Description The warmest, funniest, most erudite and ambitious philosophical dialogue of the twenty-first century? A lonely professor in a bookstore café overhears someone trying to explain Wittgenstein to a good friend–the two of them once having come close to an adulterous affair? The professor surreptitiously records their conversation, and then… Read more…
Description This collection of essays is about people. My people. In the midst of a pandemic, I am even more aware of the importance of my people— and time. Read more…
Description The prolific Georges Simenon was convinced that “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” “Let’s face it,” William Styron concluded, “writing is hell.” But now, under the oaks on a summer afternoon, I remember none of that. Read more…
Description Dispatched by their mother to learn why his estranged twin brother Gregory (or “Brock Jones, PhD,” as he’s known to fans of his bestselling self-help book Coffee, Black) has disappeared, Stewart Detweiler drives 1,500 miles to find his twin hanging from a ceiling beam in their deceased father’s lakeside… Read more…
Description When Fanny Kemble, an acclaimed nineteenth-century British actress, marries Pierce Butler, a Philadelphia aristocrat, she is yoked to a philanderer, a liar, and, as she soon learns, a slaver. She must deal with a husband who expects her absolute obedience, as though she were one of his slaves. Read more…
Description ON SALE NOVEMBER 15, 2020 The Hot Sauce Madness Love Burn Suite is a book of poems that revolves around the beloved and sometimes notorious culture of hot sauce and hot peppers. Read more…
Description Elisheba Haqq, the youngest of seven children has lost her mother, Mamaji to cancer. She is living with a cold and unfeeling stepmother and searching for answers. The small-town Minnesotans believe the family members are the “perfect immigrants.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Read more…
Description The stories in this collection represent about six decades of writing. Over time some of them have grown the “claws and wings” of novels as Vladimir Nabokov put it. But they were stories first. At the University of Kansas I took a course titled “Narration and Description. Read more…
Description LOVING MODIGLIANI will be released on December 15, 2020 Amedeo Modigliani, embittered and unrecognized genius, dies of meningitis on a cold January day in Montparnasse in 1920. Jeanne Hébuterne, his young wife and muse, follows 48 hours later, falling backwards through a window. Read more…
Description [The book is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble (Buy Now button) in advance its September 7, 2020 release date.] Moving at surprising angles between the personal and the public world, Gary Fincke’s poems lead to discoveries that are both exhilarating and unsettling. Read more…
Description RIVER TOWN GIRL has been selected as one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2020! Only 100 books make the list, and Kirkus reviews thousands of books through their Indie program every year. The memoir received a Kirkus Starred Review. Read more…
Description Billy Horn is on the run with serious mob money in a satchel. He has crossed a threshold, inhabiting an alternate existence, a heavy dream filled with menace and deception. Read more…
Description Our literary travels have taken us to Miami, Prague, the West of Ireland, Bruges/Brugge, Copenhagen, Broughton Castle, Bath, Haut-Koenigsbourg, Stockholm, Danish Prisons, Buonconvento, Paris, London, South Africa, Iceland, the Virgin Islands, and the Isle of Mull. Read more…
Description Of all the creative elements that go into making a movie, probably none is more misunderstood by those outside the industry than the role of the screenwriter. Read more…
Description Solonche is productive and prolific, but that doesn’t water down his poetry… He can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines… His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems. Read more…
Description Do You Know What I’m Not Telling You? is a collection of stories about New Yorkers—a wannabe cabaret singer, a dermatologist attracted to a frustrated poet, a single man trying to adopt a baby, a lonely stay-at-home dad. Read more…
Description A small rag-tag circus/carnival breaks down in the desert in southern New Mexico after a dust storm. Various members of the troupe begin to pull out—this latest disaster the last straw. Read more…
Description The Kuhreihen Melody will be released on December 3, 2019. It may be pre-ordered by clicking Buy Now. Once considered a disease, nostalgia has been described as a yearning to return to “a past that never was, “a place that can only be reached through the imagination. Read more…
Description These poems consider everything from the most transformative moments of childhood to the intense hold that mythological and literary history have on the poetic imagination. Read more…
Description This is the story of the decline of a marriage and of a woman, stepping out of the ashes—not quite a Phoenix yet, but dusting off her wings from the fire of an anguished, codependent love. It is the story of betrayal, infidelity, illness, addiction and loss. Read more…
Description When it comes to a good story, I’m an elephant served a single salted peanut. I suspect I’m no different than most in this respect, but test yourself to see if I’m right: read “The Dean’s Story” and ask yourself if you aren’t hungry for more. Read more…
Description When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconicartist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Read more…
Description The Kid wanted to do something for me—and the question was, would I let him? He’s on his way up in the world these days, and there’s no telling how high he’ll soar. Read more…
Description There it stood, all in sunlit glory, lost in the radiance of itself: towers, roofs, casements, doorways, intersecting planes of white and dazzle: the Seventh City. Read more…
Description This book is meant to stimulate thought on the various elements of fiction and on the techniques of writing good fiction and avoiding the bad. Read more…
Description Fifteen stories and the sixth story collection by Jerry Bumpus, the unique and celebrated master of the short story form, and the author of the much acclaimed novel ANACONDA. Twenty-four of Bumpus’s 121 published stories have been anthologized and taught in colleges from New York to San Diego. Read more…
Description Las Vegas, NV— Gurlesque collides with The New York School of poetry in Angela M. Brommel’s debut chapbook, Plutonium & Platinum Blonde. Layered between works of desert love, Brommel‘s poems engage with an array of larger-than-life pop culture icons, including the reimagined 1950’s beauty queen, Miss Atomic. About the Author Angela M. Read more…
Description In a new, provocative collection of essays, William Eaton, the author of Surviving the Twenty-First Century, shares the pleasures of a life full of questions, tastes, reading and more visual arts. “That we are animals, that is as sure as ever. Read more…
Description Confessions of an Accidental Professor reveals ten years of teaching college freshman through the prism of an adjunct professor. In this hybrid memoir, essays are interspersed with anonymous student evaluations, emails, and chair observations. Read more…
Description Your First Page is unlike any other craft book on writing. It is based on the premise that almost everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page. Read more…
Description In this second novel of Gladys Swan’s The Carnival Quintet, Curran—the small wonder of the title, at four feet one inch—receives a troubling letter from Elise, a woman he had adored long ago. Although he hadn’t heard from her in years, he is compelled to find and protect her. Read more…
The authors of From Pantyhose to Spandex: Writers on the Job Redux take you on a tour through a single night in a taxi in Copenhagen while listening to Mahler’s Ninth, through the “Melancholy House” of a maximum-security prison and assigning juvenile delinquents as their sentence to do the sentences of… Read more…
Description Paterson Light and Shadow tells the stories in poetry and photography of Paterson, New Jersey, from one of the most gifted poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and fine art photographer Mark Hillringhouse, who together have spent a lifetime living, growing up and working in and around one of America’s most… Read more…
By Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Mark HillringhousePhotography and Poetry
Description In Reaching Beyond the Saguaros, a book titled for its beginning roots in the Southwest, contributors write themselves around the globe, connecting pieces of their individual hometowns. Read more…
Description Dean Troost is working on his master’s thesis in history and can’t seem—even though he realizes he must—to get beyond counting the war dead from the present war and innumerable past wars. Read more…
Description In this collection, poems selected from a distinguished thirty-year career converse with each other across books and across time. Soulful, artful and yet accessible, these poems explore essential connections–one’s relationship to poetic tradition, the reader, the natural world, other lives, language itself. Read more…
Description Among Gladys Swan’s many short story publications, a number of the most significant have appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest, continuously published literary magazine in America. Now they are collected for the first time, together with the prize-winning story, “Jungle. Read more…
Description Having lived under and outlasted two globe-girdling empires, the Portuguese and the British, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro considers himself to be a pre-postcolonial writer, one of the last survivors of a dying breed. Read more…
Description This debut story collection depicts a wide range of compelling characters and their worlds: a hermaphrodite falling in love, a veteran Marine’s “piercing” attempt to cope with PTSD, preparations for the anticipated destruction of a hurricane, aging and the aftermath of breast cancer, immigrants fleeing famine, a mother’s worst… Read more…
Description A provisional title for this collection was “Fifty Stabs at the Truth of Language,” which despite its weight, I remain fond of because of its nod to Montaigne’s Essais, which the French master thought of as stabs at the truth of his experience. Read more…
Description In these rich and incisive essays, Robert Day reveals how his “learning” as a student defined his “teaching” at Washington College, the University of Kansas, the Iowa Writers Workshop and other colleges and universities. Read more…
Description In this poignant story of new found love and love discarded, reminiscent of some of Graham Greene’s novels, Tim Schell takes us to Central Africa where a young American, an African prostitute and the seventeen-year-old daughter of American Baptist missionaries are on the run from the police and other… Read more…
Description The Silver Baron’s Wife traces the rags-to-riches-to-rags life of Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor (Lizzie). This fascinating heroine worked in the silver mines and had two scandalous marriages, one to a philandering opium addict and one to a Senator and silver baron worth $24 million in the late 19th century. Read more…
Description The place is Washington, D.C., and the year,1984. The ruthless dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell has not come to pass. Or has it? Under the presidency of a former Hollywood actor, the struggle for America’s soul has begun-a trial of conscience and idealism versus idolatry and political dictatorship. Read more…
Description In this stirring new collection, Ronna Wineberg explores our essential bonds to partners, children, parents, and friends. Intimacy, marriage, parenthood, adultery, divorce, and the legacies left by the past unfold in these beautifully written stories. Men and women search for happiness and love, yet face longing, disappointment, and loss. Read more…
Description In Ancestors, Hawkins, a man adrift, finds himself in a Native American homeland called Chaco Canyon, a place of relics haunted by history. Read more…
It’s a winter of snow of mythic proportions. Caught in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, Philip Fellows is meanwhile happy to be immured inside with his lover—free to dodge undesirable work—as he seeks continual sensual pleasure. Read more…
I offer up, in summation, writer/director Ron Shelton’s refutation of a younger generation of filmmakers’ blind allegiance to “Show, don’t tell.” “(The) old canard that action defines character is only partly true,” Shelton argued in an interview. Read more…
This book shares an abundance of delightful discoveries. As a viewer-reader, you can’t be sure where the journey will take you next. At one moment you’re intrigued by a green vista that’s next to a close-up of a bird on a patch of parched earth. Read more…
Robert Day has invented a new form, the Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind memoirs–brief, whimsical, sometimes touching, reminiscences about his brushes (often friendships) with literary greatness. He treats Shakespeare, William Stafford, Mavis Gallant, John Barth, Ray Carver, Walter Bernstein, and Michael de Montaigne. Read more…
In Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life, four editors and numerous poets and essayists pool their understanding of and admiration for a brilliant poet/ essayist/ teacher/ animal-rights advocate/ political activist and self-proclaimed “all-around no good troublemaker” who died April 2, 2015. Read more…
With his customary pyrotechnics, Herriges gives us a “what if” tale written in a swift, agile manner that has become his signature style over the course of seven luminous novels. Read more…
As Chloride, a dying New Mexican mining town, whirls toward a rendezvous with truth, its people find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. Read more…
Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man’s struggle to adhere… Read more…
Madeleine Beckman’s Hyacinths from the Wreckage, her third book of poetry, is a glittering collection that embraces body and place, and the constantly changing geography of an emotional landscape. The language of these poems wrenches, arouses recognition and empathy, and, finally, sings a persuasive song with the promise of renewal. Read more…
Each of the fourteen interviews in this collection tells the story of a poet’s career, starting with origins that in many cases overcame unlikely beginnings and went on to fortunate educations with inspiring teachers who often became friends and colleagues, and in at least one case a spouse. Read more…
A Dark Gamble, a Western epic inspired by the great epic of Gilgamesh, is set in New Mexico during the era when gold and silver were being discovered and prospectors, miners and ranchers were pouring into the territory, the local Apaches consequently being hunted down and displaced. Read more…
Can the truth really set one free? In Miriam Polli’s debut novel, In a Vertigo of Silence, Emily, the young protagonist, discovers a family secret and thinks, I know now that secrets run in the blood and bones of those who came before. Read more…
After the death of James Gandolfini in the summer of 2013, David Starkey decided to pay poetic homage to The Sopranos TV series and its star. Like a Soprano features one poem for each episode, with the poem sharing the episode’s title. Read more…
Twelve stories depicting Americans in France, a broad array of characters and situations- -a boozy basketball player colliding with bigotry; a vet at Omaha Beach confronting a memory; a boy sent abroad while his parents divorce; a jealous sister coveting one last heirloom; a killer seeking peace at Lake Geneva;… Read more…
The Narrow Gate presents 19 short essays that explore ways in which literary writing and visual art affirm and clarify values, in our personal lives and in art, itself, with topics ranging from “resilience” to “madness” to “art + work. Read more…
Ravenous: New & Selected Poems by Rick Mulkey provides new and returning readers an opportunity to consider recent and previously published work in a collection containing wide stylistic variety with deep unifying themes and concerns. Read more…
In this anthology incarcerated me in the Prison Literacy Project at S.C.I. Graterford contribute pieces about regretful decisions made or painful experiences in their youth, fearlessly exposing their vulnerability. Read more…
When Mr. Finger builds his first Finger a half mile high flipping off the fabulously wealthy, Peter Boatz, a professor of Icons, finally has a fertile subject for his Icons of Power book. Read more…
Sixteen-year-old Elbert Earl Evans (known as Triple E) bursts out of Goodpasture Correctional Facility and speeds toward freedom in a stolen Oldsmobile. As he outraces the police, his car stalls in the Colorado badlands in the middle of a snowstorm and he is stranded with his girl, Jeanne. Read more…
Infidelity anyone? Vicariously enjoy the unfaithfulness of twenty-four writers in this anthology, Runnin’ Around, subtitled The Serving House Book of Infidelity. The cover is a black- and-white Mark Hillringhouse photograph of an appropriately seedy motel advertising day-rates. Read more…
A man who can’t bring himself to return to the apartment of his failing marriage, a woman spied on by a neighbor, a father terrified by the four-year- old next door, a boy living in a house haunted by his mother’s madness, a mother whose children are freezing in a… Read more…
Both the beauty and frailty of human connections are seen in the thirteen stories collected in Sympathetic People. Here are women and men struggling to find love, meaning, happiness in marriage, adulterous affairs, art, meditation, and even the passage from life to death. Read more…
Frivolity, joy and self discovery are the things which, Les Stein, the protagonist of Wagon 537 Christiania, arrives at in his two-year sojourn in the freetown of Christiania. Read more…
Hidden Lives presents compelling true stories of three New York City immigrant families—one Jewish, one German, and one Italian—set in three tenement neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and Hell’s Kitchen—during the first decades of the twentieth century. Read more…
John Spector is a seasoned high school teacher with 22 years in the trenches of a ghetto school filled with struggling teenagers, gangs, apathetic students— but also students “who make an indelible impression, kids with souls and hearts as big as the world. Read more…
Writing successful fiction is a balance between trusting one’s own instincts and making the right conscious choices. In By Cunning & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story writer Peter Selgin shows you how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity. Read more…
Claire Bateman’s Locals is a narrative atlas of prose poems as intimate as they are unpredictable, each a keyhole glimpse into the life of a different realm where our normal logic doesn’t apply. Read more…
The poems in David Memmott’s poetry collection Lost Transmissions speak to the need we have to explore the depths of our own psyches, a need so insistent that many of us would sell our souls to unearth the answers to what motivates our lives—what motivates our actions. Read more…
Fifteen-year-old Virgil Foggy is trying to survive on a failing dairy farm in Minnesota. Virgil’s mother is pregnant-an unwelcome addition to the family. Virgil’s older brother joins the army and goes to war, but warfare is also close to home, much of it between Virgil and his stepfather. Read more…
A Vision of Neon is a story of two friends—one who survives the complex years of adolescence and one who does not—and the unconditional love and commitment between these young girls. Read more…
Mark Hillinghouse’s Between Frames integrates poems previously published in many magazines with more than twenty striking black and white photographs. Read more…
29 women artists and writers explore aging through art, comics, poetry, photography, and essays. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sublime, each entry adds insight into the many ways we learn to be women. Read more…
Mesmerizing: In 17 riveting stories set in the author’s native Minnesota, Duff Brenna’s edgy tales journey from the mid-19th century to our current 21st century. Read more…
Made Priceless presents snapshots of objects that their holders treasure: a 1950s swivel rocker, a fortune-cookie fortune that reads “The rubber bands are heading in the right direction” a marble with a world map painted on it, a bread-baking pan, a bar of soap, crocheted doilies, a masonry trowel… Each… Read more…
Ida Mae Glick, a critically acclaimed filmmaker, has lived and taught in the small town of Willow Bend, New York for five years without drawing attention to her troubled past. Read more…
What is it like to go abroad but not for vacation? What business do we have? What right-minded, haunted search for community, for family, for social justice takes us beyond our borders, domestic rooms, and familiar walls? What responsibility is there—those of us who’ve been to the two-thirds world, met… Read more…
In this searing memoir, a father confronts the complex issues of love and hate as he struggles to deal with his emotionally troubled and often violent son. Desperate Love examines the lengths that parents go to preserve their families and rescue children from themselves. Read more…
Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer and Stephen Dunn, Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins, National Book Critics Circle Award winners Albert Goldbarth and Jack Marshall, and twenty-three other notable authors are in Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, an engaging collection of poems,… Read more…
The stories in this book have been selected from the six previous collections of short fiction, as well as from recent work, Gladys Swan has published in that genre over the past four decades. Read more…
Liam Mac Sheóinín’s George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity, a Menippean satire, relocates James Joyce’s Dublin to the New Jersey shore with the same spirit of inventive wordplay. Frank McCourt called an excerpt “a language mad romp with many, many laughs along the way. Read more…
The mythical T’ang poet Han-shan, placed somewhere between the camps of Daoism and Zen Buddhism and the alleged author of some three hundred poems, probably remains a post-T’ang literary invention – and a good one, it seems, since ‘his’ poetry is being read, translated and re-translated to this very day. Read more…
Thomas McCarthy’s The Coast of Death is a literary thriller of IRA tensions. In the edgy lull between the Good Friday Agreement and the formation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, there is frantic manoeuvring. Read more…
The Meeting with Evil contains three chapters from a book about Dr. Genefke’s work to rehabitate torture victims from throughout the world (translated by Thomas E. Kennedy and first published in New Letters) and Kennedy’s interview with Dr. Read more…
Steve Kowit’s Lurid Confessions, his first full-length poetry collection, had two printings with Carpenter Press in 1983 but has been out of print for years. It’s been our loss not to have access to the wit and insights of so many excellent poems. Read more…
The Book of Worst Meals contains essays by 25 writers on their worst culinary experiences, tales of wretched dining in Paris, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships. Read more…
By Walter Cummins and Thomas E. KennedyAnthologies
In Out-patients, Elisabeth Murawski transforms the vulnerabilities of our bodies into poetry, her precise lines evoking hospitals and cemeteries, malignancies and bomb blasts, The birth of a child prefigures its end: “this life / slated to be brief / as a poem.” These poems confront our inevitabilities. Read more…
Susan O’Neill’s Don’t Mean Nothing, a powerful story collection now in a Serving House Books edition after initial publication by Ballantine Books and then the University of Massachusetts Press, is the first work of fiction by a woman wno served in Viet Nam, revealing much about that war from a… Read more…
In this chapbook, you will find the first chapters of Carnival for the Gods, and the three novels that form a sequence from Gladys Swan’s comic fantasy, first published in the Vintage Contemporaries Series. Read more…
All these poems come from a suite-in-progress called Old Sayings. They are based on English clichés, bromides, idiomatic locutions, &c. Actually, “based on” is not correct; sometimes, a phrase is the starting point for a poem (e.g. Read more…
What is the relationship between memory and imagination? How unbridled is the power of story? How intimidating? The narrative essays in What We Choose to Remember tread the tenuous, shifting grounds of memory, revealing how our imperfect recollections shape not only how we live our lives, but the act of… Read more…
A world of strange, haunting tales, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dark as deep Danish winter night, and sometimes both, and sometimes all of these things. Read more…
In these poems, Rita Signorelli-Pappas fuses classical, aesthetic, and personal history. She summons a world in which mythic time mercurially flickers into the present, and transformations erupt and intersect with Ovidian force. Read more…
Susan Tekulve’s Savage Pilgrims includes five poems and five stories, most of which were first published in journals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Denver Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Emrys, Connecticut Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. Read more…
Coronology is a compendium of the crowns we bear, from the asbestos crown that insulates our thoughts to the zeitgeist crown, “a collective rather than an individual illumination,” and provides pertinent information concerning crown birth, crown anatomy, the medical treatment of crowns, and more. Read more…
