Evangeline Starr Raybuck -- plain-spoken, lusty, and hardworking -- and June Keel are high school seniors, best friends going out with best friends, working together at Noecker's chicken farm after school. Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes to each other during the day at school. They tell each other everything: "That was the kind of friends we were". After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesn't become clear to Vangie that there's something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.

For readers of Girl with a Pearl Earring, a luminous and evocative novel of Édouard Manet’s muse. Paris, 1862. A young girl in a threadbare dress and green boots, hungry for experience, meets the mysterious and wealthy artist Édouard Manet. The encounter will change her—and the art world—forever. At seventeen, Victorine Meurent abandons her old life to become immersed in the Parisian society of dance halls and cafés, meeting writers and artists like Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens. As Manet’s model, Victorine explores a world of new possibilities and stirs the artist to push the boundaries of painting in his infamous portrait Olympia, which scandalizes even the most cosmopolitan city. Manet becomes himself because of Victorine. But who does she become, that figure on the divan? Intense, erotic, and beautifully wrought, Paris Red evokes the unconventional love story of a painter and his muse that changed the history of art.

Taut, unpredictable and compelling. - Vogue One lazy summer, Suzanne escapes her life in the city for a long holiday in the countryside. She rents a cabin in the woods, and places a personal ad in the newspaper: "Great kisser, good listener." Among the several replies to her ad, one stands out. An ordinary letter, unremarkable in every way, except for the postmark: Stillwater State Prison. The sender is Alpha Breville. A convict, a thief, and a rapist. Perhaps against her better judgement, she writes back to him. But what begins as a remote correspondence quickly evolves into something much more dangerous, exciting, and intimate...

Steph Bowe is back. Night Swimming is a love story with a twist, and a whole lot of heart. Imagine being the only two seventeen-year-olds in a small town. That’s life for Kirby Arrow—named after the most dissenting judge in Australia’s history—and her best friend Clancy Lee, would-be musical star. Clancy wants nothing more than to leave town and head for the big smoke, but Kirby is worried: her family has a history of leaving. She hasn’t heard from her father since he left when she was a baby. Shouldn’t she stay to help her mother with the goat’s-milk soap-making business, look after her grandfather who suffers from dementia, be an apprentice carpenter to old Mr Pool? And how could she leave her pet goat, Stanley, her dog Maude, and her cat Marianne? But two things happen that change everything for Kirby. She finds an article in the newspaper about her father, and Iris arrives in town. Iris is beautiful, wears crazy clothes, plays the mandolin, and seems perfect, really, thinks Kirby. Clancy has his heart set on winning over Iris. Trouble is Kirby is also falling in love with Iris...

An Angle of Vision is a compelling anthology that collects personal essays and memoir by a diverse group of gifted authors united by their poor or working-class roots in America. The contributors include Dorothy Alison, Joy Castro, Lisa D. Chavez, Mary Childers, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Teresa Dovalpage, Maureen Gibbon, Dwonna Goldstone, Joy Harjo, Lorraine M. Lpez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes, Bich Minh Nguyen, Judy Owens, Lynn Pruett, Heather Sellers, and Angela Threatt.

Suzanne believes she knows who she is: a former wild child, neither virgin nor virginal as a teen; someone who pulls for the wayward girls and troubled boys she now teaches in Minnesota. She has learned to survive good love and bad love and people who don't care at all. At her rented cabin, she gathers strength, like a storm forming over the lake. While looking for a spark in her life, a random coincidence leads Suzanne to try to unlock a harrowing event from her past. She is drawn into an unusual relationship with Alpha Breville, a convicted criminal with a disturbing history; simultaneously, she begins seeing an unpredictable, dark-haired drifter—a cowboy who's part angel, part howling dog. Though the cowboy matches Suzanne in intensity and desire, he's less faithful than the captive Breville. Which man can offer Suzanne the knowledge she seeks? Which man can truly touch her? How can she find her unique peace? In writing that has been likened to Kate Chopin's, Maureen Gibbon constructs a taut story of desire at the other end of the Mississippi, in the north woods of Minnesota. Against deep lakes, casinos, and a bar named the Royal, Gibbon's unconventional characters show us how to play the hands we're dealt and own the choices we make, in a tough and tender book about hard-won redemption from one of America's most original writers.

Writing programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers have proven time and again to be transformative and empowering for people in need. Halfway houses, hospitals, and shelters are all fertile ground for healing through the imagination and can often mean the difference for inmates and patients between just simply surviving and truly thriving. It is in these settings that teachers and their students need reading that nourishes the soul and challenges the spirit. Words without Walls is a collection of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration. Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart. Each selection expresses immediacy--writing that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the page--revealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence. Included is work by writers dealing with shared issues, such as Dorothy Alison and Jesmyn Ward, who write about families for whom struggle is a way of life; or Natalie Kenvin and Toi Derricotte, whose pieces reveal violence against women. Also included are writings by those who have spent time in prison themselves, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dwayne Betts, Ken Lamberton, and Etheridge Knight. Eric Boyd ennobles the day he was released from jail. Stephon Hayes reflects on what he sees from his prison window. Terra Lynn evokes the experience of being put in solitary confinement. Because in 2011 almost half of all prisoners in federal facilities were in for drug-related offenses, there are pieces by James Brown, Nick Flynn, and Ann Marlowe, who explore their own addiction and alcoholism, and by Natalie Diaz, Scott Russell Sanders, and Christine Stroud, who write of crippling drug abuse by family and friends. These powerful excerpts act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret. For students in alternative spaces, these writings, together with their own expressions, reveal the same intense desire to write and share one’s writing, found in the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who scratched her poems on bars of soap in a Gulag shower, or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who smuggled bits of poetry out of jail in the clothing of visiting friends. Wole Soyinka, in solitary confinement forty years ago, wrote that “creation is admission of great loneliness.” In these communal spaces, our loneliness is lessened, our vulnerability exposed, and our honesty tested, and through these revelatory writings students receive the necessary encouragement to share the whispering corners of their minds.