Lithium for Medea is as much a tale of addiction—to sex, drugs, and dysfunctional family chains—as it is one of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Here is the story according to Rose—the daughter of a narcissistic, emotionally crippled mother and a father who shadowboxes with death in hospital corridors—as she slips deeply and dangerously into the lair of a cocaine-fed artist in the bohemian squalor of Venice. Lithium for Medea sears us with Rose’s breathless, fierce, visceral flight—like a drug that leaves one’s perceptions forever altered.

Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, this novel from the O. Henry Award winner is finally back in print. In her acclaimed second novel, Braverman explores the intertwined lives of three women - a prosperous whore, a murderous housewife, and a weary matriarch - who await absolution and revelation in the bougainvillaea- and violence-filled barrio of Los Angeles.

Kate Braverman grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1950s at the time when glitz was just beginning to be manufactured. Her Los Angeles was made up of stucco tenements, welfare, and the marginalized. It wasn't a destination city, it was the end of the line. Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles chronicles the trajectory of Braverman's Left Coast generation with a voice of singular power. She was an antiwar activist in Berkeley, a punk-rock poet on Sunset Strip, a single mother in the East L.A. barrio, and a woman in recovery at AA meetings in Beverly Hills. By 1990 she was married and settled into a life of writing and teaching. In her forties, Braverman did the unthinkable and moved from Beverly Hills to New York's Allegheny Mountains to a 150-year-old farmhouse. In wide-ranging transmissions, Braverman deftly contrasts the social histories of Los Angeles with her new, timeless rural community; describes the effects of the changing seasons on her Californian, sun-drenched soul; and marvels at how a remote farmhouse can offer surprising consolations. Library Journal calls Braverman a "literary genius"; Rolling Stone describes her as having the "power and intensity you don't see much outside of rock and roll." Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles offers an eccentric and insightful view of social and individual transformation.

Haunting new stories about girls on the brink of adulthood, women on the verge of breakdowns, and families undone by past deceptions. "Kate Braverman is a writer of astonishing versatility and lyricism. Her stories are brilliantly rendered, painfully intimate portraits of individuals who come alive on the page as if illuminated by strobe lighting. With remarkable precision she tracks the restless motions of a mind searching for its reflection in the world—a continuous interrogation of the self that sweeps us along with it, as in a mysterious adventure."—Joyce Carol Oates "If fame did not find Braverman when the moment was right, perhaps it will make amends now that the moment is wrong. . . . Braverman excels at flooding readers in images that throb with menace or pleasure, as if descriptive language were a vein into which our most primal fears and desires could be injected."—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "The book feels timeless, think Transparent, sans the trans . . . Kate Braverman, an underground literary icon through decades of razor-sharp writing, returns with a gorgeously observed collection of stories about contemporary Jewish identity. It's profound, realistic, and funny in equal measure."—David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly "Braverman daringly, ravishingly, and resoundingly dramatizes the profound consequences of delusions, lies, ignorance, anger, cruelty, poverty, disappointment, conformity, inebriation, and violence with high imagination, sensual precision, cutting humor, and bracing insight."—Donna Seaman, Booklist *Starred review "Braverman writes forthright but beautiful sentences. Her details are so vivid that they feel like memories . . . "—Publishers Weekly, *Starred/Boxed review "Kate Braverman is an original. Reading her is like hitching a ride on a runaway train, always dangerous, always thrilling, always a knockout. Seppuku is all that and more."—Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake "Braverman is the godmother of literary bad girls and a connoisseur of the shattered beauty glittering in the wreckage of her characters' lives. A Good Day for Seppuku celebrates the Braverman vision, and frames her legacy."—Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. A thirteen-year-old girl must choose between her mother in Beverly Hills or her pot-growing father in the Allegheny Mountains. Dr. Bernie Roth and his wife Chloe reside in a grand hacienda in La Jolla. Their children are in college, and their disappointments are profound. But Bernie has his doctor's bag of elixirs for the regrets of late middle age. Mrs. Barbara Stein, a high school teacher, looks like she'd sacrifice her life for Emily Dickinson's honor. That's camouflage. Mrs. Stein actually spends summers in the Sisyphean search for her prostitute daughter in Los Angeles. These are some of the tales told in Kate Braverman's audacious new story collection. These furious and often hilarious tableaus of American family life remind us of why she has been seducing readers ever since her debut novel Lithium for Medea shook the literary world nearly forty years ago.

I was born in rain and I will die in rain, '' begins Kate Braverman's The Incantation of Frida K., an imagined life journey of Frida Kahlo. The book opens and closes inside the mind of Frida K., at 46, on her deathbed, taking us through a kaleidoscope of memories and hallucinations where we shiver for two hundred pages on the threshold of life and death, dream and reality, truth and myth. Defiant and uncompromising, Frida bears the wounds of her body and spirit with a stark pride, transcending all limitations, wrapping her senses around the places, events, and conversations in her past. Frida K. interacts from her hospital bed with her mother, sister, Diego, and her nurse. She calls herself a ''water woman, '' navigating into unexplored dimensions of her world, leading us through the alleys of San Francisco's Chinatown, of Paris in 1939 (where she rubbed shoulders with Andre Breton), and of her neighborhood in Mexico City, Coyoacan. Her voyage is an inward one, an incantation before dying. In The Incantation of Frida K., Braverman's language dances and spins. She carves out a bold interpretation of the life of an artist to whom she is vitally connected.Kate Braverman is a native of Los Angeles. She has published three other novels, Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, and Wonders of the West; four books of poetry, Lullaby for Sinners, Milkrun, Hurricane Warnings, and Postcards from August; and a collection of stories, Squandering the Blue. She was a 1992 O. Henry Award winner for her short story, ''Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta.'' Braverman lives in San Francisco with her husband, biologist Alan Goldste

In a world without succor, Braverman's characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows" must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has enjoyed so avidly.

The story is simple: a love affair ends badly. But Margarita Karapanou's novel tells the couple's story twice, from opposing perspectives. Our sympathies are inverted; we don't know whom to trust; the distinction between truth and deception blurs, and then seems simply to dissolve. But inevitably both stories must arrive at the point of rien ne va plus: the moment in roulette when all bets are off and you eitehr win or lose-the moment when the game becomes fate.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Recounts the addiction and recovery of the world-renowned solo artist and former lead singer and songwriter of Soul Coughing.