"An incandescent collection that interrogates the personal and political nature of desire, freedom, and disaster. In his brilliant, expansive second volume, Whiting Award-winning poet Roger Reeves probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity-climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss. The poems in Best Barbarian roam across the literary and social landscape, from Beowulf's Grendel to the jazz musician Alice Coltrane,...

"Failing memory has forced Eva Gordon to move in with her granddaughter, Breezy. But Eva hates the bustle of Boston. All she wants to do is move back to her quiet, cozy Cape Cod home and be left alone. Then Breezy announces she's getting married, and they'll be moving to her new husband's rundown family farm, where he lives with an elderly uncle. They'll be one big family-but only Breezy and her new husband think it'll be a happy one. It's all too...

"When Ben Aitken learnt that his gran had enjoyed a four-night holiday including four three-course dinners, four cooked breakfasts, four games of bingo, a pair of excursions, sixteen pints of lager and luxury return coach travel, all for a hundred pounds, he thought, that's the life, and signed himself up. Six times over. Good value aside, what Ben was really after was the company of his elders - those with more chapters under their belt, with the...

"After he's forced to sell the family farm he's labored on his whole life, 63-year-old Gerrit Laninga doesn't know what to do with himself. He sacrificed everything for the land--his time, his health, his family--with nothing to show for it but bitterness, regret, and two grown children who want nothing to do with him. Fifteen-year-old Rae Walters has growing doubts and fears about The Plan--the detailed blueprint for high school that will help her...

"It's been sixteen years since Caretta 'Cara' Rutledge has returned home to the beautiful shores of Charleston, South Carolina. Over those years, she has weathered the tides of deaths and births, struggles and joys. And now, as Cara prepares for her second wedding, her life is about to change yet again. Meanwhile, the rest of the storied Rutledge family is also in flux. Cara's niece Linnea returns to Sullivan's Island to begin a new career and an...

At the end of what is (she cannot help observing) an extraordinary life, Elisabeth Rother has decided to write her memoirs. She brushes aside her narrow escape with her Jewish husband from the Nazis, and the perilous voyage to the New World of New Jersey. The subject that really consumes her is the waywardness of her impossible daughter, Renate, and her granddaughter, Irene. Renate performs autopsies on the bodies of politicians whom death has harvested...

"Kathleen is eighty years old. After she has a run-in with an intruder, her daughter wants her to move into a residential home. But she's not having any of it ... Martha is having a quarter-life crisis. Unemployed, unloved and uninspired, she just can't get her life together ... When Martha sees Kathleen's advertisement for a driver and companion to share an epic road trip across America with, she decides this job might be the answer to her prayers...

In Jazz Age London, a tale of a passionate and forbidden interracial romance, and the unbreakable bond between a bright young woman and her eccentric grandmother, unfolds. Betty forfeited everything in order to care for her grandmother Arlette in their dilapidated home on the English island of Guernsey. But her will included a beneficiary unknown to her family, a woman named Clara Pickle, at a London address. Flashback to 1920s bohemian London, where...

The story of four women "as they negotiate one of Manhattan's swiftly changing neighborhoods, extreme weather, and the perils and unease of twenty-first-century life--

Stages is a moving and surprisingly funny vérité exploration of the unexpected power of the simple act of storytelling. In New York City's oldest community center, a group of older Puerto Rican women and inner-city youth come together to create an original play out of the stories of their lives. Weaving together themes of immigration, identity, aging and coming of age, Stages offers an intimate portrait of an unlikely ensemble, transformed by the...