An Irish farce on the inhabitants of a provincial town. They include a poet who is working as a headwaiter, a former pin-up girl who is a magazine editor, and a man who only reads books about God and who makes anonymous phone calls to convince people to believe in God. A first novel.

The hapless inhabitants of Killoyle, Ireland, face all manner of chaos in this comic novel from an author “capable of spinning a fabulous yarn” (Minnesota Daily). After local lush Mick McCreek gets into a car crash with a cross-dressing church sexton, he enlists the help of a lawyer, Tom O’Mallet. As it turns out, the lawyer’s real gig is selling missiles to an IRA splinter group, and he plans to use his clueless client as a patsy. O’Mallet also hoodwinks Anil, an Indian waiter who has found himself the unlikely target of a manhunt. What Tom doesn’t know is that his lucrative weapons are destined for a massive terrorist attack on the Pint-Pulling Olympiad, and that Anil’s sexy cousin Rashmi—a sweatshop worker turned intelligence operative—is hot on the bombers’ trail. With a wink and a nudge, Roger Boylan’s pyrotechnic prose brings to life Ireland at its manic extremes, proving the author a dazzling and distinctive talent in American fiction.

Readers often have regarded with curiosity the creative life of the poet. In this study, David Bethea illustrates the relation between the art and life of 19th-century poet Alexander Pushkin, the central figure in Russian thought and culture. Bethea shows how Pushkin, on the eve of this 200th anniversary, still speaks to our time. He indicates how we, as modern readers, might realize the promethean metaphors central to the poet's intensely sculpted life. The Pushkin who emerges from Bethea's portrait is one who, long unknown to English-language readers, closely resembles the original both psychologically and artistically.

Seventeen-year-old Fay flees her abusive father and the migrant labor camps of her childhood and hitchhikes through Mississippi.

In the magnanimous tradition of Henry James's Hawthorn, Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, our fall issue will present innovative homages by a diverse group of important contemporary American writers in honor of our great forebears and predecessors. In these iconoclastic (break the icons) and post-canonical (quash the canon) times, what better way to review the directions in which literature may now be headed, than to rethink where it has been?