In the aftermath of a devastating epidemic, bodies marked with eerie patterns called withers become symbols of a painful past— a past many want to forget. Riatta, one of the marked, finds herself cast out, a survivor of controversial surgeries that saved her life but cost her everything else. Seeking refuge, she recovers in the home of a surgeon who once saved her. But when she learns his wife is pregnant, a shadow falls over this fragile sanctuary. Ruthless organ traffickers roam the stre...

When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everythin...

Whether crisp and understated or capacious and kinetic, the poems in Lee Upton' s seventh collection are lyrically dexterous and reverberant. Shrewd, formally ambitious, excavating cultural myths and contradictions, these poems allow the ordinary and the supernatural to inhabit one another. The poems are often attentive to suffering: torture as it persists through centuries, the extinction of species, and the agonies of illness, grief, and the blasting of innocence are meditated upon. At t...

Tabitha is a lonely fifty-year-old biographer who, in order to restore her self-respect and pay her rent, attempts to write two biographies simultaneously: one about an actor so famous his face is on the side of buses, and the other about a popular writer of children's books recently outed as an author of erotic fiction. Is Tabitha ready to deal with interviewing an actor so handsome and charismatic she thinks he should be bottled and sprayed on belligerent people as a form of crowd contro...

A young woman living alone sees a mysterious older woman roaming the woods outside her house. As they strike up an unlikely friendship, the narrator finds herself questioning what she knows about love, friendship, and family.Lee Upton’s most recent books are Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2015); The Tao of Humiliation: Stories, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Award, finalist for The Paterson Prize, and...

Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science.A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this gui...

A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You’ll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic kissing. Delicious kissing. Kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union … Kisses in this anthology may be romantic or funny or comforting or erotic or mournful—and more … We...

Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these twenty stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a woman who searches through her past lives to recall a romantic encounter with the poet W. B. Yeats; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the poignant scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman.Writer-i...

“Poignant, exquisite, and endlessly witty” — Kirkus Review (Starred Review)“People—the species defies logic!” reflects the protagonist of one of the dazzling, intricate stories in Visitations. In this latest collection from Lee Upton, characters navigate often bewildering situations, from the homeschooled girl trying to communicate telepathically with an injured man she finds on the beach to the experimental theater troupe (called the Community Playas) composed pr...