Excerpts

When Teffy Byrne steals a dead sex worker’s coded journal from a local art show, she thinks it might shed light on an unsolved murder committed seven years ago.

From acclaimed crime novelist Gar Anthony Haywood comes a riveting tale unlike any he’s told before….

California poet Karen An-hwei Lee, inspired by Virgil, has created her own dense, richly-layered collection of “Neo-Georgics,” constituting an extended exploration of such motifs as happiness, olive groves, vineyards, soil chemistries, the seacoast, and the birth of trees.

From California coastal redwoods to giant sequoias in the Sierra, from practical jokes of adolescence to unexpected epiphanies marking an academic career, the many poems in Somewhere to Follow range through the life of a poet on the lookout for what comes next.

For a brief time in mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, two of the most eccentric and fascinating figures in American history crossed paths when troubled soul and soon-to-be presidential assassin Charles Guiteau threw in his lot with John Humphrey Noyes’s utopian community of “free love” believers.

With the exception of a single book published in his lifetime, much of the late Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete’s wisdom has been scattered and hard to find. The Relevance of the Stars fills this vacuum.

The poems in John Pleimann’s Come Shivering to Collect live and move and have their being in a world that is both twilit and sacred. Speakers wrestle with memory’s power to obsess and distort, to haunt, and to evoke. They discover that life mocks happiness, and the only thing sacred is to be vulnerable.

In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d’Azur. They’d bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean.

They were a family with a plan: to live differently.

In the title poem of Into the New World Robert Schultz takes the reader on a walk around the World Trade Center site shortly after its destruction: in response to this event, the book ranges through the extremes of war and peace, as well as backwards and forwards in time, searching for shards out of which to build an enabling, humane perspective.

“Love took the words right out of my mouth.” So begins the first line of Christopher Jane Corkery’s poignant and unforgettable new collection of poems. Throughout the  work these two themes—the power and mystery of language, especially the crafted  one of poetry, and what Keats called “the holiness of the heart’s affections”—intertwine, accumulating a rich panoply of associations and meanings.

If the short story collections of John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor had a love child, it would be The Beasts of Belladonna. Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, Gilbert Allen’s collection of fifteen linked stories explores every corner of the suburbanized foothills of South Carolina.

A timely, stylishly written, and brilliantly conceived metaphysical thriller, Coyote Fork carries us on an unforgettable journey, before bringing us face to face with the darkness at the heart of Silicon Valley itself.

All three characters in this novel confront the question: when are we most ourselves—when we realize the selves we aspire to, or when we are unadorned? The characters converge on the same place: as they come together, each will come away changed.

The lyric poems in Phillippo’s radiant debut collection Thunderhead explore faith, motherhood, family, and community. As the author has put it, she has lived her life “backwards,” first raising a large family, then going back to school, and only now seeing her work find its way into print.

In All in a Garden Green, thirteen-year-old Erica Pickins walks through a door of the old manor house, Hengrave Hall, on a family visit to England and finds herself mistaken for the elder daughter of the house, Margaret, in the year 1578. Queen Elizabeth herself is about to arrive on a royal visit, and, because of her musical talent, Erica becomes the most important part of the desperate attempts by the Catholic family to entertain the Protestant Queen.

In the spirit of Muriel Spark and Walker Percy, The Age of Infidelity’s eleven stories embrace the comic, the absurd, and the dead serious. These stories travel through time, set in landscapes from the small-town South to New York City, from a parched Midwest to a deserted Dublin where American ex-pats hunker, these stories time-travel from our Jim Crow past to an imagined future of warehouses for the aged where robots do the nursing, where pet dogs commit suicide while young mothers spin yarns.

The poems in Toward inhabit the landscapes and seascapes of the wild southwest of Ireland, the islands of America’s Pacific Northwest, the poet’s home in Massachusetts, and then round again, back to the land north of Dublin. Moira Linehan’s eye and imagination capture lyrical, sonic, and imagistic details of these places. So, too, their embedded history: the Famine, the days of the whaling industry, and the speaker’s paternal genealogy are all woven in.

“Somebody we’ve all heard of once turned water into wine. With this project it’s more like turning vinegar into arsenic. In the first place, most everyone on the translation committee arrived with suspicions. And those suspicions were quickly confirmed.”

“EARLY IN HIS ADULT LIFE, Peter Paul Rubens, the famous painter—though he was not yet famous at the time—took a trip to Italy with his apprentice Deodat del Monte. Rubens had been living in Antwerp with his mother. He wasn’t born in Antwerp, he was born in Siegen, in what is now Germany but was, at the time, not the unified country that it is today. Rubens was born in the time before nation-states as we know them existed. Before the French Revolution, before Bismarck, before Napoleon. Rubens was born in Siegen because his father had been in prison there, or thereabouts. That’s another part of the story we’ll get into later, the arrest and near execution of Rubens’s father.”

World Without End, Claude Wilkinson’s fourth poetry collection, takes its title from the last words of the Gloria Patri. But the preceding words—“as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be”— also echo the book’s overarching theme: the seemingly infinite spiritual implications woven throughout our experience in the natural world.