A woman sewing a dress for her anniversary night out finds herself presiding over her young daughters as they cut apart their own clothes. A four year old boy going earnestly about the business of being a four year old boy is perplexed as to why his behavior seems to have dramatic effects on his mother. An elementary school volunteer learns about a role-playing card game from a young boy, and then sees the roles play out in her own home. College friends and couples reunite for a drink, and find that although their campus couplings are in the past, their sexual competitions are still very much present. Over the course of these nine stories, Mary Rechner brings a frank, humorous, and ultimately illuminating narrative voice to the subjects of sex, marriage, family, and work. Her characters strain against expected behaviors and received opinions about emotional life: a grieving woman considers pursuing her dead lover's twin, a master gardener envies the freedom of her widowed friend, a poet considers which of her pieces will work best when read in a strip club, and a patient in the dentist's chair finds her appointment her best chance to reflect on her otherwise hectic life. Nominated for awards and the recipient of fellowships from organizations on both sides of the country, Mary Rechner's prose leavens moments of despair with moments of humor, and recognizes the knotted relationship between pleasure and pain. The patient, uncompromising work of a writer who has carefully observed the moments of possibility and peril that appear--and that we often deliberately seek--in the journey from youth to adulthood, Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women is a debut collection that signals the arrival of a significant new voice in contemporary fiction.

Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women

Literature & Fiction

Mary Rechner

Literary

Propeller Books

Nicholas Allander, 31, carless and careerless, is trying to get his life on track while holding his head high. He s trying to pay off his debt, impress his girlfriend, keep his job, cast off his introversion, and accept the world s imperfections without abandoning his heart. Unsure of what moves to make, though, he considers growing his beard, taking up alcoholism, abandoning scrounging, and owning an automobile, before too much slips by. All the while he clings to his bicycle, a simple machine whose purpose and workings he grasps. Nick s struggle to position his aesthetic within the world is the story of a perfectionist who is far from perfect, who is considerate but clumsy, and who may be invisible. Like Nick, A Simple Machine, Like the Lever is short, toned, observant, generous, purposeful, and brimming with bicycle wisdom.

A Simple Machine, Like the Lever

Evan P. Schneider

A shipwrecked sailor discovers the island he has landed on is not as deserted as he thought. A lone survivor describes an extraterrestrial invasion surprising in its circumstance. A woman wakes up to find a stranger in her bed, twins compete for a woman's affection, and a vessel trapped in the Antarctic ice becomes a site of dread and desperation. In the tradition of literary fantasists like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Tony Wolk delivers a feast of stories that challenge our assumptions about history, reality, and what stories reveal about their tellers. A collection decades in the making, The Parable of You is the work of a writer able to move from the cosmic to the personal in the space of a few deft sentences, with surprising and moving results.

The Parable of You

Tony Wolk

An American au pair considers abandoning her German host family on vacation. A French girl is sent to Munich to live with her father, though she doesn't speak his language. An American woman becomes emotionally disoriented by a German actor, a journalist escapes a lover via a bewildering Mediterranean ferry trip, and a former model travels to Amsterdam to try to save a friend. Across these six stories, Elizabeth Lopeman captures the expatriate experience like no other writer. Her characters experience art, work, love, and tragedy as richly strange and sometimes dangerous when carried over borders or translated across cultures. A collection of vivid images and fascinating characters, Trans Europe Express is a smart, exciting new chapter in the literary tradition of Americans searching Europe not only for experience but, ultimately, for identity. Elizabeth Lopeman's criticism on art and design has appeared in top magazines for years, but it is in this debut story collection that she reveals the full range of her powers as a writer. Trans Europe Express introduces readers to an exciting new voice in American fiction.

Trans Europe Express

Elizabeth Lopeman

The Horse Latitudes follows one Cavalry platoon's time in Baghdad, Iraq. The missions are long stretches of boredom broken by flashes of violence. The single sniper shot fired. An IED loosely buried in the roadside, waiting. A schoolyard of kids throwing fist-sized rocks at gun trucks. The enemy is vast and changing, and the downtime is a combination of homesickness, RPGs, and mortar fire. These men suffer through the war, heat, and each other. The Horse Latitudes observes not only the firefights and their aftermath, but also the soldiers struggles within themselves: how to fight a faceless enemy, what it means to serve, how one soldiers, what makes a man, what makes a good man, what it might mean to die for this, and what it might mean not to.

The Horse Latitudes

Matthew Robinson

Elizabeth/The Story of Drone (Propeller Books Contemporary Poetry)

Akers, Louise

Poetry

When her troubled husband dies unexpectedly, mercurial Therese gets tangled in competing desires and demands--her own and those of her friends and family on Long Island. Ambitious in scope yet carefully observed, Marrying Friends deftly illuminates multiple characters as grief forces them to reimagine their lives and relationships. A frank and often wry look at the bewildering bonds between women, men, siblings, parents, and children, this novel-in-stories confirms Rechner's talent for capturing how we find meaning not only in our dreams, but also in our desperations.

Marrying Friends

Rechner, Mary

Survival Tips: Stories

Gershow, Miriam

United States

Criminals follows the lives of a sister and brother, Ruth and Hank Tanazaki, as they struggle to free themselves from the weight of their parents' generation in a small Japanese American community in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This poignant story of the double-edged nature of community-a force that supports the group, but often at the expense of the individual-explores the possibilities and limits of seeking personal freedom through creativity. Masaoka's dazzling, deeply-moving debut is also an eloquent addition to the canon of Asian American literature.

Criminals

Masaoka, Ben

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