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For five heart-churning days, the world turns its attention to tiny Pridemore, Missouri, where rescue teams work around the clock to free a mentally challenged man from a collapsed cave. That’s how Mayor Roe Tolliver envisions it, anyway. Weary of watching the town he’s led for more than forty years slide into economic oblivion, the mayor hatches a devious and dangerous plan. Get ready for a fast-paced romp filled with quirky characters, hilarious twists and turns, and a small town that just might get its fifteen minutes of fame.

Margaret Norman lives in a family with secrets, not the least of which is her own. But what concerns Margaret more is that her family will not talk about her mother, “Weezie,” an artist who died shortly after Margaret was born. Her father, Jim Norman, a brooding attorney, is too obsessed with his own pain to share. Louisa, her older sister, is hostile toward Margaret and ignores her. Black housekeeper, Ida, who is helping to raise Margaret, does not think it her place to tell what others will not. And gentle great aunt, Maggie, did not know Margaret’s mother. Set in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, CARDINAL HILL takes place in a world where blacks and whites, although separated by custom and law, often thrive in personal relationships; where half a world away, a war disrupts lives of those close to home; and where little girls suspect that kissing causes babies.

In her first collection of poems, Sara Pirkle Hughes explores the role memory plays in shaping identity and a person’s perception of the past. The book’s title, THE DISAPPEARING ACT, posits that time is a magician causing every moment in a person's life to disappear, and every poem in the collection is the poet's attempt to recapture what has vanished, while also acknowledging the inherent paradox of writing about the past. The fallible nature of memory makes it impossible to preserve an experience free of distortion.

Part memoir, part essay collection, part spiritual journal, THIS GLADDENING LIGHT offers a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of universal themes--doubt and devotion, childhood and parenthood, disconnection and ecological mindfulness, anguish and empathy--all told at the level of the ground. This much-anticipated nonfiction debut from Christopher Martin is, ultimately, a work of belonging. Through narrative prose that moves between a rain-soaked Appalachian cove, Thoreau’s hut site at Walden Pond, hospital rooms in Atlanta and Cherokee County, Civil War battlefields crossed by highways, and the suburbanized, ore-red hills of Northwest Georgia, Martin paints a spirituality of the ordinary, of the creaturely world.

Good ole boy Dickie Frye vanishes from the Georgia hills and the urbane Fletcher Carlyle bursts onto the New York publishing scene, winning the Nobel Prize for literature. But when a psychotic rampage lands Carlyle in Weatherhaven, eminent psychologist Anton Kohl finds himself talking to Dickie Frye. Kohl’s instincts tell him Frye is not lying—but what he says can’t possibly be true. A fallen priest comes out of Sumerian mythology, the love of Kohl’s life comes out of his past, and a chicken comes out of a posh apartment on Central Park West to meet his fate. Anton Kohl’s carefully constructed world is about to be deconstructed.One part fable and one part Southern yarn, Kiss of the Jewel Bird soars from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Manhattan, rewriting history and opening a window onto a wider, more magical world, where the path to destiny is anything but straight.

THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE is told through the authentic voice of Jessie, a precocious girl raised in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Southern Appalachia after World War II. Saddled with an alcoholic narcissistic father and a passive mother, Jessie is charged with mothering her siblings as generational curses and poverty never cease to overwhelm her family. As providence would have it, Granny Isabelle sets her eagle eye upon Jessie, the child neither parents nor teachers think worthwhile.

In May of 1964, eleven-year-old Etta McDaniel’s horse is struck by lightning—dead and gone, she hopes— out of her life “as though he’d never come in the first place, bringing with him one catastrophe after another.” But Troy, gruesomely scarred, not only survives but seems to have gained supernatural powers, which Etta sets her mind on harnessing in her search for treasure. She is convinced that a find of the sort her hero Heinrich Schliemann unearthed at ancient Troy will set to rights everything suddenly gone wrong in her life: rivalry and betrayal at home and social unrest reaching even her family’s farm.

Bill Merritt grew up in Atlanta, Georgia during the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the Vietnam War. A joyously unreconstructed Southerner, he looks on with amazement as Atlanta changes from a sleepy Southern town into the City Too Busy to Hate. This was the time of Martin Luther King and Ivan Allen, but also the time of Lester Maddox, the Temple Bombing, great moral certainties, Elvis, Klan rallies, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a corrupt political system keeping some of America’s finest statesmen in office (some since the Teddy Roosevelt administration), and a man named Armstrong walking on the moon. Merritt’s family is eccentric and colorful, occasionally courageous, often self-centered. This is the story of the way the Civil Rights Revolution looked to Southerners: to decent people trying to honor their heritage while realizing the time had come to let go of parts of that heritage, and how difficult that letting go was made by the outsiders who most wanted change. This is the story the way Southerners remember it—and tell each other.

Moving and filled with unexpected ideas and imagery, The Color of All Things is a love letter from one man to one woman, but it offers love from each of us to all of us. Brimming with a touching and generous joy, this is a book of everyday needs that can only be filled with a genuine and lasting love. This is the third volume of poetry from Philip Lee Williams, following on his Elegies for the Water and his national book of the year (Books and Culture magazine) The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram. Like his other volumes of poetry, The Color of All Things moves slowly through the natural world without sentimentality but with surefooted grace and lovely rhythms. Georgia poet laureate Judson Mitcham says that in Williams’s poetry we hear “the distinctive voice of a poet who knows how to tell the stories that matter, how to hold still and take a good look at the natural world and let himself be filled with praise, a poet who knows how to find the right prayer and how to pray it.”

HALF OF WHAT I SAY IS MEANINGLESS is a series of memoirs, set by turns in Joseph Bathanti’s hometown of Pittsburgh as well as in his ultimate home in North Carolina where he landed in 1976 as a VISTA Volunteer assigned to the North Carolina Department of Correction. Though these essays are not queued chronologically, they form a seamless chronicle of contemplation on the indelible stamp of home, family, ancestry, and spirituality, regardless of locale.

The moving targets of identity are not always dramatic or final. SHARPS CABARET brings us ex-expatriate poems. They enter—in one way or another—once-familiar territory. Here, when re-crossing oceans, streets, supermarket aisles, or exam rooms, the trip is always a trip. Something is always at stake. In SHARPS CABARET, Giebenhain handles the underestimated and overlooked with good-natured force. From horseshoe-pitching in a war zone to Mary the Mother of God speaking from an icon, from reading graffiti in a Prague restaurant to American health insurers acting like highway bandits, from the startling cleanliness of German windows to the introduction of the patron saint of the world’s most confusingly-named disease, here’s a collection that urges us to look again.

Each poem in this award-winning collection represents the life of a carnival performer or that of an outsider whose life is rife with carnival metaphor. For instance, “The Two-Headed Woman and the Two-Faced Man” is both literal and metaphorical. Naturally, she draws carnival audiences, and as an outsider and illusionist of sorts, he complicates her life. Through deft, incisive portraits, Lesley Dauer populates these pages with people and animals in whom we recognize our own strengths, quirks, and bewilderment. We meet among others: a human cannonball preoccupied with thoughts of his family’s welfare, a contortionist controlled by his emotions, and compassionate dancing bears concerned by the psychological limits of their audience.