Set against a ticking clock, this "haunting" and "atmospheric" thriller pits a ruthless cult against a mother's love, revealing that our darkest secrets are the hardest ones to leave behind (Sally Hepworth, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Sister). Four days to go Amy has only ever known life in the Clearing, amidst her brothers and sisters--until a newcomer, a younger girl, joins the "family" and offers a glimpse of the outside world. Three days to go Freya is going to great lengths to seem like an "everyday mum," even as she maintains her isolated lifestyle, hoping to protect her young son and her dog. Two days to go When news breaks of a missing girl--a child the same age as Freya's son, Billy--Amy and Freya find themselves headed for a shocking collision. One day to go

"A former police academy classmate and protaegae asks Tracy to help solve a cold case that involves the suspicious suicide of a Native American high school girl forty years earlier. But as Tracy probes one small town's memory and finds dark, well-concealed secrets hidden within the community's fabric, her own life may be endangered"--

A poetry debut that’s “a lush, lyrical book about a world where women are meant to carry things to safety and men leave decisively” (Henri Cole). Luminous and electric from the first line to the last, Allison Adair’s debut collection navigates the ever-shifting poles of violence and vulnerability with a singular incisiveness and a rich imagination. The women in these poems live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores, and they understand the nature of being hollowed out. From the midst of the Civil War to our current era, Adair charts fairy tales that are painfully familiar, never forgetting that violence is often accompanied by tenderness. Here we wonder, “What if this time instead of crumbs the girl drops / teeth, her own, what else does she have”? The Clearing knows the dirt beneath our nails, both alone and as a country, and pries it gently loose until we remember something of who we are, “from before . . . from a similar injury or kiss.” There is a dark beauty in this work, and Adair is a skilled stenographer of the silences around which we orbit. Described by Henri Cole as “haunting and dirt caked,” her unromantic poems of girlhood, nature, and family linger with an uncommon, unsettling resonance. Winner of the 2019 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize Praise for The Clearing “A dark and bodily nod to folk- and fairy-tale energy.” —Boston Globe “The poems in Adair’s debut draw on folklore and the animal world to assert feminist viewpoints and mortal terror in lush musical lines, as when “A fat speckled spider sharpens / in the shoe of someone you need.” —New York Times Book Review, “New & Noteworthy Poetry” “Like Grimms’ fairy tales, Adair’s poems are dark without being bleak, hopeless, or disturbing. Readers will find the collections lush language and provocative imagery powerfully resonant.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

Susan Frybort steps into the eye of bewildering times with a fresh collection of encouraging poems that bravely speak to the many facets of life. Connections, transitions, loss, and change meet us in the center of our hearts. Look to the Clearing will offer a cornerstone of comfort and validation in the moments most needed. It will assure you that there is a way out of the dark, a promise tucked inside each purposeful season and a calm, benevolent grace walking beside you on your path towards home. We move through dense forest into open glades on our journey, creating experiences of going from shadow to light, from enclosure into spaciousness- allowing for a different level of perspective, appreciation, and acceptance. Each poem is a loving reminder of a place waiting for you to softly land. A place to integrate, be nurtured, or rest. A place of much needed restoration, where the sunlight filters through the leaves to offer clarity.

In his critically acclaimed new novel, Tim Gautreaux fashions a classic and unforgettable tale of two brothers struggling in a hostile world. In a lumber camp in the Louisiana cypress forest, a world of mud and stifling heat where men labor under back-breaking conditions, the Aldridge brothers try to repair a broken bond. Randolph Aldridge is the mill’s manager, sent by his father—the mill owner—to reform both the damaged mill and his damaged older brother. Byron Aldridge is the mill's lawman, a shell-shocked World War I veteran given to stunned silences and sudden explosions of violence that make him a mystery to Randolph and a danger to himself. Deep in the swamp, in this place of water moccasins, whiskey, and wild card games, these brothers become embroiled in a lethal feud with a powerful gangster. In a tale full of raw emotion as supple as a saw blade, The Clearing is a mesmerizing journey into the trials that define men’s souls.