Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children is a brilliantly written story of Dan Charles, a writing professor who teaches at a small college outside of Pittsburgh. It is about the daily struggle to survive while raising two children with his wife. Funny and heartbreakingly real, author Dave Newman captures the humanity and heartbreak of one man's struggle to navigate the vicissitudes of life as a working writer in America. -- amazon.com.

When Matt's girlfriend Susan decides she's pregnant, everything explodes. A plan to rob the paint store where Danny works part-time becomes the only way to raise the money Susan needs. But Danny's not a good thief, Matt's unraveling, and Susan is desperate and capable of more than they know. Somewhere between a James Cain novel and a Larry Clark photo, PLEASE DON'T SHOOT ANYONE TONIGHT details a world where parents barely exist, lonely adults can't always recognize teenagers, and the only way to save yourself is by making everything worse.

The prize-winning, New York Times bestselling short story collection from the internationally bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo 'The best book you'll read this year' New York Times 'Dazzlingly surreal stories about a failing America' Sunday Times WINNER OF THE 2014 FOLIO PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2013 George Saunders's most wryly hilarious and disturbing collection yet, Tenth of December illuminates human experience and explores figures lost in a labyrinth of troubling preoccupations. A family member recollects a backyard pole dressed for all occasions; Jeff faces horrifying ultimatums and the prospect of Darkenfloxx(TM) in some unusual drug trials; and Al Roosten hides his own internal monologue behind a winning smile that he hopes will make him popular. With dark visions of the future riffing against ghosts of the past and the ever-settling present, this collection sings with astonishing charm and intensity.

“Simple solutions for survival in this family-unfriendly culture…Eye-opening…heart-wrenching and uplifting.”—San Francisco Chronicle Even more resonant today than at its original publication in 1996, The Shelter of Each Other traces the effects of our society’s “anti-family” way of life, where parents are overtaxed, children are undersupervised, and technology is rapidly dictating how we interact. As she did in her number-one bestseller Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher illuminates how our families are suffering at the hands of shifting cultural norms, and she snaps our gaze into crisp focus. Drawing on the fascinating stories of families rich and poor, angry and despairing, religious and skeptical, and probing deep into her own family memories and experiences, Pipher clears a path to the strength and energy at the core of family life. Compassionate and heart-wrenching, The Shelter of Each Other is an impassioned call for us to gather our families in our arms and hold on to them for dear life.

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times) Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.

The Slaughterhouse Poems, Dave Newman's first full-length poetry collection, is a series of narrative poems that tell the stories of people often kept behind the scenes in American literature - slaughterhouse workers, bowling-alley managers, strippers, prisoners dreaming of better lives. Written in the spirit of world poets like Nicanor Parra and Nazim Hikmet, coupled with American grittiness, Newman's poems hold a place of their own - real, heartfelt, true.

In this rewarding study of one of the most important writers of recent decades, Randolph Paul Runyon reveals an ambitious metafiction beneath the terse style of Carver's works and places Carver squarely in the context of the minimalist debate. Runyon's reading ably demonstrates that Carver's stories, especially as they appear in his three major collections, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Cathedral, and the seven new stories in Where I'm Calling From, are strikingly intricate and cast their subtlest spells by indirection. He reveals the intricate metaphorical connections, the structural overlaps, that are overlooked in past Carver criticism. Runyon also finds purposeful arrangement in Carver's short story collections, inviting the reader to explore another text, one written in the interstices between the stories. Each story echoes elements from its immediate predecessor, just as the subconscious, according to Freud, weaves the events of the immediately preceding day into a dream. Freud's relevance extends well to the troubling tension between fathers and sons in Carver's work and to a recurring maternal Medusa. In his assessment of Carver's collections, Runyon also considers both the influence of the Bible and events in Carver's life.