Noor

Sorayya Khan's debut novel is a powerful and poignant story of memory, family, tragedy, and forgiveness. Set in modern-day Islambad, Pakistan, the book depicts an extraordinary child who enables her mother, Sajida, and her grandfather, Ali, to confront the pasts they have chosen to suppress. Through Noor's artwork, her family members are transported through their haunted memories of the 1970 cyclone that claimed the lives of a million people and the violent atrocities of the 1971 conflict between East and West Pakistan that eventually created the independent country of Bangladesh. As Noor's drawings bring to life sights, sounds, smells, and sensations from the past, her family is forced to admit of the betrayals and disillusionments that they thought had been buried with time. Moving, heartbreaking, and unsettling by turns, Noor is a novel about the horrors of war, the power of forgiveness, and, most important, the strength of the human spirit.

Literature & Fiction

SORAYYA KHAN

Contemporary

Lookout Books

Beginning in 1987, Andy Wood began reporting his observations on nature as a weekly commentator on WHQR, the public radio station for the coastal Carolinas. Backyard Carolina includes Wood's most memorable commentaries and observations on nature from his own backyard to the larger backyard of various communities in North and South Carolina.

Backyard Carolina: Two Decades of Public Radio Commentary

History

Wood, Andy

Americas

Fifty years after its original hardcover publication, this anniversary edition features a new introduction by Philip Gerard and a biographical essay by Barbara Brannon. Winner of the 1958 Mayflower Award, The Hatterasman is part nature story, part historical narrative, part adventure story, and part rhetorical farce.

The Hatterasman (Lives in Place)

Biographies & Memoirs

Macneill, Ben Dixon

Historical

Minnie Evans is considered one of America's most important visionary artists. With over fifty full-color photographs and a narrative based on interviews with all eight Bottle Chapel artists, this book collects, for the first time, the story of Minnie Evans, her visionary art, and the garden that now memorializes her.

The Bottle Chapel at Airlie Gardens: A Tribute to Minnie Evans: a Pictorial Guide to the Installation Designed and Built by Virgina Wright-frierson

Arts & Photography

Wharton, Fred

Business of Art

Newly revised and expanded, the sixth edition of this collection features stories, memoirs, and poems by award-winning faculty, visiting writers, and alumni of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. An essential guide for novice writers and readers, Show &amp; Tell has wide application in the classroom as well as for personal study, as a point of entry for beginning writers or a useful review for the more experienced.
Contributors have been anthologized in the Best American and Pushcart Prize series and include a finalist for the National Magazine Award. It features new stories by Clyde Edgerton, Nina de Gramont, and Derek Nikitas; new essays by Wendy Brenner, David Gessner, and Brad Land; new poems by Mark Cox, Sebastian Matthews, and Sharan Strange.

Show & Tell: Writers on Writing

Unc Creative Writing Dept.

History & Criticism

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
PEN/MALAMUD AWARD
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
THE STORY PRIZE FINALIST
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.
No matter the situation in which her characters find themselves―an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of memories unearthed by an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, the deathbed secret of a young girl's forbidden forest tryst with the tsar, the danger that befalls a wealthy couple's child in a European inn of misfits―Edith Pearlman conveys their experience with wit and aplomb, with relentless but clear-eyed optimism, and with a supple prose that reminds us, sentence by sentence, page by page, of the gifts our greatest verbal innovators can bestow.
Binocular Vision reveals a true American original, a master of the story, showing us, with her classic sensibility and lasting artistry, the cruelties, the longings, and the rituals that connect human beings across space and time.

Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

Edith Pearlman

Literary

WINNER, PATERSON FICTION PRIZE 
FINALIST, FOREWORD BOOK OF THE YEAR 
OUTSTANDING COLLECTION, THE STORY PRIZE 
LONGLIST, FRANK O’CONNOR INTERNATIONAL STORY PRIZE 
BRONZE MEDALIST, INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER 
 From a “gifted storyteller” who delivers “always enjoyable, often hysterical stories” (New York Times Book Review) comes a meditation on the American Dream and its discontents. In his most ambitious collection yet, Steve Almond offers a comic and forlorn portrait of these United States: our lust for fame, our racial tensions, the toll of perpetual war, and the pursuit of romantic happiness. 
 In the exuberant title story, a hapless would-be actor, desperate to escape the drudgery of his existence, lands the role of a lifetime. In “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” reprinted in Best American Short Stories, a psychoanalyst with a secret gambling addiction squares off over the poker table against a damaged ex-patient. In “First Date Back,” a young woman becomes the target of a traumatized soldier’s misguided hopes for love. And “A Dream of Sleep,” the collection’s final story, presents a grief-stricken refugee who tends the graves of a forgotten cemetery, only to have his fragile peace shattered by an unwelcome visitor.
 Each of these thirteen stories is an urgent investigation of America’s soul, its particular suffering, its injustices, its possibilities for redemption. With deft sleight of hand, Almond, “a writer who knows us as well as we know ourselves” (Houston Chronicle), leavens his disappointment and outrage with a persistent hope for the men and women who inhabit his worlds. God Bless America offers us an astonishing vision of our collective fate, rendered in Almond’s signature style of “precise strokes . . . with metaphors so original and spot-on that they read like epiphanies” (San Francisco Chronicle).

God Bless America: Stories

ALMOND, STEVE

Humor & Satire

At the age of twenty-nine, just five years after they met, John Rybicki’s wife, the poet Julie Moulds, was diagnosed with cancer. Here, in poems raw and graceful, authentic and wise, Rybicki pays homage to the brave love they shared during her sixteen-year battle and praises the caregivers―nurses and doctors and friends―who helped them throughout. He invites the reader to bear witness to not only the chemotherapy, the many remissions, and the bone marrow transplants, but also the adoption of the couple’s son, the lifted prayers, borrowed time, and lovers’ last touches. A husband smashes an ice-cream cone against his forehead to make his wife laugh. He awakes in the middle of the night to find their dog drowsing atop a pile of her remnant clothes. 
The lamentations and celebrations of When All the World Is Old create a living testament to an endless love. Braided with intimate entries from Moulds’s journal, these poems become the unflinching and lyric autobiography of a man hurtling himself headlong into the fire and emerging, somehow, to offer us a portrait of light and grace. 
Rybicki’s hymns rest in the knowledge that even though all of our love stories one day come to an end, we must honor the loving anyway. The poet has dipped his pen in despair, but as he cleaves his heart and our own, he transmits the exquisite pain of loss into a beauty so fierce and scalding and ultimately healing that the reader comes out whole on the other side.

When All the World Is Old

Rybicki, John

Poetry

Shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing 
From a striking talent with keen powers of observation comes this evocation of an eccentric family’s tangled connections―between themselves, an unlikely cast of locals, and a seldom-documented urban Iowa, one not of cows and cornstalks but of thrift stores, TV dinners, and bridges spanning the muddy sprawl of the Mississippi River. 
By turns uplifting and harrowing, Ben Miller’s prose portrays a boy’s quest to make his life more than the sum of its worst moments in a chaotic household. The tableau revealed is endearingly adrift in time―an inventor’s dream of selling America on a mail-order ice rink, the neighbors whose prodigious cookouts have the gravitas of Greek drama, and the aspiring misfit writers who meet to quote The Elements of Style over Pall Malls in a riverside tenement. Through it all, Miller returns to his Virgil, neighbor Mr. Hickey, a bow-tie-clad widower who exhibits a beguiling power to bear losses without himself becoming lost. Together the unlikely duo forms an irrevocable bond, sipping Sanka and 7UP while tuning in to Muhammad Ali’s greatest matches or rooting for the beleaguered Cubs. 
Miller has engulfed the reader in the saga of a family fragmenting, and in the plight of a city redefining its identity at the close of a century. As characters converge and alter each other, the narrative current sweeps us toward a reckoning with secrets guarded for far too long.

River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa

Humor & Entertainment

Miller, Ben

Humor

GOLD IPPY (INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER) IN THE ANTHOLOGY CATEGORY
In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2008, Salman Rushdie called Ecotone one of a handful of journals on which “the health of the American short story depends.” Now at the close of an award-winning first decade, the magazine has established itself as a preeminent venue for original short fiction from both recognized and emerging writers, with more than twenty stories from sixteen issues reprinted or noted in the Best American, New Stories from the South, Pushcart, and PEN/O. Henry series. 
With the publication of this anthology, Lookout Books makes a permanent home for the vital work of Ecotoneregular contributors Steve Almond, Rick Bass, Edith Pearlman, Ron Rash, Bill Roorbach, and Brad Watson, along with rising talents Lauren Groff, Ben Stroud, and Kevin Wilson, among others. In keeping with the magazine’s mission to reimagine place, the collection explores transitional zones, the spaces where we are most threatened and alive. From a city fallen silent to a doomed nineteenth-century ship, from a startling birth in the woods to the bog burial of an adored archaeologist, from the loop of hair in a drowned trader’s locket to the sanctity of pointy boots in a war zone, these stories make beautiful noise of our most fundamental human longings.

Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone's First Decade

United States

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