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Dreaming Vienna begins with a quote from Missouri's Mark Twain on how novels carry their authors away, and a preface from Conley listing 36 kinds of dreams discussed by Vienna's Sigmund Freud. These openers foreground a tension between objective and subjective realities. How, exactly, does one believe a novel or interpret a dream? And what exactly does Vienna symbolize, especially for Americans? In Dreaming Vienna, subjective reactions general...

In five sets of "broken" sonnets, Jack Powers pulls readers into and through the lives, decisions, regrets and celebrations of a score of deeply human characters--himself included. From teenager Jack, who tries to "rig" the Catholic confessional system, to ancient Bob, who tends his dying Joan gently after 62 years of marriage, we watch and find ourselves rooting for Powers' people. We want his seeds to grow, his buds to blossom, his dying lea...

What does it mean to think of time and memory loosely? T.P. Bird's work helps us answer that question. He divides his fifty "renderings" into three sections-"Time & Memory", "Poets, Presidents and Me, " and "Other Considerations." In the first, his metaphors evoke a gently self-mocking nostalgia--for a Saturday trip to a barbershop, a boyhood leap into a leaf pile, a young soldier's time in Bavaria.... Old memories become road trips into his f...

All the women in Nafeesa's family have been imprisoned, assassinated, scarred or exiled. Yes, every single one. Is it any wonder, then, that the surviving men in her family have kept those disturbing facts from her? But now Nafeesa wants to know the truth. With the help of her beloved dying grandfather, Kulraj Singh, she receives clues to her past, and in return she pledges to bring his two daughters back to him before he dies. From Pakistan, ...

What would it feel like to find your middle-aged self suddenly living back in a college dorm room? Four faculty members at Prairie State College in Minnesota are about to find out after their administration comes up with a bizarre strategy to improve graduation rates - The Faculty Dorm Dweller Program.While the idea seems promising to the administration, it doesn't take long for problems to arise-problems which readers will find appallingly fu...

Devastated by the death of her husband and sons, Hannah Mercer sells the family farm and creates a store and living quarters in a delivery truck. As she travels several circuits selling her wares, Hannah becomes the heart of a network of interlinking lives: Nathan owns the motel where Hannah often parks her truck. Darla is a young and talented deaf artist, whose parents let her accompany Hannah on her rounds. Wanda, the sassy receptionist at a...

The Favorite is, in Cig Harvey's words, "an arrow to the heart." Its sixty-four poems are gently shaped into three parts as Watson leads readers into her childhood's world of social privilege, recognizes the psychological costs inhabitants pay, and demonstrates a wide and wonderful range of reactions.Most of the fifteen poems in Part I are based on childhood memories. Four sisters ride uncomfortably in the back seat of the big car, ordered not...

Raya Tuffaha's To All The Yellow Flowers is a deeply personal reflection of self through poetry. Dealing with topics of sexuality, culture, and love, Tuffaha's poetry speaks truthfully to her experience with these issues as a queer young Muslim woman. Often, she compares her culture's expectations for her life to her own, highlighting the places where the two intersect, and acknowledging the flash points. Many of her poems are formatted to ref...

In The Pain Trader, James Fowler creates timeless narratives around the people, history, and landmarks of rural America. Divided into "Hereabouts" (the Ozark region) and "Thereabouts" (a broader area), his 48 poems find meaning and beauty in the seemingly ordinary-from cheap roadside attractions ("IQ Zoo") to an impromptu chivaree. ("Ozark Yarn"), to local resentment of "Mr. [Woodrow] Wilson's war" ("Over Here"), to a set of "Mountain Airs" do...

Architecture doesn't just apply to buildings. It can apply to the way we shape our environment and the habitats of other creatures, " says Monica Barron. "There's also an architecture to our emotional/intellectual makeups." Deeply aware of how humans read their surroundings, and how these readings become the bones of a culture, Barron takes us from pond to prairie, from beauty salon to abandoned gas station, from fireside loving to winter ice....

Calling Planet Earth: Close Encounters with Sun Ra pulls us into the quirky world of the jazzmusician known first as Herman Blount, then as Sun Ra (1914-1993), the Arkestra leaderwho claimed for most of his life to have come from Saturn. The book opens with anintroduction to Ra's "sub-underground" music, a sound which fascinated the author andturned him into a fan almost fifty years ago. Introductory sections set up key questions, like, "But i...

When the fictional eighteen-year-old named Constance Shakespeare joins her brother Will in London in 1592, she's hoping for opportunities not easily available under her father's roof in Stratford, especially not for young women. Naturally confident, Constance relies on a strong sense of independence as she walks through muddy lowlands and shares a carriage with dour and charming men, two giggling girls and one judgmental matron. Once arrived, ...

Mary Fox's The Last Skipjack brings to life a time not unlike our own, a time when ways of life were changing and those affected were "circling the wagons, " trying to protect themselves from those changes. Specifically, in the 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, small tenant farmers were losing ground to larger, more mechanized operations, the local factory and foundry were closing, skipjacks no longer dredged oyster beds, women were staying in sch...

Mary Fox's The Last Skipjack brings to life a time not unlike our own, a time when ways of life were changing and those affected were "circling the wagons, " trying to protect themselves from those changes. Specifically, in the 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, small tenant farmers were losing ground to larger, more mechanized operations, the local factory and foundry were closing, skipjacks no longer dredged oyster beds, women were staying in sch...

Like most boys, Jason Blake wants to please his father and older brother. But this erratic father and hyper-competitive brother challenge beyond the norm. To find his way, Jason tries on different roles: schoolyard bully, football player, actor, student. At 20, Jason escapes his Midwest home and seeks independence and adventure: first to Cape Cod, later in Europe. Each adventure takes Jason farther from his father and brother. Each brings him ...

How long is the shadow of genocide, and how does it affect the offspring of the survivors? Set in Central California in 1953 where Armenian immigrants and their families live one generation removed from the 1915 murder of more than a million Armenians at the hands of the Turkish government, this novel addresses those questions and others.

In 2004, when Walker Maguire is called to the deathbed of his estranged father, his thoughts return to 1974 when he witnessed a bloody fight falsely blamed on a Mexican immigrant. Lies snowballed into betrayals, leading to a lifelong rift between father and son that can only be mended by the past coming back to life and revealing its long-held secrets.

In 53 tightly crafted poems, Day creates tiny moments of pain edged with hope--or, if hope is too large a concept--then edged with honesty. Into the Cracks speaks to universal dreams, fears, cravings, duties, and disappointments.ointments.

Jack Powers is attuned to twists of life and language-insults refitted as endearments, families defined by their troubles, great care taken with modes of recklessness . . . . Near the start of his debut collection, he's praising the massive coronary, favoring it over the dwindling disease and dementia that took his elders. But as mortality hovers, he teases, testing wits and teasing out the good stories of lucky close calls, game grandmothers,...

Malheur August opens with a map of Malheur County, OR and its Malheur River. "Malheur" means "bad time, " we're told--and Nancy Minor plays with that notion skillfully. Set in 1971 with substantial flashback to the 1940s, her novel becomes an utterly convincing portrait of life in rural Oregon a generation or two ago. (Think of Grant Wood joking around with Dorothea Lange.)Our protagonist, Jean Algood, spends her last home-from-college summer,...