If there's a word for the ache of forgetting exactly what you've just forgotten, Elwood Munn hopes it's a word that you'll never forget. A morbid barista in the small Midwestern town of Velton, Elwood obsesses over bar trivia, mocks infant worship and reflects on the paradox of pervasive loneliness in our hyper-connected world. Yearning for an antisocial medium, Quate's debut collection invites readers into a delightful awkwardness that may ring only too familiar to anyone who has attempted to twentysomething during the era of the Internets.

In This Book You Will Find The Face Of Our town

Literature & Fiction

Elizeya Quate

Contemporary

Kernpunkt Press

Fiction. A, as in almanac for the dead but still dreaming. B, as in bestiary for the broken and the brave. C, as in crisis, catharsis, or conclusion: the cosmological fate of us all and how we choose to end things. Offering up an eclectic landscape of language experiments, patches of surrealism, and more traditional tales, POSTLUDES spans the style spectrum from A-Z, analog to digital, and heartbreak to hope in its earnest and empathetic variations on the theme of finality and The End.

Postludes

Burnside, Matthew

Fiction. John Eliason is a young Mormon missionary from Alberta about to return home after two years in Sweden. When his only convert dies, John's last duty is to visit the estranged family to make funeral arrangements. As the snow strands him in the countryside, tensions rise and family secrets are uncovered. The story unfolds through letters, journal entries, flashbacks, and fragmented ruminations. It is a love note to people outside of their cultural comfort zones, to failed poets, and to silence.

The Field is White: A Novel

Åkebrand, Claire

Genre Fiction

Fiction. Horror. Women's Studies. MOTHER WALKED INTO THE LAKE, Alana I. Capria's second novel, merges fantasy, feminism, and horror into a brilliant but disturbing allegory on motherhood and mental illness. The story follows three children who come face-to-face with the consequences of their Mother's drowning. The novel explores the complicated nature of Motherhood and how women uniquely carry this onus of self- sacrifice, responsibility, and all- consuming love.

Mother Walked Into the Lake

Capria, Alana I.

Fiction. A man wakes up one morning believing he has a wife who lives in Tucumcari, New Mexico. A wife he somehow remembers yet does not know. When he decides to find her, he embarks on a surreal journey through both landscape and memory. The reader travels with the narrator through sinking cities, his father's various jobs, government-designated atomic safe havens, motel rooms, cities made of only men, and interactions with people from his childhood including Boyd Delmarco, a famous radio personality whose lungs have turned to glass. "Parks' debut novel is a kaleidoscope of deep-rooted imagery, infused with magic realism yet tempered by the groundedness that comes with instinctive storytelling."--Booklist, starred review "This timely novel is to be treasured for the rich prose and witty intellect that inform the boldness of its storytelling. Parks is willing to risk the safety of a more traditional approach in order to press readers into a different kind of knowing, a truth that is more deeply felt than thought. He embraces the timeless human necessity to make stories from what we think we know and transform them into what we know we believe."--Critical Flame "A thoughtful, surrealistic, and strange novel, TUCUMCARI delves into ideas around memories and the subconscious, as well as into the significance of places within both. It is as wild and mesmeric as can be imagined."--Foreword Magazine "Patrick Parks, in this relentlessly quantum mechanical rendition of the novel, TUCUMCARI, combines the traumatic rhythmic keenings of Philip Glass's World Our of Balance or Einstein on the Beach with a deeply poignant Buster Keatonian deadpan."--Michael Martone "Everyone wants to get away from the falling ash of this life. everyone wants to get away from the threat of nuclear bombs, away to some far away, imagined safe place. Rootless, fugitive, we want love, a place to call home. In TUCUMCARI, Patrick Parks takes us there in a novel so clearly written, so lucidly poetic, it breaks the heart."--Richard Jones "What a strange and wonderful novel Patrick Parks has written! It's a road trip novel without an actual road trip--the narrator imagines a trip he will take to Tucumcari, NM, to find the woman he just remembered he married years ago--but except for floating above his bed at night or teaching english to immigrants in a city that rains ash, he almost never goes anywhere. But his mind goes everywhere, and it's a bona fide delight to ride along with him on his mental road trip. Written in brief fragmentary sections that often read like prose poems, this is a narrative as delightfully disjointed and digressive as Sterne's Tristram Shandy and as darkly comic and magical as Kafka's The Metamorphosis."--David Jauss

Tucumcari

Humor & Entertainment

Parks, Patrick

Humor

Fiction. Latinx Studies. Flowers that grow from light bulbs. Bullets stopped by an iPod. A ship and woman taken apart piece by piece. FABULATIONS is a collection of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination. Encompassing thousands of years, this collection is at once intimate and panoramic. Each story aspires to be an imaginative periscope to see part of our shared human experience from a new angle.

Fabulations

de Piérola, José

United States

Fiction. Olivia and her mother obsess over memories. For her mother, compulsion is a need to document everything in her life. To preserve. Olivia's urge is to revisit the scars of her body, as places of destruction. Yet, as Olivia grows up, she discovers that she cannot always rend memory from herself; it can burrow itself into places so deep that she can't make them bleed.

How to Carry Scars

Green, Dana

Fiction. THE BOOK OF TRANSPARENCIES begins in 2005 with an unnamed narrator who finds a copy of The Book of Transparencies by William Bolzebados, published in 1977, in the community college library where he teaches. Drawn to the author and the book's subject (the relationship between Bolzebados and the artist Cleo Barnes), the narrator begins to follow Bolzebados' life and the story of his book, travels that take the narrator through New York, Paris, Italy, Berlin, fictional parallel landscapes and fabrications, and finally to Maine where Bolzebados disappeared from the back of the Aucocisco Ferry bound for Peaks Island in October of 1975. The arc of the narrative swirls around the reasons for, and results of, this event. The narrator creates an archive of this particular history which includes himself, Bolzebados and Barnes, but also a more amorphous, clouded space where all three of them exist, speak and attempt to fill in the holes and gaps of their collective memory.

The Book of Transparencies

Navicky, Jefferson

Fiction. Poetry. California Interest. Women's Studies. It's 1983. A woman drives through California with something in her trunk. There are ghosts on the road, and she is on the run.

Fugitive Assemblage

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Calkins, Jennifer

Mystery

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. From award-winning essayist Chelsea Biondolillo, THE SKINNED BIRD is about all the ways we break our own hearts. In lyric, fragmented essays--full of geological, ornithological and photographic interventions, with landscapes, loss, and longing--Biondolillo travels the terrain of leaving and finding home while keeping her sights fixed firm on the natural world around her. Includes "How to Skin a Bird," winner of the Carter Prize for the Essay, and the Best American Essays 2014 notable, "Phrenology." "Sometimes when a human is truly an animal, their thinking patterns shift in fundamental ways, absorbing the color here and the systems within systems, to the point where they feel alienated from humans and the human part of themselves. The ache and dizziness of pulling these back into an integrated body and psychology is a story only a few of us can tell. Luckily, Chelsea Biondolillo is here to walk us through that process with no apology, only reverence."--Kristin Hersh "Birds fill this book. But THE SKINNED BIRD is also full of music, silence, rain, deserts and desertion. Chelsea Biondolillo shows us through science, memory, an updraft of questioning, and a flicker of answers how we learn and relearn how to sing. Like the space feathers need between them, Biondolillo gives us the space inside these essays for the air to flow and lift. Don't worry if there is a pause. Biondolillo will stitch you in. THE SKINNED BIRD is a brilliant dive into how deeply we can love people and place and dirt and birds and air. And how we sometimes have to let go of all of that to truly fly."--Nicole Walker "That every bird has on its chest a featherless patch ideal for our incision, that we learn our songs in the phrases our families hold aloft and, once each phrase is learned, repeat it as though our own invention. Chelsea Biondolillo doesn't shy away from how the figures of our childhood may, and do, compose our adulthood. At the same time, Biondollilo's lyric--sometimes fragmented, sometimes purposefully obscured, and other times replete unto bursting--essays hold open the moment where a long-repeated note may slip or twist, a new note sound. In a new home, a new city, or the final walk on the familiar towpath, we might alter our song just enough that it continues to contain our history and finally ushers us into the vast expanse of our future."--Danielle Pafunda "Chelsea Biondolillo's THE SKINNED BIRD is nothing short of breathtaking. Between poetry and prose, between flight and feet in the dirt, between feather and bone, the stories open up what we mean when we say being, steal your breath, and bring you back to life so that we might yet remember the risk and beauty involved in becoming. We could all use a new way to imagine becoming just now. Chelsea forges a path through imagination, science, the natural world, and language back to the heart of all things. I will read this book into forever. THE SKINNED BIRD is tattooed on my heart."--Lidia Yuknavitch "Chelsea Biondolillo's THE SKINNED BIRD seamlessly weaves science and intuition into text, image and diagram that allows us to travel wild-eyed and headfirst into this deliberate and hopeful repurposing of trauma and loss. We are transfixed by the baby bird who leaves a perilously broken nest to finally be able to see, then sing, and through the sharing of these songs, we manage to finally hear our own."--Joanne Dugan

The Skinned Bird: Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Biondolillo, Chelsea

Arts & Literature

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