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In this collection of short stories that focuses on the modern-day experiences of Indigenous people living in Oklahoma, Johnston documents the quiet sorrow of everyday life as her characters traverse the normalized, heartbreaking rites of passage such as burying your grandfather, mother, or husband, becoming a sex worker, or reconnecting with your family after prison; the effects are subtle, yet loud, and always enduring. Whether Johnston's characters are coming of age and/or grappling with complex family dynamics, Johnston delivers the economy of loss and resilience that marks this post-colonial collection with biting, captivating prose that demands to be read from start to finish.
Set in Bangladesh and the United States, the eight stories in The Bird Catcher address gender expectations, familial love, and questions of identity and belonging. In "The Anomalous Wife," when Nirjhara decides she wants to walk into the ocean, her husband of thirty years is confused: she has the perfect life, he insists, the life of a dutiful housewife and mother who wants for nothing in her adopted country. The staff at the psychiatric facility can't even pronounce Nirjhara's name, let alone understand her mordant humor and her use of wide-ranging literary references (from Rabindranath Tagore to Sylvia Plath to The Ancient Mariner) to describe her despair. The other stories are equally res...
Greer Michaels has come home to tend to his dying mother-but this means reckoning with the ghosts of his past. Set in 1977 in a town mired in racial tensions, where family secrets are rooted in the traumatic history of the segregated South, As a River is a spare and lyrical exploration of the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
A child of alcoholics and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Carly Israel describes her journey to sobriety and the challenges she faces as the mother of a child with complex medical issues. A memoir of recovery and transformation, and a thoughtful reflection on generational trauma, self-acceptance, and gratitude. Foreword by Jennifer Pastiloff.
In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn't the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she was a child, lives alone with her dog and struggles to finish her book. The photographer, stunted by the death of his grandmother and caretaker, struggles to take a single picture and enters into a complicated relationship with the writer. The...
The world envisioned by Kingdom of Women is much like today's-except that the Roman Catholic Church has allowed women to be priests; North Dakota has seceded from the United States; and women are forming vigilante groups and fighting back against their oppressors.
Isla, a Black, transgender girl, is just an ordinary student when government forces arrest her and her teacher for revolutionary activity. This action turns Isla into an activist working for social justice. What follows is an exhilarating ride marked by danger, close calls, and betrayals, with love and friendship as the reward among a LGBTQ+ community. Throughout this coming of age dystopian novel are the cornerstones of an authoritarian government: loss of civil rights, violence, suppression, and, most importantly, the inevitable countermovement. It is within this movement that all human life is valued and fought for, and it is within this movement that heroes are born.
Johnson's dark magical-realist narrative weaves familial haints, shadows of the transatlantic slave trade, and the black mystical into a liminal world where they are forced to confront themselves, each other, and the powerful anchors of their emotional inheritances.
'An enchanting story about love, loss and the power of language' Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory Sometimes you have to start with what's lost to truly find yourself... Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood at her father's feet as he and his team gather words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. One day, she sees a slip of paper containing a forgotten word flutter to the floor unclaimed. And so Esme begins to collect words for another dictionary in secret: The Dictionary of Lost Words. But to do so she must journey into a world on the cusp of change as the Great War looms and women fight for the vote. Can the power of lost words from the past f...
After the passing of a volatile patriarch, one Black family navigates social and familial issues in order to survive.