The River Gods is a novel in fragments, a mix of fact and fiction, in which various inhabitants of the area around what is now Northampton, Massachusetts, from the eleventh century through the 1990s, speak of their lives and of the community, a place haunted by the pervasive melancholy of extinguished desire. Each of the voices—including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others—ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.

Originally published in 1989 by Ticknor & Fields, Brian Kiteley’s Still Life with Insects is the intensely focused chronicle of Elwyn Farmer, an amateur entomologist, who uses the field notes of his insect sightings to examine and reweave the tattered fragments of his life. In a series of visually powerful and emotionally breathtaking vignettes Kiteley distills the transient beauty of the natural world and lays bare the suffering and joy of one man’s life from his maturity in the post-war years to very old age in the 1980’s. His striking narrative technique aptly captures the experience we all have as we struggle to make sense of what it means to be human in the face of the inevitable passage of time.

Chosen by The Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Novels of 2005, Lily King's new novel is a story about an independent woman and her fifteen-year-old son, and the truth she has long concealed from him.

Fifteen years ago Vida Avery arrived alone and pregnant at elite Fayer Academy. She has since become a fixture and one of the best teachers Fayer has ever had. By living on campus, on an island off the New England coast, Vida has cocooned herself and her son, Peter, from the outside world and from an inside secret. For years she has lived largely through the books she teaches, but when she accepts the impulsive marriage proposal of ardent widower Tom Belou, the prescribed life Vida has constructed is swiftly dismantled. This is a passionate tale of a mother and son's vital bond and a provocative look at our notions of intimacy, honesty, loyalty, and the real meaning of home. A triumphant and masterful follow-up to her multi-award-winning debut, The English Teacher confirms Lily King as one of the most accomplished and vibrant young voices of today.

From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the ‘30’s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives.

English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers’ deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell’s poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control. Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice from accomplished author Lily King.

"Kimbrell sings a serious song . . . The poems are deft and sure, there is a sense of vision in them, and I have the feeling that this is the start of something significant." —from the Foreword by Charles Wright

In his debut collection (selected by Charles Wright as the 1997 winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry), Kimbrell revisits the mysterious landscapes of childhood and returns with poems that fathom meaning yet retain a sense of awe. The book's title section, a poignant ten-part poem, portrays a son's lifelong struggle to connect with a father made absent by mental and physical illness: "It's quite/The wonder, what madness can do for a man,//Much more than me far below the harsh light of heaven/Down here, in the make-shift center of this world." The Gatehouse Heaven serves as testament and guide to the kind of love that lies beyond anger.

“Kimbrell helps us see into the mysteries and losses that haunt our world—primal, incessant, hidden, and true as ‘fog rising from our wordless mouths.’” —David Baker

My Psychic is a book about the soul—what it might be, under what circumstances it might show itself to the rest of us curious, bewildered living. The center sequence of poems elegizing his mother’s death movingly establishes an unbroken continuity between the living and the dead.

Notes from the Divided Country, Kim's first collection of poetry, confronts a number of difficult subjects—colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile. In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question "what threads hold / our lives together" in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man's-land between every "you" and "I," her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past and hope for the future. Drawing upon a wide range of voices, styles, and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world. Here is a rare new talent in American poetry, showcased in this dazzling debut.

Saladin Khourdi has always known he will leave Iran. He spends his days in the cinema, dreaming of Hollywood stars in swimming pools. For his older brother, Ali, Iran is their home, their history. But both will have to leave, when the 1979 revolution leads to a killing in their mountain village. For both, there is a question of how far they will go, weighing the danger of return against the danger of continuing.

Laleh Khadivi’s novel moves fluidly through time, and from the Khourdi brothers to the broader chorus of the Iranian diaspora, to create a stunning sense of a people caught between the ancient and the modern, tossed by political currents. In the story of Saladin and Ali, she explores the tension in all immigrants, the attachment to the place they must leave, and the dreams in the places they land. It is, at last, Saladin alone who touches down in Los Angeles. He is hungry, and homeless, but he is not invisible—the city is unexpectedly heated with hate as the hostage crisis unfolds back in Iran. Los Angeles means avoiding confrontation while searching for work, counting coins and collecting sand in his shoes. But as Saladin slowly makes connections in this new place, he must determine whether home can be made anew.

Told with an evocative richness of language that recalls Michael Ondaatje or Anita Desai, the story of Reza Khourdi is that of the 20th century everyman, cast out from the clan in the name of nation, progress and modernity who cannot help but leave behind a shadow that yearns for the impossible dreams of love, land and home. Before following his father into battle, he had been like any other Kurdish boy: in love with his Maman, fascinated by birds and the rugged Zagros mountains, dutiful to his stern and powerful Baba. But after he becomes orphaned in a massacre by the armies of Iran's new Shah, Reza Pahlavi I.; he is taken in by the very army that has killed his parents, re-named Reza Khourdi, and indoctrinated into the modern, seductive ways of the newly minted nation, careful to hide his Kurdish origins with every step. The Age of Orphans follows Reza on his meteoric rise in ranks, his marriage to a proud Tehrani woman and his eventual deployment, as Capitan, back to the Zagros Mountains and the ever-defiant Kurds. Here Reza is responsible for policing, and sometimes killing, his own people, and it is here that his carefully crafted persona begins to fissure and crack.

Goat Song is the story of a year in the life of a couple who abandoned their one-bedroom apartment in New York City to live on seventy-five acres in Vermont and raise Nubian goats. In poetic, reverent detail, Brad Kessler explores our ancient relationship to the land and our gradual alienation from the animals that feed us. His fascinating account traces his journey of choosing the goats and learning how to breed, milk, and care for them. As Kessler begins to live the life of a herder, he encounters the pastoral roots of so many aspects of Western culture—how our diet, our alphabet, our religions, poetry, and economy all grew out of a pastoralist setting, a life lived among hoofed animals.