A yacht races to outrun a tsunami. A young man jailed on a drug charge forms a relationship with his cellmate that is by turns tender and brutal. A family buys a rural slaughterhouse, and tensions with their religious neighbors quickly escalate. A teen raised by his eccentric gay father, a Turkish immigrant, finds his life fractured by violence. A fictionalized Coretta Scott King, surveilled and harassed by the FBI, considers the costs of her life with her husband. Here Is What You Do is a bravura, far-ranging collection, its stories linked by sorrow and latent hope, each one drilling toward its characters’ darkest emotional centers. In muscularly robust prose, with an unfailing eye for human drives and frailties, Chris Dennis captures the raw need, desire, cruelty, and promise that animate our lives.

    From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.

    And mermaids are on display at the local aquarium.The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night is a collection of twelve haunting stories; modern fairy tales brimming with magic, outsiders and lost souls.

    In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, bitter, and wise. Black Light contains the type of storytelling that resonates somewhere deep, in the well of memory that repudiates nostalgia.

    Dani is befriended--against her own better judgment--by a young therapist named Grace Beaumont, who helps Dani make it through the ordeal of bringing the attacker to justice.

    Dorothy Strachey’s classic Olivia captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle. Julie, and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Mlle. Julie and the other head of the school, Mlle. Cara, in its final months. “Although not strictly autobiographical, Olivia draws on the author’s experiences at finishing schools run by the charismatic Mlle. Marie Souvestre, whose influence lived on through former students like Natalie Barney and Eleanor Roosevelt. Olivia was dedicated to the memory of Strachey’s friend Virginia Woolf and published to acclaim in 1949. Colette wrote the screenplay for the 1951 film adaptation of the novel. In 1999, Olivia was included on the Publishing Triangle’s widely publicized list of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of the 20th Century. “Dorothy Strachey (1865-1960) was the sister of the novelist Lytton Strachey and a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group…….Olivia, originally published under a pseudonym, is her only novel.” -- Amazon.com

    The debut collection from the vibrant voice of Roxane Gay is a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all interwoven to represent the Haitian diaspora experience.

    She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. In “Desert Hearts,” a woman takes a job selling sex toys in San Francisco rather than embark on the law career she pursued only for the sake of her father. In “Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love,” a woman realizes she much prefers the company of her pit bull—and herself—to the neurotic foreign fling who won’t decamp from her apartment. In “How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?” a daughter hauls a suitcase of lingerie to Mexico for her flighty, estranged mother to resell there, wondering whether her personal mission—to come out—is worth the same effort. And in “Barbara the Slut,” a young woman with an autistic brother, a Princeton acceptance letter, and a love of sex navigates her high school’s toxic, slut-shaming culture with open eyes. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.

    And 'A Good Man,' one of the most important. Rarer than the newness, the wit, the vivid readability, is the deep caring understanding, the wholeness, the truth which this astonishing, haunting writer creates her people. 'A Good Man' will be a revelation, an epiphany to many a reader."—Tillie Olsen"In Annie Oakley's Girl, people are so much larger, their motives, dreams and mysteries so much more complex than you ever imagined. Love is so much more dangerous, grief so much more powerful, hope so much more tenuous and necessary. I read everything Rebecca Brown writes, watch for her books and hunt down her short stories. She is simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around, and Annie Oakley's Girl is stunning."—Dorothy AllisonPublished in 1993 by City Lights, this collection includes seven stories: "Annie," "The Joy of Marriage," "Folie a Deux," "Love Poem," "The Death of Napoleon: Its Influence on History," "A Good Man," and "Grief."Rebecca Brown is the author of a dozen books of prose including The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, The Dogs, The Terrible Girls (City Lights) and The Gifts of the Body (HarperCollins)."Brown's fourth (The Terrible Girls, 1992, etc.) mixes fantasy, conjecture, and some realism in seven stories that feature atmospheric neo-feminist allegories and fables. The two longest pieces are the most striking: "Annie" (originally published in Adam Mars-Jones's Mae West is Dead: Recent Lesbian & Gay Fiction) is about the narrator's love affair with Annie Oakley—it's part historical pastiche, part touching daydream, and part biting satire. Juxtaposing the narrator's western daydreams with grittier realism, Brown manages to force upon her narrator the kind of rude awakening best displayed by Tim O'Brien in Going after Cacciato. She also has a good deal of fun along the way: in one instance, Annie Oakley signs autographs at Saks—"the release of her authorized biography coincides with the arrival of the special line of new fall fashions—Annie Oakley Western Wear." "A Good Man" (which first appeared in Joan Nestle and Naomi Holoch's Women on Women II) is a tribute to a decent man dying of AIDS, nursed off and on by his lesbian friend; the striking "Folie a Deux" posits a couple who deliberately cripple themselves—one deaf, one blind—so that "Each of us had something the other didn't have"; and the remaining four stories, published in Britain in 1984, are dreamlike fables. In the best, "Love Poem," the narrator and "you," an artist (the second person becomes a tic in several of these), sneak into the Tate and destroy the artist's work; "The Joy of Marriage" is a touching but ideological look at a honeymoon; "Grief" is about a woman sent off by her clique to a foreign country—she never returns. Occasionally moving, the story's too obliquely personal to make enough sense to a wider audience. Imagistic, edgy fictions about postmodern longing in a world off its screws—and where sadness seems to be a woman's only fate."—Kirkus Reviews

    They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.

    The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing—territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.Complainers --Air mail --Baster --Early music --Timeshare --Find the bad guy --The oracular vulva --Capricious gardens --Great experiment --Fresh complaint

    Mind your manners and enjoy the chocolate in a dance of sparkling wit and political intrigue.Tremontaine is an episodic serial presented by Serial Box Publishing. This collected omnibus edition gathers all 16 episodes from Season 1.

    They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.

    Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form—in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway—but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel and translated by award-winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning Red Cavalry Stories; The Odessa Tales, featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including "Guy de Maupassant." This will be the standard edition of Babel's stories for years to come.

    "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted.Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.