A collection honoring the experience of human connection.Inspired by classic Motown and the Midwest's rich history of social poetics, Andrew Collard's poetry collection asks readers to trust their bodies and the experience of human connection in a society that alienates us from our handiwork and from each other. Set largely in Southeast Michigan, these poems evoke the joys and difficulties of raising a family amid financial uncertainty in the empire of the automobi...

These lyrical poems about growing up and becoming a parent in Detroit reflect deeply felt connections to places and experiences that inevitably fall victim to irrevocable change.Sprawl is a reconstruction of the constantly shifting landscape of metropolitan Detroit, which extends over six counties and is home to over four million people, from the perspective of a single parent raising a young child amid financial precarity. Part memoir, part invention, the book is ...

What is a handywoman to do when her not-so-handy husband decides to retire and help around the house?

Belying its title, "Summer of Love" is one man's story of how his entire world was turned upside down on a beautiful summer day so many years ago. Every assumption he has made about life is destroyed, leaving him with only questions.

Selected for the 2006 National Poetry Series by August KleinzahlerWilliam Stobb's poems attend calmly to a dynamic world. Nature, family, and friends are among the shifting systems where Stobb finds poems. His fluency in a variety of forms—from the measured tenderness of Jay Meek to the oceanic surrealism of Donald Revell—enacts the tension between order and entropy in the physical world we live in."Stobb has nerve, talent, and engages this madly accelerati...

Home for his parents' funeral ... all the familiar, yet unfamiliar, things. And the horizon. How could he have forgotten the horizon? Mind-bending fiction from a Hugo-winning author.

Michael Collier's poems are like a living film of the image of one's past. In rich detail, they bring to life the geography of childhood—commonplace events that have a unique texture of one's own—a dream of flying, a secret obsession, a school pageant, a jam session in the garage. The memories are folded into the heart, but with an inevitable sense of loss, a sense of capturing "the moment held in the air, the illusion of something whole, something true."Water and light are constan...

What is the single greatest secret to a breakout writing career? What is it that every agent and editor wants to see, and every reader delights in?It's VOICE. Everyone talks about it, yet no one seems able to define it. Voice has therefore been the most elusive aspect of the entire writing craft to teach.Until now.In this book, #1 bestselling writing teacher James Scott Bell reveals the true source of voice, and what any writer in any genre can do t...

**"Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington PostThe New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean VuongHow else do we return to ourselves but to foldThe page so it points to the good partIn this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sit...

Bold new essays on how to craft a thrilling read--in any genre--from the bestselling author of The Dead LandsAnyone familiar with the meteoric rise of Benjamin Percy's career will surely have noticed a certain shift: After writing two short-story collections and a literary novel, he delivered the werewolf thriller Red Moon and the postapocalyptic epic The Dead Lands. Now, in his first book of nonfiction, Percy challenges the notion that l...

Beloved for his keen eye, sharp wit, and relentless self-mockery, David Foster Wallace has been celebrated by both critics and fans as the voice of a generation. In this hilarious essay, originally published in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, he chronicles seven days in the Caribbean aboard the m.v. Zenith. As he partakes in supposedly fun activities offered on the luxury tour, he offers riotous anecdotes and unparalleled insight into contemporary Americ...

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories range in setting from Japan at the outset of World War II to a remote cabin in the woods of Wyoming, and the characters that inhabit them range from a misanthropic survivor of an apocalyptic flood to a unicorn hidden in a suburban house. Whether fantastical or realistic, gothic or lyrical, the stories here are uniformly ...