In this compelling and spirited debut novel, 16-year-old Rayna Evans has spent the last three years in a mental institution for seeing angels—intent on remaining free, she ignores signs that she may be slipping into a world she has tried to climb out of. When her hallucinations begin showing up at school, can she keep her sanity and prevent students from dying at the hands of angels she cannot admit to seeing? Psychiatry, fantasy, and realism come together here in a story of a young girl struggling with identity, secrets, and confronting her greatest fears.
Haderlap is an accomplished poet, and that lyricism leaves clear traces on this ravishing debut, which won the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2011. The descriptions are sensual, and the unusual similes and metaphors occasionally change perspective unexpectedly. Angel of Oblivion deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and lyrical prose. The novel tells the story of a family from the Slovenian minority in Austria. The first-person narrator starts off with her childhood memories of rural life, in a community anchored in the past. Yet behind this rural idyll, an unresolved conflict is smouldering. At first, the child wonders about the border to Yugoslavia, which runs not far away from her home. Then gradually the stories that the adults tell at every opportunity start to make sense. All the locals are scarred by the war. Her grandfather, we find out, was a partisan fighting the Nazis from forest hideouts. Her grandmother was arrested and survived Ravensbrück. As the narrator grows older, she finds out more. Through conversations at family gatherings and long nights talking to her grandmother, she learns that her father was arrested by the Austrian police and tortured - at the age of ten - to extract information on the whereabouts of his father. Her grandmother lost her foster-daughter and many friends and relatives in Ravensbrück and only escaped the gas chamber by hiding inside the camp itself. The narrator begins to notice the frequent suicides and violent deaths in her home region, and she develops an eye for how the Slovenians are treated by the majority of German-speaking Austrians. As an adult, the narrator becomes politicised and openly criticises the way in which Austria deals with the war and its own Nazi past. In the closing section, she visits Ravensbrück and finds it strangely lifeless - realising that her personal memories of her grandmother are stronger. Illuminating an almost forgotten chapter of European history and the European present, the book deals with family dynamics scarred by war and torture - a dominant grandmother, a long-suffering mother, a violent father who loves his children but is impossible to live with. And interwoven with this is compelling reflection on storytelling: the narrator hoping to rid herself of the emotional burden of her past and to tell stories on behalf of those who cannot.
When two strangers appear during the annual MacDougal family Christmas celebration in the Blue Ridge Mountains, siblings Shayne, Morwenna, and Bobbie must band together to fend off the growing danger and figure out who they can trust.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts explores the wilds of the Grand Tetons—and the mysteries of love, murder, and madness—in this engrossing and passionate novel. The sole survivor of a brutal crime back East, Reece Gilmore settles in Angel’s Fall, Wyoming—temporarily, at least—and takes a job at a local diner. One day, while hiking in the mountains, she peers through her binoculars and sees a couple arguing on the bank of the churning Snake River. And suddenly, the man is on top of the woman, his hands around her throat... By the time Reece reaches a gruff loner named Brody farther down the trail, the pair is gone. And when authorities comb the area where she saw the attack, they find no trace that anyone was even there. No one in Angel’s Fall seems to believe Reece—except Brody, despite his seeming impatience and desire to keep her at arm’s length. When a series of menacing events makes it clear that someone wants her out of the way, Reece must put her trust in Brody—and herself—to find out if there is a killer in Angel’s Fall, before it’s too late.
Texas, Being: A State of Poems collects more than forty-five poems from a beautiful and brutal state. Some are about the music of their languages. Some speak to the dead, some to the sun, and others to omissions of history. One concerns a hedgehog cactus, and another a roller rink. From “Happy, Texas” to “Palestine, TX,” from seashores to skeletons to Selena, all are in one way or another about Texas, but good poems are always about more than one thing. Selected by Jenny Browne, 2017 poet laureate of Texas, these poems draw a picture of one of America’s vastly sublime yet most audaciously independent corners. In these diverse voices, the state is a lovely and painful contradiction of space and meaning. Texas is a place “where blind catfish cruise” and wild asters grow. It’s a frame of mind where Jenny Boully writes “the history is unending” and Mexican American studies professor Christopher Carmona can “feel the slowness of time.” Jorge Luis Borges wrote of it as “an endless plain / Where a man’s cry dies a lonely death.” Victoria Chang writes that “there is so / much sky that even birds / get lost." Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson describes her hometown as a “fiercely loving city tougher on the outside / but smooth as pecan shells,” and Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us to “be patient, sure there’s lots of bad around, / but more room for good too, with all this empty.” Whether it is Joshua Edwards imagining his photographer father or Primo Feliciano Marín’s declaration “Hail Texas, fraught with charms unknown,” these voices, past and present, give us a glimpse into the poetic soul of the nation’s most willful state. Poets include Robert A. Ayres, Curtis Bauer, Jan Beatty, Layla Benitez-James, Jorge Luis Borges, Jenny Boully, Catherine Bowman, Susan Briante, Bobby Byrd, Christopher Carmona, Aline B. Carter, Rosemary Catacalos, Victoria Chang, Hayan Charara, Joshua Edwards, Tarfia Faizullah, Carrie Fountain, Vievee Francis, Mag Gabbert, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Lucy Griffith, Aaron Hand, Fady Joudah, Jim LaVilla-Havelin, Emma Lazarus, J. Estanislao Lopez, Primo Feliciano Marín, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Walter McDonald, Jasminne Mendez, Townsend Miller, Ange Mlinko, Naomi Shihab Nye, Shin Yu Pai, Cecily Parks, Emmy Pérez, Octavio Quintanilla, Iliana Rocha, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, ire’ne lara silva, Jeff Sirkin, Margo Tamez, Lao Yang, Loretta Diane Walker, Emily Winakur, and Matthew Zapruder.
Clarity, focus, and startling detail are the stuff of lasting images--in poetry or photography. Who better, then, to illuminate what would elude us than a native state photographer and native state poet laureate? Selected from hundreds of photographs and poems, these pairs show surprising harmony of vision and insights about the vast, wide plains, their dramatic colors, and the calm, vigorous people who thrive beneath their sprawling skies, accepting the risks and splendor of it all. Together and on their own, these photos and poems astonish and delight, stagger and jostle, each resonating with texture and joy.
My soul was inspired by spiritual love and the Angels are part of that world. I am an observer of my own evolution in poetry and photography. Angel Witness is a testimony to my life-long passion to give creative birth to spiritual messages through the language of my heart. Infused with this are photos of my friends, the Angelic world, that I know through the lens of the camera. Gail McNaughton Angel Witness
Bitter Creek Holler is a collection of poetic reflections on life with an emphasis on grief and loss which I hope will help the grieving heart. My heart needed a voice to cry its sorrow as I went through my own grief journey and encountered others on their theirs. After the sudden, unexpected death of my 22-year-old husband, a police officer in 1981, and now today, years later, the sudden, unexpected death of my 32-year-old son due to Covid 19, I find myself once again walking the road of confusing emotions and striving to hold on to hope. While the reader and I may never meet, it is certain, that as fellow humans, we are alike. We have lived, loved, gained and lost. May you ultimately be encouraged and realize that you are not alone. I wish you peace.
