A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
Welcome to Cokesville, Pennsylvania. This is coal-and-steel country, the sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck--and two inches means a fat one. Where the only way to drown out the moaning of the cooling steel is to turn your radio up. And the best make-out spot in town is next to the burning slag heap. In seventeen captivating interlocking stories, Bathsheba Monk brings to life the fictional American town of Cokesville.

Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA

Literature & Fiction

Monk, Bathsheba

Contemporary

Picador

It's pretty much a straight shot from the upstate New York towns of Richard Russo's books to Bathsheba Monk’s Cokesville, PA. This is coal and steel country. The sort of place where an inch of soot on the windowsill means a regular paycheck—and two inches means a fat one. And what's the best make-out spot in town? Next to the burning slag heap. In seventeen beguiling, linked stories, spanning fourty-five years, Monk brings a corner of America alive as never before. Her world bursts with indelible characters: Mrs. Szilborski, who bakes great cake, but sprays her neighbors’ dogs with mace; and Mrs. Wojic, who believes her husband was reincarnated—as one of those dogs. Then there is the younger generation: Annie Kusiak , who wants to write, and Theresa Gojuk, who dreams of stardom. Cokesville is their Yoknapatawpha; they ache to escape it and the ghosts of their ancestors and the regret of their parents. What ghosts—and what regrets! When Theresa’s father Bruno falls into a vat of molten steel, the mill gives the family an ingot roughly his weight to bury. As deliciously wry as Allegra Goodman in The Family Markowitz, and with the matter-of-fact humanity of Grace Paley, Bathsheba Monk leads us into a world that is at once totally surprising and recognizable. These stories glow like molten steel.

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Nude Walker: A Novel

“I think the most beautiful things in the world are things in flux,” says Kat Warren-Bineki, the heroine of Nude Walker. Everything about Kat’s world is in flux. She hails from Warrenside, Pennsylvania, a once prosperous town named after her mother’s family. With the death of the steel industry, Warrenside has fallen on hard times; when its economy falters, Kat and her parents are among the few citizens still eking out a living there. And then there’s Kat’s love life. As the young, beautiful granddaughter of a proud old-guard industrialist, she has plenty of suitors and a longtime boyfriend; certainly she has no business falling in love with Max Asad. After all, Max is the aloof only son of a newly arrived Lebanese entrepreneur who, despite the resistance of Warrenside’s traditionalists, has bought up most of its dilapidated downtown and is trying to get it off life support. But when Max and Kat return from Afghanistan, where both served with the National Guard, they share a series of intriguing encounters, and soon neither can deny that their romance has changed them. Kat forfeits her social standing by declaring love for a bitterly resented foreigner, and when Max’s heart wins out, he jeopardizes his father’s dreams for a brighter, better Warrenside. As their families feud (sometimes comically, sometimes ferociously), the old town braces for an epic flood, and the city’s denizens try frantically to realize their ambitions—with love, lust, insurance fraud, hallucinations . . . any means of outrunning their obsolescence. Above all, Nude Walker is a story of forbidden love seen through the prism of post-industrial America. Bathsheba Monk writes with flinty wit and warm spirit, but she’s unlike other writers we know. In a voice as true as it is disarming, she depicts the kaleidoscopic tensions between generations and cultures. As Library Journal said about her, “Monk makes us see that we are all exiles in a changing world.” In Nude Walker, she offers an unlikely romance about the fantastical myths we weave to define ourselves in unmoored times.

Literary

Sarah Crichton Books

Boston society divorce lawyer Swanson Herbinko has never been out of Massachusetts, but when she meets Guy de Guy, a Frenchman with sandy blond hair and an adorable soul patch living in Boston’s Back Bay, she runs—not walks!—in her five inch Jimmy Choos to get her passport. Guy woos Swanson with food and she falls hard, but when she goes to France to help Dick untangle the murder of Michel Meriodoc the head of the French Farmer’s Association and chief proponent of gastronomie terroir she finds herself in the middle of an international food fight between Meriodoc’s organization and the sellers of GMO food. Quelle horror! Swanson and her dachshund Devil Dog dive into the thick bouillabaisse of French food, getting arrested in a Parisian demonstration, getting in a brawl in a French women’s prison and almost dying in the chateau’s maze which was built to imprison people. The only question that remains is whether Swanson will wind up just like Meriodoc... DEAD.

Dead Silence: A Swanson Herbinko Mystery in Paris (The Dead Series)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Blue Heron Book Works

Set in Warrenside, Pennsylvania, Nude Walker is the story of forbidden love seen through the prism of post-industrial America. When Kat Warren-Bineki, the daughter of old industrialists, and Max Asad, the son of Lebanese immigrants, return from Afghanistan, where they both served in the National Guard, the two share a series of intriguing encounters, leading to a romance that will change them forever. Bathseheba Monk writes in a voice as true as it is disarming, depicting the kaleidoscopic tensions between generations and cultures.

Fuad Hamdi is an Iraqi born artist who was caught up in the diaspora of 2006 to Syria, then fleeing that country for Turkey in 2011 when the Syrian civil war broke out, finally finding asylum in Canada. His art is an explosive mix of West and East, landing finally in an imaginary country where sensuality and peace are brought out from behind the veil What we are seeing in Fuad Hamdi’s work is an artistic sensibility formed in a specific culture, thrown headlong and mid-career into a world where every color is available to him. Every thought is celebrated. An artist who was jailed for daring to paint what he saw behind the veil is suddenly able to explode onto the canvas all his concealed ideas, longings, fears and ideas of beauty. It’s a rich feast that we are fortunate to be invited to.

Fuad Hamdi: 21st Century

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

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Books by Monk, Bathsheba

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Monk, Bathsheba. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA

Now You See It . . .: Stories from Cokesville, PA

Nude Walker: A Novel

Dead Silence: A Swanson Herbinko Mystery in Paris (The Dead Series)

Nude Walker: A Novel

Fuad Hamdi: 21st Century