In this remarkable debut novel set in 1940s Mexico, Marc Bojanowski has crafted a work of startling originality -- a poetic, mesmerizing tale of loyalty, violence, love, and redemption.

Written in the searing voice of its unnamed narrator, this is the story of a young man drifting through the badlands of California and Mexico after the death of his mother. He eventually settles in Canción, a sleepy Baja city on the verge of transformation. Lured by money and fame, he enters int...

A moving and utterly extraordinary
debut novel about love and loss and the
unforeseeable darkness that lurks around
the corners of everyday life

Respected professor and noted author Jack Owens brought his son, Danny, to Gilbert, Indiana, to escape a past and a betrayal too painful to endure elsewhere. In this quiet midwestern college town Jack believed they'd be safe to start over -- and for ten years, it appeared to be so. But on an ordinary-seeming...

In this novel of social drama, a casual murder in the small Georgia town of Cotton Point just after World War II and the resulting court case cleave open the ugly divisions of race and class. The man accused of shooting a black girl, a storekeeper named Paris Trout, has no great feeling of guilt, nor fear that the system will fail to work his way. Trout becomes an embarrassment to the polite white society that prefers to hold itself high above such primitive prejudice. But the trial does not ...

Ray in Reverse is such an exceptionally winning novel from start to finish (or would that be finish to start?) that one can almost forgive its opening chapter. The shtick: Ray's in heaven, and he's joined a group called Last Words, where the members... well, you guessed it, rehash the last things they said on Earth. As it turns out, the dead make for fierce critics, and when they criticize his offering (the incomplete phrase "I wish--"), Ray storms out in a huff.

Not so funny,...

Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson's Neely, North Carolina, doesn't appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinste...