Customer Comments

Perfect for the little bulldozer and dump truck lover in your house. The verses of “Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site” make the rumblings of a drowsy construction site into a soothing story, and the art makes these mighty vehicles cuddly and always worth another look each night. It’s been one of the few bedtime books that has been successful in transitioning a very energetic young boy into quiet time and bed.

A beautiful book with embraceable characters. This story collection has lyrical writing, earned emotion, variety and humor, and spot-on characters who are all so true and human in their faults and quirks. Highlights are “’The Scriptological Review’: A Last Letter From the Editor,” which is very funny, and after reading you’ll never look the same at how you put pen to paper; the powerful stories “Escape Key,” and “The Gulf;” and “Lion and Panther In London,” with all its many defining moments of wrestling, figuratively and literally, with one’s family, self, and cultures.

Evans’ writing is so skillfully cool, and the underpinnings of race, class and family are so subtly crafted into her characters, that it’s easy to be swept away by her stories. These stories cut close to the bone -- they’re easy reads, because of the confident and heartfelt writing, but the relationships and identities in the stories are complex. There’s a wide array here of characters and perspectives -- different genders, races, classes -- yet amid all this variety, there are the many shared experiences -- loneliness, love, passion and fear -- that bring these stories, and us all, together.

Tiphanie Yanique’s collection "How to Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories" is experimental in the best sense of the word. The stories may explore a wide-range of terrains (Caribbean and beyond), perspectives and voices, however,they always allow the beautiful complexity of their characters’ inner lives to pulse with emotion. There’s a heart-moving and soul-stirring loneliness throughout the collection, as Yanique’s characters struggle to connect with others, despite how they see, or are seen by, the world.

From an imaginative initial concept that the Minotaur is alive and well, working in the kitchen crew of a Southern steak house, Sherrill crafts an entirely convincing and emotionally true tale of working-class heroes and family. We believe in the characters, and we feel for their struggles and dreams, horns and all.

Tragic moments lead to haunting lonely epiphanies for working-class characters. They face their hardscrabble lives—pipefitters, hunters, foundry workers, meth heads—and the cold hard realities of bad relationships, bad jobs and addictions. Beneath it all is hope, held tightly in their hearts. A heartbreaking and beautiful collection of stories.

A compelling and humane look behind the headlines, or what used to be headlines, as meth addiction moves off the front page and more firmly into the fabric and underground economics of our small towns. Reding delves into the lives touched by this drug in small town Iowa, but the setting could just as well be small town anywhere, as it’s truly what Sherwood Anderson’s "Winesburg, Ohio" has become. We have the doctor, the prosecutor, the law enforcement officer, the child, the producer, the addict—with the distant hand of big agricultural and big pharmaceutical—but more than anything, we have the voices of people who all in their own way struggle with what life has become within the rippling effects of addiction.