Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. The last Midwestern traveling circus is due to arrive in a rural village it has visited for a century of summers. Like the village, the circus is on its last leg. It's down to one elephant and a handful of acrobats. The circus boss's sweetheart is dying. The former starring act is recovering from cancer. The assistant, Frank, plans to retire after this show. Meanwhile, twins Heza and Abe wander the hot fields and roads, waiting for the circus or anything better. HEZADA! I MISS YOU is a novel that explores tradition, love, and suicide--set under the fading tents of small-town America and the circus.
The Cassandra follows a woman who goes to work in a top secret research facility during WWII, only to be tormented by visions of what the mission will mean for humankind. Mildred Groves is an unusual young woman. Gifted and cursed with the ability to see the future, Mildred runs away from home to take a secretary position at the Hanford Research Center in the early 1940s. Hanford, a massive construction camp on the banks of the Columbia River in remote South Central Washington, exists to test and manufacture a mysterious product that will aid the war effort. Only the top generals and scientists know that this product is processed plutonium, for use in the first atomic bombs. Mildred is delighted, at first, to be part of something larger than herself after a lifetime spent as an outsider. But her new life takes a dark turn when she starts to have prophetic dreams about what will become of humankind if the project is successful. As the men she works for come closer to achieving their goals, her visions intensify to a nightmarish pitch, and she eventually risks everything to question those in power, putting her own physical and mental health in jeopardy. Inspired by the classic Greek myth, this 20th century reimagining of Cassandra's story is based on a real WWII compound that the author researched meticulously. A timely novel about patriarchy and militancy, The Cassandra uses both legend and history to look deep into man's capacity for destruction, and the resolve and compassion it takes to challenge the powerful.
Poetry. IMMORTAL SOFT-SPOKEN is a collection of short prose poems that resonate well beyond the page. In this ecstatic and beautiful book of dervish essays, Robert Vivian uses style, imagination, and stunning feeling to give voice to the small moments of wonder so often overlooked. This book is a tender and joyful reminder of our shared humanity.
The stories in The Expense of a View explore the psyches of characters under extreme duress. In the title story, a woman who has moved across the country in an attempt to leave her past behind dumps an empty suitcase into the Columbia River over and over again. In another story, a woman who wakes up mornings only to discover she's been shooting heroin in a night trance, meets her doppelganger on a rainy Oregon beach. Most of the characters are displaced and disturbed; they suffer from dissociative disorders, denial, and delusions. The settings—Florida, eastern Washington, Seattle, and the Oregon coast—mirror their lunacies. While refusing to look at what’s right in front of themselves might destroy them, it’s equally likely to be just what they need.
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Through these powerful and insightful essays, David Olimpio explores the residual effects of sexual abuse, divorce, and grief. With surprising candor and a disarming sense of humor, Olimpio takes on the outwardly wholesome landscape of his suburban Houston childhood and the complex sexual relationships in his adult life. Both poignant and poetic, THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION leaves us with a sense that our identities have the power to transcend our circumstances. "THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION is risky, and David Olimpio's voice is modern and insightful. He has found a way to share his journey without ego or shame, and arrives at the center of one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves: Who am I and how did I get here? Olimpio answers these questions with a fearless, sometimes heartbreaking, honesty that speaks truth to the human experience." Janna Marlies Maron "THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION a road map, a refutation, and a reminder that while shame and confusion may well reverberate across time, we need not be the products of the transgressions visited upon us." Ben Tanzer "'In the end, our stories are the most powerful things we have, ' David Olimpio writes in THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION. Born not of a singular form but forged from many essay, memoir, hybrid, collage this book is as textured and varied as the human experience. It may defy easy classification, but readers will agree: here is an unforgettable debut that will shatter you. With devastating honesty and keen, poetic insight, Olimpio captures the fluidity of time and selfhood as he pierces the heart of the age-old question: What makes us? 'We create our memories; they do not create us.'" Sara Lippmann "A truly extraordinary piece of writing with a superb, graceful economy of style and zero pretension, THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION is also not 'misery memoir.' It is wry and witty and brutally honest without the cheap shock factor. You will want to read it at least twice." Sarah Lotz "The ambiguity of time, the confusion of numbers, the cycle of cicadas and the Big Bad Wolf, these are just some of the elements that David Olimpio softly wraps around us before pulling us seamlessly into his past. Heart-wrenchingly brutal memories laid out honestly on the page, THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION is all confession, the reader, a priest, sitting raptly, sometimes teary-eyed, behind a dark screen." xTx"
One of Esquire's 50 Best Biographies of All Time Winner of the 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Award | Winner of the 2020 Washington State Book Award | Named a 2019 Southwest Book of the Year | Shortlisted for the 2019 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize What happens when an undocumented teen mother takes on the U.S. immigration system? When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida’s mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at sixteen, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans. Following a misstep that led to her deportation, Aida found herself in a Mexican city marked by violence, in a country that was not hers. To get back to the United States and reunite with her son, she embarked on a harrowing journey. The daughter of a rebel hero from the mountains of Chihuahua, Aida has a genius for survival—but returning to the United States was just the beginning of her quest. Taking us into detention centers, immigration courts, and the inner lives of Aida and other daring characters, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez reveals the human consequences of militarizing what was once a more forgiving border. With emotional force and narrative suspense, Aaron Bobrow-Strain brings us into the heart of a violently unequal America. He also shows us that the heroes of our current immigration wars are less likely to be perfect paragons of virtue than complex, flawed human beings who deserve justice and empathy all the same.
Edited by Tatiana Ryckman. Is it possible to be free while bound by an American myth? TO THOSE BOUNDED explores the effects of living in the far-reaching shadow of stereotypes, and the pressures one feels when their actions are always framed as reinforcing or rejecting an ethnic caricature. In this collection the author reflects on how popular media have shaped his identity, and how he's learned to navigate the expectations it creates. Drawing inspiration from MAUD MARTHA by Gwendolyn Brooks and PENS...ES by Blaise Pascal, the personal vignettes that compose TO THOSE BOUNDED examine Black exceptionalism and the mythos of criminality among African American men. Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies.
They should have walked away. They should have left well enough alone. Gilbert gave them every chance and they still wouldn't stop breaking into his car, again and again. He could imagine them laughing at him as they destroyed what was his. But he'll show them. He'll make them pay. Gilbert's car is about to get some killer upgrades. "Sometimes it feels like a book was written just for you. Demented, funny, and way more philosophical than you'd think a novella about a deadbeat booby-trapping his car would be, DEATH THING reads like part-Harold Pinter, part-Roger Corman." -- Adam Cesare, author of MERCY HOUSE and TRIBESMEN.
"Troubled souls haunt these thirteen interrelated stories of loss and rebirth. From a cramped passenger van in Ghana to a cash-only roadside motel in Utah to a cursed forest in Japan, Donald Quist's narratives draw connections between the common and inexplicable. The diverse characters that people these stories are foreign and flawed but intimately familiar."--
"Exquisite. . . . Anchoring the story is a pair of Cairo-born sisters whose fates spin in radically different directions in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. . . . A lovely novel that does a remarkable job of bringing troubling realities to light, and life." --Vanity Fair A powerful novel about two Egyptian sisters--their divergent fates and the secrets of one family Sisters Rose and Gameela Gubran could not have been more different. Rose, an Egyptologist, married an American journalist and immigrated to New York City, where she works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gameela, a devout Muslim since her teenage years, stayed in Cairo. During the aftermath of Egypt's revolution, Gameela is killed in a suicide bombing. When Rose returns to Egypt after the bombing, she sifts through the artifacts Gameela left behind, desperate to understand how her sister came to die, and who she truly was. Soon, Rose realizes that Gameela has left many questions unanswered. Why had she quit her job just a few months before her death and not told her family? Who was she romantically involved with? And how did the religious Gameela manage to keep so many secrets? Rich in depth and feeling, A Pure Heart is a brilliant portrait of two Muslim women in the twenty-first century and the decisions they make in work and love that determine their destinies. As Rose is struggling to reconcile her identities as an Egyptian and as a new American, she investigates Gameela's devotion to her religion and her country. The more Rose uncovers about her sister's life, the more she must reconcile their two fates, their inextricable bond as sisters, and who should and should not be held responsible for Gameela's death. Rajia Hassib's A Pure Heart is a stirring and deeply textured novel that asks what it means to forgive, and considers how faith, family, and love can unite and divide us.
