General & literary fiction Books

Charlotte "Charlie" Sobczak finds the most comfort in making cheese-a craft she learned at the side of her father, Karl Mayer. In the wake of his untimely death, she and her daughter, Lucy, return to her rural hometown of Falls River, Wisconsin. With her...

Set in Madison, Wisconsin, and New Haven, Connecticut, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Mourning Light is a semi-autobiographical love story. Our narrator, Reb (so named by his mother because of her love of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca), is...

One Breath from Drowning tracks the foundering relationship between Ryan Jensen, a lapsed Mormon from Utah and heretofore closeted aspiring actor, and Sam Carter, a cocky party- and surf-loving Australian realtor whose family connections and wealth have...

A small-time celebrity keeps dying. A Bigfoot hunter and his grandson give presentations on the elusive beast. A disgruntled office drone reaches his breaking point and quits, in the middle of a zip-line trust fall. The characters populating Brian...

Knowing that queer voices have been making themselves heard in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria decades before Stonewall, editors Gary Schmidt and Merrill Cole curated thrilling snapshots of prose fiction from more than twenty contemporary writers whose...

Dorothy "Dot" Greenbaum and Rafaela "Ralfie" Santopietro have been together for years, but as they age, their stable lives begin to show cracks. Ralfie can't navigate the stairs in their home after a debilitating knee replacement and Dot's heart...

In the fall of 1980, young Casey Adair begins a year of postgraduate theater research in Spain, then on the verge of a military coup. As he attends plays and dinner parties, visits gay bars, and becomes increasingly involved in protests, Casey's...

As he finishes a cup of his morning coffee, retired cop and former detective Pat Donegal gets a curious call from the Kickapoo County Chief Deputy Hennie Duggan. A gruesome discovery of human remains on a ridge portends grisly possibilities that neither...

It's the summer of 1945, and sixteen-year-old ruffian Milo Egerson has been shipped from his Minneapolis home to his great-uncle Ham's farm in rural northwestern Wisconsin. Though his mother puts on a smile and says it'll do him good to be out in nature,...

No matter what Reader's Digest would have you believe, C.J. Anderson wants you to know he's no hero. Broken and reeling from the untimely death of his parents, the young vet with PTSD begins working a small farm plot at the suggestion of his grandfather...

A mysterious illness is afflicting the residents of Millsville, Wisconsin-but that might be the least of their problems. Investigating the situation is Arthur Reilly, the county restaurant inspector who recently relocated from New York City following an...

Like stones cast into a river, these sixteen moving, intimate stories illuminate how devotion and degeneration ripple through a working-class Polish American community in the postindustrial Midwest. At the heart of the collection is Eddie "The Bronko"...

By turns wrenching, transcendent, and haunting, the rich stories in Minus One follow characters whose lives are upended by death, estrangement, and loss-and the ways they must negotiate loneliness and absence to rebuild their new realities. In intimate...

In the summer of 1881, the twenty-five men of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition watched their ship sail for home from Discovery Harbor, just 500 miles from the North Pole. Commanded by the ambitious yet underqualified Adolphus W. Greely, this crew...

On a chilly Monday in late spring, Sheriff Dave Cubiak is at the Green Arbor Lodge for lunch when a scream from a nearby medical conference disrupts the scene. Leaping into action, he finds the ninety-three-year-old director of the prestigious Institute...

It's a sparkling August day on Washington Island and the resonant notes of early classical music float on the breeze toward the sailboats and ferries that ply the waters of Death's Door strait. After a forty-year absence, the Viola da Gamba Music...

"I know nothing about death, absolutely nothing," asserts the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel. Yet he can't stop thinking about it. Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, he...

Having a baby to save a marriage-it's the oldest of clichés. But what if the marriage at risk is a gay one, and having a baby involves a surrogate mother?    Pat Faunce is a faltering romantic, a former poetry major who now writes...

Setting the Lawn on Fire, the first novel by critically acclaimed writer Mack Friedman, trails its narrator through his obsessions with sex, drugs, art, and poison. Ivan, a young Jewish boy from Milwaukee, embarks on a journey of sexual discovery that...

Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the "Push Buttons," a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country's deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built...

Ten-year-old Sadie Meadows is reading in bed on New Year's Eve when she finds a book called The World from Your Bedroom - There and Back Again, but when she opens it up and begins to read, she is a little disappointed to see it is nothing more than a...

Scrive Luciano De Crescenzo che "Napoli non è una semplice città, ma una componente dell'animo umano". Se così stanno le cose, i quindici racconti di questo libro sono altrettanti frammenti di quest'animo. Scritti da un napoletano trapiantato e cresciuto...

Wilbur Mcduff is a young man who doesn't have a lot of positives in his life. He's a social misfit with parents that are emotionally detached from him. He spends his evenings sitting alone in the the dark or drinking beer with the few friends he has. His...

From Nafisa Haji, author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Writing on My Forehead, comes The Sweetness of Tears, an emotional, deeply layered story that explores the far reaching effects of cultural prejudice, forbidden love, and hidden histories...