The Hopefuls

​​​​​​​​​Elizabeth Oness

​​ ​From award-winning writer Elizabeth Oness comes a new collection of rapturous and compelling stories about ordinary people and their joys, slights, families, and failures. The Hopefuls shimmers with characters destined to keep desiring, searching, and living . . . and finding themselves again and again.

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​Praise for The Hopefuls

“In Oness’s hands, even the small​​est, most ordinary lives loom large.” 

Never Stop Exiting

​​​​​​​Michael Hopkins

​​ ​An unhittable baseball pitcher, a young woman who wants to keep her amputated leg, a couple dealing with an Alzheimer’s afflicted father, and the rocks speaking with one another when everything comes to an end. Michael Hopkins’ dazzling mix of stories helps us see the world as if through beginner’s eyes, a prism where the refractions usher in light and life.​

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​Praise for Never Stop Exiting​

—Jim Knipfel, author of Slackjaw

​“Compelling characters, intriguing storylines, and masterfully made connections.”

—John Bloner, Jr., editor of Moss Piglet

Broken Heart Syndrome

​​​​​​Anne Colwell

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​“A journey across the landscape of the heart.”

–Nina McConigley, winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“What a beautiful, beautiful book. Kaleidoscopic and virtuosic, Anne Colwell’s exploration of how broken hearts heal, break, and heal again is nothing less than thrilling.”

—Liam Callanan, author of When in Rome

“Colwell wields her poet’s scalpel to explore . . . all the surprising ways hearts can break and, more importantly, all the surprising ways those hearts can mend.”

—Maribeth Fischer, author of A Season of Perfect Happiness

“Colwell has a poet’s eye for exquisite details that pinpoint who we are, and her characters look out for one another in small, beautiful ways. “

—Ethan Joella, author of The Same Bright Stars

“Through all the heartbreak and loss, the mistakes and disappointments, I was cheering for every last one of the characters in Broken Heart Syndrome to make it.”

—Clifford Garstang, author of What the Zhang Boys Know

The Mexican Messiah: A Novella & Stories

​​​​​​Jay Kauffmann​​

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"Wholly convincing and heartfelt . . . a work of wonderment."

—Vanessa Blakeslee, author of Perfect Conditions

“Exquisitely written and compelling . . . nothing short of brilliant.” 

—Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

“With shimmering, vibrant language, Kauffmann offers unexpected insights on the nature of fate and faith.” 

—Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Colorado Book Award Winner

“Kauffmann has the grace to write about the nature of faith and belief, the emptiness of privilege, the baffled rage born of loss—all without passing judgment” 

—Diane Lefer, author of California Transit

“Polished, haunting . . . as cinematic as Sonoran Desert heat shimmer.” 

—Kris Saknussemm, author of Zanesville

“An unforgettable launch for an exciting new voice.” 

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze 

​“A haboob of a book, a dervish of story, salted with oases of dread and delight.” 

—Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

Close to a Flame

​​​​​​Colleen Alles​​

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From a dive bar in Big Rapids, Michigan, to nowhere Ohio, and back, the characters in Close to a Flame are broken in the ways all people are. On a cross-country road trip, Robin can’t stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend. Carol has grown increasingly unhappy in her long marriage to Gerald. On a summer Saturday, Christine comes through for Dalia in an important way. Pat takes his girlfriend, Katie, to San Francisco for what he hopes will be a romantic proposal. Beth’s son, Jonah, gets called to the principal’s office; and Jamie gets a scare from her elderly mother. With her radiant stories, Colleen Alles wants to tell you it’s often the case that deep connections to other people—sometimes friends, sometimes sweethearts, sometimes spouses—help restore what’s broken. 

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​Praise for Close to a Flame​

—Caitlin Horrocks, author of The Vexations

“As subtle as they are piercing, these stories will tear you open and then stitch you back up. ” 

—Nathan Gower, author of The Act of Disappearing 

“Across these stories, Alles does what only the keenest writers can: she shows her readers their fullest selves.” 

—RS Deeren, author of Enough to Lose

“Fortunately for us, Alles tends to love’s all-too-familiar wounds with compassion and understanding” 

—Phillip Sterling, author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told

​​Soaked

​​​​​​Toby LeBlanc

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One word describes Louisiana fifty years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked. A nearly silent Cajun man is the last speaker of Louisiana French but doesn’t know what he is saying. A Vietnamese woman recovering from the trauma of war looks for home in a hurricane. A farmer gambles his inherited land on the best marijuana Louisiana has ever known. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy, and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc’s people, do best.​​​​​

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​Praise for Soaked​

​"A 5+ star collection of grand work by a magnificent writer and storyteller."

—Amy's Bookshelf​​

"A fully imagined and always surprising take on life along the Gulf of Mexico fifty years and many disasters from now. Yet people—and the old spirit of Louisiana—endure.” 

—Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

Deep South Magazine Amy's Bookshelf​

​​​The Continental Divide

​​​​Bob Johnson

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A country woman makes a Sophie’s Choice regarding her family’s survival. A small town marshal hunts his own son for murder. A former football hero must face his role in a brutal locker room ritual. Ferocious and real, the fourteen tales in Bob Johnson’s blistering debut The Continental Divide explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana, where men, women, and children struggle to find their way in the darkness…of the divide.​​​

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​Praise for The Continental Divide​

—Foreword Reviews

"A gifted conjurer of fiction as reality. Truly, I know these people; I've been in the homes of their families, wrung out from asking, 'What went wrong,' 'What couldn't we see coming and prevent it,' 'What now'? In giving voice to the layers—the person, the family, the community—Johnson paints and sculpts us and sets us out to be seen as we are."

—Nuvo

"Fast-paced and unpredictable, infused with mayhem and true evil, the situations in Johnson's stories go from bad to worse."

—Hudson Review

 "I highly recommend this collection for those who enjoy literary fiction with a dark twist."

—Cantina Book Club

"Forget anything you thought you knew about the Midwest—these stories will set you straight.” 

​—Charles Baxter, National Book Award Finalist​

“A riveting, powerful literary debut. Bob Johnson is my new favorite writer. From the first story to the last, he has his foot on the gas and never lets up. ”  

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

“These hard-wrought stories chart a course through a richly textured world. . . . Johnson’s clear-eyed sensibility and honest prose show us where the trouble starts and why it’s so hard to find a happy ending that doesn’t include violence.”

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist

“What Eudora Welty does for Mississippi, The Continental Divide does for Indiana. . . . These stories ripple with life.”

—Matthew Neill Null, author of Allegheny Front

​“With quiet lyricism and great precision, Bob Johnson reveals to us the brutal beauties of the human heart. Riveting, chilling, the stories in this masterful collection will startle, unsettle, and amaze you.”

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

New York Times Book ReviewForeword Reviews​​

LitHub NPR​Vol. 1 Brooklyn Book of the Month​

Hasty Book List​​Writer's Digest​​​

What Is This Book About? Book Marks​​​​

Book Q&As Deborah Kalb​​​​Cantina Book Club​​​​​

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​Keeping What's Best Left Kept Secret

​​​​David Ricchiute

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An epidemic’s emotional strain drives among victims a stoic resolve to conceal their disability. A mother retreats inside herself, disarmed by the steps of a building she sees. A neighbor’s drooping, palsied cheek belies the expression on the other cheek. A father conceals that he cannot read, and a son struggles with crippling guilt, having been acquitted of a crime he did commit. Stirring and elegant, Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret probes the force of untold secrets on the daily business of making do. In these stories, David Ricchiute uncovers deception teeming with self-deception, and the final returns have much to do with the accidental chemistry of fate.

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"Rich, enigmatic short stories . . . truth is whispered if told at all and sorrows are unnamed but deeply felt.” 

—Barbara Shoup, author of A Commotion in Your Heart

​​Shocker in Gloomtown

​​​​​Dan Libman

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​“Quick, funny, touching, serious, sometimes surreal, with a distinctive colloquial voice.”

   —Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and Interstate, National Book Award Nominee 

“In dry, dark, very funny stories shot through with poignance and compassion, Libman’s outwardly polite folk navigate everyday disappointments, always on the brink, surprised by the possibilities of human inadequacies. Shocker in Gloomtown is the real thing.”

 —Joe Bonomo, author of Field Recordings from the Inside

“Libman is the first great, darkly comic explorer of Rockford, Illinois. In his fictional Rockford, word play and comic gestures are the spiritual currency of the day. And I’m so grateful he’s made it so.”

—Chris Fink, editor of Beloit Fiction Journal

“Realism that’s weightless, surrealism that’s grounding, and a world of experience in between.”

—Aaron Sitze, author of The Andrew Jackson Stories

“Playful, inventive, and funny, Shocker in Gloomtown will crack you up and crack open a new line of sight into the absurdities of the human condition.” 

—Joseph O’Malley, author of Great Escapes from Detroit

“Dan Libman is equally dexterous rendering a fictional work in realism or fabulism, and likewise adroit in blurring the two seamlessly together, with the understated ironic perspective of a Coen Brothers film.”  

—Cris Mazza, author of Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls

​​​The Correct Response

​​​​Manfred Gabriel

A zombie learns to pass for a living human being. College friends decide to play a child’s game that turns out to be anything but child-like. A man builds a box to keep his loneliness. Two department store elves share a drink on Christmas Eve and discover presents aren’t always neatly wrapped beneath the tree. In The Correct Response, Manfred Gabriel artfully blends the fantastic and the real, culminating in surreal but heartfelt tales of longing, love, and loss against the backdrop of modern America.  

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“Manfred Gabriel has created a short-story collection with characters so real they might just grab you by the shirt collar. Vivid scenes, intriguing plots, and spot-on dialog are other hallmarks of the author’s craft. Crack open The Correct Response and enjoy this smorgasbord of nineteen delicious tales. The pages will be turning well past midnight.”

—Jim Guhl, author of South of Luck, Midwest Book Award Winner

“Vivid, haunting and authentic storytelling . . . offering the chance to look past the world we see every day to reveal a new, fathomless one—which maybe has been there all along.”

—Nikki Kallio, author of Finding the Bones​

“A subtle blur of lush Midwestern settings and speculative fantasy with characters as real to life as tobacco juice, all haunted by the question we’ve feared to put to our own selves: Has anything ever made you happy?”

—Steve Fox, author of Sometimes Creek

​​​​​​The Path of Totality: Stories & A Novella

​​Marie Zhuikov

A young man is mystified by why he can’t see an eclipse. A scammer falls for a woman he is targeting. A nondescript gray house hides a secret from a curious woman walking her dog. A girl discovers a mummified Viking bog boy while on a birding tour. A college student gets trapped in a biosphere after hours. Hemingway’s stolen early stories are found in New Jersey. Singing in the shower takes on a whole new meaning. And a librarian develops her own theories about the influence of trees. United by the power of appearances to deceive and captivate, Marie Zhuikov’s tales glisten with the magic and menace of everyday lives.​​

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​“Each of the spine-tingling scenarios will delight and surprise, bringing you to unexpected frontiers—all without ever straying far from the yearnings of the human heart.”

—Carol Dunbar, author of The Net Beneath Us

“These stories, rich in emotional metaphors that play out in magical ways, remind us to tread carefully and to always pay attention.”

—Sigurd Brown, author of The Girl in Duluth

“A gem of a collection. . . . Readers will get carried away—just like these memorable characters get carried away—into imaginative worlds full of mystery and wonder.”

—Jim Ray Daniels, author of The Perp Walk

“Not all of Zhuikov’s characters find peace and harmony, for the damned soul and the broken heart and the heart’s longing are nothing to fool with. But the few who find love . . . enter paradise.”

—Anthony Bukoski, author of The Blondes of Wisconsin

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

​Wisconsin Writers Association​​ ​The North (UMD)​​​

WDIO-TV (ABC)​​​

​​​​​​​​​​​The Three Devils

and Other Stories

​​​​William Luvaas​​

From acclaimed writer William Luvaas comes a new collection of dark and devastating tales. With grit and grace, chaos and compassion, angst and absolution, The Three Devils makes us reckon with the maelstrom, all while wrestling with the longings of the busted and beautiful human heart.

 

“William Luvaas, my friends, is a wild-eyed genius” 

​​—Lauren Groff, National Book Award Finalist​

"Wildly imaginative and always engaging."

​​—Kim Barnes, Pulitzer Prize Finalist​

“A rare read, a post-apocalyptic odyssey that’s fun.”

—George Michelson Foy, author of The Last Green Light

“A nightmarish vision of the inevitable conclusion of the world we’ve created today.”

—Chase Dearinger, author of This New Dark

​​​​​​​​Welcome Back to the World

A Novella & Stories

​​Rob Davidson​​

Mark cares for his ailing ex-wife in his home and comes to terms with his unresolved anger and hurt; American expatriates Will and Margaret become close but platonic friends, united in their loneliness and love for Taiwan and its complexities. Heartbroken over his parents’ divorce, Jon longs for a reconciliation that his father insists will never happen. Grant, smitten with Melinda, learns valuable lessons about race, tolerance, and accepting change. And the title novella, a tale of identity, faith, and betrayal, documents the long, slow process of recovery from trauma and the promise of renewal. In stories of finding life anew in ever-changing circumstances, Rob Davidson’s soaring prose reminds us that hope is visible in the darkest of times. 

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"An impressive set of stories from a skilled observer of the human animal." 

—Kirkus Reviews

"Welcome Back to the World is for short story aficionados who love concise, character-driven narratives that delve into the unpredictable nature of human behavior. There is so much to love about this book." 

—Readers' Favorite

“A master of the short form.” 

​​—Patricia Henley, National Book Award Finalist

“These striking, deeply moving stories took me in and held me. Their generous range and tender vision won my heart.”

—Joan Frank, author of Where You’re All Going

“A master craftsman at home in the heart of his greatest subject in this collection—love.” 

—Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand

“A reminder that brightness, despite the odds, is possible.” 

—Patricia Ann McNair, author of Responsible Adults

“Vivid and sensual, compelling and mysterious . .. a delight”

—Fred Arroyo, author of Sown in Earth​

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

Readers' Favorite Kirkus Reviews​

Dan Barnett Nancy's Bookshelf (NSPR)​ 

Chico News & Review​

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​​​​​​​Greyhound Cowboy and Other Stories

​​Ken Post

A young woman unexpectedly shows up at a remote Forest Service fire lookout; a fly-fishing guide is stranded with a cowboy in a Montana Greyhound bus station during a blizzard; an Afghanistan war veteran struggles with PTSD and a decades-long family conflict with a family across the lake; a hot shot crew firefighter wards off her demons with backbreaking work, until a fire catches up with her; a son tries to honor his parent’s last wishes to dispose of their ashes on their old family farm, only to be stymied by the current owner. Caught in the grandeur and sweep of nature, the characters in Greyhound Cowboy and Other Stories experience revelation, camaraderie, relationships on the brink, and danger. In his perceptive debut, Ken Post peeks into frailty, confrontation, and friendship, illuminating the fascinating and fragile details that make up our lives. 

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“This little book is big in many ways . . . the stories warmed me with their humanity, surprised me with their twists and turns, and often expanded my imagination.” 

—Kim Heacox, author of Jimmy Bluefeather, National Outdoor Book Award Winner

“Ken Post’s characters learn about life the hard way, and so do we, in stories of both grit and humor, action and reflection, blindness and insight: it is a reward to experience these stories.” 

—Evan Morgan Williams, author of Stories of the New West

“Ken Post’s collection of tales are alive with unexpected twists that will keep the reader turning the pages.” 

—Lynn Schooler, author of Walking Home

“This magnificent collection should be savored around a campfire or under the covers on a cold night . . . a thrilling and satisfying read..” 

​​—Michael Freed-Thall, author of Horodno Burning

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

KCAW (AK)​ 

​​​​Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse

​​​and Other Stories

Heidi Bell​

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Two sisters play an unsettling game; a child witnesses a casually violent neighborhood ritual; an up-and-coming young professional is disturbed by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings; a woman’s ideal life unfolds in the pages of a mail-order catalog. The Midwestern men and women, girls and boys who populate Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories are united by a yearning—for answers or simply for relief—that is often twisted by their baser impulses. With lyricism, humor both dark and playful, and brutal clarity, Heidi Bell approaches reality sideways in her sensational debut collection.

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FINALIST, Short Story/Anthology, Midwest Book Awards 2025​

 

“With her mix of light and dark, lovable and unlikable characters, and hope and regret, Bell’s collection is part Neil Gaiman and part Donald Barthelme, with a touch of Joyce Carol Oates.”

—BOOKLIST, starred review

"Bell knows Americans, and it is her masterful ability to capture the sentiments of these people that allows for her to so accurately portray the immediacy of their spiraling perspectives. In a way, it’s all about the details again. What makes her characters and their trivial issues so prevalent and demanding is her ability to flesh them out with all those tiny facets that most of us recognize but fail to name, guided by her own years of observing the classic American: the Midwesterner."

—New City Lit

"Juxtaposing dark humor and lyrical writing, Bell captures the strange but emotionally charged interactions we have with family, coworkers, strangers, and even ourselves to dazzling effect."

—Electric Literature

​​“An exquisite, achingly rendered collection of stories.” 

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award

“A golden thread of magic, shape-shifting, and light along the edges is at play in these stories, often allowing a glimpse of another world altogether, the richer universe where stories are born.”

—Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule, winner of the National Book Award

“Heidi Bell is one of our great unsung writers. Let these stories sing to you. Listen to their music and you will fall under their spell as I did.” 

—Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder

​“A fierce and funny collection from a highly original and enchanting sensibility. Bell’s stories shine a brilliant light on the marvelous, the disturbing, the uncanny.”

—Andy Mozina, author of Tandem

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

Electric Literature​​

New City LitBook  Q&As with Deborah Kalb 

LitHub Largehearted Boy​Art Beat​​

The Waterman

​​Gary Schanbacher

Clayton Royster is a waterman living in the fictional coastal town of Sand Point, Virginia. Since childhood in the 1940s, he’s plied the local waters, crabbing in the estuaries, and fishing the open waters of the sea. But when Loretta Pine, the teenage wife of a much older man, comes to town, things change. With powerful and salty prose, Gary Schanbacher shows how the decisions we make reverberate through the decades of our lives and affect not only our destiny but also the destinies of those around us.

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“A moving testament to what fulfillment can mean, what regret can engender, how simple desire can tangle a life.” 

—William Haywood Henderson, author of Augusta Locke

“A gorgeous collection populated with memorable, original characters.” 

—Tiffany Quay Tyson, author of The Past is Never 

“Gary Schanbacher performs a miraculous feat, riding the fierce wave of naturalism to gracefully land in the sands of community. ”

—Jennifer Wortman, author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. 

​“The Waterman has a spare, crystalline beauty to it, much like the ocean on a clear day. It’s an incredible book.” 

—Michael Henry, author of Active Gods

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

Rocky Mountain Reader​Colorado Sun

​​​​Close Call

​​​Kim Suhr

A door-to-door salesman’s visit shows Carol a new side of her mother and threatens the security they both had taken for granted; a woman finds out what happens when we’re “too busy to die”; a woman in her fifties celebrates her newly augmented body parts; four friends try to breech a chasm in their friendship by planning a reunion; and a researcher examines his relationship to creativity in a world where it has been deemed a mental illness. Carefully crafted, surprising, and humane, the stories in Kim Suhr’s Close Call unveil emotion in tight spaces, hearts in turmoil, and the searching soul of the Midwest.​

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“The clarity, humor, and inventiveness of Kim Suhr’s work is a joy.”  

—Jane Hamilton, author of The Excellent Lombards

“Generous stories with great heart and tenderness toward the human condition.” 

—Anne-Marie Oomen, Michigan Author Award Winner

“A finely rendered collection of stories told in a sure and strong voice.”

—Patricia Ann McNair, author of Temple of Air​

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

Madison Magazine Up North News ​Isthmus​​

​​​​The Silver State Stories

​Michael Darcher​

Amidst the casinos of Reno, Nevada, the “Biggest Little City in the World,” Michael Darcher introduces us to the dealers, workers, and patrons of the Aces Oasis Casino. Like Leonard, a blackjack dealer who makes earrings out of flies meant for fishing; James, a craps dealer who falls in love with Phyllis in a bad year for relationships; Liz, a blackjack dealer who struggles with how big a part she played in a player’s suicide; and Gessler, a slots worker who reckons with his girlfriend Polly’s charge to be more. Darcher’s steady, assured, and compassionate prose shows us more than high rollers and underbellies. He gives us real people. 

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“Exquisitely funny, wry, and tender. This book is hard to put down.” 

—Corrina Wycoff, author of Damascus House

​“Colorful and poetic, funny and humane.”

—Matthew Sullivan, author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“The Silver State Stories gets Nevada and its people exactly right.”

—Christopher Coake, author of You Would Have Told Me Not To​

“Unstinting insight and a masterful sense of particularity.” 

—Peter Donahue, author of Three Sides Water

“Darcher uncovers the true euphoria and desperation of human nature one pull, one roll, one wager at a time.”

—Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze​

“Polished, funny, at times unnerving.”

—Barry Kitterman, author of The Baker’s Boy​

​What We Might Become

​Sara Reish Desmond

An adolescent struggles with race and sexuality and her father’s return from war; a spiteful social pariah finally reveals her rumored, freakish robot anatomy when she attends the senior prom with her geriatric date; an unemployed husband grows enamored with the new immigrant next door as she reveals her tragic past; and a new widower is tormented by the smell of his neighbor’s expert baking and feigns that he is part bear. Sara Reish Desmond’s characters find themselves at the threshold; on the verge of discovery, navigating the space between childhood and adulthood, between fidelity and scandal, between honesty and deceit. Deft and moving, What We Might Become shares the uncertainty about how we ought to live in transitional moments and, perhaps more desperately, forever.

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"Strange, unpredictable, and excellent . . . The urge to pretend that nothing is happening, whether in moments of panic or in moments of vague existential uncertainty, is universal. We never want to think about what might actually come next. Desmond’s book says that these moments matter. That there is something happening. Things are always happening. We are, in fact, always becoming."

—Necessary Fiction

​“These stories are vivid and taut, and one of Desmond’s great virtues is that she doesn’t get in the way of her characters. She lets them breathe. ”

—Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days

“The cadence of the sentences, the probing, unsettling voice of her narrators, and the dark conclusions she reaches about the underside of contemporary American life. . . Desmond writes with quiet fury. Anyone who loves short stories will want to own this one.” 

—Jess Row, author of The New Earth​

“You will not shake these stories easily. I certainly have not.”

—Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia

Necessary Fiction​ Bloom​

​​​​An Instinct for Movement

​Michael Mattes​

A boy sets off to trace the aquatic life in a local stream and is overtaken by the journey itself … A single day of violence and comic absurdity separates an aimless young man from the confining reality he’s known to the unimagined one he’ll have to navigate. These are the opening entries in An Instinct for Movement, a collection marked by fraught relationships, shifting trapdoors, and the often unreliable instincts of its linking central character. From a blighted Mid-Atlantic city to pre-millennium San Francisco to the hills of California pot country to a woodland outpost in the Pacific Northwest: with each new dislocation, Michael Mattes strives for clarion, momentary truths born of human comedy.

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​​​​Salt Folk

Ryan Habermeyer​

Set within a speculative geography that is and is not Utah’s past, present, and future, the panoramic collage of stories and flash fictions in Salt Folk explore the eco-fabulist environs of the American West at the intersections of history and myth. The Yeti, recently deported from the Himalayas, finds himself in a Mormon retirement community. A glacier grows in the toxic valley left behind by the evaporated Great Salt Lake. A librarian collects the residue of a decayed rainbow on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer’s reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness.

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​The Commission of Inquiry

Patrick Nevins

A chimpanzee is stolen from Cameroon and rocketed to space as the test flight for John Glenn’s historic orbit; a former child star struggles to stay sober; a prehistoric mammal imagines a better version of itself; a trio of ragpickers strip Union and Confederate dead of their clothes; a couple sees the woods move; the former commissaire of the French Congo investigates atrocities. Eclectic in its breadth and startling in its power, The Commission of Inquiry investigates life, death, and other matters, as Patrick Nevins delivers twenty stories built to surprise, challenge, and even change us.

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The Machine We Trust

Tim Conrad

A boy attends summer camp where campers are tasked with managing their own flocks of sheep; a set of brothers kidnap their father’s prized pet buffalo; a young man travels the country with his mother, a peripatetic professor who has pioneered a radical service-learning curriculum; an unemployed man attempts to teach himself to beat a polygraph test. In The Machine We Trust, Tim Conrad’s narrators and characters come of age in a surreal American landscape—sometimes late, sometimes unsuccessfully. With exacting prose that searches and clutches, Conrad exposes the cracks where hearts are broken, and redemption is just one chance away.

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FINALIST, Short Story/Anthology, Midwest Book Awards 2025​​

“Tim Conrad is something of a Raymond Carver for the new millennium—his everyday people glow with the power of loss and suppressed longing.”

—Wendy Brenner, author of Large Animals In Everyday Life

​​​Gridlock

Brett Biebel

There’s a 200-mile long traffic jam on I-94, and people are going to be stuck there for days. Maybe weeks. Told in striking, kinetic flashes, Brett Biebel’s Gridlock explores the event, its origins in American political, athletic, and romantic institutions, and its impact on all the individual lives that go on in its shadow. Four roommates order a Japanese sex robot. A man designs a book review algorithm. Sentient pitching machines debate life, death, and violence, and bags of deli ham fly across trashy grocery store parking lots as the cars idle. Day in and day out. Their gears grinding down to nothing, or, well. Maybe it’s something after all.

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“Poignant and inspired, evaporating the gridlock that can blind us all to our own humanity.”

—Leigh Allison Wilson, author of From the Bottom Up 

“Each wildly different story in Gridlock begins with a terrific first sentence that announces the world of the story, then moves along at a headlong, hellbent pace that is totally mesmerizing to end with a perfect last line.”

—Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications 

“Beautifully crafted, these stories will invite you, no, tell you to read and re-read them as you get to know the wonderful landscape Brett Biebel has created.”

—Francine Witte, author of Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

M​​aximum Speed​

Kevin Clouther​

Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther’s Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters’ lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects ​Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.​

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“These elegantly braided stories, told in precise, crystalline prose, create a vivid portrait of friendship and loneliness, of nostalgia and loss. Moving effortlessly between humor and heartbreak, these stories add up, as in the best linked collections, to a rich and varied world of tenderness and beauty.” 

—Nathan Oates, author of A Flaw in the Design and The Empty House: Stories 

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Reviews, Interviews, & Media

Booklist​​​​Large Hearted Boy​​​​Hypertext​

​The​​ Spirit in My Shoes

John Michael Cummings​

Featuring twenty-three stories, John Michael Cummings’s debut story collection brims with the vitality and complexity of our shared humanity. In tales that conjure comparisons to John Updike, Raymond Carver, and William Gay, Cummings tells the truth about loneliness, relationships, and the common struggles we all face with prose both precise and vibrant. Cummings’s voice, assured yet questioning, will stay with you long after you’ve finished The Spirit in My Shoes.​​

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​Praise for The Spirit in My Shoes

​“Alternatingly funny, touching, and at times surprising, but wholly satisfying in its weight and depth.”

—Kali White, author of The Monsters We Make

“A remarkable collection of stories thrumming with subtle probing humor and quiet insight.”

—Aimee Parkison, author of Girl Zoo

“In the flawed, indomitable spirits of these characters, we see ourselves. An unforgettable collection.” 

—Gerry Wilson, author of Crosscurrents and Other Stories

“A wonderfully thoughtful work by an obvious master of the short form.” 

—Sung J. Woo, author of Skin Deep and Everything Asian

“In the wide range of Cummings’s concerns, readers will find not only much to contemplate but also much to celebrate.” 

—Ron Tanner, author of Far West and Missile Paradise 

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Reviews, Interviews, & Media

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The Journal (Harpers Ferry, WV)​​​​The Frederick News-Post (WV)​​​​

Charleston Gazette-Mail (WV)​​​​Spirit of Jefferson (Charles Town, WV)​​​​

Eastern Panhandle Talk​​​West Virginia Morning (PBS) 

Author 2 Author 

​Fugit​ive Daydreams

Leah McCormack​​​

Blending elements of fiction and nonfiction, Fugitive Daydreams dares to challenge the boundaries of the short story by blurring the lines between convention and experimentation. Leah McCormack’s debut collection features a house as alive as its inhabitants, a mother dealing with multiple sclerosis and dementia, a pair of conjoined twins getting separated, dysfunctional families struggling with expectations and middle-class realities, and a writer pushing against gendered aggression. With power and stylistic inventiveness, McCormack embraces the absurd while refusing to look away from painful truths.​

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​Praise for Fugitive Daydreams

​​​​The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories​​

Jeff Esterholm​

​The last good time in the Great Lakes region, the so-called Third Coast gouged into the Upper Midwest of America, was in the shipbuilding era of the two world wars. But even in 1941, in Port Nicollet, Wisconsin, a certain taint grew and spread. It was a port city: sketchy men; fresh-faced boys; salesmen with their sample cases; able-bodied seamen. Always passing through. Occasionally, the locals glimpsed opportunity, but, just as quickly, it was gone. The prospect of something better could not gain purchase on the south shore of Lake Superior. It was as if the people and region, an area in the distant past promoted by developers as the next Chicago, had slipped the moorings and drifted, minus captain and crew, on the waters of Lake Superior. In The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories, Jeff Esterholm explores what happens when people slip their moorings and are set adrift.

FINALIST, Fiction, Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards 2024

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​Prai​​se for The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories

​“Peopled with folks who live dark lives without knowing exactly the why’s or how’s of how it all happened . . . history, story, despair, hope, all in such sparse wording. A compelling read.” 

—Marcie Rendon, author of Sinister Graves

​“A master storyteller at work.” 

—C.W. Blackwell, author of Hard Mountain Clay​

"Esterholm delivers a watertight collection of short crime stories deftly written with prose cut to the bone but never lacking a poet's sensibilities."

—Sean Patrick Little, author of the Abe & Duff Mysteries

Reviews & Interviews

The Cap Times (Madison, WI)​​​​Wisconsin Writers Association​​

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel​​Madison Magazine​Sean Patrick Little​

Great Lakes Review​Tom Andes​Luciano Marano​

​Hoist House: A Novella & Stories

Jenny Robertson

Cher Bebe manages the dance floor and flogs patrons at a nightclub while his estranged father takes his last breaths back home; a man walks a moonlit trail through his ancestral lands on his way to abduct a child; a Michigan tornado spotter grieves the end of his marriage; Maggie Pancake returns to her Minnesota hometown, jilted by her fiancée, a professional clown; and the titular novella follows fourteen-year-old Sadie and her Finnish immigrant mining family in Iron Range Minnesota in the months leading up to the Milford Mining disaster of 1924. With power and compassion, Jenny Robertson weaves tales that explore the precarity of immigrant life, worker exploitation, the tensions and dangers inherent in growing up, and the ephemeral nature of the American Dream.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu​

​Praise for Hoist House

“Hoist House, made me ache for home, for a sense of place so palpable I could feel it stinging in my throat. A hoist house contains machinery that moves (objects, people) from below to above ground. The stories and novella, just like their namesake, lift the unseen to the surface.”

—North American Review

“Hoist House is a delightful read, and Robertson is a powerful writer. Her details have teeth that sink in and stick, and her esense of story leaves the reader more than sated.”​

—South Carolina Review

​“These comedies and tragedies are sweaty and fragrant, brimming with energy, and the language is exuberant.”

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, National Book Award Finalist, author of American Salvage

​​“Beautiful and shattering, these stories cut deep grooves into my memory.” 

—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Relinquenda​

​“Jenny Robertson’s stories evoke my favorite Midwestern writers: Jon Hassler, Joan Chase, and Jim Harrison—no-nonsense storytellers who lure you in with a sentence and then keep you rapt with prose as straight as an arrow aimed at your heart. Hoist House is everything you could possibly want in​​ a debut.”

—John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph

“Every next story took me deeper, and deeper into that human realm where hilarity and tears combine in a rare and lovely kind of magic.”

—Jack Driscoll, author of 20 Stories: New & Selected

“Robertson has conjured a stunning debut that every reader should cherish.”

—Craig Lesley, author of Winterkill and The Sky Fisherman

Reviews & Interviews

Grey Sea & Sky (Hillary Moses Mohaupt)​ ​KAXE (Northern Minnesota)​

North American Review​South Carolina ReviewSouth Carolina Review.pdf 

Hypertext​

​Where Are Your People From?

James B. De Monte

Meet Giacomo Agostini, retired coal miner and first-generation American, a son of foreigners, a Depression kid who never got over it, the second-oldest living member of the St. Theresa’s Knights of Columbus hall, and a pick-and-shovel man from Appalachian Ohio. Spanning ninety years, James B. De Monte’s Where Are Your People From? explores the fellowship and hardship of Midwest Italian-Americans in the post-industrial Appalachian region of Ohio through the eyes of a son of immigrants. With authenticity, humor, and grace, De Monte delivers a truly American story.

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To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Where Are Your People From?

“A completely original, ambitious collection of stories skillfully united by voice, place, and spirit. While spanning decades of struggle in one Italian-American family, De Monte writes with both humor and pathos of these complex, unvarnished working-class lives.” 

—Jim Ray Daniels, author of The Perp Walk and Gun/Shy

“By turns elegaic and brimming with vivid, immediate life, James DeMonte’s collection evokes the soul and concern of Carlo Levi and the gorgeous rough detail of the Appalachian writer Breece Pancake. The reach is bold, novelistic, the individual stories break ground into the soil of Frank O’Connor’s ‘submerged populations."

—Varley O'Connor, author of The Welsh Fasting Girl and The Master's Muse

“It’s about storylines, and how those stories we pass on give us the power to know ourselves, and the hope that we might be remembered after we’re gone.”

​—Joseph Bates, author of The Strikeout Artist and Tomorrowland: Stories

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​Finding the Bones: Stories & A Novella

Nikki Kallio​​

A father tries to explain to his daughter what Earth was like, a boy believes his mother has been abducted by aliens, a ghost hunter wonders if her absent father is a deceased serial killer, and in the near future the sun makes people go insane. Weaving science fiction, gothic storytelling, and paranormality into eight stories and a novella, Nikki Kallio establishes herself as a fresh, innovative, and compassionate voice in speculative fiction and magical realism.

LONGLIST, Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, Wisconsin Writers Awards 2023

FINALIST, Fiction: Short Story​, American Book Fest Best Book Awards 2023 

​FINALIST, Cygnus Award in Science Fiction, Chanticleer International Book Awards 2023

​​To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise f​​​or Finding the Bones

“With themes of home and homelessness, destruction and humanity, Nikki Kallio delivers a focused and nuanced collection with whimsical and surreal connections to Wisconsin and the Midwest. These are very fine stories.” 

—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Godspeed

“Nikki Kallio . . . deftly moves through time and space to illustrate griefs both massive and particular, as well as the impossibility of understanding and loving anything new.” 

—Rebecca Meacham, author of Let’s Do and Morbid Curiosities

Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection" Wisconsin Writers Association

Windy City Reviews A Geography of Reading​Readers' Favorite ​

​Someti​mes Creek

Steve Fox

The seventeen unrelenting stories in Steve Fox’s debut story collection, Sometimes Creek, traverse a sub-zero trail of plausible magic and grit from a kaleidoscope of broken ice at a hockey rink in Wisconsin that coils through haunted rivers and around dangling legs of jamón serrano in sweltering Spanish bars and back again to a place where Kafka and Carver meet up on the page. Fox’s clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm into that gauzy space that collectively takes shape in your hands as Sometimes Creek.

WINNER, Fiction: Short Story, American Book Fest Best Book Awards 2023 ​

WINNER, Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction, Wisconsin Writers Awards 2022

FINALIST, Indie Fiction, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Awards 2023

To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Someti​mes Creek​

"An astute, confident writer spins grim but entrancing tales."

​—Kirkus Reviews

“Perfectly Midwestern, perfect portraits of perfectly imperfect people. Like coal that never turns into diamonds, but sparks up just the same.” 

​—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

“You fall into these words, are enveloped by these lives, troubled by the uncanny—coming away from this collection moved, haunted, and not quite intact.”

—Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion

“Endlessly surprising, strange, and satisfying.”

—Richard Mirabella, author of Brother & Sister Enter the Forest

“Hardscrabble and tender, these seventeen story gems gleam in Midwestern dust.”

—Amy Cipolla Barnes, author of Ambrotypes

Reviews, Interviews, & Media​

Kirkus Reviews Madison Magazine​Wisconsin State Journal​

Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection" Madison BookBeat

Wisconsin Writers Association CutBank (interview)​

CutBank (review) Twin Cities Pioneer Press​

Eyes on Imagination​ Hudson Star Observer​​

New Books in Literature​​ Wisconsin People & Ideas​​

​The Plagues​

Joe Baumann

To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Plagues

“Over and again, Baumann’s characters reach across the ever-widening gulfs opened by the ever-increasing weirdness of their worlds for human connection, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but that’s where the hope lies.” 

—Adam Brooke Davis, editor of Green Hills Literary Lantern

“Joe Baumann is a force of nature, and his collection is imaginative, heartfelt, and brilliant, and an absolute must-have.” 

—Aura Martin, author of Butterflies Over Flame

Reviews & Interviews

Peculiar Journal

​Kind of Blue

Christopher Chambers

The stories in Kind of Blue juke and jive in an unpredictable voice-driven romp. Set in rural Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Duluth, Milwaukee, Detroit, New Orleans, Houston, and South Florida, these are stories that start and stop and surprise, swerving all over the road.These are stories of wanderlust and music, loss and misdirection, disasters large and small. With the sound and rhythm of language driving each tale, Christopher Chambers gives voice to the working- and middle-class worlds of the American Midwest and the South.

To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Kind of Blue

“I finished it feeling as if the man had left little pieces of his soul on every page, and I swear to God I lost count of the number of sentences I wish I had written.” 

—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table

“Chambers accomplishes what only the best writers can; he makes every character feel both universal and unique, each setting both a vacation and a return home.” 

—M.O. Walsh, New York Times bestselling author of My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize

Reviews & Interviews

Madison Magazine

​The Clayfields

Elise Gregory

In The Clayfields, Elise Gregory’s powerful debut, the lives of three women are threaded together through the changing backdrops of farming communities in the twenty-first century. Where country churches are closing and old man bars are turning into wineries, an eclectic mix of characters must decide to evolve with new forces or leave their settler roots for new lives.

To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for The Clayfields

“Elise Gregory has brought a world to life in this beautiful, engaging book. ” 

—Samuel Ligon, author of Wonderland

“The Clayfields is a sensual and heartfelt debut.” 

—Keith Lesmeister, author of We Could Have Been Happy Here

Reviews

Volume One   Madison Magazine 2023 "Don't Miss Collection"

​Twin Cities Pioneer Press Cutleaf​

Wisconsin People & Ideas​

​Evangelina​ Everyday

Dawn Burns

Evangelina is as everyday as women come. If she were a landscape, she'd be a patch of woods on the edge of a fallow Indiana field, her edges visible from all directions from miles away. Nothing special on the outside. A disturbance to nobody. One might think her a boring, self-contained Midwestern housewife. Mixing humor and sincerity, Dawn Burns roots her debut collection firmly in the minutiae of Midwestern life, focusing on the inner life of one who suffers the annoyances of a Midwestern lifestyle in a manner all her own, a manner filled with anxious contemplation of the worth of her life.

To order directly from the press, email cornerstone.press@uwsp.edu

Praise for Evangelina Everyday

“Evangelina Everyday is dazzling in its balance of satiric fun and serious storytelling, underscoring the stifling safety of traditional women’s roles and the vulnerability involved in accepting one’s own socially disruptive desires.” 

—Mary Catherine Harper, author of Some Gods Don’t Need Saints

“Evangelina dreams of what feels to her like the boldest fantasy of all: getting to somehow be her full self. Burns renders this vivid inner world with compassion and a sharp eye for emotional detail. As a result, Evangelina Everyday is an invitation to hope—to hope that what is bound can become free.” 

—David Ebenbach, author of Miss Portland and How to Mars

Reviews

Steve Henn ​Pan-o-ply: Story & Art Michiana​

Praise for Township

“Supple, deeply rooted in place, and astonishing in their bite and wit, the stories in Township reveal Jamie Lyn Smith’s mastery of the form.” 

—David Lynn, Editor Emeritus of The Kenyon Review

“Jamie Lyn Smith’s voice rings with the authenticity of hard-won wisdom. The stories in her debut collection, Township, open the hearts of the broken and put-upon and find the underside of the overlooked, the ignored, the tossed-away, the miscreant, the wild, the wandering.” 

—Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Bright Forever

Reviews & Interviews

Kenyon CollegeBexley Public Library (OH)Dayton Daily News (OH) 

Writer Writer Pants on Fire Now, Appalachia

Praise for Responsible Adults

"​Edgy, empathically imagined, and strongly crafted."​​

—​Booklist

“Responsible Adults is devastating, in the best possible way. . . . Readers are wiser and more compassionate for knowing these stories.” 

—Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of American Salvage, National Book Award Finalist

"In this remarkable collection, McNair hits her writerly stride with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking.” 

—Christine Maul Rice, author of Swarm Theory

Reviews & Interviews

New City LitNational Book ReviewLiterary Hub 

InterlochenChicago Review of BooksColumbia Chronicle 

Fiction Writers Review Solstice Literary Magazine  Superstition Review Booklist