If the Sky Falls is the debut short-story collection from award-winning fiction writer Nicholas Montemarano. These eleven stories show why Jayne Anne Phillips has called Montemarano "an American stylist capable of redeeming our darkest dreams." Redemption in these intense and sometimes violent stories is found in the lyrical prose, in the act of storytelling itself. A young man tries to rescue his sister from her abusive lover, and in the process must revisit his own family's violent history ("Note to Future Self"); a home healthcare worker pops pills and takes two men with cerebral palsy...

In the best tradition of southern storytelling, Uke Rivers Delivers features raconteurs as beguiling as the tales they tell. These lyrical, darkly humorous monologues portray a range of denizens of the American South desperately trying to come to grips with their inherited pasts. A Confederate reenactor receives a message from the beyond to lay to rest the remains of Stonewall Jackson's horse. A docent at Washington and Lee University's Lee Chapel offers prim instruction on the facts and legends about "the General" with both reverence and irony. The young son of a lewd, alcoholic,...

The five heartbreaking and radiant stories in John Fulton's The Animal Girl explore the awkwardness of situations in which grief and erotic love collide. Here are people in extremis, struggling mightily, and often failing, to keep it together. In the Pushcart Prize--winning "Hunters," Fulton contrasts the humorous clumsiness of dating with the grim realities of death in the tale of a middle-aged woman who keeps her cancer a secret when she starts a relationship with an avid hunter. In the novella-length title story, a lonely adolescent girl deals with the recent loss of her mother and the...

The sixteen stories in Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean etch sharp portraits of people in odd and sometimes surreal situations who thus have the opportunity to view their lives from a unique perspective. In "Chestnut Season," a young woman stalled in traffic sees her future self parked beside her; in "Boyfriends," the recently deceased protagonist endures eulogies by her ex-beaus and husbands; in "Mrs. Fargo," a young man faces a reckoning with his first-grade teacher, a suicide, for whom he's harbored a crush and whom he hopes to impress with his worldly successes. The short-short...

Fifty-year-old science teacher Dale Portwit believes that the peak of his life has come and gone. A failed suicide, a food fetishist, so isolated that the Best Man at his wedding is a framed photograph of his former mailman, Mr. Portwit resolves to live entirely for the moment, to speak his mind at each turn no matter what the consequences. He sets his sights upon Mary Ann Tucker, Elkhart Elementary's plump, accommodating third-grade teacher. Their whirlwind courtship leads to wedding bands, a house in the suburbs, and an indulgent sex life -- so why aren't they happy? Perhaps a little...

Oklahoma is a forgotten territory of "Indians, outlaws, and immigrants" when its first Jewish settler, Boggy Haurowitz, arrives in 1859. Full of expectations, he finds the untamed region a formidable foe, its landscape rugged, its resources strained.

In Stations West, four generations of Haurowitzes, intertwined with a family of Swedish immigrants, struggle against the Territory's "insatiable appetite." The challenges of creating a home amid betrayals, nature's vagaries, and burgeoning statehood prove too great. Each generation in turn succumbs to the overwhelming lure of the...

Walter Schmidt's life isn't simple: His wife Nadine wants to live next door to her dead first husband's mother, the Mississippi River is three blocks down the street and rising dangerously, FDR is dead, and the war seems like it will never end -- but for the most part, things are going Walter's way. Then one bright April morning in 1945, Walter comes home early from work to find Nadine in bed with his best friend, Sammy.

Shocked into silence, when she then calls him a "kraut," Walter becomes even more confused. True, he's a German immigrant, but he's lived in New Orleans for almost...

A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder's Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.

In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus: he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog. Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each...

Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames consume the canvas and vast sections collapse, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.

Inspired by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore the aftermath of a disaster in a world of clowns, elephants, and childhood fantasies.

In the opening story, Ania Liszak, a young Polish housemaid, steals circus tickets from her employer to take her three-year-old son, Teddy,...

In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerizing and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow--era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters' voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence...