With humor, wisdom and tenderness, Ann Packer offers ten short stories about women and men--wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends, and lovers--who discover that life's greatest surprises may be found in that which is most familiar. In the title story, on the anniversary of their father's suicide a young woman discovers that her brother may have found a "reason for living" in the love of a good woman. In "Nerves," a young man realizes that the wife he is separated from no longer loves him but that it is his own life he misses, not her. The narrator of "My Mother's Yellow Dress" is a gay man remembering his deceased mother and their vital and troubling intimacy. In "Babies"--which was included in the prestigious O. Henry anthology series --a single woman in her mid-thirties finds that everyone, including her best friend at work, is pregnant, and that their joy can only be observed, not shared. In these and six other stories, Ann Packer exhibits an unerring eye for the small ways in which people reveal themselves and for the moments in which lives may be transformed.

In this collection of richly imagined stories, Elizabeth Tallent, the master of short fiction, delivers a diverse suite of stories about men and women confronting their vulnerabilities in times of transition and challenge. Beginning in the 1980s, Elizabeth Tallent’s work appeared in some of our most prestigious literary publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s. Marked by its quiet power and emotional nuance, her fiction garnered widespread praise. Now Tallent returns with a new collection of diverse, thematically linked, and deeply powerful stories that confirm her enduring gift for capturing relationships at their moment of transformation: marriages breaking apart, people haunted by memories of old love and reaching haltingly toward new futures. Mendocino Fire explore moments of fracture and fragmentation; it limns the wilderness of our inner psyche and brilliantly evokes the electric tension of deep emotion. In these pages, Tallent explores expectations met and thwarted, and our never-ending quest to avoid being alone. With this breathtaking collection, Elizabeth Tallent cements her rightful place in the literary pantheon beside her contemporaries Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, and Louise Erdrich. Visceral and surprising, profound yet elemental, Mendocino Fire is a welcome visit with a wise and familiar friend.

Another collection of true crime stories from the pages of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Mendocino County's newspaper of record.

From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex. Ann Packer is one of our most talented archivists of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils, and in these stories she explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. With Swim Back to Me, she delivers shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and page-turning drama: her most enticing work yet.

Locomotive steam whistles echo no more in the forests of the north California coast. A century ago, Humboldt and Mendocino Counties had more than 40 railroads bringing logs out of the forest to mills at the water's edge. Only one single railroad ever connected to the outside world, and it too is gone. One railroad survives as the Skunk Train in Mendocino County, and it carries tourists today instead of lumber. Redwood and tan oak bark were the two products moved by rail, and very little else was hauled other than lumberjacks and an occasional picnic excursion for loggers' families. Economic depressions and the advent of trucking saw railroads vanish like a puff of steam from the landscape.

From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Ann Packer, a “tour de force family drama” (Elle) that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of his future family, Bill buys the property and proposes to Penny Greenway, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life appeals to him. In less than a decade they have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, overwhelmed and undersatisfied, chafing at the conventions confining her. Years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence sets off a struggle over the family’s future. One by one, they tell their stories, which reveal Packer’s “great compassion for her characters, with their ancient injuries, their blundering desires. The way she tangles their perspectives perfectly, painfully captures the tumult of selves within a family” (MORE Magazine). Reviewers have praised Ann Packer’s “brilliant ear for character” (The New York Times Book Review) and her “naturalist’s vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented” (The New Yorker). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children’s Crusade, “an absorbing novel that celebrates family even as it catalogs its damages” (People, Book of the Week). This is a “superb storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle), Ann Packer’s most deeply affecting book yet, “tragic and utterly engrossing” (O, The Oprah Magazine).

How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer’s intimate and emotionally thrilling new novel, which has won its author comparisons with Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller. At the age of twenty-three Carrie Bell has spent her entire life in Wisconsin, with the same best friend and the same dependable, easygoing, high school sweetheart. Now to her dismay she has begun to find this life suffocating and is considering leaving it–and Mike–behind. But when Mike is paralyzed in a diving accident, leaving seems unforgivable and yet more necessary than ever. The Dive from Clausen’s Pier animates this dilemma–and Carrie’s startling response to it–with the narrative assurance, exacting realism, and moral complexity we expect from the very best fiction.

The fifteen stories in this volume all take place in the lovely town of Mercy on the north coast of California: tales of self-discovery, love, survival, friendship, creativity, and the quest for meaningful ways to spend this precious life. Each story may be read as a stand-alone creation, or the stories may be read as interconnected tales giving the reader an experience akin to reading a novel. Poets, chess masters, bartenders, artists, musicians, purveyors of cannabis, sheriffs, writers, moviemakers, shopkeepers, dogs, gardeners, children, auto mechanics, psychotherapists, and actors populate these stories about facing the ceaseless challenges of being human: the need for love, the sorrow of loss, confusion, doubt, hope, the longing to be seen and heard, and our great desire to belong. Todd Walton is the author of the acclaimed novels and short story collections Inside Moves, Forgotten Impulses, Ruby & Spear, Buddha In A Teacup, Under the Table Books, and Little Movies. His many music CDs include Lounge Act In Heaven, Dream of You, Mystery Inventions, and Ceremonies. His delightful short videos may be watched on YouTube and his blog of stories and memoirs is on his website.

True crime stories from Mendocino County about murder, corruption, arson, and other crimes.

Todd Walton is the author of the acclaimed novels and short story collections Inside Moves, Forgotten Impulses, Louie & Women, Ruby & Spear, Buddha In A Teacup, Under the Table Books, and Little Movies. His many music CDs include Lounge Act In Heaven, Dream Of You, Mystery Inventions, and Incongroovity. A visionary science fiction novella, Oasis Tales of the Conjuror is a life-affirming response to the question: How will humans survive in the wake of societal and environmental calamity caused by the imbalance between human desires and the earth’s capacity to sustain those desires? Oasis Tales of the Conjuror may be science fiction, but the story may prove to be prophetic in the not-too-distant future. The challenges facing the citizens of the oasis are the same grave challenges facing humans on earth today, challenges we have faced many times before in the grand sweep of human history. The Golden Light is the story of two soldiers, as different from each other as two men can be, thrown together in the aftermath of a terrible battle, their quest for safety and enlightenment creating between them a profound friendship transcendent of their differences. Of Water and Melons is an uplifting family drama set in the hills of North Carolina during America’s Great Depression, a tale of hope and faith about a farmer and his family and their dream of one day being free of fear and want. When Is It Done and Clumsy Booby are two charming short stories starring the same young poet, a humble yet ambitious fellow named Theodore who wants nothing more than to be appreciated for his way with words.