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Anne Elliott

These stories about struggling artists are “a fierce and funny exploration of creation and its discontents” (Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal).

Set in various creative communities—an art school, an illegal loft studio, a guerrilla street performance troupe—where teamwork and professional jealousy mix, these interconnected short stories by prizewinning author Anne Elliot follow artists as they grapple with economic realities and evolving expectations.

A middle-aged poet, reeling from 9/11, fights homesickness, writer’s block, and ladybugs at an artist’s colony. A new empty-nester finds a creative outlet in her community garden, but gets tangled up in garden politics. As the characters pass through each other’s stories, making messes and helping mop them up, some find inspiration in accidents and others are ready to quit art completely. Together, they stumble through the creative process, struggling to make art and find the spark of something new and original within themselves. In a world where the odds of becoming a star are nearly impossible, The Artstars tells the darkly humorous yet moving stories of those who dare to dream.

Indiana University Press

Blue Light Books

The Artstars

Tom Howard

This debut story collection from the Tobias Wolff Award–winning author “is streaked with fantasy that deconstructs society’s lost and wasted lives” (Publishers Weekly).
 
 In these eight darkly comic stories, acclaimed author Tom Howard explores the conflicting instincts for tenderness and violence that mark his character’s lives. A brother and sister wander the pier after a deadly plague destroys most of humanity. A high school bully struggles to overcome his demons. A man in the grips of dementia is visited by his children’s ghosts.
 
 The people in these tales grapple with past mistakes, trying to navigate their way toward redemption and resurrection. Though they often fail, they strive with ferocious hearts as their voices guide us through schoolyards, cemeteries, drive-in theaters, and the rich landscapes of their own imaginations.

Fierce Pretty Things: Stories

Jennifer Givhan

The prize-winning poet “crafts a clear-eyed narrative of Latina womanhood in this lovely collection ripe with longing, hope, and broken faith” (Publishers Weekly).

Winner of the Pleiades Editors’ Prize and Miller Williams Poetry Prize, poet Jennifer Givhan now explores the path from girlhood to womanhood through love, tequila, sex, first periods, late nights, abuse, and heartache. She describes a journey brimming with transformative magic that heals even as it shatters.

In four rich movements of poems, Givhan profiles the suffering and the love of a Latina girl who enters motherhood while coming to terms with sexual trauma. Her daughter is a touchstone of healing as she seeks to unravel her own emotions and protect the next generation of women. Givhan uses changing poetic forms to expose what it means to mature in a female body swirling with tenderness, violence, and potential in an uncertain world.

Girl with Death Mask