If the Ice Had Held Product Details: Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners
Paperback: 260 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1939650917 About the Book: Melanie Henderson's life is a lie. The scandal of her birth and the identity of her true parents is kept from her family's small, conservative Colorado town. Not even she knows the truth: that her birth mother was just 14 and unmarried to her father, a local boy who drowned when he tried to take a shortcut across an icy river. Thirty-five years later, ...
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eightball Product Details: Paperback: 235 pages
ISBN: 978-1939650955 About the Book: eightball strikes hard. Fueled by an abiding sense of loss, these eight stories take you on a journey over the exploded fault lines of intimacy, unfolding across cities and continents. Whether hitchhiking the Italian Veneto, trekking through a pitch-black Balinese rice field, or queuing for drinks in a crowded Seattle bar, Geoghegan sets her characters adrift in a world that stakes its claim to the enigmatic terrain of desire. This collection of darkly ...
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We All Scream:
The Fall of the Gifford's Ice Cream empire Author: Andrew Gifford Paperback: 296 pages ISBN-13: 978-1939650795 Cover Design: Douglas Luman About the Book For more than 70 years, Gifford’s Ice Cream and Candy Company was associated with nothing but pleasure for native Washingtonians and visitors to the nation’s capital. Few knew the dark truth… Behind the iconic business’s happy facade lay elaborate schemes, a crushing bankruptcy, two million dollars of missing cash, and a tragic suicide. As the last Gifford heir unfolds ...
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Crossing Over In 1980, Richard Currey published Crossing Over to wide critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Best described as flash fiction, Crossing Over is hybrid prose-poetry about one young man’s journey through the Vietnam War. Adapted for the stage, and praised by antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan, Currey brings us vignettes from the war-torn jungles. Crossing Over has long been regarded as one of the Vietnam Era’s most evocative literary works. Cited by Library Journal as a ‘Best of the Small Presses,’ the prose ...
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Imperial Governor: 50th Anniversary Edition Londinium is burning. Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, newly appointed governor of Roman Britain, is charged by an increasingly unstable Emperor Nero with a difficult task—the untamed island on the fringes of the empire must earn a profit. To do so, Suetonius pursues the last of the Druids into Wales and, along the way, subdues the fractious Celtic chieftains who sit atop a fortune in gold and rare metals. Meanwhile, in the provincial capital of Londinium, war is brewing. As Nero’s corrupt ...
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Crusade: Book Three of the Paladin Trilogy Daniel M. Ford Old ways have been broken in the blood and smoke of the Battle of Thornhurst by Allystaire Stillbright and followers of the Goddess. Now the Paladin must recover from his ordeal, carve out a hopeful future for the shattered Baronies, and prepare for the next attack upon the Goddess's new and fragile following. But the corrupt deity Braech, the Sea-Dragon, will not easily let go of the power that has long been his. Braech's minions, ...
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All Roads Lead to Blood Unflinching and compelling portrayals of desire fill this award-winning story collection by Bonnie Chau. Chau explores the lives of young women, focusing on love, heritage, and memory, presenting fresh perspectives of second-generation Chinese-Americans. Moving back and forth between California and New York, and ranging as far away as Paris, Chau’s exquisitely written stories are bold, highly imaginative, and haunting, featuring unique characters who defiantly exert their individuality. Selected as the Grand Prize Winner for the 2040 Books Awards Program by ...
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SFWP Annual: Volume 1 Selections from the SFWP Quarterly Paperback: 140 Pages ISBN-13: 978-1939650719 Editor: Melanie J. Cordova Cover design and artwork: Gwen Grafft In this inaugural issue of the SFWP Annual Vol. 1, we take some of our favorite stories from the first issues of the SFWP Quarterly, the latest iteration of the SFWP Journal, which has been running since 2002. Inside, these twelve writers will grab hold of your imagination and transport it to intense, captivating places. Read heartbreaking fiction about finding companionship as ...
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Stillbright: Book Two of the Paladin Trilogy Paperback: 525 pages ISBN-13: 978-1939650580 Cover Design and artwork: Kerem Beyit About the Book: The exciting sequel to Ordination! Ordained by an ancient goddess of mercy and light, former knight Allystaire Coldbourne has become a paladin, a hero out of legend. But evil stalks him, angry gods align against him, and greedy warlords want him dead. With the help of his friends, each blessed with extraordinary powers by the Goddess, Allystaire must escape the clutches of ...
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Patagonian Road: A Year Alone Through Latin America Author: Kate McCahill Paperback: 350 pages ISBN-13: 978-1939650542 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book Spanning four seasons, ten countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, Patagonian Road: A Year Alone Through Latin America chronicles Kate McCahill's solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina. In her struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, she personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but a route to meaningful work, rare inspiration, ...
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Magic For Unlucky Girls Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners
Paperback: 242 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1939650665
Cover Design: Gwen Grafft, Art: Arthur Rackham, "Goblin Market"
About the Book:
The fourteen fantastical stories in Magic For Unlucky Girls take the familiar tropes of fairy tales and twist them into new and surprising shapes. These unlucky girls, struggling against a society that all too often oppresses them, are forced to navigate strange worlds as they try to survive.
From carnivorous husbands to ...
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Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons
Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners
Paperback: 110 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1939650627
Cover Design: Gwen Grafft

About the Book: The best-selling indie hit returns! This revised, expanded edition of Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons brings the darker side of social behavior back to the shelves. Tara Laskowski’s demonically clever stories break the rules of a "decent" society, providing a definitive guide on the etiquette of obesity, dementia, infertility, homicide, arson, and more. Blending humor with a sharp ...
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Living: A Handbook for Maturing Hipsters Author: Pagan Kennedy Series: Pagan Kennedy Project Paperback: 133 pages ISBN: 9781939650504 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book Zinester, author, maturing hipster, and graduate of Wesleyan University, Pagan Kennedy first captured the hearts of America with her personal zine Pagan’s Head. Drawing from this source, she presents not only the zine-world standards (an interview with the ever-beguiling Lisa Suckdog, articles on dumpster diving, and eight-track collecting), but also includes some helpful dating tips, such as “Pretend to ...
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American Fallout Product Details: Coming Spring 2016 Paperback: 345 pages ISBN-13: 9781939650429 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book: For Avery Cullins—library archivist, former teenage runaway, and gay man from a small Southern town—”family” means a live-in boyfriend and a surly turtle. But when his father, a renowned nuclear physicist, commits suicide, Avery’s decade-long estrangement from his mother—now hobbled following a stroke—comes to a skidding halt. With his boyfriend’s help, Avery takes custody of his mother and the trio heads cross country in a rented ...
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Bystanders Author: Tara Laskowski Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners Paperback: 238 pages ISBN-13: 9781939650382 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book Legacies of violence and tragedy haunt these thirteen stunning stories from Tara Laskowski, author of Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons. A woman becomes obsessed with her co-worker’s murderer; an investigative reporter with a nose for scandal finds his own life suddenly unraveling; eerie sights in a video baby monitor haunt a new mother. When the unexpected happens, these bystanders—who are not always innocent—come face ...
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Ordination: Book One of the Paladin Trilogy Product Details: Series: The Paladin Trilogy Paperback: 440 pages ISBN-13: 9781939650344 Cover design and artwork: Kerem Beyit About the Book: A Country Shattered by War - For generations, warlords fought bitterly for dominance in a land without a king, leaving a fractured, war-torn country plagued by thieves, slavers, and the servants of dark gods and darker magic... A Fallen Knight - Allystaire Coldbourne, former castellan of Wind’s Jaw Keep, walks away from his privileged position and into self-imposed ...
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The Wars of Heaven Product Details: Paperback: 160 pages ISBN-10: 1939650054 ISBN-13: 978-1939650054 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book: The lives of the working class in West Virginia—a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed—are explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gone—but the stirring clarity of people and ...
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The Fires Product Details: Paperback: 128 pages ISBN-10: 0977679918 ISBN-13: 978-0977679911 Cover design: Bill Douglas @ The Bang Studio About the Book: Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish—to be cremated—only to find herself entirely at sea in the ...
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An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories Product Details: Paperback: 318 pages ISBN-10: 1939650097 ISBN-13: 978-1939650092 About the Book: The very best short stories and novellas from National Public Radio's Alan Cheuse are brought together in a quintessential collection. Countless listeners depend on the book reviews from Cheuse, America's "voice of books," and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction. The title story—a flash fiction piece that acts as both prologue and an intriguing look at a writer's ...
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Moody Food Product Details: Paperback: 400 pages ISBN-10: 097767990X ISBN-13: 978-0977679904 Cover Design and Photo: Bill Douglas @ The Bang Studio About the Book: Inspired by the exploits of ill-fated country-rock visionary Gram Parsons, this mid-60s tale of idealism and escape traces the trials of a fictionalized draft-dodging flower child from the United States to Canada and back. It is the late 1960s in Yorkville, Toronto's hippie ghetto of artists, intellectuals, drunken poets, and would-be rock stars. In this idyllic haven, narrator Bill Hansen, a ...
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The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories Product Details: Paperback: 247 pages ISBN-10: 0977679934 ISBN-13: 978-0977679935 About the Book: Nonfiction is the new black comedy in this hilarious collection of award-winning literary essays written by the inimitable Pagan Kennedy. In the title piece, Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, reinvents himself as a sex guru in California and hatches a plan to destroy monogamy forever. In the essays that follow, a retired chemist finds a way to turn a ...
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Fatal Light Product Details: Paperback: 210 pages ISBN-10: 0977679926 ISBN-13: 978-0977679928 About the Book: A young medic goes from his sleepy West Virginia hometown to the soul-searing terrain of the Vietnam War to learn about American "innocence" in a war that brings new horrors each day. Later the medic returns home to confront his shattered personal history and the mysterious human capacity for renewal. "Of all the many books written about the war . . . this one will be among the handful destined to ...
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By Way of Water Product Details: Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners Paperback: 262 pages ISBN-10: 098822528X ISBN-13: 978-0988225282 Cover Design: Dreux Carpenter; Photo: "Under" by Ines Batlio About the Book: A unique look at the Jehovah Witnesses in the rural western United States and the logging industry in Northern California during the 1970s, By Way of Water addresses the devastating effects of poverty on rural families. Struggling to feed their children in an unforgiving California forest when there are no logging jobs to be found, ...
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Paradise, or, Eat Your Face Product Details: Paperback: 193 pages ISBN-10: 0981966195 ISBN-13: 978-0981966199 About the Book: From acclaimed author Alan Cheuse comes a trio of provocative novellas. In the title piece, Paradise, or, Eat Your Face, we meet travel writer Susan Wheelis and follow her exotic journey to Bali, and into her own frustrated soul. Care centers on Rafe Santera, a recent stroke victim who was once a vibrant, intellectual romantic. Attended by one of his many female admirers, we find ourselves in the ...
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Milk Product Details: Paperback: 110 pages ISBN-10: 0988225271 ISBN-13: 978-0988225275 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book: The fourteen stories in this collection display the often quiet, inconspicuous way in which terrible truths and experiences are intimated: the death of a sailboarder makes a widower see deeper into love and loss; a young poet visits his former teacher only to discover he is literally not the person he used to be; a middle-aged man glimpses the terrible humdrum of his third marriage as his son ...
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My Chinese-America Product Details: Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners Paperback: 188 pages ISBN-10: 1939650305 ISBN-13: 978-1939650306 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft; Photo: John Farnan About the Book: Allen Gee writes about aspects of Asian-American life in a detailed, eloquent manner, looking at how Asian-Americans view themselves in light of America’s insensitivities, stereotypes, and expectations. My Chinese-America speaks on masculinity, identity, and topics ranging from Jeremy Lin to immigration to profiling to Asian silences. This not-to-be-missed collection from SFWP Awards Program winner Gee has an intimacy that ...
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Smoking Cigarettes, Eating Glass: A Psychologist's Memoir Product Details: Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners Paperback: 310 pages ISBN-10: 1939650267 ISBN-13: 978-1939650269 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft; Photo: "Annita in Mind," Erica Harney About the Book: What would lead a lively, high-achieving teenager to shrivel into a dark, inaudible wraith dedicated to her own destruction? How would she survive? How might healing happen? Dr. Annita Sawyer’s memoir is a harrowing, heroic, and redeeming story of her battle with mental illness, and her triumph in overcoming it. In ...
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Muscle Cars Product Details: Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners Paperback: 244 pages ISBN-10: 1939650224 ISBN-13: 978-1939650221 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft; Photo: Jody Potter About the Book: The stories in Muscle Cars explore the unique and sometimes flawed relationships between men, their families, and their friends. Featuring a diverse cast of inarticulate misfits—including a compulsive body builder obsessed by the death of his brother; a former boxer forced to sell his prized 1946 New York Yankees autographed baseball; and two boyhood friends who plan to steal ...
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The Poor Children Product Details: Series: SFWP Literary Award Winners Paperback: 190 pages ISBN-13: 978-1939650184 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book: Debut author April Ford bursts onto the literary scene with this edgy, stunning collection that deftly examines the underbelly of the human condition through a cross-section of fascinating characters—a correctional officer fixated on a juvenile offender, a Goth teenager and her werewolf boyfriend, a pyromaniac by happenstance, a set of twins haunted by an unconfirmed death. Pushing beyond the norms of daily life ...
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Black Livingstone Product Details: Series: Pagan Kennedy Project Paperback: 144 pages ISBN-10: 0988225263 ISBN-13: 978-0988225268 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book: Part of SFWP's ongoing effort to bring Pagan Kennedy’s works back into print, this biography on William Sheppard — an African American in the 19th century who defied segregation and became an explorer and hero of freedom — displays Kennedy’s trademark “participatory journalism” putting herself into Sheppard’s shoes as he exposes the cruelty of Belgian colonialism in the Congo, is crowned a prince ...
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Dissonance Product Details: Paperback: 196 pages ISBN-10: 1939650119 ISBN-13: 978-1939650115 Cover Design: Gwen Grafft About the Book: When Anna Kramer, a Los Alamos piano teacher, inherits the journals and scores of composer Hana Weissova, she is mystified by this bequest from a woman she does not know. Hana’s music, however, soon begins to uncover forgotten emotions, while her journals, which begin in 1945 after she is released from a concentration camp, slowly reveal decades-old secrets that Anna and her family have kept buried. Dissonance is ...
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Zine Pagan Kennedy Product Details: Series: Pagan Kennedy Project Paperback: 196 pages ISBN-10: 1939650100 ISBN-13: 978-1939650108 About the Book: Find out where it all started for Pagan Kennedy... Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally... Found Myself... I Think is a book compiling all eight issues of the zine Pagan's Head. A young woman named Pagan, just graduated from a writing program at a very prestigious university, is left with one burning question - Now what? She then ...
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