An episodic novel set somewhere in the New South, Luminous Mysteries traces the lives of Grim Power and his sister, Rita, from their youth to early middle age. In powerful prose that has been compared to that of his writing mentor, Raymond Carver, Holman tellingly paints a portrait of the lives of middle-class African Americans today. Grim, who worked as a race-car driver and a show-business cowboy before returning home to run a car restoration business, and Rita, a math teacher, are enriched by their friends, their family, and the small beautiful moments of everyday life. In penetrating language Holman exposes the uniqueness of each person's soul that always lies just beneath a quotidian surface.

A compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity—"adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times). When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive arena of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable.

Iris Surrey has a secret. Iris Surrey is a secret. An only child, Iris lives with her mother in a rambling house in a small midwestern town. Her mother is everything: provider, confidante, friend. But at seventeen, Iris begins to question their nearly symbiotic relationship—and the noticeable lack of others in their sheltered world. Where is Iris’s father? Where are her grandparents? What is her mother keeping from her? When she stumbles upon the explosive truth, Iris begins a monumental journey of self-discovery—one that will throw everything she has ever known into turmoil.

In 1959 13-year-old Eva Hoffman left her home in Cracow, Poland for a new life in America. This memoir evokes with deep feeling the sense of uprootendess and exile created by this disruption, something which has been the experience of tens of thousands of people this century. Her autobiography is profoundly personal but also tells one of the most universal and important narratives of twentieth century history: the story of Jewish post-war experience and the tragedies and discoveries born of cultural displacement.

The name of the title poem—“Brother Salvage: a genizah,” provides a skeleton key to unlock the powerful forces that bind Rick Hilles’s collection. A genizah is a depository, or hiding place, for sacred texts. It performs a double function: to keep hallowed objects safe and to prevent more destructive forces from circulating and causing further harm. Brother Salvage serves exactly this purpose. The poems are heartrending and incisive, preserving stories and lives that should not be forgotten. Yet, through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images are beautifully and luminously contained. Like scholars sifting through ancient genizahs in search of spiritual and historical insights, readers immersed in Brother Salvage will find, at the heart of the book, the most sacred entity: hope.

"Always a poet of authentic promise, with A Map of the Lost World, Rick Hilles emerges into an importance that may rival such poets as Henri Cole and Rosanna Warren. I find it immensely moving that he evokes dead poets for whom I cared personally as well as critically, including James Wright and James Merrill. Beyond that he adds what may be a new dimension to our poetry by evoking the shade of Walter Benjamin and with it the tragedy of European Jewry. I emerge from this book somber yet fortified because like Kafka it reminds us of a kind of indestructibility of the human spirit." —Harold Bloom

"Determined to extract pleasure and meaning from every experience, Hiestand looks for magic properties in familiar objects. Staring out the window of her apartment, she advises herself: 'but be alert / as though you were seeing all new, / as Balboa awakened by the Pacific.' Particularly in the impressive book's first section, the poems share the mechanisms of fairy tales: 'The last summer we lived in a picture book,' Hiestand says, and asks in all seriousness, 'Is our cat in heaven?'; just as naturally, she refers to Dante or the philosophy of Spinoza. By the middle of the volume, princes depart from their storybook models and desert their maidens. In one of the final poems, 'Birthday Party,' enchanting imagery suddenly produces a forceful political statement, all the more potent given the innocence of the poet's vision. Hiestand manipulates words with uncommon playfulness and precision, and her enjoyment is highly infectious. Jorie Graham selected this first collection for the National Poetry Series." —Publishers Weekly

A childhood shaped by her zestful aunt Nan Dean of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; a girlhood spent in Oak Ridge ("Atom City"), Tennessee; a journey north to a seedy seaside town where a stripper named Angela the Upside-Down Girl is her first neighbor—these are only some of the geographical and spiritual journeys in this dazzling, seriously funny guide to the art of being human.

One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude.

Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock’s stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

From an award-winning poet, a new collection in which the political and the personal converge in innovative and beautiful ways. In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.