Paulette Alden's Unforgettable: Short Stories is a beautifully observed, wryly humorous, and profoundly moving collection that follows Miriam Batson, the protagonist of Alden's earlier collection, Feeding the Eagles, into middle-age as she navigates her own aging, the life choices she's made, and the loss of those she loves. Written from the heart but without sentimentality, the stories give shape and meaning to feelings and experiences common to many, especially women.  In "The Student," Miriam, caught up in the drama of the suicide attempt of one of her favorite college students, ricochets between maternal and romantic feelings, as she remembers her own youth "when love was new," and her desire to mother the young man. "Sorrow" brings Miriam  back to the South Carolina of her childhood when she returns to visit the grave of a beloved maid, where she feels heartache not only for her death, but also for the whole tragic history of the South. In "Enormously Valuable," Miriam decides to take a stand for herself at the university where she has been passed over for a teaching job given to a less qualified man: "Her mother hadn't taught her to be tough; she had taught her to be nice. As if that could protect her. And maybe it could, in a parlor. But not in the English Department. Nice was nice, but no defense against getting screwed. In fact, it just made it easier . . ." And in "Swimming, Snow," Miriam experiences the spiraling nature of grief after the sudden death of her father.  The last five stories in Unforgettable form a progressive narrative as Miriam tries to keep her mother afloat as she is being pulled under by Alzheimer's. Moving her mother first from South Carolina to a senior apartment in Minnesota, then to assisted living, and then to a nursing home, Miriam experiences all the grief, guilt, poignancy, painful humor, exhaustion, intimacy and ultimately deep love involved in caring for a failing parent. Anyone who has experienced such a situation will relate to Miriam's feelings as she struggles with the inevitable, arriving at last at acceptance and appreciation for what, after so much loss, still remains.  The memoiristic stories in Unforgettable reveal the power of writing to transform common, familiar, relatable experiences into compelling works that move us, entertain us, and illuminate our own lives. 

Unforgettable: Short Stories

Literature & Fiction

Alden, Paulette

Short Stories & Anthologies

Radiator Press

In the wake of the brutal lynching in 1947 of a young black man named Willie Earle by a mob of cab drivers in Greenville, South Carolina, four people on the periphery of Earle's life find their own lives unexpectedly upended. Against the backdrop of the social and racial strictures of the fifties, each of these characters struggles to find his or her own version of freedom. Each experiences loss, sorrow, and growth, as the South begins its own long march towards racial equality.

The Empty Cell: a Novel

United States

How well can you really know the people you love, even your own son? Four young women are murdered, and he's the suspect . . . After raising her son, Ben, as a single parent, librarian Inga Daudelin is blindsided when he is accused of the murders of four young women. At the same time, Jean, a young, pregnant waif who seems both simple and wise, "imprints" on Inga at work, drawing her into an unusual friendship. When Ben kidnaps Jean, Inga and lead detective Ron O'Loughlin, with whom she is falling in love, search for the two, who along with Jean's baby, have formed a strange but human family. "This wonderful novel is a success at every level--an engrossing thriller and a nuanced examination of love--written with artful directness. I loved every word and could not put it down." -- Scott Turow

The Answer to Your Question

Poetry. "You have no future because you are in it. And so, what is now? What does it feel like, what is its real language? Is someone or something dying, going on, or gone? Cynthia Arrieu-King is a gifted, present poet, but I forget her, reading this (and it is hers) account of a world going more and more 'off'--off-base, out of kilter, not like some previously perceptible 'normal': it is real, and it is a dream. The souring world is a dream. But this is such an interesting book! The author is an honest tracker, so you never know, finally, what she'll say, in her own futureless language."--Alice Notley "FUTURELESS LANGUAGES is a manual for you written in the sound of the wind, in the language 'the air in the rock speaks.' A mixed tape of things 'beyond interpretation.' Manifesto made all of questions and a very listening speech: 'how did I get here? what should we do?' King writes a poetry of now that bears out how language already accesses tomorrows: a simple switch of tense changes everything, like the time traveler who butterfly-effects their own birth. While they hold language's paradoxes, these poems hold the world's too. 'Every time I watch the news I delete a few more poems.'--but the ones that remain brim with the fragile power of the poet's word. That power whose truth still get poets detained. King's poems work as embodiments and records, laments and wishes: 'To walk outside at / midnight with zero fear.' Locations, languages flow, revealing observation for translation, syntax for alchemy, and poetry to be 'a toil and an art,' time-spinning and thing-keeping. FUTURELESS LANGUAGES is tender, brilliant play: read it aloud."--Ana Boži?evi?

FUTURELESS LANGUAGES

Arrieu-King, Cynthia

Poetry

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Marion Bell's first book, AUSTERITY, is poetry written through and against neoliberal demands, "committed to what can only be approached by trust which is impossible to imagine after the things we've lived thru." In conversation with friends, activists and philosophers, these poems explore love, intimacy, queer liberation, and time. What takes shape is a music "that happens also / while looking for work / so you can keep living / to undo / what work does."

AUSTERITY

Bell, Marion

"The drone, the cage, the market accumulate their victims by watching them. They watch so they can tag, they tag in order to conquer. But, as Sousveillance Pageant shows, we are not theirs. A brilliant blend of insight and imagination, Sousveillance Pageant has an exuberance that exceeds the page. With a creative pathos and an unruly commitment to a world within our grasp, Emily Abendroth offers an incandescent look at watching back, dreaming big, and fighting to win. Sousveillance Pageant is our abolitionist avatar, our determined alter ego marshalling collective wisdom against the punitive surveillance state with an ingenuity all her own. Follow her rebellious spirit."--Dan Berger, author of Rethinking the American Prison Movement & co-curator of the Washington Prison History Project"Sousveillance Pageant offers delicate looks and creative thought that could dismantle and redefine systems of surveillance, causing individual actors and reactors to have no choice but to redirect their usage. An overall revolutionary way that Emily Abendroth suggests a redirection is to surveil surveillance or rather, in the interest of the people, to SOUSveil surveillance."--Clinton Walker, incarcerated writer, activist, & founding member of LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty"Here's a book written on behalf of every seen face, each of us surveilled, targeted, data'd and metadata'd unto state and market, mugshotted, incarcerated, known by heat trace and GPS. Abendroth has written an extraordinary essay/fiction, heedless of genre's limits, tumbling with joyful desperate exuberance from analysis to care to theorization to performance art to pun to tender languages for decarceration. This book gives form to Sousveillance Pageant, agent and avatar of the action we need: surveillance from below. What if a drone was seen by your seeing? What if you could slip through the hands of surveillance capitalists like a ghost? What if we each cared how we each answered the question What do you think security is? This book is comfort, incitement, inspiration, manifesto, careful dreaming, courageous friend." --Hilary Plum, author of Strawberry Fields

Sousveillance Pageant

Abendroth, Emily

History & Criticism

Selected from two decades of work, the poetry in Warren C. Longmire's OPEN SOURCE chronicles the complexities of language, identity, love and time. Ranging widely in style, with a lyric intensity rooted in the Philly landscape, this book reveals the interconnections between public and private history, a black man's daily struggle for self-acceptance and joy amidst "disastrous news and the grace/of each of arc of decay." Longmire addresses work in the tech industry as well as the gentrifying city as it grinds through a pandemic. At times raw, playful, painful and technical, OPEN SOURCE is poetry alert to the particulars and subtle shifts from day to day in uncertain times, unafraid to grapple with the past inside the present.

Open Source

Longmire, Warren C.

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