Fiction. "It was supposed to be the greatest night of our lives." It's the eve of the Obama election. Change is in the air and hope is running high. And for twenty-five-year-old, self-proclaimed cool man Michael Bishop, so is the alcohol and the bluster. Working a dead-end job proofing subtitles on third-rate videos, Michael has kept his future at bay through a stream of boozy nights or by blowing time in front of his Nintendo. That is, until he meets Ivy Chase, the smart, pretty pastor's daughter whose innocent charm takes his breath away. But Ivy turns out to be much more than Michael bargained for, and in a moment that surprises even him, he makes the decision of his life. Smart, funny, poignant, and very, very timely, LAST CALL IN THE CITY OF BRIDGES is a Bright Lights, Big City for the new millennium. With its memorable characters and unforgettable scenes, this insightful look into twenty-first-century America is a book you won't want to put down."Like his post po-mo Facebook generation, Michael Bishop, the manic narrator of LAST CALL IN THE CITY OF BRIDGES, has reached the end of his irresponsible youth. Stuck and unsure, he looks back at those eight-bit Nintendo years with tender nostalgia while trying to feel his way forward. Like The Moviegoer, Salvatore Pane's debut novel is a romantic ironist's plea for authenticity in a fantastic age. It's telling—and hilarious—that his hero's model for male adulthood isn't William Holden but Super Mario."—Stewart O'Nan"Quite obviously, Salvatore Pane's mind has been dunked in video games, social media, comic books, the WebNet, and everything else our august literary authorities believe promote illiteracy. I'd like to hand the authorities Pane's novel—a funny, moving, melancholy, sad, and immensely literate book about what being young and confused feels like these days—and tell them, 'See? Things are going to be fine!'"—Tom Bissell"LAST CALL IN THE CITY OF BRIDGES is Goodbye, Columbus 2.0, a poignant novel about looking for something real in a plastic world where Irony is Everything. This generational anthem is ultimately, despite all the 21st century detritus, an old-fashioned page turner, full of old verities and truths of the heart. Salvatore Pane's voice is both new and necessary, one I know I'll be reading for years to come."—Cathy Day"Like the comic book heroes he obsesses over, Michael Bishop has an origin story, the story of the first wound that makes his powers necessary—and in LAST CALL IN THE CITY OF BRIDGES, Michael at last faces into that tragedy, resurfacing suddenly at the mid-point of his twenties, those years of snark and expectation spent proofreading DVD subtitles, drinking literature-themed cocktails, and pining over preacher's daughters and college crushes. In this witty and charming debut, Salvatore Pane reminds us that while you can't retcon your past, you can perhaps learn to live up to its responsibilities, by using your powers not necessarily to save the ones you love from loss, but to care for those left behind in its wake."—Matt Bell

Last Call in the City of Bridges

Literature & Fiction

Pane, Salvatore

Contemporary

Braddock Avenue Books

Fiction. Get ready. These are not your mother's bedtime stories. In this mesmerizing debut collection, Aubrey Hirsch will lead you into the darkest recesses of human life, where hope and longing and love and loss look all too much like one another. Each of these sixteen stories may be filled with its own kind of despair, but they are not despairing as Hirsch enters with deep sympathy into the souls of lonely women , broken men, young recruits, and dutiful daughters. With a hard intelligence, Hirsch considers the toll of heartache and loss, and the simple cost of longing. Taut and tension filled, these stories will transport you into the heart of what it means to be human. But be careful. Hirsch's compassion arrives on a knife blade. And you just may find your own heart cut open. "In WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR, Aubrey Hirsch posits an uncertain world, offering us her characters at their most confused, frightened, obsessed. As protection against their troubles, these men and women cling often to science, and also to story and if these two ways of seeing cannot always save them, then still they might provide some comfort, some necessary and sustaining faith, the mechanisms of what greatest mysteries might await us all, when all else is stripped away." —Matt Bell "Aubrey Hirsch is a bright shining star of a writer and the stories in her flawless debut collection, WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR, are a little disturbing and a little strange and a little sweet but always a lot to hold on to. Hirsch shows us the charm of her imagination and how carefully she will break your heart. This is a book you will keep coming back to, the one you won't be able to stop talking about because it's that damn good."—Roxane Gay "Each story in WHY WE NEVER TALK ABOUT SUGAR is a Petri dish, a distinct world in which a particle is discovered, a lake vanishes, but the narrative microscope never forgets that what really matters are the characters. This fiction is lyrical and wicked smart, reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Miranda July. So, here's my hypothesis: Aubrey Hirsch is a bright new voice in American fiction."—Cathy Day

Why We Never Talk About Sugar

Hirsch, Aubrey

Fiction. Like the existential quest of Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas or Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Anita Palatino's journey is one you won't forget. In this gripping new novel, Catherine Gammon will take you into the psychological danger zone of desperate longing and unfulfilled desire before returning you safely home. Set in New York City, the novel plumbs the tumultuous inner lives of people searching for something as simple to name and as difficult to achieve as understanding: there is Anita, a young woman tormented by the abuse and mistreatment of her family; Cruz Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant wrestling with his personal demons; his nephew Tomás, in the States to earn money for the family he left behind; Sister Monica Luz, a young nun and mother figure to Anita; Sydney Booker, the world-weary detective who knows more than he wants to about people and life; and Magda Ramirez, a big-hearted widow from Colombia struggling to carry on. These and the many other characters contending with the sorrowful core of the human condition—what Eugene O'Neill called "the whole misbegotten mad lot of us"—will leave you pondering our search for connection and meaning long after you've turned the final page. Unflinching and complex, SORROW examines the hidden selves enfolded within each of us and shows the painstaking path to clarity and faith ... and love. A story of betrayal and redemption, Catherine Gammon's SORROW will lay hold of you, and it won't let go. "SORROW is a devastating, gorgeous, impossible, unstoppable book—powered by unbearable desire, murder, a stunning turbulence of language and story. The real triumphs of this novel are Anita, Magda, Danny, Tomas, Cruz, people you will never forget even though tragedy, abuse, and circumstance did their best to render them invisible. A tour de force."—Eve Ensler "What SORROW illustrates with such dark and devastating beauty is that the heart that is forced out of innocence into terrible knowledge will one day utter its grief, and when it does, the sound, like its source, will be unimaginable. One of the many astonishing things about Catherine Gammon's novel is the exacting emotional and psychological candor with which it is written. Never does the book blanch for the sake of false comfort; never does it allow the reader to dodge harrowing truths, those truths humanity most urgently needs to confront. It is a work of profound courage and integrity."—Kellie Wells "Think of a female Dostoevsky. Think of a female Raskolnikov. Gammon's modern turn on the classic tale takes us into the mind, heart and soul of a woman who has been the victim of sexual abuse in childhood; but, in so doing, she illuminates the dynamics of power and redemption to which we are universally subject. SORROW is a stunning page-turner and unforgettable."—Toi Derricotte

Sorrow

Gammon, Catherine

Fiction. What saves us? It's a question as old—and as urgent—as humanity itself. With this remarkable book, award-winning poet, essayist, and short story writer Gary Fincke opens an exciting new chapter of his career. Structured as a novel-in-stories, HOW BLASPHEMY SOUNDS TO GOD explores our capacity for loyalty and love as it delves into the lives of people on the brink of faith. In prose so pitch-perfect you'll forget you're reading, Fincke lays open the hearts and souls of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons—each in their own way struggling to protect themselves from the chaos of life, reaching for things they only barely know exist... or fleeing those they can't quite see. Set in the tumult of the nineteen sixties, HOW BLASPHEMY SOUNDS TO GOD explores the lives of average people rocked by the seismic shifts around them: the specter of Communism, the war in Vietnam, the space race, the Kennedys and Camelot, and the many shifting social mores that spark and flash and too often catch fire. Whether it's a young mother facing her mortality or a wife flaunting her sexual freedom in front of her husband or a father trying to prepare his child for the dangers of life, Gary Fincke handles the fragile lives of his characters with a respect and understanding that will take your breath away. Displaying the same unwavering sensitivity and brilliantly observed detail that brought him two Pushcart Prizes, a Flannery O'Connor Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, and many other honors, Gary Fincke has produced a book of heart-breaking depth. Here is a writer at the height of his craft.

How Blasphemy Sounds to God

Fincke, Gary

Set near the Maine coast, Rachel May s taut and probing new work of fiction, The Benedictines, conjures up the spirit of Sara Orne Jewett s atmospheric landscapes. With prose that will have you turning pages in anticipation, May follows Annie James, a passionate, young artist whose decision to take a job teaching for a Benedictine school brings her deep into her students lives and up against the limits of control...and, for Annie, the limits of passion. With generosity and insight, May traces the deep conflicts between the human heart and the rules that heart invents. Like the quiet beauty of Maine, The Benedictines is a book that will stay with you for a long, long time.

The Benedictines

Rachel May

Fiction. Jimbo Stark, teenage soldier of fortune, loves, fights, drinks, mopes, and steals his way through this brilliant novel of the late 1950s. His America glows with an almost romantic light—it is an electric, song-filled garden for teenage love, where everything is possible, even heroism. Imagining himself sometimes as James Dean's reincarnation, sometimes as a beatnik gangster poet straight out of Jack Kerouac, Jimbo lives a legend of his own construction. THE SILVER GHOST is a wonderful novel of coming of age in America—letter perfect in its evocation of an almost mythical time, and powerfully affecting in its portrait of its hero. In a dazzlingly shifting series of set-pieces, flashbacks, and reveries, Chuck Kinder cuts back and forth from caper to sentiment to myth, from self-pity to self-mockery. With deft comic sense, a complex and winning hero, and a supporting cast of vividly realized characters, Kinder writes about Jimbo Stark with the same mixture of fond memory and relief that it's over that we all have toward that time when we, too, were perfectly seventeen; he makes THE SILVER GHOST one of the very best—and most sensationally written—novels of adolescence.

The Silver Ghost

Kinder, Chuck

United States

Fiction. In story after story of this highly anticipated collection, Geeta Kothari lays bare an America deeply uneasy about its heterogeneity. In "Small Bang Only," a man from the former Yugoslavia struggles to come to terms with his wife's successful career in America only to find the resolution to his grief in violence. In "Missing Men," a woman from an unnamed African country wrestles with her sense of self when she is forced to hide her identity after her boss, the editor of a community newspaper, is arrested in a post 9/11-related investigation. And in "Her Mother's Ashes," a young Indian woman taking her dead mother's cremated remains "home" to spread in the Ganges comes to realize that the very idea of home may have vanished forever. In stories bristling with the tensions of an increasingly globalized world, Kothari's luminous prose pulls back the curtain on one of the most pressing problems of contemporary life: how we can understand ourselves in an ever-shifting world.

I Brake for Moose and Other Stories

Kothari, Geeta

Fiction. Poetry. EVERY SINGLE BONE IN MY BRAIN is an enthralling debut story collection—by turns electric and thoughtful, comic and wise. A young music journalist tries to avoid becoming a band groupie, only to discover she has far more to offer to their music than she realized. A Jewish teenager gets involved with an alluring Mormon woman who presents an alternative to life with his dysfunctional family. And in the title story, a man whose condition—his body is a conduit for enough electricity to kill a person—forces him to live and work in isolation, uses the internet to form a relationship with a similarly reclusive woman; one that may bring them both joy or end in tragedy. Aaron Tillman's beautiful prose and sense of fun make him an essential new voice in contemporary short fiction.

Every Single Bone in My Brain

Tillman, Aaron

Short Stories & Anthologies

THE BEST SMALL FICTIONS 2017 offers readers 55 exceptional small fictions by 53 authors. This acclaimed new annual series, hailed as a "milestone for the short story," continues to honor contemporary masters and emerging writers of short-short and hybrid forms from across the globe. Guest editor Amy Hempel chose the winners from a pool of 105 finalists: "They conjure and seduce, they startle and haunt, they are funny and searing, short and shorter." The 2017 volume includes Pamela Painter, Brian Doyle, Ian Seed, Frankie McMillan, Karen Brennan, Stuart Dybek, and W. Todd Kaneko, and spotlights Joy Williams and SmokeLong Quarterly.

The Best Small Fictions 2017

Tara L. Masih

Amy Hempel

Fiction. Poetry. Anthology. This second installment of THE BEST SMALL FICTIONS, edited by series editor Tara L. Masih and guest editor Stuart Dybek, continues to celebrate the diversity and quality captured in fiction forms fewer than 1,000 words. Forty-five acclaimed and emerging writers including Alberto Chimal, Toh EnJoe, Kathy Fish, Amelia Gray, Etgar Keret, R. O. Kwon, and Eliel Lucero offer readers 'some of the brightest concise writing available today.' (NewPages). With spotlights on Texture Press and author Megan Giddings, the acclaimed new series, with its 'finger on the pulse,' succeeds in its aim to make something big from many small things.

The Best Small Fictions 2016

Stuart Dybek

Poetry

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