Narrative theme: Sense of place

The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by...

"Flawless. . . . Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she's become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There's...

An American student in 1970s Kyoto rambles among the city's beauties and traditions, learning as he goes. Don Ascher is a young American living in Kyoto in the 1970s.He is a studentof Japanese. He also teaches English, works at...

tender gravity charts Marybeth Holleman's quest for relationship to the more-than-human world, navigating her childhood in North Carolina to her life in Alaska, with deep time in remote land and seascapes. Always the focus is on what can be found by...

Poet Emily Wall began collecting birth stories after the birth of her third child, Lucy. She realized that women were always quietly sharing their stories-in living rooms with a mug of tea, or whispered at the preschool playground. She saw the intensity...

Twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user's short-term memory, have left single mom Mellie with her mind in fragments. With the help of a tough-minded sponsor, and motivated by her own medically-challenged daughter, Mellie clings to...

*Winner of the 2021 International Association of Authoethnography and Narrative Inquiry Award for Outstanding Book**GOLD MEDALIST in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English* In...

Jane is a Los Angeles nurse who grew up in a Christian cult that puts celebrities on trial for their sins. Daniel is a has-been actor whose career ended when the cult family members nearly killed him for flirting with her. Eight years after a romantic...

What shape does Dutch art take in the American imagination? Austere, perhaps. Insular. Fixated on nature, every writer's "traditional source of consolation." And all of these qualities may indeed be true of the Netherlands' early literature. But...

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flightis a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire-and with the many tendons in between.When Return Flight asks "what name / do you...

Winner of the 2022 Levis Reading Prize Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's 2021 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book "Top Ten Pick" for Fall 2021 Poetry Titles "Poetry Title to Watch" for 2021 "Must-Read Book of September 2021"Selected by...

Kathryn Cowles's Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions. "I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I...

"Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life-poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment."-Los Angeles Review of BooksWesley McNair's story-like...

"It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived." -NPR, "Books We Love""Not to miss!" -USA TodayIn Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol's daddy lost his...

A beloved short story collection-now in a new paperback edition with a never-before published story and an afterword by the author.In nine interlinking stories, the town of Abbot Falls reacts as Ernie Whitten, pipefitter, builds an ark in his backyard...

A mesmerizing, poignant saga of love and loss firmly grounded in the Midwestern landscape by National Book Award finalist Laird Hunt.On a dark and lovely winter night, Noah Summers sits before a roaring fire, drifting between sleep and recollection,...

Part poetry collection, part soundscape, Village uses dark humor and keen observation to explore the roots of memory, grief, and estrangement.In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage,...

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in PoetryWinner of the 2022 Emory Elliott Book AwardFinalist for the 2023 Firecracker AwardFinalist for the 2023 ASLE Creative Book AwardInterweaving elegy, indictment, and hope into a love letter to California,...

DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he's called back to his cramped Southern hometown for his uncle's funeral, he s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly...

Reading the poetry of Dan Gerber, we are summoned to this larger truth: Though we live in fraught times, on the tipping point of human self-destruction, we and our planet are still very much alive.In one of his last sonnets, nearly five hundred years...

National Book Award,2023Longlist* "Elegiac and shot through with righteous anger, this essential collection demands a national reckoning."-Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW* "A must-have for libraries." -Booklist,STARRED REVIEW"A remarkable collection...

A politically urgent yet timeless collection that studiesthe devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.In Wind, Trees, John Freeman presents a meditation onpower and loss, change and adaptation. What can the trees teach us...

Debut poems of stunning power and range from a China scholar and policy advisor Torn between intimacy and estrangement, eros and politics,history and futurity, Your Face My Flag is a riveting debut poetrycollection. Gewirtz explores the place of poetry...

An essential collection from the leading figure of Chinese poetry translation, presenting work of insight, humor, and musicality that continues to resonates across thousands of years. Red Pine is one of the world's finest translators of Chinese poetic...

New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2022"NPR "Best Books of 2022""Levin's luminous latest reckons with the disorientation of contemporary America. . . . Through the fog of doubt, Levin summons ferocious intellect and musters hard-won clairvoyance...

A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go.In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang...

Intimacies, Received signals agency, as trauma isheld to the light and finally named.In this astonishing second collection by Taneum Bambrick,violence hides in the glint of the carving knife-every intimacy a shadow, everymemory a maze to navigate. Set...

"Nezhukumatathil's poems contain elegant twists of a very sharp knife. She writes about the natural world and how we live in it, filling each poem, each page with a true sense of wonder." -Roxane Gay"Cultural strands are woven into the DNA of her...

"Dimitrov is a vital new energy in American poetry."-Los Angeles Review of Books"Truth-telling, raw, fierce with feeling."-Brenda Shaughnessy "Dimitrov can sound at once hip and naive, devoted to the sincerities that other sorts of poets reject or...

Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel. A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking...

Away From Her meets Strangers on a Train in this follow-up to cult bestseller And the Birds Rained Down"A journey as geographical as it is interior... a bumpy route, but one punctuated by contemplative pleasures, by small, lost joys... Simultaneously...

Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road tripby his parents' friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries tounearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary roadtrip...

Set in the British Columbia Interior, the novel Cambium Blue is an homage to resource towns, independent women and local newspapers.In 1994, at the outset of the bark beetle epidemic that will decimate millions of acres of pine forest in western North...

As World War II intrudes upon their home, three young friends risk everything for freedom, love, and a chance at a better life.On October 28th, 1940, Mussolini provides Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas with an ultimatum: either allow Axis forces to...

"Destined to have readers squirming in their seats. Terrifying from beginning to end." -Willow Rose, international bestselling author of the Emma Frost series, onThe ClinicAbi Ansel is not the most confident woman in the world; in fact, she might be the...

Included as one of the Best Books of 2017 by the Los Angeles Review From a compelling new voice in LGBTQ and Southern fiction, a gripping tale of crime and desire amid small-town America's meth epidemic.This was Drear's Bluff. Nothing bad happened here...

From the acclaimed author of the internationally bestselling Ava Lee novels, a bold and captivating new novel about a search for lost family and the cost of keeping secrets.As a boy, Jack Anderson was abandoned by his mother in a Glasgow movie theatre...

Like Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles's Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generationA little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police...

Winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Award, selected byPulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown.Bright Shadeis an appreciation of the wild woods, the rolling hills, the Appalachian air, and the little rivers that were the setting of Chelsea Harlan's...

Maleea Acker's dauntless new poetry collection is crafted with emotion and bold style.Any day now I shall be released to the Bangladesh runaway, its burnt out plane a little hulk from a different dimension,a researcher of longing, no one selling...

The long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Gillian Jerome, about rediscovery and reconnection in the centre of urban Vancouver.Nevertheless is a book of walking poems and odes. Poet Gillian Jerome roams into ordinary places inside and...

This is our lead title of the season. In early 2021, Tongo was named the 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco, which garnered major media coverage and involves high profile public events through 2023. This book will be prominently featured in all settings...

Winner ofthe American Book Award,the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press's 2023Derek Walcott Poetry PrizeNational Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist"Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of...

Shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2018 California Book Award - Poetry2018 NCIBA Book of the Year - PoetryThe much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, Allen Ginsberg,...

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2016"Cortzar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortzar is a people's...

Rural West Cork, Ireland. Two Kids, Joseph and Paul, and their struggling, poet father, Fraser, are battling grief and poverty. When a letter arrives with a summons to Dublin and the promise of publication, it offers a chink of light - the hope of rescue...

In You and Yours, Naomi Shihab Nye continues her conversation with ordinary people whose lives become, through her empathetic use of poetic language, extraordinary. Nye writes of local life in her inner-city Texas neighborhood, about rural schools and...

Like the movie of the same name, the poems in Rancho Notorious are peopled with a colorful cast of characters, all born of the fertile imagination of Richard Garcia. Through narratives, lyric poems and dramatic monologues, Garcia's characters demonstrate...