SET AGAINST THE DECAYING HALLS of a San Diego rest home in the 1970s, God Clobbers Us All is the shimmering, hysterical, and melancholy account of eighteen-year-old surfer-boy orderly, Edgar Donahoe, and his struggles with romance, death, friendship, and an ill-advised affair with the wife of a maladjusted war veteran. All of Edgar's problems become mundane, however, when he and his lesbian Blackfoot nurse's aide best friend become responsible for the disappearance of their fellow worker after an LSD party gone awry. Ballantine's own brand of delicious quirkiness and storytelling is smooth and compelling, and God Clobbers Us All is guaranteed to satisfy Ballantine fans as well as convert those lucky enough to be discovering his work for the first time.

In a San Diego rest home in the 1970s, eighteen-year-old surfer-boy orderly, Edgar Donahoe, struggles along until the night he and his best friend become responsible for the disappearance of a fellow worker.

D'ARCY FALLON OFFERS AN IRREVERENT, fly-on-the-wall view of the Lighthouse Ranch, a Christian commune she called home for three years in the mid-1970s. At eighteen years old, when life's questions overwhelmed her and reconciling her family past with her future seemed impossible, she accidentally came upon the Ranch during a hitchhike gone awry. Perched on a windswept bluff in Loleta, a dozen miles from anywhere in Northern California, this community of lost and found twenty-somethings lured her in with promises of abounding love, spiritual serenity, and a hardy, pioneer existence. What she didn't count on was the fog. After living communally with more than a dozen "sisters," marrying before she was ready, and doing domestic chores to keep the ranch afloat, Fallon's life and religious idealism begin to unravel. Through a series of harrowing and heartbreaking decisions, she begins the process that will lead her away from the ranch and into her own life one step at a time.

The action of Toby Olson’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel Seaview sweeps eastward, following three men and two women across a wasted American continent to an apocalyptic confrontation on Cape Cod. Melinda hopes to reach the seaside where she was born before she dies of cancer. Allen, her husband, earns their way back by golf hustling, working the links en route. Outside of Tucson, the two meet up with a Pima Indian also headed toward the Cape to help a distant relative who has claims on a golf course there that is laid out on tribal grounds. Throughout the journey, Allen knows he is being stalked by a former friend, Richard, a drug-pusher whom he has crossed and who is now determined to murder him. The tortured lives of Richard and his wife Gerry stand as a dream of what might have become of Allen and Melinda had things been otherwise. The lines that draw these people together converge at Seaview Links, and on the mad battlefield that this golf course becomes, the novel reaches its complex ending. Seaview’s vibrant language and fateful plot make this study of an America on the edge an unforgettable read.

It's Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo's lively nightclub scene. Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight against American troops in the Philippines. Their perilous attempts to remain neutral in a conflict where their loyalties are deeply divided are shattered when Jimmy is killed by the commanding officer for refusing to shoot an American prisoner. The deed then falls to Teddy. Thirty years later, Teddy is married to Jimmy's widow, father to his son, a star on Japanese TV -- and still wrestling with the guilt over Jimmy's death. Winner of the 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award for Best American Fiction, Soldiers in Hiding is a haunting portrayal of war's lingering emotional burdens. This revised edition features a new preface by the author and an introduction by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka.

Fans of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" will embrace Poe Ballantine's "Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere." Poe Ballantine's "Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel" included in Best American Essays 2013, and for well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, trying to make a living as a writer. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America. But one day in 2006, his neighbor, Steven Haataja, a math professor from the local state college disappeared. Ninety five days later, the professor was found bound to a tree, burned to death in the hills behind the campus where he had taught. No one, law enforcement included, understood the circumstances. Poe had never contemplated writing mystery or true crime, but since he knew all the players, the suspects, the sheriff, the police involved, he and his kindergarten son set out to find out what might have happened.

WINNER OF THE H.L. DAVIS AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION at the 2004 Oregon Book Awards and GLCA's 2005 New Writers Award, Scott Nadelson’s interrelated short stories are graceful, vivid narratives that bring into sudden focus the spirit and the stubborn resilience of the Brickmans, a Jewish family of four living in suburban New Jersey. The central character, Daniel Brickman, forges obstinately through his own plots and desires as he struggles to balance his sense of identity with his longing to gain acceptance from his family and peers. In Kosher, Daniel’s disdain for his parents’ values and lifestyle, for their materialism and need for security, leads him to take a job as a telemarketer for the Robowski Fund for the Disabled, a charity benefiting two people only: Daniel and Helen Robowski. And in Young Radicals, Daniel gathers research for a thesis on early Soviet history by interviewing his grandfather, now a retiree in Florida, who painted factories and sang Communist work songs in 1920s Leningrad before immigrating to America. This fierce collection provides an unblinking examination of family life and the human instinct for attachment.

THIS INTENSE AND COMPACT NOVEL crackles with obsession, betrayal, and madness, and was an Oregon Book Award Finalist for fiction 2005. As the narrator becomes fixated on his best friend’s girlfriend, his precarious hold on sanity rapidly deteriorates into delusion and violence. This story can be read as the classic myth of Hades and Persephone (Core) rewritten for a twenty-first century audience as well as a dark, foreboding tale of unrequited love and loneliness. Alonso skillfully uses language to imitate memory and psychosis, putting the reader squarely inside the narrator’s head. In addition, deliberate misuse of standard punctuation blurs the distinction between the narrator’s internal and external worlds. A sense of alienation and Faulknerian grotesquerie permeate this landscape where desire is borne in the bloom of a daffodil and sanity lies toppled like an applecart in the mud.

MICHAEL STRELOW WEAVES THE STORY OF A TOWN and its mysteries in his debut novel, The Greening of Ben Brown, an Oregon Book Award Finalist for fiction 2005. Ben Brown, the protagonist, becomes a citizen of East Leven, Oregon, after he recovers from an electrocution that has not left him dead but has turned him green. He befriends eighteen year-old Andrew James and together they unearth a chemical spill cover-up that forces the town to confront its demons and its citizens to choose sides. Strelow's lyrical prose and his talent for storytelling come together in this poetic and important first work that looks at how a town and the natural environment are inextricably linked. The Greening of Ben Brown will find itself in good company on the shelves between Winesburg, Ohio and To Kill a Mockingbird and readers of both will have a new story to cherish.

"It’s impossible not to be charmed by Edgar Donahoe (Publishers Weekly)," and he’s back for another misguided adventure. When Edgar is expelled from college for drunkenly bellowing expletives from a dorm window at 3:00 am, he hitchhikes to Colorado and trains as a cook. A postcard arrives from Edgar’s college buddy, Mountain Moses, inviting him to a Caribbean island. Once there Edgar cooks at the local tourist resort and falls in love with Mountain’s girl, Kate. He becomes embroiled in a love triangle and his troubles multiply as he is stalked by murderous island native Chollie Legion. Even Cinnamon Jim, the medicine man, is no help. Ultimately it takes a hurricane to blow Edgar out of this mess.