Half memoir and half philosophical improvisation, each focuses loosely on a relationship with a man in the author's life: The Pharmacist's Mate with her recently deceased father, and 8 with "my pedophile" (as Fusselman painfully refers to her childhood assailant). Along the way, Fusselman covers sea shanties and artificial insemination, World War II and AC/DC, alternative healers and monster-truck videos. Fusselman's "wholly original epigrammatic style" (Vogue) "makes the world strange again, a place where dying and making life are equally mysterious and miraculous activities" (Time Out New York).

    Containing more than fifty new poems and a generous gathering from his collections of the past decade-Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, and Nine Horses-Aimless Love showcases the best of his poetic maneuvers: the everyday ends in the infinite, playfulness is paired with empathy, irony gives way to wonder. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

    Constantly. He falls helplessly in love with pretty much every girl he meets—and rarely is the feeling reciprocated. Time after time, he hops in a car and tears across half of America with his heart on his sleeve. He’s continually coming up with outrageous schemes, which he always manages to pull off. Well, almost always. But even when things don’t work out, Rothbart finds meaning and humor in every moment. Whether it’s humiliating a scammer who takes money from aspiring writers or playing harmless (but side-splitting) goofs on his deaf mother, nothing and no one is off-limits.But as much as Rothbart is a tragically lovable, irresistibly brokenhearted hero, it’s his prose that’s the star of the book. In the tradition of David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley but going places very much his own, his essays show how things that are seemingly so wrong can be so, so right.

    1 pick: 5 Small Press Books to Read, BookRiot, 2016Uses magical realism, revolutionary politics, and romantic adventure to bring to life a colorful community of squatters in an imaginary Latin American city  Damnificados is loosely based on the real-life occupation of a half-completed skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, the Tower of David. In this fictional version, 600 “damnificados”—vagabonds and misfits—take over an abandoned urban tower and set up a community complete with schools, stores, beauty salons, bakeries, and a rag-tag defensive militia. Their always heroic (and often hilarious) struggle for survival and dignity pits them against corrupt police, the brutal military, and the tyrannical “owners.” Taking place in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, the novel has elements of magical realism: avenging wolves, biblical floods, massacres involving multilingual ghosts, arrow showers falling to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth, and a trash truck acting as a Trojan horse.

    He, an accountant worn down by the day-to-day struggles of the nine to five, is dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. She attempts, with scornful wit, to shock him out of his commuter's habits and into an experience of ecstasy.Man Booker Prize shortlisted Deborah Levy whips up a storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this passionate work of dramatic poetry.Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her most recent novel, Swimming Home (2011 And Other Stories, UK publication, and 2012 Bloomsbury US publication), was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards (UK Author of the Year) and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, while her most recent collection of short stories, Black Vodka: ten stories, was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and its title story "Black Vodka" shortlisted for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award. An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell was first published in 1990 in the United Kingdom and appears now in a new edition, its first US edition.

    

    After surviving the worst year of her life, she's struggling to build a new life for herself and her son as a social worker. Perhaps in doing a job that makes a difference, she can find some sense of purpose and solace in her shattered faith.For new Moses Lake game warden Mart McClendon, finding a sense of purpose in life isn't an issue. He took the job to get out of southwest Texas and the constant reminders of a tragedy for which he can't forgive himself.But when a little girl is seen with the town recluse, Mart and Andrea are drawn together in the search for her identity. The little girl offers them both a new chance at redemption and hope--and may bring them closer than either ever planned.

    Inspired by the familiar lines from William Wordsworth, “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,” she uncovers the evidence presented to us daily by nature, in rivers and stones, willows and field corn, the mockingbird’s “embellishments,” or the last hours of darkness.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    ever. This book left me speechless and with my heart in my throat the whole way through..." Sometimes, love can surprise you… Rowan McClain has everything a girl could ask for: a handsome, charming husband and a successful career as a romance writer. But when Prince Charming’s affections begin to wane and her mother’s cancer returns, Rowan’s perfect world begins to crumble. When Army Lieutenant Luke Cartwright arrives in Iraq, the last thing on his mind is falling in love. But when a friend gives him a copy of RJ McClain’s book, he writes a letter to the author using his friend’s name on the return address. After exchanging several letters and sharing their deepest secrets, the two become unlikely friends. After a year with no letter from Iraq, Rowan becomes convinced that the soldier she had befriended has been killed in the line of duty. Now divorced from her husband, she moves on with her life. But when her sister sets her up on a blind date with a soldier named Luke Cartwright, Rowan begins to feel as though she has met him before. Will she give into her feelings for him? Or will thoughts of the man she had come to love through his beautiful letters keep her from giving her heart to Luke? What Fans are Saying: “One of my top five favorites... ever. This book left me speechless and with my heart in my throat the whole way through. The emotions were intense, the characters were perfect and it will take me a long time to get it out of my head. I am in love with Luke and Rowan and wish their story had never ended.” BookLover70 “It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry, it will make you believe in true love. 5 Stars!” MelanieB “Luke and Rowan’s story was just so true to life. This was such a well written book; the characters so believable. This one is just emotional from the beginning, from romance to humor to tears. Definitely a read again book.” Sherri M

    In this sequence of memoir-esque poems, Sierra DeMulder pulls at the threads of a past abusive relationship and the long road to forgiveness. The poems themselves become an act of recovery and reclamation, wherein the poet finds again the voice which was taken from her. These are hard poems, made up of clarity and healing, which attempt to share some of their peace with the world.

    The silver and china is still dented and cracked from Yankee invaders. And the houses have names...and memories. Nora Bondurant is running away--from her husband's death, from his secrets, and from the ghosts that dog her every step. When she receives a telegram informing her that she has an inheritance, Nora suddenly has somewhere to run to: a house named Avoca in Natchez, Mississippi. Now, she's learning that the lure of Natchez runs deep, and that, along with Avoca, she's inherited a mystery. Nora's aunt Amalia Bondurant was killed in a murder/suicide, and the locals are saying nothing more--except in hushed, honeyed tones. As Nora becomes more and more enmeshed in the community and in her family's history, she learns surprising things about the life and death of her aunt: kinship isn't always what it seems, loyalty can be as fierce as blood relations, and every day we are given new mercies to heal the pain of loss and love.

    In Harlan Coben's "Missing You," nearly 20 years after being kicked to the curb unceremoniously by an old fiance, an NYPD detective runs into that very man on a dating site, leading to a reawakening, a realization, and ultimately, the deaths of several people. This review details which readers will ultimately enjoy this novel, which is virtually everyone. The face of Jeff Raynes is staring back at Kat Donovan. She contacts him and is surprised by his response. He fails to even remember her at first, then remembers, showing only modest affection. As detailed in this review, the twists that ensue are among the reasons for the success of "Missing You." If that wasn't strange enough, a Connecticut college student asks for Kat's assistance in finding his mother, who has mysteriously gone missing. On top of that, he asked for Kat in particular. How does he even know her? Need more? Kat visits the contract killer who is rotting away in prison for murdering her father, a man who is now denying his involvement. Who can Kat trust? The twists in "Missing You" are literally stacked on top of one another, which creates a pulsating ride for Coben fans. Not that the author needs help, but this review also details an alternative outcome that might have added even more miles to this thrill ride.

    Then about the murders, which happened later."When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he once knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of America's greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a modern classic.

    It contains more than twenty primarily erotic short stories and vignettes, along with explicit illustrations by the author in his signature style. As an exploration of extremes, in lush prose and evocative images, Tonight, Again is not to be missed by the author's many fans.

    Archeophonics, defined as the archeology of lost sound, is one way of understanding the role and the task of poetry: to recover the buried sounds and shapes of languages in the tradition of the art, and the multitude of private connections that lie undisclosed in one's emotional memory. The book takes seriously the opening epigraph by the late great James Schuyler: "poetry, like music, is not just song." It recognizes that the poem is not a decorative art object but a means of organizing the world, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, "into transient examples of shaped behavior." Archeophonics is a series of discrete poems that are linked by repeated phrases and words, and its themes and nothing less than joy, outrage, loss, transhistorical thought, and day-to-day life. It is a private book of public and civic concerns.