A novel of ambition and obsession centered on the race to discover Pluto in 1930, pitting an untrained Kansas farm boy against the greatest minds of Harvard at the run-down Lowell Observatory in Arizona In 1928, the boy who will discover Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, is on the family farm, grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff, Arizona, the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowell's interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile, the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs and in Cambridge, Massachussetts, the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane while her ex-heavyweight champion boyfriend stands by helplessly, desperate to do anything to keep her. Inspired by the true story of Tombaugh and set in the last gin-soaked months of the flapper era, Percival's Planet tells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers, schemers, and madmen. Following Tombaugh's unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet, the novel touches on insanity, mathematics, music, astrophysics, boxing, dinosaur hunting, shipwrecks—and what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your life's greatest sorrow.

In his first collection of new poems since Unsleeping, Michael Burkard presents an array of verse and prose forms dense with allusion, emotion and sensuality. Drawing on his own strand of the confessional lyric--a peculiar combination of dreams, personal disclosure, and matter-of-fact accounts of daily life--these poems rinse perception and allow one to actually see the world, free of simulation and stimulation, for what it really is.

Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkhard's seventh collection of poetry and his first book since W.W. Norton published My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems) in 1990.

In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing—and the truth is coming on fast.

Please explores the points in our lives at which love and violence intersect. Drunk on its own rhythms and full of imaginative and often frightening imagery, Please is the album playing in the background of the history and culture that surround African American/male identity and sexuality. Just as radio favorites like Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, and Pink Floyd characterize loss, loneliness, addiction, and denial with their voices, these poems' chorus of speakers transform moments of intimacy and humor into spontaneous music. In Please, Jericho Brown sings the influence soul culture has on American life with the accuracy of the blues.

An illusion only works if we believe that what we've just seen is exactly what happened. This collection of poems, Joel Brouwer's first, seeks to unveil the magician's trick, and expose the deceptions that we live with daily.

And So, the third poetry collection by Joel Brouwer, frames and zooms close-up on lovers and strangers as they couple and recoil. Cynical yet energetic, And So is a considered study of the ways we tell the lives we lead. With its poignant lacunae and recurring events, Brouwer offers an unstinting look at how separate our lives together are.

When free spirit Jadranka mysteriously disappears shortly after emigrating to America, her older sister Magdalena must leave their ancestral Croatian island home and follow her to New York City. Magdalena's search begins to unspool the dark history of their family, reaching back three generations to a country torn by war. This haunting and sure-footed first novel explores the legacy of betrayal and loss in a place where beauty is fused with hardship, and where individuals are forced to make wrenching choices as they are swept up in the tides of history.

The war in the Balkans provides the striking backdrop for these emotionally resonant, morally challenging, and uplifting short stories. Brkic’s collection gives voice to people caught in situations beyond their control, as man, woman, and child struggle to survive and understand what it means to live beyond those you love. A man trapped in a cellar; a sniper overlooking a city street; a young woman whose father is convicted of war crimes. Each character challenges the reader’s notions of conflict by living lives of surprising self-awareness, deceit, and courage.

In this extraordinary literary debut third-generation homesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on the prairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as the landscape. On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle and snakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastating prairie fires. She also grew up with a set of rules and roles prescribed to her sex long before she was born, a chafing set of strictures she eventually had no choice but to flee, taking along three children and leaving behind a confused husband and the only life she’d ever known. Gritty, lyrical, unsentimental and wise, Breaking Clean is at once informed by the myths of the West and powerful enough to break them down.