Murder mysteries, thrillers, whodunnits, all in the context of the "Indian," or Native American, experience, that's my subject. But really I'm writing about family and friends. Love letters to a people and life. My mother's father was native, and I lived and worked near and on two reservations growing up, White Earth and Red Lake. My novel, for example, was written out of my experience of being a hunting/fishing guide for Sabaskong Bay Lodge. My current work, about the Indian Boarding School genocide, has been inspired by first-person witness to that atrocity.
Deep in the magnificent landscape of northwest Minnesota, near the Chippewa reservation where he grew up, Paul Two Persons owns a resort lodge on fourteen thousand acres of pristine forests and lakes. Haunted by the death of his young son and his disintegrating relationship with his beautiful wife, Paul is on the verge of losing the land he loves due to an unpaid loan to his childhood friend Al.
When he is called on to identify Al's body at the morgue, he knows his troubles have just begun. Not only are shady developers eyeing his property, but his best friend is putting moves on his mourning wife, and he's getting the dizzying sense that these occurrences are related to his son's death and Al's "suicide."
Subversive, edifying, and laugh-out-loud funny, Yeatman’s satirical novel follows Victoria, a woman in a failing marriage, from her initial fantasies of dispatching her clueless husband to the act itself. And no less employing the necessary help of her too-sweet and clueless gal-pal, Holly.
A book about a bookworm, Victoria, it contains countless Easter Eggs and riffs on some of the greats while spinning out a wholly engaging and, by all means, original and captivating story.
“Imagine if Patricia Highsmith had written The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and instead of heroic daydreams she gave her protagonist murderous ones—that would be Bookworm. Robin Yeatman’s story is subversive, surprising, and satisfying in a way that only the best comic noir can be.”—Claire Oshetsky, author of Chouette
A wickedly funny debut novel—a black comedy with a generous heart that explores the power of imagination and reading—about a woman who tries to use fiction to find her way to happiness.
Victoria is unhappily married to an ambitious and controlling lawyer consumed with his career. Burdened with overbearing in-laws, a…
A tour de force thriller set in Paris, this book assembles, through a mysterious observer, a disparate and culturally rich cast of characters, all of whom, ultimately, converge over an act of terrorism.
The book's beauty is in its finely nuanced and richly sympathetic portrayal of otherwise marginalized individuals, the Witch, the tale-teller, being one of them. It has brilliant execution, is sly, mysterious at times, and profound.
The Witch of Matongé by Madison Smartt Bell, Concord Free Press, 2022, 258 pages. ISBN 978-0-9835851-8-3 The first thing that will strike you about Madison Smartt Bell’s new novel, The Witch of Matongé, is the beautiful language. This is not a typical narrative. It is startling, and the depth of what is described is thrilling. In the beginning, the viewpoint appears to be omniscient. However, the witch of the novel’s title is actually narrating and her unique manner of speaking is exquisite. She uses a bowl of water to understand what is happening in order to tell the story. And…
A sensation in France and elsewhere in Europe, David Vann is a writer of brutally unsparing narratives. This book, one of his best, surprises, shocks, and horrifies—and sometimes amuses, too—and all at once.
It is a story about a family on what should be nothing more than a hunting trip. Only after a senseless murder, it becomes a meditation on the power of myth. The story is as real as real gets, though it’s far larger than that. It becomes the stuff of revelatory—and prophetic—nightmares. It’s a big dark dream of a book, unforgettable.
A shocking, suspenseful and daring new novel from one of the greatest American writers at work today, whose previous books include Caribou Island, Dirt and Legend of a Suicide.
In David Vann's searing novel Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy is eager to make his first kill at his family's annual deer hunt. But all is not as it should be. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.
This book is a compelling and, at times, shockingly revealing story of a love that cannot be, should not be, but is.
Seventeen-year-old Mari, after an altercation at the hotel where she works, becomes involved with the perpetrator of it, a much older man of, to all but Mari, unacceptable morals. Through its unsparingly graphic depiction of the lovers’ sometimes extreme but mutual intimacies, Ogawa’s novel navigates the rarely explored region between violence and impassioned love.
A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa―author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire,…
Gritty, shocking at times, and utterly winning, Moshfegh’s novel has the form of a well-wrought thriller, but it is so much more.
It’s a character study, one grimly amusing in its oh-so-granular depiction of a down-and-out life, yet it is, too, all the while, riveting in its lethal and inevitable escalation. It’s surprising. Twists ahead. Told through Moshfegh’s narrator, Eileen, who has survived her ordeal, it allows the reader to—somewhat comfortably—navigate what could have been, otherwise, a too-muchness. In the end, it’s all Eileen, our un-plucky bulimic heroine, who delivers the final blow.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes-a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to…
Introducing the irrepressible Liddy-Jean Carpenter, a young woman who has learning disabilities but also has a genius plan.
While Liddy-Jean spends her days doing minor office tasks with nobody paying attention, she sees how badly the wand-waving big boss treats the Marketing Department worker bees. So, she takes lots of notes for a business book to teach bosses to be better. Liddy-Jean likes office-mate Rose and Rose’s new friend Jenny, but she doesn’t like Rose’s creepy boyfriend. So how can she save Rose?
Liddy-Jean knows with certainty that love is love, and she concludes that Rose should be with Jenny, bosses should do better, and everybody needs the services of Liddy-Jean, Marketing Queen.
Liddy-Jean Marketing Queen and the Matchmaking Scheme
Novelist and filmmaker Mari SanGiovanni introduces readers to the irrepressible Liddy-Jean Carpenter, a matchmaker with special talents who will charm readers with her wit, wisdom, and sensibilities in this warm, enchanting love-is-love office romance.
Liddy-Jean Carpenter has learning disabilities. But she also has a surprisingly genius plan.
While she spends her days doing minor office tasks with nobody paying attention, she sees how badly the wand-waving big boss treats the Marketing Department worker bees. So, she takes lots of notes for a business book to teach bosses to be better.
While compiling pages of bad behavior notes, she finds she…
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