Fiction / Poetry

American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.

One summer night on a side street in downtown Toronto, Kim Lystrander is attacked by a stranger. In the weeks and months that follow, she returns to the night, in writing, searching for harbingers of the incident and clues to the identity of her assailant. The attack also torments Kim’s father, and as he investigates the crime on his own, he begins to unravel. Entwined in their stories are Kim’s ailing mother, a young Colombian man living in the country illegally, and a woman whose faith-based belief in the duty to give asylum to any who seek it, even those judged guilty, endangers them all. 

 

A novel of profound moral tension and luminous prose, Cities of Refuge shows how a single act of violence connects close-by fears to distant political terrors. It weaves a web of incrimination and inquiry in which mysteries live within mysteries, and stories within stories, and the power to save or condemn rests not only in the forces of history but also in the realm of our deepest longings.

The poems in Portuguese began while Brandon rode city buses around Seattle, and were inspired by his fellow passengers—their voices and their minds, their faces and their bodies, their exuberances and infirmities, and the ways in which they enlivened and darkened the days at once. It was with and within these people that poetry seemed most alive. At the same time, they began as responses to the words and writings of visual artists, mostly painters, whom Brandon was reading while riding the bus, especially Etel Adnan, Eugène Delacroix, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, and Joan Mitchell, all of whom appear in the book. It was with and within these people, also, that poetry seemed most alive. In both senses, Portuguese is a work of color.

Looking back, Martha could’ve said no when Mr Booker first tried to kiss her. That would’ve been the sensible thing to do. But Martha is sixteen, she lives in a small dull town—a cemetery with lights—her father is mad, her home is stifling, and she’s waiting for the rest of her life to begin. Of course Martha would kiss the charming Englishman who brightened her world with style, adventure, whiskey, cigarettes and sex. But Martha didn’t count on the consequences. Me and Mr Booker is a story about feeling old when you’re young and acting young when you’re not.

A single mother takes her two sons on a trip to the seaside. They stay in a hotel, drink hot chocolate, and go to the funfair. She wants to protect them from an uncaring and uncomprehending world. She knows that it will be the last trip for her boys. 

Beside the Sea is a haunting and thought-provoking story about how a mother's love for her children can be more dangerous than the dark world she is seeking to keep at bay. It's a hypnotizing look at an unhinged mind and the cold society that produced it. With language as captivating as the story that unfolds, Véronique Olmi creates an intimate portrait of madness and despair that won't soon be forgotten.

Marilyn Monroe is one of the most iconic figures in the history of Hollywood, and her legendary work on the big screen is eclipsed only perhaps by the lengend of her life off it. Adam Braver’s Misfit centers on the last weekend of Monroe’s life, which she spent at Frank Sinatra’s resort, the Cal Neva Lodge, in Lake Tahoe. Melding facts with fiction, Braver takes moments throughout Monroe’s life—her childhood, her marriages with Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, her studies with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and her role in The Misfits, the film Miller wrote for her—and explores how they informed her tragic end.

There's a war going on between the earth and the sky, but that doesn’t stop Parsifal, a humble fountain pen repairman, from revisiting the forest where he was raised by his mom, a woman with a taste for Victoria’s Secret lingerie. On his journey, Parsifal, a wise fool if there ever was one, encounters several librarians, a therapist, numerous blind people, and Misty, a beautiful woman who may well be under the influence of recreational drugs. Head-spinning and hilarious, Parsifal is a book like no other about the entanglement of the past and present, as well as the limitations of the future.

Charlie Blakeman has just published his first novel, to almost no acclaim. He's living on New York's Washington Square, struggling with his follow-up, and floundering within his pseudointellectual coterie when his college love, Sophie Wilder, returns to his life. Sophie is also struggling, though Charlie isn't sure why, since they've barely spoke, after falling out a decade before. Now Sophie begins to tell Charlie the story of her life since then, particularly the story of the days she spent taking care of a dying man with his own terrible past and of the difficult decision he forced her to make. When she disappears once again, Charlie sets out to discover what happened to Sophie Wilder. Christopher Beha's debut novel explores faith, love, friendship, and, ultimately, the redemptive power of storytelling. 

Hypnotic and profoundly disquieting, The Listeners is the story of a woman whose life is shaped by tragedy. Thirtysomething Quinn is the survivor of a fractured and eccentric childhood marred by the death of her younger sister. Twenty years later she is in the midst of a decade-long slide down the other side of punk-rock stardom after her successful music career was abruptly halted. Sassy and smart, tough but broken, Quinn is at loose ends. She develops unique strategies for coping, but no matter what twisted tactic she conjures to keep her psyche intact, the past won’t stay away. Leni Zumas portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss, in all its grotesque beauty. From the first line the prose is glorious: pricklingly honest and hallucinatory, a lucid dream world realized. Marking the debut of a major American writer,The Listeners is about what lurks in the shadows and what happens when what's lurking insists on being seen.

Mahi Binebine’s courageous novel takes place in Morocco, where seven would-be immigrants gather one night near the Strait of Gibraltar to wait for a signal from a trafficker that it is time to cross. While they wait, their stories unfold: Kacem Judi is an escapee from the civil war in Algeria; Nuara, with her newborn child, hopes to find her husband, who hasn’t been in touch for months since moving to France; and Aziz, the young narrator, and his cousin Reda are severed, in different ways, from their families in southern Morocco. They all share a longing to escape and a readiness to risk everything. Welcome to Paradise delves into a world that most readers know only from stories on the nightly news, delivering a compassionate and striking portrait of human desperation.

Dr. Miranda is faced with a tragedy: his father has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has only a few weeks to live. He is also faced with a dilemma: How does one tell his father he is dying? Ernesto Duran, a patient of Dr. Miranda’s, is convinced he is sick. Ever since he separated from his wife he has been presenting symptoms of an illness he believes is killing him. It becomes an obsession far exceeding hypochondria. The fixation, in turn, has its own creeping effect on Miranda’s secretary, who cannot, despite her best intentions, resist compassion for the man. Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s tender, refined novel interweaves the stories of four individuals as they try, in their own way, to come to terms with sickness in all its ubiquity.

Cleaning up her father’s home after his death, Gwenaëlle Aubry discovered a handwritten, autobiographical manuscript with a note on the cover: “to novelize.” The title was The Melancholic Black Sheep, but the subtitle An Inconvenient Specter had been crossed out. The specter? Her father’s disabling bipolar disorder. Aubry had long known that she wanted to write about her father; his death, and his words, gave her the opportunity to explain his many absences—even while he was physically present—and to sculpt her memory of him.

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska. 

Matt Kish has illustrated Herman Melville’s classic, Moby-Dick, creating an image a day based on text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics edition. Kish refused to set any boundaries for the artwork and employed a deliberately low-tech approach. He used found pages torn from old, discarded books, as well as a variety of mediums, including ballpoint pen, marker, paint, crayon, ink, and watercolor. By layering images on top of existing words and images, Kish has crafted a visual masterpiece that echoes the layers of meaning in Melville’s narrative.



In the tradition of Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Miller, John Franc's masterful novel explores sexual obsession, as a group of male friends delve further and further into the world of brothels under the gleaming surface of their cosmopolitan city. Told through an anonymous collective point of view, the narrative names no character or location, implying that these men speak for all men. 

Meet the daughters of Franz Kafka, Mary Shelley, the Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter. Fantastic Women assembles the work of eighteen inventive, insightful women authors who steep their narratives in a heady potion of surrealism and macabre black comedy. The results are wildly creative stories that capture the truth about human nature far more than much of the fiction (or, for that matter, the nonfiction) being written today. 

Wire to Wire assembles a cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, in a stunning homage to one of our most popular enduring genres—the American crime novel.

Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a field trip to a San Francisco beach, Francis spirals into unbearable grief and all-consuming paranoia.

Toward You completes Jim Krusoe's bittersweet trilogy about the relationship between this world and the next. Bob has spent several years trying to build a machine that will communicate with the dead. He's gotten more or less nowhere. Then two surprising things happen: he receives an important message from a dog, and a former girlfriend, Yvonne, reenters his life. These events make Bob even more determined to perfect the Communicator, as he calls his invention, in the belief that it will change his friendless, humdrum life for the better.

Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason collects Mike Sacks’s unique humor pieces into one handsome, convenient volume. Originally published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, among other venerable publications, Sacks’s writing is original and sharp, yet broadly funny. Whether it’s a groom tweeting his wedding and honeymoon in real time, or a publisher offering editorial suggestions for The Diary of Anne Frank, Sacks’s work tangles contemporary social satire with his absurdist sensibilities.

Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique, forty-year relationship between Milla, a sixty-seven-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene van Niekerk creates a story about love and loyalty.

In this stunning story collection inhabited by dreams and disappointments, good intentions and small triumphs, Keith Lee Morris chronicles the lives of men lost in the liminal spaces between adolescence and adulthood.

Vibrant, sexy, and quite possibly crazy, Bernice is determined to reclaim the child she gave up for adoption five years ago. She convinces her boyfriend, Landis, to help carry out her plan, but once the abduction is accomplished, Bernice is plagued with doubts. As Bernice and Landis journey across America, from Colorado Springs to Tucson to Baltimore, Bernice must confront her past and the secrets she has kept.

What magical message is a giant snowflake trying to bring to a little general, and to the world? In a time of violent military solutions to global problems, this illustrated allegory by leading poet Matthea Harvey has a powerful  resonance.

Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present twenty-two depictions of the new Russia from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time.

A tender chronicle of a boy's coming of age in South Africa during the apartheid years of the sixties.

Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe's trilogy about resurrection.

An astonishingly assured and compelling debut, When I Forgot explores the relationship between a sister and her brother, the past that they share, and the memories that shape their lives forever.

A poignant and darkly funny story narrated by Asta Hewitt, a resourceful seven-year-old growing up in an isolated house in Maine. Shut off from the outside world and restricted to the company of a delusional mother and a bookish older brother, Asta is content to be part of a "society of three."

Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House celebrates Tin House magazine's commitment to publishing innovative contemporary poetry by both established and emerging poets.

November 22, 1963 chronicles the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination and explores the intersection of stories and memories and how they represent and mythologize that defining moment in history.

An intriguing tale of darts, drugs, and death. Russell Harmon is the self-proclaimed king of his small-town Idaho dart league, but all is not well in his kingdom.

Sometimes funny, sometimes eerie, Salvation is the story of the coming of age of Crane Cavanaugh, born into a family of three former charlatan preachers and two older siblings living in poverty in rural Iowa. A budding scientist, Crane narrates her life from the moment of birth, with a rich awareness of the natural world and her own precarious spot in it.

Things don’t always work out the way they ought to—or do they?—in this unsettling darkly comic novel. Girl Factory is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling, all set against the backdrop of a frozen yogurt shop's underbelly.

Do Me goes all the way with the funniest, boldest, hottest, and most richly imagined explorations of sex by some the finest contemporary writers.

Lucy Corin’s daring debut story collection leads the reader through a world where characters behave normally in the most extreme situations and bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. Unpredictable and playful, Corin brilliantly dissects time, people, places, and things, truly rendering how it feels to be human.

Skateboarder, restaurant worker, and punk rocker wannabe, the antihero of Jeff Parker’s uproariously funny debut novel adds a new twist to the classic coming-of-age story. When Thinfinger, a ne’er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold, relies on Post-it notes to help him make sense of the chaos and momentum of his life: a girlfriend who dreams he murders her, a long lost Biodad who writes letters filled with lies, a televised war that is over before it has even begun, and a robbery he can’t remember committing.

Poignant and sharply rendered, Mary Otis’s debut collection seeks answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places.

In his debut short story collection, award-winning writer Josh Goldfaden limns the magical, witty, and touching world of these singular characters and their hidden compulsions and idiosyncrasies.

Artist Zak Smith has created more than 750 pages of drawings, paintings, and photos—each derived from a page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Smith aimed to be “as literal as possible,” but his images are as imaginative and powerful as the prose they honor.

It’s Christmastime in Los Angeles and Max is lying on the beach, attempting to survive one day without heroin. Her failure to do so inspires the adventures of a lifetime—a tour of the bizarre that inhabits the underbelly of LA glitz.

Lyrical and explosive, Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him to see life in a wholly new way.

Set in Wisconsin, Girls in Peril is a novella about the special bonds between young women on the verge of adulthood. Karen Lee Boren weaves issues of sexuality, identity, and class into a magical and unforgettable web.

From the award-winning literary magazine comes another dazzling collection of stories by contemporary masters of the form.

All three books of Jim Krusoe's critically acclaimed Resurrection Trilogy: Girl Factory, Erased, and Toward You.