A poet’s public reading shines a spotlight on her isolation. Robbers look to their former teacher for a chance at redemption. A painter of railroads stubbornly documents decline and abandonment. A Halloween festival is rooted in matters of life and death. Set in a fictional Pacific Northwest town, told through the gossip and grievances of its residents, Spearwood, OR examines the impacts of place, inherited narratives, and generational traumas on a community in seventy-two very short stories. John Carr Walker’s vision of the new American west is funny and furious, desperate and demure, familiar on the surface, yet deeply strange.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Propeller Longform Original Fiction ISBN: 9781955593151 Publication Date: September 30, 2026 Paperback, 5 x 7 in.
In 1974, the great Iñupiaq writer and historian Ticasuk (also known by the English name Emily Ivanoff Brown) completed a master's degree program at the University of Alaska by researching and writing the history of the Iñupiaq, who lived at Unalakleet, on the Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. The result is a fascinating account of culture, nature, and survival that spans generations and leads, inexorably, to the birth of the author herself. The Roots of Ticasuk is not only a deftly-written series of adventures, but also a family story crucial to understanding the rich culture of the Iñupiaq people and their role in the history of present-day Alaska.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Northwest Collection (#5) ISBN: 9781955593113 Publication Date: November 5, 2024 Paperback, 5 x 8 in.
Criminals follows the lives of a sister and brother, Ruth and Hank Tanazaki, as they struggle to free themselves from the weight of their parents’ generation in a small Japanese American community in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This poignant story of the double-edged nature of community—a force that supports the group, at cost to the individual—explores the possibilities and limits of seeking personal freedom through creativity. Masaoka’s dazzling, deeply-moving debut is also an eloquent addition to the canon of Asian American literature.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction ISBN: 9781955593106 Publication Date: October 8, 2024 Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.
Survival Tips: Stories follows characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning. A wife begins communicating to her husband only in rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts her strongest foes, the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a jerry-rigged sweat lodge. A woman shows up to her blind date in a "Don't Leave Me" t-shirt. With wit and candor, these ten stories examine the ways we live, the mistakes we make, and the paths we take in hopes of delivering us to ourselves and each other.
The collection features twenty years of stories that have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Pithead Chapel, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and other top publications.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction ISBN: 9781955593083 Publication Date: March 19, 2024 Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.
When her troubled husband dies unexpectedly, mercurial Therese gets tangled in competing desires and demands--her own and those of her friends and family on Long Island. Ambitious in scope yet carefully observed, Marrying Friends deftly illuminates multiple characters as grief forces them to reimagine their lives and relationships. A frank and often wry look at the bewildering bonds between women, men, siblings, parents, and children, this novel-in-stories confirms Rechner's talent for capturing how we find meaning not only in our dreams, but also in our desperations.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction ISBN: 9781955593069 Publication Date: October 2023 Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.
Nicholas Allander, thirty-one, carless, and careerless, is trying to pay off debt, impress his girlfriend, keep his job, cast off his introversion, and accept the world’s imperfections without abandoning his heart. He considers growing his beard, taking up alcoholism, abandoning scrounging, and owning an automobile. All the while he clings to his bicycle, a simple machine whose purpose and workings he grasps. Written in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown, this subtle, charming novel about the attempt to maintain one’s humanity in the face of constant affronts to it is as timely now as when first released.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Northwest Collection (#3) ISBN: 9781955593045 Publication Date: November 1, 2022 Paperback, 5 x 8 in.
After the appearance of YouTube but before the invention of smartphones, a disconsolate young writer hears, from an apartment window, a soft rock song from his youth. Identifying and owning the song, he decides, will transform him into the confident man he needs to be in order to complete his manuscript on the relationship between Heian-era Japan and the 1967 Ice Bowl. His inability to name or locate the song, however, drives him to acts of increasing desperation and, ultimately, madness.
Beginning in the mode of 1960s hysterical realism, Soft Rock transforms into a meditation on delusion, mortality, and the haunting power of high-quality analog stereo systems.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Series: Propeller Longform Original Fiction ISBN: 9781955593076 Publication Date: September 12, 2023 Paperback, 5 x 7 in.
