Patterns is a collection of short stories that takes the reader into the lives of a wife who can’t stop herself from washing and cleaning, to a grocery store check-out clerk who attempts to find her life’s meaning in selling cosmetics, to a woman who buries a letter from her daughter-in-law in her garden, to a teenage girl who falls in love with her teacher. Mining the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia, the author unravels a tapestry of real people who live their lives the best they can, while rising above the mundane to find grace.
“Sandra Worsham’s humor and clear-eyed honesty stitch this amazing quilt of meaning and experience together in a wonderful way.”—Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life after Life and Going Away Shoes.
“I was deeply moved by Sandra’s book, engaged by her voice, her mind, her heart. I think many will find their very human story here in the hands of a wise and compelling woman.”—George Hodgman, New York Times bestselling author of Bettyville.
“Such an honest and moving account, filled with loving detail, of one brave, passionate, and determined woman.”—Sheila Kohler, New York Times bestselling author of Once We Were Sisters and Becoming Jane Eyre.
“Worsham writes in a way that captures the reader from the beginning page. She inspires us with her unflinching look at the hard task of living the truth, and the courage she shows in the face of loss.”—Elizabeth Cox, author of A Question of Mercy and Night Talk.
Beauty and terror collide in Doug Lawson’s Bigfoots in Paradise, a wild new collection of stories set largely in and around Santa Cruz, California and the surrounding mountains. It’s a land tucked between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean, one that’s populated by aging hippies and venture capitalist sharks, pot farmers and surfers, child prodigies and roaming herds of wild boar. Earthquakes rumble, meth labs explode, helicopters search overhead for drug farms while wildfires ravage the hillsides. Blimps crash, mushrooms dream, dogfights erupt, trustafarians pontificate while pneumatic ostriches walk the streets and sons and fathers and lovers try desperately to find some way to connect with the past, with themselves, before it’s too late. Doug’s prize-winning prose is as nimble and touching as it is lyric, and he plunges headlong into this astonishing country at a fine-tuned, white-knuckled pace that will leave you both gasping for breath and holding your heart in your hands. His characters are awkward, ungainly, and great at hiding and they shamble through the beautiful wilderness of their lives, searching for meaning, searching for themselves.
This collection of "linked, rural-noir" stories depicts endangered humans in endangered environment. Jaimee Wriston Colbert has given us a story collection for our times. In WILD THINGS, Colbert's human characters face displacement, just like the tropical alligator who appears in New York's Susquehanna River. They face sheer desperation, like that of an ohia tree clinging to solid lava on a Hawaiian volcano. In an environment where good-paying factory jobs are an endangered species, Colbert's protagonists confront such post- industrial predations as meth, homelessness, and the ghosts of lost dreams. Their survival is their triumph.
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.
Weaving together the real and the fantastic, the linked stories in this collection introduce a diverse group of characters living in an urban neighborhood surrounding Martin Luther King, Junior Boulevard. A once middle-class, predominantly African American area, the neighborhood became riddled with poverty but is now in the midst of gentrification.
In the 15 stories in this collection, faith plays a key role, either through traditional religion, spirituality linked to nature or belief in the promise of a better life. The stories also present a microcosm of many neighborhoods in cities throughout the country, in which people of different races, ethnicities, class and sexual orientation are living in close proximity to one another, with neighbors being both strangers and friends.
Based totally on satire, Human Blight weaves four separate stories of the failed social experiment. The individuals characterized in these stories are some of the most repulsive, repugnant, and reprehensible people. Yet every one of their traits, actions, and methodologies is on display today in social media, news, and in print. Beginning with Al, the Racist, caught up in his past with the inability to change, he struggles with the world that has passed him by, and he knows not why or how. To Rod, the Opportunist, he’s driven by an insatiable need to dominate. If the world does not give him his oyster, he will concoct a way to get it himself. Followed by Kyle, the Activist, misguided and oblivious to the cause. Believing in what he does, but not understanding what it is that he is doing. And finally, Dodge, the Entitled, given all the advantages of wealth, privilege, and prominence, he is led by the basest of urges. Like a spoiled crying child in a crowded movie theater, he can only understand his need for satisfaction. All four men move through life with a narcissistic grace and an intolerance for rules that they believe do not apply to them. This allows them only to see the world through the lenses that they have created; lenses that reflect back their own warped and misshaped desires.
Inspired by the works of international artists, this Young Adult - New Adult collection of nineteen spellbinding magical realist, paranormal, slipstream, dark fantasy, alternate history, and fabulist tales (with a connecting novella) is collaboratively authored by Joe DiBuduo and Kate Robinson:
Peter John Rizzo, a 1960 graduate of Yale University’s journalism program, inherits a floundering art magazine from his uncle, John Rizzo, with the provision that he must increase the circulation or forfeit all assets to creditors.
Peter Rizzo, Pete’s father, is a banker who scorns careers in the Arts and Humanities, and is jealous of his late brother’s influence upon his wife and son.
Classic Art Exposé’s devoted but unorthodox editorial assistant, Jason, and two university interns, sisters Shirley and Evie, help Pete start a monthly short story contest with artwork prompts, hoping to expand and save the business.
As the four friends publish the winning (and sometimes disturbing) stories over the following eighteen months, Pete battles his father’s attempts to ruin his business and his reputation, and in the process, discovers a sordid family secret. What else could possibly go astray?
2018 Eric Hoffer / da Vinci Eye Finalist for excellence in cover art
2018 New Generation Book Award Finalist in the Young New Adult category
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."
