The spellbinding tale of six queer witches forging their own paths, shrouded in the mist, magic, and secrets of the ancient California redwoods. Danny didn’t know what she was looking for when she and her mother spread out a map of the United States and Danny put her finger down on Tempest, California. What she finds are the Grays: a group of friends who throw around terms like queer and witch like they’re ordinary and everyday, though they feel like an earthquake to Danny. But Danny didn’t just find the Grays. They cast a spell that calls her halfway across the country, because she has something they need: she can bring back Imogen, the most powerful of the Grays, missing since the summer night she wandered into the woods alone. But before Danny can find Imogen, she finds a dead boy with a redwood branch through his heart. Something is very wrong amid the trees and fog of the Lost Coast, and whatever it is, it can kill. Lush, eerie, and imaginative, Amy Rose Capetta’s tale overflows with the perils and power of discovery — and what it means to find your home, yourself, and your way forward.
eff Taylor, twenty-five, is a former college basketball star whose path in life has been changed by an accident: he lost half of his right hand to a threshing machine. He had been prepping for the MCAT, but Jeff's chopped hand triggered a loss of confidence in his medical ambitions. He ends up working as a private eye for Sherman Investigations, a player in the underbelly of California politics. Jeff's boss calls in the middle of the night. He asks Jeff to drive to the cold northern California coast to bail out an old friend, state senator Allan Watkins. Watkins has been arrested for drunk driving and charged with vehicular manslaughter of a man named Joe Garston. While Jeff transports Senator Watkins and his wife back to their vacation rental, the senator forces Jeff to pull over at the accident site. Watkins makes a case for his innocence, claiming he's been set up. Jeff rejects the idea and simply drops them off at the cabin. But now he's curious. He starts asking questions around town. That night, he gets stomped. Rather than being scared off, Jeff sets out on a quest to find the truth behind the death of Joe Garston...
From London to Corsica to Paris — as a young woman pursues the truth about her late mother, two captivating love stories unfurl in this captivating novel from the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Paris Apartment and The Guest List. Kate Darling's enigmatic mother — a once-famous ballerina — has passed away, leaving Kate bereft. When her grandmother falls ill and bequeaths to Kate a small portrait of a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Kate's mother, Kate uncovers a mystery that may upend everything she thought she knew. Kate's journey to find the true identity of the woman in the portrait takes her to some of the world's most iconic and indulgent locales, revealing a love story that began in the wild 1920s and was disrupted by war and could now spark new love for Kate. Alternating between Kate's present-day hunt and voices from the past, The Book of Lost and Found casts light on family secrets and love — both lost and found.
This is the first anthology of nature writing that celebrates California, the most geographically diverse state in the union. Readers—be they naturalists or armchair explorers—will find themselves transported to California's many wild places in the company of forty noted writers whose works span more than a century. Divided into sections on California's mountains, hills and valleys, deserts, coast, and elements (earth, wind, and fire), the book contains essays, diary entries, and excerpts from larger works, including fiction. As a prelude to the collection, editor Steven Gilbar presents two California Indian creation myths, one a Cahto narrative and the other an A-juma-wi story as told by Darryl Babe Wilson. Familiar names appear in these pages—John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, John McPhee, M.F.K. Fisher, Gretel Ehrlich—but less familiar writers such as Daniel Duane, Margaret Millar, and John McKinney are also included. Among the gems in this treasure trove are Jack Kerouac on climbing Mt. Matterhorn, Barry Lopez on snow geese migration at Tule Lake, Edward Abbey on Death Valley, Henry Miller on Big Sur, and Joan Didion on the Santa Ana winds. Gary Snyder's inspiring Afterword reflects the spirit of environmentalism that runs throughout the book. Natural State also reveals the many changes to California's landscape that have occurred in geological time and in human terms. More than a book of "nature writing," this book is superb writing about nature.
National Bestseller "The Seas took me back to how I felt as a kid, when you’re newly falling in love with literature, newly shocked by its capacity to cast a spell..." ?Maggie Nelson (from the Introduction) A Most Anticipated Book of Summer at BuzzFeed, NYLON, and more. Moored in a coastal fishing town so far north that the highways only run south, the unnamed narrator of The Seas is a misfit. She’s often the subject of cruel local gossip. Her father, a sailor, walked into the ocean eleven years earlier and never returned, leaving his wife and daughter to keep a forlorn vigil. Surrounded by water and beckoned by the sea, she clings to what her father once told her: that she is a mermaid. True to myth, she finds herself in hard love with a land-bound man, an Iraq War veteran thirteen years her senior.The mesmerizing, fevered coming-of-age tale that follows will land her in jail. Her otherworldly escape will become the stuff of legend. With the inventive brilliance and psychological insight that have earned her international acclaim, Samantha Hunt pulls readers into an undertow of impossible love and intoxication, blurring the lines between reality and fairy tale, hope and delusion, sanity and madness.
Fiction. Winner of the Florida Authors and Publishers Association Award. Winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award. Winner of the Chicago Public Library's 21st Century Award. Winner of a Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction. Winner of the International Latino Book Award in Most Inspirational Fiction. Amina Gautier's THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives... that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon....Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
Life is going surprisingly well for Arthur Less: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freedy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis have Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US. [...].