(Fiction) In HELEN ON 86TH STREET AND OTHER STORIES, girls grow into women and women become wise in portraits filled with biting humor and small but hard-earned victories. One girl makes a burnt offering of letters written to her wayward father, while another struggles to leave her dying father and face adult life. Women navigate the rocky shoals of adultery, illness, and infertility as they make their way in an unsteady world, where the heart is easily betrayed and loyalty is rarely a straightforward matter.

Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

Kaufman, Wendi

Contemporary

Stillhouse Press

(Literary Nonfiction / Fiction / Hybrid Genre) When Mark Polanzak was seventeen, his father spontaneously combusted on the tennis court, vanishing forever. It is also entirely possible that he died of a heart attack. Either way, his father's death is a story Polanzak spends much of his life trying to get right. POP! captures the absurdity and authenticity of the grieving process with grace and humor.

POP!

Polanzak, Mark

Parenting & Relationships

(Fiction) Maybe mermaids and robots are lonely. Maybe stargazing dinosaurs escape extinction, and 80s icons share their secrets and scams. A boardwalk Elvis impersonator declines in a Graceland of his own, Bigfoot works as a temp, families fall apart and come back together. This wild and vibrant collection of explorer's tales will take you from fabulist faraway worlds to Great Recession realism in a single breath. "There's a sense of aspiration throughout this book, stamped on the opening title story. It fuses the otherworldly with the familiar, the mermaid and robot who can hope for enduring love just like humans...Energetic stories unveil limitless possibilities always within reach."—Kirkus Starred Review

Maybe Mermaids & Robots are Lonely: Stories and a Novella

Matthew Fogarty

(Poetry / LGBT Studies) Bryan Borland's third poetry collection examines what it means to dig―to undertake the intense labor of unearthing the personal/political/artistic self and embracing the consequences of that knowledge. These poems assert that to dig is to reveal the bedrock on which we may rebuild ourselves; to discover the beauty and reward of life buried deep within us―no matter how many layers of earth we need to overturn. DIG is a 2017 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature as honored by the American Library Association and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Gay Poetry.

Borland, Bryan

Poetry

(Poetry) A woman leaps from the Empire State Building but falls only a single floor before she is blown back inside. So begins Christina Olson's second collection of poetry, a rollicking, richly imagined mosaic that pits science, history, and fate against one another in an attempt to answer the bedeviling questions of cause and effect. TERMINAL HUMAN VELOCITY is a steady-voiced, multi-faced narrative of the human condition, mythic yet modern—keenly inquisitive, never complacent, and ceaselessly compelling.

Terminal Human Velocity

Olson, Christina

For poet Anna Leahy and scientist Douglas R. Dechow, quintessential children of the Space Age, love for each other and love of space are inseparable. The moon landings, the shuttle program, the prospect of manned travel to Mars: each stop in humanity's journey to space has marked a step in their ongoing love affair with each other and the cosmos. Told by Anna and Doug in alternating chapters, part memoir and part homage to the unquenchable spirit of exploration, GENERATION SPACE is a charming, captivating celebration of the serendipitous power of a shared passion.

Generation Space: A Love Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Leahy, Anna

Dechow, Douglas R.

Arts & Literature

For more than 70 years, Gifford's Ice Cream and Candy Company was associated with nothing but pleasure for native Washingtonians and visitors to the nation's capital. But behind the iconic business's happy facade lay elaborate schemes, a crushing bankruptcy, two million dollars of missing cash, and a tragic suicide. As the last Gifford heir unfolds his story with remarkable immediacy and candor, he reveals the byzantine betrayals and intrigue rooted in the company from its modest beginnings―dark influences that would ultimately destroy the legendary Gifford business and its troubled founding family.

We All Scream: The Fall of the Gifford's Ice Cream Empire

Gifford, Andrew

In her fourth collection, celebrated poet and author Megan Merchant uses the natural world as her canvas, mapping the abstract shape of the American social consciousness onto a wintry landscape of marriage, motherhood, and grief.Suffused with autumnal decay and the silent promise of snow, Merchant's collection serves as a powerful distillation of the ageless themes of memory and loss.

Before the Fevered Snow

Self-Help

Merchant, Megan

Death & Grief

For those who've been sad and tried not to be, seventeen stories about the absurdity of searching for joy in a dying world. A neighborhood of picturesque content-creation houses perched on too-green lawns in a California desert; a meandering stampede of unleashed dogs on the streets of San Francisco; a skein of snow geese alighting in a state park in Missouri; an uncanny fundraising auction at an upscale suburban-DC prep school. Inhabiting these worlds of disconnection and dislocation are the "sad grownups" a middle-aged queer couple arguing over whether to have children, a college professor dying from cancer, two recent high school graduates plotting a robbery, a sixty-year-old counselor at a boys' summer camp sheltering herself from the realities of life-all connected more closely to the landscapes around them than to other people, searching fervently for liberation, understanding, and even happiness, wherever and however they might be found.

Sad Grownups

Stuber, Amy

Short Stories & Anthologies

When a seemingly routine medical procedure results in her mother's premature death, Anne Panning is left reeling. In her first full-length memoir, the celebrated essayist and short story writer draws on decades of memory and experience, piecing together hard truths about her own past and her mother's.
We follow Panning's winding path from rural Minnesota to the riverbanks of Vietnam's Mekong Delta. A stark, poignant tale of two women deeply connected, yet forever apart, Dragonfly Notes is a testament to the prevailing nature of love, whether in the form of a rediscovered note, a sudden moment of unexpected recall, or sometimes, simply, the sight a dragonfly flitting past.

Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss

Panning, Anne

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