Ordered by his editor to write a crime novel to reignite his stalled career, poet Jesper Humlin reluctantly travels to Gothenburg, where three unlikely pupils of an impromptu writing workshop draw him into their culturally driven, compelling worlds.

When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time. It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that...

"Cadenza is the City of Words, a city run by poets, its skyline dominated by the steepled towers of its libraries ... Carlo Mazzoni, a young wordsmith, arrives at the city gates intent on making his name as the bells ring out with the news of the death of the city's poet-leader. Instead, he finds himself embroiled with the intrigues of a city in turmoil ... A war that threatens not only to destroy Cadenza but remove it from history altogether"--

Aimless and steeped in writer's block in the months after losing her husband and the father of her children, writer Stacey Lane enters a secret affair with Hollywood star and poetry fan Tommy, who offers her chances to escape into his glamorous world before they are forced to evaluate their growing bond.

"A perfect storm of comedic proportions erupts in a DC bookstore over the course of one soggy summer week--narrated by two very different women and punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner. Independent bookstore owner Sophie Bernstein is burned out on books. Mourning the death of her husband, the loss of her favorite manager, her only child's lack of aspiration, and the grim state of the world, she...

"It's the end of summer, 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished and the unemployment rate is at its highest level in years. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America's most prestigious creative writing program, to...

Evicted from her social housing in south London, 28-year-old Elsie turns to her childhood friend, Juliet, for help, and among Juliet's mismatched cushions and shelves lined with trinkets, Elsie is able to breathe for the first time in years, discovering what she's been searching for has been there all along.

Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul. A brilliant mix of the psychological and supernatural, blending the acute insight of Roberto Bolaño and the eerie imagination of H. P. Lovecraft, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on...