Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

Joan Chase’s subtle story of three generations of women negotiating lifetimes of “joy and ruin” deserves its place alongside such achievements as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. The Queen of Persia is not an exotic figure but a fierce Ohio farmwife who presides over a household of daughters and granddaughters. The novel tells their stories through the eyes of the youngest members of the family, four cousins who spend summers on the farm, for them both a life-giving Eden and the source of terrible discoveries about desire and loss. The girls bicker and scrap, they whisper secrets at bedtime, and above all, they observe the kinds of women their mothers are and wonder what kind of women they will become. But always present is the family’s great trauma, the decline and eventual death from cancer of Gram’s daughter Grace. A powerful story about family ties and tensions, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a book about place, charting the transformation of the old hardscrabble Midwest into the commercial wilderness of modern America.

A collection of stories features the tale of a divorced woman reminiscing with her ex, a husband consumed by home improvements, a woman's recollection of her odd bond with the school tomboy, and a small-town wife obsessed with a drifter.

How is a woman in her thirties, HIV-positive and fresh out of rehab, supposed to find love and work in contemporary, urban America, steering clear of self-pity and doctrinaire “happy-talk”? This linked short story collection shows how Glory goes and gets some.

Emily Carter’s impressive debut traces one woman’s journey from town houses on Park Avenue and apartments on the Lower East Side, to Minnesota’s recovery community of boarding-houses in blighted urban neighborhoods and well-funded treatment centers in bucolic pastures.

Glory Goes and Gets Some is a streetwise and sardonic look at sex, HIV, addiction, and recovery. From her patrician childhood on the Upper East Side, to her chemical addictions downtown, to her unlikely, tenuous, yet rewarding alliances with the full range of treatment mavens in the Midwest, Glory gives us an uncensored and irreverent account of her experiences in twelve-step recovery—a process that, for all its faults, ultimately works for her. “That first six months, there were an awful lot of people I met who talked the talk, all the time. Their faces seemed to glow, and they’d go on about so-and-so ‘getting it,’ ‘getting’ the program, having that much-touted aura of serenity about them. It was my experience that such persons usually relapsed and stole their roommate’s stereo equipment, or charged five thousand dollars worth of lingerie at Neiman Marcus.”

Hayden Carruth, one of the most acclaimed poets of our age, lives his music—finding the perfect low tones of terrible loss and high riffs of family and friendship.

Collected Shorter Poems presents hundreds of lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, nature, and erotic poems spanning nearly half a century. Hayden Carruth's engagement with political radicalism, rural poverty, and cultural responsibility in the life of poetry is unique in our time. Celebrated for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, and influenced by jazz and blues, he has been called by Adrienne Rich "one of our country''s poetic treasures."

The debut collection of ten short stories from Ryan Call, including stories originally published in Keyhole, The Lifted Brow, Lo-Ball, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart and Web Conjunctions.

Ms. Beatrice Hempel, English teacher, is new—new to teaching, new to her school, newly engaged, and newly bereft of her devoted father. Overwhelmed by her newness, she struggles to figure out quite what is expected of her—in life and at work. Is it acceptable to introduce swear words into the English curriculum, enlist students to write their own report cards, or bring up personal experiences while teaching a sex-education class? Or not? Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum finds her characters at their most vulnerable, then explores those precarious moments in sharp, graceful prose. Ms. Hempel Chronicles takes the reader on a journey down the rabbit hole to the wonderland of middle school, memory, daydreaming, and the extraordinary business of growing up.

When a girl falls into a deep and impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband's viol. And in their midst travels Madeleine, the dreamer, who is trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis as she leaves home, joins a gypsy circus, and falls into an unexpected triangle of desire and love.

This dazzling debut collection from a Seattle native features stories evocatively set along the Northwest coast, stories of quiet but astonishing lives. Here are ferry workers, carpenters, park rangers, living alongside crab factories, cranberry bogs, the misty ocean. Here are people puzzled by the processes of growing up, leaving home, parenting, aging. Here are people who realize there are second chances, that from illness can come hope, that from family can come a greater sense of self. Psychologically complex and glowing with warmth, these rich stories recall Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver.