An early novel by the distinguished American writer Fanny Howe, recently revised, Bronte Wilde, set against the background of the emerging counter-culture of the early 1960s, is the tragic tale of a dispossessed young woman, in thrall to a childhood friend, who flees from the East to the West coast of the USA in a vain bid to reinvent herself. Fanny Howe, acclaimed as a poet and novelist, was born in Buffalo, NY, and brought up in Boston. For some years she was professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, and later visiting writer/lecturer at various colleges in the USA and Ireland. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005, and for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. She has won the National Poetry Foundation Award (twice) and the American Book Award for Fiction, among others.

Bronte Wilde

Literature & Fiction

HOWE, FANNY

Literary

Grand Iota

Despite being subtitled "A Mystery", Ken Edwards' third novel is no conventional crime story. An old and vulnerable woman has gone missing, and a private detective, Phidias Peralta, an illegal resident in a business park near the run-down port of Deadmans Beach, has been hired by her nephew to find her. His assistant, Lucy, is more concerned with her seven-year-old son who is failing at school - but she too is drawn into the quest to try to solve a mystery for which there appears to be no single solution.

The Grey Area

Edwards, Ken

Writer-director Pan Fleet plans a new experimental play for the off-Broadway stage: Killer Killing Killers, a montage of murder scenes, aiming to provoke his audience's ire with a work apparently amorally predicated on senseless violence. The plan is complicated by the intervention of his heart surgeon, who also fancies himself as a kind of "director" and by the surgeon's wife, an empathy-challenged child psychologist who clashes with Pan's leading lady. The novel plays, so to speak, on the distinction between acting (doing something) and acting (playing a role). The narrative, which alternates between episodes of planning and rehearsing Pan's play and scenes that will be performed on opening night, presents a fiercely satirical staging of the problems we face whenever we attempt to do justice to other people's experience.

Play, A Novel

Singer, Alan

The Shenanigans

Marley, Brian

Product Description Grand Iota brings back into print this classic: the late Barbara Guest's only novel, first published by Black Sparrow in 1978 and out of print for many years. Our edition includes Barbara Guest's preface to the 2nd edition and a new, specially commissioned afterword by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.The novel is mostly narrated by a male protagonist, Morgan Flew, whose relationship with the main female character, Miriam, forms the focus - although there are digressions and passages in the third person, and poetic flights. The setting is mainly New York in the 1970s, a world of art and creativity, familiar from Guest's poetry. Blau DuPlessis' afterword provides useful insights into this fascinating and unique text. About the Author Barbara Guest (1920-2006) was one of the foremost American poets of the 20th century, her many books spanning 60 years of writing. She came to prominence as a member of the 1960s New York School of poetry, alongside John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler.

Seeking Air

Guest, Barbara

Twenty-four short stories by Toby Olson are collected here for the first time. They move effortlessly from depictions of American working-class and suburban life to wondrous and sometimes grotesque surrealism, but always with an undertone of humanity and humour. This selection, spanning Olson's career, forms a fine introduction to the work of this noted contemporary novelist and poet. The edition includes an introduction by British scholar Ian Brinton, setting the work in context.

Journeys on a Dime: Selected Stories

Olson, Toby

Contemporary

This short novel is based on the story of Edith Bone, a writer falsely accused of spying and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Hungary in the early 1950s. She keeps herself sane by inventing numerous techniques, from reciting lists of writers in alphabetical order, to playing games using the languages she knows, to going on imaginary walks. It is written under a modified form of the Oulipian "prisoner's constraint", in which letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y) may not be used.

Bone

Terry, Philip

GREATER LONDON tells the life-story of Leo Barber, a celebrity across several domains. He first finds fame during the 1975 referendum on the UK's membership of the Common Market (as it was then), by inventing a character called Jimmy Paxton, a faux-innocent, rabble-rousing xenophobe. Later in life he passes himself off as a poet, whose poems were in fact generated by computer in his brother's laboratory. Later still he "authors" a book on the neuroscience of the creative mind, about which he knows nothing (though luckily his clever, put-upon brother does). But, despicable though he is, who would have thought he'd stoop to murder? We hear about all this in Leo's own voice - discursive, opinionated, vulnerable, comic, often sympathetic. Not the voice or mind of a natural villain.

Greater London

RUSSELL, James

In the eight stories comprising THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT BOW the cast of characters includes a journalist in a Middle Eastern war zone, an unemployed actor struggling with elder care, members of a commune planning to kidnap a priest, a torturer's mother and, finally, Nikolai Gogol wrestling with his angels and demons.

The Man Who Would Not Bow: and Other Stories

Melnyczuk, Askold

United States

The unnamed, somewhat paranoid hero's experiences of "In-Between places" such as an airport baggage reclaim area, a hotel complex that exists solely to cater for bumped airline passengers, a rest stop, and a shopping mall, are achingly funny. But the humour takes increasingly dark turns: the "literary novel" is turned inside out as we encounter a plot to kidnap and replace the critic James Wood, an unknown play allegedly by Samuel Beckett (featuring Dr Johnson and his cat Hodge) is discovered and its fugitive production discussed, and, finally, the horror of the Palestinian Nakba is confronted. First published in 2012, this novel was received enthusiastically before quickly slipping out of print. Our edition, including an afterword by Joseph G Ramsey, is published by agreement with Edmond Caldwell's estate.

Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant

Caldwell, Edmond

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