12 Short Stories and Their Making
An Anthology with Interviews
Paul Mandelbaum (Editor)

Here is a fascinating and enlightening book for fiction readers and writers alike. Written by some of our most powerful contemporary authors, the stories gathered here were selected as striking examples of one of the six elements of craft: character, plot, theme, structure, voice, and setting. In interviews that focus on the appropriate craft element, the authors discuss sources of inspiration and the challenges they faced.

Contributions by Sandra Cisneros, Kim Edwards, George Garrett, Ellen Gilchrist, Gail Godwin, Allan Gurganus, Charles Johnson, Walter Kirn, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tobias Wolff.

“This unique collection will appeal to aspiring short story writers and is a great read for those who enjoy this literary form.”
—Library Journal

“Mandelbaum is very good at getting writers to reveal their secrets.…A marvelous curiosity is at work here, one that digs deep.”
—Shannon Ravenel, former Series Editor, Best American Short Stories

Paperback / $18.95 (Can $24.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-312-9 / 356 pages / Anthology

All I Could Never Be
Anzia Yezierska

Fanya, a young Polish Jew, living and working on the Lower East Side, attends a lecture by a famous educator, Henry Scott, that seems meant specifically for her.  Scott calls America “the meeting ground of all the nations of the world” and exhorts Americans to “blaze a trail to a future where people would be judged not by membership in a group... but as individuals on their own merits.”  
On an impulse, Fanya goes to Scott’s university office and boldly asks him to read the autobiography she has written. After a highly charged exchange, the rational, older, American professor is won over by the young, passionate, Jewish immigrant. She is his fascination; he is her “symbol of all she could never be.”

This moving portrait of a vibrant and talented immigrant woman is based on the author’s true relationship with John Dewey, the important and famous educator who was her most significant influence. It depicts the workings of American society during the 1930s, especially between the privileged class and immigrants who were striving for a better life. It is an early and optimistic story of Jewish assimilation, and grapples with issues still faced by immigrants today.

Anzia Yezierska emigrated from Russian Poland to the United States in 1890. She lived on the Lower East Side and worked her way up through menial jobs and hard-won education to success as a writer about “her people.” Her books are widely read, including the classic novel Bread Givers, How I Found America: Collected Stories, and Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story.

Paperback / $16.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-456-2 / 240 pages / Fiction
 

Download a Teacher’s Guide by co-editor Brice Particelli

View the table of contents.

America Street
A Multicultural Anthology of Stories
Anne Mazer & Brice Particelli (editors)

A Revised Edition of the Classroom Favorite

When published in 1993, America Street was the very first collection of stories about young people growing up in our diverse society. It has informed and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers. Now this influential and much-loved anthology is expanded and updated for a new generation. Twenty stories, twelve new and eight returning favorites, focus on life issues, from the personal to the political: from making friends and keeping up traditions to the right to an equal education and to protest.

Authors included are: Duane Big Eagle, Marina Budhos, Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, Lan Samantha Chang, Tope Folarin, Rivka Galchen, Joseph Geha, Veera Hiranandani, Langston Hughes, Gish Jen, Edward P. Jones, Francisco Jiménez, Mary K. Mazotti, Toshio Mori, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Power, Gary Soto, Justin Torres, and Michele Wallace.

“A collection of short stories that brilliantly capture defining moments in the lives of a diverse group of American children and teens. . . . most of the protagonists express a deep but conflicted love of their families and heritages, resulting in nuanced narratives that feel honest and relevant. . . . A lyrical, poignant collection of voices . . . .”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Anne Mazer is the author of forty-four books for young readers and writers, including the novel The Oxboy, and the editor of four significant and widely adopted Persea anthologies about youth: the first edition of America Street; Going Where I'm Coming From, memoirs; Working Days , stories about teens at work; and A Walk in My World, international short stories.

Brice Particelli earned his Ph.D. in English Education from Columbia University.  He has taught in middle schools and high schools, and was director of the literacy-focused Student Press Initiative at Teachers College.  He publishes regularly in both research and literary journals, and has been honored by fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Wilson Center.  He teaches writing at Pace University.

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-491-1 / 224 pages / Anthology

Beirut Fragments
Jean Said Makdisi

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

An intensely personal yet timelessly crafted portrait of life in a worn-torn city, Beirut Fragments spans the years of the civil war in Lebanon, 1975-1990. When thousands fled, Jean Said Makdisi chose to stay. She raised three sons, taught English and Humanities at Beirut University College-and she wrote. She records the breakdown of society and the physical destruction of Beirut, the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli invasion, everyday acts of terrorism, the struggle to maintain ordinary routines amid chaos, and the incredible spirit of a people.

“An impassioned cry against indifference... Beirut’s long-suffering residents are fortunate that someone as perceptive and compassionate as Ms. Makdisi has come forward to tell their story”
—The New York Times Book Review

“[a] profound, heartbreaking book...”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem and studied in Cairo and the United States. She lives in Beirut. 

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-245-0 / 260 pages / Memoir

The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan
Pat Jordan

Introduced and selected by Alex Belth

For decades, Pat Jordan has been one of the best sports writers in America. This engrossing book compiles twenty-six features from throughout his career, among them his most famous magazine pieces and a small selection of previously unpublished gems. Included is an exciting selection of Jordan's profiles of sports legends such as Wilt Chamberlain, Tom Seaver, Greg Louganis, Venus and Serena Williams, as well as an extraordinary sampling of the pieces with which Jordan made his name: those about athletes who are obscure, unsuccessful, or have fallen from grace. 

“[Jordan's] appreciative of authenticity and unimpressed by celebrity or notoriety. He's a good listener determined to discover the story and present it with energy and wit. The proof of his success is that the pieces in this collection have held up over the years.”
—Bill Littlefield, Boston Globe

Pat Jordan is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and has published innumerable articles on sports and other subjects in The Atlantic, GQ, Esquire, Los Angeles Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere. He is author of a number of nonfiction books, including the acclaimed memoir A False Spring. Jordan lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Hardcover / $27.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-339-6 / 480 pages / Sports

Big City Cool
Short Stories About Urban Youth
M. Jerry Weiss and Helen S. Weiss (Editors)

In these fourteen compelling stories, young people of all backgrounds—from immigrant to native-born, from privileged to the poor—make their way in this glamorous yet risky world.

Contributors include T. Ernesto Bethancourt (Upper West Side, New York City), Judith Ortiz Cofor (Paterson, New Jersey), Eugenia Collier (Baltimore), Joseph Geha (Chicago and Brooklyn), Ann Hood (Greenwich Village, New York City), Cherylene Lee (Los Angeles), Paul Many (Cleveland), Walter Dean Myers (Harlem, New York City), John H. Ritter (San Diego), Michael Rosovsky (Boston), Eleanora E. Tate (Morehead Ciry, North Carolina), Neal Shusterman (Las Vegas), Amy Tan (San Francisco), and Sharon Dennis Wyeth (Washington, D.C.). 

Paperback / $11.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-278-8 / 192 pages / Young Adult Fiction / Anthology
 

The Book of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan

Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards Foreword By Natalie Zemon Davis                               

In dialogues with three celestial ladies, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan builds an allegorical fortified city for women using examples of the important contributions women have made to Western civilization and arguments that prove their intellectual and moral quality with men. In this edition, the acclaimed Richards translation of the authoritative Harley 4431 manuscript is updated to correspond to Richard's critical edition of the original medieval French text; the Introduction is augmented to cover the latest scholarship; and a completely new Foreword by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University, is added. 

“The first work in praise and defense of women...available for the first time in print and in modern English—here is a real book event. We owe thanks to the translator for a fine, flowing, readable English prose, and to the publisher for the rebirth of this moving to remarkable work.”
—Barbara Tuchman

“An astonishing, original work...true eloquence resurrected from the silence of the past.”
—Maureen Quilligan, New York Times Book Review

“A volume without which no shelf of women's works should be considered complete.”
—San Fransisco Chronicle

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-230-6 / 281 pages / Fiction

The Book of the Duke of True Lovers
Christine de Pizan

Translated, with an introduction by Thelma S. Fenster with lyric poetry translated by Nadia Margolis

Written in 1405, this charming tale of courtly romance follows the progress of a clandestine love affair between a young knight, the Duke, and a married noblewoman. The Book of the Duke of True Lovers is as readable and entertaining today as it was when it was written. At the same time it provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of late medieval France, its society, fashion, and customs. Based on a new, more complete text of the French original, this translation is accompanied by six illuminations, an introduction, notes, a glossary, and a bibliography.                                                                                             
Christine de Pizan (1365-1429?), France's first woman of letters, is the author of more than twenty distinguished works, many concerning the political life of France or the defense of women. The book is a part of the Persea series of critical translations of the works of Christine de Pizan, which also includes The Book of the City of Ladies, A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, and The Writings of Christine de Pizan.

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-166-8 / 162 pages / Fiction

A Boy From Ireland
Marie Raphael

Set in 1901, this is the exciting story of Liam, a fourteen-year-old, half-Irish, half-English boy who triumphs over a bully and a cycle of hatred through friendship and the love of a horse.  

“A poignant tale unsparing in its depiction of ethnic and racial prejudice and, at the same time, heartwarming in its portrayal of friendship and moral awakening. . . . This is a story you will want to share with every young teenager you know.”
—Howard Zinn

Marie Raphael is the author of the novel Streets of Gold. She has been a teacher in middle school, high school, and college. She lives in Redway, California.

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $12.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-426-3 / 224 pages / Young Adult Fiction

Also available as a hardcover

Bread Givers
Anzia Yezierska

Foreword and Introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris

This masterwork of American immigrant literature, set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father’s rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. Sara’s struggle towards independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Beautifully redesigned page for page with the previous editions, Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance.

“Yezierska captures American hunger with extraordinary intensity.”
—Vivian Gornick, New York Times

Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970) is the author of many stories and novels about New York’s immigrant Jews, including How I Found America and The Open Cage and the memoir Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 

Paperback / $16.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-290-0 / 336 pages / Fiction, Jewish Studies

A Brief Conversion and Other Stories
Earl Lovelace

In thirteen vivid stories, award-winning author Earl Lovelace paints a compassionate, often humorous portrait of everyday life in Trinidad. Ordinary people like Victor the barber, Shoemaker Arnold, Miss Ross, and Blues and Joebell are invested with the magic of their colorful, changing world. Written with Lovelace’s characteristic ear for melody and rhythm, A Brief Conversion and Other Stories is an invaluable contribution to contemporary world literature. 

“Lovelace evoke[s] Trinidad in a generous, torrential prose that seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy.”
—New York Times Book Review

“In an island patois that, for all of its richness and color, is always to the point, Lovelace expresses powerful and often subtle ideas with memorable directness.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Lovelace deftly conveys his hallmark theme of the search for a Caribbean and a personal identity.”
—Multicultural Review

Earl Lovelace, the “consummate Caribbean man of letters” (Publishers Weekly), was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His many books include the novels While Gods Are Falling, winner of the Independence Literary Award; Salt, winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize; and The Dragon Can't Dance. He resides in his native Trinidad, and is on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. 

Paperback / $14.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-271-9 / 150 pages / Fiction

A Cat in the Ghetto
Stories
Rachmil Bryks

Translated from the Yiddish by S. Morris Engel

First published in English in 1959 and long unavailable, Rachmil Bryks’s vivid stories portray Jewish life in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz. In a spare and tragicomic style, they illuminate the small and large absurdities that arise at the limits of human endurance—from the cooking of “roast meat” made of cabbage leaves to the predicament of Jews forced to cooperate in the hierarchy of their own annihilation. Deceptively simple and often humorous, these stories nevertheless mirror Bryks’s nuanced view of major moral dilemmas of the period: action vs. inaction, preserving dignity vs. survival.

This new edition brings together Bryks’s well-known novellas, “A Cat in the Ghetto” and “Kiddush Hashem,” two short stories, an early poem, and his important but little-known essay, “My Credo,” in which he defends his use of black humor in writing about unspeakable tragedy. 

“Unique in world literature.”
—Isaac Bashevis Singer

“One should read it in order not to forget.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Rachmil Bryks was born in Poland in 1912. At twenty-seven he wrote his first book to critical praise. Soon after he found himself behind the barbed wire of the Lodz ghetto. He was transported to Auschwitz, then to a work camp in Germany. In 1949 he came to New York, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1974. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-327-3 / 154 pages / Fiction

Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works
A Biography
Charity Cannon Willard

The result of more than forty years of research, this definitive biography vividly recounts Christine's rise from society poet to eminent writer, and discusses her work at length and in relation to her life and times. 

“The long-awaited biography...by the scholar who has devoted her career to the study of this 14th-century author...affords pleasure and profit.”
—Joan M. Ferrante, New York Times Book Review

“A valuable contribution to women's history.”
—Regina Minudri, San Francisco Chronicle

“A treasure trove of delights...her crisp and unpretentious prose makes this biography a pleasure to read.”
—Katharina Wilson, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Charity Cannon Willard, a noted scholar of medieval French literature, is internationally recognized as the foremost authority on Christine de Pizan. She is the translator of Christine de Pizan's A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies and the editor of Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan. 

Paperback / $14.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-523-5 / 266 pages / Nonfiction

Crazy Weekend
Gary Soto

It’s summer in East Los Angeles, and Hector and his best amigo Mando are bored. But when they spend the weekend in Fresno with Uncle Julio, a freelance photographer, things heat up.

Uncle Julio takes the boys on a photo shoot up in a rickety old airplane. Flying over the highway, they spot an armored car heist, and Uncle Julio snaps some shots of the robbers. After they report was they saw to the local newspaper, pictures of Hector and Mando appear in the next morning's edition. The robbers—two of the most inept thugs ever to steal anything—decide to teach the boys a lesson. When the two dumb thugs and the two quick-witted boys meet up, the results are hilarious.

“A fun-paced adventure...Crazy Weekend has something for everyone.”
—VOYA

“Lighthearted and fast-paced.”
—The Horn Book

Gary Soto is the award-winning author of many books for adults, young adults, and children, including The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy, Baseball in April, Living Up the Street, Buried Onions, and Jessie De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker. He lives in Berkeley, California. 

Paperback / $10.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-286-3 / 144 pages / Fiction

The Dragon Can't Dance
Earl Lovelace

In this novel, Carnival takes on social and political importance for the population of a shantytown called Calvary Hill. Usually invisible to the rest of society, these locals join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during the Carnival festivities. For some, these disguises help to realize secret longings and aspirations. But for Aldrick, the dashing “King of the Hill” who is dressed as a glorious dancing dragon, it will take one more masquerade—this time involving guns and hostages—before the illusion of power becomes reality.

“The Dragon Can't Dance is a wonderful work filled with depth, insight, and truth. While the story is grounded in the milieu of Trinidad, its message is universal and timeless.”
—Multicultural Review

“Powerful...memorable”
—Chicago Tribune

Earl Lovelace, the “consummate Caribbean man of letters” (Publishers Weekly), was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His many books include the novels While Gods Are Falling, winner of the Independence Literary Award; Salt, winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize; and A Brief Conversion and Other Stories. He resides in his native Trinidad, and is on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. 

Paperback / $16.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-272-6 / 240 pages / Fiction

The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy
Recollections and Short Essays
Gary Soto

Set mostly in Soto’s hometown, Fresno, and the San Francisco Bay area, the forty-eight pieces in this volume include the much lauded recollections “The Jacket” and “Like Mexicans,” as well as new, never-before-collected essays, among them “Childhood Worries, or Why I Became a Writer” and the title piece in which Soto fashions himself to be Fresno's own Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer of the 1920s who lived on nothing more than his five senses, who walked around his town observing the ordinary with amazement. 

Gary Soto is the award-winning author of novels, poems, and essays, most notably Buried Onions, Nickel and Dime, Living Up the Street, Crazy Weekend, and the young adult biography Jessie De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker. He teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Paperback / $15.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-254-2 / 206 pages / Nonfiction

The Eloquent Short Story
An Anthology of Narrative Forms
Lucy Rosenthal (Editor)

This concise anthology gathers twenty-four short stories that show the richness and vitality of the form. Each engaging, accessible story represents one of the many modes of storytelling now in our literature. Here are short stories in the guise of memoir or confession; written as a letter, a fable, a report; or accomplishing what we usually expect of a novel, an essay, a character study, a poem.

A uniquely contemporary collection, yet with an eye on tradition, the book includes long-revered as well as more recently heralded masters, including Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Robert Olen Butler, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, Junot Díaz, Louise Erdrich, Ian Frazier, Randall Kenan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Tim O'Brien, ZZ Packer, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Joy Williams, and Richard Yates.

Paperback / $14.95 (Can $16.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-292-4 / 256 pages / Fiction Anthology

Exiled Memories
A Cuban Childhood
Pablo Medina

Medina left Cuba with his family at the age of 12. In this short, personal memoir, he depicts a happy, middle-class childhood in pre-revolutionary Cuba in brief vignettes. He also shares the experience of being transplanted to the United States. He writes from the heart, seeking to recapture the essence of being Cuban despite the 30-year effort of Castro to transform Cuba. This volume provides one person's view of what that life was like.

“Medina writes from the heart, seeking to recapture the essence of being Cuban...filled with telling detail and humorous, insightful anecdotes.”
—Library Journal

“A powerful work of literature.”
—Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Yale University

Pablo Medina is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and three novels, including The Marks of Birth and The Return of Felix Nogara. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-280-1 / 144 pages / Memoir

First Awakenings
The Early Poems of Laura Riding
Laura Riding
 

When Laura Riding sailed for England in 1925 she left many of her possessions with a friend for safekeeping. Among the items was a box containing the typescripts of more than two hundred poems. These poems remained in storage until they were discovered in storage and returned to Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1979.
Rediscovering these poems of her youth, Jackson saw in them “a precise anticipation of an envisaged whole of poetry.” Readers will find here the same confident authorial presence that permeates the “sell-determining canon” of her poetic work, many of the themes developed in her later work, and a characteristic freshness of vision and scrupulosity of word-use. These poems are experiments in what poetry can do.
Those familiar with the poetry of Laura Riding will read First Awakenings with the delight of enlarged recognition, and those new to her work will find direction for the mind’s journey.

“...this is the early work of an important poet, one who could conjure the musicality of thought and fit the eccentric orbits of ideas into the taut logic of her verse.”
—Publishers Weekly

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Hardcover / $29.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-179-8 / 280 pages / Poetry

First Sightings
Contemporary Stories of American Youth
John Loughery (Editor)

Twenty powerful stories written by some of our best contemporary fiction writers explore the experience of coming of age in America today. Chosen for their literary excellence and insight, and ordered according to the age of the stories’ protagonists (from three to eighteen), they range across gender, ethnicity, and circumstance.

Authors include Toni Cade Bambara, Michael Chabon, Gish Jen, Carson McCullers, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, John Updike, Alice Walker, and twelve more.

“With its gamut of emotions, issues and real-life situations, this volume provides high quality reading that all Americans can identify with.”
—Publishers Weekly

John Loughery teaches English at the Nightengale–Bamford School in New York City. He edited the Persea Anthologies The Eloquent Essay and Into the Widening World.

Paperback / $14.95 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-187-3 / 320 pages / Anthology

Fishing For Chickens
Short Stories About Rural Youth
Jim Heynen (Editor)

In these seventeen short stories, some of our best writers take us into the lives of young people growing up in rural America from the backwoods of New England to a ranch in the West.

Contributors include Pickeny Benedict, Nancy K. Brown, Nora Dauenhauer, Eric Gansworth, Jim Heynen, Tomas Rivera, Wallace Stegner, Alma Villanueva, Jon Volkmer, Alice Walker, Vicky Wicks, and Hisaye Yamamoto, among others.

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $11.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-265-8 / 192 pages / Anthology

Four Unposted Letters To Catherine
Laura Riding

Like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, this remarkable little book of wisdom and advice refreshes the mind and renews the spirit. Written in 1930 and published in Paris in a limited edition, these letters were addressed to an eight-year-old girl, the “thoughtful and sensible” child of Nancy Nicholson and Robert Graves. But they were also meant for adults who might have such a child in their spirit.
In simple, luminous language, Laura Riding explains the difference between learning and knowing; the value of thinking, of doing, and of not-showing-off; and how it is good to live straight, avoiding the hypocrisies and pretensions of “the muddle.”
Here is a literary treasure to be shared between generations. 

“...a small, miraculous book... With great simplicity and unpretentious sincerity, both comprehensible and enchanting as much to this particular little girl as to any child or even any wakeful grownup at all, Riding addresses some of the most elemental questions of existence — how to live a life of creativity and integrity, why praise and prestige are corrosive objects of success, and above all what it means to be oneself.”
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Hardcover / $16.95 (Can $22.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-192-7 / 80 pages / Literature

Foxybaby
Elizabeth Jolley

Alma Porch, aspiring dramatist, agrees to teach a course in Trinity College’s “Better Body Through the Arts” summer program for overweight women. There she's surrounded by starving matrons, orgies of sex and gluttony, and a motley array of staff and students eager to improve their minds and diminish their flesh by acting in her play, Foxybaby.

“Delicious and sustaining... shines and shines and shines like a good deed in a naughty world.”
—Angela Carter, The New York Times Book Review

“This is prose, thought, and art of the highest elegance and quality.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A literary romp...merges fiction and fact in a campy style.... Alma Porch is a well-drawn and endearing guide.”
—The Washington Post

“Hilarious, wry, disturbing, and optimistic.”
—The Boston Globe

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Miss Peabody's Inheritance, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, The Sugar Mother, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-363-1 / 262 pages / Fiction

From the Fishouse
An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great
Camille T. Dungy, Matt O'Donnell & Jeffrey Thomson

Foreword by Gerald Stern

Derived from the From the Fishouse Web site, a one-of-a-kind online archive devoted to the oral and aural aspects of contemporary American poetry, the From the Fishouse print anthology is a jamboree of poetry at its acoustic best. It collects over 175 poems by nearly a hundred poets from the archive, dividing them into ten playful thematic sections. Each poem is a striking example of why poetry is meant not just to be read, but read aloud. To complement the poems, the book includes illuminating excerpts from the Web site's Q&As with the poets, and, in the Fishouse tradition of poetry as an oral/aural form, it comes with a compact disc that features dynamic recitations of 36 of the poems in the book. Indispensable for poetry lovers of any ilk, From the Fishouse is the most exciting, portable way to experience the array of poetry being written and performed in the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century.  

Included are poems from Lindsay Ahl, Dan Albergotti, Kazim Ali, Lucy Anderton, Christian Barter, Curtis Bauer, Sherwin Bitsui, Rebecca Black, Adrian Blevins, Paula Bohince, Roger Bonair-Agard, Shane Book, Geoffrey Brock, Stacey Lynn Brown, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and many others! 

Paperback / $25.95 (Can $28.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-348-8 / 296 pages / Poetry Anthology

Gateway To Paradise
Stories
Matthew Vollmer

In these bold stories set in the mountains and small towns of the South, men and women looking for escape from dull routines and a culture of hype (whether of consumerism, sex, or religion) are led to places of danger and self-reckoning. A dentist on a tryst is seduced by and impregnates an impetuous ghost. A beleaguered young writing professor follows his imagination one step too far while escorting a famous writer he finds darkly alluring. Provoked by a radio talk show, a woman tests who is more intimate, her husband or her dog. In the novella-length title story, a young McDonald’s cashier sets off alone on a harrowing, surreal journey after her domineering boyfriend commits a murder in her name—a journey from nowhere and nothing to an epiphany in Gatlinburg, at the edge of the Smoky Mountains wilderness. 

“[Vollmer] has now conjoined his two writing brain halves, his formal ease with tradition and an impulse to upset your applecart. There is little to nothing else like it.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“A beautifully voiced, precise, hilarious, utterly serious, and extremely impressive book.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

Matthew Vollmer is also the author of inscriptions for headstones, essays. His work has appeared in Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-466-9 / 184 pages / Fiction

The Girl in the Mirror
A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries
Meg Kearney

Lizzie, now 17, begins to search for her birth mother when another devastating loss overtakes her. Lizzie’s story chronicles how friendship and the profound bond of love between an adoptee and her parents—known and unknown—save her from emotional crisis.

“There is an honesty, a darkness, a steel fragility in these beautifully crafted words.  I suspect there are few readers who would not be swept into the tornado of Lizzie’s destructive grief. Kearney fully engages the reader in this very fine coming-of-age novel.”
—Karen Hesse

“Meg Kearney is a deft magician...It's amazing what [she] does with presences and absences—people who aren't quite there anymore remain potently everywhere—as Lizzie’s life unfolds. This book is a generous gift.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

Meg Kearney is the author of The Secret of Me—the acclaimed novel that introduced Lizzie McLane—, When You Never Said Goodbye, the conclusion of Lizzie's story, and two collections of poetry for adults, most recently the award-winning Home By Now.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $16.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-385-3 / 168 pages / Young Adult

Going Where I'm Coming From
Memoirs of American Youth
Anne Mazer (Editor)

14 personal memoirs by some of America’s finest writers, these stories are journeys of self discovery. Whether dealing with the complexities of being a new immigrant or growing up between two cultures, against urban or rural backdrops, this anthology showcases the diverse experiences of American youth.

Authors included are Judith Ortiz Cofer, Lee A. Daniels, Helen Epstein, Tracy Marx, Ved Mehta, Thylias Moss, Lensey Namioka, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Power, Luis J. Rodríguez, Willie Ruff, Graham Salisbury, Gary Soto, and Hisaye Yamamoto. 

Anne Mazer is the author of several widely acclaimed books, including the novels Moose Street and The Oxboy, and a picture book, The Salamander Room. She is the editor of the anthologies  America Street,  A Walk in My World, and Working Days.

Paperback / $10.95 (Can $13.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-206-1 / 180 pages / Anthology

A Good Place for the Night
Savyon Liebrecht

This collection by one of Israel’s most popular authors turns upon issues of family, place and disconnection, and the stories have the dreamy, evocative smoothness of underwater films. As one character observes “I was frightened by the unfamiliar sensations flooding me, as if I'd lost my old place and still didn't have a new one.”
Disorientation afflicts Liebrecht's characters from the Israeli reporter in Munich to cover a Nazi war trial to the mentally handicapped man trying to make a life among unsympathetic members of a kibbutz.
In the last and finest story, “A Good Place for the Night,” a woman struggles to survive in an unnamed place virtually destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe. The permanent unsettledness of Israel is exported and globalized here; no matter where Liebrecht's characters go or what they do, they are never yet truly at home.

“I read these stories with bated breath...a wondrous and thrilling human and literary experience.”
—Orit Harel, MAARIV (Tel Aviv)

Savyon Liebrecht was born in Germany in 1948 and immigrated to Israel as a young child. She is an award-winning playwright and the author of six story collections and the novels A Man and a Woman and a Man and The Women My Father Knew. She lives in Tel Aviv. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-320-4 / 224 pages / Fiction

The Gray Lover
Three Stories
Carl Friedman

Friedman proves herself a master of the short story in these three moving, beautifully nuanced tales which explore Holocaust themes but also branch out in new directions.
In the title story, a fable set between the wars, Gershom Katz, a widowed 100-year-old Polish Jew, becomes the boarder of a wicked, greedy couple who work the old man to exhaustion.
“Holy Fire” charts the metamorphosis of an average Dutch Jewish teenager into a fanatical fundamentalist who moves to Brooklyn, joins a militant Hasidic sect and ultimately, as a settler on the West Bank, kills a Palestinian boy.
In the agonizing final story a Dutch woman cares for her terminally ill mother, Bette who is dying of cancer two years after she nursed her husband, an Auschwitz survivor, while on his deathbed. Now Bette's impending death should draw together her three children, but they remain strangers to one another, constantly at odds and bitter about their legacy.

“Among the emerging voices of the second generation of Holocaust survivors Carl Friedman deserves the highest rank.”
—Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

Carl Friedman was born in 1952, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She is the author of Nightfather  and The Shovel and the Loom. Ms. Friedman lives in Amsterdam and is working on a new collection of short stories. 

Paperback / $12.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-296-2 / 176 pages / Fiction

The Heart Knows Something Different
Teenage Voices from the Foster Care System
Youth Communication

In well-crafted narratives that are remarkable for their candor, range of experience, and hard-won insight, more than three dozen young writers, ages 15-20, provide an insider's view of growing up in “the system.”  It takes us into a world largely hidden from public view, and attests to “the mix of pain and fear, and sometimes hope, and sometimes even happiness” that the foster care experience involves, as Jonathan Kozol writes in his foreword.

“...a book of hopefulness that adults intending to improve foster care and adoption will need to read and understand.  These are very special voices.  One can only hope we are prepared to listen and respond to their call.”
—Robert Little, former foster child and former Commissioner, New York City Child Welfare Administration

“...a testimony to the spirit and relentless courage of young people who have persevered in the face of adversity.  I rejoice with the children in their triumph.”
—E.P. Jones, author of Where Is Home? Living Through Foster Care

Youth Communication, based in New York City, helps teenagers develop their reading and writing skills so they can acquire the information they need to make thoughtful choices about their lives. They are also the authors of Starting with “I”. 

Paperback / $14.95 (Can $21.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-218-4 / 232 pages / Anthology

Heart of the Order
Baseball Poems
Gabriel Fried (Editor), Foreword by Daniel Okrent

This anthology gathers together some of the finest poems written on baseball from the past seventy-five years. They represent the entire spectrum of verse-writing about the National Pastime, from stickball and sandlot games to Little League and the Majors, from spectators to scrubs to superstars.  In a myriad of voices—earnest to zany—they capture baseball's poetic sensibility, its rhythms, culture, and timelessness.  They evoke memories of youth and promise, of growing up and growing older. They bring us back to our personal and collective pasts.

Included in the roster are Hall-of-Famers and contemporary All-Stars: Richard Hugo, Marianne Moore, William Matthews, May Swenson, B. H. Fairchild, Linda Gregerson, Donald Hall, Yusef Komunyakaa, Edward Hirsch, Thomas Lux, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Quincy Troupe, and more than sixty others.

“A welcome addition to growing corpus of baseball poetry. Fried. . .has a keen ear for the sound of good baseball poetry and a good eye for a good baseball tale.”
—Kenneth Sammond, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature

“Baseball has a long history and season. While instant replay is the newest (though not terribly reliable) way to capture it, the carefully chosen words in Heart of the Order, conveying enthusiasm or disappointment and every emotion in between, remain one of the truest ways to experience it.”
—Patricia Contino, New Pages

Original Trade Paperback / $17.95 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-435-5 / 184 pages / Sports / Poetry / Anthology

The Holocaust Kid
Sonia Pilcer

Zosha Palovsky was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany but has grown up in New York City, joined a Latina gang, and refused to attend a yeshiva. She’s a rebel—outspoken, sexually liberated, and determined to live her own life, free of her parents’ past. Yet, as daring and defiant as she is, Zosha cannot escape, obsessed with events that took place before her birth. She has dreams of Auschwitz, falls in love with “her own private Nazi,” and has an affair with a kinky Holocaust scholar.  Meanwhile, her parents are baffled by the life of their American daughter. With unflinching honesty and wild humor, this collection of autobiographical, linked stories captures what it means to be born in the shadows of death, and to live and love without forgetting.

“Fifteen finely crafted, interconnected stories, loosely based on the life of novelist Pilcer, that cumulatively reflect the tensions haunting the children of Holocaust survivors, . . . Fresh and affecting.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Wit and humor interface with stark realities and unanswerable questions... Provocative fiction, not just for the second generation but for all our collective memories.”
—Booklist

“...a life-affirming story told with verve, wit, and the kind of passion that is often missing from contemporary fiction.”
—Oscar Hijuelos

Sonia Pilcer is the author of the novels Teen Angel, Maiden Rites, Little Darlings, and The Last Hotel, as well as several theatrical productions. She teaches at Berkshire Community College and at the Writer’s Voice in New York City. 

Hardcover / $23.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-261-0 / 180 pages / Fiction

How I Found America
Anzia Yezierska

Introduction by Vivian Gornick

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories and novels, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the Jews of New York’s Lower East Side and their struggle to escape poverty and to partake of America’s promise.  

How I Found America gather together all of Yezierska’s short fiction: the two collections published during her lifetime—Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness—and seven additional tales. Each story is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next. Taken together, they constitute an enduring portrait of a time and a people.  

“All the stories in How I Found America are rich with a primitive energy that rises with volcanic force.”
—Los Angeles Times

Anzia Yezierska was born around 1880 in Russian Poland and immigrated to New York City in the 1890s. In addition to her stories, she is the author of many novels, including the classic Bread Givers and The Open Cage, and a memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. She died in 1970. 

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-298-6 / 314 pages / Fiction

Human Landscapes from My Country
Nazim Hikmet

An Epic Novel in Verse, Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, Foreword by Edward Hirsch

Written during the Second World War while Hikmet was serving a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner, his verse-novel, Human Landscapes from My Country, uses cinematic techniques to tell the story of the emergence of secular, modern Turkey by focusing on the always-entertaining stories of sundry characters from every social class. As vignettes of Turkish life flash before our eyes at movie-like speed, it becomes clear that the poet is also telling the turbulent story of the twentieth century itself and of the ongoing global struggle between tradition, which trusts in God, and modernity, which entrusts the world to human hands. This is the first complete English translation of Hikmet’s epic masterwork. 

“A human landscape of the twentieth century.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“A lastingly fascinating work.”
—Publishers Weekly

Banned in his own country for thirty years, the poetry of Turkey's foremost modern poet, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), has been translated into more than fifty languages. Today Hikmet is recognized around the world as one of the essential voices of our time.

Paperback / $27.95 (Can $33.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-349-5 / 466 pages / Fiction / Poetry

If There Are Any Heavens
A Memoir
Nicholas Montemarano

On January 6, 2021, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, while the U.S. Capitol is under attack, Nicholas Montemarano drives six hundred miles to see his mother, who is hospitalized with COVID pneumonia and in a critical state. For ten days he lives in a hotel minutes from the hospital, alternating between hope and helplessness. This is the story of those ten days.

Written with visceral urgency in the earliest days of grief, If There Are Any Heavens resists categorization: it is a memoir, a poem, a mournful but loving song. It is an almost real-time account of the anxiety, uncertainty, and sorrow brought on by this pandemic. It is also, finally, a devastating homage to a family’s love in a time of great loss.

“If There Are Any Heavens joins a handful of heartbreaking books written in the white-hot storm of grief. In some ways it is reportage, a document salvaged from the wreckage of our pandemic. In some way it read like a play, a monologue unspooling in real time.”
—Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

“A masterpiece that transcends genre. An astonishing achievement. Timely and timeless.”
—Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

Nicholas Montemarano is the author of three novels and a short story collection. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Southern Review, and many other publications. His writing has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the Alumni Professor of Creative Writing and Belles Lettres at Franklin & Marshall College.

Hardcover / $24.00 (Can $32.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-557-4/ 168 pages / Memoir
 

View the table of contents here.

Imagining America
Stories from the Promised Land
Wesley Brown and Amy Ling (Editors)

Thirty-seven short stories from 1900 to the present, written by some of our best authors—African, Asian, European, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Native American—follow the waves of immigration into and migration within the United States. These stories are unique in time and circumstance, yet they address a common dilemma: how to reconcile America's mythologized “promise” with its more complex reality.

Contributors include Sui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, Bernard Malamud, Amiri Baraka, Junot Díaz, Chiyra Divakaruni, Jessica Hagedorn, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie, Oscar Hijuelos, Monfoon Leong, Sandra Cisneros, Grace Paley, Alice Walker, Hisaye Yamamoto, among others

“An excellent tool for exposing YAs to the multicultural experience.”
—School Library Journal

Wesley Brown and Amy Ling also edited the anthology Visions of America.

Paperback / $21.95 (Can $24.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-277-1 / 404 pages / Anthology

View the table of contents here.

Download a Teacher’s Guide here.

“Whether the collection’s short story characters face structural or interpersonal violence, neglect, or the inevitability of death, they are transformed into or out of liminal space… These authors make variable lives understandable to those who do not live them.”—Lesly-Marie Buer, Good River Review

In the Between
21st Century Short Stories
Edited, with a introduction by Brice Particelli

Collected here are seventeen prose stories and two comics created by established and rising stars in American fiction and graphic narrative, all published since the year 2000—masterful works that vary greatly in style and content but spring from a common source: the desire to forge a future in today’s divided America. They speak to our changing society, presenting characters from differing and often mixed cultural and racial backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ableness. Bold and sometimes unsettling, these intimate stories have the power to open our eyes and our hearts. They urge us to embrace a complex understanding of who we are as a nation and who we can be as individuals.

The authors are: Vanessa Hua, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bryan Washington, Roxane Gay, Alice Hoffman, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Akhil Sharma, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Mister Loki, Rion Amilcar Scott, Maria Anderson, Phil Klay, Joy Baglio, Robert Anthony Siegel, Ryka Aoki, Bryan Hurt, Shivana Sookdeo, Casey Robb, and Nancy Fulda.

Brice Particelli, the editor, teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been named a 2022 Creative Writing Fellow in Literature by the National Endowment for the Arts. He is co-editor (with Anne Mazer) of the multicultural anthology of short stories, America Street, and is currently working on his first book. 

Paperback / $18.95 (Can $24.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-546-8 / 216 pages / Anthology
 

In the Company of my Solitude
Americans Writing from the AIDS Pandemic
Marie Howe and Michael Klein (editors)

This essential collection encompasses a broad range of voices on the AIDS pandemic: a college student with HIV who hasn't told her parents, the mother of a homeless and addicted daughter who died from AIDS, a worker in a city shelter, a doctor who comes to understand the limits of medical power, a sex workers and AIDS activist, an AIDS hotline volunteer, and more.
These pieces—essays, memoirs, letters, and diaries—are social, political, and spiritual in nature. Whether angry or hopeful, funny or sad, they speak to us about love and stamina, about ordinary courage, alone and in brave company. Each one, powerful and complete, attains the eloquence of witness.

Among the authors included are Harold Brodkey, Tory Dent, Mark Doty, Carol Muske Dukes, Eve Ensler, Paul Monette, Andrew Sullivan, and many more.

Marie Howe is an acclaimed poet. Among her books are The Good Thief and What the Living Do. Michael Klein’s 1900, and his Poets for Life, which he edited, were both Lambda Literary Award winners.  

Paperback / $14.95 (Can $19.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-208-5 / 222 pages / Anthology
 

Into the Widening World
International Coming-of-Age Stories
John Loughery (Editor)

The twenty-six short stories gathered here come from twenty-two countries and are written by recognized masters as well as by new, emerging writers. They represent the richness of world literature and, at the same time, offer unusual insight into a changing world.
The stories in this collection draw us in by their powerful images of a special time of life, images culled not only from our own backyard but from the many yards across the globe and brought to life by some of the world’s greatest authors.

Contributions by Nissim Aloni, Peter Carey, Michelle Cliff, Margaret Drabble, Jorge Edwards, Margareta Ekström, Nadime Gordimer, Ha Jin, Charles Johnson, Thomas King, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Mario Vargas Llosa, Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel García Márquez, John McGahern, Yukio Mishima, Rohinton Mistry, Bharati Mukherjee, Charles Mungoshi, Alice Munro, V.S. Naipaul, Ben Okri, Mercè Rodoreda, Tatyana Tolstaya, Zoe Wicomb, and B. Wongar.

John Loughery is the author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist John Sloane: Painter and Rebel, and the editor of First Sightings and The Eloquent Essay.

Format / $15.95 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-204-7 / 268 pages / Anthology

Jessie De La Cruz
A Profile of a United Farm Worker
Gary Soto

Born into a family of migrant workers, Jessie De La Cruz worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley from the age of 5, picking cotton, grapes, cantaloupes, onions, and more. She rose to become a member of the fledgling United Farm Workers union in 1966, and then, at the request of its leader Cesar Chavez, became its first woman organizer. Jessie fought injustice toward Mexican and all farm workers, seeking ways for workers to purchase their own farmland.  As an activist, she became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, testified before the Senate, and met the Pope.

Jessie De La Cruz is a role model for all– an ordinary person who became extraordinary by making change happen, not only for herself but for others.

“A portrait of a true American heroine.”
—Studs Terkel

“Chicano writer Soto (who worked in the fields in high school and college) has written [De La Cruz’s] biography, based on personal interviews...teens will be caught by the facts of her hardship and struggle.”
—Booklist

“The author effectively personalizes the struggle of farm workers in a manner that will enable students to understand and care about their triumphs.”
—School Library Journal

Gary Soto is a beloved and award-winning author of many novels, stories, memoirs, and collections of poetry, including Crazy Weekend and The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy. 

Paperback / $11.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-285-6 / 128 pages / Young Adult Nonfiction

The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader
Laura (Riding) Jackson

Some see Laura Riding and Laura (Riding) Jackson as virtually two separate writers, the former a strikingly original Modernist poet and critic, the latter a supposedly reclusive thinker on man and woman, language, meaning, and truth. However, encountering her work in this rich cross-section, one discovers a remarkable consistency of theme developing throughout, from the earliest poems and stories to the "post-poetic" writings of her final years. The selections presented here span sixty-four years (1923-1987) and include famous works of poetry and prose—some long out of print or difficult to find—significant lesser-known writings, and an important previously unpublished late essay, “Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate.”

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $21.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-263-4 / 380 pages / Criticism

Life’s Good, Brother
Nâzim Hikmet

Translated from the Turkish By Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Set in 1925 in Izmir, Turkey, protagonist-narrator, Ahmet, a Communist Party member who shares many biographical details with Hikmet himself, is hiding out in a stone cottage. Ahmet is being pursued by the secret police as he sets up an underground printing press. Using a cinematic technique, Hikmet experiments with the fluidity of time and memory, flashing back to his/Ahmet’s earlier years in Turkey and Russia and forward to the years and experiences to come. Present events and memory freely mix and merge, capturing everyday exigencies as well as the passionate undercurrents of Hikmet’s tumultuous life.

“One of the first and most important ‘European’ novels written in Turkey: its horizons are not limited to the national issues of Turkey, it explores the basic values of life, and its heroes live cosmopolitan lives.”
—Orhan Pamuk

“A man’s never-ending search for life’s truths and loves...Humorous...exciting...profound.”
—James Burt, ForeWord Reviews

Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) is “one of the essential poets of the twentieth century” (Edward Hirsch). Life's Good, Brother has been translated into more than fifteen languages. This first English version is by Mutlu Konuk Blasing, the co-translator (with Randy Blasing) of Hikmet’s poetry and the author of the biography Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-418-8 / 191 pages / Fiction

Little Eden
A Child at War
Eva Figes

Eva Figes was a child in 1939 when her family fled Germany and settled in a London suburb. To escape the daily bombings, Eva was sent to a small, unconventional school in the country town of Cirencester. The town—rooted in old traditions bu now crowded with soldiers, evacuees, and refugees—and the school itself were to become Eva’s “little Eden,” a place of respite from the war and the setting for a formative period in her life. Here, Eva was to discover the world of books and writing, to begin to form her sensibility as a writer and to reckon with her identity as a Jew.
In Little Eden, Figes looks back on this experience and offers a memoir about childhood and war combined. Interweaving a history of Cirencester with her own, she provides a penetrating look at English society and the British war effort as well as a unique portrait of a sensitive young German-Jewish girl displaced from her homeland, beginning a lifelong involvement with British culture.

“A wise and witty book... Figes has a wonderfully wry eye and ear for the rich streak of eccentricity in the English personality.”
—Florence King, New York Newsday

“Eva Figes is at her sharp, hilarious best...”
—The New York Times Book Review

Eva Figes is the author of many novels, as well as the non-fiction works Patriarchal Attitudes and Sex & Subterfuge. She died in 2012. 

Paperback / $8.95 (Can $11.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-137-8 / 140 pages / Memoir
 

Living on the Margins
Women Writers on Breast Cancer
Hilda Raz (editor)

In this powerful anthology of personal narratives, essays, shaped journals, and poems, eighteen women writers share their experiences with breast cancer—from diagnosis and treatment, to aspects of marriage, motherhood, friendship, sexuality, work, and recurrence.
Authors included are Lucille Clifton, Carol Dine, Marilyn Hacker, Annette Williams Jaffee, Maxine Kumin, Amy Ling, , Dr. Susan Love, Pamela Post, Mimi Schwartz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and more.

“These writers use their cancer as creative fuel, bringing alive the fullness of an unknown and sometimes frightening world.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune”

“Full of imagery that cracks open the experience of breast cancer....superbly written and well worth reading...”
—Journal of the American Medical Association

Hilda Raz is the editor-in-chief of the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner, and author of many published essays and two collections of poems. She is professor of English at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

Paperback / $15./8 (Can $23.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-270-2 / 286 pages / Anthology

A Man and a Woman and a Man
Savyon Liebrecht

Translated from the Hebrew by Marsha Pomerantz

From one of Israel’s most acclaimed authors, here is a powerful novel of intertwined passion and mourning. In the unlikely setting of a Tel Aviv nursing home, Hamutal, wife and mother, falls in love “in a blinding storm of emotion.” While visiting her mother, a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer’s, she meets a man tenderly caring for his father in the room across the hall. After an exchange of only a few words, she cannot forget him. As her mother begins to reveal disturbing secrets from the war and painful memories are awakened, Hamutal grows more and more obsessed, until finally she believes that only this man can bring her joy in the midst of such sadness. 

“A finely wrought novel....strikes an original note.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Rewarding psychological depth...A true and resonant and meaningful story...[told] with a sure storyteller's skill.”
—Jerusalem Post

Savyon Liebrecht is the author of many collections of short stories, including Apples from the Desert and Women My Father Knew. A Man and a Woman and a Man was a critically acclaimed  bestseller in Israel. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $21.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-297-9 / 250 pages / Fiction

A Mannered Grace
The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson
Elizabeth Friedmann

This authorized biography of Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) sheds clarifying light on the work of this great modernist and American poet and on the controversies of her personal life that have dominated other biographical accounts. Written by the woman that (Riding) Jackson took into her confidence and with full access to all of her papers, here is the accurate story of (Riding) Jackson’s Socialist family origins in New York, her education and rise to literary prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, her literary circle here and abroad, her 13-year relationship with Robert Graves, her many publications, the small press she ran, her activism in Europe during the Second World War, as well as her return to the U. S. in 1939 when she and Graves parted, her last years in rural Florida—until now largely untold—married to Schuyler Jackson, running a citrus grove, avoiding the publishing world but still writing, and concluding with her death in 1991, only months after she received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

“Because of its new material, its depth of scholarship, and it first-hand witness from the subject herself, this is the new standard against which other biographies of Jackson will be read.”
—Laurel Blossom, American Book Review

Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death. She has edited/co-edited many volumes by (Riding) Jackson, including First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding, The Word “Woman,” Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, and Chelsea 69, a special issue of later works. She lives in Florida.

Hardcover / $37.50 (Can $54.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-300-6 / 570 pages / Biography

A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor
The Treasury of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan

Translated, with an introduction by Charity Cannon Willard and edited, with an introduction by Madeleine Pelner Cosman

This fifteenth-century instruction book—the first written by a woman for women—offers a firsthand glimpse into how medieval women actually lived. Conceived as a companion to her history of women, The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan wrote A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor to offer practical advice on how to live an honorable, “noble” life and thus to qualify for entry into her allegorical, utopian City. 

Just as Christine de Pizan intended in 1405 when this book was written, A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor charms and entertains as it enlightens. For the modern reader, it provides a unique view into the medieval world, the history of women, and the social as well as intellectual history of the period. 

Christine de Pizan (1364-1429?) was France’s first professional woman of letters. She wrote more than twenty distinguished works, most concerning the political life of France or the defense of women. Her Book of the City of Ladies has attained the stature of a world classic.  

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-135-4 / 266 pages / Fiction

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance
Elizabeth Jolley

A New York Times Notable Book

Miss Peabody, a lonely spinster in a London suburb, writes a fan letter to an Australian novelist, Diana Hopewell. In reply, Hopewell sends installments of her novel-in-progress, the bawdy misadventures of a trio of gently lesbian ladies, a headmistress and two companions, touring Europe with a hapless female student. With each mail delivery, Miss Peabody’s fascination with Hopewell and her characters intensifies, until fantasy and reality poignantly merge. A memorable duet of art and life.

“Wonderful . . . like letters from a faraway friend…. the double narrative ends with a flourish of perfect closure… Jolley’s best surprise.”
—Thomas Disch, New York Times Book Review

“Treads the ‘too thin…line between truth and fiction’ to memorable effect.”
—Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World

“Delicately and ironically told, informed by a warm sympathy that tinges even the funniest scenes with rue.”
—Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, The Sugar Mother, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-370-9 / 157 pages / Fiction

Mr. Scobie’s Riddle
Elizabeth Jolley

A New York Times Notable Book

An accident lands octogenarian Mr. Scobie in a ramshackle nursing home in Australia, run by the domineering Matron Hyacinth Price. At first he spends his time listening to classical music and reciting Wordsworth and the Bible, but gradually a disturbing side of the home reveals itself: nocturnal card sharks, carousing fueled by medicinal brandy, and an ongoing extortion of the residents’ financial assets. Scobie decides he must get out as quickly as possible. To protect himself (and his fragile memories and dreams) he rebels through a unique recourse—his very simple riddle. Can a voice calling for dignity be heard?

“With the publication of Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, Elizabeth Jolley joins the handful of Australian writers... of whom it may be said that their books are able to alter the direction of one’s inner life.”
—Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World

“A satire of great verve and acerbity.”
—Thomas Disch, New York Times Book Review

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, The Sugar Mother, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-369-3 / 226 pages / Fiction

A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
Essays by Kimberly Grey

Ingenious out of necessity, these essays erupt from the exile of the author by her mother. In them, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources in an effort to create coherence out of absolute dislocation. To do so, she calls on—beseeches—dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists (among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil) to help her survive, if not fully comprehend, her banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, she becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, pondering motherhood even as her daughterhood has been rescinded. Synthesizing creative writing and theory, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing is a powerful testament to the essay’s potential to help us persevere.

"In every page of this uncompromising, inventive book, Grey grabs hold of [...] the devastation of the unrecognized, unloved, and thereby invaded child—and shakes it, dissects it, studies it, and offers it up. What we learn from these pages is the power of language—searing, ingenious language—to remake the self word-by-word, to ‘reassemble’ an ‘I’ in the present tense." —Julie Carr

Kimberly Grey is the author of Systems for the Future of Feeling and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner at Stanford University, she holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati and currently teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Original Trade Paperback / $17.00 (Can. $23.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-575-8/ 152 pages / Essays

The Murderer
Roy Heath

Winner of the 1978 Guardian Fiction Prize

Galton Flood grows up under enormous psychological and cultural burdens. Overpowered by his mother, and too worshipful of his older brother and father, Galton struggles for independence. He leaves his hometown of Georgetown, Guyana, for remote townships to make a life of his own.
He meets Gemma, a woman who fascinates him, and whom he marries. Then secrets in her past emerge and Galton again feels trapped.
Impossible to put down, impossible to forget, The Murderer is at once a stunning portrait of a “character who might have been created by Dostoevsky” (Spectator) and an immersion into the unsettling world of colonial Guyana.

“A beautiful writer and an unforgettable book.”
—Salman Rushdie

“... a hauntingly powerful story.”
—The New York Times

“A picture of a lost soul emerges that is mysteriously authentic and unique as a work of art.”
—The Observer (London)

Roy Heath, originally from Guyana, emigrated to England at the age of twenty-four to study at London University. A teacher, attorney, and poet, and the author of nine novels, including The Armstrong Trilogy, and The Shadow Bride which was nominated for the Booker Prize. He died in 2008.

Paperback / $9.99 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-169-9 / 190 pages / Fiction

Nazim Hikmet
The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet
Mutlu Konuk Blasing

This important critical biography draws from a myriad of Turkish sources and presents Hikmet as neither the dangerous subversive the military feared nor the legendary figure that he came to be, but as the sum of his opposites. Blasing has given us a moving portrait of a poet for the ages whose life was acted out on the world stage of the twentieth century.

“This evocative biography reveals a towering figure who, up to now, has remained largely unknown beyond his homeland and the Republic of Poetry. Nâzim Hikmet captured the spirit of the new nation with simple but deeply stirring words, and also plunged into the great social and political conflicts of his age. Anyone seeking to understand the twentieth century will be enriched by reading the story of his passionate life. It is a tale full of beauty, and beautifully told.”
—Stephen Kinzer

“Nazim Hikmet is one of the heroes of the twentieth-century poetry. His work arrived to poets in the United States with a great rush of purity, power, and inspiration from a literary culture to which and a poet to whom we were all but oblivious. To have a biography of this singular monumental presence who, like Pablo Neruda, embodied so much history in a life of conviction, commitment, and passion for justice is another gift for which we should be grateful.”
—C.K Williams

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, a native of Istanbul and a professor of English at Brown University, is the author of four books of literary criticism, most recently Lyric Poetry (Princeton). She is also the co-translator (with Randy Blasing) of Persea’s renowned English versions of Nâzim Hikmet’s poetry, among them Poems of Nazim Hikmet and Human Landscapes from My Country, and the translator of Hikmet's last work, the autobiographical novel Life's Good, Brother.

Hardcover / $27.95 (Can $29.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-417-1 / 294 pages / Biography

Nightfather
Carl Friedman

Tell us a story, the children say. It is the 1960s; the Second World War is in the past. Yet their father begins: “When I was in the camp...” He cannot stop telling stories about the concentration camp. Any ordinary event can evoke a memory and another story. The children are his frightened witnesses, his spellbound audience. They live in the everyday world of school and friends, and also in their father's nightmare world. The enormous tragedy of the Holocaust is passed down from parent to child through the powerful bond of love that ties them.

“Friedman writes without ever compromising her compassion or extinguishing her sense of hope....a shocking and touching first novel.”
—New York Times Book Review

“A terse, haunted novel....with the tone and rhythm of a child's tale....heart-wrenching.”
—Margo Jefferson, New York Times

“Like Anne Frank's diary, [Nightfather] transcends genres, addressing adults and children alike....it retains a deep humanity in a pared-down, skeletally beautiful style....An extraordinary novel, written with passion, lucidity, and restraint...A noble addition to the literature of Holocaust survivors and their children.”
—The Forward

Carl Friedman was born in the Netherlands in 1952. She now lives in Amsterdam. Her books include The Gray Lover and The Shovel and the Loom.

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $11.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-210-8 / 136 pages / Fiction

No Mate for the Magpie
Frances Molloy

Belonging in the company of Flann O’Brien and Stevie Smith, this wonderfully original novel tells the story of Ann Elizabeth McGlone, a Catholic girl growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Written in a language of marvelous colloquial vividness, it is actually a series of tiny stories—from Ann’s birth into a large working-class family in Derry to her misadventures os a machinist in a pajama factory, nun (temporary), inmate in a mental institution (treatment for a sore neck), bacon-slicer in Belfast, political demonstrator, and more, until she finally decides to leave “the compellin’ godforsaken shores” of Ireland altogether.
Ann Elizabeth McGlone is an unforgettable character, and No Mate for the Magpie is a gem of a comic novel in the great tradition of Irish storytelling.

“A special story, funny and touching.... You become part of its world.”
—Maeve Binchy

“... Ann Elizabeth McGlone is like a very young, female Irish Candide.”
—The Guardian

Frances Molloy is also the author of Women Are The Scourge Of The Earth. She died in 1991. 

Paperback / $18.95 (Can $24.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-105-7 / 170 pages / Fiction

Normal People Don't Live Like This
Dylan Landis

At the center of this startling fiction debut is Leah Levinson, a teen at sea in the anonymous ordeals of a middle-class upbringing on the Upper West Side in the 1970s. In ten installments, written from varying perspectives, we witness her uneasy relationships with faster, looser peers—girls she is drawn to but also alienated by.

No one, though, alienates Leah more than her mother, Helen. Estranged yet intertwined, they struggle within the confines of their personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are. Just when they seem at a lonely impasse, each makes an impulsive change—Leah taking a risky trip abroad, Helen renting a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from their old patterns, the two of them independently glimpse the possibility of a more hopeful life.

“Nothing pleases and startles a reader like a well done short story, and in Normal People Don't Live Like This, debut author Dylan Landis provides 10 of them, each a star turn. Landis knows when to be dreamy, and she knows when to be sharp, a perfect match for her themes of female desire, the quest for knowledge. [Her] precisely observed women are on the verge of everything, capable of anything.”
—Susan Larson, New Orleans Times Picayune

“Dylan Landis has a gift for creating characters... it is in her character details that the writing comes to life.... Leah is a female Holden Caulfield.... As for Landis, watch her very carefully. Once you can create characters like Leah (or Angeline, Rainey and Helen), there's no stopping you”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“The characters in Dylan Landis's debut short story collection, Normal People Don't Live Like This are blessedly extraordinary.”
—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

Dylan Landis has published stories in Bomb, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. A former journalist, she has won a Poets & Writers California Voices Award and other honors for her fiction. She lives in Washington, DC.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $16.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-354-9 / 182 pages / Fiction

On The Trail of Elder Brother
Glous’gap Stories of the Micmac Indians
Michael B. RunningWolf (Micmac Nation) & Patricia Clark Smith

The Adventures of Glous’gap, embodiment of the Great Spirit, have been told by many Algonquin tribes. With their pipe smoking whales and irascible porcupines, the sixteen Micmac stories included here are wondrous and magical; they are also wise, as Glous’gap teaches his people what it means to be fully human in a fragile world. 
Every reader, from the uninitiated to the specialist will fall under the spell of the powerful, joy-filled volume.

“Collectively, this is a most worthy and thoroughly accessible glimpse of Native American thought.”
—Library Journal

“…strongly shaped and full of rhythmic incantations that both readers and storytellers can enjoy.”
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Michael B. RunningWolf is a direct descendent of Beminuit, the Grand Chief of the Micmac nation. A master storyteller, he lives in Los Lunas, New Mexico. Patricia Clark Smith, of Irish, French-Canadian, and Micmac descent, teaches Native American Literature at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $14.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-288-7 / 145 pages / Native American Studies

Also available as a hardcover

Available in September

Also by Joy Ladin: Family

Once Out of Nature
Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender
Joy Ladin

This compassionate, constructive volume collects eleven essays written between 2008, on the cusp of what Time called America's “transgender tipping point,” and 2021, as anti-trans laws began metastasizing around America. Drawing on her experiences as a trans parent, spouse, teacher, and author, she writes honestly and insightfully about gender, exploring its intersections with feminisms, psychotherapy, divinity, ontology, and even the poems of Emily Dickinson. Written for any curious reader, these essays teach us about who we are, who we can be, and what it means to be human.

"Joy Ladin is our finest writer on transgender issues." —Jennifer Finney Boylan, New York Times bestselling author of She's Not There

Joy Ladin is a widely published essayist and poet, literary scholar, and nationally known speaker on transgender issues. From 2003 to 2021, she held the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University; her gender transition and return to teaching in 2008 made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Joy is the author of twelve books, including the National Jewish Book Award-winning The Book of Anna, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Through the Door of Life, and ten books of poetry. She is also a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Paperback / $20 (Can. $27) / 978-0-89255-586-4 / 192 pages / Essays

One Another
Monique Schwitter

Translated from the German by Tess Lewis

When a writer googles the name of her first love and discovers he committed suicide years ago, she is deeply shaken. Memories of Petrus begin to flood into her mind, followed by the memories of other loves, one after another.  What exactly is love?  How does it come and go?  She begins to search her personal history for answers. Twelve men. Twelve chapters in a novel.  Melancholy Petrus, handsome actor Jakob, Simon with his pet rat, gay Nathanael, a student, her brother.  Her husband’s story is supposed to be the last.  But as story after story unfolds, the past and present entangle until her orderly search is interrupted by present-day complications of love and by a startling event overlooked at home that begins to seize the plotline of both her art and life.
One Another dazzles as Monique Schwitter deftly weaves an intricate, moving, and wonderfully eccentric portrayal of love and art—erotic, chaotic, comedic, tragic, and glorious.

“Nimble, entertaining, and at the same time unobtrusively profound: if only we could say this of books more often”
—Die Presse (Austria)

“Monique Schwitter... [has] the gentlest gaze and the hardest kick.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)

Monique Schwitter was born in 1972 in Zurich, Switzerland, and now lives in Hamburg, Germany. She is the award-winning author of novels, short stories, and plays. Her first story collection won the 2006 Robert Walser Prize. Goldfish Memory, her most recent collection, is her only other work in English translation, published in 2015.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-497-3 / 224 pages / Fiction

The Open Cage
Anzia Yezierska

Selected and with an Introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris
Afterword by Louise Levitas Henriksen

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the lives of Jews of New York City’s Lower East Side.
The Open Cage collects sixteen of her best stories and excerpts from her autobiography to illustrate her extraordinary storytelling gift as well as her personal experience as an immigrant woman.

“Intensely personal stories and recollections... tightly and effectively told.... Her stories of old age hit the mark...”
—The New York Times

“Magnificently selected and organized....  Yezierska’s work [is] a unique literary contribution to the history of women in this country,”
—Library Journal

Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970) is the author of many stories and novels about New York's immigrant Jews, including Bread Givers and How I Found America, and the memoir Red Ribbon on a White Horse.  

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-036-4 / 00 pages / Fiction / Autobiography

Our House in the Last World
Oscar Hijuelos

35th Anniversary Edition, featuring a new forward by Pablo Medina

Pulitzer Prize winner Hijuelos’s debut depicts the struggle of an American-born son of Cuban immigrants to make sense of his “Cubanness” amid the harsh realities of 1960s New York City. 

Filled with the sights and sounds of Cuba’s Oriente province and New York City, the music and films of the fifties, lusty fantasies and the toughest of life’s realities, it is the unforgettable story of Hector Santinio who is haunted by tales of “home” (a Cuba he has never seen) and by the excesses and then the death of his loving father.

“Just about the finest first novel ever written… one of those great works of art that breaks your heart and yet miraculously makes you whole - a towering achievement.”
—Junot Díaz

“Virtuoso writing that describes immigrant life in New York… a novel of great warmth and tenderness.”
—New York Times Book Review

“What a pleasure that Our House in the Last World, in a new edition, will be readily available when we most need it, a story that stands up for the dignity of American immigrants.”
—Esmeralda Santiago, author of When I Was Puerto Rican

Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) was born in New York City. He is the author of nine novels and a memoir. Our House in the Last World (1983) won the Rome Prize, given by the American Academy in Rome. In 1990, he became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Hijuelos's novels have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-484-3 / 242 pages / Fiction

No Longer Available 

Outside Rules
Short Stories About Nonconformist Youth
Claire Robson (Editor)

These compellingly readable stories focus on the vulnerability and resilience of teens who are too brainy, unathletic, poor, the “wrong” religion, emotionally fragile, from non-traditional families, not model-thin, or simply bent on following a unique path.

Among the contributors are Sandra Cisneros, Rand Richards Cooper, Chris Fisher, K. Kvashay-Boyle, Wally Lamb, Reginald McKnight, Sandell Morse, Katharine Noel,  Rebecca Rule, Annette Sanford, Akhil Sharma, seventeen-year-old Caitlin Lonning, and others.

“This thought-provoking collection of short stories evokes the many expressions of the outsider. Neither edgy nor extreme, each story can provide material for discussion about alienation, fitting in, and compassion for the self and for others who are or are perceived as different.”
—VOYA

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $12.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-316-7 / 178 pages / Young Adult Fiction / Anthology

The Oxboy
Anne Mazer

An ALA Notable Book

“No one can tell that I am the son of an ox. Like my father, I am hardworking, and I have a stubborn, tenacious nature. But so do many pure humans...” In the mythic past, when people and animals lived side by side, were friends, married and had offspring, the oxboy would have been accepted and safe. But now he is an outcast and must hide his true identity—or die.
Anne Mazer’s stunning allegorical fantasy examines our relationship with nature—and our feelings about our own natures—as it reveals and challenges our deepest prejudices. 

A Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies.

“An exquisitely told tale of a purely imaginary mythical world, whose ‘people’ and ‘animals’ are both disturbingly similar to, and quite different from, our own.... The Oxboy leaves one moved and edgy. In other words, it’s a really good book.”
—Chaim Potok

“What happens to the oxboy will keep readers of all ages turning the pages.... a most significant novel.”
—The ALAN Review

Anne Mazer is the author of several widely acclaimed books, including the novel Moose Street, and a picture book, The Salamander Room. She is the editor of the anthologies America Street, Going Where I'm Coming From,  A Walk in My World, and Working Days.

Paperback / $6.95 (Can $9.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-240-5 / 106 pages / Fiction

“Part Beauty and the Beast, part monk meditation, part pulse-galloping thriller, part Salingeresque coming-of-age with an untamable femme lead, part intoxicated art school sex party, part goldenrod glow the morning after a storm—this novel illuminates how we can rescue others by allowing our own rescue.”— Aimee Seu, Southeast Review

Read a conversation about the book from Ron Slate’s On The Seawall here.

Paradise Close
A Novel
Lisa Russ Spaar

In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade—fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support—finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s.

Decades later, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change.

These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.

“Soulful, sexy, extraordinarily lyrical…. If this is what happens when poets write novels, they should all write them.”
—Eleanor Henderson

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Madrigalia, Orexia, Satin Cash, Vanitas, Rough, and Blue Venus, a collection of essays. She is the editor of several anthologies, including More Truly and More Strange. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Hardcover / $25.95 (Can $34.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-551-2 / 232 pages / Fiction

Patriarchal Attitudes
Women in Society
Eva Figes

First published in 1970, Patriarchal Attitudes has since become famous and is considered a classic feminist text. Writing with wit as well as scholarship, Eva Figes examines the factors which have helped place women in subservient roles in most societies, including the influence of Christianity, the rise of capitalism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and sexual taboos. She draws on a wide range of material to illuminate one of the central issues of our time.
Urgent, brilliantly reasoned, elegantly written, Patriarchal Attitudes is an important, enduring work. 

Eva Figes is the author of many novels, as well as the non-fiction book Sex & Subterfuge, and the memoir Little Eden. She died in 2012.  

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $12.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-122-4 / 192 pages / Gender Studies

Places I’ve Taken My Body
Molly McCully Brown

In seventeen intimate essays, Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—in her case one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy. These essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, from the rural American South of her childhood to the medieval streets of Bologna, Italy.
Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her, inside and out.

“[A] work of great humanity.”
—Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased

“I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I know.”
—Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon

Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and, with Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us. She lives in Gambier, Ohio, and teaches at Kenyon College 

Hardcover / $24.95 (Can $31.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-513-0 / 224 pages / Essays
 

Places I’ve Taken My Body
Molly McCully Brown

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020

In this “uncommonly wonderful collection of essays” (Rain Taxi), Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—one shaped since birth by cere- bral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder Throughout the book (which now includes an essay on Seamus Heaney, Notre Dame, and the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic), Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry.

“Places I’ve Taken My Body will strike chords in anyone who’s ever questioned their faith, been challenged by their body, or who has ever been vulnerable—which is to say, all of us.” —Jaime Herndon, Foreword Reviews

“Without a trace of self-pity, Places I’ve Taken My Body accomplishes what literature does best: it allows readers an opportunity to step into someone else’s shoes.”—Mia Levitin, Times Literary Supplement

Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and, with Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us. She teaches in the MFA program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.  

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-538-3 / 232 pages / Essays
 

Primrose Hill
Helen Falconer

School's out and summer has transformed Primrose Hill, the London park where best friends Si and Danny hang, into a tropical island. Si plans to spend his vacation chilling—smoking weed, listening to tunes, maybe falling in love. But Danny needs his help... killing his mother’s boyfriend, a drug dealer who beats her up. Si can see Danny's point, but murder just isn’t his scene.
Enter Eleanor. She’s beautiful, obsessed with sex and death. Si’s loyalty to Danny and his attraction to Eleanor lead him into a dilemma beyond is control.

“Gritty and profane in the best sense... Primrose Hill achieves a thrilling momentum.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Sweats atmosphere, crackles with bad intentions... a vivid negative of inner city life.”
—Sunday Times (London)

“Intense, intelligent, and highly readable... stunning.”
—Guardian (Manchester)

Helen Falconer has been a journalist at several major British newspapers. She is also the author of Sky High.

Paperback / $12.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-294-8 / 212 pages / Fiction
 

Red Ribbon on a White Horse
My Story
Anzia Yezierska

Introduction by W.H. Auden

First published in 1950, Red Ribbon on a White Horse is Anzia Yezierska’s autobiography, her life as she saw it, from the Polish ghetto to the sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side and then to Hollywood, when she was at the height of her success.
Her collection of stories, Hungry Hearts, written with vivid emotional power about the Jews of the immigrant community in which she grew up, was made into a movie by Samuel Goldwyn in 1921. Yezierska offers a sharp portrait ofHollywood in its golden years, as well as an important account of her work with the WPA Writers Project later.
Yezierska’s focus on success and failure—how they felt and what they meant to her as an artist and a woman—make Red Ribbon on a White Horse a universal document.

Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970) is the author of many stories and novels about New York’s immigrant Jews, including Bread Givers, How I Found America and The Open Cage. 

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-124-8 / 228 pages / Memoir

The Resilient Writer
Tales of Rejection and Triumph from 23 Top Authors
Catherine Wald (Editor)

Every author, from unpublished to bestselling, experiences rejection from agents, editors, publishers, critics, even loved ones. It comes with the turf. But rejection can stop a writer dead in his tracks unless he learns how to persevere.
In these conversations successful authors recount their personal struggles, offer strategies for coping, and inspire us with their stories of ultimate triumph. rewrote eight hundred pages and went from an agent’s thumbs-down to the bestseller list.
Dramatic, surprising, funny, practical, and wise, this is a must-read for bibliophiles and scriveners alike.
Writers included are Frederick Busch, Bret Easton Ellis, Janet Fitch, Arthur Golden, E. Lynn Harris, Kathryn Harrison, Wally Lamb, Elinor Lipman, Esmeralda Santiago, Amy Tan, Edmund White, and more.

“Unusually frank, often startling and illuminating.”
—Joyce Carol Oates

Catherine Wald is a freelance writer whose work had appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Woman’s Day, Reader’s Digest, Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere.

Paperback / $14.95 (Can $21.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-307-5 / 236 pages / Writing / Literature

The Return of Felix Nogara
Pablo Medina

The dictator is dead and suddenly the exiles can return. So begins Pablo Medina’s most compelling work to date, a novel set on Barata, an imaginary Caribbean island (not unlike Cuba). Sent to the United States at the age of twelve, Felix Nogara has remained attached to his native land through dissident fellow exiles and through his family legacy. Thirty-eight years later, he returns, and with a wise and sardonic cab driver as his guide, he travels through the ruined landscape to recover his lost history, his lost happiness.  With wit, imagination, and visionary insight, Medina takes the reader to an island in chaos in order to explore the deepest regions of an exile’s heart. 

“Medina...writes a gritty yet graceful prose. [A] searching and lyrical second novel.”
—John Freeman, Washington Post Book World

“[D]elicious, astute, darkly funny...this novel is right on target.”
—Bob Shacochis, New York Times Book Review

Pablo Medina is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose including Exiled Memories and The Marks of Birth. He is on the core writing faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina, and is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Paperback / $15.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-279-5 / 272 pages / Fiction

Also available as a hardcover

The Rock Pool
Cyril Connolly

First published in 1936, this engaging satire chronicles the clash between two cultures—the snobbish, cliché-ridden English world that Naylor, the hero, represents, and an international group of artists and writing who inhabit a French Riviera town. Naylor, a smug young literary man from Oxford, at first studies the dissolute inhabitants as if they were aquatic organisms in a pool. But he soon is demoralized and swindled by them, and as winter approaches he remains, scarcely distinguishable from them.
Much has been written of the expatriate temperament, but nowhere has it been treated with greater wit, spirit, and elegance of style, than in this small, enduring classic.

“Sentence by sentence—as Naylor the protagonist subverts himself among personalities more livid than he could dream—it is superb.”
—John Leonard, The New York Times

Cyril Connolly, the famed critic and essayist, founded the British magazine Horizon in 1939. He is the author of Enemies of Promise, The Condemned Playground, Ideas and Places, The Modern Movementm and The Unquiet Grave. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-059-3 / 138 pages / Fiction

Salt
Earl Lovelace

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize

Guinea John, mythical ancestor of Blackpeople in Trinidad, put two corncobs under his armpits and flew away from the scene of his enslavement, back to Africa. But his descendants, having eaten salt, were too heavy to fly and would not follow....
One hundred years after official Emancipation, the diverse people of Trinidad—Africa, Asian, and European—still have not settled into the New World. Two men set out to free them from “old captivities” and to welcome them to their island homeland. Around them swirl a cast of unforgettable men and women, each telling his own story in his own voice, each striving with passion and wit to make sense of life in a still-young country where the roles of enslaved and landowner still linger, but “the sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom.”

“A novel confident in its rhythms, in the authority of its selling, driven by an exultant compassion for its characters.”
—Derek Walcott

“[Lovelace’s] generous, torrential prose...seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Earl Lovelace was born and still resides in Trinidad. Among his many award-winning books are the novel The Dragon Can't Dance and A Brief Conversion and Other Stories. 

Paperback / $17.95/ ISBN 978-0-89255-235-1 / 260 pages / Fiction

The Secret of Me
A Novel in Poems
Meg Kearney

Fourteen-year-old Lizzie and her older brother and sister were adopted as infants, a fact of life in the McLane household. But dry facts rarely encompass feelings, and what it feels like to be adopted is something Lizzie never dares openly discuss with her loving parents—or with outsiders, including her boyfriend. In this vivid, heartfelt tale, told entirely through her own poetry, Lizzie finds the courage to speak the secret of her identity.

An Afterword by the author discusses her experience as an adopted child and how writing can help make sense of one’s life. Also included are a Guide to this Book’s Poetics, Some Poems Lizzie Loves (reprints of poems by Lucille Clifton, Hayden Carruth, Anne Sexton, Donald Hall, and others), and Recommended Books and Links about adoption and poetry. 

“A sincere, at times poignant, novel-in-verse reads like a memoir…. A real balance of personal exploration as an adoptee and new teenage emotions creates a powerful blend in a warm character ready to connect and sustain that bond to readers.…[Adolescents] will get a good dose of real poetry with unique and inspiring language.… Substantive backmatter… makes this a first-rate offering.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Meg Kearney is the author of An Unkindness of Ravens, When You Never Said Goodbye and The Girl in the Mirror. She is the director of the Solstice Creative Writing Programs of Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. 

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-336-5 / 136 pages / Young Adult

View the table of contents here.

Short
An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, & Other Short Prose Forms
Alan Ziegler (Editor)

Here are hundreds of pieces of no more than 1250 words, from twenty-four Western countries, written by nearly two hundred contributors, from the sixteenth century to the present. They run the gamut, from short-short stories, prose poems, and brief essays to pieces that stretch and defy genre, such as tableaus, apothegms, sketches, and tropisms. They are mysterious, humorous, delightful, shocking, magical, profound, highly entertaining, laced with emotion—and addictive.

“Essential reading for anyone interested in the short form.... The array of writers is unprecedented, and the pieces are fabulous, engaging, and, well, they’re short!”  
—Gary Shteyngart

Contributors include Michel de Montaigne, Joseph Joubert, Giacomo Leopardi, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Daniil Kharms, Stanley Kunitz, Samuel Beckett, E. M. Cioran, Czesław Miłosz, Octavio Paz, Clarice Lispector, Zbigniew Herbert, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Donald Barthelme, Tomas Tranströmer, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, Luisa Valenzuela, Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, Ron Padgett, Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jamaica Kincaid, Anne Carson, Meena Alexander, Ana María Shua, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Jayne Anne Phillips, Kimiko Hahn, Etgar Keret, Ben Marcus, Dave Eggers, Ben Lerner, Amelia Gray, and many more.

Paperback / $24.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-432-4 / 354 pages / Anthology

The Shovel and the Loom
Carl Friedman

Chaya, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, lives in the old Jewish quarter of Antwerp, Belgium. Twenty years old, a philosophy student (and nonbeliever), she takes care of the children of a Hasidic family by day. At night she stays up reading - Nietzsche, Einstein, the Baal Shem Tov. The more she reads, the less she seems to understand. Does God exist? What does it mean to be a Jew? Chaya questions the reasons for anti-Semitism, the role of women in Judaism, the reasons for suffering. Mr. Apfelschnitt, an old friend of her father, tells Chaya that Creation is a masterpiece, that Science can’t replace God or the Torah. But her father advises her to study physics. Trying to put her Auschwitz past behind her, Chaya’s mother obsesses over baking, tea, and weaving. Her advice to Chaya: go out dancing. 

Finally, it is Chaya’s love for Simeha, the three-year-old boy in her care, that provides the key. She clashes with his tradition-bound father, then propelled by a tragic accident, learns just how much she is tied to her people and her faith. 

“In The Shovel and the Loom, Carl Friedman perfectly accomplishes the delicate task of making unspeakable stories at once accessible and shocking.”
—Katherine Albert, The New York Times Book

“One this is certain: Friedman’s vivid emotional power. Her prose is spare and reticent and her narrative gifts impressive. Among the emerging voices of the second generation of Holocaust survivors she deserves high rank.”
—Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

Carl Friedman was born in 1952 and now lives in Amsterdam. She is the author of Nightfather and The Gray Lover. 

Paperback / $12.00 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-231-3 / 168 pages / Fiction

Show Me A Hero
Great Contemporary Stories about Sports
Jeanne Schinto (Editor)

Combining two great American traditions—sports and short fiction—this anthology presents twenty-one first-string stories written by many of our most revered contemporary North American writers. It offers a glimpse into the world beyond winning and losing that lies deep within us all. 

Contributors include Toni Cade Bambara, T. C. Boyle,  Mark Helprin, Ann Packer, John Sayles, Elizabeth Spencer, John Edgar Wideman, and more.

Jeanne Schinto is the author of three books, Shadow Bands: Stories; Children of Men, a novel; and Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City. She has also edited the short fiction anthologies Virtually Now and The Literary Dog: Great Contemporary Dog Stories. Ms. Schinto teaches literature and creative writing at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts. 

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-209-2 / 265 pages / Anthology

Sky High
Helen Falconer

Disenchanted pretty-boy Ferdia is having a hell of a time. His dad has run off with an embarrassing pop star and his mom is shacked up with a local hooligan half her age. Meanwhile, gangs at school want to beat him to a pulp, and he feels increasingly detached from Matt (his pissed-at-the-world best friend) and their post-punk, “tower block rock” band, Boybits.
So when sexy Cassandra, the young, new English teacher, takes a very pointed interest in his music and wellbeing, Ferdia is thrilled, not to mention smitten. However, this is no ordinary schoolboy crush the two can't get enough of each other. Ferdia’s on cloud nine, until the line between lust and obsession turns razor thin, and a series of mind-blowing events push him to the brink. Erotic, provocative, and gripping, Sky High has an intensity and pace that will leave readers breathless.

“... an impressive second novel, full of the spikes and troughs of tightly contained emotion.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“Gritty, erotic and emotionally intense...”
—Publishers Weekly

“[Falconer] handles both the narrative and the varied cast with tremendous skill and sympathy.”
—The Telegraph (UK)

Helen Falconer has been a journalist at several major British newspapers. She is also the author of Primrose Hill.

Paperback / $12.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-304-4 / 236 pages / Fiction

Starting With “I”
Personal Essays by Teenagers
Youth Communication

Edited by Andrea Estepa and Philip Kay, Foreword by Edwidge Danticat

In thirty-five frank and intimate personal essays, teens express their views on serious issues like violence, racism, and teen parenting, as well as common teen experiences like dating, getting a first job, and starting college. Their stories resonate with their desire to discover who they are, through the written word, and to share their discoveries with their peers.

“A rich and varied collection with themes to which teens from all kinds of backgrounds will be able to relate. An inspiration to aspiring young authors.”
—School Library Journal

Youth Communication, based in New York City, helps teenagers develop their reading and writing skills so they can acquire the information they need to make thoughtful choices about their lives. They are also the authors of The Heart Knows Something Different.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-228-3 / 200 pages / Young Adult Essays / Ages 12+

Stepping Up
The Story of Curt Flood and His Fight fo Baseball Players' Rights
Alex Belth

With a Foreword by Tim McCarver

Stepping Up is the first-ever biography of Curt Flood, the All-Star with a conscience who stood up to Major League Baseball. Flood was a fixture for the championship Cardinals teams of the 1960s. He had survived a hard road to stardom and was a hero in St. Louis. He had given his heart and soul to the city, and had made a life there. Then, suddenly, in 1969, Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. He was crushed. But instead of accepting the trade as generations of players before him had done, he shocked baseball by suing the sport over its unfair reserve system. Flood’s courageous case went to the Supreme Court and paved the way for free agency, a major advance in players’ rights that changed the face of the game forever.

“Alex Belth’s stirring and hugely readable Stepping Up plugs a significant gap in the history of baseball's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s.”
—Allen Barra, Chicago Tribune

“Stepping Up, a wonderful tale about Curt Flood, is a splendid reminder that once upon a time, athletes really did stand for more than the bottom line of their contract.”
—Mike Vaccaro, New York Post

“The first biography of the gifted centerfielder who challenged the reserve clause.… A fine read on a pioneer in baseball and African American history.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

Alex Belth is the editor of The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan. He lives in the Bronx.

Hardcover / $22.95 (Can $30.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-321-1 / 228 pages / Biography

Streets of Gold
Marie Raphael

It is 1901. Marisia and her family flee Poland ahead of the czar's soldiers. But at Ellis Island, her sister and parents are turned away. Now Marisia and her brother, Stefan, must find their way in the New World alone.

Marisia dreams of becoming an artist. Can she overcome the hardships of immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side, the struggle to find work, and the tyrannical views of those who would stand in her way? With only her wits, her talent, and her feisty spirit to guide her, she sets out to turn dream into reality.

“Streets of Gold will carry young people to another time and place. Readers won't want the story to end!”
—Diana Pardue, Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Marie Raphael is a life-long educator who has worked with young people at many levels and in many situations—from a Harlem pre-school in New York City to college classrooms in Boston and California to a rural junior high school. Presently, she lives in northern California and supervises student teachers at Humboldt State University. She is also the author of A Boy From Ireland.

Paperback / $12.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-256-6 / 216 pages / Fiction

Sudden Flash Youth
65 Short-Short Stories
Christine Perkins-Hazuka, Tom Hazuka, Mark Budman (Editors)

A unique collection: the only anthology of short-short stories to focus on youth.

In no more than 1000 words, young protagonists examine crucial moments of decision and challenge, involving love, faith, sports, accidents, toys, pets, slavery, the end of the world—from the historical past into virtual reality and beyond. Whether action-packed or meditative, realistic or fantastical, these brief stories brim with the vitality and intensity of youth.

Among the contributors are Steve Almond, Peter Bacho, Richard Bausch, Daphne Beal, Gayle Brandeis, Richard Brautigan, Ron Carlson, Kelly Cherry, Stuart Dybek, Dave Eggers, Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Jim Heynen, Meg Kearney, Anne Mazer, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maryann O'Hara,Pamela Painter, Sonia Pilcer, Bruce Holland Rogers, Robert Shapard, and Alice Walker.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-371-6 / 224 pages / Short Stories / Anthology / Ages 15+

The Sugar Mother
Elizabeth Jolley

A New York Times Notable Book

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they’re locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in—and then can’t get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. “Wickedly amusing ... subversive” (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.

“Jolley’s warmest novel, her most moving, and possibly the best introduction to her fiction.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Humor, suspense, and exquisite characterization.... Jolley has us in her able grip.”
—The New Yorker

“A droll domestic comedy…emotionally astute and, at times chilling...as much a character study as it is a thriller...”
—The Washington Post

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-362-4 / 212 pages / Fiction

Travels in Vermeer
A Memoir
Michael White

Longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Part travelogue, part soul-searching investigation into romantic love and intimate discourse on art, this erudite and lyrical memoir encompasses the author’s past—his difficult youth, stint in the Navy, alcoholism, and the early death of his first wife—and ends with his finding grace and transformation through deeply affecting encounters with the paintings of Vermeer, an artist obsessed with romance and the inner life, who has captivated millions, from the seventeenth century until now.

“All the sorrow of love is compressed into White’s memoir.  But so, too, is all the consolation of art. Nothing I’ve read...suggests so eloquently what [Vermeer's paintings] hold for a contemporary viewer…. Figures it took a poet to get it this beautifully, thrillingly right.”
—Peter Trachtenberg

“[Travels in Vermeer] touches on the mysteries of seduction, loss, and the artistic impulse.  It shows how time can be interrupted.”
—Clyde Edgerton

“This book is a treasure and a guide. It is a type of healing for the intellect and the heart.”
—Rebecca Lee

Michael White is the author of four award-winning collections of poetry including Vermeer in Hell. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and heads the creative writing department at UNC-Wilmington.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $20.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-437-9 / 178 pages / Memoir

The Unquiet Grave
A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Cyril Connolly

Considered by many to be his most enduring work, The Unquiet Grave is a highly personal journal, written during the devastation of the Second World War and filled with reflections on aging, the break-up of his marriage, and the horrors of the world around him. Dazzlingly original in both form and content, this book has continued to influence generations of writers and readers. 

“A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.”
—Ernest Hemingway

“That The Unquiet Grave has been published in paperback by Persea means that civilization has a chance.”
—John Leonard, The New York Times

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Paperback / $14.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-058-6 / 142 pages / Memoir

The Vera Wright Trilogy
My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife
Elizabeth Jolley

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point—now a doctor and writer—she looks back on her life’s journey.
Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour-de-force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love. 

“A haunting portrait of a woman who came of age during WWII in England, forging her identity in courageous circumstances. . . [A] lyrically written, imaginatively observed and emotionally compelling work.”
—Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, and The Sugar Mother. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $19.95 (Can $22.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-352-5 / 560 pages / Fiction

Virtually Now
Stories of Science, Technology and the Future
Jeanne Schinto (Editor)

In this unique anthology, you will find an intriguing mix of first-rank science fiction writers and mainstream literary writers. All are using the power of storytelling to explore the human costs and rewards of living in an era increasingly dominated by science and technology. Here, futuristic tales of alien-earthling encounters, cyberlife, and new social orders stand easily alongside stories about more immediate realities, such as e-mail romance, bio-technology, and high-tech warfare. 

Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Thomas Fox Averill, Alsion Baker, Michael Bishop, Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, Octavia E. Butler, Stephen Dixon, Audrey Ferber, Karen Joy Fowler, Richard Goldstein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dorris Lessing, Ralph Lombreglia, and Simon Ortiz.

Jeanne Schinto is the author of three books, Shadow Bands: Stories; Children of Men, a novel; and Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City. She has also edited the short fiction anthologies Show Me A Hero and The Literary Dog: Great Contemporary Dog Stories. Ms. Schinto teaches literature and creative writing at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts. 

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-220-7 / 254 pages / Anthology

Visions of America
Personal Narratives from the Promised Land
Wesley Brown and Amy Ling (Editors)

In this diverse collection, three dozen 20th-century writers muse about their experiences in and observations of America. Though the essays are organized in rough chronological fashion, some emphasize place, others identity, others the immigrant experience or the changing times. Some Americans must leave home to find insights, while some non-Americans come here to observe. Amidst the play of ideas and emotions surrounding ethnicity and identity, these essays celebrate the enduring truths of the land.

Contributors include James Baldwin, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vivian Gornick, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ron Kovic, Sonia Pilcer, Mario Puzo, Adrienne Rich, Monica Sone, Gary Soto, and more.
 
Wesley Brown and Amy Ling are the editors of Imagining America.

Paperback / $20.00 (Can $22.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-174-3 / 369 pages / Multicultural Anthology

A Walk in My World
International Short Stories about Youth
Anne Mazer (Editor)

This volume of sixteen stories, written by some of the world's best writers—including three Nobel Prize winners—will transport readers to all parts of the globe to meet kindred spirits in other cultures on their journeys to adulthood.

Included are stories by Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Toni Cade Bambara (United States), Italo Calvino (Italy), Anita Desai (India), Elizabeth Jolley (Australia), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Frank O’Connor (Ireland), V. S. Pritchett (England), Valentin Rasputin (Russia), Cora Sandel (Norway), and Xiao Hong (China), among others. 

“High in literary merit and accessible to teens.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This collection offers many compelling tales for pleasure reading or classroom discussion.”
—School Library Journal

Anne Mazer is the author of several widely acclaimed books, including the novels Moose Street and The Oxboy, and a picture book, The Salamander Room. She is the editor of the anthologies America Street, Going Where I'm Coming From. and Working Days.

Paperback / $12.95 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-249-8 / 220 pages / Young Adult Fiction / Anthology

When You Never Said Goodbye
An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother
A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries
Meg Kearney

Eighteen-year-old adoptee and aspiring poet, Liz McLane, transfers to NYU in Greenwich Village for two reasons: New York City is the place to be a writer, and it’s where she last saw her birth mother, when, at five months old, she was given away. Liz is determined to find the answers to the questions that have always haunted her: “Who was the woman who gave me life?” and “Why was I given away?” Supported by her sister and friends, and with the help of a compassionate social worker and a private investigator, she pursues her search to its surprising conclusion.

“I loved everyone I met in these pages and felt every moment of deep love and deep loss. When You Never Said Goodbye is a gift to the world, a book you’ll want to read slowly, savoring both the eloquent writing and the brave, beautiful story.”
—Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming

“An all-around sparkling story of self-discovery.”
—Briana Shemroske, Booklist

Meg Kearney is an award-winning poet and author of two previous of books about Liz McLane, The Secret of Me and The Girl in the Mirror.

Hardcover / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-479-9 / 280 pages / Young Adult Novel

The Women My Father Knew
Savyon Liebrecht
Translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

A literary mystery, set in New York City and bohemian Tel Aviv, by one of Israel’s most admired popular authors.

After his successful first novel, Meir suffers writer’s block. Then his father, poet and charmer of women, who supposedly died decades earlier, contacts him and they arrange to meet. Fragmented, troubling memories of a forgotten childhood time spent alone with his father rise to Meir’s consciousness. Swirling floodwater, a man hiding from the Gestapo, a woman flirting, a bloodstained sheet. What happened during that time, and why did his father disappear?
While solving these riddles of the past, Meir inhabits the borderland between memory and artistic creation. There he finds emotions so deeply tangled in his being that they can only be expressed through art. He begins to write again—a story of a loving son who witnessed a seduction and perhaps also a murder.

“… totally enthralling, The Women My Father Knew is a must-read… mysterious, tremendously thought-provoking… a quick read with enough suspense that you won’t want to put it down.”
—Maayan Jaffe, Baltimore Jewish Times

“One of the most important writers of our generation.… [In The Women My Father Knew] Liebrecht legitimizes the return to ourselves, to our personal biography.”
—MAARIV (Tel Aviv)

“Liebrecht knows how to delve into the archaeological layers of her characters… She empathizes with them and she loves them—and love is contagious.”
—Modern Hebrew Literature

Savyon Liebrecht was born in Germany to Holocaust survivors, and immigrated to Israel as a yong child. An award-winning playwright and author, her published books include the story collections Apples from the Desert and A Good Place for the Night, and the novel, A Man and a Woman and a Man. She lives in Tel Aviv. 

Paperback / $16.95 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-356-3 / 214 pages / Fiction

The Word Woman
Laura (Riding) Jackson

Edited by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark

Laura (Riding) Jackson was a woman of vision, and at the heart of her work in poetry and prose is a vision of woman. This volume brings together some of her most profound and explicit writings on the subject of woman’s role in the story of human identity. The core piece, “The Word ‘Woman’” was written in Majorca during 1933-35 when she was known as Laura Riding and is published here for the first time. In it Riding searches for an understanding of woman by investigating definitions of the word and it historic and literary usages; what women say about themselves; and the physical body of woman in appearance and impression Among the topics she discusses are motherhood, “man-fever” in women, work satisfaction, sexual equality, and the essential relationship between man and woman.
Also included in this volume are three later essays and two stories.
Laura (Riding) Jackson sought to understand “the woman element in human identity.” She has come very far. The Word “Woman” belongs in the company of other groundbreaking works of gender study.

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-185-9 / 212 pages / Gender Studies

Working Days
Short Stories about Teenagers at Work
Anne Mazer (Editor)

In this collection of fifteen nearly all original short stories, teenagers go to work, many of them for the first time. They work in fast food restaurants, sell subscriptions by telephone, do odd jobs, clerk, tutor, and harvest crops.

Whether the job is exciting or dull, something to avoid later on or a true vocation, the teenagers in these stories discover that work is who we are and how we live—and it often leads to the unexpected.

Authors include Victor Martínez, Lois Metzger, Graham Salisbury, Ann Hood, and eleven more.

“Almost without exception, the pieces are thought-provoking and consciousness-raising, and are certain to ring a bell with teenagers working, unemployed, or planning their careers.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Anne Mazer is the author of several widely acclaimed books, including the novels Moose Street and The Oxboy, and a picture book, The Salamander Room. She is the editor of the anthologies America Street, Going Where I'm Coming From, and A Walk in My World.

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-224-5 / 208 pages / Anthology

The Writings of Christine de Pizan
Selected and edited by Charity Cannon Willard

Christine de Pizan, France’s first woman of letters, is widely known for her classic The Book of the City of Ladies, but very few of her many other distinguished works has been translated into English. 
The Writings of Christine de Pizan offers lengthy excerpts of nearly all of Christine’s works, in authoritative and gracious translations. Edited by Charity Cannon Willard, the foremost authority on Christine, and rendered into English by major scholars and translators, it presents the full range of Christine de Pizan's accomplishment.

Charity Cannon Willard is internationally recognized as the foremost authority on Christine de Pizan. She is the author of the biography, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works, and translator of A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies. She has edited the critical editions of the Livre de la Paix and (with Eric Hicks) the Livre des Trois Vertus. 

Paperback / $13.50 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-188-0 / 384 pages / Nonfiction