Seen through the lens of four families who've been a part of one another's lives since their kids were born over a decade ago, the story reveals not only the lengths that some adults are willing to go to get ahead, but the effect on the group's children, sibling relationships, marriages, and careers, as simmering resentments come to a boil and long-buried, explosive secrets surface and detonate. It's a humorous, keenly observed, timely take on ambitious parents, willful kids, and the pursuit of prestige, no matter the cost.

    At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave woman, fearing for her infant son's life, exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's.  From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels.  On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century mystery:  reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising, unusual solution.  Yet it is not a mystery novel.  Seething with the undercurrents of antebellum southern culture, the book is a savage indictment in which the real criminal is society, and racial prejudice and slavery are the crimes.  Written in 1894, Pudd'nhead Wilson glistens with characteristic Twain humor, with suspense, and with pointed irony:  a gem among the author's later works.

    Greenstreet's highly original CASE SENSITIVE posits a female central character who writes chapbooks that become the sections in this book. What happens in the book I want to read? Greenstreet asked herself. And how would it sound? Everything the character is reading, remembering, and dreaming turns up in what she writes, duly referenced with notes. Using natural language charged with concision and precise syntax, Greenstreet has created a memorable and lasting first collection. A poem intrigue of the highest order. Greenstreet has made a brilliant beginning with this first book--Kathleen Fraser. A beautiful dwelling of ideas. CASE SENSITIVE suggests that there need be no divide between the associative connections of poetry and the extended thinking of the essay. This is a book full of luminous footnotes, details, and attentive readings. CASE SENSITIVE strings together a series of moments to create something resonate, large, and inclusive--Juliana Spahr.

    Admission. Aren't there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides...It's what we let in, but it's also what we let out." For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as thousands of the nation's brightest students await her decision regarding their academic admission, so too must Portia decide whether to make her own ultimate admission. Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman's life to its core.

    His is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well. Here is a fine novel."From its dazzling opening page, which announced the appearance of a stylist of the first rank, to its moving close, this brief novel has charmed and captivated millions of readers since its publication twenty-five years ago and its subsequent translation into fifteen languages. On the triumphant publication of Kate Vaiden, his most recent novel, in 1986, there was almost no review that -- praising the new book to the skies -- didn't also mention in glowing terms the reviewer's fond recollection of the marvelous first novel, the troubled love story of Rosacoke Mustian and Wesley Beavers and its beautifully evoked vision of rural North Carolina. It is a pleasure now to restore to print the clothbound edition of this truly enduring work as a companion volume to his brilliant book of essays, A Common Room, published simultaneously.

    A story that traces the bonds between four generations of resourceful Southern women through stories passed from one generation to another.

    But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and highly radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as Precious learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it her own for the first time.

    The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he is also a frequent contributor to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.

    Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

    The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his side of the story in a book William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."

    But his past life is a recurring nightmare—filth, desperation, and blackouts. And more trouble is only a hundred miles away. Darren and Alastair leave Liverpool, heading south in a rickety old car. They have been sent by their gang boss to wreak violent revenge, but they have only a rough idea of their quarry: a one-armed man.Interspersed between the scabrous banter and a pitch-perfect street dialect, Niall Griffiths offers stunning descriptions of the Welsh landscape and a dark, knowing humor. Despite the ever present drugs, violence, and anger, he reveals a fragile humanity. Graywolf is proud to introduce this striking, distinctive voice to American readers.

    Will Barrett is a 25-year-old wanderer from the South living in New York City, detached from his roots and with no plans for the future—until the purchase of a telescope sets off a romance and changes his life forever.Publisher: Spring Arbor/Ingram.

    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

    Fish in Exile spins unimaginable loss through classical and magical tumblers, distorting our view so that we can see the contours of a parent’s grief all the more clearly.

    Inspired by this gift, Thomas forms Coyote Springs, an all-Indian Catholic band who find themselves on a magical tour that leads from reservation bars to Seattle and New York--and deep within their own souls.