Slant Books – förlag

Ideals and reality collide when six college friends band together to start an ice cream store, promising "Better Food for a Better World," but finding a worse world than they had expected.It seems like a great idea: six friends from college pool their money and energy to start an ice cream store. Natural High Ice Cream: Better Food for a Better World. It''s high-minded, with a wink, like the marital self-help group they all belong to. The store finds a ready clientele in its northern California college town filled with amiable ex-hippies who are happy to contribute to a better world, even if all they have to contribute is the price of an ice cream cone.But the store, like the marriage group, turns out to be work, not fun, and rifts start to appear between the friends. Nancy, who had seemed so easygoing and sweetly sexy when they started, turns stern. Cecilia, who had wanted to be a musician, is openly bored. And flighty, excitable Vivy is crawling out of her skin. She yearns for the old days, before Natural High, when she and her husband Sam traveled around the country with countercultural musicians and dancers. She''d give anything to have those days back again. And so quietly, without telling the partners, she starts to rev up the old company, contacting her old acts--the fat contortionist, the muscle-bound juggler. She''s going to save them all, and Natural High, too. But saving turns out to be harder than it looks, and Vivy isn''t the only one with secrets.

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Summer Books 2013"e;In A Land Without Sin Paula Huston has written a novel that's wise and wry, tragic and tender, and altogether thrilling. Both moved and enthralled, I couldn't stop reading."e;--Robert ClarkAuthor of In the Deep Midwinter and Love Among the Ruins"e;Huston treads where few writers dare, jumping fearlessly into the roiling cauldron of factious Central American politics, class, culture, and religions. No doubt it would have been easier to write a mere gloss, a panoramic report describing the horror of war, revolution, grinding poverty, and the inevitable human carnage. However, the lens through which Huston sees penetrates far deeper than a perusal of these surface wounds to examine the limits of family loyalty, faith, and the causes and cure of hatred. A Land Without Sin is a compelling narrative that leaves me both haunted and hungry for more."e;--Gina OchsnerAuthor of People I Wanted to Be and The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight"e;With some of the sheer excitement of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and the depth of soulful inquiry of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Paula Huston's A Land Without Sin is a savvy look at the violent struggles in southern Mexico over the last quarter century and a vivid perspective on the hopes and perils of liberation theology. It is a poignant and splendid book."e;--Ron HansenAuthor of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus

Jon Mote--grad school dropout and serial failure--has been hired to investigate the murder of his erstwhile mentor, Richard Pratt, a star in the firmament of literary theory. Feeling unequal to the task, Mote skitters on the edge of madness, trying to stifle the increasingly threatening voices in his head. His only source of hope is the dogged love of his developmentally disabled sister, Judy, who serves as cheerleader, critic, and moral compass.Death Comes for the Deconstructionist follows Mote and his sister through the streets and neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota--from crime scenes to the halls of academe. Mote''s investigation uncovers a series of suspects--including the victim''s wife, mistress, and intellectual rivals. Along the way he stumbles onto Pratt''s terrible secret, one that prompts the discovery of an equally dark mystery from his own past.These revelations hasten Mote''s descent into darkness, putting both him and Judy at grave risk. Death Comes for the Deconstructionist is a tragicomic mystery, a detective story that is at once suspenseful, provocative, and emotionally resonant. It asks not only "whodunit" but whether truth is ultimately something we create rather than discover.

Dunstan Thompson was an American poet of great promise who burst onto the Anglo-American literary scene during World War II. In the words of one contemporary, Thompson was one of the rising "stars of modern poetry," a writer who might one day join the pantheon of poets like Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas.And yet Thompson more or less disappeared from public view by the early 1950s. After publishing two volumes of poetry, a travel book, and a novel, Thompson had only a few scattered magazine publications until his death. A posthumous volume was privately printed in England, but the circulation was small. Here at Last is Love: Selected Poems is the definitive, authorized selection of Thompson''s best work, revealing to a wider public the literary vision of a "lost master." The introduction by editor Gregory Wolfe offers the first extended narrative in print relating Thompson''s complex personal story. The afterword by distinguished poet and critic Dana Gioia provides a thorough--and just--assessment of his poetic achievement. Thompson''s early poetry was not only technically innovative, but saturated with the language and the drama of gay experience during World War II. Yet just a few years after the war, Thompson returned to the Catholic faith of his childhood, only to find that his new poetic voice was out of sync with the times. In spite of the difficulties he faced in his later years, Thompson did not give up writing poetry, continuing to produce quality work. After his reconversion, the poetry shifted in tone and form from a lush romanticism to an urbane classicism. The later work covers a wide range of subjects, from studies of historical figures to devotional lyrics.This volume will not only stir up the debate about Thompson''s sexual and religious passions, but also help complete the history of twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry, finally making his work available to scholars and lovers of poetry everywhere.

A young woman is dead. A man with diminished capacity is accused. His friends, also wounded, try to help him. In the process, they teach Jon Mote a thing or two he desperately needs to learn.Jon no longer hears voices, but he''s not convinced a silent universe is much better than a haunted one. He''s returned his sister Judy to her group home and taken a staff job there that puts him in the company of six folks who, a bit rebelliously, he calls Specials. Jon thinks his job is to teach these people basic life skills like telling time, making change, and riding the bus. The world says they are to be pitied, perhaps even eliminated. At best taken care of. But he finds that Judy, Ralph, Bonita, Jimmy, Billy the Skywatcher, and J.P. possess something that he and the world badly need. The accused, J.P., is a gentle man who can''t tell time or temperature, but wants you to be happy. Is he also a killer? The bureaucracy judges him so and sends him to an institution for the criminally insane. His friends know that if they do not get him back he will wither and die. Meanwhile, Jon has his own problems. He finds himself threatened not so much by disintegration as by normality--the meaningless of the mundane. Alive but trivial.While searching for something to fill the emptiness and for a way to rescue his client and friend, Jon unexpectedly reconnects with his estranged wife, Zillah, and he has an unsettling encounter with an unusual nun who presents him a way of seeing the world that puzzles and intrigues him.

"Llorona was no harmless little pigeon. She was the lechuza, the owl you see just before someone is about to die, the one that haunts you in your dreams and you never want to see in real life because it means you are about to lose someone you love."Llorona is the only girl Guero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore. True to her namesake, Llorona cast Guero away with the coldness of the apparition she has become. But Guero--though he would never admit it to his friends--still wants to get back together with her.Guero spends time with his friends Angel and Smiley--members of the HCP (Hispanics Causing Panic) gang--roaming the streets of the South Texas border towns they inhabit, trying to forget Llorona even as she seems to appear around every corner. Over three days Guero''s increasingly violent confrontations with Llorona''s current boyfriend will jeopardize the lives of Angel and Smiley and the love he hopes to regain. As events begin to accelerate toward their conclusion--and gang signs are thrown as both threats and claims of identity--the question arises: will Guero throw the HCP sign, or will he throw off that life? Guero''s life will be irrevocably changed by violence and loss, but who will he lose, and will he--somewhere along the way--lose himself?

Ever since the Middle Ages, the first hour of daily prayer in monastic life--Matins--has roused the community from sleep. Wisely, the second hour was reserved for Lauds, which means praise. Praise with that freshly awakened consciousness. In this way, such an attitude toward the world, seen and unseen, could be absorbed before breakfast. The poems in this book continue that tradition--though outside a monastic community--of waking up, reflecting, and discerning what there is to praise--and how, and whom. The book constructs an introspective retrospective of a woman charged with curiosity and accommodating doubt. Over decades, she acknowledges with gratitude her own daily shaping by students, grandchildren, rhinos--a public and private history full of saints and ain''ts. Beyond the author''s erstwhile community chanting Lauds, she explores its resonance with wit and wistfulness and arrives at this truth: praise over time alters the one who gives it.

Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace. This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire." Cording''s task has therefore been to evoke what he calls "the primordial intuitions of Christianity": that we live in a world we did not create; that God''s immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot "taste and see" that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it. The reflections in Finding the World''s Fullness--comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz--suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, "The world''s fullness is not made but found."

In Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, the beloved bestselling novelist Ron Hansen opens the doors of his writing studio to share with us his passions for history, scandal, theology, Jesuits, the American West, and golf (which he plays even in bad weather). If Hansen''s novels explore people very different from himself--from a stigmatic nun to a Victorian poet to Billy the Kid, and even Hitler''s niece--the meditations in this book do the opposite, allowing us to glimpse the wellsprings of his imagination, the places and traditions and books that drive him to create made-up worlds. In that sense, the reflections in these pages truly serve as "notes toward a memoir."As each section unfolds, we gain a clearer sense of Hansen''s aesthetic, the parallels he sees between writing and the sacraments, between literature''s capacity to make history present to us and the Church''s rich array of traditions, including the Jesuit charism that has inspired great writers, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (and himself). Equally adept at telling a hilarious anecdote and guiding us through a complex, ambiguous episode in history, Hansen''s language remains fresh and invigorating. Hotly in Pursuit of the Real takes you inside one writer''s imagination, only to send you back out into the wide world with new eyes.