“Brown’s comic take on America today is both amazing and memorable . . . One of the most brilliant and original new writers to appear for a long time.” (Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author) “Everything Natalie said seemed, to herself, to have been said better by him. He was less fond of speaking, however, than he was of hitting people in the face, which seemed a more likely source of her love to those of us who knew him,” begins Jason Brown’s linked collection of beautifully haunted, violent, and wry stories set in the densely forested lands of northern New England. In these tales of forbidden love, runaway children, patrimony, alcohol, class, inheritance, and survival, Brown’s elegant prose emits both quiet despair and a poignant sense of hope and redemption. These vivid accounts of troubled lives combine the powerful family drama of Andre Dubus and Russell Banks, the dark wit of Denis Johnson, the lost souls of Charles D’Ambrosio, and the New England gothic of Nathaniel Hawthorne. “One quality that makes these stories feel unmistakably new is Brown’s . . . seamless, oddly cinematic shifts among points of view . . . He has a gift for crisp, angular sentences, some of which are embedded with a quiet humor.” —Time Out New York “In Jason Brown’s fine story collection . . . the inhabitants of Vaughn, Maine, are stalked not by Stephen King horror but by intimate afflictions of blood, accident, and history. Yet their stories are too vivid to be entirely bleak. Maine’s woods and rivers, its changing light, are the beautifully rendered constants in a harsh, even malevolent, world.” —The Boston Globe

Fiction. The ten linked stories in Jason Brown's A FAITHFUL BUT MELANCHOLY ACCOUNT OF SEVERAL BARBARITIES LATELY COMMITTED follow John Howland and his descendants as they struggle with their New England legacy as one of the country's founding families and the decaying trappings of that esteemed past. Set on the Maine coast, where the Howland family has lived for almost 400 years, the grandfather, John Howland, lives in a fantasy that still places him at the center of the world. The next generation resides in the confused ruins of the 1960s rebellion, while many in the third generation feel they have no choice but to scatter in search of a new identity. Brown's touching, humorous portrait of a great family in decline earns him a place among the very best linked-story collections--James Joyce's Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Alice Munro's Beggar Maid and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.

In keeping with the tradition of the Noir series, Boston Noir 2 is made up of the works of several celebrated authors whose work is tied together by a common setting. After the massive success of the first Boston Noir, bestselling author Dennis Lehane is back as curator for another anthology of crime stories set in Boston. The Boston Noir 2 collection features reprints of the classic chilling short stories and novel excerpts that brought the world of noir to its knees. Contributors include Pulitzer winners Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike.

Exciting and fascinating, Maine: An Annotated Bibliography is a look at the Maine Experience from its many historical, political, social, and literary perspectives. Organized under such unifying themes as "The Wild, Wild East," "Ethnicity Matters," "Women in Maine," and "Maine in the Civil War," the work gives readers a most useful and often humorous overview of over 400 books written about Maine. The author introduces the reader to many often overlooked works from the nineteeth century and early twentieth century, such as those by Sally Field, Elijah Kellogg, and Chenoa Hall, as well as many studies of familiar political figures such as Bill Cohen, Ed Muskie, Joshua Chamberlain, Angus King, Margaret Chase Smith, and George Mitchell. A valuable resource for anyone interested in the Pine Tree State.

Boston Noir & Boston Noir 2: The Complete Set combines all twenty-five stories from best seller Boston Noir. "Dennis Lehane advises us not to judge the genre by its Hollywood images of sharp men in fedoras lighting cigarettes for femmes fatales standing in the dark alleys. [Lehane] writes persuasively of the gentrification that has left people feeling crushed." --New York Times, on Boston Noir "The contributor list is delightfully quirky...The collection's unifying element is a deep understanding of Boston's Byzantine worlds of race and class--as seen terrifyingly in Andre Dubus's tale of Milltown resentment and pampered preppies." --Boston Globe, on Boston Noir 2: The Classics Boston Noir & Boston Noir 2: The Complete Set combines all twenty-five stories from best seller Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane, and its sequel, Boston Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lehane, Mary Cotton & Jaime Clarke; featuring Lehane's own "Animal Rescue," the basis for the motion picture The Drop, and twenty-four classic noir stories set throughout Boston.

Ring in the New Year in style with The Southern Review's jewel-studded winter 2012 issue. Featured poets include Charles Simic, Mary Ruefle, Stephen Dunn, Bob Hicok, Wendy Barker, Elana Bell, Daniel Johnson, and Anna Journey. A snow-dusted Copenhagen at Christmas is the site of Thomas E. Kennedy's surprising and movingly human account of what it means to face death and emerge grateful to the world. Jason Brown brings us "Wintering Over," a chilling story about an artist couple isolated in a neglected Maine house over a winter that may be prove too long for them to endure. New fiction by Stuart Dybek, Christie Hodgen, Christine Sneed, Ted Sanders, and Reese Okyong Kwon joins nonfiction by Rachel Ida Buff and paintings by Gwyneth Scally.

The Devil's Dominion examines the use of folk magic by ordinary men and women in early New England. The book describes in vivid detail the magical techniques used by settlers and the assumptions which underlaid them. Godbeer argues that layfolk were generally far less consistent in their beliefs and actions than their ministers would have liked; even church members sometimes turned to magic. The Devil's Dominion reveals that the relationship between magical and religious belief was complex and ambivalent: some members of the community rejected magic altogether, but others did not. Godbeer argues that the controversy surrounding astrological prediction in early New England paralleled clerical condemnation of magical practice, and that the different perspectives on witchcraft engendered by magical tradition and Puritan doctrine often caused confusion and disagreement when New Englanders sought legal punishment of witches.