Dreiser's second novel and his own personal favorite features an impoverished heroine who, in simply trying to make her way in the world, inadvertently defies a host of social conventions.

When her step-daughter steals money belonging to Amber, a woman who has since been evicted along with her teenage son, Cassie invites them to move in with her and as they each form friendships, Cassie discovers that Amber is trying to outrun her dark past.

"One child preacher traveling across the plains. One young woman with a mysterious touch. Two old friends, their baby, and their bloodhound. And all the stars that shine above them. When fifteen-year-old Marigold becomes pregnant amid the Great Depression, she is rejected by her family and forced to fend for herself. And when she loses her baby in the forest, her whole world turns upside down. She's even more distraught upon discovering she has an...

"Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date."-- In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. A recent widower and his adult son ferry to a craggy Scottish island in search of puffins. An actress who plays a children's game show villainess ushers in the New Year with her...

"Sonya used to perform on stage. She used to attend glamorous parties, date handsome men, ride in fast cars. But somewhere along the way, the stage lights Sonya lived for dimmed for good. And then, in their absence, came darkness--blackouts, empty cupboards, hazy nights she can't remember. Haunted by her failed career and unresolved childhood trauma, Sonya has fallen deep into an alcoholic abyss. What keeps Sonya from losing herself completely is...

"Truth: Sherri Griffin and her daughter, Katie, have recently moved to the idyllic beach town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Rebecca Coleman, widely acknowledged former leader of the Newburyport Mom Squad (having taken a step back since her husband's shocking and tragic death eighteen months ago), has made a surprising effort to include these newcomers in typically closed-group activities. Rebecca's teenage daughter Alexa has even been spotted babysitting...

"Sara King has nothing, save for her secrets and the baby in her belly, as she boards the bus to Memphis, hoping to outrun her past in Chicago. She is welcomed with open arms by Mama Sugar, a kindly matriarch and owner of the popular boardinghouse The Scarlet Poplar. Like many cities in early 1960s America, Memphis is still segregated, but change is in the air. News spreads of the Freedom Riders. Across the country, people like Martin Luther King...

Byrd is a contemporary novel about a woman who bears and surrenders a son, her only child, without telling his father, little imagining how the secret will shape their lives. Through letters and spare, precisely observed vignettes, the book examines how a 33-year-old birth mother comes to make, and live with, the most difficult, intimate, and far reaching of choices.

Swept off her feet by a costumed man at a comics convention, a graphic novelist discovers that she is pregnant with a biracial child and avoids telling her conventional Southern family while assisting her elderly grandmother, who has been hiding a dangerous secret linked to the Civil War.

In Stacey D'Erasmo's acclaimed second novel, a quintessentially modern family is ultimately transformed by the emerging breakdown of their teenaged son, Christopher. When he disappears from his San Francisco home, his extended family comes together in a frantic search. But Christopher is in much more trouble than they know, and their attempts to support him and to save him will challenge their assumptions about themselves and one another. Exquisitely...