwill end much the same: watchinga woman's hands pretend to knowthe piano keys, wishing to be fixedinside the song. When you visitthe Oracle, it's best to have your questionin mind as well as written on your hand.While a live rabbit or lamb might travelbetter than a statue, both are necessaryforms of appreciation. The spoilsof conquest or dumb luck, too.Laid against itself, notated inthe player's and composer's mind,shadow becoming shadow and backagain, to solid. The after-effect,peripatetic, multiphasic. If wateredinto bloom, again in the room, a handcoaxing a hand to become real.This could be the thing that lasts;Makes physical, thought. Is thishow to remember? This couldbe the things that lasts.

Glitched collabs from Andrew Brenza and Kristine Snodgrass find a neon outlet in the merging of vispo and digital alteration. This striking book features color-saturated work that enlivens the structural bombast inherent in Brenza and Snodgrass's stark visual poetry. What is glitched is not superceded nor muted, rather transformed in a true collaborative spirit.

Less Than What You Once Were begins in a pivotal moment for the speaker-during the 2008 "Battle of N'Djamena" in Chad's capital. This destabilizing experience-in which the speaker's home is broken into-results in the family embarking on a months-long departure from the place, and the narrative begins to cycle through childhood memories, from the first night when Brown lands at N'Djamena's airport as an eight-year-old boy to the failed attempt at bird hunting with a slingshot. These centering memories soon give way to stories of displacement as a young adult and, much later, a return to the country of his youth. This fragmented memoir, told in a similar, episodic style to Claudia Rankine's Citizen, is both a coming-of-age story and also a story of exile, ending in a state of dislocated adulthood, the speaker longing for a return to a childhood home that can't be accessed.