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1975. America has lost its war in Vietnam and Cambodia. Racially-tinged riots are tearing the city of Boston apart. The politics and counterculture of the 1960s is disintegrating into nothing more than sex, drugs and rock and roll. The Boston Red Sox are on one of their improbable runs toward a postseason appearance. In a suburban town in Maryland, a young couple is murdered and another young man is accused. The couple are white and the accused is black. It is up to his friends and family to prove he is innocent. This is a story of suburban ennui, race, murder and injustice. Religion and politics, liberal lawyers and racist cops. In Short Order Frame Up, Ron Jacobs has written a piece of crime fiction that exposes the wound that is US racism. Two cultures existing side by side and across generations--a river very few dare to cross. His characters work and live with and next to each other, often unaware of the other's real life. When the murder occurs, however, those people that care about the man charged must cross that river and meet somewhere in between in order to free him from (what is to them) an obvious miscarriage of justice.

A young draftee named Victor Willard goes AWOL in Germany after an altercation with a commanding officer. Porgy is an African-American GI involved with the international Black Panthers and German radicals. Victor and a female radical named Ana fall in love. They move into Ana's room in a squatted building near the US base in Frankfurt. The international campaign to free Black revolutionary Angela Davis is coming to Frankfurt. Porgy and Ana are key organizers and Victor spends his days and nights selling and smoking hashish, while becoming addicted to heroin. Police and narcotics agents are keeping tabs on them all. Politics, love, and drugs. Truths, lies, and rock and roll. All the Sinners, Saints is a story of people seeking redemption in a world awash in sin.This is the third novel in the Seventies series by Jacobs, and is a prequel to Short Order Frame Up (ISBN- 9780977459094) and Co-Conspirator's Tale (ISBN- 9780983206309).

Marlowe has recently moved back home to Vermont after flunking his first term at a private college in the Midwest, when his sort of girlfriend, Eleanor, goes missing. The circumstances surrounding Eleanor's disappearance stand to reveal more about Marlowe than he is willing to allow. Rather than report her missing, he resolves to find Eleanor himself. Raven or Crow blends elements of the picaresque and the noir to tell a story of mistakes rooted in the ambivalence of being young and without direction.

Guilt and a desperate need to repent drive the antiheroes in Tom Walker's dark (and often darkly funny) stories: -A gullible journalist falls for the 40-year-old stripper he profiles in a magazine.-A faithless husband abandons his family and joins a support group for lost souls.-A merciless prosecuting attorney grapples with the suicide of his gay son.-An aging misanthrope must make amends to five former victims.-An egoistic naval hero is haunted by apparitions of his dead wife and a mysterious little girl.The seven tales in Signed Confessions measure how far guilty men will go to obtain a forgiveness no one can grant but themselves.

Meanwell is a twenty-four poem sequence in which a female servant searches for identity and meaning in the shadow of her mistress, poet Anne Bradstreet. Although Meanwell herself is a fiction, someone like her could easily have existed among Bradstreet's known but unnamed domestic servants. Through Meanwell's eyes, Bradstreet emerges as a human figure during The Great Migration of the 1600s, a period in which the Massachusetts Bay Colony was fraught with physical and political dangers. Through Meanwell, the feelings of women, silenced during the midwife Anne Hutchinson's fiery trial before the Puritan ministers, are finally acknowledged. In effect, the poems are about the making of an American rebel. Through her conflicted conscience, we witness Meanwell's transformation from a powerless English waif to a mythic American who ultimately chooses wilderness over the civilization she has experienced.

Suite for Three Voices is a dance of prose genres, teeming with intense human life in all its humor and sorrow. A son uncovers the horrors of his father's wartime experience, a hitchhiker in a muumuu guards a mysterious parcel, a young man foresees his brother's brush with death on September 11. A Victorian poetess encounters space aliens and digital archives, a runner hears the voice of a dead friend in the song of an indigo bunting, a teacher seeks wisdom from his students' errors and Neil Young. By frozen waterfalls and neglected graveyards, along highways at noon and rivers at dusk, in the sound of bluegrass, Beethoven, and Emily Dickinson, the essays and fiction in this collection offer moments of vision and aspire to the condition of music.

Visiting Hours, a novel-in-stories, explores the lives of people not normally met on the page---AIDS patients and those who care for them. Set in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and written with large and frequent dollops of humor, the book is a profound meditation on faith and love in the face of illness and poverty.

As It Is On Earth received a 2013 PEN/Hemingway Honorable Mention for Literary Excellence in Debut Fiction.Four centuries after the Reformation Pilgrims sailed up the down-flowing watersheds of New England, Taylor Thatcher, irreverent scion of a fallen family of Maine Puritans, is still caught in the turbulence. In his errant attempts to escape from history, the young college professor is further unsettled by his growing attraction to Israeli student Miryam Bluehm as he is swept by Time through the "family thing"- from the tangled genetic and religious history of his New England parents to the redemptive birthday secret of Esther Fleur Noire Bishop, the Cajun-Passamaquoddy woman who raised him and his younger half-cousin/half-brother, Bingham. The landscapes, rivers, and tidal estuaries of Old New England and the Mayan Yucatan are also casualties of history in Thatcher's story of Deep Time and re-discovery of family on Columbus Day at a high-stakes gambling casino, rising in resurrection over the starlit bones of a once-vanquished Pequot Indian tribe.

In the 1970's churches began to burn in Burlington, Vermont. If it were arson, no one or no reason could be found to blame. This book suggests arson, but makes no claim to historical realism. It claims, instead, to capture the dizzying 70's zeitgeist of aggressive utopian movements, distrust in authority, escapist alternative life styles, and a bewildered society of onlookers. In the tradition of John Gardner's Sunlight Dialogues, the characters of Travers' Inferno are colorful and damaged, sometimes comical, sometimes tragic, looking for meaning through desperate acts. Travers Jones, protagonist, is grounded in the transcendent - philosophy, epilepsy, arson as purification - and mystified by the opposite sex, haunted by an absent father and directed by an uncle with a grudge. He is seduced by a professor's wife and chased by an endearing if ineffective sergeant of police. There are secessionist Quebecois involved in these church burns who are murdering as well as pilfering and burning. There are changing alliances, violent deaths, love making, and a belligerent cat

Jackson Heights in this book is a fictional locale with common features assembled from immigrant-friendly neighborhoods around the world where hardworking honest-to-goodness traders from the Indian subcontinent, rub shoulders with ruthless entrepreneurs, reclusive antique-dealers, homeless nobodies, merchant-princes, lawyers, doctors and IT specialists. But as Siraj and Shabnam, urbane newcomers fleeing religious persecution in their homeland discover there is no escape from the past. Weaving together the personal and the political The Good Muslim of Jackson Heights is an ambiguous elegy to a utopian ideal set free from all prejudice.

Thirty-year-old Manhattan bachelor Ariel Zinsky is still recovering from his abusive childhood when he realizes no one -- including his few living relatives -- is truly interested in his narrative. While they numb themselves with the latest celebrity rehab story or the third-world atrocities replayed without ceasing on cable news, he sets out to write his autobiography as an exercise in his own self-medication, recasting himself as the hero in a coming-of-age story. Fans of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES and THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER will relate to this tale of overcoming your childhood's traumas, and the world's indifference to them.

On the Poems in The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music"They couple words and music as surely as Schubert and Irving Berlin. But Goldensohn's poems aren't song lyrics; rather, they are intense reflections on music as experienced, by ear and by mind. The essence of listening is his key topic. For the Bach cello suites, it's the inviting conundrum of one voice being several. For Schumann's Dichterliebe it's the clarity and purity of the piano in contest with the "groping," "searching," "laboring," "huffing" voice. Broader issues matter, too: Don Giovanni's "comic murderous lust" and its absurd end, he and his "phallus errant cursing through the trap door and stage flames." The people making the music enrich the experience: "The first violinist, all of him, follows his arm... The cellist grinds his teeth, clenches his face in spasms of control." Blues and jazz are there with the classics: we hear Bessie Smith, "with the whole world's sorrow in her voice" and see Thelonius Monk "doing a march time heavy footed non-dance dance." Eros is often up front: "the girls forget themselves, skirts / above their breasts as they flash their white unsunned asses and the house is all meat, / shrieks and hair." Mainly, we are led to open our ears wider and to abandon the filters that steer our hearing by custom. Immediacy is Goldensohn's great gift in this brilliant collection."Lewis Spratlan, composer, Pulitzer Prize for his opera Life is a Dream

When You Remember Deir Yassin is a collection of poems by R. L. Green, an American Jewish writer, on the subject of the occupation and destruction of Palestine. The poems are offered in the original English with translations into Arabic by Mousa Ishaq and Kristen Peterson-Ishaq."Robert Green's anguished poetry speaks with raw emotion, evoking the decades of conflict and intimate injustices between Arab and Jew in the land that is now Israel and Palestine. As a Jewish writer, Green is as familiar with the tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust as the massacre at Deir Yassin. He challenges his friends and family to open their hearts to the experiences of the people who bore the brunt of the Jewish catastrophe, the subsequent 'War of Liberation', and the ongoing brutality of the Israeli occupation. By bluntly giving voice to the voiceless, he also challenges us all to join in his vision with both compassion and outrage."Alice Rothchild MD (author of Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience)

In the four stories and two novellas that comprise Love's Labors the protagonists Ben and Laura, discover in their fervid romance and long marriage their interlocking fates, and the histories that preceded their births. They also learned something of the paradox between love and all the things it brings to its beneficiaries: bliss, disaster, duty, tragedy, comedy, the grotesque, and tenderness.Ben and Laura's story is also the particularly American tale of immigration to a new world. Laura's story begins in Puerto Rico, and Ben's lineage is Russian-Jewish. They meet in City College of New York, a place at least analogous to a melting pot. Laura struggles to rescue her brother from gang life and heroin. She is mother to her younger sister; their mother Consuelo is the financial mainstay of the family and consumed by work. Despite filial obligations, Laura aspires to be a serious painter. Ben writes, cares for and is caught up in the misadventures and surreal stories of his younger schizophrenic brother. Laura is also a story teller as powerful and enchanting as Scheherazade. Ben struggles to survive such riches, and he and Laura endure.

These poems are a chronicle of complicity in our modern lives, a witnessing of war and the destruction of our planet. It is also an attempt to adjust the more destructive blueprint myths of our society. Often our cultural memory tells us to keep quiet about the aspects that are most challenging to our ethics, to forget the violations we feel and tremors that keep us distant and numb. If we begin to face and speak and create from these human aftermaths, as these poems do, then we can change and become more comfortable with healthier ways of being alive.

"There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings." - Johann Wolfgang von GoetheRoots and wings are the key words that best describe the short story collection, Carts and Other Stories, by Zdravka Evtimova. The book is emotionally multilayered and memorable because of its internal power, vitality and ability to touch both the heart and your mind. Within its pages, the reader discovers new perspectives true wealth, and learns to see the world with different eyes. The collection lives on the borders of different cultures. Carts and Other Stories will take the reader to wild and powerful Bulgarian mountains, to silver rains in Brussels, to German quiet winter streets and to wind bitten crags in Afghanistan. This book lives for those seeking to discover the beauty of the world around them, and will have them appreciating what they have -- and perhaps what they have lost as well.

Still Time is a collection of twenty-five short and shorter stories exploring tensions that arise in a variety of contemporary relationships: a young boy must deal with the wrath of his out-of-work father; a woman runs into a man twenty years after an awkward sexual encounter; a wife, unable to conceive, imagines her own murder, as well as the reaction of her emotionally distant husband; a soon-to-be tenured English professor tries to come to terms with her husband's shocking return to the religion of his youth; an assembly line worker, married for thirty years, discovers the surprising secret life of his recently hospitalized wife. Whether a few hundred or a few thousand words, these and other stories in the collection depict characters at moments of deep crisis. Some feel powerless, overwhelmed-unable to do much to change the course of their lives. Others rise to the occasion and, for better or for worse, say or do the thing that might transform them for good. Even in stories with the most troubling of endings, there remains the possibility of redemption. For each of the characters, there is still time.

Animals have always understood that mankind is not fully at home in the world. Bestiaries, hoping to teach, send out warnings. This one, of course, aims at doing the same.

Words fail but the voice struggles on.The culmination of a decade's worth of performance poetry, Roadworthy Creature, Roadworthy Craft is Kate Magill's first full-length publication. In lines that are sinewy yet delicate, Magill's poems explore the terrain where idea and action meet, where bodies and words commingle to form a strange new flesh, a breathing text, an "I" that spirals outward from itself.

Named Arizona's professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation, a faculty member in Arizona State University's creative writing program for more than twenty-five years, Jay Boyer is primarily known as a playwright and a teacher. His plays have been produced in Europe and Canada, as well as throughout America, many of them off-off-Broadway, and they have won honors both here and abroad. But he is equally adept as a fiction writer. During this same quarter century his stories have been honored internationally and published in some of the literary world's most prestigious journals. Flight and Other Stories brings ten of these together, often drawing us into landscapes so foreign that they defy what we know of our daily reality. We're with the fattest woman on earth as she draws her last breaths and her soul ascends toward its final reward. We meet a divorcee who can fly for no more effort than flapping her arms. We follow a middle-aged butler whose love affair with a young woman leads him first to the mysteries of bondage, and then to the pleasures of malice. Story by story, we set foot into worlds so strange as to seem all but surreal, yet everything feels familiar, each moment rings true. And that's when we recognize we're in the hands of one of America's truly original talents.

In a world afflicted with war, toxicity, and hunger, does what we do in our private lives really matter? Fifty years after the creation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, newlyweds Pauline and Clifford visit that once-secret city on their honeymoon, compelled by Pauline's fascination with Oppenheimer, the soulful scientist. The two stories emerging from this visit reverberate back and forth between the loneliness of a new mother at home in Boston and the isolation of an entire community dedicated to the development of the bomb. While Pauline struggles with unforeseen challenges of family life, Oppenheimer and his crew reckon with forces beyond all imagining. Finally the years of frantic research on the bomb culminate in a stunning test explosion that echoes a rupture in the couple's marriage. Against the backdrop of a civilization that's out of control, Pauline begins to understand the complex, potentially explosive physics of personal relationships. At once funny and dead serious, My God, What Have We Done? sifts through the ruins left by the bomb in search of a more worthy human achievement.

The Empty Notebook began its life as a very literal metaphor for a few weeks of what the poet thought was writer's block, but was really the struggle of an eccentric persona to take over her working life. It won. And for the next three years everything she wrote came to her in the voice of the Empty Notebook, who, as the notebook began to fill itself, became rather opinionated, changed gender, alternately acted as bully and victim, had many bizarre adventures in exotic locales and developed a somewhat politically-incorrect attitude. It then began to steal the voices and forms of other poets and tried to immortalize itself in various poetry reviews. It is now thrilled to collect itself in one slim volume.

Catherine, a young anarchist estranged from her parents and squatting in an abandoned building on New York's Lower East Side is fighting with her boyfriend and conflicted about her work on an underground newspaper. After learning of a developer's plans to demolish a community garden, Catherine builds an alliance with a group of Puerto Rican community activists. Together they confront the confluence of politics, money, and real estate that rule Manhattan. All the while she learns important lessons from her great-grandmother's life in the Yiddish anarchist movement that flourished on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century. In this coming of age story, family saga, and tale of urban politics, Dan Chodorkoff explores the "principle of hope", and examines how memory and imagination inform social change.

There's a place where love and mistrust are never at peace; where duplicity and deceit are the universal currency. The Co-Conspirator's Tale takes place within this nebulous firmament. There are crimes committed by the police in the name of the law. Excess in the name of revolution. The combination leaves death in its wake and the survivors struggling to find justice in a San Francisco Bay Area noir by the author of the underground classic The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground and the novel Short Order Frame Up

Combining lyricism and narrative poetry, (laughter) reaches for and touches, the heart of the heart of where the light of our ordinary days tries with its exhausted efforts in broke down cars and jobless afternoons to penetrate and succeed finally in overcoming the nameless loss and sense of desire and confusion that dogs so many of our hours turning into night. A spectrum of personality and voices is used in barrooms and streets, bedrooms and the sun stained grasses we walk though and lie in, drawing out the emotional landscapes of what is so human and needs to connect in an unfolding of what must break free into what is unknown and then finally, untethered in communion, laugh at the absurdity.

The year is 1976. East and West are being dissolved in an increasingly globalized world. The narrative moves between India during and after the Emergency and Vienna in the remembered shadow of the Anschluss, while drawing larger parallels about the consequences of intolerance. Chaos stalks the streets as the characters confront their inner holocausts.

The stories in The Inconvenience of the Wings inhabit a imaginative landscape so expansive in conception that it permeates the border between the natural and the supernatural, showing us that what seems beyond our ken is as much a part of the human experience as the tactile ground on which we tread. The situation of a ghostly mother spelling out hints and instructions to her suspicious son in "The Inconvenience of the Wings" is balanced by sharp observations of nature, as in, "A whippoorwill, hunting mosquitoes by the pond, gave the cry that gave the bird its name." The macabre rendering of a man's consciousness trapped by a stroke in his inert body in "The Language of Men Who Speak of What They Do Not Understand" is set against precise natural descriptions, such as, "Birch trees creak under the wind's pressure; a chorus of hounds begin to howl and keen." In "Outlaw," a group of feckless friends attempts to rob a gas station and causes an explosion worthy of a Quentin Tarantino scene, yet the description juxtaposes violence with a poetic evocation of nature: "The red maple leaves lifted skyward. Bloodgouts and furstrips and flesh hung among the branches. Then the wet sound of body parts falling....I pointed toward the blackened Japanese maples and what once had been my dog." Trapped in a vacation cabin by a blizzard, some friends solve the problem of finding one of their company dead by placing her body in the freezing barn, necessitating the digging of a passage which is described in strangely beautiful language: "We shoveled. Wind harried the snow in horizontal gusts. We channeled between the house and the barn: the snow even with my navel, the sky a vertiginous swirl, the air scented of cold."

The characters in these thirteen stories set in the mountains of east Tennessee struggle with both regret and renewal. Three children confront the reality of death, and the possibility of a returning, during a family camping trip; a lonely teacher endures both condemnation and forgiveness from a challenging student; a missionary's wife makes a surprising discovery about the true definition of love; a widower regains his confidence thanks to some unexpected help; an unlikely interchange between a depressed car salesman and a neglected housewife sparks a revival in them both. These and other characters discover unexpected turns even along the most familiar trails. They often find that where there are two or more, there is the potential for clarity and rebirth, even in the wilderness of lives they never saw coming.

In Joseph Reich's most recent social and cultural, contemporary satire of suburbia entitled, "The Housing market: a comfortable place to jump off the end of the world," the author addresses the absurd, postmodern elements of what it means, or for that matter not, to try and cope andfunction, and survive and thrive, or live and die in the repetitive and existential, futile and self-destructive, homogenized, monochromatic landscape of a brutal and bland, collective unconscious, which can spiritually result in a conflict and crisis of a desperate, disproportionate 'situational depression, ' triggering and leading the narrator to feel constantly abandoned and stranded, more concretely or proverbially spoken, "the eternal stranger," where when caught between the fight or flight psychological phenomena, naturally repels him and causes him to flee and return without him even knowing it into the wild, which by sudden circumstance andcoincidence discovers it surrounds the illusory-like circumference of these selfsame Monopoly board cul-de-sacs and dead ends... Most specifically, what can happen to a solitary, thoughtful and independent thinker when being stagnated in the triangulation of a cookie-cutter, oppressive culture of a homeowner's association he never ever really wanted when attempting to offer a piece of 'the absurd' American Dream to his wife who he loves and adores and never had it; when the house eventually goes on the market for its third, fourth, and fifth year of a collapsed and "depressed" economy; A memoir all written in critical and didactic, poetic stanzas and passages, and out of desperation, when freedom and control get taken, what he is forced to do in the illusion of 'free will and volition, ' something like the derivative art of an ironic and social, cultural satir