Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more...
Is it truth or fiction? Memoir or essay? Narrative or associative? To a writer like Michael Martone, questions like these are high praise. Martone’s studied disregard of form and his unruffled embrace of the prospect that nothing-no story, no...
Radio Iris follows Iris Finch, a twenty-something socially awkward daydreamer and receptionist at Larmax, Inc., a company whose true function she doesn't understand (though she's heard her boss refer to himself as "a businessman").
Gradually,...
During China's collectivist era in the late 1950s, a rural work team responsible for building an important floodgate receives a strange new recruit: Hei-hai, a skinny, silent and almost feral boy. Assigned to assist the blacksmith at the worksite...
"Will put Allen in the company of writers such as James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison." — The Philadelphia Inquirer.
When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen's debut novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its...
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the...
A reimagination of one of the most famous stories in all of literature — Achilles’s slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam’s attempt to ransom his son’s body in Homer’s The Iliad—Ransom is the first novel in more than a decade...
In an endeavor similar to his debut novel, The Kitchen Boy, Alexander couples extensive research and poetic license, this time turning his enthusiasm toward perhaps the most intriguing player in the collapse of the Russian dynasty: Rasputin. This...
Abe Ravelstein is a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who glories in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously-and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick...