William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable. It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.

Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written. Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walks of life. Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist in an itinerant circus sideshow, he has escaped from the show and has been wandering in a quest for his lost family. Speaking intimately to the reader, he tells the bizarre and fantastic tale of his life. This unforgettable novel is the crown of Goyen's exploration of the forms and feelings that could be compassed within fiction.

"I was twenty when I followed away from my town a trapeze family, aerialists, a group of beautiful winged people, mother, father, son and daughter. They were the Ishbels". Chris, whose leg is injured, and his lover Stella, with whom he lives in a ruined, abandoned house; Chris's male nurse; Marvello the circus aerialist; a lighthouse keeper; a flagpole sitter in small-town America - these are the creatures of William Goyen's visionary fable of love, lust, and loneliness. Half a Look of Cain: A Fantastical Narrative was written in the 1950s and early 1960s, and is now being published for the first time. Part fable and part rhapsodic exploration of desire and loss, Half a Look of Cain bears Goyen's unmistakable artistic signature on every page. Too far ahead of its time in its swirling visionary structure, this novel was rejected by Goyen's first publisher as not sufficiently commercial and remained unpublished despite extensive revisions. The novel is shaped as a group of "medallions" - a series of related episodes. It dreams of defying mortality - as if living in the air, like the aerialists or the flagpole sitter - and of finding perfect companionship in lover and friend. The novel is both a rediscovered cry against the conformity and suppressed emotions of the 1950s and a celebration of passion. Reginald Gibbons has edited the novel from the author's multiple manuscripts and has contributed an illuminating afterword.

With over three hundred new and previously published short stories as well as three novellas, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together distilled works of “unsettling brilliance” (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of American short fiction. From Ben Marcus’ introduction to The Collected Stories of Diane Williams: “Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, most of them no more than a page long. She’s a hero of the form: the sudden fiction, the flash fiction, whatever it’s being called these days. The stories are short. They defy logic. They thumb their nose at conventional sense, or even unconventional sense. But if sense is in short supply in these texts, that leaves more room for splendor and sorrow. These stories upend expectations and prize enigma and the uncanny above all else. The Williams epiphany should be patented, or bottled—on the other hand, it should also be regulated and maybe rationed, because it’s severe. It’s a rare feeling her stories trigger, but it’s a keen and deep and welcome one, the sort of feeling that wakes us up to complication and beauty and dissonance and fragility.”

Fiction. In these short stories, Garber blurs the margins between reality and fantasy to create an "eerie domain of magical ambiguity. the work of a grandly talented storyteller" -William Kennedy. Winner of numerous awards for fiction, and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Albany, Garber writes what Joyce Carol Oates once called "almost real" stories that are vivid, surprising and provocative. Brimming with both the quotidian and the transcendent, "underneath there is always a powerful story pumping and pumping, carrying everything with it" -Norman Lavers.

"One dizzying vortex, combining colonial history, generational delusions and psychedelic drug trips. . . . An eerily familiar vision of American madness and decay." —The New York Times Book Review From award-winning novelist Argentine Betina González, American Delirium is a dizzying, luminous English-language debut about an American town overrun by a mysterious hallucinogen and the collision of three unexpected characters through the mayhem. In a small Midwestern city, the deer population starts attacking people. So Beryl, a feisty senior and ex-hippie with a troubled past, decides to take matters into her own hands, training a squad of fellow retirees to hunt the animals down and to prove to society they’re capable of more than playing bingo. At the same time, a group of protesters decides to abandon the “system” and live in the woods, leaving behind the demands of modern life—including their children. Nine-year-old Berenice never thought her mother would join the dropouts, but she’s been gone for several days, leaving only a few clues about her past for Berenice to piece together. Vik, a taxidermist at the natural history museum and an immigrant from the Caribbean, is beginning to see the connections among the dropouts, the deer, and the discord. He’s not normally the type to speak up, but when he finds a woman living in his closet, he’s forced to get involved. Each of these engrossing characters holds a key to the city’s unraveling—despite living on the margins of society—and just as their lives start to spin out of control, they rescue one another in surprising ways.

Winner of the William Goyen Prize for Fiction Eugene Garber's masterpiece of the imagination takes readers on a rich fictional odyssey that is a meditation on the American character and experience. Moving back and forth in time, populated by memorable characters that include Henry Adams, Isadora Duncan, and Lincoln Steffans, the story follows the historian's quest to find the American woman, whose vitality has been all but written out of history by puritan consciousness.