A dazzling family saga that brilliantly reflects the reality of the African-American experience in the United States. Hatch and Jesus Jones are cousins on their fathers' side and on their mothers' side, and you can't have a family much more bound than that. And family is the most important entity for these young men, even when family seems to be defined by abandonment. Rails Under My Back traces these two men from one form of bondage or freedom to another, from one job to another, as they face down danger and try to come to terms with their family's past. This ambitious novel, which has been hailed by critics nationwide as a rare achievement on the level of fiction by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, is the communal expression of a century of African-American life in America, with its imagery of exodus and exile, departure and destiny. It wields extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power, and announces the triumphant debut of a most powerful and utterly original voice.

Something is happening. Wars, both national and internal, are being waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. War by Candlelight is an exquisite collection of stories that carry the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people—a devastating portrait of a world in flux—and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios—a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared—those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decade-long bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change—thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.

Beauty Skinner is, as she herself admits, a woman to whom small men have never been indifferent, that most unfortunate of females, a “big girl.” Beauty is fated to be the subject of unbelieving stares, to stop conversations, and to realize with every lumbering step that towering ungainliness is the inescapable fact of her life. But in Ellen Akins’s fierce comedy Little Woman, escape is precisely what Beauty manages. After almost accidentally killing her twin sons (the product of a peculiar marriage into which she has stumbled), Beauty decides to head for greener pastures alone. Her cunning plan: to set up a rural shelter where needy women can be rehabilitated, a shelter that is designed to fail quickly, leaving Beauty a cozy retreat of her own. Her willing tool: the guileless philanthropist-heiress Clara Bow Cole, who is all too pleased to apply her wealth to this altruistic adventure. A plot of land and a house are secured, a group of down-and-out women is solicited, and Clara Bow and Beauty depart for the wilds of Wisconsin to await their charges. What arrives, however, are hardly the wretched souls that Beauty has anticipated. Molly, Kathy, Gigi, Lynn, Cathy, Elizabeth, Cora, Joan, Barbie, and Mary Belinda are, in fact, a ferocious and intractable crew. Thieves, drunkards, and runaways, they greet their new life with a raunchy stubbornness that leaves Beauty nonplussed as she becomes determined to make her bogus venture work. She insists that her diffident charges eke an existence out of the wilderness, a task that turns their colony into something like Robinson Crusoe’s island in a bad year, and its occupants a distaff counterpart of Lord of the Flies. While its heroines’ battles to survive nature—and one another—have hilarious (and ultimately tragic) consequences, Little Woman takes an unsparing look at the struggle to form families and communities, and how people’s need for control renders any sort of bond between them suspicious.

From a writer whose work Robert Coover has described as "subtle, wise, intricate, innovative," a rich novel of family rivalries, corporate maneuvers, and sexual intrigue—set in a small Wisconsin beer town. In the background: a small family-run brewery, Gutenbier, whose backward business practices have been miraculously transformed into an asset by the new vogue for microbreweries and designer beverages. At the center: two women whose world is the brewery. Melissa Johnson is the heiress to Gutenbier, and Alice Reinhart works there. On her father's death, Melissa inherits the chairmanship everyone expected to go to her brother and finds herself resented by both workers and management. Alice, returning from New York and a bad marriage, takes up her job in the brewery only to discover that an indiscretion she committed at seventeen has surfaced and has made her the object of a series of seemingly innocent pranks that slowly reveal a darker intent. As these two women fight the forces arrayed against them and the novel moves toward its climax, the business, the politics—the life—of a town are compellingly portrayed.

This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later. In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life—Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.

With his third and most ambitious novel, Aciman delivers an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation—a moving story of an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American.

It’s the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square café, everything changes. Nicknamed Kalashnikov—Kalaj for short—for his machine-gun vitriol, the cab driver roars into the student’s life with his denunciations of the American obsession with "all things jumbo and ersatz"—Twinkies, monster television sets, all-you-can-eat buffets—and his outrageous declarations on love and the art of seduction. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend’s magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarified world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and cafés around Harvard Square, trade intimate accounts of their love affairs, argue about the American dream, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. But as final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old World friend. Harvard Square is a sexually charged and deeply American novel of identity and aspiration at odds. It is also an unforgettable, moving portrait of an unlikely friendship from one of the finest stylists of our time.

The Man Who Danced with Dolls is a portrait of a family’s legacy—the language of their memories, the secrets of their buried past, and the subway busker whose wordless dancing punctuates their lives.

Over the body of a reservation Indian thrown into a snow bank by a careening car, a coyote stands guard. The eerieness of the desolate scene is never forgotten by the Indian, Black Horse, a man whose peace lies in his painting—a way for him to escape the sordidness of reservation life by putting on canvas the beauty of the place. But this ambition is thwarted almost from the beginning by the prejudice and fears of the whites around him, by the self-defeating attitudes the Indians themselves are prey to—their ignorance and poverty leading them to alcoholism, bitterness, frequent run-ins with the law, and even more frequent stays in the local and state jails. In a novel told dispassionately but deeply felt, the reader shares at once the course of Black Horse's ultimate destiny.

A collection of contemporary American Indian stories and essays by author Raymond Abbott, including pieces published previously in magazines such as the North American Review and Creative Non Fiction. Also collected is the novella "The Axing of Leo White Hat," originally published in 1979 by Applewood Books as part of Death Dances: Two Novellas on North American Indians.