Fiction. THE FOURTH OF JULY takes place in the summer 1974 on an island off the coast of Connecticut. All Jack Smith wants is a vacation like he enjoyed in his youth: swimming, sailing, and sunshine. But Jack finds his summer plans spiraling out of control. His estranged wife follows him to the island, looking for money. The priest and constable are conspiring his ruin. And the local Lolita is intent upon seducing him. Jack suddenly has more problems than he can handle, and he deals with them the only way he knows how: with rum and romance, all leading to a calamitous Fourth of July, in Kevin Dowd's hilarious first novel. "First novels are always interesting business. It's a special treat to come across a new writer with a unique outlook on the way the sexes cohabit—particularly someone as humorous as Kevin Dowd. THE FOURTH OF JULY reminded me of such gin-soaked comic classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The Ginger Man. Dowd's hero, Jack Smith, joins the rank of those lovable rogues, a man who spends his summer tippling into all sorts of trouble with only the best intentions. I laughed out loud."—Rand Richards Cooper

The Fourth of July

Literature & Fiction

Dowd, Kevin

Contemporary

Roundabout Press

Charlie Martens is desperate for stability in an otherwise peripatetic life. An explosion that killed his parents when he was young robbed him of normalcy and he was shuttled from relative to relative, left alone to decipher the world he encountered in order to cobble together an answer as to how he would live. Ever the outcast, Charlie recognizes in Olivia, an international student from London, the sense of otherness he feels and their relationship seems to promise salvation. But when Olivia abandons him, his desperate mind fixates on her favorite writer, Vernon Downs, who becomes an emblem for reunion with Olivia. Charlie's quest takes him from Phoenix to New York City and when chance brings him into proximity to Vernon Downs, he quickly ingratiates himself into Downs's world. Proximity invites certain temptations, though, and it isn't long before Charlie moves dangerously from fandom to apprentice to outright possession.

Vernon Downs

Clarke, Jaime

Kirkus (Starred Review): "A debut collection of stories--one of the best in recent memory--that finds psychological acuity within characters who are unreflective or even impenetrable. Ryan has plainly been honing his craft, because the 13 tales here are the work of a writer who knows exactly what he's doing--and challenges the reader to figure out how he's doing it...." A tyrannical father gradually shrinks to the size of a doll. A World War II veteran living at a Laurel Canyon ranch in the late '60s faces the threat of changing times and a disturbing, soon to be famous, cult at the next ranch over. A former Olympic contender, after an injury leaves him with a glass eye, takes work as a security guard at the mansion of a ruthless CEO. A child who discovers the scene of a bizarre and unexplained crash in Roswell, New Mexico, fashions the rest of his life through the lens of what he found there... With language at turns diamond sharp and stone blunt, the thirteen stories of David Ryan's dark and edgy debut, Animals in Motion, map the existence of their characters through the uncharted world of the psyche. The animals that mysteriously appear suggest a leveling, a weave of human experience with that of the natural world. A landscape alive in the space between thought and impulse, where present circumstances are ruled by memories of the past, and where conscious reality is trumped by greater truths of the imagination. Animals in Motion presents an often surreal yet consistently beautiful tapestry of American despair and hope. "From the first page of Animals in Motion one is immersed in the precisionist's world, filled with startling light, stunning events, exquisitely captured moments--a haunting world of which the reader has a particularly wide-angled view. Story after story Ryan works his unique magic, showing us a world as mystifying as it is mundane. This recognition, that the ordinary is very strange indeed, is at the heart of these quiet but searing stories. Animals in Motion is a marvel." --Frederick Barthelme

Animals in Motion: Stories

Ryan, David

Fiction. This collection of linked stories follows the curses of a father, visited upon the Nash family over the course of three generations, spanning the 1960's to the present. In rich, moving episodes, readers engage the lives of stunned-straight racists, scarred veterans, doomed lovers, would-be assassins, gun-toting grandmothers, nascent female crime-bosses, ambivalent mourners, big-time drug- running, and bewildered survivors trying to make sense of it all. This is not a family—it's a world; this is not a book—it's an indictment; these words are not written—they're howled. "Digging Up The Bones is one of the most gorgeous and wrenching books I've read in years. In the tradition of Jayne Anne Phillips and Dan Woodrell, Marlowe has given us a cast of unforgettable characters marked by abuse, addiction, and—against all odds—hope. The prose is glass clear, the humor is dark, and the story is as sweeping—and as strong—as the Kentucky hills."—Bret Anthony Johnston, Corpus Christi and Remember Me Like This "Marlowe has created a world at once strange and familiar, where love and violence move in lockstep, and where the sound of one family's barbaric yawp echoes over rooftops and reminds us of our own. This is a brave, brilliant book."—Josh Emmons, The Loss of Leon Meed "Nothing stays buried in DIGGING UP THE BONES. The Nash family comes roaring off the page; these are characters who struggle with the generational brutalities of the American working poor, and—in doing so—show us human nature at its weakest, at its most vulnerable and most raw."—Peyton Marshall, Good House "Marlowe adeptly weaves a complex tale of the ways in which the often horrific behavior we heap upon each other reverberates across generations. His prose is harshly lyrical, demanding and dynamic, and evokes with exquisite accuracy this Kentucky holler from which no one emerges unscathed."—Colette Sartor

Digging Up The Bones

Marlowe, Dale

WORLD GONE WATER enlarges the portrait of Charlie Martens, first introduced in VERNON DOWNS, a young man grappling with how to navigate the world. Set in Phoenix, seven years before the events of VERNON DOWNS, Charlie finds himself released from a voluntary stay at a behavioral clinic in the Sonoran desert, the result of an incident with a woman he met while tending bar in Florida where Charlie had fled to forget his high school sweetheart, whose sudden marriage to someone else devastates him. But Charlie's homecoming launches him into a chain of events with a cast of characters that assault his fragile state and further undermine his general impressions about life and how to live. WORLD GONE WATER roves the deep terrain of our want for emotional connection and is a devastating narrative about love, sex, and friendship. "Jaime Clarke's WORLD GONE WATER is so fresh and daring, a necessary book, a barbaric yawp that revels in its taboo: the sexual and emotional desires of today's hetero young man. Clarke is a sure and sensitive writer, his lines are clean and carry us right to the tender heart of his lovelorn hero, Charlie Martens. This is the book Hemingway and Kerouac would want to read. It's the sort of honesty in this climate that many of us aren't brave enough to write."--Tony D'Souza "This unsettling novel ponders human morality and sexuality, and the murky interplay between the two. Charlie Martens is a compelling antihero with a voice that can turn on a dime, from shrugging naiveté to chilling frankness. WORLD GONE WATER is a candid, often startling portrait of an unconventional life."--J. Robert Lennon "Funny and surprising, WORLD GONE WATER is terrific fun to read and, as a spectacle of bad behavior, pretty terrifying to contemplate."--Adrienne Miller "Charlie Martens is my favorite kind of narrator, an obsessive yearner whose commitment to his worldview is so overwhelming that the distance between his words and the reader's usual thinking gets clouded fast. WORLD GONE WATER will draw you in, make you complicit, and finally leave you both discomfited and thrilled."--Matt Bell "Charlie Martens will make you laugh. More, he'll offend and shock you while making you laugh. Even trickier: he'll somehow make you like him, root for him, despite yourself and despite him. This novel travels into the dark heart of male/female relations and yet there is tenderness, humanity, hope. Jaime Clarke rides what is a terribly fine line between hero and antihero. Read and be astounded."--Amy Grace Loyd

World Gone Water

Written from within the ranks of a much-maligned generation, Ending Gently challenges readers to consider whether modern masculinity is a triumph of the Beat Generation—or a brazen indictment of it. Its hero, a floundering and alcoholic author of romance novels for men, is forced to face the many loves in his life, from his love of the bottle, to women, to his painfully complex relationship with his ever-judgmental parents. Provocative, full-hearted, and as quirky as it is rewarding, Ending Gently is an unflinching exploration of love, hope, and the naked faults that make us human.

Ending Gently: A Memoir By Frank Gently

Gently, Frank

Genre Fiction

Fiction. DIVORCE, DOG STYLE takes place in one day. A beleaguered womanizer, Grafton, attempts to win back an old girlfriend, Caroline, whose son has recently died in a wind turbine accident. Yet there are other men and ex-lovers in line before him, including a veterinarian who is coming to her house to put down Caroline's dog with the "two-injection method." Flook's iconic blend of black comedy, biting wisdom, and characteristic lyricism explores the raw sanctuaries where women and men connect and disconnect. "Flook's vivid and exhilarating writing puts her in the front ranks of new American Writers."--Annie Proulx

Divorce, Dog Style

Flook, Maria

Romance

Fiction. Short Stories. Latinx Studies. Chalar's fiction debut, THE GUARDIAN ANGEL OF LAWYERS, comprises thirteen stories examining the themes of guilt and innocence, punishment, legal culpability, and moral justification. A well-respected lawyer is haunted by a crime he committed in his youth. Violence between a young couple offers a harried criminal judge an unlikely chance for redemption. A controversial college professor enlists one of his students to obtain the skull of a murderer in order to prove a groundbreaking theory. In this collection of stories, many of them drawing from her experience of the legal profession, Chalar explores issues of morality and conflict, shedding light on our most questionable actions and on the enduring effects of things we do to others and ourselves.

The Guardian Angel of Lawyers: Stories

Chalar, Laura

Short Stories & Anthologies

Fiction. The daringly imagined, masterfully realized story of poet John Keats's second life abroad. What if Keats had not died in Rome at only twenty-five, just as he was coming to realize his poetic gifts? In this audacious alternate telling, the young poet is pulled back from the brink of death only to find his troubles far from over. He is short on money, far from home, his literary reputation anything but assured--but his life and imagination have been spared, and a new country awaits. In an Italy at uneasy peace, full of foreign armies and spies, Keats is drawn into Percy and Mary Shelley's expatriate circle, resumes his old profession of surgery and falls in with student revolutionaries who are plotting a more radical cure for their nation. His fiancée in London expects his return, and everyone is expecting his next poem, but he has not returned from his deathbed quite the same person--or poet--that he was. Written with deep knowledge, compassion and brio, Paul Kerschen's debut novel is a spellbinding historical yarn and a heady engagement with the literature of the past, a thing of beauty in itself and a meditation on the writer's duty in troubled times.

The Warm South: A Novel

Kerschen, Paul

Fiction. All novels are necessarily concerned with their protagonists, but what of the minor characters that fill out a novel's landscape? We can never know them as well as we should or like. The same is true for the trilogy of novels by Jaime Clarke: Vernon Downs, World Gone Water, and Garden Lakes. MINOR CHARACTERS brings together Clarke's previously published short stories featuring the supporting characters in his trilogy, as well as stories by some of today's most talented contemporary writers, who have chosen characters from the trilogy and contributed a story. With a Foreword by Jonathan Lethem, and an Introduction by Laura van den berg, this Warholian enterprise has produced a unique and stirring collection that both stands on its own and enriches the standalone novels in Clarke's trilogy. Featuring original stories by Mona Awad, Christopher Boucher, Kenneth Calhoun, Nina de Gramont, Ben Greenman, Annie Hartnett, Owen King, Neil LaBute, J. Robert Lennon, Lauren Mechling, Shelly Oria, Stacey Richter, Joseph Salvatore, Andrea Seigel, and Daniel Torday. "Clarke has done more, even, than Vonnegut in setting his characters free: he's flipped foreground and background, and at the same time invited others in to browse, and revise, and interfere with, and extend, his fictional who's who."--Jonathan Lethem, from his foreword

Minor Characters: Stories

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