From the Back Cover: Born to the sun god and the earthly princess, Kanti, Radheya’s birthright is to inherit sovereignty over all the kingdoms of the earth. But a quirk of fate sees the newborn baby abandoned on the waves of the River Ganges—not to learn of his true identity until hours before his glorious death some four decades later.

Though he is raised in obscurity by humble peasants, Radheya’s natural kingly qualities cannot be covered by the poverty and disadvantage of his circumstances. They shine through like sun’s rays through dark storm clouds, and, against all odds, Radheya makes his mark on the world.

The Ballad of Radheya tells the life story of one of the most poignant figures of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata.

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About the Author: Krishna Rose Sharanya is a British writer with an interest in Indian literature and in India’s mystical teachings on reincarnation and the spiritual self. As a university student in 1989, she found herself reading alongside each other Kamala Subramaniam’s English translation of the Mahabharata and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, both of which captivated her immensely. Of all the many tales and threads of life stories contained in the Mahabharata, it is the life story of the character Radheya that has remained with her throughout the years as the most compelling, and she became inspired to showcase Radheya’s story in a book of its own in classical style English poetry inspired by Tennyson, and decorated with her sensitive pencil illustrations.

Krishna enjoys traveling to different countries around the world, and spent a number of years in India visiting the ancient historical sites that were the settings of the stories in the Mahabharata. She also runs a teaching consultancy in England called Avesha Presentations Hinduism Workshops for Schools, which provides support to religious education teachers around Britain and gives thousands of students of all ages each year an adventuresome day of storytelling from the Mahabharata and exploring India’s timeless philosophical ideas and culture. In the summer of 2013, Krishna began work on a series of novels for children featuring themes of mysticism and reincarnation.

Caroline Tate is the consummate good girl who always played by the rules. When her world spirals out of control and crashes down around her, Caroline becomes the girl who made all the wrong choices. At twenty-one she is failing out of law school and five months pregnant. In a series of letters to her unborn child Caroline discovers not only the power of love but the true meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

Ka is a Bearer. A surrogate for wealthy parents who want the perfect child. It’s the only life she knows or wants. Until the day she meets the father of the child she carries inside.

From the Publisher: Poetry celebrating children separated from original family: A valedictorian honoring her long lost biological family; a child reminiscing of life before the flood; a former child soldier chasing peace, chased by the ghosts of war; an adoptive youth’s loving plea to adoptive parents; a little girl’s tea party conversation with her favorite doll. These are among the many fictional voices of displaced children in Beautiful. This poetry, written in the adult voice yet conveying child spirit, is inspired by displaced youth Jaiya John has worked with over a lifetime. The poetic scenarios inhabiting Beautiful are entry points for our union with the true heart of child separation from original family. Beautiful is much more than a source of inspiration. Its words reveal the majesty and vulnerability of all children, especially those uprooted. Beautiful is an empowerment anthem for youth, a resource for those who love, care for, and work with these purposeful souls. Child light shines through these pages, asserting the demand of our young for their dignity, while portraying their limitless power to heal, grow, and flourish. A poetic companion to Jaiya John’s Reflection Pond, Beautiful is the kind of treasure we polish repeatedly, its truth seeping into our compassion. Struggle and triumph. Solitude and belonging. A journey of sunflowers toward the sun of selfhood. In these pages we find Beauty born.

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About the Author: Jaiya John lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he enjoys the beauty of his daughter, Jordan, and serves his life’s mission through writing, speaking, and mentoring. A former professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., he holds a doctorate degree in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has served as a trainer and consultant in multicultural education, and is a former associate director of the National Center for Permanency for African American Children. From inmates to educators, and children to clergy, he has spoken his inspirational messages on human relations to audiences worldwide.

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By the Same Author: Black Baby White Hands: A View from the Crib (2002); Legendary (2008); and Reflection Pond (2007).

This story, whose title is taken from a line in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, won the 1991 Best Novella Award from the Horror Writers of America. It tells the story of a man who, after his parents are both killed in a horrific automobile crash caused by a drunk driver, discovers surrender papers for two children, executed one week before his own birth, by a woman whose name he does not recognize, in a town in California, among the papers of his dead father who, like himself, was a lawyer. Not being able to imagine why his father would keep such a document among his personal papers in a safe deposit box, he asks the obvious question: Am I adopted? Against the advice of his family, he seeks the answer to this troubling question, and finds something even more horrible than he could ever have imagined.

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About the Author: David Morrell was born in Canada. He is a former Professor of American Literature at the University of Iowa. He now lives in Santa Fe, NM. Mr. Morrell is a multiple bestselling author, with over fifteen million copies of his books in print, translated into 22 languages. His novels include First Blood (basis for the Sylvester Stallone action movie Rambo), Testament and Blood Oath, and, more recently, Extreme Denial and Double Image. In the Foreword to his collection of short stories, Black Evening, David Morrell wrote that his fiction often reveals his inmost fears: “... I grew up with a morbid fear of war, that economic necessity [which] forced my mother to put me in an orphanage for a time, [and] I could never be sure whether the woman who reclaimed me was the same person who had given me up.”

From the Publisher: Fifteen unforgettable prose-poems and over 20 true short stories by NDN author Laramie Harlow [NDN = Indian, apparently]; Becoming is her impressive (and controversial) second collection. Her sensational first book, Sleeps with Knives, was published in 2012 by Blue Hand Books. Her writing about being a Lost Bird, a journalist-author-blogger, a grandma, and the Seven Fires Prophecy in modern times is pure alchemy. Times change and people change so Laramie Harlow is about becoming the change... “Becoming” Laramie, Lethal Journalist about her foray into becoming an editor, Terror Bunny, a story she tells her granddaughter, and Butt Dancer, a chapter about birthdays and her “my bad” and so much more. “... I used to be a rock singer, shop owner, trophy wife, Native history book junkie, journalist, radio show producer. That’s changed like titles change, and names change ... These days I make mosaic. I laugh more. I write poetry when I am moved. I live my culture. I blog about everything.” What’s in the BOX? Brad Pitt says this in the movie Se7en, remember? (Content in the box pushed poor Brad over the edge.) You can say this about what’s in Becoming. “Writing about colonizers, Indian Country and ongoing genocide usually gets someone’s head in a tizzy or butt in an uproar. I do that....” The author Lara Trace Hentz is formerly known as award winning journalist Trace A. DeMeyer.

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About the Author: I am Laramie, a wife, grandma, former rock musician, an artist who writes and takes photos. These days I make mosaic. I laugh more. I write poetry when I am moved. I live my culture. I write about my vision for the world. I blog about everything. I opened my adoption in Wisconsin, a closed adoption record state. It took almost 20 years to find my people and my answers. My ancestors are Tsalgi, Shawnee, French Canadian and Irish, which makes me a breed like many other NDNs. My Harlow clan has an annual pow wow.

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By the Same Author: Sleeps With Knives: Poems (2012).

When a woman is reunited with her mother and daughter for the out-of-wedlock birth of the latter’s child, she learns from her daughter something she hadn’t known about her mother after she dies within days of the birth.

From The New York Times (2/21/82): Good and evil are active principles in Trevor’s fiction. He knows their force and persistency and complexity; he knows the subtle, perverse ways in which they infiltrate the will. In “Being Stolen From,” ... Bridget Lacy, an Irish countrywoman who lives in London, has been raising a little girl she adopted six years ago from a troubled woman in the neighborhood. Bridget has since lost her husband to a younger woman; though it came out of the blue, her husband being a decent man, it also seemed a part of her fate. She has a passive, retiring nature, “a taste for the shadows,” as she puts it, and people have often taken advantage of that. Now the child’s mother has turned up with a social worker, who is also the mother’s husband, and they want the child back. The husband is pleasant and persuasive—“there was an honest niceness in his eyes when he referred to the human side,” as against the legal, where Bridget tries to stand her ground. Still, he is a control freak who has the social worker’s air of representing the authorities, and Bridget’s resistance stimulates his unscrupulousness. She has the strength of her need and love for the child; he of his do-good convictions. Bridget consults her priest and the woman she cleans house for, even, finally, her former husband. They support her in her rights, but she sees a flicker of doubt in their eyes. In the end, the social worker gives up his ugly assault, and Bridget gives up the child. In a way, Bridget’s firm, quiet dignity had defeated him, but she senses that he is probably right about the child’s welfare; his love for the girl’s mother is real, and her own household, darkened by the presence of an aging boarder, is not the right place for a growing child. Everything is determined, she reflects, by the way life uses who you are to put you in your place: her husband with his younger woman, the child with her parents, she with Miss Custle, her boarder, who will soon need looking after. This is a generous art—one that welcomes the homely, the banal, the meager life that writers of Trevor’s sophistication tend to pass by. He has filled Bridget with interest and savor, she is the salt of the earth. Trevor takes risks, for the stringencies of his realism require him to work out in the open, as it were, accountable to the ordinary and the probable, while creating Bridget’s unique, mysterious core. To get the surface details and tonalities just right involves a perfect eye and ear and an exceptional degree of empathy: the ability, as Auden put it, to “be just with the just, filthy with the filthy too.”

— Ted Solotaroff

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About the Author: William Trevor was born in Cork in 1928, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and has spent a great part of his life in Ireland. Since his first novel, The Old Boys, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1964, he has received many honours for his work: the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Allied Irish Banks Prize for Literature and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Recently he was awarded an honorary C.B.E.

From the Dust Jacket: Fifteen-year-old Molly Biden has always been studious, dependable, some might even say saintly. And she’s sick of herself. So when she spots mysterious Grady Dillon, it doesn’t take Molly long to devise a plan to become someone new, someone who will attract Grady’s attention. And attract him she does. But when Molly discovers she’s pregnant, she realizes too late that her makeover has gone much further than she ever intended.

Told in a series of poems, from haiku to sonnets to free verse, The Best and Hardest Thing is the story of a good girl who makes a bad choice—and then has to figure out where to go from there.

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About the Author: Pat Brisson is the author of several books for young children. This is her first young adult novel, and her first book written in poetry. She and her husband have four sons. They live in Phillipsburg, New Jersey.

From The New York Times, October 9, 1927: [O]f all the stories in Yellow Gentian and Blue, one stands out, uniquely dramatic and intensely moving. This is “Bill,” to my mind the most beautiful and memorable story in the book, in which a fine, simple soul, but with a few months to live, advertises for some one to adopt his motherless daughter, and, unable even to kiss her good-bye because he is consumptive, watches her go away with her new parents so engrossed in a parasol that she forgets even to wave back at him. Miss Gale has written this story admirably, with pity and without sentimentality.

—Louis Kronenberger.

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About the Author: Zona Gale was an American author and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. She was born in Portage, Wisconsin, which she often used as a setting in her writing, and attended Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. She later entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from which she received a Bachelor of Literature degree in 1895, and, four years later, a master’s degree. After college, Gale wrote for newspapers in Milwaukee and New York City, for six years. A visit to Portage in 1903 proved a turning point in her literary life, as seeing the sights and sounds of town life led her to comment that her “old world was full of new possibilities.” Gale had found the material she needed for her writing, and returned to Portage in 1904 to concentrate full time on fiction. She wrote and published there until her death in 1938.

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Compiler’s Note: When reprinted in The Short Story Reader, the story was accompanied by a brief introduction: One of the most interesting things about “Bill’s Little Girl” is ... how it came to be written. Zona Gale says: “The City Editor of the New York Evening World once handed me a cutting from the want advertisements of that day’s Morning World. ‘Go and find what lies back of that,’ he said. The advertisement was that one which I have included in the story of Bill[, whose] story is rather like that of the man who had advertised. ...”

Award winning poetry chapbook. Companion to Scott’s novel The Lucky Gourd Shop.

A book about maternal abandonment and betrayal and loss lightened with a few limericks and a bit of satire.

From the Dust Jacket: Pam Durban’s new collection of stories explores the myriad ways people lose, find, and hold on to one another. When all else fails her characters (science, religion, family, self) the powerful act of storytelling itself keeps their broken lives together and fosters hope. Each story in this rewarding and multifaceted collection introduces people who yearn for better lives and find themselves entangled in the hopes and dreams that heal and bind us all. The title story in Soon—chosen by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century anthology—follows two generations of a family whose lives are driven by the “patient and brutal need that people called hope, which ... formed from your present life a future where you would be healed or loved.” In “The Jap Room,” winner of the 2008 Goodheart Prize, a woman tries to help her husband, a World War II veteran, finally come home. “Rowing to Darien” introduces a famous English actress as she rows away from her husband’s rice plantation. In “Hush” a gravely ill man encounters himself in the darkness of Kentucky’s iconic Mammoth Cave. An adopted child waits for his mother to come back for him in “Birth Mother,” and, in “Forward, Elsewhere, Out,” a mother must come to terms with her adolescent son’s sexuality. The stories in this collection deftly broach universal themes of love, loss, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

Durban’s writing has been praised for its depth and mastery of characterization, its ability to persuade readers that the lives of the people in her stories are true, that their troubles and pleasures are real enough to matter. The nuanced and artfully rendered cast in this collection wrestles with the big questions that face us all—Why are we here? How are we to live? What matters most? The thirteen stories in Soon have appeared in earlier forms in Atlanta Magazine, Indiana Review, Georgia Review, Carolina Quarterly, Idaho Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, High Five: An Anthology of Fiction from 10 Years of Five Points, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Short Stories of the Century.

The collection includes a foreword from novelist and short story writer Mary Hood, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize, Townsend Prize, and Lillian Smith Award.

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About the Author: Pam Durban is the author of the novels The Laughing Place (winner of the Townsend Prize), So Far Back (winner of the Lillian Smith Award), and The Tree of Forgetfulness and the short story collection All Set About with Fever Trees. Her short fiction has been published in Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, Epoch, New Virginia Review, Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Durban has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award as well as a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa. With former Georgia poet laureate David Bottoms, she is founding coeditor of Five Points literary magazine. A native of Aiken, South Carolina, she is the Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From the Publisher: After nineteen years, Erica Langley is going home again; yet the prospect is bittersweet. Ron Meers becomes more to Erica than a nice guy helping her find her roots and solve the mystery of her troubling past. In the hopes of winning his heart through his sweet tooth, she takes a “sweet treats” cooking course through Cynthia Lyons’ school. Her sad attempts at baking should have him running the opposite direction, but he doesn’t. Still, if he does care about her, why is he so distant?

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About the Author: Pamela Griffin lives in Texas and divides her time among her first loves—God and family—with writing coming in as a close second. She also loves to bake sweet things, and every Christmas, especially, the house is filled with mouth-watering scents. Like the heroine in her story, Pamela is a bit of a creator and enjoys being inventive if she doesn’t have the usual ingredients on hand. Thankfully, she’s never experienced the major flops that Erica had, and no medical assistance was required for the eaters of her sweet treats. Pamela’s main goal in writing Christian romance is to encourage others through entertaining, hard-to-put-down stories that also heal the wounded spirit.

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Compiler’s Note: The variable page count is due to differing formats (paperback vs. hardcover), type sizes, and line spacing. Presumably, the word count is the same.

When Jasmine’s husband died in a car accident, he left behind a wife and adopted daughter, Rosie, in a world of destruction and grief. The once financially stable world Jasmine grew accustomed to had been unwelcomely exchanged for a life containing three jobs and frightening loneliness. Knowing they need to get away, Jasmine takes Rosie on a trip that unexpectedly bonds them in ways they could never imagine.

There are two things about herself that Izzy has always known with absolute certainty: One, that she was adopted and two, that she has an affinity for the sea. For from her earliest memories on, the ocean has always called out to Izzy. But her adoptive parents thwart her attempts to get closer to the sea at every turn. When Izzy turns eighteen, she goes in search of her past and her birth family. It’s a quest that will take her to the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey, and to a mysterious fur coat that might hold all the answers to Izzy’s questions.

In hard-hitting, sophisticated, often lyrical language, Jan Beatty investigates the idea of the body as cultural machine, shelter, mirage, or home. She rescripts the birth scene with girders and industrial pulleys; the womb as inhabited by a young girl architect. Structurally adventurous, the poems in Boneshaker question icons and invoke taboos, connect desire with place and class, walk the tightrope between sex and love.

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About the Author: Jan Beatty was born in Rosalia Foundling Home in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, an establishment once known as a “home for unwed mothers,” and grew up in Whitehall as the adopted daughter of a steelworker. She is the author of three other poetry collections: The Switching/Yard (2013), Red Sugar (2008), and Mad River (1996; winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize). She is the recipient of the Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2013, among other honors. Beatty is cohost and producer of Prosody, a weekly radio program featuring the work of national writers. She is the director of the creative writing program at Carlow University.

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By the Same Author: Mad River (1996); Red Sugar (2008); and The Switching/Yard (2013).

Tasked with cleaning out her dead mother’s attic, a woman digs through old feelings about the adoption of her son and the woman she swore she’d never be like.

From the Back Cover: In Desiree Cooper’s “Breakin’ It Down,” a highly successful talk show host, haunted by the abandonment and self-loathing she felt as a child, is shocked to find herself inflicting the same abuse she experienced on her seven-year-old [adopted] daughter.

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About the Author: Desiree Cooper is a journalist, author, and former co-host of American Public Media’s Weekend America. A 2002 Pulitzer Prize nominee for her column in the Detroit Free Press, Cooper graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland with degrees in journalism and economics and earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. Cooper has been published in Best African American Fiction 2010 and is a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. Cooper was born in Japan to a military family and now makes her home in suburban Detroit.

A poignant tale of love and devotion, Brian’s Wish introduces us to Brian McAlester and Charles Vos, two people who would likely never meet barring extraordinary circumstances, but fate has a way of increasing the odds. Brian is an eleven-year-old in foster care who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Vos is a jaded billionaire businessman who established a charitable foundation that grants the wishes of dying children. Normally, his involvement in granting wishes is limited to writing a check to the foundation each year. All that changes when they receive Brian’s wish.

Eager for love, Buddy tries to win over his foster family, even though he’ll move to upstate New York and live with his adoptive parents who are strangers. First Marissa feels awkward with Buddy, then affectionate, and then jealous when Buddy—with his sparkling personality—gets on better with her parents than she does. Buddy hits a home run, playing with Marissa’s friends, batting from his chair as she runs the bases. Later, there’s a menacing run-in with Luis, the neighborhood bully. Buddy dares to give him lip. Marissa, her parents and Buddy have come together as a close family. It’s a painful day when the adoption papers clear, but all is not lost.

Excerpts from Various Reviews: These warm, insightful stories portray adolescents at touching moments of infatuation, awareness and recognition of the many guises of love. ... “Camouflage” movingly recounts the love and grief of a 16-year-old giving up her out-of-wedlock baby and then her brightening hope for the future... (Publishers Weekly)

This is wonderful writing, notable for its subtlety and clarity. The entire collection in fact is filled with such observations. In “Camouflage,” a woman gives birth, and the doctor “lay the child casually on Mary’s chest as if Mary were a shelf. Instinctively, she touched the top of the baby’s sticky head and felt life beating furiously: the eager, steamy warmth of it. ...” (Los Angeles Times)

Another story titled “Camouflage,” navigates the tricky waters of teenage pregnancy. Mary, 16, is unable to attend her high school homecoming dance because she is giving birth to her first child, a girl, whom she will hold for 30 breathless seconds before handing her over for adoption. Mary`s re-entry into her teenaged life after this chilling experience is painful, but the realistic treatment of the matter makes the reader smile with sympathy and understanding. It is a rare writer who can make this story tender, believable and oddly upbeat. (Chicago Times)

“Camouflage” [is] the story of a high school girl who has decided to give up her baby for adoption. Gingher describes a young woman’s love for the child she saw briefly, and how she searches for a way to replace the love she surrendered with love for her family and, failing that, for a dying and unwanted pet. It is one of the most moving stories [among those set in the present]. (North Carolina Books, Fall 1988)

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About the Author: Marianne Gingher was born on Guam but grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she lives with her two sons. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit. Currently she directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From the Dust Jacket: Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? is a dazzling and original collection of short stories by Elyse Gasco, a bold and vibrant new voice in Canadian fiction.

Daring, tough, and darkly humorous, this is writing with a razor edge. These stories have at their centre the relationship between parents and children, often focussing on motherhood and adoption. They are stories as devastating in their emotional honesty as they are poignant and wise. Among them: a girl is abducted by a man claiming to be her father; a distraught mother finds herself fabricating a past for her adopted teenage daughter; a woman is haunted by her birth mother’s ghostly visitations; a new mother is overtaken by a feeling of alienation as gradually her world becomes as empty as she feels her heart to be.

Elyse Gasco’s stories are uniquely imagined and alert to the trappings that define today’s urban world. Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? is a stunning literary debut.

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About the Author: Elyse Gasco was born in Montreal. She received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Concordia University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. Her work has appeared in literary magazines in the U.S. and in Canada, including The Little Magazine, Western Humanities Review, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Prism international, Grain, and The Malahat Review. In 1996, the title story from this collection was awarded the $10,000 Journey Prize for the most accomplished work originally published in a Canadian literary journal, and anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology.

Elyse Gasco lives in Montreal with her husband and their two daughters. She is at work on her next book of fiction.

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Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, “A Well-Imagined Life”; “The Third Person”; “The Spider of Bumba”; and “Mother: Not a True Story.”

From the Publisher: Intense personal experience of South Africa’s brutal social system, a sense of stifled creativity, and a distaste for politics made Bessie Head leave for Botswana on an exit permit at the age of 27. There, in her chosen rural haven of Serowe, and despite a severe mental breakdown, she wrote novels and stories that earned her international recognition as one of Africa’s most remarkable and individual writers.

The publication at last of The Cardinals--thought to be the first long piece of fiction Head produced and the only one she ever set in South Africa--is an exciting literary event.

After a childhood of poverty and abuse in the slums of Cape Town, the protagonist unexpectedly lands a job as a reporter in the offices of African Beat. She is too withdrawn to flourish in her new world and struggles to find her identity as a woman and a writer against the muckraking demanded by her editors and the sexism of the newsroom. Johnny believes in her, but his faith carries its own dangers. Questions of origins, identity, sexuality, writing, love, revenge, and politics unite to propel the characters to joy while disaster waits. The seven short pieces of fiction included in this volume come from the years immediately after Bessie Head went to Botswana. Among them is "Earth Love," which she called the "goddam best bit of writing I ever did."

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About the Author: Bessie Head, one of Africa’s best known writers, was born in South Africa but spent much of her life in Botswana. She died tragically early, in 1986, leaving behind her a fine collection of literary works. Tales of Tenderness and Power was the first of her works to be published after her death, and another anthology, A Woman Alone, has also been published posthumously. Both these titles reinforce Bessie Head’s literary achievements, already evident in her novels Maru, When Rain clouds Gather, The Cardinals, A Collector of Treasures, A Question of Power, and her historical account Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, which are all available in the Heinemann African Writer Series.

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Compiler’s Note: A reviewer writing for Kirkus Reviews says “‘The Cardinals’ is in many ways a brief but intense reprise of [Head’s] early life and the major themes that would later preoccupy her. For Head, Cardinals ‘in the astrological sense are those who serve as the base or foundation for change,’ and the novella’s protagonist, Mouse, emotionally stunted by her childhood, and her lover Johnny are two such people. Mouse, whose mother sold her as an infant to a childless couple in a city slum, is initially happy and learns to read on her own; but when her adopted father molests her, she runs away and spends the rest of her childhood in foster homes. A letter to a magazine gets her a job as a reporter; there, she meets the mercurial but charismatic older Johnny. Their love affair, tainted unwittingly with incest, develops inevitably against a background of increased repression.”

From the Dust Jacket: With this collection of beautifully written, interconnected stories, Nalini Jones establishes herself as a strong, new voice in contemporary fiction. Home to her characters is a Catholic town in India—an India unfamiliar to most American readers—but the tales of their relationships, ambitions, and concerns are altogether universal, capturing the miscommunication, expectations, joys, and losses experienced by families everywhere.

A mother pours her religious fervor out in letters to her son whom she has sent away to seminary. Years after his father’s sudden death in a movie theater, an older man begins to see his long-dead parent riding a bicycle around town. A brash, eccentric aunt speaks her mind and leaves home without a trace, but not without haunting her godson. Returning home to tend to her mother’s cataract surgery, a daughter wonders how much she should reveal of her new life in the United States. American childhoods, Indian childhoods; love abroad, love at home—the worlds of these characters mirror and refract one another in a play of revelation and secret.

Gracefully and with deep emotional intelligence, Jones vividly evokes the ebb and flow of life across several generations and continents. What You Call Winter is a resonant, beguiling fiction debut.

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About the Author: Nalini Jones was born in Newport, Rhode Island, graduated from Amherst College, and received an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is a Stanford Calderwood Fellow of the MacDowell Colony, and has recently taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at Fairfield University in Connecticut. She lives in Norwalk, Connecticut.

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Compiler’s Note: “Colleen, a closeted lesbian, returns from America for her mother Grace’s cataract operation in ‘The Bold, the Beautiful’; Grace’s son Michael and his wife visit from America with their adopted child in ‘Carrying.’” (Kirkus Reviews).

From the Dust Jacket: Before John Sayles was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director, he was an award-winning writer of fiction. Praised for his naturalism and lyricism, the Washington Post described him as “one of our most exciting and accomplished young writers.”

Now Sayles has written his first short story collection in twenty-five years. The keynote story—“Dillinger in Hollywood”—is populated by leftovers from the golden age of Hollywood who live in a nursing home catering for “below-the-line” talent—dancers, stunt doubles, horse wranglers, stand-ins, studio drivers—who wait for death and dementia, playing cards, breaking hips, busting ribs, and telling tall tales of days gone by.

Dillinger in Hollywood showcases Sayles’s uncanny ear for language, his skill at crafting character, humor, and atmosphere, and his ability, as Barbara Kingsolver has written, “to pull apart our most cherished myths and icons and see what they’re really made of.”

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About the Author: John Sayles is the writer and director of acclaimed independent films, including Return of the Secaucus Seven; Baby, It’s You; The Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, and Passion Fish. His most recent film, Silver City, is a timely satire for election year 2004. He was twice nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

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Compiler’s Note: The reviewer in Kirkus Reviews said, “The meat of the volume is likely ‘Casa de los Babys,’ a lengthy [previously unpublished] story from 2000 that was the basis for a film three years later. The setting is phenomenal, a group of American women in a rundown Mexico hotel waiting for the glacially slow bureaucracy to provide them with the children they came down to adopt. A well-nuanced selection of examples of American ignorance, arrogance, and innocence, the women alternate between support and backbiting, each not-so-secretly hoping her baby comes first.”

A collection of work from the 2014 CCSWP. This collection is to highlight the work of young writers. It is sold at cost, not at or for profit. Compiler’s Note: See, particularly, Janet Oakes and Nikitha Yelukati.

A ten-year-old boy from the Philippines is adopted by a family with a ten-year-old boy from the Midwest. Neither boy is prepared for the feelings that each of them have when facing such circumstances. Marc begins to understand that change can be good as does William but getting to the acceptance of these changes holds a lot of pain for both of them. They learn from each other and grow together to become loving brothers and best friends.

From the Publisher: In the Gathering Woods contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator’s boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather—a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward to a young shepherd-artist in the Apennine mountains in the 1500s, who yearns to be discovered, as Giotto was. Later, a preverbal baby accumulates bits of the conversation carried on by adults at the table above her head; a neurologist from Chicago returns to the Apennines to deposit shards of glass at a grave.

Whether they speak in the lost dialect of an immigrant, of infancy, or of an adolescent girl’s school lessons, these stories call up fragments of language in a struggle to understand and attempt to console through the act of reassembling. The language of these stories is both lyrical and comic, providing insight through the details of Bernardi’s writing.

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About the Author: Adria Bernardi was awarded the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize by Frank Conroy for her collection of short stories, In the Gathering Woods. She is the author of two novels, Openwork, and The Day Laid on the Altar, which was awarded the 1999 Bakeless Prize by Andrea Barrett. She is the author of a collection of essays, Dead Meander. Her translations include Chernobylove―The Day After the Wind: Selected Poems 2008-2010 by Francesca Pellegrino. She received the 2007 De Palchi Translation Fellowship to complete Small Talk, the poetry of Raffaello Baldini. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Compiler’s Note: As described in the review in Kirkus Reviews, “The Child Carrier” is a story about “a woman from the mountains [who] serves as wet nurse to abandoned babies before they’re claimed by wealthy adoptive parents.”

More than anything, Doug and Amy wanted a child. They had put their careers ahead of everything else, and now they discovered that it was too late to have a child of their own. However, Lucille would remind them that there were many children in the world who needed love.