"We are all slightly askew," says one of the characters in this delightful and moving collection of innovative stories that bend, at times, toward allegory. Here's a vintage world of cigarette vending machines, Jazzercise, Sears photography studios, McNally road maps, full-service filling stations, and Green Stamps dish sets, a world where a sister with sugar for shoes desires an octopus lover, giraffes give funeral eulogies, a teacher with a backpack wormhole that houses Einstein, and a woman who places a want ad to see if someone has found her name-all highlight our humanity, its losses and its longings, and in moments, the last times we don't know are the last times. I loved these stories." 
- Jill Talbot, author of The Way We Weren't: A Memoir 
Nothing can really prepare you for the people you'll encounter in Amy Barnes' Ambrotypes: little girls with feet made of sugar; alligator babies; wives who grow feathers; fathers made of origami. These stories are surprising, wholly original, and go down easy-the perfect reading for our current reality. 
- Amy Shearn, award-winning author of Unseen City and The Mermaid of Brooklyn\n"These stories cover family, childhood, friendships, and love with hints of the strange and bizarre. However, at their hearts even the briefest stories in Barnes' hands become windows into what it means to be human. A must-read collection that bursts with the beauty, weirdness, and heartbreak of living." 
- Chloe N. Clark, author of Collective Gravities and Escaping the Body\n"No one aces the first sentence test quite like Amy Cipolla Barnes. Every story in her whimsical debut begins with a zing. With irresistible openers like: "There's a beach ball in the apartment toilet," "I knew what I was doing when I swallowed the glass piano," "My great grandmother hung the moon," and "My third baby was born an alligator," how can we not keep reading? These may be Ambrotypes but Barnes writes in living, breathing color to bring us captivating, quirky family snapshots that engage faith, myth, fairy tale, and a little magic. For all the absurdist delight, there's no shortage of heartache or truth: "I prayed hard that my plastic Jesus would find my daddy either real pants or a job; It felt like too much to ask for both." Barnes is adept at rendering the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar in these sharply observed slices of life that never fail to snap, crackle, and pop." 
- Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace

Ambrotypes

Literature & Fiction

Barnes, Amy Cipolla

Short Stories & Anthologies

Word West LLC

A strongman grapples with his shrinking body; a couple recalls the metamorphic stages of their love; a deck salesman makes a long-winded sales pitch; a magician guards a deadly secret. These are the lives that populate the stories of Dustin M. Hoffman--a vibrant, eccentric dream of America, one that deconstructs the blue-collar experience, and expands the possibilities of short fiction itself. Satirical and heartfelt, poignant and loopily funny, NO GOOD FOR DIGGING cements the arrival of a singular literary talent.

No Good For Digging: Stories

Hoffman, Dustin M.

In this triptych of linked stories, a working-class family goes about seemingly ordinary lives--on a camping trip, or participating in "take your family to work day." In the hands of Dustin M. Hoffman, however, things are not quite as ordinary as they seem. Quickly, these scenarios are flung down a surreal rabbit hole filled with bizarre taxidermy museums, and an outrageous relationship involving a silverback gorilla. Yet, amid all of its convention-smashing glee, Secrets of the Wild reveals a generous and moving portrait of a family, a family doing their best to keep it together--to play-act at normalcy, even sanity--in an American landscape slipping into madness.

Secrets of the Wild

Dustin, Hoffman M

Dawg Towne explores universal themes of love and loss through the deceptively simple lens of suburban life. But is life in the suburbs ever really simple? Over the course of one year in Towne, spouses die, children grow up, affairs begin and end, lies are repeatedly spoken, bad sex happens (good sex, less often), gender is questioned, and dogs go missing. Many dogs. Humorous and canine-centric, Dawg Towne is like Peyton Place re-written by Dorothy Parker and your friendly neighborhood veterinarian. And yes, this is work of fiction.

Dawg Towne

Kaltman, Alice

In this imaginative hybrid of fiction? poetry? autobiography? we are brought into the mind of Sebastian, who narrates a continual stream of thoughts, dreams, regrets, and memories. As the book progresses, a larger picture comes into focus. It's a stunning cumulative effect-strange, funny, and moving. In Not I, we miraculously get it all: a gleeful dismantling of literary expectation, a story of a life, and a dive into the mind of an artist in the world.

Not I

Castillo, Sebastian

Literary

"So wildly imaginative, and yet so open to all that is small, bright and counter. Deeply felt and often joyful, in its way. A beautiful, beautiful book."- Rivka Galchen, Author of American Innovations "What a marvelous möbius band of a book. Too beautiful for blurbs. It's one of those books you'll read for the rest of your life."- Paul Beatty, Booker Prize-Winning Author of The Sellout Gauraa Shekhar was a graduate of Columbia University's MFA Writing Program and a founding editor of No Contact. She published work in Nimrod, Sonora Review, Literary Hub, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among many other places. She passed away in Richmond, Virginia in 2022. Notes is her first book.

Notes

Shekhar, Gauraa

In Collective Gravities, something magical is always just beneath the surface--the zombie apocalypse happens, but the world stays relatively the same; a woman begins to feel the earth moving beneath her feet. In this fantastical, genre-bending collection, Chloe N. Clark launches readers from Iowa, to outer space, and back again. Lyrical, funny, and full of transcendent beauty, Collective Gravities is a cause for celebration: an astronomically gifted writer, who, in twenty-six stories, shows us an entire world (and beyond) full of heartbreak, hope, redemption, and wonder.

Collective Gravities

Clark, Chloe N.

In this electrifying debut collection of poems, Dillon Thomas Jones demonstrates that he's a poet to be reckoned with. A brilliant interrogation of pain, confusion, frustration, adoption, race, and anger.

A Study of Frustration: Poems

Jones, Dillon T

Poetry

In this stunning collection of poems, Rodriguez finds the extraordinary in the day-to-day mundane, our wounded and worn bodies, the inconsequential rituals of our lives. In his talented hands, all ordinary bodies are allowed grace and beauty. Always moving, these poems are lived-in monuments to the sometimes painful, sometimes joyful beauty of living. 
- Chole N. Clark, author of Collective Gravities\nIn "Ordinary Bodies," Rodriguez's intriguing examination of the faded, calloused, and broken, leads to a higher empathy (without romanticizing) and an embracing of the ordinary people and moments of his barrio, family, and self. Through an accessible yet intricate verse, Rodriguez takes us into his first-generation, working-class, Mexican American barrio and shows us another side of the American reality and dream; a world of blue-collar jobs, overbearing moms, a beer on the couch: a world of our own. This is a book to be read in one feverish sitting, not just because of its approachability and palabra, but because of its flowing energía, charm, and wisdom. 
- Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Fire Eater

Ordinary Bodies

Rodríguez, Esteban

"Drunk ghosts, feral mothers...riveting obsessions and unbelongings and captivities-the fragmented texts in Beautiful, Violent Things seethe and grip and fluoresce without apology. In these eleven dispatches, Madeline Anthes carefully weaves desire and estrangement, reimagines power as a woman's capacity for hollowing a man, the ability to deliver impossibilities from her misappropriated body. The speakers in this collection compose a primal song, reprise-with blood and feathers and new ferocity-the iconoclastic feminisms of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Anthes is alive on the page, a writer to watch."- Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of Blood Histories"I know these stories by Madeline Anthes. You know them too. They are the stories we whisper to each other: Mother to daughter, sister to sister, friend to friend. They are the stories about the things we want, the things we need, the things that have broken us, the things that have tried to break us. Listen closely to the voices in these stories -- you will find someone you know in them. You might even find yourself. This is a powerful debut collection from a gifted writer. We are lucky to have it." - Cathy Ulrich, author, Ghosts of You "The narrators in Beautiful, Violent Things want powerfully. They want to be seen, want to be left alone, want to hold their baby, want to want to hold their baby-but more than anything, they want you to listen to their voices. To the way the words sound coming from their mouths in a cold and specific arrangement. I am Wendy, chrome sleek and velvet fast: breathing heat and running wild. They want you to hear what lies just behind their words: the impossible problem of desire. A problem Anthes has studied like a scholar. Let's listen to what she's found-all these alluring, dangerous voices calling out." - Tyler Barton, author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum "The stories in Beautiful, Violent Things are alive, visceral and raw, not just in the blunt emotional honesty of their narrators-women who know what they want, who feel the twisted pull of the lives they have and the ones they've given up to be mothers and lovers-but in the prose, so very warm with poetry and song. Anthes is a writer who understands how to make the quiet moments in life roar." - Christopher Gonzalez, author of I'm Not Hungry But I Could Eat

Beautiful, Violent Things

Anthes, Madeline

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