Award Winner: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon...Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
A searing portrait of suburbia, friendship, and family strained by a devotion to false appearances.
In an idyllic suburb, four young families quickly form a neighborhood clique, their friendships based on little more than the ages of their children and a shared sense of camaraderie. When one of the couples, Paige and Gene Edwards, adopt a four-year-old girl from Russia, the group's loyalty and morality is soon called into question. Are the Edwards unkind to their new daughter? Or is she a difficult child with hidden destructive tendencies?
As the seams of the group friendship slowly unravel, neighbor Nicole Westerhof finds herself drawn further into the life of the adopted girl, forcing Nicole to re-examine the deceptive nature of her own family ties, and her complicity in the events unfolding around her.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
To Rachel, there’s no one in the world like her uncle Jake. Handsome and mysterious, he fills her with stories, sends postcards and gifts from exotic places. And he’s so much more fun to be with than her parents, who are always fighting. When she learns he’s gay, she keeps it under wraps. And when he gets sick, she doesn’t even tell her best friends. Until she realizes that secrecy does more harm than good.
Framed by the passions of the ’60s and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s, Just Like February begins with the wedding of Rachel’s parents when she’s five and ends with her sexual awakening as Jake is dying. As this poignant coming-of-age story unfolds, Rachel is forced to reckon with a home broken by the stormy love between her mother (a social worker) and her father (a Vietnam veteran) and a heart broken by the realities of homophobia and AIDS.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
From the author of House Arrest and On Hurricane Island comes a thrilling new activist novel that begs the question, “How far is too far?”
He was nine when the vines first wrapped themselves around him and burrowed into his skin. Now a college botany major, Jeremy is desperately looking for a way to listen to the plants and stave off their extinction. But when the grip of the vines becomes too intense and Health Services starts asking questions, he flees to Brooklyn, where fate puts him face to face with a group of climate-justice activists who assure him they have a plan to save the planet, and his plants. As the group readies itself to make a big Earth Day splash, Jeremy soon realizes these eco-terrorists’ devotion to activism might have him—and those closest to him—tangled up in more trouble than he was prepared to face. With the help of a determined, differently abled flame from his childhood, Zoe; her deteriorating, once–rabble-rousing grandmother; and some shocking and illuminating revelations from the past, Jeremy must weigh completing his mission to save the plants against protecting the ones he loves, and confront the most critical question of all: how do you stay true to the people you care about while trying to change the world?
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
Margaret Saville’s husband has been away on business for weeks and has stopped replying to her letters. Her brother, Robert Walton, has suddenly returned after three years at sea, having barely survived his exploratory voyage to the northern pole. She still grieves the death of her youngest child as she does her best to raise her surviving children, Felix and Agatha. The depth of her brother’s trauma becomes clear, so that she must add his health and sanity to her list of cares. A bright spot seems to be a new friendship with a young woman who has just returned to England from the Continent, but Margaret soon discovers that her friend, Mary Shelley, has difficulties of her own, including an eccentric poet husband, Percy, and a book she is struggling to write. Margaret’s story unfolds in a series of letters to her absent husband, desperate for him to return or at least to acknowledge her epistles and confirm that he is well. She is lonely, grief-stricken and afraid, yet in these darkest of times a spirit of independence begins to awaken. 'Mrs Saville' begins where Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' ends.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
"He successfully combines the anarchic nihilism of Hunter S. Thompson with the deeper, exploratory writings of William Faulkner."-Kirkus Reviews
"A finely crafted collection that perfectly evokes a place and culture."- Kirkus Review
Wright's debut collection of short stories was awarded the 2018 Tartt First Fiction Award. Drawing heavily on the author's experiences growing up in Alabama, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good explores themes of racial injustice, class, the Civil Rights Movement, environmental catastrophe, imprisonment, suburbanization, and the perennial themes of love, life and loss. Through sixteen stories sharing common environments and characters--a used car salesman, a cook on death row, a lynching survivor, a U.S. Census enumerator, the author's first short story collection, attempts to come to terms with the modern South. Though set there, these stories aspire with humor and pathos to address national dilemmas.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Fiction: Literary
From the unforgiving surf of Costa Rica to hidden vineyards in the South of France, the stories in Perfect Conditions span the globe, and the characters often struggle to find control in unrelenting circumstances: a deep sea fisherman discovers he may not be allowed to return home when his contract expires; a young woman mourns the death of a dear friend she cannot save; a newlywed couple embark on a disastrous honeymoon. Unflinching stories from an award-winning writer.
Vanessa Blakeslee's writing has appeared in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Globe and Mail, Kenyon Review Online, among many others. Her novel Juventud won the 2015 Bronze Medal, was a finalist for Foreword Review's Book of the Year, and a runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her short story collection Train Shots won the 2014 IPPY Gold Medal in Short Fiction.
A Captivating Exploration of Mourning and West Texas
Hunter’s friend Ty survived war in the Middle East only to succumb to cancer at home. On a quest with his college buddies and Ty’s father, Hunter journeys from South Texas into the mountains and desert of West Texas to bury his close friend. During this trek, they’ll drink, hunt, party, and encounter unexpected people and enthralling landscapes as Hunter deals with his grief, compounded by his struggle with depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder.
The West Texas Pilgrimage is a love letter to West Texas and the wild culture that defines it. Author M. M. Wolthoff vividly depicts the regional landscape, exploring intriguing stops along the way and the authentic context of music, food, and language integral to this generation of Texans, while frankly and thoughtfully addressing relationships, mourning, and mental illness, with characters as unforgettable as the region itself.
Praised by The New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki for delivering "astute portrayals of people who desire connection, hope, and renewal," World Gone Missing offers a page-turning collection of haunting and emotional stories about the many ways people can vanish from life. From the newly married couple anxiously searching for a brother who disappeared into thin air without warning, to the San Francisco businesswoman who becomes increasingly obsessed with a high school friend whose mother drove them apart years before, to the insurance clerk on her way to meet her son's mystery birth mother, Doyle's writing vividly evokes the loss and liberation absence can bring.
30-year-old Bronwyn Artair, feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist, much to the dismay of her mentor, Diane Fenwick. After a year of living alone in Southern New Hampshire, enduring the indignities of her job, dumped by her boyfriend, she discovers her deep connection to the natural world has given her an ability to affect natural forces. When she finally accepts she really possesses this startling capability, she must then negotiate a new relationship to the world. Who will she tell? Who will believe her? Most importantly, how will she put this new skill of hers to use? As she seeks answers to these questions, she travels to Kansas to see the tornado maverick she worships; falls in love with Matt, the tabloid journalist who has come to investigate her; visits fires raging out of control in Los Angeles; and eventually voyages with Matt and Diane to the methane fields of Siberia. A woman experiencing power for the first time in her life, she must figure out what she can do for the world without hurting it further. The story poses questions about science and intuition, women and power, and what the earth needs from humans.
Heald Brown might be responsible for the loss of highly classified TITLE 13 government documents--and may have hopelessly lost himself as well. Since leaving his home in Detroit for Chicago during the recession, Heald teeters anxiously between despondency and bombastic sarcasm, striving to understand a country gone mad while clinging to his quixotic roots.
Trying to deny the frightening course of his alcoholism, Heald struggles with his mounting paranoia, and his relationships with his concerned family and dying grandmother, all while juggling a budding office romance at the US government's Chicago Regional Census Center. Heald's reality soon digresses into farcical absurdity, fevered isolation, and arcane psychological revelation, hilarious though redoubtable in nature. Meanwhile the TITLE 13 secrets remain at large, haunting each character and tangling the interwoven threads of Heald's life, as the real question looms: Is it the TITLE 13 information that Heald has lost, or his sanity?
"Affecting and inventively funny... Ferro's work is an eclectic me´lange."—Kirkus Reviews
"A wonderful experience and a terribly compelling character study... sometimes fun, sometimes dark. For a first-time novelist, (Ferro is) very knowing about the emotional territory of life. A very, very ambitious book."—Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune
What does the second coming of the Klan portend for Satilla County? Is it one more sign evil is winning? Setting out to find answers, a northern-born young journalist experiences life in the deep South, the struggle to survive for whites and blacks. Her search turns personal and horrific when her best friend disappears.
The year is 2016 and President Paul R. Yenmor has just begun his second term in the White House. Secretly backed by North Korean forces, he implements a nationwide plan that includes the dismantling of all branches of government. With unquestionable impunity, he then systematically wipes out half of the population and finalizes the destruction of the United States. With no American military left to intervene, his new militia spans the continental U.S., taking children from their homes and rounding up their mothers, forcing them into indentured servitude to get them back. Amidst the barren wasteland that was once a thriving powerhouse, what follows is one woman's fight to get back her son and right the wrongs made by a maniacal administration. Together with other escapees whose children were taken, and a few remaining soldiers that have returned to find their homeland decimated, she fights to retrieve her kidnapped son, destroy the occupying militia and restore the United States to its former glory.
Caught up in the turmoil of her own problems, Fez is oblivious to the struggles of her family members, who each face serious challenges—and things are only getting more complicated.
Fez, now fifty-two, never knew she had a sister—until one day, sixty-four-year-old Penny, a woman with special needs, has nowhere else to go and must move in with Fez and Fez’s teenage daughter, Hazel. But Penny hasn’t had to deal with change for a long time, and neither sister is sure how this new life will affect her. With her estranged husband living elsewhere, Fez is too distracted to notice the changes in Hazel, who has been falling into dangerous patterns of substance abuse.
The reunited sisters delve into family history to gain closure on a dark past, but before they find a satisfying answer, tragedy strikes—and their priorities finally start coming into focus.
Told from the varying perspectives of the three women, Seven Birds illustrates how complicated family issues and shared pain can forge stronger links among its members. If they can find compassion—for each other, for themselves, and for a mother’s past mistakes—then moving forward toward reconciliation and peace is possible.
If the adage “nothing civilized ever resulted from the drinking of beer” requires further proof, one needs look no farther than down Houston’s pothole-infested Richmond Avenue. There, the blurry-eyed denizens of the Relix Club wile away the hours engaged in their two favorite activities – drinking and betting.
Until recently that was good enough for our storyteller, a journalist of questionable work ethic, who undergoes an epiphany following a bus stop meeting with pretty Michelle, a woman he declares has “skin so perfect I doubted she even had pores.”
Could she be his redemption? Maybe, but first he’d better contend with her baseball bat-wielding former beau, her nihilistic stripper roommate and the suspicious death of a friend, who fancies himself the father of Brute Generation poetry.
Mostly satire, often wildly unpredictable, the only real long shot in Songs From Richmond Avenue would be for its protagonist to put down his beer long enough to learn anything of true value.
Set in the 1980s in the rural community of Bidarkee Bay, Alaska, a fictional area the size of a small state with a population of barely 20,000, Wander is the story of Patrice "Pete" Nash, a young broadcast reporter who finds herself facing the winter alone after her husband, Nate, accepts a job on "the slope." As Pete pursues the next big breaking news story, she strikes up a friendship with the new guy in town, the Ivy League-educated Ren, who recites poetry and lives in the family-owned, vacant inn. Their friendship offers a glimpse of a different kind of life - one that seems to Pete to offer everything marriage to the country-raised Nate does not. But unbeknown to Pete, Ren has come to Alaska for his own dark reasons - to end his life. By the time, Nate returns home, their lives have been irrevocably changed. One man is dead, two others missing and a third forever lost to them.
"What do you want from me?" she says. "You have to go to Paris," he replies, but only because he doesn't know exactly what he does want from his new bride. Everything?
Lucas Amado is a husband, a grad student, a dreamer, a young man not wholly convinced about anything in the world but his love for Callie and their baby son, Johnny. But love, he finds, is a risky business.
When things start to go bad in his marriage Lucas is approached by Marla Tupo, a cheerful, attractive and mystifying older woman he meets at his provisional blue-collar job. What at first seems a harmless affinity soon deteriorates into a mutual dependence that changes everything. In recounting his struggle to save his marriage and sanity, Lucas wonders if human life is of any consequence in this dark and lonely universe.
Mr. Galaxy's Unfinished Dream resides at the intersection of realism and dream where belief and unbelief mingle, and where saints, psychopaths, and ordinary people give us glimpses into the darkness and light of the human heart and mind
Readers who are intrigued by the psychological and spiritual forces that shape human experience will be challenged and find much to ponder in this novel. Lovers of literary fiction and allegory will discover in R. García Vázquez an author whose writing Bookish Creature describes as "utterly captivating and closer to poetry than prose."
When Iraq War veteran Jacob Miranda returns home for good following the end of his enlistment, he finds that he has trouble reintegrating into the life he’d left behind before ever going off to the Army. Increasingly finding himself unable to cope in the aftermath of the IED blast which nearly killed him and claimed the lives of five of his brothers-in-arms, Jacob begins blaming himself for what he perceives as his personal failure to protect his men and isolates himself from his loved ones, turning instead to alcohol—the only refuge able to lessen his pain. Jacob’s self-destructive tendencies nearly lead him to utter ruin, but his saving grace arrives in the form of childhood best friend, Maddie, whose comfort and love finally give him the strength to rise above his inner demons and find purpose and meaning in an existence which he’d all but given up on.
As a counselor at the maximum-security Arnone State Correctional Institution, Beth Sharpe sees potential in intelligent prisoners like José Ayala. She teaches them about historical figures who confronted their oppressors, and she encourages them to overcome obstacles–both those of their own making and those imposed on them by society. When their only chance for redemption is taken away, José and other prisoners follow Beth’s advice and take a stand against the injustice. But a deadly prison riot is not what she had in mind. Indiscretions become public, and mistakes have dire consequences. Beth is determined to end the violence, and she is willing to risk her own life to save others. Can she stop the carnage and help the prisoners achieve justice another way? Can she balance her conflicting loyalties and find a peaceful resolution to the riot? The Struggle Within is a novel with diverse characters, page-turning action, and ethical ambiguities that will leave your book club talking for hours.
Is it too much to ask that a managed care facility refund a year’s advance payment when your grandfather dies before he can move in? Frank Johnson doesn’t think so, which is why the thirty-three-year-old now lives in a nursing home, locked in a chess match feud with management that doesn’t occupy nearly enough of his time. When foster kid Elroy is thrust into his life, Frank decides to turn this forced relationship to his advantage – launching a string of absurd decisions, inappropriate behaviors and unexpected glimpses of tenderness that ultimately turn a New Jersey suburb upside down. A laugh-out-loud celebration of bad choices for good causes, Managed Care is an offbeat story about three misfits on the social fringes of suburbia and their ridiculous campaign to introduce an unfiltered version of intimacy to their stale, impersonal community. Because, according to Frank, it’s probably what Jesus would have wanted.
Clementyne Jones wanted just one thing; to be allowed to live her life her way. It was the reason why she lived in Tucson, Arizona and not Los Angeles or New York while plying her trade as the writer of popular novels. She freely admitted to using a pen name to keep as much privacy as she could. It was her way of assuring she would be liked for herself in terms of her friends and in romance. When tapped to write a screenplay for one of her books, she jumped into it, glad for the challenge. Working on the set in Northern California would give her time to sort out whether or not there was a future for her and her boyfriend, Todd. To her chagrin, mega movie star Peter "Chance" Swift drops into her path. Oh, she likes him well enough, had actually based the male lead on him. But, a romance with a man of his reputation is out of the question. Holding her ground is hard when Peter Swift says, "Why not take a chance?"
At seventeen, the realm of faerie is the only world Celeste knows, and she aspires to become as close to a faery as a human may. But daunting revelations made by her dying mother knock her plans off course. Orphaned and anxious to establish where she fits in, Celeste’s convictions waver.
Is she the human princess her mother raised her to be, or is she the human faery she longs to become? Is she to avenge the wrongs done to her parents by an evil sorceress?
Is she to honor a betrothal she’s known nothing about? Or should she keep at the side of the true love that recently walked into her life?
Celeste chooses to be the avenger of her parents, even if it means having to acknowledge her rightful place in the human dimension.
Urged by the faery, Nahia, and championed by the faerie court and her true love, Celeste sets out to expose the deceitful sorceress, Arantxa. She trusts that nothing can keep her from returning to the realm of faerie, nothing that is, until the identity of her betrothed becomes known.
Jackson Levee, an ambitious young college instructor and writer, saves nine-year-old twin girls, Hadley and Haley, from drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. He writes a poem titled "After the Rescue" based on the incident and receives critical acclaim and a wide readership as the result of an appearance on a popular national television talk show.
The twins mature into beautiful but troubled young women. Jackson's success leads him to a professorship at an esteemed university in the Carolina mountains where meets LaVeda with whom he has a temporary happy marriage, but his ascendant star falls soon thereafter. Hadley marries a womanizer and discovers through a chance meeting that she is gay, loses the relationship, and sinks into alcohol and drug abuse. Haley suffers a depressive episode and afterwards begins an unfulfilling affair with her older supervisor, subsequently marrying an army reservist who is horribly wounded in the Iraq War and whose PTSD threatens everything.
Through twenty-five years, Jackson's, Hadley's, and Haley's recklessness in sex, love, marriage, and life produces wild and horrific results. They struggle to transcend their misfortunes and realize their destinies.
It is 1943, and nineteen-year-old Casey Cochran joins the Air Force and enters World War II to escape his father's drunken abuse. In the cockpit of a Mustang, he finds his destiny. This is where he belongs, blasting the Jerries out of the sky in wild dogfights in the skies over Europe. With each kill, he is not only helping to destroy the German Luftwaffe, but proving his worth to the father he hates. He has four kills, and needs a fifth to be a fighter Ace. On the mission where he gets that fifth kill, he is shot down and parachutes into a beautiful valley, untouched by war, in the mountains of eastern France.
He is hidden by a Frenchman, Jean-Albert, and his daughter, Solange. Both speak perfect English, a lucky break. The valley is another Eden--alive with a beauty that seems almost unreal, and under the spell of this magical place, Casey's soul finds peace, and with the gentle Solange, he finds love like he has never known. They vow to love forever, and that she will wait for him to come for her after the war.
