Selected eBooks: 2016

This dark and suspenseful novel tells the story of a fictitious West African country caught in the grip of civil war. The dispassionate and deadpan narrator, Asante Kroma, is a former head of Secret Services and finds himself living with the corpse of the dictator, a man who once ruled his nation with an iron fist. A surprise reckoning comes about when six-year-old Kaveena is murdered.

An affectionate satire of the culture of self-indulgence, The Final Days of Great American Shopping exposes the American obsessions with money, mass marketing, and material objects. In Belladonna, a gated subdivision in upstate South Carolina, readers meet acolorful cast of characters doing their best to buy happiness in a series of sixteen closely linked stories from the past, present, and future.

A woman obsessed with reality TV encounters a sorority girl who has embarked on a very personal scavenger hunt. A man unexpectedly discovers that his father--a seemingly rational man--believes, seriously, in lake monsters. A woman whose husband has just survived a near-fatal accident flees to St. Petersburg, Russia, to wander through museums and palaces and simply try to forget. From Mississippi to Arizona to Russia, characters find themselves faced with a choice: make sense of the past, or run from it.

A novel of homecoming, loss, and the power of story, Familiar Ground follows the return of Jacob Bechner to rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, summoned by Callie, a dying woman nearly 100 years old. Jacob aims to confront a moment of violence from forty years in his past that cost him the life of his brother Drue. Elizabeth Cox's debut novel is about the recurrence of loss in our lives and of the intractability of guilt that must give way for any measure of self-forgiveness.

Lowcountry storyteller Delores B. Nevils and acclaimed artist Jonathan Green collaborate to share the story of Amadeus, a loud and proud leghorn rooster who comes to live with a widow lady in the Corners community of St. Helena Island on the South Carolina coast. The widow lady's dogs--Kane and Able--and cats--Mae Liza, Scooter, and Pumpkin--are unhappy with the arrival of this new resident in their yard. Amadeus makes himself at home and becomes the pride of the neighborhood.

Writer Paul Ruffin celebrates the mysteries of the sea in the short story collection The Time the Waters Rose. From shrimp boat captains to shipyard workers, Ruffin's characters are men who drink, swear, fight, and sometimes kill, but what unifies them is that all-embracing magic of the Gulf coast and the barrier islands. The title story, which Ruffin started writing as a ten-year-old bored with traditional Biblical tales, is an irreverent, satirica l retelling of the epic Noah story.

One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist brings to life the narratives of midwestern blue-collar workers. In these sixteen stories, author Dustin M. Hoffman invites readers to peek behind the curtain of the invisible-but-ever-present "working stiff" as he reveals their lives in full complexity, offering their gruff voices--so often ignored--without censorship. The characters at the heart of these stories are painters, drywall finishers, carpenters, roofers, oil refinery inspectors, and hardscapers, all aching to survive the workday.

In 1944 Italian officer Captain Francesco Verdi is captured by Allied forces in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the senior POW, the ruthless Kommandant Vogel, demands that all prisoners adhere to his Nazi dictates. His life threatened, Verdi escapes from the camp and meets up with an American woman, Chiara Frangiapani, who helps him elude capture as they flee to the Lower Peninsula.

"The Egret's Plumes" is a cautionary tale exalting the virtues of good sportsmanship, conservation of the natural world, and the universality of parental instincts. Fleeing the relentless plume hunters of their native Florida, a pair of exquisite snowy egrets make a new home and family in the South Carolina lowcountry swamps of Blake's Reserve. This is an inspiring narrative illuminating the pitfalls awaiting immoral acts and the saving virtues of selflessness and compassion.

Clawing chest pains and a fiery car crash take one life and change the destiny of four others. The Stone Necklace braids together the stories of a grieving widow, a struggling nurse, a young mother, and a troubled homeless man, reminding us of the empowering and surprising ways our lives touch one another and how, together, we can recover from even the greatest of losses. Carla Damron weaves the stories of four people whose seemingly disparate existences intersect through tragedies realized and averted.

Along with his siblings, Raphael Hardin left his childhood home in rural Kentucky. Grappling with an AIDS diagnosis, he returns to care for his dying father. Told from the perspectives of Raphael, his family, and their lifelong neighbor, Fenton Johnson's landmark novel reveals the blood struggles and binding loves of a broken family made whole.

Ng Kim Chew's stories are raw, rural, and rich with the traditions of his native Malaysia. They are also full of humor and spirit, demonstrating a deep appreciation for human ingenuity in the face of poverty, oppression, and exile. In prose that is intimate and atmospheric, these stories depict the struggles of individuals torn between their ancestral and adoptive homes.

A family that has escaped Vienna ends up on the edge of the Amazon, where the parents fight yellow fever and the daughter falls in love with a village boy. Two sisters learn lessons about race and war during the Columbia University riots of 1968. A young girl confronts death when her former babysitter is mysteriously murdered. In Paraguay, two adult sisters confront their loneliness while their precocious young charge faces off with a monkey.

An HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with his brothers; a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the mother who abandoned her; and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families and communities, Madden masterfully explores what it means to be an outsider always looking in.

Alice is a motherless child, born to a motherless child, and raised with neither care nor grace. Her response to this multiple abandonment is a lifelong obsession with her best friend Ingrid, or Thingy, as Alice calls her, and a sort of fantastic narcissism wherein she figures herself as the nexus of a supernatural world she understands through a blend of mountain lore, indigenous Cherokee legend, and the dangerous idiom of the fairy-tale girl who enters the forest despite being warned.

It's the summer of George Wallace's last run for governor of Alabama in 1982, and the state is at a crossroads. In Katherine Clark's All the Governor's Men, a political comedy of manners that reimagines Wallace's last campaign, voters face a clear choice between the infamous segregationist, now a crippled old man in a wheelchair, and his primary opponent, Aaron Osgood, a progressive young candidate poised to liberate the state from its George Wallace-poisoned past.

"Red Indian" and "The Rooster's Cry" complement You as of Today by providing, with striking transparency and precision, narratives that examine man's journey to self-discovery through events that are culturally unique, transparent, and at times shocking. This volume is rich with tales of war, love, politics, censorship, and the search for self in a complex and conflicting Arab world at a critical time in its history.

Blue is a novel about identity, friendship, figuring out who we are during the "in-between" phases of life, and the search for people who "get us." Visual art, television and film, appear as signposts throughout the narrative, providing a context for how we each come to build our sense of self in the world. With a tribute to 1980s pop culture, set against the backdrop of contemporary New York, Blue both celebrates and questions the ever-changing cultural landscape against which we live our stories, frame by frame.

In this imagined future, seven natives are exiled from federal sectors that have replaced federal reservations; they pursue the liberty of an egalitarian government on an island in Lake of the Woods. These seven narrators, known only by native nicknames, are related to characters in Vizenor's other novels and stories. Vizenor was the principal writer of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, and this novel is a rich and critical commentary on the abrogation of the treaty that established the White Earth Reservation in 1867, and a vivid visualization of the futuristic continuation of the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, in 2034.

Based on the infamous novelist Eve Langley, Ava Langdon is an eccentric outcast solely preoccupied with her passion for words. Little does Ava know, she does not have long to live. Each day she wakes obsessed with finding the perfect sentence, the perfect description. She dons men's clothing and inspires confusion with her penchant for slipping snippets of French into conversation. From submitting a manuscript, to getting hit by a ute, to meeting with her estranged son, Ava's last days encapsulate the freedom of eccentricity and the sadness of isolation.

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. In the 18th century the notion of "interiority" understood as a paradigm of human subjectivity came to be articulated in a sustained way in architectural and visual, rather than only literary forms. The book examines models of understanding "interiority" as these were developed in relation to notions of space and spatial experience.

The novel begins with the family of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was imprisoned in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek's rule. Zhu Zuyan spends his days luxuriating in his Lotus Garden, which he builds according to his own desires. Eventually the entire household is sold, including the Lotus Garden. The novel then swings to modern-day Taipei, where Zhu Yinghong falls for Lin Xigeng, a real estate tycoon and playboy. Though the two ultimately marry, their high-styled romance dulls over time, leading to a dangerous, desperate quest to reclaim the enchantment of the Lotus Garden.

Keet, a ten-year-old Tlingit Indian boy, stows away for a voyage on his father's canoe . . . and soon finds himself caught in the middle of a wild seastorm. The story carries him far from his home village, and when he makes land, he winds up right in the middle of a dangerous dispute between two Indian clans. The story of how he copes with these surprises and extricates himself from danger is dramatic and unforgettable. And it's mostly true.

Readers are taken on a whirlwind journey across the globe and across time and space, where magic and science exist in possibilities that are not of this world. Travel from Norway to Russia and America to Gehenna. Discover a calculus problem that rocks the ages and robots who both nurture and kill. Meet a magical horse who protects the innocent, a semi-repentant troll, a savvy teenager who takes on the Devil, and time travelers from the Mesozoic who party till the end of time.

At a time when humankind faces unprecedented, global-scale challenges from climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling vital resources, and widespread wars, this collection of planetary tales will strike a poignant chord with the reader. Sanders has created worlds where death tolls rise due to dream deprivation, where animals only exist in mechanical form, and where people are forced to live in biodomes to escape poisoned air.

Adam Finney, a young man who is mentally disabled, faces sterilization and lobotomy in a state-supported asylum. When he is found dead his teenaged stepsister, Jess, is sought for questioning by their family and the police. Jess's odyssey of escape across four states leads into dark territories of life-and-death moral choices where compassion and grace offer faint illumination but few answers.

In this fresh and distinctive collection, Comfort Food offers a close inward focus and an exquisite sensitivity which bridge van Neerven's Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage. The melding of cultural experiences offers access to a unique and vibrant bicultural experience. The textures and sensuality of the poems' imagery create a portrait of a young woman's life and her exploration of body and mind. A stunning poetry debut from an immensely talented author.

Island of the Blue Dolphins tells the story of a girl left alone for eighteen years in the aftermath of violent encounters with Europeans on her home island off the coast of Southern California. This edition also considers how readers might approach the book today, when new archaeological evidence is emerging about the "Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island," on whom O'Dell's story is based, and Native peoples are engaged in the reclamation of indigenous histories and ongoing struggles for political sovereignty.