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"Pickles is going to be around for a long time, and I am glad we have this collection to look at over and over and over," wrote Charles M. Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts gang about Brian Crane. After thirty-five years, we can now say Mr. Schulz was one-hundred percent correct. 35 Years of Pickles celebrates the amazing thirty-five-year career of Brian Crane and his work with Earl, Opal, Nelson, and the rest of the Pickles gang. Including full-color strips never published in a collected format, 35 Years of Pickles is sure to delight the lifetime fans continuing their journeys with this award-winning strip, as well as new fans the Pickles family is eager to welcome into their home and hearts. 35 Years makes a unique addition to any Pickles library.All strips in 35 Years of Pickles, including Sunday strips, have never been published in a collected format beforefull-color, including updated strips from black and white originalsStrips from each year from 1990 through 2025Crane has hand drawn the strip daily for the past 35 yearsPickles appears in over 900 newspapers nationwide

A poetic story about the life and work of William Morris, maker of beautiful, useful things, sure to engage young dreamers and artists alikeWilliam Morris is best known for his colorful wallpapers and textiles, inspired by the English forests and wild foliage where he grew up. But did you know this icon of the Arts and Crafts Movement was also a poet, a painter, a preservationist, an activist, an environmentalist, and a maker of many other beautiful useful things, like books?

DreamWorks Animation brings Puss in Boots back to the big screen, following the daring outlaw as he risks his last life to find the fabled Wishing Star, which holds the power to restore his nine lives. The Art of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish celebrates the studio’s latest installment from the Shrek universe, presenting hundreds of character designs and concept art from the making of the movie, along with exclusive interviews from the writers, artists, and filmmakers who brought this story to life. Featuring a foreword from Antonio Banderas, this insider’s guide provides a glimpse into the creative process and celebrates everyone’s favorite leche-loving, swashbuckling, fear-defying feline.

I Carry Your Heart With Me is a children's adaptation of the beloved E. E. Cummings poem, beautifully illustrated by Mati Rose McDonough. Showing the strong bond of love between mother and child, within nature and throughout life, Cummings' heartfelt words expressed through McDonough's lovely illustrations combine to create a fresh, yet classic, portrayal of love. First published by Liveright Publishing in 1952 in Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, as [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in], "I Carry Your Heart With Me" has become a classic and very popular poem over the years. McDonough's illustrations provide a new artistic interpretation on this familiar poem.

I Carry Your Heart With Me, rereleased as a board book, is a children’s adaptation of the beloved E. E. Cummings poem, beautifully illustrated by Mati Rose McDonough. Showing the strong bond of love between mother and child, within nature and throughout life, Cummings’ heartfelt words expressed through McDonough’s lovely illustrations combine to create a fresh, yet classic, portrayal of love.

Winemaker Steven Kent Mirassou has brought forth a jewel of a book, one that will have a unique place in the literature of American wine.With his decades of winemaking expertise, and with his extraordinary gift for evocative writing, Steven takes us straight into the heart of his calling: how it looks and feels to be in a vineyard heavy with grapes, awaiting the dawn and the throbbing pulse of a harvest about to begin. It’s a magical moment, and it’s the beginning of a journey deep into the art, the craft, the passion, and the 8,000 years of history that lie inside the finest of wines.This is not glossy PR copy. This is raw truth, dirty jeans, arms deep in crushed grapes, heart pounding, dust in your nose, spirit in your mouth writing, flowing from a winemaker who sees crafting beautiful wines and combining them with healthy food as a way to serve others, to bring people together in joy and common cause, a noble calling that Steven Mirassou aptly terms “the true north” of our civilization.And every step of the way, Steven helps us feel his connection to the six generations that the Mirassou family has been growing grapes and crafting wines in California, the last thirty years in the Livermore Valley. It’s a region that struggles, image-wise, in the shadow of the Napa Valley but holds fast to its belief in the virtues of its hills and valleys and fertile soils, and to its unshakable faith that crafting beautiful wines and sharing them with others is, at its core, good for the heart and pure tonic for the soul.There is high drama too. Like all family-owned wineries, Steven’s faces a mountain of challenges: rough growing seasons, business mistakes, the loss of cherished vineyards and more. And Steven loses something larger too: his beloved wife, from a terrible illness. But as Steven shows us, with the proper attitude every loss can be a new beginning, an opportunity to live more deeply, and, with luck, to improve the character of the wines you craft and the enduring wisdom you can pass along to the next generation.In the literature of American wine, there is nothing quite like what Steven Kent Mirassou has brought us. Come feel the spirit, come share the wine.

When a Wall Street tycoon insists that his family join him for an annual backpacking trip into the Sierra, some of his children are not enthusiastic about the idea.And that's before people start turning up dead. Ranger Dan Courtwright is first on the scene. And with his friend Sheriff Cal Healey, he sticks with it to the terrifying finish, which is a real cliffhanger.Literally

Monroe Katz cuts right to the heart of it: “The artist must find his own way to say what he has to say in paint, pencil or clay, but he has to be in a proper frame of mind, as a passionate artist, playing, experimenting, agonizing over subject matter, daring, failing, cutting free, trusting his or her inner voice, being in the ring rather than in the grandstand.”Yes, the artist must “dare to create.” From there, Dr. Katz takes us deep inside the high arts of painting and sculpting, showing us how to convey feeling with color, composition, texture, and, above all, the eye and heart of the artist at work. Whether he is depicting a rural landscape, a bridge in the Napa Valley, or the essence of his own daughter, Dr. Katz’s top priority is transmitting through paint or clay what the artist is feeling inside. And when you get that feeling right, he says, it’s like “music to your brush.” As he urges, “Be daring; don’t sacrifice feeling for accuracy, and draw every day.” And through these pages, this gifted artist and storyteller helps guide and inspire you every step of the way.Using sketches and paintings from his beloved Rembrandt and other great masters, plus his own work, the author explains composition, color, the use of light and shadow, plus the joys of painting to music, and the creative anguish that every artist faces on his journey of exploration and growth.

Move over, Marley: here comes Zelda, a scruffy, high-spirited dog struggling to survive in the mean streets of India -- until she charms her way into an American family and goes on to fame and glory in Paris, Italy, and California Wine Country.In India, wild scavenging street dogs are considered the lowest of the low. Shopkeepers swat them away with brooms. Mothers scream at them and kick them away from their kids. Taxi drivers often drive straight at them and even run them down. After a little time in India you can understand why: These dogs can be vicious, and many carry nasty infections and disease, including rabies. Not surprisingly, most of these dogs come to a miserable end.This is the story of one lowly street dog who was determined to do better. One day, while roaming the streets of New Delhi and begging for something, anything to eat, she found her way to the backdoor of Paul Chutkow and his very pregnant wife Eda. Paul wanted no part of this mangy mutt; India was in the throes of a major political crisis, their first child was on the way, and this dog promised to be nothing but trouble.But this little beast had charm, humor, and a magnificent spirit: if beg she must, she would do so with dignity and her best paw forward. For Paul and Eda, there was simply no resisting her. Soon, Zelda was an essential part of their young family, and before long she was on her way to Paris and a life far beyond anyone’s dreams: with royal care, gourmet meals, and heavenly summers on the island of Sardinia. At first, her Parisian neighbors shunned the lowly mutt and wished she’d go away. But when Zelda alertly captured a very high-end wine thief -- only in France! -- she won every heart in the neighborhood and was promptly crowned “The Queen of Paris.” What a girl! What a story! And what a delightful addition to the wealth of dog books that so many American readers love and cherish!

Where were you on 9/11?Where were you when those two hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers, those majestic symbols of American wealth and power, and sent them crashing to the ground?From the depths of that wound to our national psyche, author Gordon Mott brings us Caleb Drake, a good man living a seemingly safe and satisfied life in the suburbs north of New York City. But one morning, as he awaits his commuter train into Manhattan, Caleb spots two private jets flying low over the Hudson River, and the sight sends a shiver up his spine.Moments later, Caleb takes his usual place on the train, and all seems right with the world -- until the train makes a sudden and unexpected stop. Then cell phone service for everyone goes dead, and Caleb’s agonized memories of 9/11 and what he had endured in Vietnam surge up and grab him by the throat.What follows is a first-class psychological thriller, recalling 9/11 and showing us how this new attack radically upended the lives of Caleb Drake and many of the other people trapped on that commuter train into Manhattan.Where were you on 9/11? And these pages will have you asking: where were you on 10/10, that fateful October morning when a simple commute into Manhattan becomes a nightmare, shattering lives and washing away our bedrock belief that, even in the darkest times, the good in us will always triumph over evil.

All boys tinker with fire. Oby Brooks holes up in a backyard shed to experiment with napalm recipes. He has a hand in burning down his own house, twice. He can't help it: his very DNA seems made of TNT. Meanwhile, amidst the detonations, Oby's sexuality is up for grabs. Parents, mountain men, chemistry teachers, neighbors, and arson inspectors all try in their own quirky ways to usher Oby into adulthood with his fingers any eyelashes intact. In the end, the question is whether Oby's nature will be nurtured, or neutered. Oh, and, will he land a Nobel Prize?

Author of Talk to Me, James Dean and Cold Deck, H. Lee Barnes is an eloquent ambassador for the contemporary American West. In these twelve moving stories, Barnes delves deep into the wild, expansive places of the region and of the human heart that are slowly coming to rein. With gorgeously distilled prose, Barnes writes of vastness and distance, of the separate, small inches and whole histories that occupy equal measures of the western spirit. Each of the stories in Life Is a Country Western Song reveals a character longing to close a gap, or who, for better and for worse, have come to terms with their estrangement and exile. A divorcee rekindles a doomed romance over the internet; a locksmith absorbs broken dreams in foreclosed homes; a boy learns how to love and hate in Juarez, Mexico; because he has no one else, a Nevada Patrolman confides his marital troubles in a dog. Wrought with empathy, precision and a steady finger on the pulse of the complexities facing today’s changing, often turbulent West, Barnes’s stories show a writer at the apex of his craft, offering an updated take on a West that is rapidly descending into the annals of legend.

In The Dying Time, Bernard Schopen delivers a thrilling and contemplative addition to the Jack Ross series. Jack Ross has settled into his old age as well as anyone can. He jogs. He eats right. He naps. He no longer involves himself with the actions or the people that have developed into a “nasty notoriety.” That is until Alicia, Ross’s ex-wife and sister of Jack’s best and ailing friend, receives a potentially earth-shattering letter. A young woman, Mia Dunn, believes that Randall Barnes, Alicia’s deceased husband, might be her father. Reluctantly agreeing to discover the truth of these claims, Ross soon finds himself embroiled in a plot stretching back decades, and it’s not long before old habits come to the surface. The Dying Time is a poignant observation on the process of aging, astute and insightful as it is suspenseful intrigue. This novel asks how people come to create an identity and if we can ever truly bury the past. Can hurt stay hidden? How about the money? In a wonderful addition to the Jack Ross Series, Bernard Schopen is running on all cylinders as he weaves his plot with the golden thread of truth. In The Dying Time, the power of fiction is manifest. Here is a masterly yarn that keeps you guessing while always touching on something profound and inevitable in us all.

Philosophers, bugs, and bears! Horses, cats, and teachers of English! These are just a few of the hilarious inhabitants populating Dicus’s The King’s Highway. The King’s Highway is a stretch of road in south Brooklyn that, as Dicus imagines it, runs out of the borough in both directions until it has ringed around the globe, traveling through every conceivable life. Travel this road long enough and the extraordinary may become absurd, the absurd extraordinary. Maybe this says something profound about humanity? Or, perhaps, it’s a little tragic? Whatever the case, in The King’s Highway, cartoonist-philosopher Dicus notes with a scrupulous gaze, wry wit, a touch of empathy, and a whole lot of honesty just where he has been and what he has seen on his journeys. Here is a cartoonist who expected a road lined with royalty. Instead, he has confronted the oddities and peculiarities existing right next to us all along The King’s Highway.

Colin Rafferty's Execute the Office uses lyric prose and formal invention to explore the humanity, or lack thereof, that thrived in each of the forty-five American presidents. Whether these powerful individuals were celebrated for infamous deeds and heroism, or forgotten as placeholders in the annals of American history, too often presidents are commemorated by the sterility of simple fact. Execute the Office builds upon factual accuracy with essays that are equally invested in lyricism and experimental forms. To balance these factions, Execute the Office uses constraint, metaphor, allusion, and epiphany to explore not just the facts and artifacts of history, but describe the connections between those facts and human nature. These essays discuss the modes in which we remember through death songs, footnotes, infinite rooms, evacuation routes, and nomenclatures, to name a few examples, engaging with history from fresh perspectives. Execute the Office contains histories in and of unusual objects. While unfamiliar at first, they soon become distinct, unforgettable, profound, human.

Donovan James enjoys his routine. Wake up. Catch the El. Teach high school English. Run the track. Return home on the train. Repeat. In a turbulent Chicago, this routine keeps his mind from wandering. Well, from wandering into the less-immediate world anyway. You see, Donovan can’t seem to stop watching the people who frequent his morning commute, or from dissecting their lives based on these regular but limited encounters. He believes that he knows them well. That is until one morning, he runs late, and by a series of minuscule events he runs into her, the lady in the blue coat, a passenger on his train car whom he has seldom paid attention. The moment is fleeting, but now everything has changed. The routine is disrupted. Lives are not what they seem. Soon Donovan will be caught up in the investigations of Detective Lesley Powell as well as a train full of other lives and their lies, careening toward something mysterious and sinister. Donovan knows where he got on this train, but where will he get off? In M-theory, Tiffany Cates meticulously layers America’s societal, spiritual, and moral tensions in a plot that travels through the streets and elevated tracks of Chicago, creating a riveting thriller with an endearing love story at its beating heart. As inventive and intelligent as it is entertaining, M-theory marks Tiffany Cates as an important voice in American fiction.

In The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, the full-length debut from Jesse DeLong, the beauty and processes of the natural world are distilled in the cycles and seasons of human love. DeLong poignantly observes the paradoxes and parallels between seed and bird; water and stem; history and humanity. With sharp lyricism and formal ingenuity that interrupts and intertwines, DeLong creates an experience of the world, a story of life. Fragmented yet familiar these poems become "acts of attention that carry, often indistinguishably, great beauty and disillusion."The Amateur Scientist's Notebook does the hard work of affirming humanity as a part of the natural world in all of its volatility and symmetry, speaking for both the segment and the singular, the continuous, and the instantaneous. The Amateur Scientist's Notebook marks Jesse DeLong as a major emerging talent in American poetics.

Sophie Sheppard's The Moon's Tear: A Desert Night's Dream follows Raven in his journey to find a companion for the Moon, who is traveling alone across the empty night sky. Enlisting Child for help, Raven must travel with his friend high into the mountains to retrieve a precious gift from the belly of a trout and fill the night with light. Quiet and dreamlike, Sheppard's illustrations perfectly compliment a tale of loneliness and how it is conquered by friendship. The Moon's Tear is a contemporary legend that will delight and entertain anyone with the courage to dream.Northern Nevada, a landscape reflected in much of The Moon's Tear, is home to the Massacre Rim Dark Skies Sanctuary. One of only fourteen sites designated as IDA International Dark Sky Sanctuaries in the entire world, Massacre Rim Dark Skies Sanctuary is a "land that has an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and a nocturnal environment that is protected [and located] in a very remote location with few (if any) nearby threats to the quality of its dark night skies" (darksky.org).

Pip Pip Toodle Doo follows Pinky the bird as she sings her playful song, dives through the clouds, and meets new friends Fred, Sue, Jean, and Ray! These birds aren't like Pinky, but as she'll find out, that only makes them more fun and more interesting. Lisa Sobiek's buoyant story, accompanied by Paula L. Robison's colorful illustrations, demonstrates the fun of being actively interested in others and how asking questions leads to new understandings and new friends!

Cartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love's name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.

Am I Even a Bee? is the story of Osmia, a solitary bee, decidedly green and unquestionably un-fuzzy. Osmia has always believed she is a bee, (her mom told her so), but recent run-ins with people, and even other insects, leave her wondering, “Am I even a bee?!” Confused, Osmia faces an identity crisis, and she turns to her meadow for comfort. It is here that she meets her new friend and guide Xyla, a carpenter bee who, like Osmia, does not fit the black-and-yellow social mold. Through some adventures and chance encounters, Osmia and Xyla meet a slew of non-honey bees, each special and important to the meadow in their own unique way. Osmia discovers that while fame is great, diversity and acceptance are essential to a happy ecosystem. As it turns out, there is no one way to be a bee!

A collection of visions shared across cyberspace, Souvenirs, a collaboration between authors Andrew Colarusso and Karen An-hwei Lee, celebrates fragments from the literary afterlife. In Souvenirs, a philosophically astute, poetically searing collection of miniature fictions and contemporary fables, objects take on shapes of their own designs creating a composite map to a world populated with little transparent souls and ghost ships in lost bottles; a menagerie of curios; photophores of bioluminescence humming in the depths: light begetting light, deep calling to deep. In these twenty-seven prose gems, it seems that Colarusso and Lee are writing from a single mind as they strike a balance between humor and philosophy; the acute and the everlasting. The ideas they discuss—religion, faith, universality, continuance—are large, but their prose is accessible, and at times outright hilarious. Strange, compelling, and arcane considerations of watches, jade, seaweed, and cake, among many other items, come through with stylistic prowess and earnest, intelligent considerations. Souvenirs adds complexity to the mundane, re-centers the iconic, and gifts the reader with nothing short of astonishment; wonder baked into each delicious slice.

A new story collection focused on the Heartland from Michael Martone, one of America's most prolific and important contemporary authors.In Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, Michael Martone places steady fingers on the arrhythmic pulse of the Flyover as he conjures Winesburg, Indiana, a fictional town and all of its inhabitants’ lyric philosophies, tales of the mundane, and the sensation of being “lost” in the heart of the heart of the country. But here, in over one-hundred and thirty short fictions, even as there is much sadness, the citizens continue to tinker and create, marvel and wonder in the midst of ruin and rust. These stories may capture lives of quiet desperation, but in so doing, they create a kind of hobbled poetry in the spontaneous sketches of the ordinary made extraordinary, the regular irregularities, the familiar knocked off-balance with a glancing blow. From the overly overworked City Manager, to Margaret Wigg’s obsessively collected collection of library stamps, to Blanche’s air-filled aluminum ice cube tray, the town is a community of everyday odd-balls rife with isolation and idiosyncrasy. They are people trying to get by; that question loss as well as passion, devotedness, childhood wonder, and kinship in their observations and daily routines. With undeniable humor, intelligent quirk, and earnest longing for a pastoral passing into the annals of deep Midwestern time, Michael Martone crafts an unforgettable panoply of characters whose perspectives invite us to alternatively interpret our own commonplaces.

A new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.

This Side of the Divide: New Lore of the American West is the second entry in the Divide anthology series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality, and sense of transience alive in the American West. In this collection legends, myths, tales, omens, folk horror, and science fiction explore the fantastical, the apocalyptic, the bizarre, the unknown, and the apocryphal origins and conclusions of life on the occidental side of the Continental Divide. In this collection, after the ‘what is’ comes the ‘what will be’, as acclaimed authors and emerging voices weave tales thatpush the boundaries of imagination: Ken Liu takes us to the frontiers of America and China in a stark tale of perseverance; Kate Bernheimer immerses us in the fairytale lands of modern celebrity; Benjamin Percy takes us hunting for deer and connection in eastern Oregon; Yuri Herrera grants us insight on our future overlords; Tessa Fontaine places us in-between with a monster and a question; Dominique Dickey chases familiar ghosts; and Willy Vlautin takes us on the wild ride that is a winning streak. Accompanied by a foreword from This Side of the Divide alum, and author of The Forbidden City, Vanessa Hua, these twenty-five pieces of new lore excavate the beauty, the uncertainty, the longing, the bitter interactions and stark truths; the strong people and vivid places that have shaped, and will continue to shape the West until the end of days.

Chloe N Clark's Patterns of Orbit spans genres, perspectives, and styles to articulate contemporary uncertainties in a rapidly changing world. Steadily gazing into and across the uncanny valley, Clark examines those jarring or subtle shifts in familiar stories, writing light into dark, and offering slivers of hope despite the longest of odds. Successfully navigating a potent concoction of science fiction, folktale, and horror this collection of literary, character driven stories combines the accumulated forces and darker natures of those genre elements, unleashing the terrors of alien fungi, forest demons, and interplanetary specters upon her characters. However, while these characters, capable and intelligent, face off against their prescribed monsters, it is their existential misgivings on the state of their worlds or conditions that will leave an indelible mark on the reader. An impressive entry in the literary/genre hybrid canon, this collection offers a satisfying read to the connoisseurs of both genre and literary fiction. So, be bold. Take a swim through the anti-gravity. You are sure to be captured by Patterns of Orbit.

TheBook Cook is the delightful children’s picture book debut from author D.CSwanson and illustrator Clint Hansen.On Christmas Eve, the spirit of theholiday comes alive when twins Maria and Matty need a miracle if they are going to find the perfect gift for their mother before the big day arrives. With their father’s permission, the twins set out, traversing the city through a blistering storm searching for an open shop where they might find a gift at such a late hour. With time and their hopes dwindling, the twins catch a wonderful scent on the wind. Following their noses, they find an alley marked by a large sign . . . that just winked at them?!As this sister and brother are about to find out, this fantastical sign is only the tip of the magical iceberg that awaits them in the shop of the Book Cook, where ingredients, stewed together in a massive cauldron, come not only from gardens, but also from tales, legends, and literary classics. This Holiday Season, join the adventure as the elvish Book Cook teaches Maria and Matty to harness the joy, the magic, and the pleasure of story creation! Who knows, maybe you’re about to begin your own brand-new Holiday Tradition with TheBook Cook.

Timely and introspective, Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival is the meeting of contemporary voices and visions that offer not relatability, but an intimate encounter open to strangeness and its embrace. The stories in the inimitable Catherine Gammon’s The Gunman and the Carnival — loosely linked and set in Los Angeles, California — center on women of various ages and backgrounds. Constructed around themes of solitude and connection, creation and destruction, love and loss, these sixteen stories unfold in a world haunted by individual and collective violence, systemic injustice, pandemic, and environmental duress: not with genre sensibilities of the dystopic or apocalyptic, but with compassion and wisdom that renders a staid, meditative examination of our contemporary challenges. The Gunman and the Carnival does not aspire to be a panorama or to portray the city (or the nation) in its extraordinary complexity. Rather it shines a roving light into the minds and hearts of an idiosyncratic handful of characters living in our difficult times and invites each one to sing. Some of the stories are realist, some oblique and fragmented, others metafictional or surreal, and the urban / suburban landscapes are accented by the occasional appearance of wildlife and the presence (and voices) of trees. Handled with grace and intelligence, these stories chronicle contemporary struggles: the violence and the joy examined in equal measure.

Undercurrents, the debut novel from fourth-generation Montanan, Joan Maki, steps through forest doorways and crosses rivers into twilight’s thresholds to dissect the emotional and psychological aftermath of Kit in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of Patrick, a childhood friend who vanished so suddenly it was as if he fell into the Earth. Decades after this incident, Kit escapes her rural Montana upbringing for a new life in the city, but her disjointed memories and the questions she has had to carry bind her to her past. Was Patrick claimed by natural forces, falling into the river or a ravine? Was his estranged father involved? Or, as old Marg believes, was the boy claimed by the people of the forest? Will Kit be able to find closure as she raises her own child and is inevitably drawn back toward the woods of home?Imbued with elements of Finnish folklore, Undercurrents charts the liminal destruction of society and self, where wild and rural places are encroached upon by more contemporary forces. Like a story written on a warped mirror, Undercurrents presents a calm surface slightly askew, and definitely dangerous, where mind, lore, religion, and reality collide in uncanny reflections.