"[A] compelling debut…Townsend's writing [is] full of fresh turns of phrase and keen insights." —Ayana Mathis, New York Times Book Review Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she’ll never get out of Kentucky—but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County. That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem—an offer she can’t resist, not even for Caroline. And in New York City the music never stops. Audrey flirts with love and takes the stage at the Apollo, with its fast-dancing crowds and blinding lights. But fortunes can turn fast in the city—young talent means tough competition, and for Audrey failure is always one step away. Meanwhile, Caroline sinks into the quiet anguish of a Black woman in a backwards country, where her ambitions and desires only slip further out of reach. Jacinda Townsend’s remarkable first novel is a coming-of-age story made at once gripping and poignant by the wild energy of the Jazz Era and the stark realities of segregation. Marrying musical prose with lyric vernacular, Saint Monkey delivers a stirring portrait of American storytelling and marks the appearance of an auspicious new voice in literary fiction.

Two friends from the mountains of eastern Kentucky try to retain their friendship when one of them is invited to play the Apollo with a jazz group while the other sinks lower in her poor, backward, backwoods life.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a twelve-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction, written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies. This book offers an account of US fiction during a period demarcated by two traumatic moments: the eve of the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The aftermath of the Second World War was arguably the high point of US nationalism, but in the years that followed, US writers would increasingly explore the possibility that US democracy was a failure, both at home and abroad. For so many of the writers whose work this volume explores, the idea of "nation" became suspect as did the idea of "national literature" as the foundation for US writing. Looking at post-1940s writing, the literary historian might well chart a movement within literary cultures away from nationalism and toward what we would call "cosmopolitanism," a perspective that fosters conversations between the occupants of different cultural spaces and that regards difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. During this period, the novel has had significant competition for the US public's attention from other forms of narrative and media: film, television, comic books, videogames, and the internet and the various forms of social media that it spawned. If, however, the novel becomes a "residual" form during this period, it is by no means archaic. The novel has been reinvigorated over the past eighty years by its encounters with both emergent forms (such as film, television, comic books, and digital media) and the emergent voices typically associated with multiculturalism in the United States.

Twenty-one vivid, moving essays on caesarean birth “No one talks about C-sections as surgery,” writes SooJin Pate. “They talk about it as if it’s just another way—albeit more convenient way—of giving birth.” The twenty-one essays in My Caesarean add back to the conversation the missing voices of a vast, invisible sisterhood. Robin Schoenthaler reflects: “A C-section for us meant life.” And yet, women who don’t give birth vaginally—by choice or necessity—often feel stigmatized. “My son’s birth was not a test I needed to pass,” writes Sara Bates. “As if growing a human inside another human for nine months then caring for it the rest of its life isn’t enough,” adds Mary Pan, herself a physician. Alongside their personal stories, the writers—decorated novelists, poets, and essayists—address the history of the C-section as well as its risks, social inequities, impact on the body, and psychological aftermath. My Caesarean is a heartfelt meditation, offering much-needed comfort through shared experience. Contributors include: Catherine Newman, Judy Batalion, Nicole Cooley, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Lisa Solod, Misty Urban, Jacinda Townsend, Mary Pan, Robin Schoenthaler, Elizabeth Noll, Jen Fitzgerald, Tyrese Coleman, SooJin Pate, Daniela Montoya-Barthelemy, Cameron Dezen Hammon, LaToya Jordan, Sara Bates, Susan Hoffmann, and Alicia Jo Rabins.

Winner of the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Shortlisted for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author. Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life. In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.

New York Times–bestselling author Ron Rash joins 23 writers on Appalachian culture and community: “Buy this book, it's a barn burner!” (Dorothy Allison). Drawing on Appalachian literature’s roots in Native American myth, African American urban legend, and European folk culture, and embracing Appalachian urban fiction, the Southern Gothic, gritty no-holds-barred realism, and magical realism, the illuminating works in Red Holler perfectly depict what makes Appalachia so fascinating: its irreverent and outlaw challenges to mainstream notions of propriety and convention. “Enthusiasts of Appalachian literature will appreciate the breadth of work” in this extraordinarily diverse anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narratives by fresh new voices alongside widely known and celebrated authors. We travel into housing projects, forest-stripped ravines, trailer parks, and communities ranging from Mississippi to New York to explore vibrant hometown and migrant Appalachian traditions, values, and society. Red Holler takes us over and beyond the stock imagery of rural mountain habitués and redefines this expansive and distinctive American landscape (Publishers Weekly).

In Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray collect essays from today’s finest established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia. Together, these essays take the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture, whether the details of that theme revolve around faith, class, work, or family legacies. In essays that take wide-ranging forms—making this an ideal volume for creative nonfiction classes—contributors write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken. They consider the courage required for the inheritances they carry. Toughness and generosity alike characterize works by Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, Silas House, and others. These writers travel far away from the boundaries of a traditional Appalachia, and then circle back—always—to the mountains that made each of them the distinctive thinking and feeling people they ultimately became. The essays in Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean are an individual and collective act of courage. Contributors: Dorothy Allison, Rob Amberg, Pinckney Benedict, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Sheldon Lee Compton, Michael Croley, Richard Currey, Joyce Dyer, Sarah Einstein, Connie May Fowler, RJ Gibson, Mary Crockett Hill, bell hooks, Silas House, Jason Howard, David Huddle, Tennessee Jones, Lisa Lewis, Jeff Mann, Chris Offutt, Ann Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips, Melissa Range, Carter Sickels, Aaron Smith, Jane Springer, Ida Stewart, Jacinda Townsend, Jessie van Eerden, Julia Watts, Charles Dodd White, and Crystal Wilkinson.