Wendy is an aspiring contemporary artist whose adventures have taken her to galleries, art openings, and parties in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Toronto. In Wendy, Master of Art, Walter Scott's sly wit and social commentary zero in on MFA culture as our hero hunkers down to complete a master of fine arts at the University of Hell in small-town Ontario.

 

Finally Wendy has space to refine her artistic practice, but in this calm, all of her unresolved insecurities and fears explode at full volume—usually while hungover. What is the post-Jungian object as symbol? Will she ever understand her course reading—or herself? What if she's just not smart enough? As she develops as an artist and a person, Wendy also finds herself in a teaching position, mentoring a perpetually sobbing grade-grubbing undergrad.

 

 

 

 

 

Kolko’s groundbreaking and widely cited study of the Vietnam War, with a new postscript by the author.

 

"A book that goes far beyond the ambitions of earlier writers by synthesizing the difficult story of United States intervention with the yet more complicated internal dynamic of the Vietnamese Revolution. A stylish, passionate, stimulating, and provocative work that needs to be read by anyone concerned about the overweening role of the United States in the world." —Richard Gott, Manchester Guardian

 

 

 

 

 

Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland—a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits—assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.

 

 

 

 

 

A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.

 

When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.

 

Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.

 

Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.

 

 

 

"Angels is Johnson's first novel and his best. A concise, lyrical, brutal, and loving book about prisons, factories, psychiatric hospitals, trailer parks, and the open road."

 

 

Angels puts Jamie Mays—a runaway wife toting along two kids—and Bill Houston—ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con—on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise.

 

 

 

 

 

In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell—broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure—set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: America Concentrate) seemed to Russell to embody America's divided soul. The journey, with two friends intent on filming the ensuing mayhem, quickly reduces the trio to filthy drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in a suddenly, increasingly diverse new land of minority-majority cities and of unrivaled ethnic and religious variety.

 

 

 

 

 

The third book in Tommy Pico's Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation? The narrator wonders what happens to the sense of self when the illusion of security has been stripped away. And for an indigenous person, how do these lost markers of identity echo larger cultural losses and erasures in a changing political landscape? In part taking its cue from A.R. Ammons's Garbage, Teebs names this liminal space "Junk," in the sense that a junk shop is full of old things waiting for their next use; different items that collectively become indistinct. But can there be a comfort outside the anxiety of utility? An appreciation of "being" for the sake of being? And will there be Chili Cheese Fritos?

 

 

 

Best read aloud in the company of a four-year-old, Emily Jenkins's Toys series is a marvel of complex character development and sly existential anguish. I would kill to write characters this good. There is this stingray named StingRay who always pretends to know stuff that she doesn't know, a buffalo named Lumphy who is brave but also scared, an enthusiastic rubber ball named Plastic, a wise towel named Tuk-Tuk, plus this sheep who is missing one ear who is obsessed with talking about the one time she went outside and ate real grass... as well as a dryer (Frank, he lives in the basement), assorted mice, a rubber shark, and these Barbies who can't talk and who all the other toys despise... at one point a stuffed animal who doesn't talk is described as having "furniture eyes" ... I'm obsessed with these books.

 

 

In these six linked stories from Emily Jenkins, and illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner Paul O. Zelinsky, readers will meet three extraordinary friends. Lumphy is a stuffed buffalo. StingRay is a stuffed stingray. And Plastic... well, Plastic isn't quite sure what she is. They all belong to the Little Girl who lives on the high bed with the fluffy pillows. A very nice person to belong to. Together is best for these three best friends. Together they look things up in the dictionary, explore the basement, and argue about the meaning of life. And together they face dogs, school, television commercials, the vastness of the sea, and the terrifying bigness of the washing machine.

 

 

 

 

 

Set in the border states of Kansas and Missouri, Woe to Live On explores the nature of lawlessness and violence, friendship and loyalty, through the eyes of young recruit Jake Roedel. Where he and his fellow First Kansas Irregulars go, no one is safe, no one can be neutral. Roedel grows up fast, experiencing a brutal parody of war without standards or mercy. But as friends fall and families flee, he questions his loyalties and becomes an outsider even to those who have become outlaws.

 

 

 

 

 

Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work published here for the first time in book form, including the provocative and charged "Brazilian Is Not a Race," a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author's native Rio Grande Valley; it also includes widely-circulated "128-131," a caustic, hilarious, tender account memorializing three days in jail during the Occupy movement, one of the many insurgencies that provide the context and kinesis of this powerful collection. This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle through our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.