Kwanzaa Browne, Indigo Abdulrahaman, Destiny Jones, and Ericka Stockwell are four best friends who are closer than sisters and will go to the ends of the earth for one another. Yet even their deep bond can't heal all wounds from their individual pasts, as the collegiate and post-collegiate women struggle with their own demons, drama, and desires.As the women try to overcome--or give in to--their impulses, they find not only themselves tested but also the one thing they always considered unbreakable: their friendship.

    Adultery. Betrayal. Murder. Hattie Durham committed some Unthinkable Sins in her lifetime, but now she’s gone, leaving her three sons and their wives behind to deal with the fallout. THE SONS… Junior – wants to escape his past as he learns the truth about how his mother died. But will his need for revenge and his own past sins come between him and the family he loves? Carl – has been carrying a terrible secret alone all these years and can’t bear the weight anymore. Can he keep it together with his family’s help or will the burden break him? Jerome – is blessed with everything a man could want – influence, power and a destiny to fulfill. But when life deals him an unexpected blow, will the family have his back or will they fall apart around him? …AND THEIR WIVES Donetta – finds her self-confidence growing along with her doubts about her husband’s fidelity. Are their marriage vows enough to keep her in the family now that she has what it takes to make it on her own? Trudy – senses the strain on the family in the wake of her mother-in-law’s death. Will she able to help keep the ones she loves from self-destructing or is her own life in danger? Susan – managed to escape an uncertain past, leaving behind a few bodies in her wake. Will her dreams of love and success finally come true or ultimately be overshadowed by Hattie Durham’s death? Find out now in UNTHINKABLE SINS 2: The Family

    Home is a new house with a loving husband in 1970s California that suddenly transformed in to the frightening world of the antebellum South. Dana, a young black writer, can't explain how she is transported across time and space to a plantation in Maryland. But she does quickly understand why: to deal with the troubles of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder--and her progenitor. Her survival, her very existence, depends on it. This searing graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's science fiction classic is a powerfully moving, unflinching look at the violent disturbing effects of slavery on the people it chained together, both black and white--and made kindred in the deepest sense of the word.

    Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

    Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics to mortality, Armantrout engages with the half-seen and the half-believed. These poems step into the dance of consciousness and its perennial ghost partner--"to make the world up/of provisional pairs." At a time when our world is being progressively despoiled, Armantrout has emerged as one of our most important and articulate authors. These poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the "next life" and find it where we can.

    Although he has edited several anthologies of his favorite poems, this volume forges a new path for him, as a poet of light verse. He writes—with his characteristic combination of humor and insight—on love, modernity, nostalgia, politics, religion, and other facets of daily life. Keillor’s verses are charming and playful, locating sublime song within the humdrum of being human.

    A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.

    Using fragments as a narrative mode to highlight the terror of ellipses, Potted Meat explores the fear, power, and vulnerability of storytelling, and in doing so, investigates the peculiar tensions of the body: How we seek to escape or remain embodied during repeated trauma.

    Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few climactic sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of language: Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest. In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world. The collection crescendoes in displays of raw creative power, as in Eight Plots, a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic !Blood and Soap is an arresting collection from one of a small number of writers on the vanguard of American fiction.

    the new black sees our racial past inevitably shaping our contemporary moment, but struggles to remember and reckon with the impact of generational shifts: what seemed impossible to people not many years ago--for example, the election of an African American president--will have always been a part of the world of children born in the new millennium. All of the poems here, whether sonnet, mesostic, or deconstructed blues, exhibit a formal flair. They speak to the changes we have experienced as a society in the last few decades--changes that often challenge our past strategies for resisting racism and, for African Americans, ways of relating to one another. The poems embrace a formal ambiguity that echoes the uncertainty these shifts produce, while reveling in language play that enables readers to "laugh to keep from crying." They move through nostalgia, even as they insist on being alive to the present and point longingly towards possible futures.

    Frank Stanford was called by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alan Dugan a brilliant poet, ample in his work, like Whitman. He was the founder of Lost Roads Publishers and the author of a number of important works, among them the epic THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU, reprinted by Lost Roads under the editorship of Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright. Frank Stanford said his purpose in his writing and with his press was to 'reclaim the landscape of American poetry' - The Arkansas Times. Stanford ended his own life in 1978 when he was 29. The reprinting of this major book is a truly important, much anticipated literary event.