The Slippage is a wry, wistful tale of marriage, lust, and disconnection from Ben Greenman, the critically acclaimed author of What He’s Poised to Do.William Day must confront some uncomfortable truths about his life and his future when his wife Louisa asks him to build her house. The take-it-or-leave-it demand becomes all the more difficult to swallow when he finds himself grappling with a past recklessness, an ex-girlfirend’s son he considers his own, and his own wants for what lies ahead.Sure to appeal to everyone who has ever been in love and had their heart broken, The Slippage shares uncanny truths about intimacy and modern relationships.Review“In The Slippage, Ben Greenman illuminates the strange, electric moments that lurk in the seemingly ordinary milieus of the suburban kitchen, the married bedroom. With compassion and dark humor, Greenman brings the absurdity and grace of marriage vividly to life.” (Laura van den Berg, author of *What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us* )“Ben Greenman’s The Slippage is a slyly funny and heartbreaking portrait of suburban American marriage, like an update of John Cheever in an age of smartphones and rampant corporate greed. This stellar novel asks whether it’s ever possible to see clearly-in love, life, or art.” (Luis Jaramillo, author of *The Doctor's Wife* )“With The Slippage, Ben Greenman proves what many of us suspected: he’s one of our best writers, and he can do anything...It’ll be the book of the year.” (Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and *Chang & Eng* )“Ben Greenman’s relentlessly funny novel engages with the mystery whereby a seemingly sane man can take steps to simultaneously solidify and destroy his life. Greenman is a brilliant and wry stenographer.” (Karen Russell, author of *Swamplandia* )“Reminiscent of the greatest, elegiac work of William Maxwell, Greenman’s book is a reminder of the ways we fail, in love, and find grace in even that failure. This is truly a beautiful book.” (Pauls Toutonghi, author of Evel Knievel Days and *Red Weather* )“Ben Greenman’s The Slippage turns backyard barbecues and suburban playgrounds into tense and charged territory. . . . If Emma Bovary had lived in the ‘burbs, she would have left a story like this in her wake.” (Emma Straub, author of *Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures* )“The Slippage is a terrific novel, a wry and affecting depiction of an America adrift in its tidy cul de sacs of anxiety, lust, and disappointment. Ben Greenman writes crackling dialogue, brilliant characters, and sentences so sharp they hurt.” (Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins and *We Live in Water* )“Greenman’s style will appeal to those who appreciate literary fiction that succinctly yet eloquently dissects the contemporary American marriage.” (Booklist )“Greenman has a knack for chronicling the uncertain angst of suburban life. . . [He] has crafted one of the more surprising and remarkable opening scenes in this year’s bumper crop of contemporary realism.” (Kansas City Star )“Perceptive.” (Publishers Weekly )“Greenman’s latest shout-inducing (angst-ridden and damned funny) novel, The Slippage, [is] a wry, wistful tale of marriage, lust, and disconnection.” (PopMatters.com ) From the Back CoverWilliam and Louisa Day are a suburban husband and wife, with no children, confronting the question of what their relationship means to them and if and how it will survive. One day, after weeks of bizarre behavior—disappearing in the middle of parties, hoarding mail—Louisa approaches William with a stark request: "I want you to build us a house." Caught off guard, William is suddenly forced to reckon with his own hopes and desires, his growing discomfort at home and work, and, in the end, his wife's fight-or-flight ultimatum. The result is an emotionally powerful novel, marked by Ben Greenman's trademark blend of yearning and mordant wit.

In Troll Or Derby, fifteen-year-old Roller Deb is singled out by town bullies for both her skates, and for being different. When her popular homecoming queen of a sister is kidnapped by a scuzzy drug dealer, Deb must flee the trailer park in which she's grown up, and rescue her. Along the way, Deb becomes enmeshed in the magical realm of trolls and fairies, and the blood-thirsty version of roller derby at which these beings excel. But spending too much time among the fairies comes with a price. Will Deb choose to save her sister, with the aid of a mysterious troll? Or will she be lost to the lures of roller derby, and the blonde temptress April, forever?Review"Red Tash delivers again with this tale of rockin', rollin' and full metal fantasy! I love this damn book." ~Axel Howerton, author of Living Dead at Zigfreidt & Roy"You'll quickly become engrossed by Deb and Harlow's story. Once you start, it's hard to put Troll Or Derby down. At 262 pages in the paperback edition, it's the perfect length for an afternoon of summer reading. If you're down for roller derby, fantasy, action, and a cast of completely insane characters (in a good way), you should definitely read Troll Or Derby." ~Captain Painway, LikeItDerby.com"This book has it all. Prophecies. Destinies. Royalty, trust, revenge. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll are doused in humor and lit ablaze with quirky snark. I blew through this book incredibly fast because I couldn't put it down. If you want a solid, fun read, then pick up Red Tash's Troll or Derby." ~Mercedes Yardley, Shock Totem"Roller Deb is a sexy ass-kicking heroine and I can't help but adore the chick! All that unleashed power is both scary and fascinating, it feels like staring into the sun. And Harlow, with his swoon-worthy name, is the kind of troll you want to fall in love with. Overall the story is crazy exciting and so fast paced you'll just keep on flipping the pages." ~ Braine of TalkingSupe.com Book Reviews About the AuthorRed Tash is a journalist-turned-novelist of dark fantasy for readers of all ages. Monsters, SciFi, wizards, trolls, fairies, and roller derby lightly sautéed in a Southern/Midwestern sauce hand-canned from her mama's recipes await you in her pantry of readerly delights. Y'all come, anytime.

A sociopolitical misadventure from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner Frank Dawley is a working-class escapee. After twelve years of spiritual nullification at a factory in Nottingham, five years in an alienating marriage, and two burdensome kids, Frank is finally free. He has quit his job, burned his possessions, and sold his car, and is hitching a ride to wherever the road will take him. Haunting Frank's physical and existential travels is a ubiquitous inscription painted on nearly every street corner in England: BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Who is this Bill Posters, who is so relentlessly hounded by the authorities? To Frank, Bill—or William—becomes a symbol of the servile proletariat, the "put-upon dreg" whose hollow ideologies have bombarded Frank throughout his entire life. As an act of resistance, Frank becomes determined to reject—even to kill—the William...

He’s falling in love—and she’s falling over the edge of sanity. From the author of Beautiful and Clean, a “real and relatable” (VOYA) exploration of a romance marred by mental illness.What if I can’t ever be who you want me to be? Connor knows that Izzy will never fall in love with him the way he’s fallen for her. But somehow he’s been let into her crazy, exhilarating world and become her closest confidante. The closer they get, however, the more Connor realizes that Izzy’s highs are too high and her lows are too low. And the frenetic energy that makes her shine is starting to push her into a much darker place. As Izzy’s behavior gets increasingly erratic and self-destructive, Connor gets increasingly desperate to stop her from plummeting. He knows he can’t save her from her pain...but what if no one else can?

Written with the raw honesty and poignant insight that were the hallmarks of her acclaimed bestseller A Widow's Story, an affecting and observant memoir of growing up from one of our finest and most beloved literary masters.The Lost Landscape is Joyce Carol Oates' vivid chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State. From memories of her relatives, to those of a charming bond with a special red hen on her family farm; from her first friendships to her earliest experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is a powerful evocation of the romance of childhood, and its indelible influence on the woman and the writer she would become.In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective account, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self, an imaginative girl eager to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. While reading Alice in Wonderland changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to view life as a...

There is a middle world between life and death, and Tess must navigate it to save her brother in this heart-wrenching story infused with the fractured and fantastical realms of Finnish mysticism.Axel and Tess are bewildered when a stranger shows up in their backyard accompanied by a giant brown bear, but before they can investigate the bizarre encounter, something more harrowing happens: their father is killed in a freak car accident. Now orphaned, Tess and Axel are shipped off to Finland to live with grandparents who they’ve never met, and are stunned to discover that the mysterious stranger with the bear has found them again. More stunning—they come to understand that this man isn’t really a man…he’s a keeper of souls. And the bear isn’t really a bear…it’s a ghost. Their mother’s ghost. Wandering, endlessly, searching for their father. Then the Keeper invites Axel, who is fighting his symptoms of muscular...

An election is held at the abbey of Crewe and the new lady abbess takes up her high office with implacable serenity.This is a satirical fantasy about ecclesiastical and other kinds of politics. The author has also written The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Girls of Slender Means.

Over the past twenty-five years, New Stories from the South has published the work of now well-known writers, including James Lee Burke, Andre Dubus, Barbara Kingsolver, John Sayles, Joshua Ferris, and Abraham Verghese and nurtured the talents of many others, including Larry Brown, Jill McCorkle, Brock Clarke, Lee Smith, and Daniel Wallace.This twenty-fifth volume reachs out beyond the South to one of the most acclaimed short story writers of our day. Guest editor Amy Hempel admits, "I've always had an affinity for writers from the South," and in her choices, she's identified the most inventive, heartbreaking, and chilling stories being written by Southerners all across the country.From the famous (Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Spencer, Wells Tower, Padgett Powell, Dorothy Allison, Brad Watson) to the finest new talents, Amy Hempel has selected twenty-five of the best, most arresting stories of the past year. The 2010 collection is proof of the enduring...

In this superb memoir, the bestselling author of In Country and other award-winning books tells her own story, and the story of a Kentucky farm family, the Masons of Clear Springs. Like Russell Baker's Growing Up, Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain, and other classic literary memoirs, Clear Springs takes us back in time to recapture a way of life that has all but disappeared, a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. Clear Springs is also an American woman's odyssey, exploring how a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael HofmannSelected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages)."Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment," as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off...