Zack Neiway was a private man who loved naval power, his family, and the quiet of the open water. His steely gaze could hold you in thrall or dismiss you into insignificance. He especially loved his daughters—much more than he should have. Zack’s Daughters is the story of a “perfect” family’s tragedies and how those tragedies are finally resolved through religion, storytelling, and music. The surface is what you see; the reality is something else. "An utterly disturbing, and often absorbing, family saga with many moving pieces" -- Kirkus Discovery Review "Mesmerizing. Kreidler seduces with poetic words to hurl us into the dark corners where abuse dwells." -- Eileen Spratt Ehlers

When Bridget the alligator arrives in the mail, she's only the size of a key chain! But after Zack soaks her in water, she grows into a real live alligator. Bridget wrestles the garden hose and swings from the monkey bars. And what other alligator can do cartwheels? Children's Books of 1989 (Library of Congress)

What were the odds of Dr. Zack Sargent turning up at Safe Harbor Medical? Nurse Jan Garcia's former fiancé would be on staff here—and assigned to work closely with her as she launches the hospital's new egg donor program. It's more than a little awkward. Years ago, a terrible misunderstanding tore them apart. And now Zack, a widower raising his young stepdaughter alone, learns that Jan secretly kept the daughter—their daughter—he thought she'd given up for adoption. Zack has become the kind of steady, caring father both girls need, and he and Jan can't ignore the sparks that still fly between them. But to become a family, they must learn to trust each other again. Could two little girls and two stray cats be enough to bring them back together?

A Carpenter’s Daughter is the story of the difficulties and rewards of the educational system for one who was not meant to go through it. The single most reliable predictor of whether someone will earn a BA is whether at least one of their parents has one-yet, today, there are an increasing number of first-generation college students. A Carpenter’s Daughter is both a memoir of the author’s experiences growing up, going to school, and becoming an academic and a thoughtful commentary on the meaning of class in American culture. By connecting her own story with ideas from scholarly works on class and identity, Christopher shows how her individual experiences reflect common struggles that people of working-class background face when their education, profession, income, and lifestyles change. This work reminds us forcefully that "moving up" isn't necessarily good and that changing one’s class isn't as simple as going to class or even becoming the teacher of the class.—Sherry Linkon, author of Teaching Working Class The work is stellar, merging the tangled and complex webs of social mobility through education in ways that leave lots of loose ends dangling just the way it should. No pretty bows adorning carefully wrapped packages here. No straight and narrow trajectory toward a mainstream version of success. Instead, readers will be pulled along by nuanced narratives portraying the warped nature of society’s construction of success and a careful crafting of the book in its entirety as a disjointed text presenting shards of a life that can never be visible in a tidied-up tale.—Stephanie Jones, University of Georgia

Equal parts speculative and satirical, the stories in Why Visit America form an exegesis of our current political predicament, while offering an eloquent plea for connection and hope. The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the broke-down United States. So they vote to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and happily set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbor: America. Couldn’t happen? Well, it might, and so it goes in the thirteen stories in Matthew Baker’s brilliantly illuminating, incisive, and heartbreaking collection Why Visit America. The book opens with a seemingly traditional story in which the speculative element is extremely minimal—the narrator has a job that doesn’t actually exist—a story that wouldn’t seem much out of place in a collection of literary realism. From there the stories get progressively stranger: a young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition—from an analog body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child—her own—from a government-run childcare facility. A man returns home after committing a great crime, his sentence being that his memory—his entire life—is wiped clean. As the book moves from universe to universe, the stories cross between different American genres: from bildungsroman to rom com, western to dystopian, including fantasy, horror, erotica, and a noir detective mystery. Read together, these parallel-universe stories create a composite portrait of the true nature of the United States and a Through the Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

Just Zack is the story of a black man born during the Depression, raised in the deep South, has fearlessly experienced the effects of segregation and Jim Crow but never having been understood or assimilated as the sociological term implies to it. As an adult, I was the first member of my family to have received a college degree. I received a bachelors degree in Sociology from California State University in San Bernardino, hoping to unlock the mystery of Jim Crow. I did not. I identified with the black national movement of that time. I was seventy-five when I became a newcomer to Christ and realized my redemption made me just. So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24). And it was at this point that I realized my earlier life impacted the man I had been until nownot all bad, not all good, no regrets, no bitterness. I was just. I was Zack. I learned that my personality was influenced by my childhood, and my past weighed heavily on my future and was the basis of my marriage, which lasted for more than fifty years. This was not because my wife or I were virtuous, but that God had protected both of us from ourselves from the beginning. Before writing this book, I prayed for God to guide me. God began to flood my mind with things that I had done in both my wifes and my life, things I could not have known and would not have known had I not become a Christian, studied the scriptures, and learned that God knew us both before our marriage and how our lives would be favored to serve his purpose. God knew us when we were in our mothers womb.

One Good Knight with the Presidents Daughter features a collision of indignant Ivy Leaguers with a crooked alumnus worth four billion dollars. The title refers to Joe Knight, the editor of a subversive campus paper, and Susannah Cameron, the university president's witty daughter who falls in love with him for his integrity and irreverence. The editor has lambasted the tycoons desire to donate a megabucks museum. In the midst of its rollicking comedy, the play confronts a serious question: What is the actual purpose of prestigious universities, when one of their richest alumni is regarded as a role model while in fact he is no better than a crook? The stage set should appeal to a director, actors, and audience for its compressed, creative use of space. The set consists of Joes dorm room63 square feet crammed with a bed, desk, closet, and two chairs. (Joe has discovered that his room allows him only half the space required for felons in the state penitentiary.) Nine remarkably colorful characters wedge themselves inside his room. The comedy of their struggle is intensified amid the heap of tangled bodies while they deal with love, fraud, and the art of getting even. Ever more ingenious leverage is applied to the tycoon, who ends up endowing a two-million-dollar professorship for studying corruption in America.