Set in Japan, Luce's playful, tender stories―reminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Aimee Bender―tip into the fantastical, plumb the power of memory, and measure the human capacity to love. The award-winning narratives in this mesmerizing debut trace the lives of ex-pats, artists, and outsiders as they seek to find their place in the world. Hana Sasaki beguiles and surprises: stories include an oracular toaster, a woman who grows a tail, and a most unusual kind of sex reassignment.

Three Scenarios In Which Hana Sasaki Grows A Tail

Literature & Fiction

Luce, Kelly

United States

A Strange Object

In this gripping debut collection, men search for themselves, for each other, for the sources of sanity and sickness, power and grief. These stories speak frankly about desire and how we are bound―literally and figuratively―to each other. Inviting the reader to participate in narrative games and investigations, Misadventure buzzes with brainy energy. Full of disorientation, urgency, gallows humor, and, ultimately, hope.

Misadventure

Grider, Nicholas

Literary

"A beautiful aftershock of the movies." -David Gordon Green EVERYONE HAS A SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES...As featured on NPR's Weekend Edition. A whip-smart fiction debut inspired by classic and cult cinema, Our Secret Life in the Movies lures us into a lush dream world. These linked short stories follow two boys coming of age in the 1980s. Blade Runner and space camp collide with Reaganomics, food stamps, and the end of the Cold War in this haunting coauthored collection. "Wildly intelligent and deeply felt, OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES gives us a fascinating look at American life, shot through an insightful and compassionate lens. After reading it, the world seems bigger. A tremendous book." -Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans "Reading OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES is like finding a lost frequency on the AM dial. The voices you hear in this book are strange, hypnotic, and intensely American." -Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men "OUR SECRET LIFE IN THE MOVIES deftly weaves together the art of film and the art of fiction to create a literary-cinematic adventure that is hauntingly beautiful, dreamily inventive, and thrillingly original." -Maud Casey, author of The Man Who Walked Away "Tyree and McGriff conjure up lonliness, loss, and euphoria with the indelible resonance of an iconic tight shot." -Suzanne Rivecca, author of Death is Not an Option "A book of poignant and affecting beauty. Readers are presented with characters who are losing their innocence in lockstep with the changing nation they inhabit, and the end result is a book that provides great insight into both who we are and how we got this way. A remarkable achievement." -Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter "You don't need to see all, or any, of the movies on their list to love this book. You just need to have a secret life." -Maria Hummel, author of Motherland

Our Secret Life in the Movies

Humor & Entertainment

Tyree, J.M.

McGriff, Michael

Movies

This bracing, intelligent debut tackles the strangeness of growing up, the joys and difficulties of breaking away from family, and our sometime absurd or downright dangerous rites of passage. The girls and women in these stories come up against the rules and roles that give shape to their worlds. As marriages are arranged over tea, blood feuds simmer beneath football games , and the rules of a city burn, they struggle between holding onto their families and seeking out new ways to live and love. These stories ask, as our hands slip from the long line of tradition and we become refugees from home, what, if anything, is lost. And how is that what we thought we’d let go keeps finding its way back?

Man and Wife

Chase, Katie

For the characters in these stories, love and music are almost indistinguishable. A famous songwriting duo is destroyed by their creative differences, a jazz musician is consumed by his inability to speak or play, a man takes a pop song literally and charts his love onto buildings. These stories cover songs and riff on melodies. They unearth chords that bridge the gap between past and present. A playful, elegant debut collection, The Great American Songbook explores the profound hold that music has on our lives.

The Great American Songbook

Allingham, Sam

The Writers Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction offers a refreshing approach to the craft of fiction writing. It takes a single page from forty contemporary novels and short stories, identifies techniques used by the writers, and presents approachable exercises and prompts that allow anyone to put those techniques to immediate use in their own work. Encompassing everything from micro (how to "write pretty") to macro (how to "move through time space"), and even how to put all together on page one, this a field guide for anyone who wants to start writing now (or get some shiny new gear for their fiction toolbox.)

The Writer's Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction

Noll, Michael

History & Criticism

Belly Up is a story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they've been given and what their bodies require to be sustained.

Belly Up

Bullwinkel, Rita

A baby is born with gills. Foxes raise and then lose a human child. A man, in the final throes of his deathbed fever-dream, experiences a cross-Antarctic voyage. The stories inFarthest South, the second story collection from renowned writer Ethan Rutherford, find characters in the most unexpectedly menacing of circumstances, in which their sanity, happiness, and safety are put to the test. Formally ambitious, with an eye toward the strange, with an inimitable style all Rutherford's own, each story is nonetheless firmly grounded by a deep, human concern: the anxiety of family connection and humanity.

Farthest South & Other Stories

Rutherford, Ethan

Seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed government―but she ultimately decides to flee to America with a young soldier she hardly knows, an impulsive act that has far-reaching consequences on both sides of the ocean. A powerful and universal debut novel about family, identity, and independence, Country of Origin is as much about a nation's coming-of-age as it is about secrets and lies, love and truth.

Country of Origin

Azim, Dalia

The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life. Mairead Small Staid's debut, The Traces is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.

The Traces: An Essay

Biographies & Memoirs

Small Staid, Mairead

Arts & Literature

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