Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all...

        These ten magical stories are primarily set in Pittsburgh-area river towns, where Italian American women and girls draw from their culture and folklore to bring life and a sense of wonder to a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt. Each story catapults the ordinary into something original and unpredictable.
        A skeptical journalist scopes out the bar where the town mayor, in seemingly perfect health, is drinking with his buddies and celebrating what he claims is the last day of his life. A woman donates her dead mother’ s...

In this mesmerizing fiction debut, Italian American women and girls spin their culture's lore to enliven a dying steel town. Even a wrecking ball is no match for the legend of Giovanna's green thumb in the title story. Quirky and profound, Paola Corso's magical leaps reveal the poetry of these women's lives. Finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award
Selected for "Best Short Stories of 2005" in "Montserrat Review" Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library...

In 1993 the narrator Jael B. Juba treks south to revisit historic Tarragona, Florida, where her friend and mentor Elizabeth Harding Dumot had restored a decrepit mansion fifteen years earlier and released the wild energies of legend and contemporary social conflict before getting out of town, her work done. Juba's work is also one of restoration. She must return a long-hidden diary-- discovered by Harding in her work on the house--to its original site, a secret room about to be opened to the public for the first time. Here, the diarist Frances Boullet and her intimates once kept a vodun...

The stories collected in "This Is Not the Tropics" come from the geographic center of a divided nation, and its protagonists evoke a split personality— one half submerged in America’ s own diehard mythology, the other half searching to escape tradition. Together they form a portrait of the Plains that is both quirky and poignant. While the themes in this collection are familiar— love and betrayal, loneliness and regret, the needs of the individual versus the needs of the community— the stories themselves are startling and new. Whether it is the story of an eccentric,...

        In this first novel from award-winning writer Sara Rath, the forests and lakes of northern Wisconsin pose a daunting threat to outsider Hannah Swann, who is content with her quiet life in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches and writes screenplays about obscure nineteenth-century poets. Her relationship with her college-aged daughter is strained yet candid, and a long-standing affair with a married professor has its own peculiar ups and downs.
        When Hannah unexpectedly inherits her uncle's rundown resort, she must head to the...