An unforgettable chronicle of a year of minor-league baseball in a small Iowa town that follows not only the travails of the players of the Clinton LumberKings but also the lives of their dedicated fans and of the town itself.Award-winning essayist Lucas Mann delivers a powerful debut in his telling of the story of the 2010 season of the Clinton LumberKings. Along the Mississippi River, in a Depression-era stadium, young prospects from all over the world compete for a chance to mov...

Lucas Mann turns his attention, tenderness, self-reflection, and humor to contemporary fatherhood. He looks closely at all the joys, frustrations, subtleties, and contradictions within an experience that often goes under-discussed. At once intimate and expansive, Mann chronicles his own life with his young daughter, but also looks outward to the cultural and political baggage that surrounds and permeates these everyday experiences. Moving through memoir, lyric essay, literary analysis, and...

An intimate portrait of a marriage intertwined with a meditation on reality TV that reveals surprising connections and the meaning of an authentic life. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.In Lucas Mann's trademark vein--fiercely intelligent, self-deprecating, brilliantly observed, idiosyncratic, personal, funny, and infuriating--Captive Audience is an appreciation of reality television wrapped inside a love letter to his wife, with whom he shares the guilty pleasure of wa...

Lucas Mann was only thirteen years old when his brother Josh—charismatic and ambitious, funny and sadistic, violent and vulnerable—died of a heroin overdose. Although his brief life is ultimately unknowable, Josh is both a presence and an absence in the author’s life that will not remain unclaimed. As Josh’s story is told in kaleidoscopic shards of memories assembled from interviews with his friends and family, as well as from the raw material of his journals, a revealing, startling portra...

From the national bestselling author of Lord Fear and Class A comes "a tender, humane, comic, brainy, unsettling achievement” (Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship) about what it means to live an authentic life and what it means to love a person.In Lucas Mann's trademark vein—fiercely intelligent, self-deprecating, brilliantly observed, idiosyncratic, personal, funny, and infuriating—Captive Audience is...

"Dermont's short story collection, which follows her debut novel ( The Starboard Sea, 2012), demonstrates the author's versatility and sardonic humor…Dermont delivers strong prose and intriguing characters who frequently defy stereotypical ideals…the overall effect is a tight collection that takes the reader in unexpected, often disconcerting, directions. Full of irony and contradictions, this compilation of contemporary short stories is a worthwhile effort."– Kirkus R...

A spellbinding story of a young American abroad and a star-crossed relationship: "This is a novel to get lost in." — The Miami HeraldLita del Cielo is the daughter of two Colombian immigrants who arrived in America with nothing and made a fortune with their Latin food empire. Now Lita has been granted one year to pursue her studies in Paris before returning to work in the family business. She moves into a crumbling Left Bank mansion known as "The House of ...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionLonglisted for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Prize“[A] terrific first novel. . . . Why worry about labeling a book this good? Just read it.” —Laurie Muchnick, New York Times Book ReviewJess is fifteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family to drive west to California, hoping to save as many...

We first met Avery in two of the stories featured in Dana Johnson's awardwinning collection Break Any Woman Down. As a young girl, she and her family escape the violent streets of Los Angeles to a more gentrified existence in suburban West Covina. This average life, filled with school, trips to 7Eleven to gawk at Tiger Beat magazine, and family outings to Dodger Stadium, is soon interrupted by a past she cannot escape, personified in the guise of her violent cousin Keith.When Kei...

From Jerusalem to Ghana to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, a woman reclaims her history in a "beautifully written and thought-provoking" memoir (Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and Zeitoun).A biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, Emily Raboteau never felt at home in America. As the daughter of an African American religious historian, she understood the Promised Land as the spiritual realm black people yearned ...

In Anthony Carelli's remarkable debut, Carnations, the poems attempt to reanimate dead metaphors as blossoms: wild and lovely but also fleeting, mortal, and averse to the touch. Here, the poems are carnations, not only flowers, but also body-making words. Nodding to influences as varied as George Herbert, Francis Ponge, Fernando Pessoa, and D. H. Lawrence, Carelli asserts that the poet’s materials—words, objects, phenomena—are sacred, wilting in the moment, yet perennially renewed...

From celebrated art historian, curator, and teacher Sarah Lewis, a fascinating examination of how our most iconic creative endeavors—from innovation to the arts—are not achievements but conversions, corrections after failed attempts.The gift of failure is a riddle: it will always be both the void and the start of infinite possibility. The Rise—part investigation into a psychological mystery, part an argument about creativity and art, and part a soulful cel...