Jake and Estuko Weedsong live a bucolic life on their vineyard in rural Oregon. Having been forced out of academia, Jake spends his days working on a memoir, much of it comprised of his years living and teaching in Japan where he married Etsuko some twenty years earlier, married her three times on the same day, in fact. 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. Although she also has published novels, poetry, and essays, she finds that she cannot do without the short story-“it is such a beautiful form. I love the challenges it presents in dealing with characters and situations that light upon the cusp of the moment and which must be handled with an eye to economy and unity of effect. 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…
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. The IRA leadership are concerned about a dissident group who oppose the GFA and seek to resume the conflict. Iggy Davin, the Army Council Chief of Staff, sends Eamon, long retired from the Council, with his wife Mary, to investigate the link between the dissidents and the drugs money suspected of funding them. During the search, they find evidence of an informer at the top of the IRA. Amidst the treachery, Eamon discovers a sinister plot to destabilise the GFA and resume the war. A deadly race develops to find the informer before he gets to them. 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 fresh and original perspective. 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. The World of Carnival, continues with its original inhabitants and their struggles against the odds: Alta and Dusty, who dream big; the midget Curran, who undertakes a journey at the behest of the acrobat Elise, whose son has gone mad (Small Wonder); the Kid, who, after a long search, sets out to find the Seventh City, picking up along the way a melancholy Jew, who grew up there (The Dreamseekers). And, finally, a return to Alta, who finds herself drawn back to the circus to follow another set of dreams (Down to Earth). The series of novels explores the relations between life and art, reality and illusion, the openness to possibility and the capacity for the renewal of energies within a culture. 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…
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. These short stories and lyric interludes roam from suburban America to the trellised landscapes of Europe, exploring the revelations of love and fear in characters thrust into fierce journeys. Read more…