In Japan's Backcountry is a lively, personal account of the two years the author lived in the Tohoku, a region recently devastated by the 2011 tsunami and seldom visited by foreign tourists. The book describes life in Misawa studying Japanese and flower-arranging, teaching at a Japanese school, and exploring the Tohoku. The book is a vivid rendering of back roads and fishing villages, thatched houses and endless mountains-small glimpses, both enchanting and resonating, of a rural Japan fast disappearing.

An artist dreaming too much, a dancer forsaking the one thing she loves, a widow plotting to kidnap the boy she lost, a woman afraid pleasure's passed her by, a boy and the rat he can't save, the Renaissance man realizing his limits, a magician who can guarantee dreams but not happiness, a troubled teen's obsession with Paul McCartney, girls forced to grow up in ways they don't want. . . In these moving, well-crafted, and resonant stories, Jane M. Newby's characters struggle to learn the difference between possibilities and illusions, innocence and acceptance, believing and knowing, between...

Inspired by a footnote to a case the author read in her first year of law school, My Mother Madly is the poignant, gripping story of young Keefe Stafflin and her mother, Olene, who is unlike the other mothers in their small town in the 1950s. When Olene slowly becomes unhinged and Keefe begins to believe her mother's paranoid delusions, the state threatens to take over custody. Jane M. Newby publishes poetry, fiction, narrative nonfiction, and a popular blog, "Idaho to New York City." Other available titles from her are "In Japan's Backcountry," a memoir travelogue, "The Closest Things to...