With a fluency of tone and a gifted eye, he examines the dark and unfathomable moments in the most committed relationships; the small distances that stretch into miles between generations and couples when long-buried secrets tumble out into the light; or the eccentricities that may label us as odd yet mark us as unique. Capturing the bewilderment and tenderness in failed connections or missed moments, his characters stand vivid in their human frailty and we warm to them almost despite ourselves. A lonely wife determined to gather her far-flung family for a reunion invents the perfect lie to persuade them; an old woman recalls how she once trained a black crow the art of thieving; and the off-duty small-town cop on his last round of the evening who does a distressed family a great service when he summons the courage to shoot their gravely injured dog.These poignant tales reveal the subtleties in love and indifference or the strange, sad, breathtaking tricks of chance that can change a life in a second. As Lychack moves among these characters with all their virtues and failings, he observes the inevitable disparity between their realities and their dreams even while investing their stories with wit, humility, and a large measure of grace. That he succeeds so remarkably in transferring it all to the page is evidence of his prodigious talent.

    Entwhistle may look like your sweet, old granny...but things happen to her: she's caught up in the witness protection program, stuck in an elevator with an assortment of strangers, her house is burglarized and her dog is kidnapped. But Mrs. Entwhistle is dauntless; she didn't get to be a fesity seventy-eight by wimping out. Come join her on her porch swing, meet her best friend, Maxine, and her dog, Roger. Maxine will probably offer you a bowl of her homemade soup. Sit a while. Come back when you can.

    He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.

    Through family rituals with his word-obsessed parents and sister, failed first love, an ill-fated run for class president, as the only Jewish boy on an otherwise all-black basketball team, all of the passages of Jeremy's life are marked in some way by his stutter and his wildly off-the-mark attempts at a cure. It is only when he enters college and learns his strong-willed mother is dying that he realizes all languages, when used as hiding places for the heart, are dead ones.

    Discover the Lion City through the eyes of its cats and their humans in From the Belly of the Cat, an anthology of fifteen feline tales by some of the city-state’s most exciting writers and notorious cat sympathisers.For best results, read this book at home on the sofa on a rainy afternoon, with a cup of warm tea within reach, and a cat by your side.

    The opening narratives feature adolescent or pre-adolescent boys struggling with their conceptions of manhood: making sense of an old hermit whose life seems to have left no mark, or coexisting with a repulsive great-uncle in a world with no other male role model. Later, the stories depict grown men who find that these same struggles of manhood never go away: a man out of place among hunters and fathers in search of a missing child, or a man fighting through a blizzard to prove his worth to his own wife. The landscapes and lakescapes serve as recurring characters in the book. The boys and men wander forests—sometimes finding tranquility, sometimes finding tragedy. They climb and descend dunes. And often, they encounter the Big Lake: Lake Michigan. The idea of a Third Coast figures prominently in the book, the lake and its horizon serving as a kind of world’s end, where things pass away or come to life.

    In AM/PM, impish humor and cutting insight are on full display. Readers tour the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes, and volcano love. June wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard falls in love with a chaise lounge; Betty insists everything except flowers are a symbol of her love for her husband; Andrew talks to his house in times of crisis. Written every morning and night for two months, these brief vignettes (50 to 100 words) recall Donald Barthelme in their whimsy and subtle yet powerful emotions. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, AM/PM mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original work of fiction.

    With her marriage shattered, Erin Belieu sifts the wreckage for the black box, the record of disaster. Propelled by a blistering and clarifying rage, she composed at fever pitch and produced riveting, unforgettable poems, such as the ten-part sequence “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral”:I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film—look. . .When Belieu was invited by the Poetry Foundation to keep a public journal on their new website, readers responded to the Black Box poems, calling them “dark, twisted, disturbed, and disturbing” and Belieu a “frightening genius.” All true.

    As midnight approaches, the box is opened, a fateful dare is made, and the children as well as Chintana come face to face with the consequences of a malice retold and now foretold.

    Winner of the 2007 AWP Award for the Novel. Robert Eversz, Judge. "WE AGREED TO MEET JUST HERE is a lyrical mystery about disappearance, told in precise and luminous prose. A young lifeguard in an Austin suburb vanishes one night while returning from a screening of The Third Man. A doctor, ill with cancer, goes missing from his home, and is later seen, bearded and ragged, wandering the aisles of a grocery store. A car is stolen, the unseen consequences tragic. One child is given up to adoption, another is lost up a tree. The absences are so keenly felt, in the drifting lucidity of the author's sentences, that every reappearance reads like a small miracle"--Robert Eversz.

    Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.Yet, as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

    Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

    I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.'These dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement are masterpieces of invention and Grand Guignol humour.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

    Rusty, ornery, and down at the heels, Zadoorian's characters have made the wrong choices, been worn down by bad news, or survived traumatic events, but like the city they live in, they are determined not to let tragedy and rotten luck define them. Rich with detail and brimming with feeling, Zadoorian's deceptively simple stories lead readers into the inner lives of those making the best of their flawed surroundings and their own imperfections.Zadoorian's stories are drawn from the everyday events that come to define his characters' lives. A woman responsible for putting down animals at a veterinary clinic travels to Mexico to stage a ritual for her victims, a veteran returns a flag stolen from a Japanese soldier he killed in World War II, an elderly couple takes a final road trip to a mystery spot out west, and a man spends his life waiting to inherit his parents' kitschy 1960s furniture but instead sells it all. Characters also find their lives shaped by seemingly random occurrences, like the junk shop owner who must stop the stranger with a vendetta against him, the woman who becomes obsessed with her in-laws' talking dog, and the urban spelunker who finds love and acceptance with a reader of his blog. Their close connection to Detroit also infuses Zadoorian's stories with themes significant to the city, including issues of racial tension, political unease, and economic hardship.Zadoorian's writing throughout this collection is clear and vivid, never getting in the way of his characters or their stories. The unique but relatable characters and unexpected stories in The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit will appeal to all readers of fiction.

    Illustrator and writer's Carolyn Marie Castagna's first shared short story.A small icicle hanging from a roof peers inside a window at a small reading room, and learns about magical human qualities, and the importance of the one most special human feeling.