Break Away Books

After the Plains queered him, Dave Madden decided to return the favor. This outstanding collection of short stories tells the tale of a different kind of difference-one not set in the glittering lights of New York or Los Angeles, but in the grand and wide American Midwest. For Madden's characters, their queerness is part of the environment, like the soil, the sky, and the supermarket: an HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with his brothers, a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the mother who abandoned her, and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families and communities, Madden masterfully explores what it means to be an outsider always looking in.

Are we responsible for, and to, those forces that have formed us - our families, friends, and communities? Where do we leave off and others begin? In The Tribal Knot, Rebecca McClanahan looks for answers in the history of her family. Poring over letters, artifacts, and documents that span more than a century, she discovers a tribe of hardscrabble Midwest farmers, hunters, trappers, and laborers struggling to hold tight to the ties that bind them, through poverty, war, political upheavals, illness and accident, filicide and suicide, economic depressions, personal crises, and global disasters. Like the practitioners of Victorian "hair art" who wove strands of family members' hair into a single design, McClanahan braids her ancestors' stories into a single intimate narrative of her search to understand herself and her place in the family's complex past.

"A small-town hairdresser is not quite what she seems in this . . quietly luminous tale of folksy gender-bending that's entertaining and authentic" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Texas, 1930s. Charlie Bader has come of age struggling with urges he doesn't understand. After his new bride finds him wearing her lingerie, she leaves in disgust and Charlie tries to move on. Landing in Chicago, he soon discovers a community of cross-dressers and starts attending their secret soirees. But when the attack on Pearl Harbor draws the United States into World War II, Charlie volunteers for the army, serving as a dentist and trying once again to leave his obsession with soft clothes behind. After the war, thanks in part to the army's faulty record-keeping, Charlie reappears in the small town of Heaven, Indiana-as Charlene. There, Charlene opens a beauty shop where Heaven's women safely share their stories and secrets as she shampoos, clips, curls, and combs their hair. Charlene manages to keep her story hidden and her sexual desires quiet. But when she falls in love with a female customer, she faces a moment of truth-and risk-unlike any she's known before. "A complex and deeply emotional novel which explores a rarely discussed aspect of gender identity in the post-war Midwest . . . captivating." -Historical Novel Society

The ordinary and the extraordinary merge in the strange and complex lives of young women in this "frequently luminous" debut short story collection (Kirkus Reviews). Unsettling and perceptive, this debut story collection challenges our notion of American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Alternately wide-eyed, wise, and mysterious, the girls at the center of these stories leave their realities behind for curious new places where the barrier between real and unreal begins to blur. Still others hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation. The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls take place at a boundary where both the girls' bodies and their narratives belong either to themselves or to the cultures that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends. "Brisk, satisfying, and fiercely observant." -Publishers Weekly

Reply All, the third collection of award-winning and widely anthologized short stories by Robin Hemley, takes a humorous, edgy, and frank look at the human art of deception and self-deception. A father accepts, without question, the many duplicate saint relics that appear in front of his cave every day; a translator tricks Magellan by falsely translating a local chief's words of welcome; an apple salesman a long way from home thinks he's fallen in love; a search committee believes in its own nobility by hiring a minority writer; a cheating couple broadcast their affair to an entire listserv; a talk show host interviews the dead and hopes to learn their secrets. The ways in which humans fool themselves are infinite, and while these stories illustrate this sad fact in sometimes excruciating detail, the aim is not to skewer the misdirected, but to commiserate with them and blush in recognition.

In these pages, a taboo romance breaks the laws of gravity; Albert Einstein writes letters to the daughter he abandoned; and a female physicist meets Stephen Hawking in a bar. In the closing novella, All Those Stairs, an elevator operator with a genius IQ rides up and down all day enclosed in a metal box. Author Erin Stalcup explores these lives with compassion, depth, and insight as she examines loss and longing and how our bodies and minds can be both weighted and freed. And Yet It Moves is a powerful combination of both absurdist and realist fiction.

While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name, a name she has not heard in more than 25 years. Not even her husband knows that back in the 60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. An American Tune moves back and forth in time, telling the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who fled town after she was complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she became, a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An achingly poignant account of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, now available as a Break Away Book Club Edition, An American Tune illuminates the irrevocability of our choices and how those choices come to compose the tune of our lives.

On April 27, 2011, just days after learning of their pregnancy, B. J. Hollars, his wife, and their future son endured the onslaught of an EF-4 tornado. There, while huddled in a bathtub in their Alabama home, mortality flashed before their eyes. With the last of his computer battery, Hollars began recounting the experience, and would continue to do so in the following years, writing his way out of one disaster only to find himself caught up in another. Tornadoes, drownings, and nuclear catastrophes force him to acknowledge the inexplicable, while he attempts to overcome his greatest fearthe impossibility of protecting his newborn son from the worlds cruelties. Hollars creates a constellation of grief, tapping into the rarely acknowledged intersection between fatherhood and fear, sacrifice and safety, and the humbling effect of losing control of our lives.

Fans today may be surprised to learn Scott Russell Sanders was previously one of the brightest science-fiction newcomers of the 1980s. In Dancing in Dreamtime, he returns to his roots, exploring both inner and outer space in a speculative collection of short stories. At a time when humankind faces unprecedented, global-scale challenges from climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling vital resources, and widespread wars, this collection of planetary tales will strike a poignant chord with the reader. Sanders has created worlds where death tolls rise due to dream deprivation, where animals only exist in mechanical form, and where poisoned air forces people to live in biodomes. Never before has Sanders’s writing been so relevant and never before have the lessons in these stories been so important.

New Stories from the Midwest presents a collection of stories that celebrate an American region too often ignored in discussions about distinctive regional literature. The editors solicited nominations from more than 300 magazines, literary journals, and small presses and narrowed the selection to 19 authors. The stories, written by Midwestern writers or focusing on the Midwest, demonstrate that the quality of fiction from and about the heart of the country rivals that of any other region. Guest editor John McNally introduces the anthology, which features short fiction by Charles Baxter, Dan Chaon, Christopher Mohar, Rebecca Makkai, Lee Martin, and others.