NCW Libraries

In Natural Causes, a provocative collection of radical reinventions of the genre of nature writing, we encounter shrimp farms and spoonbills, maize husks and Austrian woods, tarantulas and eels, multitudinous winds that pollinate or desiccate-nature in all its myriad forms, right down to photons, neutrons, neutrinos, and, yes, even Godzilla, the Sasquatch, and some of nature's other fictive and folkloric monsters.

A brilliant allegory that traces the life of a young woman whose sanity teeters on the edge as she tries to hold together her troubled family Since childhood, Grace Brush has suffered episodic migraines. With them come hallucinatory visions, which reveal buried memories, leading her inexorably on the path to discovering secrets that could send her family's business empire into ruin. Among the many branches in this provocative novel are the limb of...

Ariel Rankin seeks to locate and save her unknown father-a man deeply scarred by his secret and brutal role in the history of his country In the sequel to Bradford Morrow's heralded Trinity Fields,young New Yorker Ariel Rankin learns that her birth father is not the man who raised her but rather a soldier named Kip Calder who disappeared into the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War. Hoping to preserve her otherwise happy life, she pushes the revelation...

A densely layered journey into the dark heart of the American Dream that spans continents and centuries In Bradford Morrow's debut novel, lightning-tongued mercenary Peter Krieger travels to Nicaragua to kidnap a man who may be a 480-year-old former conquistador-and therefore could hold the secret to immortality. When Krieger attempts to sell his captive to a reclusive scientist in upstate New York, he sets off on a globe-spanning expedition, in which...

Writing about writing itself and about the books that are home to the written word. A library of ideas about language and the book in all their forms, Speaking Volumes collects poetry, fiction, and narrative nonfiction on historic, forbidden, repurposed, mistranslated, imaginary, lost, and life-changing books - books of every ilk.

Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Diane Ackerman, and more explore the double-edged sword of curiosity . . . Curiosity is as central to life as breathing. And like breath itself, when it ceases, the vibrancy of life fades and disappears. Curiosity leads to discoveries both beneficent and, at times, destructive. It often occasions wonderment, but also terror. It prompts the precise scientist, but also the nosy gadfly. A double-edged sword, curiosity...

Children deceive, as do grownups, and many are the moments when all of us even deceive ourselves. People of every age and stripe, whether rarely or often, dissimulate, bluff, and beguile. The writer who fabricates and populates worlds is a deceiver, as is the artist whose triumph is to trick the eye, to alter perception. The honest magician's livelihood is based on deception; so is the dishonest thief's. And consider the great Russian poet Marina...

Conjunctions: 61, A Menagerie gathers essays, fiction, and poetry that imagine the world of our fellow beings, animals. Cultural mythologies and pantheons are populated with snakes, monkeys, cats, jackals, whales: a cast of characters whose stories reveal how complex and wildly contradictory our species' relationship with other animals is. They're friends, enemies, tools, food. Descartes deliberated about whether animals have souls, deciding they...

The author of the acclaimed suspense novel The Forger returns to the dangerously rarified world of literary forgery in this tense sequel. When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever...

Over the past three decades, the most adventurous practitioners of the literary arts of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been transforming those genres into something all but unrecognizable. In Conjunctions' game-changing New Wave Fabulists issue, guest editor Peter Straub has put together an anthology of innovative literary reinventions of traditional "pulp" forms. Contributors range from Jonathan Lethem to Neil Gaiman, from John Crowley...