In this remarkable book, Tony Hilfer provides a major survey of the wealth of post-war American fiction. He analyses the major modes and genres of writing, from realist to postmodernist metafiction and black humour, the fiction of social protest, women's writing, and the traditions of African-American, Southern and Jewish-American fiction. Key writers discussed include William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Vladimir Nabokov and Joyce Carol Oates. The book concludes by exploring contemporary trends through detailed case-studies of Donald Barthelme and Toni Morrison.

2021 Silver Medal IPPY Awards Winner for Best Regional Fiction!Nurse Abby never dreamed of becoming a spy behind the SS frontlines nor did she expect to fall in love. Follow her journey from Montana to Germany and back again, igniting a chain of events that will change history and the future forever.Rusty barbed wire and distant AM radio-Montana hid my secrets for fifty years.Then a young reporter arrived in a beat-up Impala. Her assignment, WWII Homecoming Memories, had uncovered a puzzling lead about several dead men last seen with a red-headed nurse. I could have lied, but she reminded me of myself at that age so I rolled a cigarette and told her all of it. She spilled coffee on my table.Her research started in New York. In choosing soldiers to profile, she included her hometown and discovered her great uncle, reported MIA in 1944, bought a train ticket to Browning, Montana, three months after they buried his empty casket. Impossible, yet on two consecutive pages, she counted 14 tickets to Browning-a village on the Blackfeet Reservation. The National Archives showed that 13 of those men shared the same distinct status: Missing in Action.I know where those passengers are.Southwest of Browning, where the plains run into the Rockies, stands a church. Once it represented everything good in our country, a tiny church built in 1913 by a young man for his wedding. Only four people attended the bride's funeral in 1918. Her twin babies slept through the service. Eight months earlier her husband marched into World War I and he never returned.My story starts and ends at that little church, but in between, the darkest hours of mankind churned through Europe. Some of that darkness found its way to Montana. As bad as it ended, I wondered if the Lord forgives murder. As it turns out, sometimes yes, sometimes definitely no.

Rusty barbed wire and distant AM radio-Montana hid my secrets for almost fifty years. Then a young reporter arrived in a beat-up Impala. Her assignment, WWII Homecoming Memories, had uncovered a puzzling lead about several dead men last seen riding a train with a red-headed nurse. I could have lied, but she reminded me of myself at that age so I rolled a cigarette and told her all of it. She spilled coffee on my table. Her research started in New York. In choosing soldiers to profile, she included her hometown and discovered her great uncle, reported MIA in 1944, bought a train ticket to Browning, Montana, three months after they buried his empty casket. Impossible, yet on two consecutive pages, she counted 14 tickets to Browning-a village on the Blackfeet Reservation. The National Archives showed that 13 of those men shared the same distinct status: Missing in Action. I know where those passengers are. Southwest of Browning, where the plains run into the Rockies, stands a church. Once it represented everything good in our country, a tiny church built in 1913 by a young man for his wedding. Only four people attended the bride's funeral in 1918. Her twin babies slept through the service. Eight months earlier her husband marched into World War I and he never returned. My story starts and ends at that little church, but in between, the darkest hours of mankind churned through Europe. Some of that darkness found its way to Montana. As bad as it ended, I wondered if the Lord forgives murder. As it turns out, sometimes yes, sometimes definitely no.

In The 47th Samurai, Bob Lee Swagger, the gritty hero of Stephen Hunter's bestselling novels Point of Impact and Time to Hunt, returns in this intense and exotic thriller. Bob Lee Swagger and Philip Yano are bound together by a single moment at Iwo Jima, 1945, when their fathers, two brave fighters on opposite sides, met in the bloody and chaotic battle for the island. Only Earl Swagger survived. More than sixty years later, Yano comes to America to honor the legacy of his heroic father by recovering the sword he used in the battle. His search has led him to Crazy Horse, Idaho, where Bob Lee, ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, has settled into a restless retirement and immediately pledges himself to Yano's quest. Bob Lee finds the sword and delivers it to Yano in Tokyo. On inspection, they discover that it is not a standard WWII blade, but a legendary shin-shinto katana, an artifact of the nation. It is priceless but worth killing for. Suddenly Bob is at the center of a series of terrible crimes he barely understands but vows to avenge. And to do so, he throws himself into the world of the samurai, Tokyo's dark, criminal yakuza underworld, and the unwritten rules of Japanese culture. Swagger's allies, hard-as-nails, American-born Susan Okada and the brave, cocaine-dealing tabloid journalist Nick Yamamoto, help him move through this strange, glittering, and ominous world from the shady bosses of the seamy Kabukicho district to officials in the highest echelons of the Japanese government, but in the end, he is on his own and will succeed only if he can learn that to survive samurai, you must become samurai. As the plot races and the violence escalates, it becomes clear that a ruthless conspiracy is in place, and the only thing that can be taken for granted is that money, power, and sex can drive men of all nationalities to gruesome extremes. If Swagger hopes to stop them, he must be willing not only to die but also to kill.

Winner of the 2023 Christianity Book Award — Culture & The Arts! "One of the best, and least expected, anthologies in decades.” —Joseph Bottum, Poetry editor, New York Sun Showcasing thirty-five American poets born in or after 1940, this anthology confirms that one of the most vibrant developments in contemporary verse has been a renewed engagement with the Christian faith. Across a full spectrum of Christian belief, including the struggle to believe at all, these poets bring the power of their art to bear on serious questions: how to understand the goodness of God in a fallen and tragic world, how to reconcile universal truths with the particularities of human experience, how to render familiar events of salvation history in new language that generates its own epiphanies. As Christian engagement assumes a multiplicity of modes and voices, so does contemporary poetry in America. This volume, then, selective yet representative, features the work of early-, mid-, and late-career poets, formalists, free-verse poets, and experimenters in prosody. This anthology bears witness to the poetic mind as it seeks that which is above.