Little Casino
In this superb novel composed of fragments of memory, Gilbert Sorrentino captures the unconventional nuances of a conventional world amidst the grit of golden-era Brooklyn. Each episode, affectingly textured with penetrating detail, ferrets out the gristle and beauty found in the voices of the scrappy immigrant boys, hard drinking men, and poor, sexy, magenta-lipped women who inhabit the novel.

Some of Her Friends That Year
Maxine Chernoff fans will relish the fifteen new stories, and new readers will discover a wonderful assemblage of Chernoff's likeable and contemplative characters. With the precision of a poet and the astuteness of a sociologist, Chernoff continues to establish herself as a master of the short story genre with this excellent collection, which includes stories from Bop and Signs of Devotion.

You Never Know
You never know what to expect from Ron Padgett, a poet full of delightful surprises and discoveries. This witty new collection glides from comic to elegiac to lyrical, in celebrations of fairy tales, friendship, cubism, birds, lullabies, spirituality, Dutch painting, and the magic of everyday life, all rendered in artful conversational American.

The Mermaid that Came Between Them
As a young boy visiting the seaside, Jacob met his first love: a mermaid named Claritha. Three decades later, as a divorced father of a college-age son and a writer of maritime adventure stories, Jacob renews his fantastical relationship with Claritha only to discover that his son has fallen in love with the same bedazzling siren.

Red Suburb
Red Suburb portrays the neurotic beauty of a generation squeezed between the Baby Boomers and Generation X. These poems-ripe with love and wistfulness-scope the bright, innocent Kodak colors of suburbia, then twist like a kaleidoscope, distorting into the very un-American Dream of coming-of-age as a seer, a dreamer, a gay man, and a social iconoclast amidst the abject development of cul-de-sacs and manicured lawns.