Selected eBooks: 2017

Lovers find unexpected romance in cramped spaces, fast food addicts struggle through cheeseburger addiction, and the splendor of nature competes with the violence of television. All the while, a complicated and precarious present dawns onto a new world where wealthy women wear children's eyes as jewelry and those in need of money hawk their faces only to forever mourn what parts of themselves they have sold to survive.

Following generations of one family across nearly a century, each of Andrea Lewis's intertwined, engaging short stories evokes an intense sense of place and time, from New Orleans in 1895 to Grand Isle, Louisiana, during the hurricane of 1901 and on to London during the Olympic Games of 1948. The people in these ten vivid tales face tragedy and real-world catastrophic events--war, hurricanes, the Great Depression, racial tension--in their pursuit of love, family, and belonging.

Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes provides a new and valuable approach to the Sherlock Holmes literature, as well as making available many works that have for years remained forgotten.

In the frozen reaches of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, fierce winter storms hit without warning. The white opacity of one such blizzard allows Norman Haas to walk away from his prison work detail. Thus begins Norman's journey back to his past, back to the woman he loved who betrayed him, back to the brother who helped put him away, back to a dangerous web of family allegiances, deceptions, and intrigue.

The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Ivlita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside members of a revolutionary cell, he must again ask: is he a free man or a pawn of history?

Boston journalist Sam Adams suspects that his father may have been the unidentified gunman in the JFK assassination. True or not, Sam is certain that his father, the elusive John Adams, is responsible for his sister Abigail's tortured life of drugs, prostitution, and the conviction that she is a descendant of Salem witches, as well as the strange circumstances that surround his mother's final hours. Sam pursues the man he has not seen in years and discovers that he is not the only one searching for his father.

At nineteen, Hannah LeClaire already has a reputation in the village of Whitefish Harbor, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She is given to solitary walks along the shore of Lake Superior, and on a cold April day she meets Martin Reed, who has just moved north from Chicago to renovate a dilapidated house he has inherited. Hannah immediately realizes that Martin, who is ten years her senior, is also an outcast and quite unlike anyone she has ever met.

Growing up next door to his Granny's country store in McCracken County, Kentucky, a very young Bob Thompson had unlimited access. As he passed his childhood years on the store's front porch, Thompson internalized the tales and folk traditions conveyed by his grandmother and her customers. In Hitchhiker: Stories from the Kentucky Homefront, Thompson offers readers homegrown tales that interweave ghosts of the past with real and imagined worlds.

The summer before going into high school, Fiona receives a mysterious box in the mail. It contains stories written by the grandfather she never knew, an Anishinaabe man her mother refuses to talk about. As she reads his stories about blackbirds and bigfoot, as well as tales about Indians in space and homeless Native men camping by the river in Minneapolis, Fiona finds other questions arising--questions about her grandfather and the experiences that shaped his stories, questions about her mother's silence regarding the grandfather she never knew.

On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, the Atayal tribe killed one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing the tribe to the brink of genocide. Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng investigated the Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants.

Perla is the story of a woman who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust and would ultimately die unable to extricate herself from its corrosive memory. It is told from the point of view of her son, who, not long after losing her, learns that he is about to become a father. These two events become the impetus for reconstructing Perla's past and for understanding gestation, as he's equally in the dark about what happened in his mother's life and what is taking place in his wife's womb.

Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. However, the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

Yi, whose father abandoned his family and defected to the North at the outbreak of the Korean War, plans to reunite with his father despite having spent most of his life under a cloud of suspicion as the son of a traitor. Yet before a rendezvous on the Chinese border can be arranged, his father dies. Yi then learns for the first time that he has a half-brother, whom he chooses to meet instead. As the two confront their shared legacy, their encounter takes a surprising turn.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was the largest and most dangerous clandestine organization in American history. It amassed billions in stolen gold and silver, all buried in hidden caches across the United States. Since 1865 treasure hunters have searched, but little of that immense wealth has ever been found. Now, one hundred and sixty years later, two factions of what remains of the Knights of the Golden Circle want that lost treasure--one to spend it for their own ends, the other to preserve it.

Jerzy Kosinski was a great enigma of post-World War II literature. When he exploded onto the American literary scene in 1965 with his best-selling novel The Painted Bird, he was revered as a Holocaust survivor and refugee from the world hidden behind the Soviet Iron Curtain.But soon the facade began to crack, and behind the public persona emerged a ruthless social climber, sexual libertine, and pathological liar who may have plagiarized his greatest works.

City Folk and Country Folk is a seemingly gentle yet devastating satire of the aristocratic and pseudo-intellectual elites of 1860s Russia. Upending Russian literary clichés of female passivity and rural gentry benightedness, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya centers her story on a common-sense, hardworking noblewoman and her self-assured daughter living on their small rural estate.

The small plains town of Ingleside, Nebraska, is populated by down-on-their-luck ranchers and new money, ghosts and seers, drugs and greed, the haves and the have-nots. Lives ripple through each other to surprising effect, though the connections fluctuate between divisive gulfs and the most intimate closeness. In Glory Days Melissa Fraterrigo combines gritty realism with magical elements to paint an arrestingly stark portrait of the painful transitions of twenty-first-century, small-town America.

When Clovis and Christelle find themselves face-to-face on a train heading to the outskirts of Paris, their unexpected encounter propels them on a journey toward understanding. Clovis, a young undocumented African, struggles with the pain and shame of his brutal childhood and abusive exploits as a child soldier. Christelle, a young French nurse, has her own dark experiences but translates her suffering into an unusual capacity for empathy.

Tara Laskowski's demonically clever stories break the rules of a "decent" society, providing a definitive guide on the etiquette of obesity, dementia, infertility, homicide, arson, and more. Blending humor with a sharp social commentary, Laskowski introduces us to cynical yet sympathetic characters as each story unfolds. Snarky but optimistic, these characters are the folks you want sitting next to you at your next dinner party...or in your prison cell.

Written in the 1970s and published posthumously in Polish in 2012, Milosz's deliberately unfinished novel is set in a dystopian future where hierarchy, patriarchy, and religion no longer exist. Echoing the structure of The Captive Mind and written in an experimental, postmodern style, Milosz's sole work of science fiction follows four individuals: Karel, a disaffected young rebel; Lino, an astronaut who abandons his life of privilege; Petro, a cardinal racked with doubt; and Ephraim, a potential prophet in exile.

These stories reveal the complicated underbelly of the country's most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. When a desperately lonely woman finds herself on a bad date with a rugged man, she must decide whether to sacrifice the life of a bear in order to keep the man's affection. After having a nightmare about a mallard, a young man wakes to discover he's choking the woman he loves. When his mother starts dating a slimy pizza parlor owner, a young boy must carefully consider his loyalties.

Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin--its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history. A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future.