|
|
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||
|
Foreign Rights: Available Now: Fiction—NovelThe Agnostics by Wendy Rawlings A Bad and Stupid Girl by Jean McGarry A Century of November by W.D. Wetherell The Goat Bridge by T.M. McNally (paperback) How Like an Angel by Jack Driscoll Miss Kansas City by Joan Frank One Mile Past Dangerous Curve by Darrell Spencer The AgnosticsWendy Rawlings Rights: World The Agnostics is a novel of faith, love, and family life so closly observed and spare we can almost feel its characters think. Yet while it travels these inner roads, the sweep is as much outward and generational, exposing the geology of families in disarray across shifting fidelities, crises of faith, and the small moments that cement our lives together Stephen and Beverly Wirth are by all accounts a typical American family. Although they come from religiously disparate backgrounds—she is Jewish; he, Protestant—their love for each other is all that matters at first. Together they have two daughters, Louise and Deborah, whose own very different personalities quickly emerge as powerful forces within the family dynamics. After years of marriage, Bev and Stephen drift slowly apart, their ultimate separation coming in stages as Bev struggles with her sexuality. Between bouts of alcoholism and attempts to restore an ever-growing fleet of decrepit boats, Stephen does his best to raise their daughters. But things are no different for the girls. Abandoned by a mother they feel they no longer know and stuck with a father increasingly out of control, Louise and Deborah lose themselves in their own efforts to grow up, battling troubles both inherited and of their own convention. Painting with a fine and delicate brush, the author reveals her characters' lives as a series of discrete moments, letting us experience their conflicts from within. But The Agnostics is also a story of a generation coming of age in a time of cultural turmoil, struggling to find a place for itself in the world, and searching for something to believe in. Wendy Rawlings's first book, Come Back Irish, won the 2000 Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction from The Ohio State University Press. Her stories and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Colorado Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, and other magazines. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conferences, where she was the 2002 John Farrar Fellow in Fiction. She has an MFA from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Utah. At present, she is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Alabama. August 2007 A Bad and Stupid GirlJean McGarry Rights: World A Bad and Stupid Girl is a remarkable story of emotional and intellectual discovery, experienced by two young women from much different worlds who come together at a Catholic girl's school. Siri is a legacy admission well on her way to flunking out of her freshman year at college. Esther, her roommate, is a scholarship student, brilliant and driven to succeed. Together, in small yet revelatory ways, they help each other uncover the potential richness of their lives. Jean McGarry is the author of six previous books of fiction: Airs of Providence, The Very Rich Hours, The Courage of Girls, Home at Last, Gallagher's Travels, and Dream Date. She is a professor of fiction at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. A Bad and Stupid Girl is her third novel. October 2006 A Century of November: A NovelW.D. Wetherell Rights: World "[A] strangely timeless and hypnotic narrative reminiscent of the best poetry of Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brook or Timothy Findley's haunting novel The Wars. . . ." From the author of Morning and Chekhov's Sister, A Century of November is the story of Charles Marden, an apple grower and magistrate who sets off from his Vancouver Island home on an impulsive journey to Belgium, where his son, an Allied soldier in the first world war, has just died in battle. Upon arriving in England, Marden learns that his son left behind a pregnant girlfriend, and soon Marden's search widens to include both finding the exact spot where his son died, and locating the love his son left behind. Nearing the front lines, Marden seems to descend into the fires of hell as he navigates the mine-strewn killing fields of the trenches, still reeking with poison gas. In the end, his search for the girl nearly overtakes his original mission when he learns of what she has set out to do. W. D. Wetherell's previous books include the novels Morning and Chekhov's Sister, the short story collections The Man Who Loved Levittown and Wherever That Great Heart May Be. For the last five years he has held the Strauss Living grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. October 2004 The Goat Bridge: A NovelT.M. McNally Rights: World Winner of The William Faulkner - William Wisdom Gold Medal "Brilliant. . . . The intricately layered narrative, moving back and forth in time and space, builds to a conclusion both bloody and subtle . . ." —Chicago Tribune The Goat Bridge, a portion of which received the 2003 Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella, is the story of American photographer and sometime professor, Stephen Brings, who has run away from a troubled relationship in Chicago and the painful memories of a kidnapped and still missing son, to travel in the Balkans during the Croatian War of Independence. Unlike the other foreigners in the war zone, including the group Stephen befriends, he is not there to document the war. In fact, he is all too well aware of his lack of purpose. Holed up at night in the home of a Croatian smuggler, during the day he wanders the bombed-out streets bringing oranges and water to a woman he has taken it upon himself to protect. Yet despite the daily horrors, Stephen is unable to forget the trauma of having lost his son or the sorrow, and the war-torn landscape comes to mirror his own inner battles. After a return trip to Chicago fails to heal the rift between him and the mother of his child, Stephen returns to Sarajevo, and there he undertakes a project to document in images the Croatian people-not war images, but personal portraits of an embattled people. Stephen finds himself falling in love with a German journalist, who helps to heal his ailing body and to overcome his tragic loss. T. M. McNally is the winner of the 2004 Michigan Literary Fiction Award for short fiction. He is the author of a collection of stories, Low Flying Aircraft, which received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novels Until Your Heart Stops and Almost Home. Recipient of a Smart Family Foundation Award from the Yale Review, he also has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Howard Foundation at Brown University. He teaches at Arizona State University and lives in Scottsdale with Sally Ball and their three children. January 2007 How Like an Angel: A NovelJack Driscoll Rights: World How Like an Angel is the story of Archibald Angel. Unhappy with his career, and struggling through a failing marriage, Angel goes off to make a new life for himself in a rustic cabin in northern Michigan. For Angel, the move is in many ways a journey back in time; besides lacking all the modern comforts, the cabin brings Angel back to his troubled childhood, when his undertaker father received it in payment from a widow who could not otherwise afford the cost of her husband's burial. When Angel's mother subsequently abandoned her family and ran away to recover from a mental breakdown, the cabin was an escape for father and son. While Archibald Angel revisits his past, his ex-wife and young son are thinking about their future, and slowly Angel realizes that he must do the same, or else risk failing his son, as his own father failed him. Jack Driscoll is the author of four books of poems, a collection of short stories, and three novels. In addition, he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, the NEH Independent Study Grant, Pushcart and Best American Short Story citations, the Pen/Nelson Algren Fiction Award, the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Award, and seven Pen Syndicated Project Short Fiction Awards. May 2005 Miss Kansas CityJoan Frank Rights: World Miss Kansas City is the story of an improbable friendship, set in a mid-80s America, where youthful greed and blinkered innocence arrive intertwined: "We couldn't see further than the fog at the end of the street." Circumstances draw lonely Sausalito editor Alex Blue and her closeted melancholic boss, Morton Levi, into a strange alliance-but not before each has been taken on an equally strange ride. Joan Frank is the author of the story collection Boys Keep Being Born, which was both a Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award and Paterson Fiction Award finalist, and of the novella The Great Far Away, due in 2007. Her stories appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review, The Iowa Review, Salmagundi, Confrontation, Americans in Paris, and The Book of Eros. She is a MacDowell Colony and VCCA Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of a Barbara Deming Grant, and winner of the Iowa Fiction Award and Emrys Fiction Award. She lives in Northern California. Miss Kansas City is her first novel. September 2006 One Mile Past Dangerous Curve: A NovelDarrell Spencer Rights: World Before Eddie, his father Glen had come to Athens, Ohio to set up a Snapper franchise with Eddie's step brother, a venture the two have already completed successfully elsewhere around the country. But in the midst of construction, Glen finds himself fighting a very painful, very angry, and ultimately futile battle with testicular cancer. Eddie, recently divorced, has come to help. A sign painter by trade, Eddie finds only intermittent work in town, until the day a wealthy business man commissions him to take on a series of twenty road-signs, each different, all with odd, cryptic messages. It is on a back country road, where Eddie has gone to assemble one of the signs, that the heretofore vague threats become concrete. Though he doesn't know it, the neighboring woods hide marijuana crops, and a gun-toting rural gang arrives on the scene to discourage Eddie from getting too close. From here, things only get worse. As his father continues his bitter battle with his disease, and his step-brother tries to track down his run-away sons, Eddie finds himself hunted. Darrell Spencer is Professor of English at Ohio University, where he teaches in the creative writing program. He is the author of four story collections, the last of which, Bring Your Legs with You, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Spring 2005 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Copyright © University of Michigan. University of Michigan Press homepage. ESL/ELT Michigan homepage. |
|||
