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The work of John Jodzio has already made waves across the literary community. Some readers noticed his nimble blending of humor with painful truths reminded them of George Saunders. His creativity and fresh voice reminded others of Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. But with his new collection, Jodzio creates a class of his own.Knockout is the unified collection of stories that create flawless portraits of deeply flawed figures on the edge of the American Dream. A recovering drug addict gets tricked into stealing a tiger. A man buys a used sex chair from his neighbor. A woman suffering from agoraphobia raises her son completely indoors. An alcoholic runs a bed and breakfast with the son from his deceased wife's first marriage. These people will admit that their chances have passed them by. These people know they were born on the wrong side of the tracks, and their dreams will remain unreachable, but that doesn't stop them from dreaming. Yet readers won’t be fooled by the funny premises —Jodzio steers these stories into deeper places, creating a brilliant examination of those on the fringes of modern life.With its quirky humor, compelling characters, and unexpected sincerity, Knockout by John Jodzio is poised to become his breakout book, drawing a wide readership to this provocative and talented young writer.
The Daredevils
A twelve-year-old boy, middle son in a wealthy, politically and culturally prominent San Francisco family, watches his city disappear in the earthquake and fires of 1906. His father him that nothing has been lost that cannot be swiftly and easily replaced. He quotes Virgil: “Nothing unreal is allowed to survive.” The boy turns this stark Stoic philosophical “consolation” into the radical theater practices of the day, in the course of which he involves himself with radical labor struggles: anarchists, Wobblies, socialists of every stripe. He learns that politics is meta-acting, and he and his girlfriend—a Connecticut mill girl who is on the verge of national recognition as a spokesperson for workers—embark on a speaking tour with a Midwestern anti-railroad, pro-farmer group and take their political, philosophical, and artistic ethos to the farthest limits of the real and the unreal, where they find there is no useful distinction between the two.
Collectors
From critically acclaimed author Paul Griner comes Collectors, a novel about one woman’s risky fascination with a handsome, enigmatic man. Jean Duprez, an ad agency art director who specializes in effectual but unnerving concepts for her clients, meets the handsome and mysterious Steven Cain at a family wedding. Despite Cain’s marked indifference to her and his unsettling personal history, Jean finds herself drawn to him, confiding her own indiscretions in him despite their having just met. As their liaison continues, it becomes a mirror for the collecting process as well: how goods are bought and sold, who determines their worth, and most importantly, the tense, complicated bargaining between buyer and seller. What is never quite clear is whether Jean is the innocent prey of a dangerous lothario or if she’s deliberately put herself in harm’s way. In the masterful hands of Paul Griner, Collectors becomes not just a novel about what one woman will risk for love or something like it, but a probing examination of the intricacies of relationship power dynamics, and how they are never quite what they seem.
Why I Am a Salafi
The Salafi are a revivalist Sunni Muslim movement misunderstood by most Americans, and even many Muslims. The New York Times’ first reference to Salafis as a distinct group appears in 1979 after a band of armed men seized control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. After 1979, there is not another mention of Salafis in the Times until 2000, in an article on links between Yemeni radicals and Osama Bin Ladin. In 2013, an article appeared in USA Today labeling Salafis as Sunni Islam’s “most radical sect” and declaring them “the most anti-Western” of any Islamist group. Today, Salafism is widely implicated in the rise of ISIS.Knight—an acclaimed writer who has explored his own evolving religious beliefs in a range of novels, memoirs and essays—uses this mislabeling as yet another opportunity to engage those corners of Islamic tradition that others might dismiss as absurd or dangerous.Why I am Salafi examines problems of interpretation, practice, and community, illustrating why terms like orthodox or progressive, Sufi or Salafi often fail to convey the reality of Muslim experience. Knight’s analysis includes examination of his own complex religious journey, having converted to Islam at sixteen, studying at a madrassa in Pakistan at seventeen, to
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
From internationally acclaimed New Face of Fiction author Padma Viswanathan, a stunning new work set among families of those who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing, registering the unexpected reverberations of this tragedy in the lives of its survivors. A book of post-9/11 life, The Ever After demonstrates that violent politics are all-too-often homegrown in North America but ignored at our peril.In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of Air India Flight 182 from Vancouver, two suspects are—finally—on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in North America, comes back to do a “study of comparative grief,” interviewing people who lost loved one in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Then, to his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family that remains unable to escape the undertow of the tragedy. As Ashwin finds himself less and less capable of providing the objective advice this particular family seeks, his surprising emotional connection to them pushes him to face his own losses. The Ever After imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.
Second Life
Second Life takes us into the strange world of the second life of bodies and what happens to the physical vessel after one dies. Elena Kelly is a body broker or “corpse wrangler,” one of the best in her field. When she became too ambitious, cut too many corners and too many ethical (and legal) safeguards, she ran afoul of the law and medical profession, triggering a huge scandal in Louisville, Kentucky that quickly went national. She lost everything – and now humbled and on a strict, three-year parole, she works as coroner’s assistant in Danville.Elena is still trying to come to grips with her regret and guilt when she is unexpectedly drawn into the search for her former best friend’s missing body. Elena knows what can happen to a body that goes ‘missing,’ how it can be salvaged and used indiscriminately for spare parts, and she endeavors to seek salvation in finding Lia and bringing her body home, as complete as possible. Her desperate search drags her back to the underworld of the dead and pits her against a new and nefarious corpse wrangler – one more talented and deadly than she ever was.Second Life pulls back the curtain on those who exist on the edge of the medical profession, the ones who remove skin and tissue and bones from the dead, for use by surgeons, medical students practicing technique, cosmetic surgeons, medical equipment companies and labs running medical experiments–anyone in need of muscle and ligament and bones. It philosophically explores our obligation to protect the dead and thrillingly examines what happens when we –literally– leave the land of the living.
The Palace of Illusions
In her new collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.In “Beautiful Lady of the Snow,” young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather; in “Night Owls,” a young college student’s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire; in “Cancer Poems,” a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days; in “Intuition,” a young girl’s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend’s father; and in the collection’s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner’s wife.The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved «Ever After,» which was featured on NPR's «Selected Shorts.»Distracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making.
No Stopping Train
No Stopping Train is the magnum opus and final novel of the late writer Les Plesko, a powerful, swirling novel of memory and violence set during the Hungarian Revolution.The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt following World War II that spread quickly across the destabilizing country. A new government pledged to re-establish free elections until a large Soviet force invaded, killing more than 2500 Hungarians and forcing 200,000 Hungarians to flee the country. Mass arrests and denunciations continued for months until a new Soviet-installed government suppressed all opposition. Public discussion of this revolution was suppressed in Hungary for more than thirty years.Although the revolution failed, it served as a source of great inspiration to many Hungarians, and here Les Plesko taps into his country’s history as the dramatic backdrop to his most accomplished and powerful novel. Sandor and Margit are young lovers suffering with their nation through the degradations of war, hunger, and political oppression in Budapest. Into their lives comes the mercurial Erzsebet – ravaged, war-torn, alluring. Their eventual love triangle upends an already tenuous existence and threatens what little safety they have found in a nation on the brink of revolution. When Sandor’s activities as an underground publisher are exposed in a vicious act of betrayal, the lives of each of our characters will never be the same.No Stopping Train is a stylistic tour de force and the final work of Les Plesko.
The Anxiety of Kalix the Werewolf
Now eighteen, Scottish teenage werewolf Kalix MacRinnalch is settling in London, though she still struggles with anxiety, depression, and self-abuse. Her new friends support her – and all is fine until the Guild of Werewolf Hunters start picking off her clan, one by one.Most of the Scottish Werewolf Clan have a very low opinion of Kalix Macrinnalch, youngest daughter of the Thane. There is little sympathy for her illiteracy, her substance abuse, her self-harming, her eating disorder, her anxiety and depression and her propensity for extreme violence. Safe from her clan in London, and living with two friendly students, she's been much calmer. If only she were allowed to live quietly, she might get on top of her problems.Unfortunately, that's difficult for the young werewolf. She's still the number one target for the werewolf hunters, and they're stepping up their efforts to find her. And no matter how Kalix tries to make her life more normal, there will always come a time when, under threat, her insanity and battle-madness will descend on her, and the skinny young girl will again transform into the most feared and ferocious werewolf in the country.
In the Course of Human Events
Clyde Twitty could use a break, a helping hand. He’s a young man lost – in his finances, in his family – and stuck deep within the fast-settling muck of a dwindling rural Missouri town that has, in every way, given up hope. The hand that reaches down, pulls him up, and leads him forward is that of Jay Smalls, a fiercely charismatic patriarch, a man who exerts a kind of gravitational force and who breeds purpose in those who get caught in it. Un-rattled by the increasingly sinister racial undertones of Jay Smalls and his posse, and desperate to look forward and not down, for once in his life, Clyde hardly stumbles when the path he’s being ushered down takes a dark and irrevocable turn.In this thrilling debut novel – equal parts satire and morality play – Harvkey shines a sharp light on the dark and radical underbelly of the floundering American Midwest. As he leads us down the violent spiral of a desperate youth, he explores with unflinching acuity the ugly nature of hate, the untempered force of personality, and the sometimes horrific power of having someone believe in you.