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“[Paula] Bohince is more naturalist than romantic, meaning that her poems above all honor their dark side, their realism, their edge.”—Stanley Plumly

Spanning decades and set on a decrepit farm, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods begins with a speaker invoking her dead father. As details are gradually uncovered, we learn the father was murdered by a trusted laborer.

Paula Bohince has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Award in 2007, the Grolier Poetry Prize, and grants from the Puffin and the Ludwig Vogelstein foundations. In 2008, Bohince will be the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Massachusetts. She lives in Pennsylvania.

Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. . . . Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation . . . . Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer.—From the Foreword by Joanna Scott

How to Fall is a darkly humorous collection that welcomes the world’s immense variety with confidence. Spanning no fewer than four countries in sixty years, these sixteen stories flesh out the complexities of people who, at first glance, live ordinary, unremarkable lives. Widowers, old men, estranged spouses, young restaurant workers, career women and Jewish grandmothers are all at the center of Pearlman’s cool, studied observation. Each character is rendered with such unpredictable intricacy that they often astonish themselves just as much as the reader. Many of the stories either begin or wind their way back to one, mythical, two-by-three-mile Massachusetts town—Godolphin, a place that “called itself a town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston.”

Edith Pearlman has published over 100 stories in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize collection, New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best and The Pushcart Prize collection. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and her second, Love Among the Greats, won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Praise for Sallie Bingham:

"Sallie Bingham binds her collection together with sheer talent. The title novella is absolutely first-rate—a skillfully suggestive amalgam of Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty. This same unblinking gaze is hard at work on the essential weakness and dependence of men (''The Banks of the Ohio'' and ''The Ice Party''), the illusion of freedom that comes with divorce (''Bare Bones''), and the desperate terror of adolescent love (''Winter Term'')."—James R. Frakes, The New York Times Book Review

"Sallie Bingham''s characters scrutinize their relationships with children, lovers, and their own treacherous souls. . . . Nearly every one of these flinty stories is a tiny masterpiece."—Entertainment Weekly

"Hardened but not compromised by adult life, these luminous stories . . . feature narrators who find mature, often solitary forms of reckoning, and even happiness. . . . There is not a false note in Bingham''s striking collection."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"These engaging tales span landscape, gender, and age, and readers will treasure Bingham''s strikingly perceptive composition and refined, clever flashes of detail and clarity."—Booklist

Sallie Bingham published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was book editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

A private eye turned moderately successful poet leads readers on a satiric, hopeful tour of how to make a life in the arts, while still having a life. Revealing, hilarious, and peppered with sly takes on the ins and outs of contemporary American poetry (chapters include "The Silence of the Iambs," "The Revisionarium, Ask Dr. Frankenpoem," and "The Periodic Table of Poetic Elements"), Jeffrey Skinner offers advice, candor, and wit.

Revision is the process a poem endures to become its best self.Or, if you are the poet, you are the process a poem endures to become its best self.Endures because a first draft, like all other objects in the universe, has inertia and would prefer to stay where it is. The poet must not collaborate.Best self because the poem is more like a person than a thing, and does not strenuously object to personification.Yo, poem.But let''s not get carried away. It''s your poem and you can treat it as you wish; sweet talk it; push it around if that''s what it takes. Alfred Hitchcock notoriously said of the actors in his movies, "They are cattle."

Jeffrey Skinner is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Salt Water Amnesia (Ausable Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, and The Paris Review, and his work has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.

"Reading Patricia Vigderman is like attending an ideal dinner party, where everyone has read your favorite books. Her essays wind particular passages of Proust, or George Eliot, or W.G. Sebald around personal moments; David Foster Wallace''s story ''The Depressed Person'' is threaded throughout an essay about her own relationship with a loved one''s serious depression. Vigderman''s responses are fresh and original and her sounding of our collective literary treasures are likely to send you back to read them again, now overlaid with her embroidery."—Mona Simpson

In this accessible collection of essays, Patricia Vigderman attempts to translate some of life''s disordered events into the orderly happiness of art. She encounters manatees, children, and snakes; with Henry Adams, Marcel Proust, and W.G. Sebald; with Texas landscape, Vertigo, and Johannes Vermeer. Adams, in Japan after his wife''s death, found in the elaborate ritual of the tea ceremony and in the discomforts of a rural inn, occasions for the wit to face down grief. His letters to friends coax laughter from strangeness and loss. Like Adams, Vigderman has a stylist''s passion for revelatory detail, and for the pleasure of immersion in a world. Smart, generous, and probing, her discoveries play with direct experience, exploring the interaction of life and art as "magic you can walk in and out of."

Patricia Vigderman''s work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Raritan, and others. She was a Literature Fellow at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Italy and teaches at Kenyon College.

"A deeply melancholic and moving work of art."—Carole Maso

Every writer is a man or woman resuscitated, brought back for a little while before being dismissed. While I was hovering in bed barely asleep, my father would sneak in to check on me. Sometimes he came in the shape of a stranger, but his black eyes with a mark of sorrow never changed. When I was younger I could run so fast my shadow would fly off me. I would leave it behind in the city where I was born. There was no city, only my mother''s arms. Dear grief, hermetic as a goat''s skull. The future where you are, but how to get there except waiting another year.

The narrator in Thomas Heise''s adventurous novel tries to fuse together his present and past, abandonment by his parents, childhood in an orphanage, and a strong sense of disconnection from his adult life. The story is written in columnar, densely lyrical sections, looping and vertiginously dropping into the speaker''s past, across several cities in Europe. W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, and Michelangelo Antonioni''s films come to mind, especially L''Avventura and Red Desert. Heise''s language is precise (dirigibles "no larger than a fennel seed") and his lush, unfolding sentences offer a great, gorgeous pleasure. Moth is a haunting, one-of-a-kind novel that will stay with the reader for a long, long time.

Thomas Heise is the author of Horror Vacui: Poems and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. He teaches at McGill University.

Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in short fiction, selected by David Means.

Winner of the University of Nevada’s Silver Pen Award.

"Mullins writes about these journeys, and about sex and the desert, with a wonderful, edgy lucidity. Greetings from Below is a remarkable debut."––Margot Livesey

What would have become of Nick Adams if he''d been born along the ragged edges of a new American city, one with more churches per capita than any other, and twice the suicide rate? Meet Nick Danze, the main character of David Philip Mullins''s vital debut collection, Greetings from Below. The opening story finds fourteen-year-old Nick and his pal Kilburg sitting in the Las Vegas desert, drinking whiskey from Kilburg''s fake leg. It''s the first of many shocks in Nick''s sexual education, which begins with a kiss from Kilburg he calls "practice." In later stories, Nick hires a call girl, visits a swingers'' club on Christmas Eve, obsesses over obese middle-aged women, and meets the love of his life, Annie, only he''s not sure he loves her and he''s compulsively unfaithful. Ashamed of his behavior, he stubbornly repeats it. And lurking behind it all is Vegas, with its gilded casinos, neon-tinted suburbs, and dingy, outer-ring strip clubs. In Nick''s wounded honesty and queasy self-consciousness, Mullins awakens us to the perverse power of alienation and shame.

"A whirling, Dionysian poet. . . . Dwyer negotiates brazenly with huge tracts of the human condition. Her leaping imagination will make you laugh out loud. The poems in Belle Laide are a rodeo; hang on to your saddle, cowboy."—Tony Hoagland

A man with a shovel in his hand / is a sexy thing.I dare myself to bury my dead, / to incline towards Cupid''s clouds.I dare myself to love a man all-out. / I''m less afraid of the stray hairs of strangersleft behind in hotel bathtubs; / less afraid of the sounds in the wind.Conversing is sometimes useless, / like beavers clawing ice –hoping to erase back into water.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer earned a BA in creative writing from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers'' Award, a Bread Loaf Scholar award, and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize. Dwyer resides in northern New Mexico where she works as facilitator for the Alzheimer''s Poetry Project.

"David Martinez is like an algebra problem invented by America—he''s polynomial, and fractioned, full of identity variables and unsolved narrative coefficients. . . . Hustle is full of dashing nerve, linguistic flair, and unfakeable heart."—Tony Hoagland

The dark peoples with things:

for keys, coins, pencilsand pens our pockets grieve.

No street lights or signs,no liquor stores or bars,only a lighter for a flashlight,

and the same-faced trees,similar-armed stonesand crooked bushesstaring back at me.

There is no path in the woods for a boy from the city.

I would have set fire to get off this wildernessbut Palomar is no El Camino in an empty lot,

the plastic dripping from the dashand the paint bubbling like a toad''s throat.

If mountains were old pieces of furniture,I would have lit the fabric and danced.

If mountains were abandoned crack houses,I would have opened their meanings with flame,

if that would have let the wind and trees lead my eyesor shown me the moon''s tiptoe on the moss—

as you effect my hand,as we walk into the side of a Sunday night.

David Tomas Martinez has published in San Diego Writer''s Ink, Charlotte Journal, Poetry International, and has been featured in Border Voices. A PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Martinez is also an editor for Gulf Coast.

What is important is to avoidthe time allotted for disavowelsas the livid woundleaves a trace leaves an abscesstakes its contraction for those cloudsthat dip thunder & vanishlike rose leaves in closed jars.Age approaches, slowly. But it cannotcrystal bone into thin air.The small hours open their wounds for me.This is a woman''s confession:I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

Simone Muench is the author of Orange Crush, Lampblack & Ash, The Air Lost in Breathing, and Disappearing Address. She teaches at Lewis University in Chicago, Illinois.