How do we rise above anger and self-doubt to achieve our most deeply held goals? Countless writers have tried to answer this question--perhaps none with more searing honesty than Dr. Johnny Lops, a respected Williamsburg psychiatrist whose refreshingly no-nonsense and humane approach to personal and professional achievement draws on his own colorful experiences growing up in blue-collar Brooklyn during the 1980s and 1990s. Witty, funny, and sometimes disconcertingly frank, Dr. Lops takes us back to his obsessive, anxiety-ridden childhood (complete with twelve-year-old neighborhood tough guys); his disastrous early dating experiences; and the process of self-discovery that enabled him to become a professional actor, doctor, and amateur marathon runner. In this vividly written and engaging book that is part memoir and part instruction manual, Dr. Lops offers eleven simple, practical, and effective tools for maximizing our performance potential and regaining control over our lives.

Reinvent Yourself: Essential Tools from a Brooklyn Psychiatrist Who Has Seen It All

Self-Help

Lops, Johnny

Success

Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC

In this fresh and subtle collection of short stories, Patrick Trotti offers a brutally vivid glimpse of millennial malaise in the Internet age. A high-school dropout struggles through the labyrinthine college admissions process as he is reluctantly drawn into the breakdown of his parents' toxic marriage. A recovering addict finds out on Facebook that his best friend is dead; a college freshman accidentally comes across his high-school girlfriend on a porn site. Set against a backdrop of abandoned factories, faceless strip malls, and suburban alienation, these unsettling and deceptively simple visions of post-industrial despair capture the ambivalence and innocence of a generation coming to terms with a fundamentally stagnant world.

Come Tomorrow You'll Regret Today: Collected Stories

Literature & Fiction

Trotti, Patrick

Literary

In Steve Karas’ debut collection, an unemployed autoworker finds himself at an elite seminar for aspiring Santa Clauses; an IT specialist eagerly awaits the Mayan apocalypse in his parents’ basement as his father descends into dementia. Through fourteen curiously ambivalent studies, Karas methodically examines and reconfigures the core archetypes—dot-com entrepreneurs, hard-striving immigrants, obsessive diner owners—that haunt and dominate the American psyche.  Their narratives, set against a dizzying panorama that stretches from the ruins of post-2008 Detroit to the desperate paradise of suburban Florida, evoke the familiar American mythology of army bases, Manhattan high-rises, and Midwestern video stores. Yet Karas’ masterful, minimalist portraits are ambiguous and tinged with uncertainty.  The winners, losers and hopeless visionaries who populate Kinda Sorta American Dream are united in their relentless quest to induce massive disruption in their lives—and their profound doubts about whether such radical change is possible.  

Kinda Sorta American Dream: Collected Stories

Karas, Steve

A man returning a tuxedo suddenly follows a parking lot attendant home; a volunteer recovery worker finds himself re-enacting a deadly fire; a husband parses the meaning of his wife's online banking password; a hack musician travels to a German math institute. Post-Facebook, post-subprime crisis, and post-prosperity, the fearlessly deadpan characters in Alex Higley's debut collection navigate the bleak and surreal suburbs from Phoenix to Chicago with minimal instincts for self-preservation--and with quietly explosive results. Stylish, perfectly controlled, and pleasurably shocking, Higley's brilliantly subversive portraits of a lost generation reconfigure and reinvent the increasingly complex relationships between art, life, and the people we love.

Cardinal and Other Stories

Higley, Alex

In this long-awaited collection of short fiction by the author of Mariana and Our Lady of the Artichokes, beauty is continually and painfully present in all places--in a Thanksgiving dinner assembled by a widowed DMV worker being stalked by an irate customer; in a middle-aged Hollywood actress who captivates a young studio animator for decades; in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy; and in a daughter's memories of the ethereal, melting ice sculptures made by a woman embroiled in an affair with a wealthy lawyer. Amid their complex, turbulent relationships in a chronic state of crisis, Katherine Vaz's wise and restless protagonists carry within them the seeds of a vanished, gracious world of urbane dinner parties and passionate affairs--a humane and cultured civilization whose flawed inhabitants are redeemed by their ability to blend the aesthetic imperative with the power to love.

The Love Life of an Assistant Animator & Other Stories

Vaz, Katherine

A young bartender in Boston's North End finds himself complicit in the breakdown of his roommate's relationship with a girlfriend; a married, middle-aged professor of composition abjectly crumbles under the stress of his affair with a beautiful student. In his debut fiction collection, poet Ed Meek vividly reimagines a gritty, freewheeling 1970s New England whose cynical, impulsive inhabitants--torn between the longing for human connection and the fear of domesticity--negotiate the blurry boundaries of personal responsibility. With these deceptively mundane accounts of ordinary lives in transition, Meek paints a humane, subtle portrait of ordinary people grasping at explanations for the things they do.

Luck: Stories

Meek, Ed

After three decades of an over-extended youth abroad, fifty-six-year-old Wade Ricky returns home to the Los Angeles suburbs to care for his dying mother and come to terms with his memories of an awkwardly sensual affair with Herta, a German woman he meets while biking across India; a two-year stint in Peshawar as an assistant to a blind British expat; and a cheerfully surreal world of drugs and sexual voyeurism in which Wade is continually a complicit outsider. As months turn into years, Wade finds companionship with a landscape painter grieving for her son killed in Iraq and slowly rebuilds his life in America--even as he begins to understand, finally, why he must be alone. In pared-down, richly evocative prose that captures the hidden complexities of social and geopolitical relations, Michael Onofrey's debut novel is a loving, even joyful meditation about the transience of human connection and the experience of solitude.

Bewilderment

Onofrey, Michael

"I'd be twenty-nine at the end of the year," the narrator of Panic Years announces, "and playing bass was the only thing I was good at." Fueled by positive online reviews and a minimum of introspection, Paul and his bickering bandmates--beautiful Laney, hard-drinking Jeff, despairing drummer Gooch--soldier unquestioningly through a gruelling and open-ended quest to play gig after gig in the seamy nightclubs and questionable dive bars of indie-rock America. As the band stoically makes its calamitous way cross-country from Texas to New York, its journey is struck repeatedly by theft, drug use, foot infections, gastrointestinal distress, crooked promoters, and the hatred of rival bands. In his earnestly deadpan account of the claustrophobic daily grind of life on the road, newcomer Daniel DiFranco has created a brutally realistic record--not only of the underground music scene, but of everyday existence in its purest form.

Panic Years

DiFranco, Daniel

" 'Because anything that can happen to you, can happen on the Cape.' It was our version of the concluding words of a sermon, or a prayer, after which it was time to stand up, or sit down again, head bowed, knowing that you lived in a place unlike any other, and maybe more like any other, too, when you got into the internal part of everyone and everything here." So says one narrator in Colin Fleming's masterful collection of short stories set in Cape Cod--a magically gritty and self-contained universe where landlubber tourists are called "googans" and locals drink at dive bars like "Sez the Flounder" and "The Ticky Crab." An aging veterinarian sifts through his memories of working on a whale-watching ship with a charismatic wanderer named Jibber Stokes; a Yarmouth filmmaker agonizes over the contents of a mysterious video that his best friend took of his beautiful cousin when they were teenagers; a troubled composer returns to his dysfunctional musical family in Chatham, complete with ancestral claims that "we had relatives that once kept the Nina rocking on the Pilgrims' maiden voyage with some improvised instruments made out of driftwood that they scooped from the sea with those big hats of theirs." With subtle grace and quiet wisdom, Buried on the Beaches vividly evokes the natural beauty of the Cape to depict the complex negotiations between individuals and their environment, memory and nostalgia, and the living and the dead.

Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls

Fleming, Colin

"Your problem is you have a Russian soul," Anna's mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve UConn senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War-and a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror. As Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents, and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien culture for the first time, she must come to terms with the aspects of the past that haunt her own life. With its intricate insight into the everyday rhythms of an almost forgotten way of life in Brezhnev's Soviet Union, Forget Russia is a disquieting multi-generational epic about coming of age, forgotten history, and the loss of innocence in all of its forms.

Forget Russia

Bordetsky-Williams, L

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