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Fiction. THIN RISING VAPORS by Seth Rogoff (author of FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith. Ezra Stern hasn't seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceased's property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abel's house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friend's reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abel's voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abel's writings, the coherence of the story of Abel's life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total otherness--the unbearably intimate.

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Poetry. Italian Studies. Haunted by three thousand years of artists who made pilgrimage to the Eternal City, collaborators Elizabeth Cooperman and Thomas Walton gather impressions from the ruinous streets in and around Rome. The result is a literary mosaic that aligns itself with the ecstatic baroque of Bernini, the concentrated vision of Caravaggio, and the sublime uncertainty of Keats, as it resists the forces of another dark age. Dazzling with image and anecdote, with comedy and cobblestones, with headless statues and the bright robes of street performers, with shadow and cicada and shock of light, THE LAST MOSAIC is an aesthetic call to arms to listen, a battle cry to be impressed, and a plea to get lost.

Poetry. When asked by a friend why he recently he had been writing only poetry, Marvin Cohen, octogenarian author of many novels, stories, essays and plays, quipped that he had run out of prose. It would be as apt to say that, in these delightfully carefree rhymed homilies about the irreducible vagaries of life, death, and evolution, he has leapt off the ground, into the air.

Fiction. Stephen Moles (author of THE MOST WRETCHED THING IMAGINABLE) returns with his most complex and rewarding novel yet. ALL THE WORLD'S A SIMULATION is a metafictional tour de force featuring Shakespeare, Snow White and an infinite number of evil Stephen Hawkings. While its main characters attempt to escape from it, the book constantly rewrites itself before the reader's gaze to reveal a profound secret about the power behind this and all other literary works. Thoroughly playful yet deeply serious, this extraordinary novel offers a personality-altering reading experience and an initiation into the realm of dark meaning. This edition includes as an appendix two related works, the novellas Fossil People and Life.exe.

Fiction. 2018 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Literary Adult Fiction. Al Lehman is a bourgeois Everyman, whose true nature is mysterious, radically unformed, incomplete, and frustrated, even as the quotidian circumstances of his life are drearily grounded in a fixed temporal reality. In this episodic novel, comic and philosophical, written in the late 70s in Cohen's highly idiosyncratic and extraordinarily poetic language, different aspects of Lehman's quest to exist in the scope of finitude, in the belly of a universe that does not fully nourish him, but is the source of all nourishment, are brilliantly distilled. INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN is a companion novel to WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI, whose central figure could be Lehman's wish-fulfilling dream projection: a Don Juan who exists in a world of limitless physical and emotional gratification. Taken together, the two novels comprise a kind of comedic Either/Or in which are explored a wide range of the merits and dismerits of the real and ideal.

Fiction. Every possible life--charmed, doomed, or both--of a Don Juan of 1970s New York, is captured, in its every conceivable inflection, in Marvin Cohen's comic episodic novel WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI. The philanderer at the heart of the novel is hopelessly, effortlessly, universally, even fatally attractive to women. His oversized invulnerability is both monstrous and very recognizably human. Gervasi is a kind of necessary mythic extrapolation of the ego, an imaginary counterweight to the reality of self-loss, a King Midas whose limitless power is his own undoing, and who is ultimately shown, through Cohen's Cubist technique of exhaustively presenting every perspective on his character, to exist in a kind of Hell of spiritual isolation and inability to love. As always, Cohen writes with a vigorous wit; his poetic dialect reforges the English language into utterly original, surprising and delightful forms. Written in the late 70s and never before published, this novel is one of a pair with INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN (published simultaneously), Cohen's novel about a non-Don Juan.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Religion & Spirituality. In WINGS, Israeli poet Amir Or's thirteenth book of poetry, transcendence is not a flight from the concrete intimacy of history and experience, but an opening within it, an interrogation of its baffling sweep, its beauty and its violence, that reveals, in the heart of unity, a profound multiplicity, the community of love, and the endless labor of birth. In these poems, we hear the sky speak with a music that seems to be wrought of hard roads, and vice versa: we see heaven and earth as shimmering mirages of each other, and the pilgrim's journey beyond time, towards liberation, as the secret heart of both. This bilingual edition follows WINGS with an encore, the brief Basho-like sequence Travelog, both translated by poet Seth Michelson. It also includes explanatory notes and an insightful critical afterword by the translator, and an interview with Amir Or by Nevena Milojevi¿.

Fiction. In METAMORPHOSIS, Doug Nufer first metamorphoses The Metamorphosis, Kafka's famous story, by subjecting a composite English translation of Kafka's full text to anagrammatic transformations that carefully retain the semantic outline of the original, but submerge it into the bubbling stew of zany detail that emerges from Nufer's richly inventive, often hilarious, and strangely beautiful wordplay. Then he turns his attention to an iconic excerpt from the beginning of the German text, rendering it into a dizzyingly diverse series of shapes and effects by various technical means in a virtuosic demonstration reminiscent of Queneau's Exercises in Style. I wonder where my project belongs, Nufer writes in an afterword; Maybe the appeal of venturing into a maze of translations and other constraints is analogous to the appeal a traveling salesman living with his parents and sister at the turn of the last century might have felt when, at the end of another awful day of work, he took up his needles to play.

Fiction. Marcus Schott, sacked from serving succour to suckers and loans to losers, leaves the office life to luxuriate in literature. His plan is to read every title featured in Dr. Peter Boxall's notorious compendium 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Motoring toward a small pre-purchased cottage on the Orkney Isles, Marcus soon encounters fatal hiccups in his scheme to compress a lifetime's reading into three years. These hiccups include skittish librarian Isobel Bartmel, self-cauterising critic Raine Upright, and the unpredictable happenings of the characterless Orkney peoples, too long trapped in their bothies of banality, each pushing Marcus further from his ecstatic vision of total list completion. A light comedy with a sunny paradisiac quality, rich in verbal virtuosity, Rabelaisian lists, and the occasional outburst of cheerful, cathartic violence, THE 1002ND BOOK is the ultimate summer novel against summer novels: an anti-crowdpleaser with a tidy, cinematic plot that should please both crowds and all those thoroughly depressed by them.

Every so often a novel appears that demands a paradigm shift, that redefines what literature is and what its powers may be. This is such a work. A novel of seemingly modest dimensions, it relates, in scrupulously direct, clear, and naturalistic prose, a story of the tense reunion of two old friends in a Maine bar. That story, and the stories nested within it, while fascinating, are hardly melodramatic; not much happens of more consequence than the refilling of a beer glass. And yet, by the novels conclusion, the reader will be faced with a dilemma as unexpected and perplexing as any thriller could provide, and as piercing, substantial and profoundly involving as anything in the work of literatures great psychologists. The first reading of this book is an unforgettable, shocking surprise; and each re-reading brings new rewards.

"These 'insomniac episodes' consist of 84 tantalizing descriptions of hallucinated Magritte murals, painted on the inside of poet Joseph Reich's sleepless eyelids."--Back cover.

"This series of thirty tiny, enigmatic stories and essays ... is a text, or so it itself seems to claim in its opening lines, that consists solely of errors."--Back cover.

Fiction. Women's Studies. Laura Davenport's poetic and harrowing AN OCCASIONAL HISTORY investigates how language and a person's place within it come to be defined in the context of an abusive relationship--one whose terrible violence is ever so gradually revealed, as layers of language and forgetting are progressively peeled away. Through five sections of differing form, in which romance novels, the OED, and etymological histories play prominent roles, we approach the core of knowledge step by step, and come to experience not merely abuse and its ramifications, but the central role in it of how language is shaped by power relations, and vice versa. Formally unique, acutely painful yet uplifting, and exquisitely written in every detail, AN OCCASIONAL HISTORY sustains an almost magical double perspective: a deeply knowing aesthetic distance and hard-won wisdom, and an intimate, willing identification with the immediate, almost to the point of being lost within it. In AN OCCASIONAL HISTORY, as in all great writing, language and soul interrogate themselves through the power of poetry.

Fiction. Edited by Walter Smart. Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drug-addled, revolting, and hilarious, J. F. Mamjjasond and Fafnir Finkelmeyer's HOPTIME is both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it. In the words of Finkelmeyer, it was for its authors a kind of scripture and something fateful and necessary; it was a way, he writes in the Foreword to this edition, for the two of us to love each other in the only way we could, willingly and totally entwined in each other's foolish, ugly, wise and beautiful fantasies, which we heard, supported and forgave. In the end, this colorful romp of two outrageous souls lost together in a sort of infinite poetic and imaginative wilderness is not only explosively funny, but moving; the reader, too, is freed into the intimacy and deep silence of a vast inner space, and finds in that solitude one is not alone.

Matthew Gasda's gorgeously contrapuntal "Orchid Elegy" is a long poem that, like a fugue, moves at once backwards and forwards, joining an impulse towards restless exploration and budding divagation with an instinct for recapitulation. Its 179 brief numbered sections are held both together and apart by a semantic tensegrity achieved through graceful thematic stratification; each structural node experiences the quality of its own solitude in resonance with an elegiac melos unfolding around and through it. These parcels of finitude, "petals like the characters of a play", constantly seek, both in form and in thought, the pattern of a lost Eurydice, even in the shifting, retreating presence of the Other, "for the most important category of beauty is the beauty of that which is lost". The spiral of longing persists through love, hunger and death. Yet, something is accomplished, if not necessarily captured, through the turning of this gyre of "lament and encomium". Tracing and dissecting through the alchemy of metaphor the form of the beloved, "slowly the poem emerges from its secret" and "consciousness emerges"; the poem, or the soul, becomes body, and vice versa, "a shared node transparent -- shining", and with renewed purpose, the elegy of life begins again.

Poet Joseph Reich writes from a great inner pressure of experience and memory. His senses are open to an America frozen in a forever unconsummated act of rotting; with humor, empathy, and a vast, restless energy, his experience bursts out, capturing the fleeting world in a poetic bubble with an almost painterly repletion, so that for a moment it becomes whole and tangible, authentic both to the outer reality to which it is a touching tribute, and to his own nature.