Lily King’s highly acclaimed, award-winning debut novel is the story of Rosie, an American au pair in Paris whose coming of age defies all our usual conceptions of naïveté and experience. Rosie is fleeing an unspeakable loss that has left her homesick for her family. As she awkwardly grasps for the words to communicate with and connect to Nicole, the cool, distant, and beautifully polished mother of the three children she cares for, Rosie’s bond with the patriarch of the household develops almost too naturally. When Lola, the middle child, begins to suspect an indecent intimacy between Rosie and her father, Rosie moves to the south of France to care for Nicole’s elderly guardian, the storyteller of the family’s secrets. There, she discovers a past darkened by war and duplicity, and finally comes to understand the tragedy behind Nicole’s elusive demeanor.

Prize-winning author Lily King’s masterful new novel spans three decades of a volatile relationship between a charismatic, alcoholic father and the daughter who loves him. Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who's beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it. As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she's found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago. A provocative story of one woman's lifelong loyalty to her father, Father of the Rain is a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities and magnetic pull of family.

Set in the remote mining country of West Virginia in the late twenties, Lick Creek is the compelling story of a fiery young woman, Emily Jenkins, and what happens when progress—and tragedy—comes to her family's farm. Brad Kessler has a generous and keen eye for natural landscape and its power in human life. In his profound, dramatic first novel, he explores the complex intersections of faith, tradition, and innovation.

After the coal mine deaths of her father, brother, and the first man she loved, Emily struggles to support herself and her mother. When construction begins on the power lines, she blames the intruders for everything that has gone awry—for her mother's increasing withdrawal from life and for lives already lost. Then, an electrical worker is struck by lightning. Brought to their farmhouse unconscious and badly injured, Joseph is taken in by Emily's mother, and Emily is seduced by the mystery of his past, his immigration from Russia, his mother's deportations, and the world of immigrants forced to flee persecution in their homelands. Moving from romance to high drama, Kessler illuminates the role of electricity in the transformation of rural life and the particular electricity between two vastly different people whose worlds and passions collide.

From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliche-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century.

In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America—from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas—over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.

James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time was one of the essential books of the sixties and one of the most galvanizing statements of the American civil rights movement. Now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a new generation confronting what Baldwin called a "racial nightmare," acclaimed writer Randall Kenan asks: How far have we come? Combining elements of memoir and commentary, this homage is a piercing consideration of the times, and an impassioned call to transcend them.

The winning volume in the 1987 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is To the Place of Trumpets. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said: "Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poems suggest a kind of folk art—their clay washed of narrative grit, serviceably turned and fancifully decorated, fired, then filled at the creative instinct's oldest well. It is a pleasure to drink from this fine local pottery."

Featuring line-drawings by Christopher Stackhouse and poems-as-essays by John Keene—handed back and forth and back, written and rewritten, drawn and redrawn—Seismosis penetrates the common ground between writing/literature and drawing/visual art, creating a revisioned landscape where much of the work is abstract or abstracted or both. The multiform agreements the texts & the drawings make, from a brilliant & decisive center, are revolutionary, antilinear, and highly responsive. Seismosis is a formal experience. The result is a highly sophisticated call-and-response affair. A pioneer occasion, in which two African American artists have collaborated on a book of this nature, weaving a cohesive study of abstraction in both poetry and drawing, 1913 Press's printing of the acclaimed collaboration approaches fine-press quality in mass-produced, perfect-bound, book-as-art-object form—in keeping with 1913's mission of integrating the visual and verbal zones.

Stealing tropes from militancy to minstrelsy, Fear, Some broadcasts from the slippery moments when personal, national, racial and aesthetic anxieties overlap. These poems seek to pressurize content ("At the Pink Teacup"), language ("Atomic Buckdance") and form (the Blaxploitation epic-remix, "(dig) Bloom is Boom, Sucka!") until they evoke suspicion, tension, fear and the laughter that rattles after the horrifyingly ridiculous.

In her third collection of poetry, Viper Rum, Mary Karr delves into autobiographical subject matter; various beloveds are birthed and buried in these touching lyrics, some of which, as the title suggests, deal with drink:

I cast back to those last years / I drank, alone nights at the kitchen sink, / bathrobed, my head hatching snakes, / while my baby slept in his upstairs cage and my marriage choked to death

Precise and surprising, Karr's poems "take on the bedevilments of fate and grief with a diabolical edge of their own" (Poetry). Also included is Karr's controversial and prize-winning essay "Against Decoration," in which she took aim against the verbal ornaments that too often pass for poetry these days—the "new formalism" that elevates form to an end itself.

Mary Karr on The Devil's Tour: "This is a book of poems about standing in the dark, about trying to memorize the bad news. The tour is a tour of the skull. I am thinking of Satan in Paradise Lost: 'The mind is its own place and I can make a hell of heav'n or a heav'n of hell . . . I myself am hell.'"