A burned-out teacher leaves New York City--and her abusive alcoholic partner--for the Center, a bucolic retreat compound, where, despite a nationwide paper ban, she' s forced to secretly document her past in notebooks and reinvent her story on paper for future generations. Synopsis: Trapped in a dead-end teaching job, a toxic relationship, and a cramped Manhattan apartment, Koö gon abandons it all for the Center: a secluded compound devoted to yoga, " empathic studies," and the secret pres...

Winner of the Leapfrog Global Fiction PrizeAmphibians invites further contemplation of female physicality--what it means to reside in a female form. An amphibious aircraft crashes in Maine, a young girl skinny-dips with her elders, a distraught cruise ship dancer boards a water taxi in Grenada, and travelers to Dubai and Abu Dhabi long for familiar oceans; back in New England, small-town artists try to smudge out their tedium with seaside transgressions. Amphibians celebrates home i...

There's no place quite like Maine. It's Vacationland. The birthplace of L.L. Bean and the whoopie pie. Maine's landscape encompasses mountains, forests, beaches, islands, and even a desert! The winters are long and brutal, and the summers are plagued by black flies, venomous caterpillars, and tourists. But despite these challenges, and in part because of them, the people who call Maine home are some of the most generous, hard-working folks you'll ever meet. They never fail to show up (even...

Elle.com described this debut novel as "an alternately hilarious and poignant look at the unsettled state of one woman trying to make it outside the socially sanctioned college-office-marriage trajectory." Karla, 22, is thrilled to be hired as an entertainer on the Sound of Music cruise ship-where the rum punch is 80 percent Kool-Aid, the ice sculptures are plastic, and her "fake it till you make it" M.O. seems adventuresome. Karla is less thrilled when new beau Jack suggests they form a s...

“A luminous novel.”—Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Orphan Train, The Exiles, and A Piece of the World“Pure color!” wrote Paul Gauguin to his wife, Mette, from the South Seas. “Everything must be sacrificed to it.”In Off Island, novelist Lara Tupper imagines Gauguin—chasing new light, new color—ran away to a new island, a rugged outpost off the coast of Maine. Ther...