Syracuse: A Novel is both a love story and an initiation narrative about a young woman trying desperately to understand herself and her choices in a world and at a time where there are few role models other than sex-pots or wives and mothers. Living on her own, Liz Brown must make decisions about love and sex and intelligence and work and friendships, decisions that she is not always well equipped to make. Sitting in a cold shower, drinking gin, she decides that her life is fundamentally comic, and it is true that there is much to laugh about in this book. But there is darkness, too--and a...

Familiar with life on the shores of Cape Cod and New Jersey, the author, Janet Hubbs, explores the idea of living at the edge of the human world in this short collection of poems aptly named, A Year at the Shore. As she concludes in the volume's title poem: "And the waves move back and forth while the years go round."

Divorces are fascinating-unless they're yours. This is the story of one divorce, told by one of its participants, who discovers that divorce is truly the art of losing, an art, as it turns out, that no one masters or even handles very well. Experience the death of Jimmy's marriage, told against the backdrop of crime and obsession, as narrated in this quietly compelling novel.