Poetry. Women's Studies. "In her luminous book, Laurie Filipelli remakes the constellations of a modern life. Her poems re-draw the lines between the parts of the world, helping us to see there are no divisions between planting a plumbago and watching the passage of hateful legislation, no space between grief for a lost father and the wonder of what he's told the speaker: 'the whale's veins are so wide we could swim / to her heart.' By looking so tenderly and incisively at the actual experience of a life, Filipelli makes us see our own differently."--Sasha West "Flying together, flying apart: in these poems the self is as elastic as a flock of birds cutting across the winter sky. Here, among carousel and cave, where 'the bigger you spin, the lighter you fall,' we are invited into the world of mothers and daughters, fathers and grandfathers, a geography whose inhabitants bear steadily forward while always casting a long look back. As our leader advances, in an outstretched hand she presents to us the artifacts of her explorations--mirrors, keys, paper dragons--reminding us all the while to accept the dangers of discovery as well as its myriad blessings. The wisdom within these pages is hard-won and generously offered, the speaker lifting her face skyward no matter the conditions at her feet. 'The future is a ballad sung in your name,' Filipelli promises, and we want to--we do--believe her."--Laurie Saurborn

She feels like a creature out of a fairy tale; a girl who discovers that her bones are really made out of stone, that her skin is really as thin as glass, that her hair is brittle as straw, that her tears have dried up so that she cries only salt. Maybe that's why it doesn't hurt when she presses hard enough to begin bleeding: it doesn't hurt, because she's not real anymore. Sethie Weiss is hungry, a mean, angry kind of hunger that feels like a piece of glass in her belly. She’s managed to get down to 111 pounds and knows that with a little more hard work—a few more meals skipped, a few more snacks vomited away—she can force the number on the scale even lower. She will work on her body the same way she worked to get her perfect grades, to finish her college applications early, to get her first kiss from Shaw, the boy she loves, the boy who isn’t quite her boyfriend. Sethie will not allow herself one slip, not one bad day, not one break in concentration. Her body is there for her to work on when everything and everyone else—her best friend, her schoolwork, and Shaw—are gone. From critically acclaimed writer Alyssa B. Sheinmel comes an unflinching and unparalleled portrayal of one girl’s withdrawal, until she is sinking like a stone into her own illness, her own loneliness—her own self.

Winner of the 2016 Quill Prose Award, Scissors, Paper, Stone contemplates the meanings of family through twenty years in the lives of a Korean-American lesbian, her adoptive mother, and her boy-crazy best friend.

A boy, a patchwork girl, and a glass cat go on a mission to find the ingredients for a charm which will transform some people turned to marble.

In Afghanistan, British secret servicewoman Marcie Brown, posing as the third wife of one of ISAF’s most trusted operatives, is killed in a drone strike. Or at least, that’s what the official report states. Deep inside enemy territory, what remains of her body is deemed irrecoverable. Seven thousand miles away, in Britain, her grieving husband, MI7 Officer Nicholas Fleming, joins a police investigation which stumbles onto an Islamist plot to bomb central London. Handed responsibility for the counter-terrorism initiative, he uncovers evidence that one of the bombers is his wife. By degrees, the utterly unbelievable becomes plausible and, at last, undeniable. Questions such as what really happened to her become academic as love and duty are rendered incompatible. To save the lives of hundreds of innocent people, Fleming must order the destruction of the only woman he has ever loved. To make matters worse, there is evidence that she is slowly recovering her memory … The Girl From Kandahar is a love story played out on both sides of the War on Terror. Its detailed understanding of Pashtun culture and Islam is matched by a corresponding recognition of Western motives and concerns. Above all, it deals with the human side of the conflict: families split, loved ones lost, communities broken, distrust, hostility, grief. Yet its prognosis is far from bleak. In the end, it may be that no ideology is as powerful as the simple truth that our best hope lies in each other.