Sam and George are childhood friends, sharing a deep loyalty that is cemented when George, the older by three years, saves Sam from drowning. When George decides to enlist during Vietnam, and Sam’s first sexual experiences lead to a pregnancy, the stress and pressures are too much for Sam’s mind to process. He breaks and has his first experience of a psychiatric hospital. As he faces the stigma of mental illness, his girlfriend Delores is ostracized after having an abortion. The two run away to join a commune. When the consequences of their choices unfold, Sam faces the frailty of relationships, the danger of misplaced emotion, and a complete loss of control. Returning home again, Sam begins a long journey to regain a sense of what is real, what is true and what is his responsibility.

Chattanooga's history is as storied and complex as any southern city that was born in the early days of America and came of age during the Civil War, but not every southern city has a writer like Cody Maxwell. Join local journalist Maxwell for a look back at some of the most enthralling, if overlooked, chapters in Chattanooga's history. This engaging collection features the legends and tall tales, small triumphs and muted tragedies, characters, criminals and folk heroes that shaped the city's past. From the folk tale of Nickajack Cave and the devastation of the Great Flood to the changing history of the Patten Towers and more, Maxwell draws an honest and engaging path through the forgotten stories that underlie the thriving and growing Chattanooga of today.

Since 1979, the literary journal Blueline has served as a venue for literature that reflects the distinctive spirit of the Adirondack region. These poems and prose pieces, drawn from twenty-five years of Blueline's pages, represent the abundance and variety of creative responses to the singular geography and history of the Adirondacks. Read together, however, they do something more: they reveal a distinct way of looking at the world, attuned both to nature in all its various detail and to profound questions about nature and humanity. Under the editors' discriminating eyes, the contributions coalesce into a natural and elegant extension of the region's landscape and people. From Joseph Bruchac's "Writing by Moonlight" and Neal Burdick's "Waiting for a Train at the Plattsburgh Amtrak Station" to Alice Wolf Gilborn's "On Adirondack Porches," The Blueline Anthology offers rare glimpses into the soul of a region, brief and shifting views that, like those glimpsed by a hiker looking out from the trees at the blue mountains, capture the eye and the mind.

Two New Hampshire teenagers fall into an unlikely relationship as they come together to save a mistreated dog. Whippoorwill is a deeply poignant story about the virulent nature of abuse and the power of human empathy.

In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein’s accounts “stretch like a tightrope across a chasm,” writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, Homeward Bound, the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travelers he meets along the way. Book Two, Homecoming at Twilight, resumes after his mother’s funeral and ends with Yash’s impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing. The Glatstein Chronicles is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, a reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

Have you ever wondered what ordinary people went through during important times in our history? Would you like to know the thoughts of the Lenape Indians, the Quakers, or the Irish immigrants? Can you imagine the problems during Washington's encampment at Valley Forge, the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, the two World Wars, the flu epidemic, the Vietnam war, the rebellious Sixties? Follow the people and their dreams during very different times in the town of Norristown and the U.S.

Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.