Without Wax
A Documentary Novel by William Walsh

If you’re asked for comment, you will comply. But you will not give your first name or say where you’re really from. And you will alter your voice slightly in pitch and modulation. You will need to be able to deny it if some friend or relation ever puts you on the spot. You will need to be able to say, “That’s not me waiting in line at that gangbang.”

228 pages  |  Now available from Casperian Books

Flying Leap
Stories by Judy Budnitz

Now women like to get where they are going as fast as they can. No time for a journey. It must be done as soon as they think of it. That’s the way Kanisa’s mother did it. She took the leap headfirst on a cloudy day in the middle of rush hour, didn’t bother to wait for the dramatic sunset. Her mother splattered neatly next to the curb. It was street-cleaning day: lucky coincidence.

256 pages  |  Now available from Picador

Let’s Talk About Love
A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson

All the heirs of Bob Dylan who downplay conventional musicality in order to isolate what Roland Barthes called “the grain of the voice,” another order of meaning and materiality, are explicitly disdaining standard measures of entertainment value and the ambitions they represent. Céline pays such aspirations tribute in every note.

176 pages  |  Now available from Continuum

Nightwork
Stories by Christine Schutt

We went looking for water beyond the fields, broke through pokered plants to the mud bank, wet-bark brown that was a river. There, crouched, we spit white spit to watch the fish puck at the surface to eat it. I was next to the older boy, the one we never asked to come along but who sometimes came along, took his pants off, made to swim. The older boy dangled his martyred feet in the river.

129 pages  |  Now available from Dalkey Archive

The Human Mind
Short Prose by Angela Woodward

The buzzing in the trees had long ago stilled, and now the swallows came in silence to swoop after gnats. Reaumur sat on, until clouds covered his source of illumination. He couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. Yet he felt the night to be gigantic, endless, spread out in a huge perfect circle all around where he sat, himself the black dot at its center.

55 pages  |  Now available from Ravenna

Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series
Prose Poems by Julie Gard

A child of the bleak Midwest defies her dutiful bloodline, takes to wandering and asymmetrical curls. Wry lip closes over a mouthful. They have caught her for one minute, before her mind once again changes. Through her life she stores them up, the revelations, the heaven in hell. I am not sure who she tells. A playmate, husband, river, aunt, dying elm tree, mouthful of jam.

30 pages  |  Now available from Finishing Line