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"Alexandra Chasin is a hugely brave writer. She dares to push the extremes of style, while daring to push the extremes of emotion" Jonathan Safran Foer Alexandra Chasins remarkable stories employ forms as diverse as cryptograms (in "ELENA=AGAIN") and sentence diagrams (in "Toward a Grammar of Guilt") to display her interest in fiction as a form constituted by print on the page, every bit as much as poetry. In "They Come From Mars," the words are arrayed on the page like troops, embodying the xenophobic image of invading armies of immigrant and illegal aliens that animates the narrative. One story incorporates personal ads ("Lynette, Your Uniqueness"), another is organized alphabetically ("2 Alphabets"), while another leaves sentences unfinished ("Composer and I"). A number of stories take metafictional turns, calling attention to the process of writing itself. The last piece in the collection plays with genre distinctions, including an index of first lines and a general index. Set in New York, New England, Paris, and Morocco, these tales are narrated by men and women, old and young, gay, straight, and bisexual; one narrator is not a person at all, but a work of art. Each of these deft, playful, and sometimes anarchic fictions is different from the others, yet all are the unmistakable offspring of the same wildly inventive imagination.

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It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides

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Winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize   Jessica Lee Richardsons debut collection It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides teems with double magicfamilies of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers. From a woman who awakes from a short kidnapping with an unquenchable need for risk to a concrete boat ride gone off the rails, from Los Angeles to the Bronx, from the Midwest to North Korea, these stories explore the absurd in real spaces and the real in absurd spaces, seeking a way into something else entirely.   Here, environments participate in agency, and voice compels movement forward, through, and in. Richly patterned language refuses singularity and the finger trap of the binary, seeking permeability in its reflection, a soft net to catch collective echoes. The collection begins and ends with stories that literalize descent and ascent, bookending the mirrored shape of the books arrangement as a vision of an inverted arc. The shape of story is literalized. We slide down from a mountaintop all the way to the inside of a womb and back, slipping on slopes unmarked by signs, catching stunning glimpses along the way. The journey along the track of desire might be frightening if it werent for all the water, if it werent for the bounce of the ride.

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A collection of stories that limn the dangers of domesticity   In Lynn K. Kilpatricks In the House, anything can happen. A collection of shortslists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructionsIn the House reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked, dangers of relationships gone awry.   In a home suffused with fragility or in a kitchen surrounded by knives, Kilpatricks men and women navigate around one anothers eccentricities with caution, highlighting the unspoken desires and veiled needs of domestic routine. In these stories those desires collide, illuminating the dangers that can lurk in seemingly insignificant places such as the pantry, a basement, the Miss America pageant, dioramas, or in the mind of the one you love.

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Impotent is a collection of moving stories about a time when "it is easier to get a refill on a prescription than approval for therapy" and individuals are reduced to letters on a medical chart. In revealing vignettes, Matthew Roberson clinically catalogs the hopes, dreams, and failures of people identified only through form-like abbreviations (C for co-dependent, I for Insured). In these "case studies," Roberson captures his subjects' lives poignantly by supplementing their diagnoses with unconventional footnotes, lists, and medicinal warnings. Each vignette exposes a different facet of our medicated society, humanizing a multitude of conditions: depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impotence, and dementia. In a world of domestic ennui, deadpan voices struggle to transcend numbness while simultaneously trying to manage the pain of living. Impotent is both important social commentary and engrossing fiction.

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Hydroplane is a story collection filled with the urgency of erotic obsession. Its breathless voices, palpable in their desire, are propelled by monomania, rushing from one preoccupation into another: a garage, a painting class, a basketball game, boys. Their words take on kinetic force, an almost headlong momentum, as though, while reading, one were picking up speed, veering out of control. The past returns. Rumination are continuous. A stranger at a bus stop is indistinguishable from the narrator's deceased grandfather; party guests turn ghoulish, festivities merge with nightmares.   Each of Steinberg's stories builds as if telegraphed. Each sentence glissades into the next as though in perpetual motion, as characters, crippled by loss, rummage through their recollections looking for buffers to an indistinct future.

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Howe tells the story of a woman traveling among geographies both real and imagined looking for her daughter. Even within the twenty-first century landscape where hybrid works are common, perhaps all too common, Fanny How's 1979 Holy Smoke offers a still startlingly inventive mixture of prose, poetry, images, found objects and ephemera, journaling and more. 

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The Professional Life of William Procter Jr.

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The position of the pharmacist in the structure of health care in the United States evolved during the middle half of the 19th century, roughly from the founding of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1821 to the passage of meaningful pharmaceutical legislation in the 1870s. Higby examines the professional life of William Procter, Jr., generally regarded as the Father of American Pharmacy, and follows the development of American pharmacy through four decades of Procters professional commitment to the field. 

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A new collection of stories by bestselling author Michelle Richmond, Hum presents a cautionary political fable, a celebration of the complexities of marriage, and a meditation on modern-day alienation.  Thirteen years after the publication of her first story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Richmond returns with Hum, a collection of ten stories that examine love, lust, and loyalty from surprising angles.  In Hum, a young couple that is paid to live in a house filled with surveillance equipment becomes quietly lost to each other, as the wifes infatuation with the subject of their surveillance turns to obsession. In Medicine, a woman grieving over the death of her sister finds her calling as a manual medical caregiver. In Boulevard, a couple who has been trying to have a child for seven years finds themselves in an unnamed country at the height of a revolution, summoned there by the enigmatic H. Scales, the story of a woman who falls in love with a man whose body is covered with scales, parses the intersection of pain and pleasure. The narrator of Lake must choose whether to walk in the footsteps of her famous grandfather, The Great Amphibian, who disappeared while performing a feat of daring in Lake Michigan. What does it mean to be heroic? How much should one sacrifice in the name of love? These questions and more are explored with tenderness, wit, and unerring precision in Hum.

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When Lucy is little something happens to her brother. He disappears for months and when he returns hes not the same. Hes not her brother. At least this is what Lucy believes. But what actually happened?   Comic, melancholy, haunted, and endlessly inventive, Gregory Howards debut novel Hospice follows Lucy later in life as she drifts from job to job caring for dogs, children, and older womenall the while trying to escape the questions of her past only to find herself confronting them again and again.   In the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighborhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found.   Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.

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Henry Darwin Rogers was one of the first professional geologists in the United States. He directed two of the earliest state geological surveys--New Jersey and Pennsylvania--in the mid-1830s.  His major interest was Pennsylvania, with its Appalachian Mountains, which Rogers saw as great folds of sedimentary rock. He belived that an interpretation of these folds would lead to an understanding of the dynamic processes that had shaped the earth. From Rogers' efforts to explain these Pennsylvania folds came the first uniquely American theory of mountain elevation, a theory that Rogers personally considered his most significant achievement.     

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The newest novel by Elisabeth Sheffield, the award-winning author of Gone and Fort Da  What does it mean to really live? Or not?   Set in eastern, upstate New York, Helen Keller Really Lived features a fortyish former barfly and grifter who must make a living in the wake of her wealthy husbands death, and who finds work in a clinic helping women seeking reproductive assistance. The other main character is the grifters dead ex-husband, a Ukrainian hooker-to-healer success story, who prior to his demise was a gynecologist and after, an amateur folklorist, or ghostlorist, who collected and provided scholarly commentary on the stories of his fellow revenants.   Their intertwined stories explore the mistakes, miscarriages, inadequacies, and defeats that may have led to their divorce, including his failure (according to her) to fully live.   As it investigates the theme of what it means to really live or not, Elisabeth Sheffields brilliant new novel is also an exploration of virtual reality in the sense of the experience provided by literature. It is a novel awash in a multitude of voices, from the obscenity-laced, Nabokovian soliloquys of the dead Ukrainian doctor, to the trade-school / midcentury-romance-novel-constrained style of his dead mother-in-law.

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Girl Imagined by Chance is a critifictional novel about a couple who find themselves having created a make-believe daughter (and soon a make-believe life to accompany her) in order to appease their friends, family, and the culture of reproduction. Structured around twelve photographs from a single roll of film, the book explores the nature of photography and the questions that nature raises about the notions of the simulated and the real, the media-ization of consciouness, originality, self construction, and the way we all continually fashion our faces into masks for the next shot. At its heart, Girl Imagined by Chance investigates the mystery of self-knowledge. The prevailing metaphor and structural device of photograpy examines the way images, in their magical ability to mimic memory, ultimately mock and eradicate it. The seemigly stable and fixed individual past turns out to be as protean and unknowable as the future. The body becomes strangely dispensable, perpetually adrift in a cybernetic world of hyperlinks and interfaces.

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A psychological and linguistic exploration of obsession and illicit love.   While working at a sleep lab in northern Germany, Rosemarie Ramee, a 38-year-old American neurologist, falls in love with Aslan, an eleven-year-old Turkish Cypriot. To get closer to the boy, RR undertakes a "marriage of convenience" to the boy's uncle. But when the uncle suddenly disappears, Ramee, alone with Aslan, must take the boy to his relatives in northern Cyprus. A train journey ensues, chronicled in RR's psychological reports and neurological inquiries.  But what begins as an objective "report" breaks down as the story progresses: RR's voice, hitherto suppressed and analytical, emerges hesitantly and then erupts, splintering every conception of inner and outer lives, solipsistic reality, and the irrevocable past. Consistently surprising and unrelenting, Fort Da turns one woman's illicit affair into a riveting exploration of language and the mind.

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Are ghosts, vampires, and other forms of haunted presence related to universal religious instincts? Are emotions that play a part in religious ritual and narrative similar to those in classical works of Gothic fiction such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe? Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction reveals the intersection of Gothic literature and contemporary theories about the psychology of religious experience, positing that the two share the concept of the numinous, the human response of awe in the face of the eternal.             Varnado offers a fresh and audacious analysis of the literature of the supernatural by employing insights derived from the philosophy of religious experience. Ranging from the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century to ghostly tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Varnado frames ghost stories as ontological challenge to the reader. The challenge is not in the form of philosophical proposition, however. Rather it is in the form of feelings and emotions that maintain a connection with the sense of reality. It is this area of reality that Rudolph Otto called the numinousthe feeling of the supernaturalthat stands at the center of Gothic literature.   An understanding of this unique category of experience, aligned with its associated concept of the sacred and the profane, exposes the purpose of ghostly literature and demonstrates the enduring relevance of this mesmerizing genre.

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Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Four is the magic number in Michael Martones Four for a Quarter.  In subjectfour fifth Beatles, four tie knots, four retellings of the first Xerox, even the sex lives of the Fantastic Fourand in structurethe book is separated into four sections, with each section further divided into four chapterettesFour for a Quarter returns again and again to its originating number, making chaos comprehensible and mystery out of the most ordinary.    Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4                

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Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

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A wild, sex-and-peyote-fueled road trip through heartbreak and the mythic American West, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours is a fever dream and cult classic of love, loss, and self-destruction. Goebels grief-stricken adrenalized alter ego goes on a cross-country search for his sanitycrashing through relationships, memories, and mania from New York to Texas, Puerto Rico to Los Angeles, spiraling through the wreckage of a love affair that wont stay put. Grieving the sudden death of his brother and a past that wont let go, the narrator must rewrite his own story before it devours him. At its heart, this is a raw reckoning with loss, abuse, and madness, told in lyrical prose that feels pulled from the heart of a bard on fire. With echoes of The Dharma Bums, The Chronology of Water, and The Catcher in the Rye, this is an untamed, confessional Kunstlerromana howl of desire, dislocation, and the burning need to belong to a world that doesnt even exist.

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Over the past thirty years, oral history has found increasing favor among social scientists and humanists, with scholars rediscovering the oral interview as a valuable method for obtaining information about the daily realities and historical consciousness of people, their histories, and their culture. One primary issue is the question of how the communicative performances of the interviewer and narrator jointly influence the interview. Using methods of conversation/discourse analysis, the author describes the collaborative processes that enable interviewers and narrators to interact successfully in the interview context.

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Father Flashes reimagines what the novel can be or do. Composed of stunning vignettes that capture the deterioration of a fathers mind and body, this novel provides poetic insight into the complex workings of a father-daughter relationship. As the father collapses, what appears is the daughters struggle to simply cope. In prose composed of intense and moving shards, Tricia Bauer delivers a revealing account of the gradual decomposition of all that is familiar and of a daughters gathering of memories to form the arresting collage that is Father Flashes.

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Not only the story of a colossus of a woman living in Kansas, Fat Girl, Terrestrial is also a meditation on God, treachery, and blind love.   In Kingdom Come, Kansas, a town from which children once mysteriously disappeared, there lives a giant woman. Wallis Armstrong is not a pituitary mutant or a person battling a rare medical condition; shes just an improbably large woman ill at ease in a world built for shrimps. Paradoxically, Wallis builds miniatures of crime scenes, and her specialty is staged suicides. She constructed her first diorama as a child when a boy in her fourth-grade class went suddenly missing. Walliss brother, Obie, believes the only explanation for his sisters amplitude is that she is the incarnation of God on Earth, and he is her one true ardent disciple. Until he too disappears.   Kellie Wellss story of Walliss odyssey through this tight-fitting world is a churlish meditation on the existence and nature of God as well as an exploration of the treachery of childhood and the destructive nature of the most blindly abiding kind of love: that of a love-struck brother for a big sister, a disciple for an unwilling prophet, and a bone-weary god for a savage and disappointing flock.

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The Letter in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Criticism

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Epistolary Responses explores the transformative nature of epistolary fiction and criticism in letter form from a largely feminist perspective. While most scholarly work to date has focused on 17th- and 18th-century manifestations of this genre, Bower's study concentrates on epistolary fiction by contemporary American writers published between 1912 and 1988. The novels discussed, all featuring women letter writers, include: Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, John Barth's LETTERS, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, John Updike's S., Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, Upton Sinclair's Another Pamela, and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters.  Bower explores the influence letters have on the act of writing and writing as act, their encoded desire for reply, their incompleteness as units of narrative information, their play on ideas of absence and presence, their apparently personal and private nature, and their foregrounding of the writer's agency and authority, all of which make letters a most useful genre both for novelists and for scholars. Several of the book's "fiction" chapters include a letter from the author of the text (sometimes a critic) that complements and supplements Bower's analysis. The final part of the book explores how seven scholars--men and women--have applied letters to their own critical writing, finding that this formal move allows them to question issues of public and private discourse, the authority of signature, and the "feminine" location.