Down in the River: A Novel

After the death of his sixteen-year-old twin sister, Lyle Rettew moves from the mountains of Idaho to Eugene, Oregon. His religious, well-intentioned older brother has forbidden any mention of her name. But Lyle, fighting to keep his memory of her alive, has quit taking the lithium that numbs his mind, and openly rebels against his mother and brother for the first time. Taking his mourning out of the house, he embarks upon a fraught pilgrimage that is at once heartbreaking and macabre. Dark though it may be, Lyle's fevered journey along the margins of youth culture is ultimately driven by fierce love and a deep, instinctive need to find a liturgy for loss and grief.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Blacketter, Ryan

Mental Health

Slant

Jon Mote--grad school dropout and serial failure--has been hired to investigate the murder of his erstwhile mentor, Richard Pratt, a star in the firmament of literary theory. Feeling unequal to the task, Mote skitters on the edge of madness, trying to stifle the increasingly threatening voices in his head. His only source of hope is the dogged love of his developmentally disabled sister, Judy, who serves as cheerleader, critic, and moral compass. Death Comes for the Deconstructionist follows Mote and his sister through the streets and neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota--from crime scenes to the halls of academe. Mote's investigation uncovers a series of suspects--including the victim's wife, mistress, and intellectual rivals. Along the way he stumbles onto Pratt's terrible secret, one that prompts the discovery of an equally dark mystery from his own past. These revelations hasten Mote's descent into darkness, putting both him and Judy at grave risk. Death Comes for the Deconstructionist is a tragicomic mystery, a detective story that is at once suspenseful, provocative, and emotionally resonant. It asks not only "whodunit" but whether truth is ultimately something we create rather than discover.

Death Comes for the Deconstructionist: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Taylor, Daniel

History & Criticism

Do We Not Bleed?: A Jon Mote Mystery

A young woman is dead. A man with diminished capacity is accused. His friends, also wounded, try to help him. In the process, they teach Jon Mote a thing or two he desperately needs to learn. Jon no longer hears voices, but he's not convinced a silent universe is much better than a haunted one. He's returned his sister Judy to her group home and taken a staff job there that puts him in the company of six folks who, a bit rebelliously, he calls Specials. Jon thinks his job is to teach these people basic life skills like telling time, making change, and riding the bus. The world says they are to be pitied, perhaps even eliminated. At best taken care of. But he finds that Judy, Ralph, Bonita, Jimmy, Billy the Skywatcher, and J.P. possess something that he and the world badly need. The accused, J.P., is a gentle man who can't tell time or temperature, but wants you to be happy. Is he also a killer? The bureaucracy judges him so and sends him to an institution for the criminally insane. His friends know that if they do not get him back he will wither and die. Meanwhile, Jon has his own problems. He finds himself threatened not so much by disintegration as by normality--the meaningless of the mundane. Alive but trivial. While searching for something to fill the emptiness and for a way to rescue his client and friend, Jon unexpectedly reconnects with his estranged wife, Zillah, and he has an unsettling encounter with an unusual nun who presents him a way of seeing the world that puzzles and intrigues him.

"Llorona was no harmless little pigeon. She was the lechuza, the owl you see just before someone is about to die, the one that haunts you in your dreams and you never want to see in real life because it means you are about to lose someone you love." Llorona is the only girl Guero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore. True to her namesake, Llorona cast Guero away with the coldness of the apparition she has become. But Guero--though he would never admit it to his friends--still wants to get back together with her. Guero spends time with his friends Angel and Smiley--members of the HCP (Hispanics Causing Panic) gang--roaming the streets of the South Texas border towns they inhabit, trying to forget Llorona even as she seems to appear around every corner. Over three days Guero's increasingly violent confrontations with Llorona's current boyfriend will jeopardize the lives of Angel and Smiley and the love he hopes to regain. As events begin to accelerate toward their conclusion--and gang signs are thrown as both threats and claims of identity--the question arises: will Guero throw the HCP sign, or will he throw off that life? Guero's life will be irrevocably changed by violence and loss, but who will he lose, and will he--somewhere along the way--lose himself? Throw is for YA readers who enjoy The Outsiders by SE Hinton, Mexican Whiteboy by Matt de la Peña, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely and Barely Missing Everything by Matt Mendez

Throw

Degollado, Rubén

Genre Fiction

“Llorona was no harmless little pigeon. She was the lechuza, the owl you see just before someone is about to die, the one that haunts you in your dreams and you never want to see in real life because it means you are about to lose someone you love.” Llorona is the only girl Güero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore. True to her namesake, Llorona cast Güero away with the coldness of the apparition she has become. But Güero—though he would never admit it to his friends—still wants to get back together with her. Güero spends time with his friends Ángel and Smiley—members of the HCP (Hispanics Causing Panic) gang—roaming the streets of the South Texas border towns they inhabit, trying to forget Llorona even as she seems to appear around every corner. Over three days Güero’s increasingly violent confrontations with Llorona’s current boyfriend will jeopardize the lives of Ángel and Smiley and the love he hopes to regain. As events begin to accelerate toward their conclusion—and gang signs are thrown as both threats and claims of identity—the question arises: will Güero throw the HCP sign, or will he throw off that life? Güero’s life will be irrevocably changed by violence and loss, but who will he lose, and will he—somewhere along the way—lose himself?

Throw: A Novel

Long after Lauds: Poems

Ever since the Middle Ages, the first hour of daily prayer in monastic life--Matins--has roused the community from sleep. Wisely, the second hour was reserved for Lauds, which means praise. Praise with that freshly awakened consciousness. In this way, such an attitude toward the world, seen and unseen, could be absorbed before breakfast. The poems in this book continue that tradition--though outside a monastic community--of waking up, reflecting, and discerning what there is to praise--and how, and whom. The book constructs an introspective retrospective of a woman charged with curiosity and accommodating doubt. Over decades, she acknowledges with gratitude her own daily shaping by students, grandchildren, rhinos--a public and private history full of saints and ain'ts. Beyond the author's erstwhile community chanting Lauds, she explores its resonance with wit and wistfulness and arrives at this truth: praise over time alters the one who gives it.

Hathaway, Jeanine

Poetry

Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace. This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire." Cording's task has therefore been to evoke what he calls "the primordial intuitions of Christianity": that we live in a world we did not create; that God's immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot "taste and see" that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it. The reflections in Finding the World's Fullness--comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz--suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, "The world's fullness is not made but found."

Finding the World's Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor, and Mystery

Cording, Robert

Hotly in Pursuit of the Real: Notes Toward a Memoir

In Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, the beloved bestselling novelist Ron Hansen opens the doors of his writing studio to share with us his passions for history, scandal, theology, Jesuits, the American West, and golf (which he plays even in bad weather). If Hansen's novels explore people very different from himself--from a stigmatic nun to a Victorian poet to Billy the Kid, and even Hitler's niece--the meditations in this book do the opposite, allowing us to glimpse the wellsprings of his imagination, the places and traditions and books that drive him to create made-up worlds. In that sense, the reflections in these pages truly serve as "notes toward a memoir."As each section unfolds, we gain a clearer sense of Hansen's aesthetic, the parallels he sees between writing and the sacraments, between literature's capacity to make history present to us and the Church's rich array of traditions, including the Jesuit charism that has inspired great writers, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (and himself). Equally adept at telling a hilarious anecdote and guiding us through a complex, ambiguous episode in history, Hansen's language remains fresh and invigorating. Hotly in Pursuit of the Real takes you inside one writer's imagination, only to send you back out into the wide world with new eyes.

Hansen, Ron.

Essays & Correspondence

Ordinary Time: Poems

With Ordinary Time, his eighth collection, the distinguished poet and biographer Paul Mariani shares a vision of the world in which the sacred and the quotidian mingle, sometimes quietly and sometimes with revelatory force. These poems treat not only the social and historical issues of the time--the poor, the marginalized, the casualties of war, the forgotten--but the importance of family and friends, especially in those moments we all share of illness and desolation. What saves us is not only beauty but the wit and humor to see the reader through. A grandfather now, Mariani celebrates a new generation and remembers the dead. If the poems often deal with the ordinary--everything from memories of New York City back in the 1940s to the Mississippi Delta and the Canadian Rockies, to Sweden, the Baltic Sea, and finally Jerusalem--they do so under the shadow of the sacred, which these poems keep reaching out to with word after word after Word.

Mariani, Paul

Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees: A Jon Mote Mystery

In this, the third novel in the Jon Mote Mystery series, Jon and his special-needs sister, Judy, find more bodies showing up in their lives. This time it's Bible translators. In Woe to the Scribes and Pharisees, Daniel Taylor's unique blend of wit, satire, drama, and provocative meditations on the Big Questions is once again on full display. Jon Mote is determined to leave behind forever both the voices that once haunted him and his life-long confusion about the meaning of his life. He reconciles with his wife, Zillah, and takes a job as a book editor. When the publishing company that employs Jon decides to get in on the Bible-selling business, Jon finds himself in the last place in heaven or on earth that he would have expected: as a member of a Bible translation committee.Knowing nothing about the Bible, the publisher assembles a team of translators based on the principles of diversity and name recognition. Wildly different understandings of nearly everything--theology, the meaning of texts, the direction of history, the nature of reality and of the church, among others--leads to take-no-prisoner clashes on issues large and small. While these surface tensions point to a profound collision of understandings of the cosmos and the human condition, Jon soon finds himself asking if they are also a matter of life and death.

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

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