As Faulkner's voice portrayed the South and Breece D'J Pancake's represented Appalachia, Eric Shonkwiler captures the Midwest, with this collection of novellas and short stories that peels back the edges of rural existence to expose the heart of it. Through parental neglect, rebellious sons and daughters, drug-addled war veterans, backwoods zombies, injured firemen, car thieves, witch doctors, and Navajo ghosts, Shonkwiler brings you a disregarded world you can no longer ignore—one thriving with the mundane, the bruised, the unheard. Here is the voice of the rest of us, spoken only the way firsthand experience, rooted deep in overworked soil, can say it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Winner of the Luminaire Award for Best Prose ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Shonkwiler's stories capture the rural experience rarely heard—the quiet, dangerous voices of the desperate, struggling for honor among thieves. A stark and timely slice of Americana gothic that both razes and rebuilds." —Paula Bomer, author of Nine Months and Inside Madeleine ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Shonkwiler has an eye for detail and a lot of heart that he places in each and every sentence to make his words leap from the page and stay with you long after they’ve been read." —Frank Bill, author of Donnybrook and Crimes in Southern Indiana ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "God bless the hardscrabble elegance of Eric Shonkwiler's prose. These stories turn strangers into familiar faces. Battered souls and stoic hearts. Revenge, redemption, mercy. It's all here for the asking, like an emotional fire sale. Comparisons don't come easy with Shonkwiler's work. Few others measure up." —Anthony Breznican, author of Brutal Youth ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "An engaging read." —Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Eric Shonkwiler is the new voice of the American Heartland. The stories in Moon Up, Past Full touch the scorched heart of the Midwest, and there is something deeply American in the telling, a directness that honors the cowhands and combat vets, single mothers and fatherless daughters, who grit their teeth and lean into those old hard winds." —Taylor Brown, author of In the Season of Blood &amp; Gold and Fallen Land ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Find out more about Alternating Current Press at http://alternatingcurrentarts.com.

Moon Up, Past Full: Novellas & Stories

Literature & Fiction

Shonkwiler, Eric

Current, Alternating

Short Stories & Anthologies

Alternating Current

Years from now, America is slowly collapsing. Crops are drying up and oil is running out. People flee cities for the countryside, worsening the drought and opening the land to crime. Amid this decay and strife, war veteran David Parrish fights to keep his family and farm together. However, the murder of a local child opens old wounds, forcing him to confront his own nature on a hunt through dust storms and crumbling towns for the killer.

Above All Men

Literary

MG Press

The first triennial collected volume of winners and top-five finalists of the Luminaire Awards for Best Prose and Best Poetry for the years 2014 through 2016. Features 13 gut-punching short stories and 15 heart-rending poems by various authors, each piece having won out over hundreds of others to be selected as the best work of its respective year through a blind judging process, conducted by Alternating Current Press and external judges. Walk with storytellers through tales of domestic violence, children disappearing on spaceships, a car-parts thief at the scene of an accident, a gravedigger pulling the plug on a childhood nightmare, attending Santa Claus school, telling your secrets to strangers, and a dangerous proposal for fertility. Explore Tennessee, chase bombmakers out of hostage situations, come of age, stand at the Alamo, walk down Birch Street, pick apples, and return to your roots in these stories and poems by some of the independent press’ finest contemporary writers.

The Sky Is a Free Country: The Luminaire Award Anthology Volume I

Catalano, Kevin

Wright, Amy

Guruianu, Andrei

Benson, Schuler

Karas, Steve

Winn, Sarah Ann

Carnie, Jared A.

Buchinger, Mary

United States

The third issue of Alternating Current's annual literary publication contains 45 works of poetry, photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by 24 authors about various historical topics. Within these pages, you will find contemporary outlooks on history right alongside little-known public domain works that feel as fresh and as vibrant (and as scary) as if they were written today. Here, the old meets the new, and you'll discover fascinating history from a personal, non-scholarly literary approach.This issue may be our most disturbing, intimate, and deeply personal yet, bringing forward challenging ethical questions and moral dilemmas of our past, and imbuing them with modern sensitivities. In this issue, you'll meet Lord Byron, Ota Benga, Mary Shelley, John Clare, Fanny and Joshua Chamberlain, and an aviator who couldn't match wits with the Wright Brothers. You'll go hunting on an 1800s kangaroo safari, graverobbing with Resurrection Men, and exploring the history of the theater and Tennessee Williams through the eyes of 9/11 New York. You'll hop from ghost towns to Fort Clatsop to Paxton, Illinois, to England to mourn the downfall of old abbeys and long-urbanized California byways. You'll learn of the horrors of human zoos, slavery, gynecological experiments on enslaved women, McCarthyism, and Jewish persecution, from the Rhineland Massacres of the Middle Ages, to Budapest in World War II. And we'll add on to history's endless list of women who never got their due, from female artists such as Kay Sage, Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, and Leonora Carrington, to the nurses of the World War I Red Cross.Our first Featured Writer, Toby Buckley, takes us from mythical mummies to Victorian ladies to the Radium Girls, with a dash of Louisa Ulrika's cabinet conspiracies. Our second Featured Writer, Joyce Schmid, travels from Gloucester Beach to Stanford University to the mining excavations of an Athenian agora well that turned up the bones of 450 dead babies, before making a quick stop with Fyodor Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad. Their work is showcased next to the winners and finalists for the 2017 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical.

Footnote #3: A Literary Journal of History

Potts, Laura

Bridger, Kierstin

Boon, Carl

Balkun, Stacey

Buckley, Toby

Schmid, Joyce

McConnell, Jon Chaiim

Helfers, Edward

The world is screaming. Are you listening? Within these pages, you'll find a lot of dark humor-a very valid response to dealing with the grief, confronting the truth, and accepting that the U.S. government won't do enough to help with our irreversible tilting into the dark canyons of the Anthropocene, so we have to pull more than our own weight, do more than our fair share, tell our stories over and over again in the face of corporate, lobbying, ignorant, and misinformed adversity, while bracing ourselves for the worst to come. You'll even find in these pages some sparks of utter optimism among the grief. But mostly you'll find the horror, the shock, the devastation, the sadness you'd expect from such a heavy topic. There are the reoccurring subjects: fossil fuel overuse, wasted water, sinking backyards, disappearing whales, food shortages, new bacteria, carbon, pipelines, drought, the disproportionately affected based on race, religion, ideology, wealth disparity, circumstances of birth and location. Women talk about not wanting to have kids born into this dying world; immigrants talk about the refugee crises to follow; and everyone rages against the corporations taking advantage of the land's vulnerability in order to turn a profit. There are the horrifying ladies you know by name: Sandy, Katrina, Irene-and there are the obscurities and anomalies that are slicing us open by a thousand slow cuts. What will surprise you, though, is how much this devastation has caused people to pause and reflect on the absolute beauty of this world, even in its darkest hurricanes of chaos. Featuring 65 pieces of nonfiction, fiction, hybrid, and poetry by 52 authors, this anthology is a document of our times-from the anger and righteousness of those left behind, to the fear for the bleak world we're leaving in the hands of those still to come. It is our hope that this anthology becomes obsolete, but it is our knowledge of a greedy and careless humanity that knows, with sorrow and certainty, that these pieces will remain timeless.

Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change

Shelby, Ashley

Rooney, Kathleen

Angstman, Leah

Malerich, C S

LaRue, Dorie

Beaudin, Marc

Garrigan, Michael

Lewis, Tracy K.

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