I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation


Francis Picabia - 2003
    Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia's poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. For too long, Picabia's writings have been presented as raw events, rule-breaking manifestations of inspirational carpe diem. This book reveals them to be something entirely different: maddening in their resistance to meaning, full of outrageous posturing, and hiding a frail, confused, and fitful personality behind egoistic bravura. I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of of Picabia's significant publications, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

A Mother’s Dilemma


Emma Hornby - 2019
    But when the baby dies of natural causes while under her roof, and knowing her neighbour will be devastated, Minnie swaps it with one of the infants in her care.Now seventeen, Jewel Nightingale knows nothing of her true origins. But assaulted by her hateful cousin and making the dreadful discovery that she is pregnant, she faces a desperate dilemma. Fleeing her job as a domestic maid, she follows an advertisement to a house in Bolton's dark slums, where a woman promises to help her when the child is born. Little does Jewel know that there’s a terrible price to pay . . .Can she keep herself – and her baby – safe? And what will happen when Jewel discovers the truth about where she came from? Gritty and page-turning historical saga set in Northern England in the late 1800s, perfect for fans of Dilly Court and Rosie Goodwin.

Lights Out Till Dawn


Dee Williams - 2011
    With her children gone and her husband John in the army, Rene Morgan misses her family terribly. When she learnsthat John has become a prisoner of war, she has to take on the highly dangerous job of firewatcher. Meanwhile, Hazel and Peter are desperate to go backhome. Returning to the city, they are overjoyed to be reunited with their mother and Gran. But their father is still far away and the worst of the waris yet to come. As the air raids increase, the Morgans must face the terror of the Blitz together...

Toxic Flora: Poems


Kimiko Hahn - 2010
    In her haunting eighth collection inspired by articles from the weekly “Science” section of the New York Times, Hahn explores identity, extinction, and survival using exotic tropes drawn from the realms of astrophysics, mycology, paleobotany, and other rarefied fields. With warmth and generosity, Hahn mines the world of science in these elegant, ardent poems.from “On Deceit as Survival”   Yet another species resembles   a female bumble bee,   ending in frustrated trysts—   or appears to be two fractious males   which also attracts—no surprise—   a third curious enough to join the fray.   What to make of highly evolved Beauty   bent on deception as survival—

Adulting


Liz Talley - 2021
    She’s been written off as a Hollywood casualty by almost everyone, including her own mother. But handsome superstar Spencer Rome has her back. So does an uncompromising stranger determined to start Chase at square one and help her pull her future into focus. If Chase is willing.Life coach Olivia Han is devoted to “adulting” boot camp therapy. It’s not just her professional specialty, though—it’s also one way to avoid focusing on building a life of her own. To escape the pressures of Tinseltown, the two women head to Olivia’s cabin in the wilds of Northern California. There they discover a place in need of TLC. As they work together to rehab the once-charming cabin, they create a refuge where Chase can come to terms with her unsettled past, and where Olivia has an unexpected reckoning with her own troubling history.For two women doing damage control, this is a time for second chances—in life, in finding love, in forgiving family, and in an emerging friendship that might be exactly what each of them needs to heal.

Stay, Illusion: Poems


Lucie Brock-Broido - 2013
    Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her “Abandonarium,” or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed “humanely,” or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no other—dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido’s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: “We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.” She dares the unexplained: “The wings were left ajar / At the altar where I’ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.” Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: “Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.” Strange narratives, interior and exterior, make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson, Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling, commanding the “silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.” And why create the web? Because: “If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.”

Confessions of a Hater


Caprice Crane - 2013
    Now her dad has a new job and the family is moving to Hollywood. Just what Hailey needs: starting a new high school.As she's packing, Hailey finds a journal that belonged to her older sister, Noel, who is away at college. Called "How to Be a Hater," it's full of info Hailey can really use. Has Hailey found the Bible of Coolness? Will it help her reinvent herself at her new school? Will her crush notice her? Will she and the other Invisibles dethrone the popular mean girls? After all, they deserve it. Don't they?Caprice Crane's funny--and deeply felt--observations about high school, bullies, popularity, friendship, and romance will leave teens thinking...and talking.

Lockstep


Karl Schroeder - 2014
    After all, the planet he’s orbiting is frozen and sunless, and the cities are dead. But when Toby wakes again, he’s surprised to discover a thriving planet, a strange and prosperous galaxy, and something stranger still—that he’s been asleep for 14,000 years.Welcome to the Lockstep Empire, where civilization is kept alive by careful hibernation. Here cold sleeps can last decades and waking moments mere weeks. Its citizens survive for millennia, traveling asleep on long voyages between worlds. Not only is Lockstep the new center of the galaxy, but Toby is shocked to learn that the Empire is still ruled by its founding family: his own.Toby’s brother Peter has become a terrible tyrant. Suspicious of the return of his long-lost brother, whose rightful inheritance also controls the lockstep hibernation cycles, Peter sees Toby as a threat to his regime. Now, with the help of a lockstep girl named Corva, Toby must survive the forces of this new Empire, outwit his siblings, and save human civilization.Karl Schroeder's Lockstep is a grand innovation in hard SF space opera.

A Ghost in the Throat


Doireann Ní Ghríofa - 2020
    In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.

Meta


Tom Reynolds - 2013
    Before ‘The Battle’ the world had been full of metas, super-powered humans whose amazing abilities came from mysterious wristbands. Since that day one has never been seen again. Now 16 years old, Connor lives in Bay View City with his older brother Derrick, a meta-obsessed blogger, where he’s just trying to keep his head down long enough to survive high school. All of that changes the night he attempts to save a girl's life and wakes up to find the first new pair of metabands anyone has seen wrapped around his wrists. Connor soon finds an unlikely ally in Midnight, a masked vigilante who helps him learn how to harness his new abilities, while also trying to balance his summer job at the lake. As a meta, Connor becomes known as Omni, potentially the most powerful meta the world has ever seen, but it isn’t long before he finds out he's no longer alone...