Selected eBooks: 2011

Peter Sackrider is the son of a judge and a vitamin-pill-popping mother, and brother to a sister whose troubles with boys take her far from Kentucky. He is a writer perhaps more in love with women (and, intermittently, men) than he is with words, whose eagerness to be loved leads him into alarming circumstances. The new story finds Sackrider in his mid-fifties, married for a second time, the father of a small child, and all tangled up with his next-door neighbor, an artist who likes to use the corpses of animals in his collages.

Following on from Helen Constantine's hugely successful Paris Tales, the twenty-two short stories included in More Metro Tales take the reader on an fascinating journey around Paris by metro. The journey begins at the Gare du Nord, stops at twenty underground stations along the way, and endsat Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Some of these stories actually take place in the metro itself, but most are to be found when you emerge above ground.

This is the fascinating story of a young girl from a very poor family who raised her head high and raised the dignity of women through her own personal and determined effort. She did not yield to the victimizations of corrupt minds, nor to the temptations of apathy and pessimistic thinking; rather she saw everything optimistically and through many hardships achieved her life's ambitions.

In Amina Gautier's Brooklyn, some kids make it and some kids don't, but not in simple ways or for stereotypical reasons. Gautier's stories explore the lives of young African Americans who might all be classified as "at-risk," yet who encounter different opportunities and dangers in their particular neighborhoods and schools and who see life through the lens of different family experiences.

I glanced out the window as my train pulled into the station and saw the girl who killed my son. So begins Josh Rolnick's powerful debut collection of eight stories, which utilizes a richly focused narrative style accenting the unavoidable tragedies of life while revealing the grace and dignity with which people learn to deal with them. The stories, four set in New Jersey and four in New York, span the wide geographic tapestry of the area and demonstrate the interconnectedness of both the neighboring states and the residents who inhabit them.

It is 1914 and life has changed dramatically for the people of Belgium. The advancing German military, delayed by a valiant Belgian Army, take out their frustrations on innocent civilians. Shockwaves reverberate around Europe. In the chaotic early days of occupation, events conspire to draw together three very different people. Their destinies become entwined and lead inexorably to a dramatic conclusion.

As a child, Lucy dreams of talking fairies and lives contentedly in the wooded suburbs of Boston; she grows up to be a successful animator of fairy-tale films. Or does she? She claims at moments to be a witch in the woods. Like her sisters, Lucy has a secret, but she is unable to fasten onto anything but brightness. This novel is a perfect end to the Gold family series, and the perfect introduction, for new readers, to Bernheimer's enchanting body of work.

When civil war erupts in Somalia, cousins Domenica Axad and Barni are separated and forced to flee the country. Barni manages to eke out a living in Rome, where she works as an obstetrician. Domenica wanders Europe in a painful attempt to reunite her broken family and come to terms with her past. After ten years, the two women reunite. Soon, Domenica and Barni find their Somali roots and start to heal the pain they have suffered in war and exile.

Whatever Gets You Through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling--one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights.

Honor's Shadow is a story of betrayal and revenge. Dr Honor Sinclair, a psychiatrist and therapist, is forced to confront a long buried betrayal, when several small events converge to awaken disturbing memories. An anniversary of loss, a newspaper article about someone from her past, a new therapy client distraught by her husband's infidelity. How can Honor control her own pressing emotions and desires, as she attempts to contain the vengeful impulses of Tisi, her strange new client?

Huang Fan burst onto Taiwan's literary scene in the 1980s, publishing pointed urban portraits and political satires that captured the reading public's attention. The first collection of Huang Fan's work to appear in English, this anthology includes Zero, a prize-winning dystopian novella echoing George Orwell's chilling 1984. Set in a postapocalyptic world, Zero features Xi De, a young man raised in an elite community who risks everything to challenge his society's charismatic leader and technocratic rule.

Celia lives in the contemporary Midwest. Ann is an accused witch, executed during the Salem witch trials. Two women separated by time and place, yet yoked by heritage and history. Set in three time periods, stories within stories unfold, and Greenslit's language seamlessly weaves Celia's modern life with the historical record of Ann's demise alongside dazzling renderings of animal life. Greenslit's hybrid of fiction and nonfiction occupies that rarest of airs: it is a book that illuminates, line by line and page by page, how it should be read.

Composed of stunning vignettes that capture the deterioration of a father's mind and body, this novel provides poetic insight into the complex workings of a father-daughter relationship. As the father collapses, what appears is the daughter's struggle to simply cope. In prose composed of intense and moving shards, Tricia Bauer delivers a revealing account of the gradual decomposition of all that is familiar and of a daughter's gathering of memories to form the arresting collage that is Father Flashes.

Continuously in print and translated into multiple languages since it was first published, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty is a classic work of children's literature that is also an important text in the fields of Victorian studies and animal studies. The new Cambridge Scholars Publishing critical edition reproduces the first edition of 1877, restoring material often abridged in other modern editions.

In this new edition of a prairie classic, Andreas Schroeder fictionalizes the true story of Tom Sukanen's wild scheme to build an ocean-going ship in the middle of a wheat field in Saskatchewan. Set during the hardships of the "Dirty Thirties," Dustship Glory presents us with Sukanen's mythic effort to escape both the drought and pestilence of his time, as well as his own personal struggle to be free.

Joe Fairlie is a treasure dowser. As the novel opens, he locates The Blessing of Burntisland, a seventeenth-century treasure barge sunk in the Firth of Forth off Scotland. The treasure of King Charles I has lain in the sea for decades; but so it seems have the spirits of two of the ship's survivors. At his moment of greatest triumph, Joe is assailed by the first of many waking dreams that plunge him into the life of one of the wreck's survivors, the court doctor, Thomas Newbolt, who is the antithesis of Joe.

New Stories from the Midwest presents a collection of stories that celebrate an American region too often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature. The editors solicited nominations from more than three hundred magazines, literary journals, and small presses. The stories, written by midwestern writers or focusing on the Midwest, demonstrate how the quality of fiction from and about the heart of the country rivals that of any other region.

These unjustly neglected works, among the most enjoyable of Mark Twain's novels, follow Tom, Huck, and Jim as they travel across the Atlantic in a balloon, then down the Mississippi to help solve a mysterious crime. "Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? No, he wasn't. It only just pisoned him for more." So Huck declares at the start of these once-celebrated but now little-known sequels to his own adventures.

The cave of Lascaux may be closed to the public, but five scholars a day are allowed inside, and Nora Barnes has finagled an appointment. Nora and her high-spirited husband, Toby, are visiting the Dordogne, in the southern French region of the Aquitaine. During their tour of the cave, another visitor is murdered. When the local inspector pegs Nora and Toby as suspects, they embark on a mission to solve the crime, tracing strange links between a Cro-Magnon symbol and a thirteenth-century religious cult.

The stories in this collection contain laments and mysteries: a car salesman implicates himself in a crime that he is not sure ever took place, a third-shift convenience store clerk accepts her unfortunate disfigurement, dinner parties generate jealousy and resignation among their participants, a sister's disappearance creates a long-standing familial black hole, a sailboat comes to symbolize the longing of an elderly couple, and a daughter finds answers in her father's speechlessness.

The search for missing seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia spans a single day, morning twilight to late evening, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors. As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become family--bound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather.

Murat's hybrid work, built around a humorous frame narrative, details a trip to a pristine country estate taken by seven Parisian aristocrats and contains interpolated examples of the period's most popular literary forms-including seven ghost stories, seven autobiographical anecdotes, one literary fairy tale, one rondeau, two gallant poems, two love letters, and eleven proverb comedies.

In the opening story of Geary Hobson's riveting new collection, Plain of Jars, a young private confides to his friend that he's trying to leave the Marine Corps because violence is contradictory to his faith. It's this acute understanding of conflict that characterizes Plain of Jars, a book populated by bullies, men in combat, abusive spouses, and Native Americans seeking a sense of personal identity in an environment where conformity is law. With pitch perfect dialogue and a sense of the unexpected, Plain of Jars tests the depths of complex lives.

After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, Bafana Kuzwayo returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. Soon he's in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.

Slow Moving Dreams tells the story of Tom Carter, a city man who is forced by the death of a cousin to return to his rural roots in West Texas. Hardy takes his readers along two journeys in this novel: the first is the physical journey that Tom takes as he drives to the funeral in Alpine, and the second is an exploration of Tom's life as a child growing up in the country that the adult Tom is now passing through. But not all of those memories are happy ones, as Tom and his cousins soon find out.

Stephen Thorpe lands a coveted internship at Ubatoo, an Internet empire that provides its users with popular online services, from a search engine and e-mail, to social networking. When Stephen's boss asks him to work on a project, Stephen innocently obliges, believing he is mining Ubatoo's vast databases to protect people unfairly targeted in the name of national security. Soon, suspicious individuals surface, doing all they can to access Ubatoo's wealth of confidential information.