The story of the relationship between two sisters—Hedda, an intelligent writer of angry feminist novels, and Stella, a woman who has married and divorced several times. Within the novel is Hedda's own novel-in-progress of two Victorian sisters: one is a gifted astronomer; both are spinsters; and both may be on the verge of madness. A compelling blend of overlapping stories and unsettling dualities, The Dark Sister is a curious mixture of Victorian repressiveness regarding sex, intricate stories within stories, and Jewish humor.

A grand gothic novel of the outer reaches of passion—of the body and of the mind—Properties of Light is a mesmerizing tale of consuming love and murderous professional envy that carries the reader into the very heart of a physics problem so huge and perplexing it thwarted even Einstein: the nature of light. Caught in the entanglements of erotic and intellectual passion are three physicists: Samuel Mallach is a brilliant theoretician unhinged by the professional glory he feels has been stolen from him; Dana is his intriguing and gifted daughter, whose desperate devotion to her father contributes to the tragic undoing of Justin Childs, her lover and her father's protege. All three are working together to solve some of the deepest and most controversial problems in quantum mechanics, problems that challenge our understanding of the "real world" and of the nature of time. The book grapples with these elusive mysteries, but at its heart is a fiery love story of startling urgency. Insights into quantum mechanics and relativity theory are attached to the nerve fibers of human emotions, and these connections are alive with poignancy and pathos. For these characters, the passion to know and understand, like the desire for love, is full of terrible risk, holding out possibilities for heartbreak as well as for ecstasy. The true subject of Properties of Light is the ecstatic response to reality, perhaps the only response that can embrace the erotic and the poetic, the scientific and the spiritual. Written with, and about, a rare form of passion, this incandescent novel is fiction at its most daring and utterly original.

A reading group favorite, The Jump-Off Creek is the unforgettable story of widowed homesteader Lydia Sanderson and her struggles to settle in the mountains of Oregon in the 1890s. “Every gritty line of the story rings true” (Seattle Times) as Molly Gloss delivers an authentic and moving portrait of the American West. “A powerful novel of struggle and loss” (Dallas Morning News), The Jump-Off Creek gives readers an intimate look at the hardships of frontier life and a courageous woman determined to survive.

In the winter of 1917, nineteen-year-old Martha Lessen saddles her horses and heads for a remote county in eastern Oregon, looking for work “gentling” wild horses. She chances on a rancher, George Bliss, who is willing to hire her on. Many of his regular hands are off fighting the war, and he glimpses, beneath her showy rodeo garb, a shy but strong-willed girl with a serious knowledge of horses. So begins the irresistible tale of a young but determined woman trying to make a go of it in a man’s world. Over the course of several long, hard winter months, many of the townsfolk witness Martha talking in low, sweet tones to horses believed beyond repair—getting miraculous, almost immediate results. It's with this gift that she earns their respect, and a chance to make herself a home.

“The first lesson [my grandmother] ever taught me was that dancing matters . . . When she did come across men she fancied who didn’t dance, she sent them away until they did. They always learned, because my grandmother was bitingly beautiful, and that is the second lesson she taught me—that beauty inspires, all of God’s beauty, but especially hers.”

So writes Allison Glock at the start of her irresistible memoir of her maternal grandmother, Aneita Jean Blair, a woman who came of age during the Depression in a West Virginia factory town yet refused to succumb to the desperation that surrounded her. Instead, Aneita Jean rouged her cheeks and kicked up her heels and did her best to forget the realities of life in an insular community where your neighbors could be as unforgiving as the Appalachian landscape. Before it was all over, Aneita Jean would have seven marriage proposals and her share of the tragedies that befall small-town girls with bushels of suitors and bodies like Miss America, girls “who dare to see past the dusty perimeters of their lives.”

In lyrical and often breathtaking language, Glock travels back through time, assisted by a fistful of old photos and the piercing childhood memories of her grandmother, “a skinny, eager child with disobedient hair and bottomless longing.” Together they guide us through the cramped dankness of the pottery plants, the dense sweetness of the holler, and into the surging promise of the Ohio River, capturing not only the irrepressible vitality of Aneita Jean Blair, but also the rich ambiance of working-class West Virginia during the twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II. Expertly written, lovingly told, Beauty Before Comfort is stirring testimony to the vanished dreams, and powerful spirit, of an extraordinary person and place.

Despite misgivings about moving to such a remote and primitive place (and bringing their young daughter with them), Peter and June Campbell leave Massachusetts for the lush rain forest of Papua New Guinea where Peter will conduct a year of medical research for his doctoral thesis. Dark undercurrents of their feelings for one another rise inexorably to the surface. And, as the ties that bind the Campbells slowly unravel, they begin to explore the undiscovered in themselves. Spare and evocative, The Undiscovered Country offers an uncompromising vision of the fragility of the family and of the resiliency of the human spirit.

Loosely based on the mysterious 1961 disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, The King of America traces the short, brilliant life of Stephen Hesse, firstborn son of one of America’s wealthiest, most powerful men. After a lonely and restless childhood in a broken family, Stephen attends Harvard, eventually accompanying his mentor, a charismatic anthropology professor, to the impossibly strange and distant world of New Guinea, where a thriving Neolithic culture still practices its ancient rites. There Stephen hopes to make an archaeological discovery that will secure his professional standing and guarantee him a lasting place in the world’s—and his father’s—esteem. But his hardheaded insistence on securing his treasure before the onset of the monsoon season has tragic consequences.

In this dynamic collection of short stories, including the eight previosuly published in the chapbook Winners on the Pass Line (1985), Dagoberto Gilb captures the texture of the Southwest's working class in clear, ironic, and bitingly realistic fiction about regular people going about their complex lives.

A Chicano of Anglo and Mexican heritage, Gilb calls El Paso and Los Angeles home. His rich experiences translate into stories that range the width of his native desert lands: finding employment as a tile setter in Dell City, Texas—or unemployment as a laborer in Los Angeles; blowing up a car in Phoenix; falling in love with the prettiest girl in El Paso on the way to a music gig in Austin; and coming to life again at the glance of a stranger across a Las Vegas craps table.

Mickey Acuña is a man suspended between a vague past and a vaguer future. Emerging from the landscape of the Southwest, buffeted by life and licking his wounds, he moves into a YMCA to wait for a check that is coming to save him and that demands an address. As days and then weeks pass without its arrival, he picks up work—first odd jobs and then shifts at the cash register of the Y—and hangs out with his neighbors, playing handball, drinking coffee, shooting pool, getting drunk, falling in love or lust with women he meets, works with, passes on the street. In the vacuum of the Y, Mickey finds himself becoming the unwitting center of a community starved for human contact and for meaning: Sarge, with his fast-food coupons; Omar, with his drunken rages and obsession with the vanished Lucy; Rosemary, whose abundant physical presence both attracts and repels him. Mickey fights to maintain his distance and his freedom, until the narrative converges abruptly around him in a profound and shocking conclusion.

In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies—all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. War Bird gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called, in “1861,” our “hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.”