Drawn with exquisite detail and told in a voice that recalls the stylish gossip of the Flapper, Paul Levitt's debut novel will entertain readers with its uncanny evocation of an era when the fangster held a place of celebrity and a teenage girl could be his unwitting collaborator.

I guess I can blame my name on the 70s, the decade my parents went to college. I think the decade instilled in many people a burning desire to give their children atypical names. Apparently, during college, Dad wanted to name his sons "Led"and "Zepp."That was in the era when my mum chose to grow hairy armpits, and Dad had long greasy hair held down by a red headband and huge earphones. My mother told me about the Zeppelin when I was lamenting the fact that my dad was such a nerd that he couldn't understand why I wouldn't wear his piano-key necktie to a formal restaurant. —excerpt from Chin Music Brook Gunderson may have a girl's name and a girl's skinny body, but no one can say he throws like a girl. As the star pitcher on his high-school baseball team in Lethbridge, Alberta, Brook (or "Gunner"to his teammates) lives for the provincial tournament and the occasional, highly elaborate practical joke. As baseball season moves on and the team starts to pull together, it seems like this might be the best summer of Brook's life. But at home, things aren't going so smoothly. Brook's older brother, Frasier, is back after dropping out of college, and his busy parents don't seem able to help keep him on the right track. Brook escapes by spending more and more time with his friends until one last crazy stunt threatens to ruin his sporting ambitions—permanently.

Chin Music. A 95 mile-per-hour fastball thrown at a hitter’s chin - an instant’s difference between disrupting the batter’s concentration and hitting him in the head. As a metaphor in life, chin music is the split second when destinies are altered and all of our certainties about who we are change forever. Ryan Buck, a high school senior and talented athlete, is weighed down with guilt over the horrific accident that has shattered his family’s idyllic life. His dad is dead, his younger brother is maimed, and his mom, Susan, is overwhelmed. Suddenly, life is full of challenges. In the aftermath of the crash, Susan is forced to sell the valuable Babe Ruth artifacts that have been in her family for five generations. A chance meeting with Sam, a retired businessman and baseball memorabilia collector, leads to a close friendship that provides the support Susan needs to investigate a secret that has plagued her family for as long as she can remember – the remarkable encounter between her great grandmother Zel and the immortal Yankee slugger. As Ryan labors, baseball becomes his only outlet, emotionally and physically. When his superior talent for the sport is recognized, a chance at the major leagues becomes a reality, leaving Susan torn between her excitement at Ryan's prospects and protecting her family from the truth that will turn their world upside down. At once a moving story about a troubled kid's dream of making it in baseball, and the struggles of a Mom suddenly alone, trying to do the best for her family, 'Chin Music' will leave readers cheering for more.

2023 Oregon Book Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction Possums Run Amok is a rollicking, slyly hilarious, at times uncomfortable and dark memoir wherein the author and two friends are nicknamed The Possumettes. With fearless candor, Lora Lafayette recounts her life from a delinquent, late 1970s punk rock adolescence through a crooked, manic, transatlantic path to adulthood and her eventual terrifying descent into schizophrenia. Whip smart, daring, and inventive, Lafayette navigates the harsh realities of being a risk-taking adventurous young woman while seeking to wrest all the wild joy she can out of life. Her story reveals how blurry the line can be between real and unreal, choice and force. It lays bare the startling lack of empathy and services in society for those in crisis. Her voice is singular, her language full of shining unconventional metaphor. Deeply uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud funny, and devastatingly moving, Possums Run Amok is equal parts challenging and entertaining.

Traversing the wild landscapes of the American West, prose and photography combine to create a lucid, dream-like vision of visitations and allegorical animal encounters with Snake, Owl, and Dragonfly, among others. The Spring tells a stirring, elegiac tale of death, love, rebirth, survival, and resilience.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.

"I lived in a haunted apartment." Zack Davisson opens this definitive work on Japan's ghosts, or yurei, with a personal tale about the spirit world. Eerie red marks on the apartment's ceiling kept Zack and his wife on edge. The landlord warned them not to open a door in the apartment that led to nowhere. "Our Japanese visitors had no problem putting a name to it . . . they would sense the vibes of the place, look around a bit and inevitably say 'Ahhh . . . yurei ga deteru.' There is a yurei here." Combining his lifelong interest in Japanese tradition and his personal experiences with these vengeful spirits, Davisson launches an investigation into the origin, popularization, and continued existence of yurei in Japan. Juxtaposing historical documents and legends against contemporary yurei-based horror films such as The Ring, Davisson explores the persistence of this paranormal phenomenon in modern day Japan and its continued spread throughout the West. Zack Davisson is a translator, writer, and scholar of Japanese folklore and ghosts. He is the translator of Mizuki Shigeru's Showa 1926–1939: A History of Japan and a translator and contributor to Kitaro. He also worked as a researcher and on-screen talent for National Geographic's TV special Japan: Lost Souls of Okinawa. He writes extensively about Japanese ghost stories at his website, hyakumonogatari.com.

The First Lady of Underfashions is a nonfiction saga-like memoir written by Christina Erteszek and including excerpts from her parents' (Jan and Olga) unpublished memoirs. It is a complex, layered, and nuanced story that bridges the violence of war, the innovation of thought, the singularity of religion, the quest for identity, and the intrigues and intricacies of family life. Jan and Olga escape from World War II Europe and arrive in the US with just a few dollars. They turn their paltry savings into a multi-million-dollar fashion business. Olga becomes a leading patent holder of female lingerie, a trendsetter in the industry, and is widely known for her innovative business tactics. But as this husband-and-wife team think of retiring, they decide to merge with another fashion company, which proves to be a fatal move when a loophole in the agreement allows for a hostile takeover. This is also a story of a daughter's need to find herself. Along her path to self-discovery, she discovers her parents have many secrets, some of which will never be revealed.