After being released from prison, Glen Davis returns to his hometown only to commit double homicide within forty-eight hours of his return. Sheriff Bobby Blanchard, as upright as Glen is despicable, walks in the path of Glen’s destruction and tries to rebuild the fragile ties of the families and community they share. Dark secrets that have been simmering for two generations explode to the surface, allowing us a chilling glimpse at how evil can fester in a man’s heart and eat up his soul.“This is the novel that will live with you day and night.” — Kaye Gibbons“Cancel the competition for the suspense thriller of the year. Larry Brown has already won it with Father and Son.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch“Larry Brown is one of the great unsung heroes of American fiction... His work is a reminder of a reason to read.” —San Jose Mercury News

    Wendell Berry tackles the problem of truth and recollection as Andy Catlett gathers the details of this tragedy from the fragile memories of the townspeople. Tenderly, yet with directness, this short novel encompasses a changing way of life at the end of World War II.

    As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth. Out of these unlikely yet incontestably fascinating materials - including innumerable details about the madness and calamity in many artists' and writers' lives, the eternal critical affronts, the startling bigotry, the countless suicides - David Markson has created a novel of extraordinary intellectual suggestiveness. But while shoring up Reader's ruins with such fragments, Markson has also managed to electrify his novel with an almost unbearable emotional impact. Where Reader ultimately leads us is shattering.

    The book follows the exploits of Bruno Dante. In New York his life is a train wreck and is turned into an upheaval when he gets the call from Los Angeles that his screenwriter father is in a coma and not expected to live. The next three weeks on the streets of L.A will change Bruno Dante's life forever. The book expresses the bewilderment of its hero and its author with rawness, crudeness, and shock, and also serves as a very beautiful and touching homage to Fante's famous father John Fante.

    This collection by the author of Airships and Bats Out of Hell explores lost moments in time with intensity, emotion, and an eye to the past. In "Uncle High Lonesome," a young man recalls his Uncle Peter, whose even temper was marred only by his drinking binges, which would unleash moments of rage hinting at his much deeper distress. Fishing is transformed into a life-altering, almost mystical event in "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis," when a huge fish caught on a line threatens to pull a young boy, and his entire world with him, underwater and out to sea. And in "Snerd and Niggero," a deep friendship between two men is inspired by the loss of a woman they both loved, a woman who was mistress to one and wife to the other. Viewed through memory and time's distance, Hannah's characters are brightly illuminated figures from a lost time, whose occassionally bleak lives are still uncommonly true.

    The incomparable Lewis Nordan's first two collections of short fiction--WELCOME TO THE ARROW-CATCHER FAIR and THE ALL-GIRL FOOTBALL TEAM--originally published in 1983 and 1986, have long been out of print in all editions. Collectors' items, these two books are now almost impossible for Nordan fans to find anywhere.To rectify that, Algonquin is delighted to announce a selection of fifteen of the best stories from the two books, newly arranged and introduced by fellow Mississippian, bookseller Richard Howorth, and with a foreword by the author. Critics have called Lewis Nordan's fiction "extraordinary" and "marvelous" and "stunning" and "scorching" and "story-telling genius." The selected stories show that genius in the making. "Characters that people the South hobble and dance across the pages of his short stories."--United Press International; "Delightfully eccentric situations and colorful language add up to a work that is even stronger than WOLF WHISTLE."--Library Journal.

    Lark is obsessed with the beauty of youth and his own mortality, his hairline and the loss of so many of his friends to AIDS, and, above all, with a stunningly virile man who haunts his days and his dreams.

    The special disaster in which the name originated had long been lost from memory when the poet Longfellow chose the spot as a background for his description of the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” and gave it an association that it will scarcely lose while the English language endures. Nor does it matter to the legend lover that the ill-fated schooner was not “gored” by the “cruel rocks” just at this point, but nearer to the Gloucester coast.

    Renowned for their meanness and always armed with their legendary nickel-plated colts, they patrol the streets of Harlem and attempt to keep some semblance of law and order.

    A delightful fish story. Definitely a good read!

    Now, in an equally groundbreaking work, Benson takes on the late Wallace Stegner--conservationist, teacher, and author of more than two dozen works of history, biography, essays, and fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971), the National Book Award-winning Spectator Bird (1976), and the bestselling Crossing to Safety (1987). Drawing on nearly ten years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, this authorized biography traces the trajectory of Stegner's life from his prairie childhood in Saskatchewan and teenage years in Salt Lake City to his prominence in the environmental movement and the impact of his Stanford University creative writing program--whose students included Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, and Ivan Doig. Wallace Stegner is a close encounter with one of the greatest American writers of our time.

    It is a deep blow to a life already in fragments: a dead-end job delivering Wonder Bread; a strained relationship with his aging father, a veteran of World War Two; and weekly visits to the VA hospital where Larry, a former Army medic, leads a support group for disabled Vietnam vets. As he struggles to win Vicki back, Larry finds he is in danger of a far more imminent sort: A disturbed member of the support group--a trained CIA assassin--has disappeared, and is stalking Larry and his family. His methods send an unmistakable message: The game will end in death. At the same time, "The Names of the Dead" is a harrowing and heartfelt portrait of the Vietnam War and the men who fought it. The year is 1968, the place A Shau valley, and Larry Markham--nineteen and green--must find a way to keep his platoon alive. Here we see the stories Larry cannot bring himself to tell--of friends who made the ultimate sacrifice in a war their country scorned."The Names of the Dead" is the story of a man trying to find his way back to himself--a story about storytelling and memories that refuse to fade. It is the story of a man rediscovering the courage to love one woman, and, through her, the world, his country, his family, and finally himself.

    A wonderful debut, this funny yet sad novel recounts a young man's attempt--as father, husband, and son--to put together the pieces of an ordinary, and at the same time, very puzzling life.

    Selected from an unusually wide variety of publications, John Edgar Wideman's choices for 1996 place stories from esteemed national magazines alongside those from some of the smallest and most innovative literary journals. Dazzling new work from favorite authors includes Mary Gordon's" Intertextuality," in which a sentence by Proust propels the narrator into an intricate portrait of her Irish American grandmother. From Robert Olen Butler comes the wry and warm tale " Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," in which a man learns the consequences of marital distrust. Alice Adams employs her customary finesse to contrast the stinging vulnerability of early adolescence with the burdens and pleasures of midlife. Including contributions from Joyce Carol Oates, Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Rick Bass, and an array of stunning new talent, The Best American Short Stories 1996 is a rewarding, en

    A collection of short stories features a young boy's confused attempt at staging a protest, a scientist's obsession with volcanoes, and baseball in pre-revolutionary Cuba.