Already an award-winning writer, ZZ Packer now shares with us her debut, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Her impressive range and talent are abundantly evident: Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream. With penetrating insight that belies her youth—she was only nineteen years old when Seventeen magazine printed her first published story—ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking performance—fresh, versatile, and captivating. It introduces us to an arresting and unforgettable new voice.

Breakfast’s boiled egg, the overhead hum of fluorescent lights, the midmorning coffee break—daily routines keep the world running. But when people are pushed—by a co-worker’s taunt, a face-to-face encounter with a woman in free fall from a bridge—cracks appear, revealing alienation, casual cruelty, madness, and above all a simultaneous hunger for and fear of the unknown. Daniel Orozco leads the reader through the hidden lives and moral philosophies of bridge painters, men housebound by obesity, office temps, and warehouse workers. He reveals the secret pleasures of late-night supermarket trips for cookie binges, exceptional data entry, and an exiled dictator’s occasional piss on the U.S. embassy. A love affair blooms between two officers in the impartially worded pages of a police blotter; a new employee’s first-day office tour includes descriptions of other workers’ most private thoughts and actions; during an earthquake, the consciousness of the entire state of California shakes free for examination. Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.

As he did so masterfully in the connected novellas of The Hill Road, Patrick O’Keeffe’s first novel moves back and forth in time and place to weave the story of two Irish families forever linked by love, secrets, and their heritage. James Dwyer was born in rural county Limerick before moving to Dublin as a teenager and ultimately settling in Ann Arbor. One night James’s past appears in the form of a down-and-out man named Walter, who issues an invitation for James to come to Upstate New York to visit his old childhood neighbor, Kevin Lyons. Although neither James nor Kevin particularly cares for each other, there’s no denying their complicated past. Kevin and James’s sister, Tess, were lovers while James fell hard for Kevin’s sister, Una. Illuminating the precarious balance of family intimacies and how stories can carry over from one generation to the next, O’Keeffe’s The Visitors further delivers on the elegant prose and plotting that earned him critical acclaim and the Story Prize for The Hill Road.

Reminiscent of Alice Munro and William Trevor, Patrick O'Keeffe's lyrical eloquence expressively unveils the cloistered world of a rural southwestern Irish town and its inhabitants. Brimming with thoughtful, gorgeous prose and linked by setting and circumstances that span generations, the four novellas in The Hill Road revolve around the parish of Kilroan and its inhabitants, and how, over time, the people and the community itself are transfigured by life-changing events. Marked by love, devotion, secrets, unfulfilled dreams, family intimacies, and missed opportunities, these characters embody the rugged unfolding of the landscape—a volatile place of natural beauty where stories alter lives.

Seven years ago, Chris Offutt made his literary debut with Kentucky Straight, a fiercely original collection that earned him not only critical praise but many prestigious awards. The eight new stories in Out of the Woods mark Offutt's return to the form in which he first displayed his astonishing talent. Offutt, who "draws landscape and constructs dialogue with the eyes and ears of a native son" (The Miami Herald), is on strong home turf here, capturing those who have left the Kentucky hills and long to return. These are stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, tales that are so full of hard edges they can't help but tell some hard truths.

Riveting, often heartbreaking stories that take readers through country that is figuratively and literally unmapped. These stories are set in a nameless community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation. Offutt has received a James Michener Grant and a Kentucky Arts Council Award.

The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness. In his intense and mysterious evocation of (seemingly) every kind of movie ever made, Geoffrey O'Brien erases the distinction between spectator and commentator and virtually reinvents film writing in our time.

Sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll: the exhilarating but deranging American 1960's, captured in a classic. Dazzling, innovative, and courageous, Dream Time plunges the reader deep into the sensibility of the '60's in a wonderful display of cultural archaeology. Far from being an unqualified celebration of the era, it is a deliberate experiment, combining the genres of memoir, novel, and cultural history in order to convey the complex impact of the late '60's counterculture.When Dream Time was published in 1988, it won Geoffrey O'Brien a Whiting Writers' Award. Previous books on the subject had focused primarily on media icons such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Andy Warhol; Dream Time shifts the focus to the ways in which the psychedelic and countercultural currents of the era played themselves out in younger and more marginal lives. If you lived it, but never really came to grips with it; if you missed it but wish you hadn't—this is the book that tells it, at last, like it really was.

Nurkse delivers, as always, narratives and lyrics of sparkling intelligence and wit, complicated by emotional dramas which engage, alarm, and earn our attention and concerns every step of the way.

This is the first full-length collection of poems by D. Nurske, whose work has appeared in such publications as The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, Epoch, Confrontation, and Hanging Loose.