Billy Lynch’s family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic. Alice McDermott’s striking novel, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide. Charming Billy is the winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction.

On a wild, windy April day in Manhattan, when Mary first meets John Keane, she cannot know what lies ahead of her. A marriage, a fleeting season of romance, and the birth of four children will bring John and Mary to rest in the safe embrace of a traditional Catholic life in the suburbs. But neither Mary nor John, distracted by memories and longings, can feel the wind that is buffeting their children, leading them in directions beyond their parents’ control. Michael and his sister Annie are caught up in the sexual revolution. Jacob, brooding and frail, is drafted to Vietnam. And the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents. As John and Mary struggle to hold on to their family and their faith, Alice McDermott weaves an elegant, unforgettable portrait of a world in flux—and of the secrets and sorrows, anger and love, that lie at the heart of every family.

Mule is highly lyrical, obsessively incantatory, audaciously formal, and actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at-the-time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son's autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God.

"Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. Mule is such a book. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae's questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song." —Katie Ford.

The follow up to 2013's Blood (Coldfront's book of the year), Forgiveness Forgiveness is a visceral poetry collection that troubles the intersections of race, abuse, memory and history. Concerned with how the visibility of blackness can become an individual burden, Forgiveness Forgiveness traces the lingering fallout of an identity informed by traumatic artifacts and events—how the story of a story can be revised. Forgiveness Forgiveness complicates the idea of family as nurturer and destroyer. A physical and haunting work of cathartic healing.

"Shane McCrae's Forgiveness Forgiveness is song that writes wrongs until they ring with generosity. When the poet turns to trauma and difficulty for subject matter, he returns to us with an unflinching devotion to hope, to possibility—bearing wisdom, sustenance. McCrae has again transmuted a legacy of violence into one of love because 'the promise / is / New life.'" —Heidi Lynn Staples

Cate Marvin uses language the way a gymnast uses her body; she is a formalist who has thoroughly learned the pleasures and gains of abandon. But it is her excursions into wild image and passionate song that win the reader's heart. The heart is central in World's Tallest Disaster, which is essentially a book of love poems—love lost and found, love requited, love abandoned and betrayed. What Cate Marvin has done in her remarkably assured and powerful first collection is to remind us in fresh terms of the news that stays news: that our desire is "Not a sea of longing,// but the brack of wanting what's physical/ to help us forget we are physical."

"Violently passionate and firmly symmetrical, like tango or the blues, these poems—at first—are about sexual passion . . . But in the great tradition of love poetry, these poems don't stop with love. They move from eros to imagination. Or they thrash between the two . . . This is an encouraging book in the context of American poetry's fashions or factions, because it evades categories. [Marvin's] is an urgent as well as an artful voice." —from the Foreword by Robert Pinsky

The speakers of Oracle occupy the outer-borough cityscape of New York’s Staten Island, moving through worlds glittering with refuse and peopled by ghosts. Cate Marvin’s haunting, passionate poems explore themes of loss, the vulnerability of womanhood in a world hostile to it, and the fraught, strangely compelling landscape of adolescence.

Natalie and Consuelo are like-minded individuals who live in Lava Landing, CA. When they aren’t working at The Big Cheese Plant, they get all dolled up for the racetrack, or go for a tequila float at The Big Five Four. They urgently need to get Consuelo’s father out of Purgatory: he won’t stop turning up in women’s dreams until they do. But that means a trip to Mexico, and Consuelo still hasn’t gotten over her fear of long car rides . . .

Inspired by La Lotería, a Mexican game of chance not unlike bingo, the novel is a joyous story of mamacitas and mariachis, fiestas and tupperware parties, rodeos and Miss Magma beauty contests. In ¡Caramba! the American experience emerges in a brilliant new language and landscape, both touching and dazzlingly fresh.

"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute." —from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series

"Dionisio D. Martínez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive." —Susan Hussey, Organica

In this exuberant and distinctive collection, Dionisio Martínez addresses topics as diverse as love, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, twentieth-century art and music, and the relevance of language in an age of image. Much of Martínez's private iconography comes from the picket-fence California community of his youth, in which large events—from the veneration of pop icons (Jean Harlow, Ed Sullivan) to the Vietnam War—seemed to move in slow motion. As an adult, the poet tries to make sense of what the child could not grasp.

In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.