Tanya Irene Schwartz narrates her hilarious and conflicting desires through the musical and psychological structure of the fugue. Jewish law, world records, 9/11, Barbies, Viagra, sex, and sisters: these are the surprising sites of Tanya's transformation from girl to woman. These short, intertwined stories explore religion, sex, and school, capturing the cadences and rhythms that mark our journey from adolescence to adulthood. Tanya’s vivid, humorous voice grants us a rare but strangely familiar view of what happens when we almost touch the divine.  

Thirteen Fugues

Literature & Fiction

Fink, Jennifer Natalya

Literary

Dark Coast Press

An anonymous cast spans four generations in the struggle for redemption, love, and peace. An immigrant cobbler sees his son wrongly arrested by a man who shines his shoes. The memory of a boy’s deceased mother is betrayed when his friend use her makeup as gag. A waitress secretly admires a man who atones for his troubled past by refurbishing a house. And a man laments his lost love by tracing her footsteps across the floors of his empty apartment. A storm looms, bringing the stories together across time and place, uniting them all by their common humanity. These intense portraits are packed with intelligent Christian allegory and lyricism that work together to culminate in one bright mosaic picture.

Elynia

Belczyk, David

Factory worker Warrell Swanson has always found meaning in work, dogs, hunting and waitresses. After suffering an injury, he escapes the summer heat at the local tavern with his best friend, and the library, where he falls in love with Defiance, Ohio’s beautiful new librarian. But old lust challenges new love and Warrell grapples with a promotion, an indifferent management and the looming threat of a rising river as he considers escaping Defiance for good.

Hell Called Ohio

John M. Hamilton

""League of Somebodies is so rich with originality that it's actually radioactive. If you captured Owen Meany in a literary time machine and fed him a strict diet of comic books and plutonium, you would come up with a main character a hell of a lot more well-adjusted than Lenard Sikophsky. Read at your own risk and beware: laughter is the first sign of infection."" –Mat Johnson, author of Pym, Incognegro, and Dark Rain Lenard Sikophsky’s father has been feeding him plutonium since the age of six in the hopes of making him the world’s first bona fide superhero. First, he must pass the unusual tests of manhood locked in the centuries old tomb, The Manaton, a secret relic passed down for generations. Falling in love with the beautiful, compulsively suicidal Laura Moskowitz doesn’t make his life any easier. But with the guidance of the Sikophsky men, the antiquated rulebook, and of course a healthy amount of plutonium, Lenard accepts his fate as an exactor of justice. . . . Twenty years later, Lenard’s son Nemo is introduced to the same destiny as his father, only this time the violent entity called THEY are in dangerous pursuit. Lenard’s life and the legacy of his family are put to the test when he is forced to defend everything he loves.

League of Somebodies

Sattin, Samuel

The characters in these quirky intelligent stories hoist the banner of solitude and misfit wit from the vast remote recesses of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.Young lovers discern self-revealing events in celestial skies. A man recounts his affectionate history with his 200-lbs mastiff, named Father. Tired workers nurse their hangovers before a loud local bar serves up contemplations of a brother’s tour in Iraq. Happy Rock brushes the dust and snow from the micro-verses of small towns and strange lives surrounded by the great outside.

Happy Rock

Simmons, Matthew