Writer's Spotlight
No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man
Tobias Wray
Wray’s poems are wry luxury items of intelligence, sheathed in the latent double of speech, where a word like family might mean, in the queer parlance, refuge, but also, refutation. This is an interrogative, primal, mythic collection, a poetry of privacy and disclosure, of contradiction, a disabused landscape under “razor-wire stars.” RANDALL MANN
Thunderbird Inn
Collin Callahan
These are dark, end-times poems that Bashō could have written, they’re that intimately observed and described. There’s a run-down small-town America here that Callahan looks at more carefully than most, uncovering the beauties and horrors of roadside motels, the ubiquity of ceiling fans, and a nacho machine that “vomits gold.” But there is a curious love about all of this, and friends who move alongside you when you pass through this book. And there is a magic to the close observation that redeems what is often squalid, like a contemporary American Georg Trakl, with just as many drugs.
Gut
J. Bailey Hutchinson
J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.
My Back Pages
Floyd Collins
Like Wordsworth’s Lucy, Floyd Collins’ the Teresa of My Back Pages is memory and wound. Like Poe’s Ligeia, she is myth and muse. Teresa is also flesh and blood, a woman with whom Collins had a brief but intense relationship a half-century ago, who gave his world color and texture, then animated it before disappearing into the future. She exists now in poems that are precise and allusive in their conjuring of one whose name becomes “a byword for all things of beauty and grace.” Collins, who has written a book on Seamus Heaney and numerous essay-reviews on contemporary poetry for The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, and The Kenyon Review, takes his rightful place among our most affective poets with this lyrical sequence: “From the ruck and maul of our humanity… / we rise incorruptible.”
The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist
Michael Downs
MFA Fiction Alum (1999)
In 1844, Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist, encountered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas and began administering the gas as the first true anesthetic. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity's relationship with pain. This novel mines the gaps in the historical record and imagines the motivations and mysteries behind Wells's morbid fascination with pain, as well as the price he and his wife, Elizabeth, paid--first through his obsession, then his addiction.
Jerusalem Stands Alone
Nicole Fares, Translator
MFA Translation Alum (2014)
"Shukair tenderly and brilliantly explores the city’s deep soul, through gorgeous lyrical portraits of its inhabitants. Poets will love this book, elegantly translated by Nicole Fares. Reading it feels like a healing. Jerusalem Stands Alone will be the enduring truth, not the pitiful passing news." —Naomi Shihab Nye
Our Lady of the Flood
Alison Pelegrin
MFA Poetry Alum (2000)
"This collection vibrates with candor and concern—forging a kinetic blaze into an emotional and physical terrain newly devastated by hurricane. But oh, what gorgeous life and sass teems in these poems! Whether she writes of the exquisite delight of eating “a foam of jeweled fruits” or the horrors of ”...unzipped bodies, emptied and stacked by size,” Pelegrin's writing is simply incandescent." —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Flash: Writing the Very Short Story
John Dufresne
MFA Fiction Alum (1984)
The history of fiction has been dominated by the novel and the short story. But now a brave new genre has emerged: very brief fiction. FLASH! identifies the qualities that make for excellent flash fiction, demystifies the writing process, and guides writers by exercise and example through the world of the very short story. John Dufresne’s characteristic warmth, wit, and humor remind writers of the joy in the creative process, making this a perfect guide for any writer interested in trying a new form.
The Unmade World
Steve Yarbrough
MFA Fiction Alum (1985)
The Unmade World is a thoughtful literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow.
Paraíso
Jacob Shores-Argüello
MFA Poetry Alum
Paraíso, inaugural winner of the CantoMundo Poetry Prize, is a pilgrimage against sorrow. Erupting from a mother’s death, the poems follow the speaker as he tries to survive his grief. Catholicism, family, good rum . . . these help, but the real medicine happens when the speaker pushes into the cloud forest alone.
Projector
Michael Catherwood
MFA Poetry Alum (1997)
Michael Catherwood’s latest collection presents a world of colorful scenarios: a one-armed Vietnam Vet running pool tables, dreaming alternate endings to John Wayne films, a vacation photo of a father scalping his son next to a teepee in the deserts of Arizona, and a man frozen in time.
"Catherwood’s limitless empathy—for those close to him as well as strangers—informs every line of these poems, bringing the balm of grace to pain, transforming grief to illumination, granting understanding to poet and reader.”—John Hennessy
Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
Beth Ann Fennelly
MFA Poetry Alum (1998)
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal the humor buried in our everyday interactions.
For Isabel
Elizabeth Harris, Translator
MFA Fiction/Translation Alum (1999/2000)
A metaphysical detective story about love and existence from the Italian master, Antonio Tabucchi. When Tadeus sets out to find Isabel, his former love, he soon finds himself on a metaphysical journey across the world, one that calls into question the meaning of time and existence and the power of words.
The Smoke of Horses
Charles Rafferty
MFA Poetry Alum (1990)
"One after another, always surprising, the transcendent short tales and meditations in Charles Rafferty's The Smoke of Horses are sometimes lyrical and ecstatic, sometimes funny and self-deprecating, sometimes wistful, but always beautifully precise in their odd and individual depiction of our very human everyday life. The narrator may compare himself to a grackle, the grackle's song to a rusty gate, and the reader takes wing along with him. A pleasure to read."—Lydia Davis
The Next Place
Al Maginnes
MFA Poetry Alum
The poems in The Next Place find the borders where lives intersect, where the sight of a former lover evokes memories of a bruised Volvo...skin that smelled like burned oil. No matter who inhabits these poems, and a large cast moves through them—Chet Baker, King Lear, Isaac Newton, various friends of the poet, both living and dead—they inhabit a space where one world is always encroaching on the next. A boy contemplates holding up a store with his father's gun, a student and teacher debate the ending of a Raymond Carver story, a father sees in his adopted daughter "a story built to parallel mine." Through their wide range of subject matter, the poems in The Next Place assert that, as fascinating as the surface of this world is, it is only the beginning of what we need to understand.
The Legend of the Albino Farm
Steve Yates
MFA Fiction Alum (1994)
The Legend of the Albino Farm is a horror story turned inside out. What if a thriving family were saddled with an unshakable spook tale? And what if that lore cursed them with an unending whirlwind of destruction from thrill seekers, partiers, bikers, and Goths? Hettienne Sheehy is about to inherit this devouring legacy. Last child to bear a once golden name, she is heiress to a sprawling farm in the Missouri Ozarks. During summer, childhood idylls in the late 1940s, Hettienne has foreseen all this apocalyptic fury in frightening, mystifying visions. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by a property that seems to doom all who would dare own it, in the end, Hettienne will risk everything to save the family she truly loves.
Lucky You
Erika Carter
MFA Fiction Alum (2012)
By turns funny, knowing and hauntingly sad, Lucky You is a study in damage and detachment, a fearless portrait of three women at a crucial point in their lives. With startling exactitude and wickedly deadpan humor, it lays bare the emotional core of its characters with surgical precision. The writing is deft and controlled, as natural and unforced as breath--which makes it impossible to look away.
The Fall of Lisa Bellow
Susan Perabo
MFA Fiction Alum (1994)
Like Everything I Never Told You and Room, The Fall of Lisa Bellow is edgy and original, a hair-raising exploration of the ripple effects of an unthinkable
crime. It is a dark, beautifully rendered, and gripping novel about coping, about
coming-of-age, and about forgiveness. It is also a beautiful illustration of how one
family, broken by tragedy, finds healing.
Understand Me, Sugar
Jane Blunschi
MFA Fiction Alum (2016)
Jane Blunschi doesn’t flinch in her storytelling, and the result is a collection of searingly honest tales that lay bare a full-throated humanity. Her characters are smart, funny, and gut-wrenchingly familiar. As Blunschi’s voice slips under the skin of these people, and flows in their bloodstreams, the reader can’t help but think, this could be me. –Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of A Thin Bright Line and The Big Bang Symphony
Fourteen Little Red Huts
Jesse Irwin, Translator
MFA Translation Alum (2017)
In this essential collection of Andrei Platonov's plays, the noted Platonov translator Robert Chandler edits and introduces The Hurdy-Gurdy (translated by Susan Larsen), Fourteen Little Red Huts (translated by Chandler), and Grandmother's Little Hut (translated by Jesse Irwin). The Hurdy-Gurdy and Fourteen Little Red Huts constitute an impassioned and penetrating response to Stalin's assault on the Soviet peasantry. Platonov's later, gentler work is represented by Grandmother's Little Hut, an unfinished play newly translated here.
The Self-Styled No-Child
Cody Walker
MFA Poetry Alum (1995)
This second book of poems by Cody Walker offers an unlikely array of characters: Edward Lear, Mitt Romney, Amy Clampitt, and Andy Kaufman share the stage. Walker himself is ever-present, with his shrugs, his heartbreak, his "way-out rhymes": "I'd like to write some lines about the snow, / but -- I dunno, / the snow seems so / fleeting: / a flock of gulls, late for a meeting." Full of comic interruptions and grave forecasts, these poems surprise, delight, and terrify.
Following Disasters
Nancy McCabe
MFA Fiction Alum (1989)
On her twenty-first birthday, Maggie Owen receives an unusual birthday gift: a house. That same day, the house’s owner, her aunt, dies. For three years, Maggie has been fleeing her childhood demons: the deaths of her parents, estrangement from her terminally-ill aunt, and a betrayal by her best friend. But now her career on the road, following natural disasters in temporary insurance claims offices, ends abruptly as Maggie returns home to face her past. But why does the house hold a mysterious spell over her? Why does she have the persistent feeling that her aunt is haunting her? Why did her aunt lie to her about the circumstances of her parents’ deaths? Who is the ghost child that may be hanging around the house? And what’s with the guy next door who seems so hostile toward her? Following Disasters is tightly woven ghost story that raises questions about legacies and their influence on our choices.
Waterlines
Alison Pelegrin
MFA Poetry Alum (2000)
Louisiana native Alison Pelegrin gives us poems that describe the terrible power of nature even as they underscore the state’s beauty. The poet moves from the familiar gaudy delights of life in New Orleans to immerse the reader in the vastly different experience of living north of Lake Pontchartrain. In this fractured world, the Bogue Falaya River becomes a highway paved with benedictions, psalms, and praise for ordinary things, as Pelegrin searches the unfamiliar for an incarnation of home.
Six Memos for the New Millennium
Geoffrey Brock, Translator
Professor of Poetry and Translation
Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium is an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations. Calvino was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) at Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. The new translation, by Geoffrey Brock, corrects old inaccuracies and burnishes the shining prose with which Calvino delivered his literary legacy.
lore
Davis McCombs
Director, Associate Professor of Poetry
Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs's third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present.
Bardo or Not Bardo
J.T. Mahany, Translator
MFA Translation Student
One of Volodine’s funniest books, Bardo or Not Bardo takes place in his universe of failed revolutions, radical shamanism, and off-kilter nomenclature. In each of these seven vignettes, someone dies and has to make his way through the Tibetan afterlife, also known as the Bardo, where souls wander for forty-nine days before being reborn with the help of the Book of the Dead. Unfortunately, Volodine’s characters bungle their chances at enlightenment: the newly dead end up choosing to waste away their afterlife sleeping or to be reborn as an insignificant spider. The living aren’t much better off and make a mess of things in their own way, to the point of mistaking a Tibetan cookbook for the holy book.
Things Like the Truth
Ellen Gilchrist
Professor, Fiction
Things like the Truth brings together for the first time essays by Ellen Gilchrist on her later life and family. Essays such as “The Joy of Swimming” reveal how Gilchrist, as an aging person, thinks about the joys one can discover late in life. Other essays focus on surgery, money, childhood memories, changing perspectives, and the vagaries of the age. Gilchrist pays special attention to her evolving relationships with her adult children and the pleasures and pitfalls of being a grandmother and great-grandmother. The volume also includes essays from her diary about the sense of place in her mountain home near her work at the University of Arkansas and about life after Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, her second residence.
I Don't Like Where This is Going
John Dufresne
MFA Fiction Alum (1984)
John Dufresne has been hailed by the New York Times as “an original talent . . . [whose] humor is frightfully dark, but . . . dazzling.” I Don’t Like Where This Is Going continues the misadventures of therapist-on-the-run Wylie “Coyote” Melville. Wylie has witnessed a woman falling to her death outside the Luxor Hotel. Troubled by the ensuing cover-up, he becomes a man on a mission, enlisting the help of his old friend, an ace card player and master magician, to help find answers. The duo’s escapades range from poker tables to desert highways, from bordellos to child beauty pageants, resulting in a thoroughly satisfying and hilarious whodunit.
Holding Everything Down
William Notter
MFA Poetry Alum (2002)
“At once humorous, lyrical, dramatic, and reflective, the voice in these poems captures the jostling freedoms of personality in cinematic terms. The intimate lies down alongside the epic, the jocular shares the verdant field with the chthonic. Like all true works of art, Notter’s poems are had—in the manner we experience dreams, theater, or movies—not simply read. This auspicious first collection possesses originality and depth, attributes far rarer than talent and skill.”—Ricardo Pau-Llosa, author of Parable Hunter and Man
Stranger
Adam Clay
MFA Poetry Alum (2005)
Stranger is a book of great change and deep roots, of the most rich elements of the earth and the instability of a darkening sky. This third collection of poems by Adam Clay dives into a dynamic world where the only map available is ”not of the world / but of the path I took to arrive in this place, / a map with no real definable future purpose." Tracing a period of great change in his life—a move, a new job, the birth of his first child—Clay navigates with elegance and wonder, staring into the heart of transition and finding in it wisdom.
Battle Sleep
Shannon Tate Jonas
MFA Poetry Alum (2005)
In his stunning first collection Battle Sleep Shannon Jonas’s poems cast such deep spells that their abiding voicings go under as well, as if poetry were also beneath the surfaces, an interior face of change. And the spells break, as they must, mid-lyric, again and again, for wounds, for losses and betrayals and exiles so willingly heard out that distance becomes a welcome medium. Frank Stanford summoned not from literary consensus but from a living consciousness. The dead and the alive, not drowning. And forgiveness as boundary crosser unto perpetuity. There is searing consolation here, the sort that returns trust to poetry.—William Olsen, author of Avenue of Vanishing
The Absence of Knowing
Matthew Henriksen
MFA Poetry Alum (2005)
In Henriken’s stirring follow-up to his debut, Ordinary Sun, he writes with an uninhibited resolve to explore intimate, everyday struggles and capture their reality in amber. Brokenness, anger, and the light of innocence power the poems of The Absence of Knowing. Meanwhile, a new beginning is captured in raw, smoldering, and cathartic expression, leaving an aftermath of aria despite discordant events.
Why They Run the Way They Do
Susan Perabo
MFA Fiction Alum (1994)
In Why They Run the Way They Do, critically acclaimed author Susan Perabo illustrates the triumphs and tragedies of daily life. Perfectly distilled into moments of sharp humor and poignancy, her latest collection features ordinary people in sometimes extraordinary circumstances. Two young students try their hand at blackmail upon learning an illicit secret; a woman grapples with feelings of betrayal after discovering her spinster sister’s pregnancy test; the ghost of a couple’s past comes back to haunt them in the form of their toddler’s stuffed toy.
Small Mothers of Fright
Tara Bray
MFA Poetry Alum (2003)
In Small Mothers of Fright, Tara Bray draws on her experiences as a mother struggling to strike a balance between protecting her daughter from the world’s perils and dazzling her with its many wonders. The birds that fill these pages convey a sense of fragility and uncertainty, while the rhythm of the seasons provides a comfort that promises the old will be made new again. In a precise yet accessible style, Bray writes about fleeting actions and thoughts that, in sum, create the memorable, lasting moments of life.
Stork Mountain
Miroslav Penkov
MFA Fiction Alum (2009)
In Stork Mountain, a young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly cut off all contact with the family three years ago. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains − a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, he gets drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths. And here, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts blaze anew until the past surrenders its shameful secrets.
Cabinet of Curiosities
Gordon Grice
MFA Poetry Alum (1993)
Cabinet of Curiosities is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the wonders of natural history and the joys of being an amateur scientist and collector. Nature writer Gordon Grice, who started his first cabinet of curiosities at age six when he found a skunk’s skull, explains how scientists classify all living things through the Linnaeus system; how to tell real gold from fool’s gold; how to preserve butterflies, crab shells, feathers, a robin’s egg, spider specimens, and honeycombs; how to identify seashells; the difference between antlers and horns; how to read animal tracks. And then, what to do with your specimens, including how to build a cabinet of curiosities out of common household objects, like a desk organizer or a box for fishing tackle.
Underwater Panther
Angie Macri
MFA Poetry Alum (1996)
Winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize
“In lush lines dense with imagery, Underwater Panther offers a journey through Little Egypt, a section of southern Illinois, as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive “dark-eyed girl.” There is elegy here for the “fathers who never seem to speak” and the mothers always trying to spare their children from inevitable suffering. There is elegy, too, for the land itself as the speaker acknowledges that the power held in the land, in the coal and in the river’s currents, like the myth of the underwater panther, might be contained, but never tamed.” —Sandy Longhorn, author of The Alchemy of My Mortal Form
Aftermath Lounge
Margaret McMullan
MFA Fiction Alum (1989)
This novel in stories is a compelling tribute to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Resurrecting the place and its people alongside their heartaches and triumphs, Margaret McMullan creates a riveting mosaic that feeds our wish to understand what it means to be alive in this day and age.
Post-Exoticism in 10 Lessons, Lesson 11
J.T. Mahany, translator
MFA Translation Student
As with Antoine Volodine’s other works, Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers—those who practice “post-exoticism”—have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.
With its explanations of several key “post-exoticist” terms that appear in Volodine’s other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature. Translated from the French by J.T. Mahany.
All the Wrong Places
Molly Giles
Professor Emeritus, Fiction
Molly Giles’ nineteen strange, tightly woven tales merge the mythic and the modern with dark humor and deep humanity. Many of the stories contain contemporary versions of ancient guides: a ghost dog seen by a young drifter in love with a much older guru; a wild goat on a cliff forever standing beside her dead ram glimpsed by a woman whose husband battles cancer; a volcano goddess with a small dog appearing to a woman whose boyfriend is flirting with her teenage daughter. The vacationland settings, Hawaii, Ireland, Baja, and California among them, accentuate the characters’ sense of displacement.
Every Father's Daughter
Margaret McMullan, editor
MFA Fiction Alum (1989)
What is it about the relationship between fathers and daughters that provokes so much exquisite tenderness, satisfying communion, longing for more, idealization from both ends, followed often if not inevitably by disappointment, hurt, and the need to understand and forgive, or to finger the guilt of not understanding and loving enough? writes Phillip Lopate, in his introduction to Every Father's Daughter, a collection of 24 personal essays by women writers writing about their fathers. The editor, Margaret McMullan, is herself a distinguished novelist and educator.
The Alchemy of My Mortal Form
Sandy Longhorn
MFA Poetry Alum (2003)
Winner of the 2014 Louise Bogen Award
"The Alchemy of My Mortal Form is fully imagined and richly worded, telling of a journey of body and soul through fever and sin to redemption--in need of just enough to make my way. How wonderfully Sandy Longhorn surprises her reader."
--Carol Frost, Louise Bogen Award Judge
Reconnaissance
Amy Nawrocki
MFA Poetry Alum (2001)
In her latest collection, Amy Nawrocki plays voyeur and thief, surveying canvases and investigating bookshelves, searching for creativity’s origins and exploring the nature of inspiration. The poems in Reconnaissance uncover muses between the frayed pages of Byron and Shelley, in Chagall’s stained glass, at Oscar Wilde’s grave, past the deep bogs of Glencoe, and in the far away snow caps of Mount Fuji. In these insightful and elegant poems, Nawrocki invites us to believe in “the authenticity of first sight.” Open the paint box and learn how to stare.
The Teeth of the Souls
Steve Yates
MFA Fiction Alum (1994)
As the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry, The Teeth of the Souls tells the story of a marriage betrayed, a lifelong and secret love, and an Ozarks city riven by an Easter lynching.
Blush Less
Julia Paganelli
MFA Poetry Student
“The poems in Julia Paganelli’s Blush Less are fueled by Appalachian shale and coal and the small town voices of waitresses and miners working the late shift. These are poems about the simple truth of needing to make ends meet. And yet as difficult as the circumstances are for the speakers in these poems, Paganelli’s language works hard to transform what fuels them into bursts of lyric intensity capable of transforming the most elemental ingredients of that which powers even our ability to get by—a glass of milk, egg noodles, olive oil on the counter top—into blessing, even into prayer.” —Joshua Robbins, author of Praise Nothing
Voices Bright Flags
Geoffrey Brock
Professor, Poetry and Translation
Voices Bright Flags is a series of experiments in what is sometimes called public poetry, where the author's relationship with his country provides the main theme. The poems approach America from a range of perspectives - political, historical, and personal - and in a range of styles and voices, with each voice planting its own flag, as it were, implying its own America. Together the poems form a partial mosaic, a discordant chorus, a succession of conversations and quarrels between the author and the motley citizens of his imagination.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
Padma Viswanathan
Assistant Professor, Fiction
In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver, 2 suspects--finally--are on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in Canada, 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 caught in the undertow of the tragedy, and privy to their secrets.
Tristano Dies
Elizabeth Harris, Translator
MFA Fiction/Translation Alum (1999/2000)
Winner of the 2016 National Translation Award in Prose. It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying. A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life…you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away.” Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major novels, is a vibrant consideration of love, war, devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it means to be a hero.
When Bad Things Happen to Rich People
Ian Morris
MFA Fiction Alum (1991)
When Bad Things Happen to Rich People is a novel of social satire, a black comedy set in Chicago in the summer of 1995. The novel’s protagonist, Nix Walters, is an adjunct instructor of English at a communications college in the loop with few prospects for advancement. He had become a literary punch line when his novel, touted as the next big literary phenomenon, was universally panned by critics. He and his pregnant wife, Flora, are struggling financially; however, their fortunes change when Nix is asked to ghostwrite the memoirs of publishing magnate Zira Fontaine.
Dispensations
Randolph Thomas
MFA Alum (1993)
Dispensations pitches teens and adults with drug and alcohol problems against aging and ill-prepared parents. Thomas's characters test the boundaries of family responsibility. Blind to each other's needs and feelings, they are haunted by visions of what their lives might have been and might still be.
Revising the Storm
Geffrey Davis
Assistant Professor, Poetry
This debut collection by Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family.
From the Hilltop
Toni Jensen
Assistant Professor, Fiction
For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen’s stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility.
The Tulip-Flame
Chloe Honum
MFA Poetry Alum (2010)
Chloe Honum's brilliant first book The Tulip-Flame traces an identity forming within radically divergent but interlocking systems: a family traumatized by the mother's suicide, a failed relationship, the practice of ballet, a garden— each strict, exacting. And with "a crow's sky-knowing mind," Honum in every case transfigures emotion by way of elegant language and formal restraint. Chloe Honum is "one astounding flame" of a poet, and I predict a long-lasting one. --Claudia Emerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Acts of God
Ellen Gilchrist
Professor, Fiction
Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In "Acts of God," she has crafted ten different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will.
The Even Years of Marriage
Ash Bowen
MFA Poetry Alum (2008)
Ash Bowen's debut poetry collection carries its readers from the bedroom to the heavens in order to define what it means to be alive at this moment. The world seen in The Even Years of Marriage teems with promise while echoing strains of loss, with a constant awareness of personal mythology and universal longing. Bowen's poems are home to an eerie intimacy where desires mingle and clash, as in "The Last Known Love Letter of Poseidon," where the speaker states, "My power can pull down any stubborn star / my finger chooses but cannot draw you back.
This is the Garden by Guilio Mozzi
Elizabeth Harris (translator)
MFA Fiction/Translation Alum (1999/2000)
Mozzi’s work appeared in Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, and “The Apprentice,” a story from this remarkable collection, was included in a collection of the best Italian stories of the twentieth century. Harris’ translation of the Premio Modello winner is fluid and fluent and captures Mozzi’s variety of tones in stories that are elliptical and compressed. The protagonist in “The Apprentice” remains nameless, a laborer in a machine shop who is too conscientious to seek a better position. In the opening story, “Cover Letter,” a purse-snatcher returns letters he found in a victim’s purse, with a long précis on his motives and methods.
East of the West
Miroslav Penkov
MFA Fiction Alum (2009)
A grandson tries to buy Lenin’s corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov’s strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up this beguiling and deeply felt debut. Animated by Penkov’s unmatched eye for the absurd, "East of the West" is a brilliant portrait of a country with its own compass.
Giacomo's Seasons by Mario Rigoni Stern
Elizabeth Harris (translator)
MFA Fiction/Translation Alum (1999/2000)
Set in Asiago, in the pre-Alps of Italy’s Veneto region, this novel tells the story of a mountain people who must adjust to life following the devastation of World War I. The story follows the young protagonist Giacomo through seasons and years as he, his family, and his entire community struggle to survive, salvaging scrap weaponry from former battlefields in the hills around them. Some must leave their homes in search of work abroad, splitting up families and threatening the mountain community with slow disintegration. They must also adjust to the ominous growth of fascism and, finally, face yet another war.
The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths
Sandy Longhorn
MFA Poetry Alum (2003)
The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths is a stunning collection of poems. With her gift for startling images and precise music, Sandy Longhorn converts the normally peaceful vision of the prairie into a place that perpetually threatens to turn innocence into a cautionary tale. In these poems, young girls discover haunting consequences for “refusing to mind.” Disobedience transforms girls through underground language or the bright forgetfulness of poppies. In this landscape formed by elegy and glaciers, everything worshiped is dead or wounded, yet Longhorn’s imagination and lyricism resurrects these myths so you can “taste the light his body had foretold.” — Traci Brimhall
The Greatest Show
Michael Downs
MFA Fiction Alum (1999)
"Though each story stands alone in scope and power, the larger portrait of a community bound and propelled by fate–specifically, a catastrophic circus fire–is a stellar, magical achievement. The Greatest Show is a fantastically conceived, compelling book.” - Sabina Murray
The Realm of Last Chances
Steve Yarbrough
MFA Fiction Alum (1985)
In a captivating departure from the Deep South setting of his previous fiction, Steve Yarbrough now gives us a richly nuanced portrait of a marriage being reinvented in a small town in the Northeast, in his most surprising and compelling novel yet.
Coney Island Pilgrims
John Hennessy
MFA Poetry Alum (1996)
"In his new collection, Coney Island Pilgrims, John Hennessy does more than catalogue the things of this world; he sanctifies them:
bruised strawberries, Kangols, an unleashed pit bull, Puccini's Suor Angelica, rainy
afternoons, Big Bird. It's all here, reconstituted in language and forms that do more
than lodge a mirror before our mind's eye. These poems are the gateway to a kingdom
of rhythmic feeling, linguistic order, and imaginative explorations." —Major Jackson
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Saturday Night at Magellan's
Charles Rafferty
MFA Poetry Alum, 1990
Charles Rafferty works in miniatures. These short short stories explore the small
disasters of desire. They investigate the problems that ensue when, inevitably, his
characters get what they wish for and what they deserve.
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A Raft of Grief
Chelsea Rathburn
MFA Poetry Alum (2001)
In her excellent A Raft of Grief, Chelsea Rathburn probes the varieties and nuances of love and relationships with unsparing lucidity. “Maybe it’s not the eye/but the mind that can take only so much beauty, or solitude, or pleasure,/ maybe we travel both to find and forget ourselves,” she says in this book set in places as varied as Paris, Florida, Krakow. I love how she’s able to affirm what can happen between two people, while asking if a storyteller sometimes has to “sacrifice lovers and selves to the narrative arc?” She’s willing to, which is one reason why her narratives are so persuasive – her allegiance throughout is to the poem as a whole. -Stephen Dunn
Some Kinds of Love: Stories
Steve Yates
MFA Fiction Alum (1994)
Sometimes the opposite of love is not hate, but depravity. In these twelve stories set in the Missouri Ozarks, New Orleans, and Mississippi, Steve Yates reveals lovers clawing back from precipices of destructiveness, obsessiveness, cruelty, vanity, or greed. They seek escape and yet find new barriers, realizing true love may not be at all what they imagined. Pioneers, limestone quarry owners, young German American Civil War survivors, bankers, sex toy catalog designers, highway engineers, Pakistani terrorists, attorneys, missile guidance masterminds, and furniture factory workers (who can see the future) populate these pieces.
Velroy and the Madischie Mafia
Sy Hoahwah
MFA Poetry Alum (2007)
In southwestern Oklahoma an intricate sense of community exists in the small neighborhoods of Comanche Tribal Housing like Madischie. From its streets comes a hell-bent young crew of Comanche, Arapahoe, and Kiowa toughs led by a young Comanche named Velroy. They seek power within a subculture of organized crime, caught in the century-long transformation from the old Comanche Nation, "Lords of the Plains," to a modern-day casino-owning tribe. This is their story, told in a distinctive narrative poetry with its honed syntax, wild imagery, and a splash of high lyricism.
The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology
Geoffrey Brock
Professor
A surprising and illuminating collection, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry invites the reader to examine the works of seventy-five Italian poets, in context and conversation with one another. Edited by the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, these poems have been beautifully rendered into English by some of our finest English-language poets, including Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, Paul Muldoon, and many exciting younger voices.
In the Absence of Clocks
Jacob Shores-Arguello
MFA Poetry Alum
In this fascinating collection, poet Jacob Shores-Arguello takes readers on an illuminating voyage through Ukrainian life. Set during the turmoil of the 2004 Orange Revolution, when the country trembled in the wake of political corruption and public outrage, Shores-Arguello’s lyrics of a revolution provide a glimpse into a world at once foreign and familiar.
Love, Tupelo
Jane V. Blunschi
MFA Fiction Student
It's the perfect road trip for any fan of rich music, deep roots and real people. That's what makes Tupelo shine and you won't miss a glimmer in this travel book about one of America's best Southern getaways.
The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men
Adam Prince
MFA Fiction Alum (2003)
Adam Prince’s highly-anticipated debut The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is a seduction in its own right, a striptease that peels all the way down to the soul. Men attempt to negotiate between their baroque imaginations and the realities of their actual lives in a dark, comic, nuanced, sexed-up collection of stories that might be offensive if it didn’t feel so true.
The Road to Happiness
Johnathon Williams
MFA Poetry Alum (2010)
These poems are to Arkansas what Robert Frost’s poems are to New England…. Like Frost, Williams explores a primal darkness and isolation, using the constraints of blank verse and the sonnet to order the chaos of a difficult life and quiet what would otherwise be unmanageable feelings. Ultimately, he shows us the frustration and clarity of vision that come when one physically and emotionally stays put. - from the foreword by Katrina Vandenberg
Into These Knots
Ashley Anna McHugh
MFA Poetry Alum (2011)
The poems of Into These Knots, Ashley Anna McHugh's debut collection, glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, interrogating and elucidating in elegant and supercharged speech ultimate questions and intimate foibles. With equal parts intelligence and passion, Ms. McHugh can quarrel with scripture or riff on the amorous pleadings of Andrew Marvell or the stark musings of Baudelaire. In "Cairns," a brilliant sequence that plays with the boundaries of the sonnet, mountain hikes in rural West Virginia trace, among other things, the difficult pathways to the divine.
Dying Light and Other Stories
Donald Hays,
Professor Emeritus, Fiction
Donald Hays is the author of The Dixie Association (PEN/Faulkner nominee), The Hangman's Children (L.A. Times Book Review critics' choice), and Dying Light. He edited Stories: Contemporary Southern Short Fiction.
“Hays offers exemplars of the genre, with tight plotting, deep idiosyncrasies, strong dialogue and everyday difficult situations.”—Publishers Weekly
Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories
Barry Hannah
Alumni, University of Arkansas
Nora Jane: A Life in Stories
Ellen Gilchrist
Professor, Fiction
Ellen Gilchrist has published many books of fiction, two books of poetry, and a book of essays. Her Collected Stories was published in the fall of 2000. Her many honors include the National Book Award for Fiction.
“Very few writers can write intelligent comedy about the philosophical pursuit of happiness. Laurie Colwin was one. Ellen Gilchrist is another. Hooray for Nora Jane!” —Kirkus Reviews
Iron Shoes: A Novel
Molly Giles,
Professor Emeritus, Fiction
Molly Giles is the author of Creek Walk and Other Stories, Rough Translations, and Iron Shoes. Her honors include the Flannery O'Connor Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and an NEA Fellowship.
“Giles's narrative is animated with zesty prose, whip-smart observations and a refreshing roster of minor characters... It is a sparkling and witty account of one woman's belated coming-of-age.” —Publishers Weekly
Dismal Rock
Davis McCombs,
Associate Professor, University of Arkansas
Davis McCombs is the author of Ultima Thule (Yale Younger Poets Prize) and Dismal Rock (Dorset Prize). His awards include the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from The Missouri Review, a Stegner Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship.
“This beautiful book records the sacraments of labor and the dark equivocations of history in a single swath of tobacco land in south central Kentucky. With infinite patience and luminous particularity, Davis McCombs unearths the traces of those-who-have-gone-before-us through the material world. His poems have the weight of psalms.” —Linda Gregerson, judge
From Adam to Adam: Seven Old French Plays
translated by John DuVal
Professor, University of Arkansas
John Duval's translations include Tales of Trilussa, Cesare Pascarella's The Discovery of America, and Fabliaux, Fair and Foul. His honors include the Raiziss/de Palchi Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Award, and an NEA Fellowship.
Galveston
Nic Pizzolatto
MFA Fiction Alum (2005)
On the same day that Roy Cady is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he senses that his boss, a dangerous loan-sharking bar-owner, wants him dead. Known “without affection” to members of the boss’s crew as “Big Country” on account of his long hair, beard, and cowboy boots, Roy is alert to the possibility that a routine assignment could be a deathtrap. Which it is. Yet what the would-be killers do to Roy Cady is not the same as what he does to them, which is to say that after a smoking spasm of violence, they are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.
The Odor of Sanctity
Michael Heffernan,
Professor, University of Arkansas
Micheal Heffernan's many books include Love's Answer (Iowa Poetry Prize, 1993) and The Odor of Sanctity (2008). He has received three NEA fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Porter Prize for an Arkansas writer.
“Michael Heffernan is a poet of very great, very casual power.” —Robert Wallace
Weighing Light
Geoffrey Brock
Professor, Poetry and Translation
Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light (poems) and the translator of books by Cesare Pavese, Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and others. He has been a Stegner Fellow, an NEA Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
*New Criterion Poetry Prize* Ivan R. Dee 2005
