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...

Reimagines the experiences of pre-fame poet Elizabeth Bishop during three life-changing weeks spent in Paris on the eve of World War II.

Two Serbian refugees, Jovan and Suzana, are desperately seeking redemption in Australia. The couple fled war-torn Sarajevo after losing their children, their standing as public intellectuals, and their connection to each other. Now working as cleaners in a suburb of Melbourne, they struggle to rebuild their lives under the painful hardships of immigrant life. During a hot summer, Jovan's janitorial work at a hospital is disrupted by mysterious acts...

This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.

"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...

The story of poet Emily Dickinson, whose genius, wit, intellectual independence, and pathos only came to be recognized after her death.

After finishing college, a struggling poet finds work at an adult bookstore and discovers a mentor in an older, troubled poet.